CAKE
Sandra Newman was born in America but has lived in Germany, Russia, Malaysia and England. Her professions have ranged from academic to professional gambler. She studied Creative Writing at UEA, and her first novel, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. She currently lives in New York.
ALSO BY SANDRA NEWMAN
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done
Cover
About the Author
Also by Sandra Newman
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cake
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Nine
Sixty
Sixty-One
Sixty-Two
Sixty-Three
Sixty-Four
Sixty-Five
Sixty-Six
Sixty-Seven
Sixty-Eight
Sixty-Nine
Seventy
Seventy-One
Seventy-Two
Seventy-Three
Seventy-Four
Seventy-Five
Seventy-Six
Acknowledgements
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto and Windus in 2007
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ISBN 9780099428824
For Robin and Jennifer
We met her when she crashed our party.
I had just bought a house and Todd decided that before we cleaned it up, we ought to have a party for our rougher, druggy friends, the Hackney crew. All the junkies, squatters, failing students, all the people who might hit an artery or run amok or die at someone’s party. So you couldn’t ask anyone except the kind of rabble you don’t even want in your house, OK.
Except, I did tell this one CFO from work, Mark Keynes – who I’d run into at a Plan 9 gig once and we had kind of bonded. Like, got throwing-up drunk but didn’t fuck then. So, he’s alpha at my work, he does karate, he’s attractive – I would blurt shit at him just to say something. I blurted, oh, this party cause I bought a house cause I’m so fucking brilliant in so many words. But I added that he shouldn’t come, I didn’t want him there. He laughed and said that he was ‘uninsultable’.
Then, catastrophically, he came, but.
The house was a Victorian terrace; three floors and a concrete garden with a dead potted palm. Cheap cause, falling apart. The dust so thick it was dirt; a broken windowpane was fixed with duct tape; mushrooms on the ground floor. Entering, you had to step over a ceiling rose.
It had three bedrooms. One for me, one for Todd (Todd is my friend from home, an overgrown skateboard kid who came to me when his parents threw him out for having no career plans, and being thirty. Cause we have this history, and
Todd said he’d work on the house, he was into that, too stoked – in lieu of paying rent. So, this thing, where I knew he was a lazy stoner but, if I didn’t give him somewhere to live, he wouldn’t have a place to live. He was a charity case. I was just housing him and when I grocery-shopped I bought for two. That’s how it has to be) and one room for a lodger. Rent £100 a week – to cover Todd’s keep, a built-in inequality that meant we couldn’t like the lodger, at all. It wasn’t going to work, right.
Anyhow, it was in Islington, the house. I had a lot of money suddenly which is a long story. We had this party and invited all the people from the dispatch company where Todd worked and his scratchy ‘artist’ mates with no art-school degree and my ex-fucks.
Eleanor crashed this party with her temporary boyfriend Mark – the CFO from the Plan 9 gig. Then she moved in with us and that was my life gone. It has kind of its own logic. Right,
this party was only at eleven o’clock, the doorbell rang and I ran down the broken stairs and got the door and it was Mark Keynes and Eleanor. As I opened up, she’d lost her balance and he had her by the shoulders; they were lurching in tandem like a maladroit pantomime horse, drunk. She was hiccoughing. He was unfocused, shy, ill at ease and
because she was so pretty, and Mark Keynes a CFO, or because she was wearing some black slip dress, green eye shadow, diamonds I thought were rhinestones,
I took her for a tart and didn’t want her in my house. She was too pretty and too young, like shiny, and long blonde hair. (I want to fuck Mark Keynes, OK, although I’m not allowed to fuck him. Anyone. Fuck anyone, I can’t. He is attractive, he is alpha, blah blah, and I had problems with just fucking people randomly. I had to quit it.)
‘Tanya, hi,’ said Mark Keynes. ‘So it was the right house. Ha.’
‘It was.’ I smiled. But then I got hung up, just watching the trees buffeted by the rainy wind, their leaves lighting up and going out again with wet. I was a little stoned. I thought my problem might go away. It didn’t. Then
across the street I noticed, like a pink kite straining in the air, a second-storey window; seeming doubly pink cause you could see men in pink-spattered work clothes painting hot pink in there: one man on a ladder, and the other standing with a beer. They were talking, I assumed they were a gay couple and imagined they would be my new friends. I felt happier and thought how most of life was taken up with stupid fantasies like that – if you had good ones, you had a happy life out of the starting gate.
Then I was like, ‘Hey, guys, come in,’ but in that time
the scene had changed cause she was crying.
She put both hands on her face and sobbed in jolts. The windy backdrop was Wuthering Heights-ish, trippy. You noticed that the stars weren’t moving in the wind. And that fact seemed very sad and profound.
She wept, Mark Keynes had stiffened, mortified. I almost not quite reached out and touched her. Now I took her for a tart who was much deeper and more real than anyone I knew. I thought, That’s how I would cry, if I were whoring, far from home. Stand weeping in the street. Fuck the world!
I loved her suddenly. Like I could have held her in my arms. I felt just so unbalanced and I wanted to slam the door or have us all sit down on the floor, like when children camp out underneath the dining table.
He patted her arm unwillingly and said, ‘Come on, come on,’ I stepped aside, they tumbled in and I had shut the door behind them.
We breathed, close in the dark, dust-smelling stairwell; El and Mark sat on a step. I put my foot on the busted ceiling rose and leaned against the wall.
Then I lit a cigarette. I turned away from them to smoke. Then I was smoking so that standing in the dark hall was its own activity. Above, in the party, OK Computer played – like the soundtrack of forlornly hiding in a closet.
Then Mark started saying he and El had been seeing each other quite a bit ‘since Jan moved out’, and he thought I wouldn’t mind. That I would like El, anyhow, that we would get along. ‘Met at karaoke, hilarious, really.’ I was looking at El, who’d introspected and leaned over dabbing her tears with the hem of her dress.
Then she spoke, clutching her skirt and speaking haltingly, ‘I had . . . pretty desperate news on the telephone. It’s actually nothing.’ Her voice was high-pitched and faint, girl-child à la Marilyn; the accent mid-Atlantic. Pensive, she licked her mascara-grey tears.
And by the time she got her hiccoughs stopped, and we climbed the stairs into the noise that shuddered faintly as it settled over us like a ponderous cloak
I felt as if I’d come with them, and we were going up to face a room of strangers.
I moved to London in the fall of ’96. I was twenty-three, just out of college, and I got a job in London cause I’d done an internship that wanted me back. It was a guarantee of work, and I needed money then because my father lost his job. Or, was thrown off the Ayer, Massachusetts Police Force for taking one too many bribes, and being hated. So I had to send him money so he wouldn’t lose the house.
But he spent my salary on restaurants and going to the dog track: lost the house.
Then I was paying his rent. I paid the landlord direct although I had to wire it and it cost a fee, I couldn’t trust Dad. My brother Vinnie told me that the family discussed it and decided this ‘castrated Dad so totally he’d never get a job, the way he felt’. Then Vinnie asked to borrow a grand. It was like comedy without the humour.
So, then they both died, my brother Vinnie and my father, dying slowly with no medical insurance just to fuck me. So they cost me every penny that I earned and still I have a lot of debts from when my dad was dying and he’d call me on the phone to spew vitriol because I wouldn’t come home and nurse him in my spare time from earning for him. Till the brain tumour robbed him of speech. So when they totally were dead I was elated and said to Todd, ‘I’m going to buy a factory with all that money that I’ll save. I’m going to buy a Greek island.’ Todd got all excited like I meant that literally. He said, ‘Do the Greek island.’
And if you want to know how Vinnie died, it was drugs. So his rehab bills forever plus emergency care. He was always overdosing and being revived at great expense until the time he didn’t come back to life.
It was a hill of money for my family to slowly die. I used to cry until I threw up a lot. That couple of years I took sleeping pills every night, and some weekend mornings.
My brother Dana and my sister Dawn are still alive. We used to call them Dungeons and Dragons. They were evil twins. I’ve fallen out of touch since they both moved to Miami.
And El and Mark and I came upstairs into the part of the house where the electrics worked and there was Todd standing in the hallway, kind of standing there, holding a shoebox of animal bones. His friend Annette boiled these bones and sold them off to other artists at parties. Todd was looking for me to give Annette ten pounds.
‘Hey, Tan. Tanya. Look.’
I said, ‘It’s chickens.’
‘No, it’s a whole rabbit. Except its ears.’
‘This is Mark and Eleanor.’
‘Do you like my bones?’ said Todd. ‘I mean, the ones in the box. Not my main bones, my body bones. What would you call them, Tan?’
‘Your . . . I don’t know.’
Eleanor started to cry again. Todd looked stricken.
I stood there gulping. I was feeling nauseous cause I have these stomach problems tied to state of mind. I said to Eleanor, ‘Why don’t you . . .’ I said to Mark, ‘You could take her to my bedroom. It’s not furnished or anything but . . .’
‘There’s a bed,’ said Todd. ‘I’ll take you there. I guess I’ll put my bones down here. I’ll put them here on the old magazines, the old tenants left these motorbike magazines. I wouldn’t buy motorbike magazines unless I really had a bike.’
I said, ‘I’ll get you drinks, I’ll get you wine. Do you want wine?’
‘Please,’ said Mark Keynes. He put his palm between her shoulder blades and I turned and walked away from them. Once you got into the sitting room it was hot and noisy. People sweating. I thought about melting into the crowd, forgetting them because, fuck them.
The wine was in the kitchen, in the new refrigerator. Someone had written WASH ME in dirt on the refrigerator cause it was the only clean thing in the house. There was a couple of artists with a cake-mix box on the kitchen floor, bitching cause there wasn’t any oven. They had cake-mix powder on them. They were pouring it into their mouths. One was saying to the other, ‘Nah, she’s binned him now cause she’s got confidence because she’s shagged.’
I didn’t talk to them, I got a bottle and went back and got to the bedroom hurried. And I put the bottle down and said, ‘Shit, I didn’t get . . . you need a corkscrew.’
‘Glasses,’ Mark said.
‘I could do that,’ said Todd, ‘I’ll get it.’ He walked out with me and said quietly, ‘She’s gorgeous.’
I said, ‘Oh, fucking hell.’
I went back to the kitchen. The cake-mix people had gone. I was alone and put both hands over my eyes and slowed my breathing. It made me feel nervous like I wanted to bite. I don’t like cake-mix cakes so I decided on the spur of the moment to make a real cake. I dropped my arms and looked around kind of violently angry.
I’m a good cook because I cooked for my family. I can make a cake without a recipe. A yellow cake or coconut but I had no desiccated coconut so it was yellow. I had butter, sugar and eggs.
In the sitting room, framed in the kitchen door, people were dancing stuffed together in too little room to dance, one lane was cleared where an OD girl was being walked by men who chanted, ‘She’s cool, she’s all right,’ dreamily, a guy with no hair or eyebrows danced with a plastic lei around his neck along their lane, doing laps behind them, I was digging in the cupboards where I’d put my groceries yesterday. Lennie Lee came in the kitchen
in a shirt with silver lightning bolts on red satin, threadbare; he steals all his clothes from the pavement in front of the Oxfam shop on principle, although he owns his own house, he went to Oxford. He has wild black hair like a joke wig, but we go way back anyway, he’s like a friend.
‘I thought you’d left,’ said Lennie.
‘It’s my house.’
He was drinking sambuca from a mug. I could smell it. The mug said ‘Stoke Newington Festival’ on it which made me feel depressed. Like if you ever tried to go to those festivals, the fucking Scottish people on stilts, it makes you desperate. I found a wooden spoon that had the cardboard still on it from Sainsbury’s. Lennie said, ‘So, how are you doing?’
‘It’s been good, ever since I closed on the house and my family is dead, it’s been a chance to regroup. I really feel OK.’ I took the mug from his hand and drank a little. Then I drank it all. I said, ‘I fixed my credit rating. That was like a Finnish saga, cause I co-signed on my brother’s car in 1996 and he was living with me in Rhode Island when he went to prison? You don’t care.’ I gave the mug back empty.
Lennie held the mug against his lip, making eye contact. He said, ‘Some people would be irritated by you just drinking their drink. But I like it. I love it when you’re really selfish. Kiss me.’
‘No. You’re going to have to leave the kitchen if . . . I’m in a serious mood. I’m trying to have a real life, I can’t put it into words.’ I looked down at the flour bag, it was King Arthur brand with a cartoon of a knight.
Lennie sighed. ‘I’m so depressed. I’m more depressed than you. It’s agony. Do you have any sambuca left?’
‘Check under the, the thing there, it’s an EasyCrate,’ I said. ‘I’m making a cake.’
‘Fantastic,’ Lennie said on hands and knees. ‘I’ll throw it on the floor.’
‘I don’t care. I’m not eating the cake.’
‘Fantastic. I love you. There’s two bottles of sambuca here.’
‘I’m rich now. I’m not joking. Drink it all.’
‘I love you. Give me thousands of pounds.’
We made eye contact again, high to low.
‘Give some money to me,’ he said. ‘Or sleep with me.’
‘No.’
Lennie handed me a bottle up and I drank more sambuca. It was making me drunk. Kind of frightening. I said, ‘I feel much better since my father died,’ and sighed loud. My hand was shaking and I had to put the bottle down. ‘However that sounds.’
Lennie stood. ‘I think you’re perfect. Perfectly evil. I mean that as a compliment. Kiss me.’
‘Oh, Lennie, fuck.’ I stooped down and got a bowl.
I felt him watching my skirt ride up. I wear skimpy clothes, my face is ugly, so I compensate. It’s not a come-on, it’s cause my eyes are too close together. I’m a dog. I mean, I don’t wear make-up, what does that tell you. But I feel uncomfortable if anybody looks, so it’s neurotic. It’s a giveaway. I said,
‘I’m trying to get over that, anyway. Fucking everybody constantly.’
‘Make an exception.’
‘I’m serious. If I slept with you, I’d sleep with some sales rep tomorrow night, I can’t face it.’ I chopped butter off a block and started pouring sugar onto it. I did it by feel because, no measuring cups. It wouldn’t probably work. I didn’t want a fucking cake though. I crushed the sugar into the butter.
I said, ‘I could really just lie on the floor and scream.’
‘I’ll join you.’
Annette walked in, saying, ‘Lennie, if you had to have sex with an animal –’
‘Deer,’ Lennie said. ‘I already spoke to Dominic.’
‘Tanya, if you had to have sex with an animal, what animal would it be? It’s for an installation.’
‘I don’t know. Toad. Salamander, given my luck.’
‘No, you get to choose, it’s what you’d prefer.’
‘It is not!’ I said. ‘No, you don’t get to choose! The salamander fucks you and you don’t get to choose!’
I broke an egg, I was weirdly excited. But we all laughed cause what I’d said was pretty funny. Lennie said, ‘I’d love to fuck a deer,’ and I scattered flour on the butter sugar egg mix. He said, ‘It would be lovely to fuck a deer.’ Annette said, ‘It would shit in your bed.’
I picked the mixing bowl up and realised I didn’t have an oven. I was saying, ‘This is just the kind of conversation,’ laughing, and I took the bowl into the sitting room. Everyone was dancing in there. It must have been one o’clock. Our friend Nick had brought a kind of strobe light that sat on the floor so it was strobing in there against the dirty-white skirting boards, feet feet feet. It smelled like people and I had this bowl. I pushed through, let the bowl shoulder through the dancing people.
I paused in the midst of it and had a spoon of batter. It was good batter, I don’t know. I thought it ought to have drugs mixed in, but otherwise it was a cooler thing to offer at a party than a cake. I walked on through, feeling as I left the crowd and, in the cool hallway it was like I had been made suddenly visible. I stood there feeling my naked legs and bare feet. The salamander fucks you. Haw haw.
I went on and opened up the bedroom door with my hip.
Her bare breast shone like a lamp. One leg was hooked over his shirted back, a slender, poised limb like a listening doe. It was Eleanor being fucked by Mark. I stepped back. The door closed by itself.
It would shit in your bed. I ate a spoonful of batter. Todd came walking towards me with a framed photograph of the Dalai Lama hugging Todd. I said, ‘No,’ in a strangled tone.
He said, ‘I was going to show her this, cause we . . . we had this conversation and I thought she might be interested.’
I said, ‘You should leave them alone.’
He read my face and we stood facing each other with our objects. I’d made them a cake and they rejected it. It was as if.
I said, ‘My God, you think all these people are ever going to leave?’
‘We should go back and try to . . . I saw you talking to Lennie, did he decide about my show?’
‘He’ll let you have a show, don’t worry. We should move away from this door.’ I put the bowl down on the hallway floor and stepped away from it. Todd leaned his Dalai Lama photograph against the wall beside the batter bowl.
He said, looking at it, ‘That was retarded good that day.’
I said, ‘I was at work, I couldn’t come because I had that meeting.’
‘No, I swore that you were there.’
‘I was at work. I might go over to the all-night gym now.’
‘Tannie. Like, no.’
‘I don’t feel good.’
‘What am I going to do?’ said Todd. We parted ways and I couldn’t get my gym clothes because they were in that bedroom and
the rest of the night I danced some and took an E off Jeremy that gave me a short mild panic attack and got in one of those political scraps with Em, who assumes I’m a Tory cause of my job and she was something on the Rainbow Warrior before she had her kid as if that made the Earth a paradise, is all. I’m not a fucking Tory. Just
I get these negative feelings. When I went back to the bedroom, they were gone. The others all were leaving, they were going to a club.
I lay on the bedroom floor and pulled the duvet down to me. I watched our friends pass going out. I watched them sideways from the floor. Some people waved. Then Todd came in and said,
‘Do you think we did OK?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘I had a good time.’
He sighed, appreciative and sheepish at my pointing out his blunder, his neediness. He said, ‘Yeah . . . I had a good time, too, kind of.’
And he went across the hall to his room, to his inflatable mattress I had bought him; I could hear him plug it in, and the moaning engine that inflated it. At last I sat up on my haunches and felt across the mussed sheet. There was no wet spot. I got in. The mattress engine stopped and I heard our friends quietly, obliquely, from the bus stop outside, saying, ‘Get a kebab? Three, I reckon. Place on Kingsland Road is open.’ Then the roar of the bus and it swept all the noise away with it.
Next week, I’m at work and my cell rings with the caller ID saying HILTON and I think it’s a client who’s in town from Liverpool, because we have this contract pending for some fertiliser people which would open doors for us if it happened
but it’s Todd.
It was six, that’s a lull for me before the building empties. I was sitting on Nick’s desk, eating shrink-wrapped sushi from the vending machine. We had our paperwork under the sushi and, complaining. We weren’t getting anything done.
Nick’s an accountant from the downstairs company, Sofanet: we got to be improbable friends because we both work later than the rest of the building. Nick has a bad home situation, and I work constantly because. And cause I own my own company, me and a partner. So that’s my excuse, like this is fate and unavoidable, although I really work constantly because I do.
When I started as an employee, our business was providing mailing lists. If you retailed diet dog food, we’d find a list of fat dog owners you could mail your catalogue. But we got some craze for diversifying cause we never had the scale of business that could keep my whole family in meds.
So first I offered Sofanet an all-in catalogue package at some cost that wouldn’t earn out in the fucking Sudan, but it ‘opened doors for us’ – then we’d do a whole catalogue, or send someone to second-guess your catalogue staff; we created a marketing IT ‘arm’ cause you can always sell new computer packages to business since existing packages are full of bugs because computers don’t really work.
But I’ll do anything, I even do some fucking day-trading in the evening after people have gone home. That’s a hobby, really, with the company’s money, but. I mean, I’m not expected to, but. It’s unexpected on the whole. But that’s what owning your own business means.
It means you don’t have a real job. OK.
Cause we don’t have the personality to be employed by anyone. Like Alan who is kleptomaniacal and violent, who’s the founder. And he’s always in a taxicab drinking from a bottle saying fuck fuck fuck in an accent like Prince Charles, or like a basset hound. One year he even sniffed glue. I mean, at forty. It was how he cheered up after his testicular cancer.
That’s all I really could say, and then the cellphone rings, OK.
It’s Todd. He’s at the fucking Hilton Intercontinental, he says,
‘Hey, Tan. I’m with that girl.’
(I turned my back to munching Nick and sighed. I was looking at, on Nick’s wall, he’d taped a poster, ‘Sporting Fish of the Americas’, with all the fish like marlin or bonefish sportsmen catch, drawn commercial-art style in rows, all facing in the same direction, mouths agape. Beside it, smaller and framed, was a photo of his older sister, facing in the same direction, mouth agape, dressed to play the part of Desdemona in a tragedy nightgown.) I said,
‘Todd, don’t fucking call me at work. Unless there’s something.’
‘But she’s going to take that room,’ said Todd. ‘I totally am not bugging you, I promise.’
‘Did you get the plumber?’ (This was from an earlier fight where he didn’t get the plumber.) He said,
‘Yeah, I’m getting the plumber tomorrow. So it’s two good things. That’s cool you reminded me, the plumber was good, too.’
‘What girl?’ Then I said, ‘Thanks with the plumber. Thanks.’
‘The crying Eleanor girl from the party. Who was with your Mark.’
‘Shit,’ I said. Todd said, ‘Yeah. She needs somewhere to live.’
‘She doesn’t like the Hilton?’
‘Yeah, this is the Hilton. It’s kind of awesome,’ Todd said. ‘It’s pretty crazy luxurious, though, like not my thing. But you should come and talk to her. You should come over now. I mean, it’s eight.’
‘I’d have to come and go back.’
‘It’s eight, you shouldn’t ought to work beyond a certain hour. I cut you out that article. It wrecks all your Arcadian rhythms.’
‘I’ll come. But not . . . OK, I’ll come now. I’ll get a taxi, OK.’
‘Well, yeah. Come over. We’ve got sausage pizza from the In-room Dining. But they call it Pizza Saucisson. Get it?’
‘No.’
‘I mean, they don’t call it sausage. It’s called Saucisson cause they’re pretentious.’
‘Oh, shit. Goodbye,’ I said hanging up.
I asked Nick why I had to be burdened down with retards. He laughed equably and started cleaning up the sushi mess. I cleaned, too, and Nick had his own problems, he was sort of a tame bloke, very chubby, pink, unattractively blond. He told me once his sister ‘got all the money’, admiringly, the way a modest person might say, ‘She got the brains, she got the looks.’ She got the money when their father died; he was living in her basement, and she acted in the RSC and called Nick ‘Nigger’. But she always had since they were small. That made it all right.
I’d got a scrap of ginger onto Nick’s copy of the autumn catalogue, it clung there. It was like a tiny handkerchief. Or like a snot, it was thematically confined in what it looked like. I threw the last garbage away, I felt a little crazy, what’s new, and
Alan came storming in, barking, ‘Fuck! What are you doing down here, you lazy cow?’
‘Nick’s ’puter wouldn’t let him in the nineties.’
‘Fix your fucking machine, Nick,’ Alan said.
I said, ‘But now I have to get a cab.’
‘Thrilled to hear it. I can get a ride with you and you can pay. I’m just assuming that’s all right. Night, Nick! I’ll ring for it, are you off back to Islington?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘And anyway, I’ll actually walk.’
‘Fuck off!’ said Alan, outraged, so I told him to fuck himself, and this was the basic conversation that we dusted off each time we saw each other. It was heart-warming if it wasn’t dispiriting. He left the room without another word.
I left the office soon after. With a fiver only so I’d have to go back. That was how – I had a house, now, to pay for. No peace for the wicked and etc.
And I walked through the streets. The rain stopped as I walked and I recalled
When I was eighteen I went to Prague for a month. I went to Prague because it was the cool place and this was when I didn’t have expenses. So I spent my money and I went to Prague.
It was a great place, totally batty and gentle and permissive, but
the point is that I went to this bar, called Asylum, that was run by expatriate American kids, they had bad bands there and showed bad art.
I was there this night to see a girl from Michigan, Melyssa, who I met at a concert in Petín Park, I had been kissing a stranger in the bushes and I walked down the hill disoriented, tousled, with leaves in my hair, and Melyssa was there. She told me that my shirt was buttoned wrong, in English. The stranger came staggering after and she said to him, ‘Pyotr, are you coming to my opening tonight?’
He said ‘No,’ in Czech, Melyssa said to me, ‘He’s so mean. You come,’ then the Kraków Orchestra began to play Martin downhill.
So I went to Asylum where I met
Melyssa with a Czech girl, Sharka, who was beautiful, a leggy white-blonde with that unearthly beauty of intelligent beauties, she was really really beautiful; wearing jeans and a man’s shirt.
Melyssa said as I joined their table, ‘I’m sick, I swear I’ve got a fever. Feel my forehead.’
Sharka said flatly, ‘You should be in bed.’
Melyssa said, feeling her own forehead since we didn’t, ‘I don’t want to go home. I’m just feverish.’
‘You should go home,’ said Sharka with the cold tone of someone declining to play games.
‘I just said I don’t want to go home. God.’
‘If you are sick, you should be at home.’
And Sharka went up to the bar and did not come back.
Melyssa said to me, ‘God! Do you believe her? We just made up? Cause only yesterday when we were walking home, I slipped and fell on the ice, OK? And then, my hip was really hurt. And this was in the middle of the road? So I said to her to help me cause I couldn’t get up. And she just says in this voice, “Get up.” And I said, but I can’t get up, I’m really hurt. And by that time there was a car coming, headlights coming towards me, and I said, could you help me, and Sharka only said, “Get up.” And I was, look, there’s a car coming, I’m really crippled, could you give me a hand, cause this is shit, and she just goes “Get up.”
‘So, I got up. And then, we were walking to my house and she stops and turns to me and says, “I am finished now with you and your friends. You are evil. You are like Satan.”
‘But I saw her here tonight and I thought she was over it,’ Melyssa wrapped up with pained eyes, with her head cocked. I looked across the room at Sharka.
Sharka was looking at me. She smiled knowingly. I realised abruptly they were lesbians. And that month Melyssa was found in a Hilton room, dead. It wasn’t murder, probably, but it was an OD which didn’t seem like her. And I remember I thought about Satan, and hell. I saw Sharka after at Bunkr, Radost, rave clubs, but she wasn’t beautiful. The beautiful was something that had happened to me.
I had come to Park Lane, I was tired. There the Hilton was, with its plaza of lit cabs, like a lap full of cabs. The stock glass/plush hotel, deluxe luxury for pigs. It was good to walk up to it on foot, it made you feel like an interloper.
I kept thinking they would stop me in the lobby, but they didn’t. It was room 312, DO NOT DISTURB in English, Japanese and Arabic.
Todd opened, high to see me. It was, ‘Tannie! Isn’t this cool? It’s too cool,’ El was sitting up in bed in a Hilton bathrobe saying, ‘Oh, no!’ and laughing and the
room trashed. Stockings, dresses on the floor where someone’d sat there playing chess on top and left the board out. Cigarette ends planted in a dried chunk of lasagne. There were so many orange-flavour Tic Tac boxes that they brightened the room. A brunette had gotten a haircut in the bathroom while eating McDonald’s. There were Polaroids of mutts shagging stuck to the mirror with (El did this later at our house) the nicotine gum she chewed wherever you can’t smoke. On the floor lay three rose bouquets, still in their cones of paper, in three different stages of dead.
I said, ‘You want to move in with me and make a mess like this?’
Todd laughed, lovingly like he knew I meant no harm. He said, ‘Duh!’
I sat on the bed and Todd was pouring me a Glenmorangie. ‘Not for me,’ I said, but he just put it in my hand. He said, ‘It’s so great, try it.’
‘I’ve had Glenmorangie,’ I said. ‘OK, it’s great. I have to work after this.’
They said, ‘No!’
I hate when people try to stop me. Like, when people try to fucking stop you, I was tired suddenly. I said, ‘So, to the point, you want the room?’ I turned to Eleanor, I hadn’t met her eye till then. (Her hair spread all over, one tress of it ran all the way across the neighbouring pillow, one ran into bed beside her body. Blonde. She had absolutely brown freckles on her white skin, her nose was pink as if she’d been crying, intense. And she was that intensely pretty that, you could not see behind it to her face, to who she was. I didn’t know what was in front of me.)
She said, ‘I’m skint, is the terrible thing. Todd said it might still be OK?’
‘Skint?’ I said, ‘But, where are you living now? Here?’
‘Probably.’ She reached under the covers and pulled out a sudden stuffed animal, a maned lion.
‘You don’t know?’ There was a pause, I said, ‘Are you still seeing Mark?’
‘Mark Keynes, no.’ She furrowed her brow. ‘I think he had some problems cause he left his wife. He’s down, in fact. You’d have to ask him.’
‘Who are the flowers from, then?’ There was a pause, I said ‘Is it a boyfriend? Are you dating?’ El coughed, there was a pause. I said, ‘I want to know because,’
‘I don’t see anyone,’ she said. El turned her stuffed lion so it looked her in the face. I said, ‘Who’s paying for the room? Cause,’
Todd said, ‘This is so not right.’
‘I’m only asking.’
‘Like a hundred questions.’
I said, ‘I have a right to know –’ he said, ‘You weren’t going to rent it till the painting was done, and then she’d have it by then,’ I said, ‘Just don’t, because I wasn’t going to rent it so I’d get some quiet –’ he said, ‘You lie so much! You’re such a liar! That was like the opposite of what you said!’ I said, ‘It wasn’t! What do you think I said? Fuck this!’
Then we clammed up. Hot. El was blinking hard. She fooled with the bathrobe – she was wearing something under it, fucking white negligee thing. Lace daisies. And she had on a scarf, white wrinkled crêpe wrapped five times around her neck and clumsily knotted.
I said, ‘Not that any of that is so vital.’
‘You got to change your mind,’ Todd muttered, sullen, and lay back.
There was a moment where I peacefully saw playing chess on the floor – I’d be lying on my side on a heap of clothes and laughing at something, smoking. Her lacy gear and schoolgirl affectations; she would hide her face in her hands when I got checkmate. And I sipped my Glenmorangie – I had finished it –
I said, ‘Well, come and live with us. What the fuck.’
Todd sat up saying ‘Cool,’ El blurted,
‘Only, I won’t ever have the money, that’s the truth. I’d like to say I will but that’s bullshit. I never have the rent, so if you need it, you should say no.’
Something in her then was so Vinnie. I got hung up by it cause, I couldn’t tell, was it her smirk (my brother Vinnie used to smirk every time he said anything that passed muster, making it immediately stop passing muster; the accepting faces at the restaurant table cooled, expressing distaste, and Vinnie noticed. Vinnie started shaking, stammering, he was so hurt, he would
go to the men’s room and I think shoot up.
I’d say, ‘Damn, you got to cut Vinnie slack, he only just got clean,’ and people’d go, ‘We didn’t do anything, we didn’t say anything,’ they’d act insulted. People have no fucking charity)
and I looked at her, imagining a world that had charity, and failed to understand that what reminded me of Vinnie – she was lying.
And Eleanor said
‘I once earned pots of money. I used to dole money out to others, I had people who depended on me. No one believes that now.
‘I was an artist,’ she said. Then she put the lion down, carefully as if it might tip over. There was a silence while we tried to picture Eleanor being an artist, or an artist having money. She said,
‘It was from being beaten, that I stopped. A drug dealer who was in love with me. He had been a drug dealer, but he got Aids. Then people didn’t want to buy from him, it’s funny. And he was ill, he had neuropathy, you know, from the treatment.