The Killing Lessons (11 page)

‘The truth is,’ Claudia Grey’s older sister had said to her during their last phone conversation a week ago, ‘you don’t know
what
you’re doing. You’re too old for this rubbish. It’s not as if you’re bloody eighteen.’

Claudia, who was twenty-six, with dark hair cut in a long bob and a promiscuous intelligence that in the wrong mood could do damage you wouldn’t walk away from, had been sitting in the window of the shared two-room apartment (a sublet on the least crummy edge of Beach Flats) enjoying in spite of her sister’s admonishment the thin Santa Cruz sunlight on her bare feet, the nails of which she’d just painted Cleopatra Gold. She’d pictured Alison in London, six thousand miles away and eight hours ahead, gathering up the supper dishes with the phone wedged under her chin while rain slithered down the dark windows. Years ago, when they
had
both been teenagers, Alison had said to her: You know what you are? With all your brains and opinions? You’re
unlikeable
. Claudia had been hurt and vindicated. She’d clamped her jaws together for a few seconds, then answered: Yes, well I’d rather be right than popular. And that dress, Alison, is
fucking execrable
.

‘I mean how much longer is all this going to go on?’ Alison said, transatlantically, with crockery clattering. Claudia thought of how different it would feel over there, three days before Christmas: dark at four in the afternoon; the crisp mornings; maybe snow.

‘How much longer is all what going to go on?’

‘All this. Ms Kerouac. Traipsing around stupid America.’

‘I’m not traipsing around. I’ve got a waitressing career. And an apartment. And a
boyfriend
. I’m a paragon of static legitimacy. I might as well be in Bournemouth, in fact.’

‘Do you have any idea how worried everyone is about you?’

‘They’re not worried,’ Claudia had said. ‘They’re jealous.’

The stubborn bit of her believed it. But there were other bits that didn’t. If most of the people in her old life weren’t worried about her it was only because they’d written her off as mad. Three years ago, having realised that not only did she not want a career in academia, but that it would probably make her kill herself, she’d dropped out of her PhD (‘Negative Capability and the Egotistical Sublime: A Comparative Study of George Eliot and Charles Dickens’) at Oxford and entered a phase of uninspiring and unremunerative jobs in London – waitressing, bar work, admin that was glorified tea-making – living chaotically beyond her means, going out too much, getting wasted, sleeping with arty but going-nowhere men and generally continuing the war inside herself between the conviction of her own potential greatness and the terror that she was just another too-smart girl who’d terminally lost the plot.

Then her grandmother died and left her (and Alison) some money. Not, as the game show hosts said,
life-changing
money, but enough to finance a temporary escape. Claudia had spent a year globetrotting on a shoestring. Quick friendships, sunsets, exotic odours, dirt, surprising conversations, exhaustion. There were prosaic hours on asthmatic trains, of course, dismal hotels, the perpetual migraine of not being able to speak the language; but compensated for by the feeling of liberty and flux, of not knowing what tomorrow would bring, of seeing her reflection in the mirrors of unfamiliar rooms. She’d discovered the bliss of drinking a cup of coffee alone at an outside table while the French or Spanish or Italian or Greek Monday morning bustle surged around her. An expat cliché, yes, but still, the coffee was good, and the warm air around her bare ankles, and the frank lust of frequently stupid Mediterranean men with whom she nonetheless slept and sometimes enjoyed.

At times, she thought herself ridiculous. She thought herself ridiculous because she truly believed it was her duty to have an extraordinarily rich, adventurous life filled with love and lust and ideas and achievement and sensation, that expanded her mind and refined her soul and freed her libido and deepened her understanding and in the long run prepared her (subtextually, as it were) for a graceful death. She knew how ridiculous this sounded. But she also knew it sounded ridiculous because people were too shit and weak and damaged and scared and embarrassed to accept that that was what life was for, if it was for anything. Better to laugh at your intensity than weep at your mediocrity.

She’d saved California for her last stop. In San Francisco, with less than a thousand dollars left in her fund, she’d decided – in an occult rush of certainty – that she wasn’t going home. Which pitched her back into on-the-breadline – not to mention illegal – life. Since then she’d got by working under the immigration radar for anyone (bars, restaurants, parents in need of a cheap babysitter) willing to bend the rules and pay her in cash. Most recently, thanks to an incredible stroke of luck, for Carlos Diaz, owner of the Whole Food Feast in Santa Cruz. Carlos was himself the child of illegal immigrants. He had an avuncular soft spot for Claudia (harmless, she’d decided), was tickled by her accent and IQ and sympathetic to putting one over on those sonsofbitches at the INS. She’d started the job four months ago without any understanding other than that she needed a place to rest up for a while and earn a minimal crust.

But Santa Cruz was seducing her. She liked her flatmate, Stephanie, also a waitress, who was three years younger and happy and uneducated and unreliable and untidy and unashamed of not wanting much more from life right now than beach days and HBO and white wine in the fridge and to be dating someone cute. She liked Carlos and didn’t mind the job. She’d made friends with a local misanthropic sculptress with whom she could talk books and art and misanthropy. Most thrillingly disturbing: she’d met a very
not
stupid guy, Ryan Wells, who owned a small digital editing company downtown, and with whom she’d been on a couple of dates and whom she’d enjoyed kissing and with whom, barring some disaster, she was ready to have sex.

More than ready. There’d been six celibate months since her last fling, back in San Francisco, and a feeling of frustrated entitlement had crept in. ‘Boyfriend’ was overstating the case for Alison’s benefit, but Ryan Wells definitely had potential. Probably for ultimate wreckage, but more than likely, since he was almost as well read as Claudia, with a healthy sense of the absurd and a quietly thudding quota of Eros, for something intense and rousing and usefully messy in the meantime. The first time they’d kissed he’d put his hands on her hips and her body had said
yes, yes, Jesus,
yes
.

She was going to a barbecue party at his house this evening. The idea of a barbecue three days before Christmas made her internal clock queasy, but nonetheless.

‘Look at you, all glamorised,’ Carlos said to her.

Claudia had finished her shift at the Feast and spent twenty minutes getting ready in the washroom. Light make-up, clean Levi’s, a blue halter top, thrift store suede jacket and sandals it was still warm enough (sixty-two degrees, for all that it was December) to wear. Overnight essentials (shameless!) in a silver sequinned bag. Ryan’s place was across the river up off Graham Hill Road, and since her shift didn’t finish till eight there wasn’t really time to trawl back to Beach Flats. He’d offered to come and pick her up but she’d resisted. Told herself she wanted to be able to change her mind (fat chance, you
wanton
) right up until she got to his front door; but there was prickly independence in it too: Ryan had money. Not a fortune, but enough to make her not want to feel like a needy British pauper female, Oxford genius or not. There was a city bus that would drop her less than ten minutes from his house.

‘This is just for the public transport,’ Claudia said to Carlos. ‘I’ve got stillies and a cocktail dress to slip into when I get there.’

‘You got
what
and a cocktail dress?’

‘Stillies. Stilettos.
High
heels
. God, it’s a drag dealing with the developing world.’

‘Never mind that, you behave yourself. I heard what British women are like. It’s an illness with you people because you don’t get enough vitamin D.’

‘See you Monday,’ Claudia said.

‘
Buenos noches
,
chiquita
. Have fun.’

The bus dropped Claudia at Graham Hill Road and Tanner Heights. Walking up the incline (good call on the sandals) she was – for the umpteenth time, and deeply at odds with her wider politics – calmed by the cleanliness of American suburbia. Languid cedars and pristine asphalt. Silence. No litter. The spirit of Updike hovering over the crisp lawns and dozing autos. This was her entire psychology in microcosm, she knew: charmed by the things it most mistrusted. She opened her nostrils and inhaled the perfume of affluent domesticity. She’d stopped smoking when she moved to Santa Cruz and she was grateful for it at moments like this. Not that her head wasn’t a mess. A perpetually fizzing cocktail of abstract thought and concrete impulses. She was still married to Literature, to Ideas, to the Life of the Mind – still married, yes, but in the raw beginning of a trial separation. When she thought of her room at Oxford, the walls of books with spines cracked in testimony to dogged engagement, when she thought of how clearly she’d sensed the scale of the imaginative relationship – what the reading life
demanded
(which was, in the end, to keep finding room for everything human, no matter how ugly or beautiful or strange) – it was as if she’d turned her back on her child. Out of fear. That she simply wasn’t up to it. That Literature would keep reminding her that she wasn’t big enough for Literature. And if she wasn’t big enough for Literature, how could she be big enough for Life? There was a flashier explanation for what she’d done – that she’d grasped the truth that for someone like her there was a danger reading would become a
substitute
for living, that her wiser self had rebelled against it, righteously – but she mistrusted that, too. It was, she thought, the Devil’s explanation. Meanwhile God waited, sad and patient, for her to come back to Him.

Christ
, Claudia thought, having gone through the familiar mental loop,
if that isn’t an argument for getting my brains fucked out I don’t know what is.

Twenty paces ahead of her, just before the tree-lined bend that would, according to the Waze app on her twitchy phone, take her within a hundred metres of Ryan’s house, a dark-haired, unshaven guy was tightening the wheel-nuts on the rear offside of his RV.

She thought:
Weird spot for an RV.

But she’d been in this country long enough to know not to be surprised by anything.

‘Fuck,’ Xander said. ‘We got a flat.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Paulie said.

They had been driving for two days. The wrongness of events in Colorado had set Xander in motion. The road soothed him, though the signs were like barbed wire if he tried to decipher them. The RV had a talking GPS. A guy with a classy robotic voice. It was a weird thing to have with you, a sort of friend that could see everything though it was calm and blind.

Xander sat with his hands on the steering wheel, eyes closed. Then he opened them. ‘You?’ he said. ‘You’ll take for ever.’

Paulie opened his mouth – then closed it again. They’d entered a phase now in which he had to choose very carefully when to speak and what to say. Xander’s will, which had been for so long like a supportive suit snug around him, had started to feel different. It still fitted snugly, but there was heat and mass and pressure now in its embrace. Paulie had an image of a picture he’d seen once as a child: a torture device from olden days, a big metal mummy case lined with spikes. You put the person inside it and when you closed it around them the spikes went into the flesh. Incredibly, he remembered what it was called: the Iron Maiden. Which – these connections your brain could make shocked him, disturbed him – was where the rock band must’ve got their name from: Iron Maiden. How weird that there were these connections you made. Was the whole world like that? Was everything somehow connected to everything else? He imagined it: the whole planet and everything in it just a massive web, things like cigarette butts and ants eventually joined up with things like presidents and the space shuttle. It made him feel sick, as if he’d just looked down and realised he was standing right on the edge of a sheer drop into nothingness.

Xander hadn’t moved. Now he turned in his seat and looked at Paulie. It had always been occasionally pleasurable to make Paulie suffer, but of late it had become a necessity. The warm feeling of contempt he could summon – watching Paulie’s face become a big vivid thing full of easily hateful details – was a cheap but satisfying drug. And the longer he went without doing what he needed to do, the more he relied on it. It had been too long. Not doing what he needed to do started a sound, whispers you could barely hear at first, like the fever when he was in Mama Jean’s house, that grew steadily, moment by moment, day by day, until it was deafening, as if his head – as if his whole body – were filled with a furious mass of bees. Only doing what he needed to do made them disappear. For a while. Colorado, two days ago? That didn’t count. He hadn’t done it right (the image of the little brown milk jug tormented him), and not doing it right, it turned out, was almost worse than not doing it at all.

‘You got any idea how fucking useless you are?’ he said to Paulie now.

Paulie looked away, down into his lap first, then out the side window of the RV. The vehicle was filled with evening sunlight. Xander let the words swell in the silence between them. Even doing just that eased some of the muscles in his neck. He could feel how badly Paulie wanted to get out, how the air outside would very slightly thin the pressure he was putting on him.

‘You think you’re doing something?’ he asked Paulie. ‘You’re not doing something.
I’m
doing something. What you do? That’s nothing. They don’t even feel it. They’re not even
there
.’

‘When we pass a store we need to get some water,’ Paulie said, unbuckling his seat belt.

‘You know what I’m telling you is the truth, don’t you?’ Xander said, smiling.

Paulie didn’t answer. His face was hot.

‘You know you’re scared of them, don’t you? How do you live with that? Being scared of them. What do you think they’re going to do to you?’

Paulie didn’t answer. Looked everywhere but at Xander. It was as if Xander had him in an invisible net.

‘It’s like carrying you on my goddamned back,’ Xander said, unbuckling his own seat belt.

Paulie bowed his head. His smell wafted to Xander. Damp canvas and sour socks and stale sweat. Paulie, Xander thought, not for the first time, didn’t wash often enough.

‘I’m just saying,’ Paulie said, staring hard at the dashboard. ‘We need water. I’m fucking starving, too. There was a McDonald’s back there on 17.’

‘Like carrying you on my goddamned
back
,’ Xander repeated. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘Fine,’ Paulie said.

‘Do you hear me?’

Paulie made a quick movement with his head, as if suddenly realising
his
neck muscles were seizing up. ‘I said
fine
,’ he said.

Xander kept the invisible net tight for a few seconds, watching Paulie breathing hard through his long, narrow nostrils. Then he opened the driver’s door and jumped down out of the RV.