Walkers (4 page)

‘That boy,’ said her grandmother,
‘you won’t be seeing him again, will you?’

‘Is there any reason why I
shouldn’t?’

‘Well, what will Carl say?’

‘Grandma, it’s none of Carl’s
goddamned business.’

‘Suzie,’ put in her grandfather,
taking off his half-glasses. ‘In this house, we don’t use words like that.’

‘Well, it’s none of Carl’s
blank-censored business, then. Grandma, we’re not even dating.’

‘ You should. He’ s a very
well-mannered person.’

‘I know, but I happen not to like
him. And anyway, he’s not Irish, he’s Armenian.’

‘ His mother is half Irish.’

Susan closed her eyes and leaned
against the icebox and her grandmother knew that there wasn’t any point in nagging
any more. Her grandfather shrugged and smiled. ‘She’ll find somebody nice,
don’t worry about it. The whole planet is wall to wall with eligible men.’

‘It’s these boys from the beach,
that’s all,’ Susan’s grandmother complained. ‘These surfers. One day, some
surfer is going to make her pregnant, and then what? It’s a responsibility,
bringing up your own daughter’s child. Sometimes I think it’s too much.’

Susan opened her eyes. ‘Grandma,’
she said, ‘I am not going to get pregnant by any surfer.’

Her grandmother shook her head, and
went off to finish her vacuum-cleaning. Every morning, she vacuum-cleaned for
at least two hours, and watched the television at the same time. Those were her
two principal obsessions in life: cleaning the house and watching TV. She
thought it was mandatory that her house should sparkle like the houses in the
Lemon-Kleen commercials, and that she should live her life according to the
gospel of Richard Simmons. She had once appeared on
The Price
Is Right and
won
three hundred dollars and a lawn-sprinkler. That was six years ago, and she
still talked about it.

Susan’s grandfather held out his
hand, and hooked his arm around Susan’s waist.

‘You’ll find somebody, you wait and
see. You’re young yet, you haven’t even finished your education.’

‘Grandpa, I’m not actually panicking
to get married,’ Susan told him. Unannounced, unwanted, a vision of the dead
girl on the beach suddenly flashed in front of her eyes. White breasts, coated
in grit. Squirming eels. She pulled herself away from her grandfather, went to
the sink to rinse out her glass, and stood there for a moment to steady
herself.

‘You all right?’ her grandfather
asked her.

‘Sure, I’m all right.’

‘You look like you’re upset. Your
mother used to look like that, when she was upset.

Kind of chalky, know what I mean?
Wasn’t anything to do with that boy, was it?’

‘It’s not morning-sickness, if
that’s what you’re trying to suggest.’

‘Well, I wasn’t,’ said her
grandfather, offended.

He glanced towards the hallway door,
where Susan’s grandmother was vacuum-cleaning in surge after surge of roaring
decibels, and then he stood up and came over to the sink, and laid his hand on
Susan’s shoulder. He was short and tubby, like Susan’s grandmother; but unlike
her grandmother he was quite content to look his age, which was sixty-six. His
bald head was varnished like a candy-apple from hours of sitting out in his
rocking-chair and watching the bouncy golden schoolgirls go by.

‘Your grandma means well,’ he told
her, in a low voice.

Susan nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘She’s only trying to protect you
from making a mistake.’

‘Yes, I know.’

Her grandfather didn’t know what
else to say. He fiddled with the cuff of his droopy grey cardigan. Then he
shrugged, and went and sat down, and picked up his paper again, although he
kept his eyes on Susan. The newspaper headlines warned of more earth tremors
mainly centred on Tijuana.

Susan went across the hall to her
bedroom. Her grandmother looked up from her vacuum-cleaning with a hurt,
impatient expression, but Susan tried to ignore her. It wasn’t
her
fault that she had to live here, and
just as soon as she possibly could, she was going to move out. She briefly
glimpsed the dead girl’s face again, and somehow it became tangled up with her
mother’s face, crushed and lopsided after the accident. She opened her bedroom
door with the flat of her hand.

Daffy was sprawled across Susan’s
divan-bed, her legs kicked up, engrossed in
Cosmopolitan.

‘Oh hi, Suze, You’re early. Did you
read this thing about the sponge?’

Susan went straight across to the
washbasin and brushed up her hair in the mirror.

Her grandfather had been right: she
did look chalky.

Daffy turned over and said, ‘It says
here that it’s only seventy per cent safe.’

Susan frowned at herself in the
mirror. ‘What is?’

‘The sponge O deaf ears. Can you
imagine that? Seventy per cent! That means for every hundred times you make
love, you get pregnant thirty times. My God, I’ll have ninety children before
I’m eighteen.’

Susan found that she was crying.
Silently, but bitterly, so that the tears ran down her cheeks and dripped down
the sides of her mouth. Daffy didn’t notice at first, and went on reading, but
then Susan let out a high-pitched sob.

Daffy jumped off the bed. ‘Suze –
what’s the matter? What’s happened?’ Outside the door, the vacuum-cleaner was
still roaring, and banging at the skirting-boards. ‘It’s not
her
again, is it?’

Susan shook her head. She dragged
two tissues out of the box beside her basin, and noisily blew her nose. Then
she dragged out another one and wiped her eyes. ‘I don’t know what it is. It’s
probably nothing, just my period.’

‘I was going to ask if you wanted to
come to my house. We’re having a barbecue, and some of the kids from Escondido
are coming over.’

‘I don’t know. I feel kind of
weird.’

‘Weird? Why?’

‘It’s – I don’t know, it’s something
that happened down on the beach. I’m trying not to think about it but it won’t
go away.’

She sat down on the edge of the
divan-bed and Daffy sat down beside her. ‘Well?’ asked Daffy, with incandescent
curiosity.

Susan dabbed at her eyes again. ‘I’m
not sure that I can tell you.’

‘Was it a boy? You weren’t raped,
were you? You definitely look like you could have been raped.’

‘It wasn’t anything like that.’

‘Then what, for Christ’s sake?’

Outside the door, the vacuum-cleaner
suddenly whined to a stop. There was silence, even the television had been
turned off, and both girls listened in case Susan’s grandmother had heard Daffy
taking the name of the Lord in vain. Susan’s grandmother prayed in front of the
television every Sunday morning with Dr Howard C Estep, and Dr Howard C Estep
sternly disapproved of anyone taking the name of the Lord in vain.

Susan whispered, ‘I saw a body, a
dead body.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘No, I am not kidding. It was a
girl, she was drowned or something. The police were there, and the ambulance,
and everything.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Daffy, shocked
and sympathetic but still desperate to hear all the details. ‘You must have
been absolutely paralysed! I mean, what was she like? I never saw a dead body
before.’

‘Daffy,’ said Susan, in an
uncontrolled voice, ‘she had eels in her stomach, where her stomach was
supposed to be, and they were eating her.’

Daffy stared in shock. ‘Eels! You’re
kidding? Oh my God, that’s absolutely disgusting!

What did you do? Were you sick?’

Susan couldn’t even speak. She kept
thinking about those eels twisting and wriggling and sliding underneath the
dead girl’s ribcage; and then the policeman dancing in agony with the eel
whipping out of his face. She clasped her hands over her eyes and forced
herself to cry, her chest heaving, her throat clenched tight, trying to wrench
out of herself all of the fright and all of the horror, trying to exorcise all
of the nightmares that she knew would come crowding in on her, come nightfall.

She had dreamed for months of her
mother’s distorted face. She knew that she would dream about the dead girl on
the beach for ever and ever.

Daffy put her arms around her and
held her close, shushing her, rocking her gently backwards and forwards as if
she were a small child. In the hallway, the vacuum-cleaner started up again,
and began to harvest the dust next to the living-room door.

Daffy was younger than Susan by four
months and two days exactly, but she was much more mature. She was a tall,
skinny, brown-skinned girl, with masses and masses of curly brunette hair, and
one of those pouting provocative mouths that every senior in high school had
wanted to kiss. She had wanted to write to Hugh Hefner and offer herself as
Playmate of the month, but her mother, although she was broad minded, had said
no. Her mother had brought up Daffy on her own. Her father had gone to work on
the oil pipeline in Alaska and never quite managed to come back, and so Daffy’s
mother was generally not in favour of male exploitation of women. She had
brought up Daffy to be pretty and suspicious and worldly wise, not to take
rides from strangers, and to take the pill.

Susan stopped crying as suddenly as
she had begun, and sat in Daffy’s arms looking around the room.

‘Are you okay now?’ Daffy asked her.

‘I guess. I wasn’t really crying. It
was just thinking about it. That poor girl, you know, all gnawed away by eels.
And one of the eels bit a cop, too, right in the face.’

‘What were they, some kind of
man-eating eel? What do they call them, moray eels?

There was one in that movie. You
know that movie with Nick Nolte? Anyway it bit some guy’s head off. Don’t you
think that Jerry looks like Nick Nolte, if he had a moustache, I mean?’

Susan stood up, and mechanically
took off her tee-shirt and her running-shorts, so that she was naked except for
her socks. She dropped her shirt and shorts on to the floor, next to
yesterday’s skirt, a copy of
Rolling
Stone
which she had been cutting up for pictures of Bruce Springsteen, her
badminton racquet, her hairdryer and the sleeve of her new Eurythmics album.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Daffy
asked her, worried.

Susan nodded. Her eyes were still
reddened and watery. ‘I just want to go take a shower; then we’ll go over to
your place.’

Daffy waited while Susan went to the
bathroom. She paced up and down the bedroom for a while, nudging with her
sneakers at discarded clothes and dismembered magazines. Then she went to the
window and looked out into the yard, a small paved area with sunbeds and a
stone fountain that didn’t work, or only rarely.

It was a hot clear day, and lizards
were poised in the shadows of the undergrowth.

From here, it was possible to see a
small part of the street outside, and Daffy’s attention was caught by a young
man in a black sports jacket and white tennis slacks sitting on the wall
outside Susan’s grandparents’ house, smoking a cigarette. He looked as if he
were waiting for somebody, because every now and then he lifted his wrist and
Daffy could see a spark of reflected light from the face of his watch. His eyes
were masked with impenetrably dark sunglasses.

She watched him for almost five
minutes. Cars passed him by on both sides of the street, but nobody stopped for
him, and it occurred to Daffy that he wasn’t watching out for any particular
car, either. He remained where he was, never turning his head, smoking and
occasionally checking the time.

She turned away from the window and
suddenly realised that Susan had stayed in the shower for an awfully long time.
She walked through to the hallway, where Susan’s grandmother was now burnishing
her collection of brass figurines of Mexican dancers, and down the end to the
bathroom.

‘Is Susan going to your barbecue?’
her grandmother asked, busily flapping her duster.

‘She said she would,’ Daffy replied.
She hesitated by the bathroom door, and then knocked. ‘Susan? Are you okay?’

‘She’s taking a shower,’ said her
grandmother, testily. ‘Of course, I’ve only just cleaned up the bathroom. Now what
am I going to get, soap all over the tiles and hair in the wastepipe. Not to
mention the wet towels all over the floor. She really has to be the messiest
girl ever.’

‘Susan?’ Daffy repeated.

‘Go on in,’ said Susan’s
grandmother. ‘She probably can’t hear you because of the water.’

Daffy opened the door and peered
into the bathroom. The shower was clattering loudly and the room was clouded
with steam.

‘Susan?’ she called again, and
stepped inside. For some reason, she began to feel frightened, and she suddenly
thought about the story that Susan had told her. The dead girl, eaten by eels.
The policeman, whose face had been half bitten off. The glass door of the
shower-stall was obscured with steam, although Daffy thought that she could
make out a pink shape on the other side of it, which must be Susan.