Need (27 page)

“Nazdrovy!”
she said, but Crouch did not respond, he was not there, and neither was she, she was on Broadway instead, and the night was hot as any oven, not that she was complaining, when you had grown up on the Golden Coast you weren’t fazed by a little summer sultriness or even a freaking inferno, still, this did feel a trifle torrid. There was something bullying and gross in the air, a lowering oppression, as if the whole last month had gathered to a fullness, everything was about to go bang, and what spelled dog days in one word, eight letters?
Canicule
. It did, it truly did, only that was not the point. The point was she was late again, and Bani Badpa had her money. But she didn’t have Bani Badpa, he was miles away, still trying to fix the John, no doubt, but that John would never be fixed, not like the black swans, her swans.
“Khar Kosseh,”
Anna said, and flagged a cab.

When debouched at Sheherazade she was stone-cold sober, don’t ask her how, she just was, and even colder when she started to dance, Zenaide from Zonguldak had never swallowed a drop in her life, an ice-maiden, she was, in her nice new veil, a subtle shade of gold trimmed with crimson tongues that licked at her like flames when she rose up rippling, trapped in the caged circle with one dim spot for moonlight.

Performing, she felt strange, then stranger, every nerve in her seemed a humming wire, the little muscles up and down her inner thighs in their slit skirt darting like schools of silver-fish, most disconcerting, and the jewelled headband pressing on her skull was a ring of steel, this didn’t feel right, not right at all, even Bani Badpa and his money were not worth this jag like bad cocaine, twitch, twitch, another hanging, although she tried to stay slow and under control it was no use, her roseful bosom jibbed, her mouth gaped with lunging, then a crazed madness entered in, and where the fuck was she, back at Camp Pocahontas, the day of Chase’s burying, standing
inside the concrete pagoda on the balcony with the wrought-iron railing that circled above the vat of feathers, carnelian, gamboge, heliotrope, curcumine, azulene, far away in her mind when she placed one hand on the railing and vaulted off into space, spinning down all arms and legs in one simple line talking with no editing no petty interruptions no limits whatever saying,
I wish I was never born I wish I never was I wish I was I wish
 …

I
llness is just a disease.”

“What about a toothache?”

“A toothache is an infection.”

“What about boils?”

“A boil is a curse.”

She looked dead white so she did. When she finished her dancing and came over to the bar where he was gainfully employed polishing glasses she looked fit for laying out. But she said it was all in your head: “Sanity is only a syndrome,” she said. “But dementia is a distemper.”

John Joe had seen her in these takings before, it would not pay him to comment. The wise approach, he’d found, was like a runaway horse: let her run. Drop the reins and close your eyes, just pray you didn’t eat a tree. “Not a bad crowd the night,” he said.

“Not a bad crowd? Two drunks and their dog? I’ve seen livelier crowds in a morgue, you should have been in Darien when Waycross Martin had his second OD, talk about a dickhead world, those clowns in the county hospital couldn’t find a pulse not a flicker, let’s face it, they couldn’t find fleas on Fido, so they carted him off to the ice-house and me along with him, blubbing in buckets but giggly at the same time, full of dumb schoolgirl jokes,
I wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this
, nerves, I guess, and the smell of formaldehyde.
Thinking of the meat-racks inside the freezers, those slabs of raw beef, and meanwhile Waycross under his white sheet with one foot poking out, a lime-green sock with pink alligators for a pattern, you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when his toes twitched, then he sat up dreaming,
Every goodbye ain’t gone
, he said, and started searching for his stash,” Anna said, sucking her teeth. “Don’t you think that was strange?”

“More odd than strange,” said John Joe.

She looked reassured. “Oddity is not an ailment,” she said. But you could tell her mind was elsewhere, she was just rattling for camouflage. Her eyes kept roaming the room as if searching for rescue, John Wayne on a white horse, and she would not take a drink. “Never touch the stuff,” she said. But that was not a true fact.

Sipping fruit juice, she stood in the pose that John Joe liked best, swaybacked with her toes pointed out. Still it was not the same if she didn’t flex, and her head that should have been held swan-high, had the droops. “I lied,” she said. “I’ve never been in a morgue in my life, I never even smelled formaldehyde, I wouldn’t know the smell from doublemint or dogshit, I just said it to say, the day I’ve had I needed to say something, such a day you wouldn’t believe, if you read about it in a book you’d say I lied.”

“Mothballs,” said John Joe.

She looked at him sideways then, that way she had, as if he was God’s misprint. “The smell of formaldehyde,” he explained.

“I am a dead man,” Mr. Badpa said.

He had sneaked up on them unawares, this man shaped like a pot-bellied stove in polyester carrying an Accounts book, and the moment he uttered, Anna whirled on him: “Eat my dust, I’m leaving you dinner, I received a better offer, Club Cleopatra wants me, the opportunity of a lifetime, my agent
says, my managers too, I’d be mad to turn it down, simply mad, I’d be out of my tiny mind,” she said. “Where’s my money?”

“Lend me fifty,” Mr. Badpa said to John Joe, which John Joe did, and Mr. Badpa handed it to Anna Crow, who threw it on the floor, then swept away towards the kitchens and her dressing room, trailing her new veil behind her, old gold with crimson tongues, it matched her hair almost. But her own colour wasn’t good, those fever spots like redcurrant stains were on her cheeks again: “One word for you, Badpa,” she said. “Boils.”

The storage space where she changed was John Joe’s hiding place. His room at the Zoo didn’t feel his own, it was too full of Godwin. Though that was a terrible way to go certainly. To drown head-down and unblessed in a vat of pizza dough, that was a tragic end. Many nights he could not shut an eye till dawn for picturing the final moments, your man’s legs stuck in the air and thrashing, frantic at first, then slower and slower like a wasp trapped in a glass, and not a priest in sight.
He died as he’d lived
, Anna said, a thought to poison any room.

But this snug spot felt like home. He knew every label on every can, the robed woman crossing the desert on Demetrio’s Hearts of Palm, the kneeling camel on Maravasti Pitted Olives, the veiled houri on Jalaver’s Nectar. And the stepcharts that papered the walls, the Oasis Floor Lift and Dervish Spin, the Turkish Travel and Pelvis Flutter and Double Hubble Bubble. And the verse tacked to the back of the door,
The Belly Dancer
, he could recite that by heart.
I can arch my back in pride, Contract my spine in humility, Sway my head in grief, Ripple my arms like a snake
, those were lines he would not forget. And the music keening in the club, the smashing of plates in the kitchen, and Bani Badpa cursing, his sisters squealing, the sound and smell of the jakes next door.

All of them together meant Anna Crow.

The rickety table where she made up was covered every inch with pots and vials and jars, and these too he had memorized. They seemed to hold the key to all mysteries, all secrets. In the long afternoon when everyone else was gone and he had Sheherazade to himself, he would speak their names out loud, and savour their descriptions: Princess Marcella Borghese diNott Complex; Mango Body Butter;
spectacular lashes that extend happily ever after; colours that won’t kiss off, good riddance to fine lines, added shimmering reflectants
; Exclusive Triple AlphaHydroxy Fruit Acid.

Every one of these words was a wondermeat, but
exfoliates
was the best. God alone in his greatness knew what it meant, and even He might need to think twice, yet the sound of it, drawn out long and slow on a dying fall, breathed all the world’s romance.

What were those words that Anna Crow loved?
The lapsing, unsoilable, whispering sea
. Those were good right enough, those were champions in their own time. But
exfoliates
had them hammered: “Knocked into a cocked hat,” he said.

“Cocked hat is right, or a tin cup even,” said Anna, sweeping bottles of Velvet Cleansing Milk and Turnaround Cream from the table. “Stick me out on a street corner in a Betty Boop costume doing the splits I’d pull down more than I do in this sweatshop, this fucking black hole of fucking Isfahan. When I think of what I sacrificed, I could have been a
première danseuse
, the toast of the Golden Coast, I could have had the world at my feet, sucking on my toes, and now look at them, there’s a broken vein for every light on Broadway, I could weep, I could just howl.”

“Calcutta,” said John Joe. “The black hole of Calcutta.”

Hair mousse, setting gels, skin toners and moisturizers flew off the quaking table, and smashed against the wall. John Joe
had never seen her so violently disturbed, her bare breasts flapped like loose tent-flaps in a thunderstorm: “Martha Graham wanted me,” she said. “Wanted me in the worst way and no cheap cracks out of you, Merce Cunningham too, he said he’d never seen anyone like me.” Snatching up a tube of New Lash Out mascara, she aimed it at the Anatolian Shimmy, then changed her mind. “I’m hungry,” she said.

“I have some peanuts just.”

The nuts were still in their shells, and Anna Crow, when she skinned them and nibbled, used only her front teeth, squirrel-style. “Stevie Smith had a parrot once, called him Onan,” she said, moving through the room, stripping off her skirt and headband and gilt sandals, scattering peanuts in their shells. “He spilled his seed on the ground,” she said, and she struck a pose, hand on hip, flaunting like one of the dirty pictures in that book Juice Shovlin brought back from England once.

Art it was called when John Joe was fifteen and Juice passed it round behind the bike shed. Most of the females displayed were old or blown enough to be your granny in their skins, and one of the Three Graces was the spit of Mrs. Kinsella that ran the tripe shop in Killybegs, but there was one picture of a girl still fresh. A skinny French bit lying stretched across a white bedspread with her legs splayed and hanging, stiff as hurling sticks, her private part split open for all to see. “Would you look at the quim on that one! It’s a city in itself,” Juice Shovlin had said, and every man jack present had laughed, John Joe included. Only he had taken a moment to cross himself, too.

The painting’s title was
La Maigre Adeline
. Juice Shovlin said that was French for a dose, and maybe it was the truth, but John Joe thought not. Instinct told him that, far from being a pro, the girl took in washing. The white bedspread with the squirls of green wallpaper behind and that scantling
body laid sprawling with no defenses, its legs stuck straight out towards you when you watched—for some reason he couldn’t pin down, the whole set-up made him think of scrubbing, a ceaseless scouring.
“I wash my hands among the innocents,”
he said.

“And I will compass thine altar, O Lord,”
Anna Crow answered him, and she stopped her pacing, she stared. “Lordamercy, where did that come from, St. John the Baptist’s maybe, the Washing of Hands,
O Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house, and the place where thy glory dwelleth
, the clutter that clings to your mind,
Take not away my soul, O God
, the worthless junk.” But she seemed calmed. At least she threw no more bottles. “I could use more nuts,” she said.

Far from washed, her hand when she cupped it to cradle the shells was stained blue and camomile-pink with spilled lotions, and the state of her black nails John Joe could not describe.
“My soul, O God, with the wicked, nor my life with men of blood,”
she said, and put her mouth on his, her tongue lapped at his teeth.

She had never kissed him before, not even a peck on the cheek, and he sensed no lust in her now. The way her tongue probed and burrowed, it seemed to be searching just. Asking a question, it might be. A tongue not plump or sleek, but whippy as an iguana when it flicked against the roof of his mouth, then drew back and licked at air, seemed to be considering, then entered him again.

This time it didn’t move, her tongue lay flat and dormant upon his own. He could feel it pulse with her breathing, quick and shallow like a dog’s. It tasted salty of nuts and raw of spirits, it was coated in slime. A sleeping slug, it felt like, without sex or any nature of desire. “Take me down,” Anna said.

“Down where?”

“The Black Swans.”

That was surprising to his ears. Times past when he had mentioned those chosen persons, she had responded with no great warmth.
Toxic waste
was one phrase he recalled,
loonytoons
another. But perhaps these stories in the papers and now on TV had helped soothe her doubts.

With each day that passed, it seemed, mole people were more the rage. Not only reporters and book-writers were swarming the subways now, but all manner of entertainments. A fashion shoot and rock videos, there was even talk of a film.

Along with the glitz came more and more guards. Randall Gurdler himself had been on the News, promising drastic action. These subway dwellers were no picturesque eccentrics, he said, but drug addicts, sociopaths, violent criminals; a menace to us all. As President of the MTA, he pledged himself to a purge.

The Black Swans were not mentioned by name, no more was Master Maitland. But no freed soul was fooled. All this blether of drugs and violence was just decoy work, a tactic to mask the true target. The packs of gun-toting mercenaries who roamed the tunnels on Gurdler’s behalf were after one prize only, and his name was not Fu Manchu.

Not a place or situation for a young lady of refinement. John Joe wished she had not asked. Wished she’d left Mount Tabor as his own; his personal retreat. Everything he possessed, of course, was hers to share, no questions asked. Or simply hers to take. But the swans had been his life apart. The thought of exposing them to any outsider, even Anna Crow, made him raise his hand, trace the puckers and ruts around his trick eye.