Mountains of the Moon (20 page)

My fingers are laced up under his mane. His head clamps me in, his chest is so warm. I look down at my bare feet on the straw and his great plates of hooves; he’s standing on my toe that isn’t there any more. I turn my eyes sideways at the stereo tower, record still spinning and the needle scuffing. Stale cold smell of morning. And horse. In a lounge dining room. I’ve still got my beautiful coat on. I move the curtain; see raindrops on the roof of the car and the muck heaps steaming hot in the air. Stopped raining. No sound of Gwen or the dog. I find her car keys on the side in the kitchen and let myself out of the front door. Horse wearing a net curtain, watches me from the winder. It’s warmer outside than in, can smell the sea. I open the Quattro with the key. It’s full of hay and takeaway rubbish, empty half-bottles of Scotch.
She has to have three cushions to see over the steering wheel and the seat pulled so far forward I can’t even get my legs in. I put the car in neutral and turn the key in the ignition. Listens. It int the battery or the starter motor.

The engine clattering wakes Gwen up. The dog hops up on my lap. I pull the bonnet release lever and get out.

“You stay in here, and drive,” I tell the dog and she does.

“What’s the diagnosis?” Gwen is wearing her nylon dressing gown; sight of it makes me shudder, the ditchwater color, the stains on it, the melted cigarette hole in it.

“Shit in your carburetor,” I says.

“Why,” she wuthers, “does it always happen to me?”

“Well, you always is driving on dregs.”

“I always
am
driving on dregs.”

I don’t say nothing.

“Poor Betsy,” she says.

“I left the Yellow Pages open, ready,” I says. “Are you going to ring the stables or am I?”

“No—no, I’ll do that.” She does a jig. “As you were.”

The carpet squares keep shifting sideways. My teef is upside down.

“Catherine Clark is here, Mr. Abraham,” she says. “That’s it, dear, through that door.”

I hobble in. My policeman comes in with me.

“I think you can wait outside,” Mr. Abraham says to him. “Leave the door ajar, would you?”

My policeman goes back out. I sit down in the daddy bear chair.

“Catherine?” Mr. Abraham says.

I shake my head.

“Who’s been sitting in my porridge?” he says.

“Sorry.” I stand up to come back out.

Through the open door I see the lions. They smells the secretary
underneath her desk. Three lions together shove it over and rips her up like sheets for bandages.

“Sit down, Catherine,” he says. “I have to write a report, about how you are, in yourself. Do you know where you are?”

I stay looking at the door. The drumming is so loud and so clear. A clock ticks but breathing int a certain thing. So sick, so sick, the taste. Knees is locked but I sinks straight down into the floor.

“Marion!” Mr. Abraham yells.

The secretary’s shoes come in.

“I’ll fetch a blanket, Mr. A,” she says.

“And a pillow, Marion. And a cup of tea. Better bring a bowl. Yes, bring a bowl too.”

There’s a hole in the bottom of Mr. Abraham’s shoe, yellow sock shines through. He’s fallen sleep in his chair, spects he needs a holiday. I stand up and hobble, fold the blanket up and put the pillow on the table. Been sick in a bowl. Shiver nearly throws me over. Don’t know if to wake him up. He’s still holding his pen. It’s dark outside but the lamp is shining on his desk. I look to see what he writ but all the pages is done Chinese. See two cups of tea both cold. I flick the skin off one with my fingers and flick it in a plant pot. Terrible taste. Thirsty, drinks mine and his as well. Shame he over-dunked his biscuit. The office is dark cept for shine from the corridor. The secretary has gone. My policeman int allowed to leave me. I look out in the corridor. He’s with a man in a dressing gown and slippers, long way up by the coffee machine.

“It’s criminal,” the man says.

My policeman has to bash it. Then I get the whistling tune, in my ear and under my skin. I know it. I know it. Listens, the whistling, louder left. All of the corridors look the same, gray filled with doors and whistling. I close my eyes and sniff the air. The whistling is fresh as air. Don’t know which way the lions is, but Pip’s coming.

Uh-huh.

He is. Whistling and drumming on the change in his pocket. I slide down the wall, wait for him to come around the corner. I wipe at my
eyes with the sleeve of my dressing gown, don’t want him to see me crying.

It int Pip.

It’s the newspaper trolley man. He stops whistling and looks down at me.

“Bit lost missy?” he says. “Do you know where you’re from?”

I wipe my eyes, on the bottom of my dressing gown. He looks about for a wheelchair but there int one.

“Well, that’s not a problem,” he says. “We can nip past reception and they can look you up, have you got your plastic bracelet on your wrist?”

I look up my sleeves.

“There we are,” he says, “your hospital number is on it.”

I sit up on his trolley tween the
Sun
and the
Mirror
. We go in the lift and long past all the arms and legs and crunched bones. The newspaper words come off on my hands, bout a little girl they can’t find. At accident and mergency the lady on reception writes down the number on my bracelet and looks through the records.

“Catherine Clark: Ward 7.” She smiles at me, then at the newspaper man.

An old man in the waiting room wants to buy a paper from him so he wheels me over and gives him the
Mirror
. Every feeling in me stands up and the drumming starts to bash. I got the taste. That’s how come I look around. The Sandwich Man is at reception.

“Lulu,” he says. “Lulu King.”

“I’m sorry.” The lady checks one more time. “We don’t have anyone of that name.”

We found a field with good grass and a shelter, out on the road to Bristol. Lucky I had the money saved thanks to half-price rent in Sheffield and holly wreath cash-in-hand from Maurice. Gwen waited in the car outside the bank while I went in and got the money. Hundred quid for field rent in advance, forty quid for the hire of this horse trailer and twenty for gas.
I’ve been two years saving that money, now, gain, back to scratch. Principle is always costly, Anton learned me that.

We leave the car and the trailer out on the road and walk down the track to the chalet. Gwen goes in to make happy tea. I climb up on the muck heap out the front, look at the fascias. Then I go in, stand in the lounge doorway; look at the door frame and the turn in the hall. I look at the horse behind the sofa. Shake my head. Gwen leans through the hatch.

“How in God’s name are we going to get him out?”

“How sactly did you get him in?”

“He just put his head down and breathed in, and slipped under the door frames. He’s scared of the folding doors, idiot. So much for ‘bomb-proof.’”

I look at the graze on his withers and the rip long his tender flank where the door catch caught him and the horseshoe-shaped dents in the wall where he kicked out, frightened. I look at the horse, nibbling sad hay. Scuffed knees. He looks up at me. I walk and whispers in his back-turned ear, he mustn’t panic or try to rear up. I see the car keys on the kitchen counter; lean in and pick them up.

“Where are you going?” Gwen says.

I tends deaf.

“But you can’t drive.” She follows me with mugs of tea. “But you’re not insured,” she says on the step. “But you don’t have a license,” she yells.

In the street I turn the tow-bar handle and drop the horse trailer onto the road. Then reverse the car down the track and park it as close as I can to the chalet.

“What are you doing?” She spills tea hot on my heels down the hall.

I touch the horse on the shoulder and he shifts to where I want him. The winders open when I bash them and the tow rope threads through the frames.

“But,” she says in the front doorway, “I don’t understand?”

“Understand?” the dog says.

I tie the rope to the car and then get in and start it. I look at the chalet in the mirror, reckon it’s only rested together like a house made out of cards. The wheels spin, the tow rope strains. Uh-huh, the front wall of the
chalet falls down. Gwen wants to say something but can’t, mugs hang limp in her wrists. The wall is laying down on the muck heap with the front door and winders in it and curtains still attached to the rail. Four-inch nails stick up from the frame, clean pulled out. I grab the wall and drag it wider out of the way.

“You get the horse in the trailer,” I says. “And I’ll bash the wall back up.”

“Nice one, Macduff,” she says Welsh.

“Macduff!” the dog says.

I don’t know what it means.

The horse can hardly walk down the track, his joints so stiff, but he holds his head up noble and stumbles up urgently into the trailer, like he knows the ordeal is nearly over. The chalet wall bashes back up so neat, from outside you wouldn’t know. I find Gwen in the dining room looking at the corners where the wallpaper tore.

“My aunt’s going to have a fit,” she says. “You’ve destroyed the decor.”

I look at the black mold growing long the coving, at dog shit in the doorway, at the puddle of bright yellow horse piss collected in the corner.

“If your aunt dies of a fit,” I says, “it will be the phone bill that done it.”

She members then, the nine hundred and forty-seven pounds she’s spent private-investigating the whereabouts and new life of her ex-fiancé, Ian. He’s getting married to somebody else, cept Gwen int going to allow it. Her
case
.

“Oh well,” she says. “Hi-ho.”

Gwen mucked out the dining end with a wheelbarrow and I borrowed a fuse from her hairdryer to get the wet and dry vacuum working. Sucked up buckets of horse piss and then water and then disinfectant with Panda mad attacking the nozzle. The carpet has come up cleaner than it ever was and almost dried overnight. Have I ever noticed, have I ever learned, if I watch the toast it don’t cook and if I don’t it all gets burned? Can see Gwen through the hatch, sitting on the sewing box in front of the Calor gas fire. She reads me what the advert says, is going to set fire to the newspaper or melt more of her dressing gown.

“Have you ever been in one?”

“No,” I says.

“No, I haven’t either.”

I reckon you has to be pretty.

“You should go for it, Gwen,” I says.

“I may just give them a call and see what they have to say for themselves. What is there to lose?”

“Best had quick then, fore they cut the phone off.”

Must mit, it is curious. I put our cups on the food-hatch ledge and walk around with our plates.

“Good morning,” she says. “I’m phoning about the advertisement in the
Western Daily Press
, for Trainee Croupiers.”

She’s got the dog on her lap and a catkin of ash on her cigarette. Young men and
young women
, the advert says. I feel like forty and a car mechanic and Gwen looks like an old cigarette, one that got wet and dried out twice.

“Yes, I’ll hold,” she says.

Someone comes to the phone and she listens.

“Yes,” she says. “This afternoon?” she says. “Right,” she says. “One o’clock. I’m phoning on behalf of two of us, as a matter of fact. Yes,” she says. “Both twenty.”

I pass her the ashtray.

“Oh dear,” she says. “What kind of tests?”

My tonsils blow up, feels sick, don’t know what she’s getting me into.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. From Weston-super-Mare.” She gestures for the pen. “Quite,” she says.

She tells our names. Then she writes
Casino Royale
and draws roundabouts and traffic lights on the margins of the newspaper.

Her hair’s hopeless, lifeless, frizz.

“For God’s sake,” she says. “What am I supposed to do?”

She’s still got a black suit from when she was a sales rep. It’s covered in horsehair and stinks of gasoline.

“Black court shoes,” she says.

I find them under a bale and some mold and fallen plaster.

“I keep meaning to get them repaired, they need new heels.”

Plastic. Fucked.

“Shall I give them a wipe?”

“There’s some polish under the sink,” she says.