Little Caesar (14 page)

‘Act a bit fucking normal, Ludwig!’ whispered the woman whose anus had shortly before been suspended above my face.

It was all very confusing.

I phoned my mother at the only number I had for her, the Belfort in London. The receptionist said she had checked out a few days ago.

‘You must be mistaken,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but Mrs. Unger is no longer a guest at this hotel.’

I hung up. The helpless feeling, as though a loved one were on their deathbed on another continent and would die before you could get there. Disgust at the prima donna facet of her character, the irresponsible whims, the way she took for granted that the world would forgive her her fickleness; the way she acted like a little girl.

‘A bit irresponsible at that, yes,’ Paula Loyd ventured.

Ashley was humming. I looked at the cell phone in my hand, the screen that had stayed black for days.

‘What will you do now? Wait till she calls?’ Paula asked.

‘I don’t even know if she still has my number.’

‘Would you like to take a cut of something or other along with?’ Ashley asked.

‘I can’t remember her ever calling me at this number.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be in contact soon. Maybe she’ll try to phone here, or to the Feldmans. She’ll always be able to find you. As a mother, believe me.’

I was ashamed of these things, around the Loyds, the impression of coming from a poor social environment. But the need for comfort, for reassurance, was stronger.

Yet another day. In principle, nothing special about it, like so many other days it disappears beneath your feet like a treadmill. It assumes meaning only later on, when you think back on it in the knowledge: that was the last day.

It starts in the dressing room, where Samuel Titterington says, ‘Did I tell you lot that I swallowed a 5p piece last night?’

And then the rumor that John Davies, our club Negro, had fucked Harriet Tooke in a beach cabin. John remains silent, smiling beatifically. We’re playing against the second XV from Lowestoft & Yarmouth. A low, cold sun is shining on the grass. I’m flanker, a nice position, you hang at the edge of the scrum so that you’re the first one off when the ball is scrummaged. There’s always a great struggle amid the forwards, it’s physical and aggressive. Bodies, shoulder. I pick up the ball from a ruck and charge a hedge of opponents – sometimes the wall gives, sometimes it doesn’t. Then you’re knocked to the ground with six or seven men on top and every last bit of air knocked out of your lungs, this is the end, the grass against your lips, flesh and swathes of sport tape in your field of vision – they don’t notice! Not enough air to scream for them to get off you!

So you drown in that sea of bodies.

A little later you’re walking around again in a daze, you’re still there, they rolled that oxcart off your chest and you sucked up oxygen like it was medicine. The relief at finding that everything still continues for the moment, the chalk on your knuckles and the wind from the sea that blows the last brown leaves across the grass.

A little later I was smacked in the eyebrow. Blood ran down beside my eye, a rip.

‘Wipe it off,’ Leland said.

If I didn’t the game would be stopped for a blood bin. We’d already run through all our substitutes. It was a hard match, but we won easily. Everyone did what he had to do, we played strongly, plainly. In the showers the elation, the flushed bodies covered in abrasions and bumps, flattered by the steam rising up from the cold floor.

‘I think it’s going to need two stitches,’ Ashley Loyd said.

He’d been watching the match from the sidelines. In the fading light outside the canteen, he looked at my eyebrow. Then he went in and rummaged about in the silver-colored first aid kit behind the bar, until he found a packet with needle and thread that was still intact. He grumbled about how we needed to replenish the kit. In the beer closet, beneath the light of a bare bulb, he peered at my brow.

‘Jungle medicine,’ he mumbled.

And, a moment later, ‘This will sting a bit.’

The long, calm glide of the needle through my skin, the doctor is a god making me whole again. Outside the door people were shouting orders to the barman, rashers hissed in the pan. From the little kitchen, Mrs. Packton shouted
I’m not a bloody magician, you know!
And just as I was retrieving my wallet and cellular from the crate of valuables, the phone went. A long, foreign number. My heart leapt. I answered it.

‘Hello?’

‘Ludwig? This is Mama. Where are you? What a horrible noise.’

I walked outside, her confusion in my ear.

‘Ludwig? Are you there?’

‘Where are you?’ I asked once I was outside the canteen.

She laughed.

‘It’s so nice to hear your voice, sweetheart.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In America, California, I’m in Los Angeles! What time is it there? Here it’s . . .’

‘What are you doing there?’

‘Do you know Rollo Liban? Haven’t I ever told you about him? Rollo’s an old friend, a good friend, he invited me to come here.’

‘You haven’t been in touch for more than a month.’

‘You can’t imagine how busy I’ve been!’

‘You’re in America . . .’

Her giggle.

‘At a hotel on the beach! Everything’s changed so much here, but somehow it’s still the same. You’d hardly believe your eyes.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘Oh, I have no idea, angel. For the time being I’m just taking things as they come. I’m sitting on my balcony now, in the sun. The first few days were very gray and somber, but the weather’s been beautiful lately. Maybe someday we can live here, I think you’d find it very special too. Of course, it’s still America, but . . .’

A little later, after we’d hung up, I realized she had not answered the essential questions: where she was exactly, and what she was doing there. I thumbed back to
calls received
and punched the last number. A woman’s voice, with the enthusiasm of good news.

‘Loews Hotel, can I help you?’

I hung up and looked around the canteen. The windows were steamy, the walls seemed to bulge a bit from all the light and life inside there.

I tore my eyes off it, turned and walked towards the lighted edge of the village in the distance.

‘THE GREATEST COMEBACK
IN THE HISTORY OF PORN’

The triumph of that first journey! As though you were piloting the aircraft yourself and setting it down, light as a feather, on the black sheet of tarmac! A little later, carrying my old suitcase, I walked out the sliding glass doors and into the world. I had drawn dollars from the ATM in the arrivals hall, the banknotes called me a man of the world. Fully confident, one strolls through the screen version of one’s own life, no one can see your heart pounding like a puppy’s. Look at him climb into that taxi, the casual air of authority, a man who has pulled so many cab doors closed behind him and says, ‘Loews Hotel, please.’

The cab driver turns around.

‘Hotel what?’

‘Loews.’

The irony tugging at your lips shows him his proper place.

‘Where’s that, man? The Lois Hotel? Never heard of it.’

Well then, if this poor immigrant lives in such dark ignorance you’ll have to help out a little, serve as his missionary, a lamp unto his feet. You spell out the name of the hotel for him and lean back; now everything will go according to plan. But the man doesn’t know when to quit. Now he wants to know
where
it is, this Loews thing of yours. Suddenly you lose your composure, it shatters into a thousand pieces;
he’s
the driver, I tell him, but if he doesn’t know anything I’m perfectly willing to take the wheel. His indifference is like bedrock, he doesn’t even seem to have picked up on my slur. Los Angeles, he explains to me, is a multiplicity of towns: Beverly Hills, Compton, Venice, Santa Monica, Palisades . . . And I have to listen to all this. I fall back in my seat and mumble Santa Monica. The taxi moves away from the airport, into dissolving sunlight. The afternoon is drawing to a close, the glory is a lie, the bitter taste in your mouth at the end of the binge.

The streets had something distinctly shabby about them. Sometimes in the distance you could see a bundle of skyscrapers, all in a clump, as though smelted together by thermonuclear heat. I looked at the screen on my cell phone, which didn’t work in these parts. The road beneath the cab rolled by in slow waves. Palm trees stood in blunt silhouette against the turquoise billboard of sky. Big black cars slid by, introverted chunks of steel with darkened windows. I lacked all curiosity about the life inside them. Between the houses I sometimes caught a glimpse of the ocean.

‘This must be it,’ the driver said at last.

I said nothing, simply handed him the fare from the backseat. There were long, drawn-out limos at the entrance and men in weird tailcoats. Once inside, the enormous space of the atrium came crashing down on me. I made my way between rows of life-sized artificial palms, a cathedral of light and openness, past the reception desk. Through the huge glass panels at the end of the colonnade you could see the quiet ocean. My tattered cardboard suitcase marked me as an intruder; ducking into the lounge, I tucked it away between the little table and the easy chair. A waitress served me a Budweiser and slipped the bill under the bowl of pretzels. When she left, I glanced at it. Eight dollars for a beer. Ten beers and I’d be broke. I was impressed. Never had I drunk anything so expensive. At the Loews, the balance between price and performance had vanished completely, the hotel was a discreet piece of machinery designed to shake as much money as quickly as possible from its guests’ pockets. The guests didn’t care much. The bronzed floozies in their gold slippers, the noisy middle-aged men with barrel chests and spindly legs, the elderly couples with failing bodily functions but a portfolio full of reduced-risk investments; the price of things was an abstraction on the statement from the credit-card company.

I had hoped to catch my mother at something, perhaps merely to catch a glimpse of her life without me, but after an hour I went to the reception to ask for her room number. A young man tore himself away from the crowd loitering behind the desk, his smile broad, his cordiality obscene. Mrs. Unger was not in her room. I went back to the bar. My chair had been taken, so I settled down beneath a giant TV screen showing a silent basketball game. Suddenly I felt nothing but disgust for Loews, this temple of whores and hucksters. The window dressing of the lie.

‘
Ludwig!
’

I looked up. The tight iron band of my thoughts pressed against my eyelids.

‘Ludwig, where on earth did you come from? How did you ever find this place?’

‘
Vade retro
.’

‘Who’s that?’ asked the man she was with.

‘Ludwig, darling, what happened to you?’

‘I came to see how you were doing,’ I say then.

She shakes her head. I see that she’s thinking about becoming annoyed, saying that it was stupid of me to come here, but you don’t say things like that to someone who has traveled halfway around the world for you.

‘Could I ask . . .’ the man says.

She turns and looks at him, scowling in irritation.

‘This is my son,’ she says.

Her finger approaches the sutures on my brow, she tries to touch them but I turn my head away.

‘What have you got there, what is that?’

‘Ah,’ the man says, ‘so that’s it. How you doin’, Ludwig?’

His eyes shift from me to the game going on above me.

‘Say hello to Rollo.’

‘Hello, Rollo.’

‘Hello, Ludwig.’

‘Okay, but who’s this Rollo Liban?’ I shouted to her a little later, from the bathroom.

I was sitting on the toilet, but conversation remained a possibility. The bathroom was filled with the smell of her body, the perfumes with which she tried to mask it; lotions, oils.

‘An old friend,’ said the voice from behind the door.

‘What kind of friend?’

‘A friend-friend, never anything more than that. Perish the thought.’

‘So where did you meet him?’

‘Listen, grand inquisitor . . .’

The smell was an intimacy, you inhaled someone. To smell her, the maternal scent, made me nauseous.

When I closed the bathroom door, the humming of the ventilation stopped. She was standing at the window. Below was the silent swimming pool. A flat, blue stone. A thin fog had moved in, along with the dusk.

‘Why don’t we take a little walk?’ she said. ‘The pier is lovely.’

In the distance I could see the Ferris wheel on the pier, bathed in shimmering light.

‘You can have your name written on a grain of rice.’

‘I’m not a little boy anymore.’

‘I know that, darling.’

‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.’

‘You can’t imagine how depressing London was.’

She turned to face me.

‘Come on, let’s go out. Stop staring at me like that, would you, sweetheart?’

*

There was gym equipment on the beach, with a low wall around it; in the semi-darkness a man was practicing on the bars. She took off her low-heeled shoes and we walked through the sand to the pier. The words were burning in my mouth, but I couldn’t spit them out.

‘People surf here during the day,’ she said. ‘Boys with those boards, what do you call them . . .’

‘Surfboards.’

‘It’s amazing, the things they can do with them. They’re completely at home on the waves, they know exactly what they’re going to do. You should take lessons while you’re here.’

A few good moments were all that remained. Who would want to go and spoil them?

‘First I want one of those grains of rice with my name on it,’ I said.

We crossed the heavy timbers onto the boardwalk. Along the way there were people fishing, and others offering useless services. The man who wrote your name on a grain of rice was there too. There was a Latino girl selling Disney balloons, a little stand where you could buy soft drinks, magazines and cigarettes. The Ferris wheel was deserted. It was almost dark, except for a deep purple stripe along the horizon. We stood at the railing. A ring of buoys with bells attached had been set around the end of the pier: an audible warning to those approaching in the fog, which had a way of coming up suddenly here. They made a lonely sound. She said, ‘The pier at home didn’t have bells like that, did it?’