Mountains of the Moon (24 page)

After the greetings the agent fumbles with sets of keys. Reckons the man that owns the house is an anthropologist. Wonders what one is.

“You’re both working here in Bristol?” he arsts.

Gwen splains: we’ve been living in Weston-super-Mare and traveling every day to the casino but when training ends next week we’ll be on different rotas. Late shift at the casino finishes at four in the morning but there int a bus til half past seven. Gwen’s got the car but the day shifts starts at two in the afternoon and it’s gas and traffic and hassle parking and a long way back at nine, if you’re blind drunk. Twice I’ve had to drive us.

“Tzzz,” the agent says. The keys keep trying him.

I liked it, driving the Quattro. Uh-huh, especial with all the winders open and the exhaust blowing and Gwen dead on the backseat. You know you is alive. I seen a barn owl in the full beam, first time ever. Its wings beat white same as playing cards do flying from the blackjack shoe. Sides, how can they take your driving license way if you haven’t even got one? The agent still can’t find the right key. I has a nap standing up, prop my elbows on the bin, got a new kind of tired on me. Keep poking myself in the eye and slapping myself about the face. I sink down in black blivion up to my waist, up to my shoulders, up to my diamond, spects my mouth is hanging open, dribbling, head is slipping off my hand.

“I can’t take her anywhere,” Gwen says to the agent.

Lucky I’m smiley kind.

“Can’t
leave
her anywhere,” I says. “I’ve tried.”

“We’re in,” he says.

House seems nice, like somebody’s actual home to rent. It’s the cheapest we’ve seen and there int many will take a dog. We could walk to the casino from here, cross the park and the river and the city center. A skinny hall bends past the stairs, with dark wood planks and a loverly rug. There’s a small front dining room with a gas fire and square table and net curtains, not especial friendly, like people tried but couldn’t use it. The back room is done like a catalogue bedroom, for catalogue people with bedding. Chest of drawers and a wardrobe. French doors look past the side of the kitchen. L-shaped bit of garden. Next door’s lilac tree hangs heavy in bud over the fence. White I spects, something to look forward to. Rest is broken concrete, forsythia and elderberry scrapping over it.

“You could do something with it,” Gwen says to me.

But I int planning on staying that long. At the end of the hall there’s a step down and light blue cold sac of a kitchen, cheered up though, with all the colors and patterns of clay pots and plants on the windersill. Old mother geranium lived here all her life. I find a pint glass in the cupboard and fill it to water the plants. Then I water myself, so tired makes a mess of drinking.

“Cooker. Washing machine. Fridge. Immersion heater.”

Washer gone on the hot tap.

“No lounge?” Gwen says.

“It’s upstairs at the front of the house,” he says.

We follow him up. There’s a plain bathroom at the top of the stairs, directly over the kitchen.

“They’re rather fond of their foreign knick-knacks,” Gwen says.

Back bedroom, same as the one below. The front lounge is the full width of the house, going over the hall.

“It’s not to everybody’s taste,” the agent warns us.

“Good God,” Gwen says.

I look at the lion skin pinned out on one wall, and the zebra skin on the back of the sofa, dark carved masks in one alcove, fists full of spears raised up in the other and other skins, drums of drums.

“…deposit and one month’s rent in advance,” the agent says.

They go back down the stairs.

“We may as well take it,” Gwen says.

“It’s good value, I feel,” the agent says.

We follow him in the car to his office in Bedminster, to do the forms. Wonder who Gwen will give as a reference. I wouldn’t let her live in my place, if I had one. My references always turn out OK, once you get past the trouble with names. Will be glad to get to Bristol and have my own room, won’t need Gwen for lifts. Rent and deposit up front for the house is all thanks to the white horse on the pier. Gwen says she’ll give me her half on payday, don’t spects she will. Don’t know how I got myself tied up in this Gwen-Car-Dog-Horse fuck-up. Feel like I’m keeping the raft afloat, just til I can get off it. We was two loose ends got tied up together. Least with Gwen something always happens. She’s on good form today, “foil” she calls it.

Never knew this kind of tired, comes from training the brain to do something it int natural good at. Five weeks now I’ve hammered the numbers and the odds, but last night my brain gave up, left me a smiling idiot. That’s the trouble with the casino, no winders. Time-warped twilight
zone. Daylight seems like medicine. We drive out of Bristol on a flyover. I love the colored hickle-pickle houses on the hill. Mazes me how the Clifton Suspension Bridge goes cross the gorge, so high up above the river mud. Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I seen his statue on a lunch break, little bloke, reckon he made this beautiful bridge cos he had a great big name to live up to.

“Bristol’s Number One Suicide Spot,” Gwen says.

Handy to know.

On the way back to Weston-super-Mare, we detour to see Piggy. I love going to see the horse. We whooshes long. Good driver, Gwen. Farmer’s lane is radiant with blackthorn blossom like clouds of chalk and bitter-sweet smell. Everything else is fit to burst, holding off, sniffing last frost. Lets it wash over me. Sky is tirely white, magine that. And it’s mild enough for the car winders open. Int ready to take my beautiful coat off though, without it I spects I would disappear.

“Isn’t the May pretty?” Gwen says.

Cept it’s April. And blackthorn flowers fore the hawthorn. They tirely different. I nods all the same.

Tirely tired, too tirely tired for whole words.

There’s daffodils long the verge my side. Minds me, one time a lady came in the garden center with a picture torn from a magazine. The timing was perfect and she already had the grassy bank. I told her they was
daffodils
cos she really didn’t know, said she’d need a couple of hundred bulbs. People always plant in rows; they can’t help it. I splained this to her, said the best way to get the natural effect was to strew the daffodil bulbs around wildly. Surprised me, she came back in the spring, disappointed, with two hundred bulbs in a sack, they was all clean and dry and somehow rotted. Turned out she never understood that when you’d strewed the bulbs about wildly you was sposed to dig a hole and plant them sactly where they landed. Uh-huh. After work I went around her house, to help her out with what was what in her garden. Nice lady. Magistrate. Gave me cake.

Must phone Mr. Mac; tell him to put that fucking ball down.

“What are you chortling at?” Gwen says.

“Nothing.”

Been Sheffield. Been Weston-super-Mare. Next week: Bristol. Next year, wonder where spring will be. Darren says a blackjack dealer like me can work anywhere in the world. He reckons my game is good enough now, but you need one year’s experience fore you can apply.

“Now, about bedrooms,” Gwen says. “I bags the one upstairs.”

True, downstairs at Park Lane is kind of lonely but I like living close as I can get to the ground, and the kettle, and a door to outside. I think about that white lilac tree hanging outside the French doors.

“OK,” I says. It int for long. I light a cigarette for Gwen and pass it. Hold mine in a pair of tweezers and smokes it, loverly, blows it out the winder.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Has to get rid of the nicotine stains.”

“The sensible thing would be to give up smoking, have you thought of that?”

“No never not for a second,” I says. “Sides, the sensible thing would be for you to buy your own.”

“Touché,” she says.

When we turn into the field gateway, the horse is fine, waiting. Neighs.

I’m winning eighteen thousand on a roulette training game, when the lady from Personnel comes into the gaming hall. It’s me she wants, waving paperwork. It’s the job application form. Wonder if it’s the next of kin, I just put “phone the council.”

“I’m having trouble with one of your references. This one.” The lady shows me what I wrote for Mick the Spit, the racehorse trainer. I never gave him notice, but I said there had been a sudden death and told him that I had to go.

“It
int
proper to give me a bad reference,” I says. “I was a good worker and no trouble.”

“It’s not that,” the lady says. “He’s just adamant that he’s never heard of you. In fact he was very rude. So rude. So insulting.” Seems she still is holding the wound.

I shrug at Darren. He looks worried; he don’t want to lose me after all this training. Then I get a dawning.

“No–no,” I says. “Tell him it’s
Jackie
, he’ll know who you mean if you say
Jackie
.”

“Your Christian name is
Jackie
?” Darren says.

“No,” I says, “it’s just what Mick the Spit always called me, I was too scared to put him right. He used to park his Merc long sides the gallops and shoot twelve-bore at us as we went past on the horses like a line of sitting ducks.”

Darren loves it.

“I’ll phone him back, Jackie, Jackie, Jackie.” The lady goes off but I don’t spect she will phone him back, she’ll just tick the box that says “reference checked.”

“They’re applying for your dealer’s license,” Darren says.

My stomach flips; next week I’m doing it for real, with a uniform and proper night shifts and real punters placing bets. He’s wanted at the cash desk. I go back to the training game with my dry tongue stuck in my cheek and sweat pouring down my back. Then Princess Grace calls me and I die another death. But it’s only a parcel, with my name on it. Gwen is in the staffroom, on a break from reception, jigging about on someone’s lap, don’t know his name, int Chrissy Wissy.

“All right? Darren’s Ace,” she snorts her smoke.

The bloke sprays his tea. The joke is on me and it int proper nice.

“My uniform has just come,” I says. “Best try it on.”

The uniform fits nicely. Darren taught me blackjack himself cos he wanted to and everyone says he’s the best in the world, sides Gwen was so bad at dealing they had to move her to reception, signing in members and hanging up coats. And we int allowed to fraternize or get chummy with punters. If we know a customer outside of work we has to declare it, so we don’t end up being accused of dealing favors to friends. True
everybody is fraternizing, all of the time, but not in the bloody reception. Yesterday some bloke, a punter, was over the reception counter, they were in the fucking cupboard, laughing and mucking about. Princess Grace had gone home sick. I could hear Gwen’s hands slapping at him.

“In your dreams,” she was saying. “In your dreams.”

We look at all the shoes on the shop floor.

“Sorry,” I says to the girl. “Fell on a pruning knife. Cut the nerves. My right foot is hypersensitive.”

“Calf,” she says. “Achilles. Outside edge.” She’s understanding. Shakes her head. Missing toe.

“That’s another story,” I says. “Every left shoe is loverly but every right shoe hurts. Maybe I should try the boxes on, stead.”

Should ring Mr. Mac, about my compensation claim, I know that sometime never, they int going to pay me a single penny, it’s just a matter of principle now.

On the way back I sit in the park on a bench. There’s a newspaper in the bin so I get it out and read it. Smokes a cigarette with tweezers. Smokes ten, reads everything, sorts out all the junk from my pockets. Late sunshine is slanting golden through the trees on the hill. I get my new shoes out of the box, most spensive thing I’ve ever bought. Skint now, down to wages and hand to mouth. But I spects these shoes can do the job forever, found them in a dancewear shop of all surprising places. They still is handsome in tissue paper with soft straps and Cuban heels. The lady in the shop said people buy them for dancing flamenco. Said I’d settle for walking in them. I put them on and start back, thin-ankled and clipperty-clop. Horse-chestnut trees long side the path seems to be unrolling as I walk, leaves hanging limp with evening dew and the effort of being born.

I can hear the music from the corner of the park. 3 Park Lane. We finally got everything here, two loads in the car. Gwen has cleared her
belongings
from the hallway. Upstairs is full of Status Quo and seems like a hundred fans, deafening. The nice rug in the hall has gone somewhere, good idea cos the dog will only shit on it. Every nice thing has gone from the hallway and the kitchen sill. Bottle of Bombay Gin. Sticky. Three-quarters empty.

Hello?

The wood carvings? Gone from the stairwell. Bare. The music is so so so loud; the neighbors must be chuffed already. Rocking all over the world. I go upstairs. Gwen’s bedroom door is open. There’s a half-empty cardboard box in the doorway and a wardrobe half full of clothes, tangle of hangers and harness on the bed. I use the toilet. She’s hung her Mensa certificate on the back of the door. Hello, a pair of Edwardian uniform trousers is bandoned on the landing, one new, size 14, man’s shoe.

“Hello?”

Lounge door is open. Stereo tower where the drums was. Bare walls where skins was. He’s on his knees. Gwen is chucking the length of her hair like buckets of water over his face. He likes it. He likes it. He lull lull lull likes it. Where’s all the stuff?