Mr Toppit (23 page)

“What do you think?” Ray loomed out of the blackness. He was holding a lantern with a lit candle inside it. “It’s all from a picture,” he said.

Martha stepped in. He was at the far end, and she saw that he was standing next to a bed. “It’s called a
bateau lit,”
he said. “That’s what they slept in then. It’s a bed like a boat.” He knelt
down, lit another lantern and then a third. There were other bits of furniture lined up against the sides: ornate chairs, a dressing table, and a pair of huge gilt mirrors wedged behind a chaise longue. Ray laughed. “The guillotine was in here until this morning. They needed it back on the main stage.” He moved down the truck and pulled the doors inwards. Martha watched the dull afternoon light vanish as they banged shut. Ray secured them with a long metal pole that fitted through a slot in each door. Now there was just the shadowy light from the lanterns. “Come on,” he said.

“This is the French Revolution film,” Martha said.

“Yes,” said Ray, surprised.

“My husband’s been working on it.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right—I’ve seen him around.”

“Have they finished with all the props?”

“Haven’t bloody used them. They’re dumping the scenes. Nightmare for us. Back and forth to the prop house like a bloody yo-yo.”

“I should go, Ray. I can’t do this. I’m already late.”

“You’re here now. What’s the point of going?”

“She’s so useless, Chita, with the baby. It’ll be his bedtime soon. I’ve got to go—I’ve got to give him his bath.”

The trouble was, she felt herself incapable of movement. Ray grabbed her hand and led her to the bed. The van smelled musty and damp. The floor creaked as they crossed it. “Ray …” she began, but then she couldn’t think what she had meant to say. She had no idea of anything. She felt she was floating.

After she had taken off her clothes, she lay back on the bed. Ray knelt between her legs holding his short, thick cock. “Tell me how much you want it,” he said, and when she spoke it
seemed to her that, in the midst of the lies and the evasions and the horror of what she was doing—had done, would go on doing—her answer was the only true thing she could almost ever remember saying.

“How come you’re so howdy-doody all of a sudden?” Alma said to Laurie in the visiting room at Spring Crest the first time she had been there since returning from England.

There were many ways to describe how she was feeling at that moment but “howdy-doody” was not one that sprang immediately to mind. On reflection, though, Laurie thought it was as good as any. Alma’s little eyes, beneath wrinkled lids, were staring at her intently and Laurie held her gaze without saying anything.

“Ever since you came back from England,” Alma snapped. “You meet someone over there? Some man? Best thing that could happen.” She threw her head back and gave a nasty laugh. “You’re like a sack of dry leaves.”

Laurie forced herself to stay silent. She turned away from Alma and began to zing as hard as she could. She was determined not to enter this particular playground.

“You ought to come to this place. They’re like dogs. Ray Tabares and Dina Nelson—Mrs. D had to haul them out of the pool house, pants round their ankles. Dina’s seventy-seven. Should’ve poured ice water over them. Anyway, what kind of vacation could you have over there on your own? Look at you—look how pale you are.”

“I wasn’t trying for a tan.”

“Weather’s terrible there. Rains all the time.”

“I don’t believe you’ve been to England, have you, Alma?” Laurie said calmly.

Alma ignored this. “When am I going home?” she said.

“This is home, Alma. This is your home now.”

“Why can’t I come home? It’s my house.”

“I pay the loan on it. I have done for years.”

Alma’s face creased up and she began to cry. “You want me to die here, don’t you?” she shouted.

Laurie reached into her purse and pulled out a tissue. She held it out to Alma, who brushed it away angrily. However and wherever she died, Laurie wanted Alma’s death to have some kind of meaning. She dreaded what she knew would be the awful insignificance of her sidestep from life. It would be a local death, a notice in the
Modesto Bee
, maybe a few lines on the obit page, although Laurie found it hard to imagine how you could embroider the events of Alma’s life into anything that approached even local note. Her homemade preserves were not legendary, her cross-stitching had not won prizes at the County Fair, she had not performed unforgettably in
Arsenic and Old Lace
with the Modesto Players. She had never even attended a PTA meeting.

Laurie saw that Alma had stopped crying and was regarding her with something that resembled astonishment. She realized that it had not occurred to Alma that Laurie would actually think about her question and not just answer it quickly and reassuringly. When Alma repeated it—“Do you want me to die here, Laurie? Do you?”—her voice was tremulous and frightened, and Laurie saw that in extreme circumstances Alma still had the capacity to connect to something real. The fact was, Arthur’s passing had spoiled Laurie. It was a hard act to follow and, in an unexpected moment of tenderness for Alma, she allowed herself to accept that when Alma died it would be unreasonable to expect her to get within a thousand miles of Arthur’s grace and dignity.

Clearly Alma was not of a mind to have a rational discussion about her death. “They all hate me here,” she said.

“Alma, you’ve done nothing to make anyone like you.”

“That is a lie!” she said, outraged. But it was true. At mealtimes the old people sat at assigned places, four to a table. She had lasted five days at the first table she was put on. When she had told Bea Brooks—the oldest extant occupant of Spring Crest—it was strange she looked so Jewish, had she changed her surname from Brookstein? Mrs. Detweiler was called in and Alma was moved to another table. There, her meal companions complained that Alma would reach over and take food from their plates with her fingers. Now she sat on her own at a card table in the far corner of the dining room, sometimes muttering to herself, sometimes loudly joining in conversations at other tables.

“I’m lonely. Nobody visits me. Even Marge Clancy doesn’t come anymore.” She looked quizzically at Laurie. “You know why?”

Laurie shrugged her shoulders. She hoped her face wasn’t going pink.

“It’s like a morgue here,” Alma said. She was right. Even though it was only eight thirty, the place was deserted and silent. Of course, that was one of the reasons Laurie tended to visit her in the evening: she hated people veering off in another direction if she and Alma were walking in what was ambitiously called the “Japanese Garden”; she hated the sternness of Mrs. Detweiler’s face when she told Laurie she needed a word. Most of all she hated the pity she saw on people’s faces when they glimpsed her and Alma together. Weren’t you meant to get over embarrassment about your parents when you stopped being a teenager? Weren’t you meant to be able to accept and forgive your parents’ faults? What baloney, Laurie thought.

“Well, where is everyone? Are they playing cards somewhere, maybe?” she asked.

“Cards!” Alma snorted. “They wouldn’t know the difference between a spade and a club.”

“They must be somewhere,” Laurie said. They couldn’t all be in the pool house with their pants round their ankles.

“They’re asleep. Or dead.”

There was a silence, then Laurie did something extraordinary: she asked Alma a question about her father. A little buzz of electricity had sparked in her brain and brought to life some long-disused circuit. If it had a sound, she thought, it would be like that zap you heard when a bug hit one of those weird ultraviolet killing boxes.

“Do you miss Dad ever? I don’t even know if he’s still alive, Alma. Don’t you think it’s right that I know?” she said. It was such a simple inquiry and it had come out so easily. She could hardly believe she had said it, but now she had, she was going to sit back and wait to see what happened.

The Exorcist
was not a movie Laurie had cared much for, although she had refused to sign the petition when some of the church groups tried to get it banned locally, but it came into her mind now.

“Don’t you talk to me about that cocksucker, Miss Laurie Clow. You have no idea!
You have no idea!”

If Alma had not had arthritis of the neck, her head might have turned 360 degrees. Her body was shaking, though, and she was certainly speaking in a frightening growl. Laurie had not seen so much energy in her for years. It was like someone had put jump leads on her.

“You don’t have the right to upset me!” Alma shouted. “You don’t have the right to get me all riled up.”

“I’d like to know what happened to him, that’s all,” Laurie said. It was extraordinary how calm she felt.

All the fire had gone out of Alma, and she was weeping again. “I had to protect you, Laurie. You were my only concern.”

If there was one thing worse than Alma being aggressive, it was Alma being sentimental. “Protect me from what exactly?” Laurie asked carefully.

“He was
weak.”

That wasn’t the way Laurie remembered it. He wasn’t the one who had slept in till lunchtime. He wasn’t the one ensconced in that bar in Santa Fe with a row of empty martini glasses in front of him, making Laurie eat the olives off the cocktail sticks when she didn’t even like olives.

“That’s not true.”

“Don’t tell me what’s true and what isn’t.” Alma’s mouth and jaw had taken on the set of a pug’s.

“You
drank.”

“You don’t know what my life was like with him. I lived in shame.”

“Oh, Alma …”

“He was practically a
Communist,”
Alma hissed. “You take after him. You’re like him.”

“Alma, I did some fund-raising once for those fruit pickers who couldn’t buy a cup of coffee with what they earned in a day.”

“Well, he believed in the redistribution of wealth, all right.” She gave a horrible laugh. “Got us kicked out of Los Alamos—didn’t know that, did you? You
loved
that place.”

It was true. The only happy time Laurie could remember of her childhood was when they had been at Los Alamos, the mountains and the desert and the sky. She had felt safe there. She had felt safe there because he was with them.

“Course we didn’t know it then, but they were making that bomb, the one that fried the Japs.”

“There were two bombs, Alma. We dropped them on two cities and killed God knows how many people.”

“Good thing, too.”

“Is he still alive?” Laurie had stopped feeling so calm, and her voice was shaking.

“You want to know? You pack me up and take me home and I’ll tell you, Miss Laurie Clow. Otherwise I’ll die here and you’ll never know. You want that?” Alma folded her arms and did an aggressive zipping movement across her lips with her finger.

Laurie stood up. Sometimes the price was just too high. “Good-bye, Alma,” she said. “I’ll see you next week.”

As she walked out of the day room, she felt a small glow of triumph that she would not have wanted Alma to observe. She had lived her life oblivious to signs and meanings, but now she had spotted a flaw in the wall that Alma had constructed to keep her from understanding, a loose stone that—with some work—might be jiggled and finally pulled free. Alma had unwittingly revealed something about Laurie’s father: something had happened when they were at Los Alamos that meant they had had to leave. Laurie would nurture it, like a gift, until she could unravel it.

Anyway, it strengthened her resolve to do what she had to do next. If she didn’t pull it off she would end up with Alma back home. Her watch showed she was five minutes early, but that was good. Mrs. Detweiler was keen on punctuality, a tall order when most of the people she came into contact with had Alzheimer’s.

A framed sampler hung on Mrs. Detweiler’s office door with “If you aim high you can’t shoot yourself in the foot”
embroidered on it. Laurie knocked. She could hear humming from inside.

“Laurie! You look well,” Mrs. Detweiler said, as she came in. “You’ve lost weight. How was it? How was the trip?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Laurie could see a file on Mrs. Detweiler’s desk with “Clow” written in big black capitals on the cover. Once she would have felt terrified by what was coming, but she would ride over those old feelings like a surfer on a giant wave. She was not about to let Mrs. Detweiler take control. “We need to talk about my mother,” she said.

Mrs. Detweiler was taken off guard. Laurie could feel her brushing aside the pile of small talk she had planned to use before getting to the point, but she recovered herself quickly. “Yes, we do, Laurie,” she said. “We’ve got ourselves in a fine mess with Alma, that’s for sure. You know that the police aren’t planning to investigate her intruder any further?” Mrs. Detweiler smirked. “Such an unnecessary fuss.”

“Really?” Laurie said coolly.

“Yes, Laurie,” she said, in a voice like a knife. “Officer Reinheimer believes she invented the story, made the whole thing up. Somewhere deep down I think she wanted the attention.”

As deep as a dry riverbed, Laurie thought.

Mrs. Detweiler turned the knife. “We can’t keep her any longer at Spring Creek. We’ll be sad to see her leave, of course we will, you know that, Laurie.”

Laurie inserted a catch in her voice. “She’s so vulnerable. I don’t want to have to put her through any more. She loves it here. In her own way.”

Mrs. Detweiler was implacable. “I’m sorry, Laurie.” She closed Alma’s file and lined up her pens, but Laurie was not about to be dismissed.

“Mrs. D, you’ve got quite a few spare rooms, I couldn’t help noticing.”

Mrs. Detweiler corrected her: “Suites,” she said. “I’ve got a waiting list as long as your arm, Laurie.”

“Of course you have. This is such an upscale place. But you need good publicity, word of mouth.”

“I don’t think our reputation is in any doubt around these parts, Laurie,” Mrs. Detweiler said, with a chilly laugh. “People know what Alma’s like. I don’t think her leaving will cause us a problem.”

“The thing of it is, Mrs. D, Alma’s confused. Something happened, maybe not in the way she thought, but I don’t doubt there was an intruder of some kind. And she’ll say that, she’ll go on saying it. You know what she’s like.”