Annabel (28 page)

“Hey, little girl,” Warford said. He held a beer bottle and waved it in Wayne’s face, and Wayne realized the bottom was broken out of it.

“Come on now, little girl. Take us for a ride down to Deadman’s Pond.”

“Where?”

“Guys. Little girl don’t know where Deadman’s Pond is located.”

The bottle hovered over his face and Wayne thought about beauty, and how he had never had it, and he realized he had been hoping for it to come. He didn’t want a lot of it but he was hoping for some. Just once to look in the mirror and see a beautiful face, even if the beauty was subdued. Even if no one could see it but himself. It didn’t even have to be beauty; it only had to be a fair face. Without the big pores. With creamy skin. Without the remnant of Adam’s apple. With ordinary beauty, the same as Margaret Skaines at Jack’s Corner Shop, or the woman on Old Topsail Road whose little girl had asked if Wayne was a man or a lady. No, that woman had been really pretty. Wayne didn’t need that much beauty. That would be greedy.

“No one took you to Deadman’s Pond before, little girl?”

Derek Warford held the broken bottle over Wayne’s face. “Sure, you just drove right past it on your way up Signal Hill. Most little girls round here, time they get to half your age, know where Deadman’s Pond is. You start her up, that’s right, turn her around, drive down there where you came up, right on, and when you get — no, steady there now — down on the left, that’s it; you need good tires here, I’ll tell you that. Right in here, in behind, keep going, keep going, that’s it, folks, in this nice little hideaway. Park further in, behind there. Turn the radio on now. What the fuck station you got on here? What kind of fuckery is that sound?”

The broken beer bottle had beauty. It had a stag on it, with antlers, and the label had a border of gold and a green part like a ribbon unfurling. Warford held the bottle close enough that Wayne could read the small golden words under the stag.
VERITAS VINCIT
. Veritas, he thought, must mean truth. What was vincit? Was it anything to do with the word invincible? Was it strength?

“Put her on KIXX Country for fuck’s sake.” Warford said. “Put on some Conway Twitty. Some Cunny Titty. Boys, we got ourselves a little girl who’s never been down here before. I heard she got a real nice set of tits on her. A real interesting cunt too. Someone want to touch her hair? Most times a little girl who comes down here, someone plays with her hair a little bit, gets her going. Girls like it. Hey, Broderick, you check out her hair. Play with it a little bit. Get the little girl going.”

“Fuck off, man. I’m not touching its hair.”

“Fuck you, Broderick.” Derek Warford pulled down Wayne’s hood. “See that hair?” Derek took a handful of Wayne’s hair and twisted it. “Nice head of hair if only a little girl would comb it once in a while.” Derek took a flask out of his jean jacket and handed it around. “Like vodka, little girl? Don’t show up on your breath at all. When you get home to your boyfriend, Steve. Hey, don’t want him to know you were out with us, do you? Where is he tonight? Know what? I think I saw him over by Katie Twomey’s place just after you left. I think he’s over there waiting on her veranda for you come spend another evening with him. Sweet, hey? Isn’t that sweet, boys? You fuck Steve, little girl? You and him give it to her on Twomey’s old planks? Good thing she’s gone out west to visit Brian and doesn’t see what you and Stevie are up to on her property. Take off your bra for us now, little girl. Some of those snaps on them new bras are hard to get off unless you’re the owner. What, you don’t have a bra on? Okay, boys, we need a volunteer. Fifield, what’s wrong with you? Get your — yeah, get the little girl’s shirt off. Yeah. Holy shit, what have we got here? I wonder, is there any hair on the fucking tits? Holy fucking Jesus snapping fucking fucked arseholes. Fifield, undo its belt. Give me a report on what you find.”

Beauty is gone, Wayne thought. Beauty is gone and beauty is never coming back and it has not even been here yet. Just like Wally Michelin wanting to sing the “Cantique de Jean Racine” when they were little more than children. A thing could depart before it reached you in the first place. There were things like that. The “Cantique” was one, and beauty was another.

“Fuck, Warford, headlights.”

The lights arced across the bushes and glinted on Warford’s jagged bottle over Wayne’s closed eyes. If he opened his eyes he would have to stop thinking about beauty and start thinking about sight. Whether he wanted to lose that or not. Warford could do it in one lurch. Then it wouldn’t matter if beauty was gone forever. Wayne’s own eyelids, then air the thickness of one more set of eyelids, lay between the broken bottle and his eyeballs.

“Fuckin headlights.”

“Fuck, man, what’s wrong with you? That’s only Jesus Graham fucking Morrisey what does he know? He’s got his head so far up Tina Payne’s cunt he don’t care about no little girl we got here. No little monster fucking girl with hairy tits and — what has she got down there, Fifield? A cunt or what? Too bad we haven’t got a camera. See, what I’m interested in is which one of us has the guts to fuck this here little girl.”

“Don’t go looking at me.”

“What about you, Broderick? Come on. Get your fingers ready. You can go at it with your fingers first, then unpack your cock. Come on.”

“Fuck off, man.”

“Or one of these Sweet Marie bars. What about that? Come on, Fifield, what’s wrong with you? Too bad we didn’t get one of those black corncobs off Mary Fifield’s front door — that’d be just like a big nigger cock we could use. Go get it, Fifield; it’s your aunt’s door. Big fucking Jesus nigger cock.”

“Come off it, Warford.”

“That’s what she wants.”

“Give it up.”

“I mean, why would anybody want to be a little girl when they didn’t have to, unless they wanted to get fucked?”

“Come off it.”

“That’s what it’s all about, folks. That’s the name of the game. See here, boys, what you got here is a real, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

28

The Costume Bank

D
ARK GREEN VELVET,
almost black, caught light from the costume-bank ceiling, and there was muslin too, and lace, some of it handmade. Wally Michelin had learned the different kinds of fabric in her aunt’s shop, and she liked knowing their names and their quality. Before she had come to work in Boston she had not thought about whether her own clothing, or that of her mother, her neighbours and classmates, had been made well or thrown together cheaply. Even the dress she had worn to her prom, with its tailoring and its red satin, was not, she saw now, like the satin dresses here. These had more weight and felt colder against her skin. She still had her satin dress from the prom. It hung in her closet in Croydon Harbour under a dry-cleaning bag. She still had the white rose too, dried and pinned to its piece of fern, in the top drawer of her bureau, beside the red cummerbund Wayne Blake had given her that night. She knew why he had given it to her. She felt it was his way of saying he was sorry for everything that had happened. He was sorry his father had destroyed the Ponte Vecchio, and mortified that Donna Palliser had destroyed Wally’s voice and her dreams, and he did not know how to bring any of it back, though he wanted to bring it all back with a longing that was beyond words. But now the cummerbund was stored away in a drawer full of past things, and here, in this many-textured room, hung the present.

The costume bank was not big but it contained all the dresses and trappings for stage performances put on by the Berklee College of Music’s theatre and music performance sections. The room was too small, really, and as she made her way through the costumes, which hung from racks strung from the ceiling, the velvet and lace brushed Wally’s face, her shoulders, and her hands, and she felt like someone in a story from the Arabian Nights, passing through the doorway of a veiled tent, magical and starlit. She had begun working here in April, two hours a week on Saturdays, doing an inventory of the costumes in time for school to start in the fall. She had to find worn elbows and hems, torn seams, and anything else that would require mending, and she also had to pull out any garments that were too far gone and label them for discarding. Her aunt had got her this job because she knew the school’s costume mistress, who regularly came into the shop looking for trimmings and tailoring supplies. Wally had learned quickly in her aunt’s shop, and the costume mistress liked her. There would be no pay but Wally would earn tuition credits so that if she wanted to take Berklee courses when they started up in September, she could do so at a fraction of what it would normally cost.

“You don’t have to do it,” her aunt said. “If you want to take courses without doing the work, we can get you into some courses. If we got you as far as Wimpole Street in London we can get you to Boylston Street.”

“I want to,” Wally said. She knew singers had worn the costumes onstage. Musical notes would have fallen into the cloth, and the musicians’ bodies had touched the dresses and had left their shape in the shoulders and bodices. There was a nearness, touching the velvet and lace, to what she herself had wanted to be, and she could not resist a chance to handle the garments that had been worn by students who sang, even if she could not sing herself.

Thomasina Baikie had gone, in the first week of the previous September, to visit the Harley Street Voice Clinic as Wally and her aunt had requested. They had found Thomasina not at the Cale Street Hostel nor at the Cadogan Hotel, but at the other hotel, the one near Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, a hotel Thomasina had not named. Wally’s aunt had inquired on the telephone and found out the names of a dozen hotels near Poets’ Corner and had phoned seven of them. At the George Hotel the concierge had promised to give Thomasina their message on her arrival on August twenty-ninth, and he had done this.

Thomasina visited the Harley Street Voice Clinic, which was a private clinic and immaculate, she reported to Wally and her aunt. There was an original painting by J. M. W. Turner on the wall of the reception hall, and a sculpture by Henry Moore under a skylight. The doctor who looked at the information Thomasina presented to him on Wally’s behalf had not promised he could repair Wally’s voice. There was not enough information, he said, on the exact damage done to her vocal cords, and a lot of time had passed. He would need magnetic resonance imaging and he would need to see Wally for himself.

Wally and her aunt had made an appointment for February. From the week she had begun working in her aunt’s shop Wally had saved her wages, and by February she had the fare to England and the fee for a consultation, but not for any treatment.

“You let us worry about that,” her aunt had said, and Wally remembered how her mother always said Aunt Doreen and her husband had more money between the two of them than they knew what to do with. They had accounts and investments up to their ears, Ann Michelin had said; Doreen did not even have to run that shop if she didn’t want to. She could quit the shop tomorrow and live out the rest of her days with a mouth full of caviar. Wally had not seen her aunt eat caviar and she had not seen her uncle at all. But there was a maid who came on Wednesdays. Wally had seen her in the doorway of her aunt’s bedroom changing the linen, a new blue-white sheet billowing in a breeze from the open window.

The discards from the costume bank had trimmings that needed to be kept, and to salvage them the costume mistress had given Wally a tool box containing a pearl-handled stitch ripper, some razor blades, and a pair of scissors from Finland. She had a box with partitions for buttons, silver fastenings, brass fittings, rivets, hooks and eyes, tassels and cords, and pieces of pocket or wristband or waistband embellished with needlework. These things could be reused, and so could squares of fabric from parts of the garments that were not threadbare. Wally sat on an arrow-back chair under a lamp and cut these and folded them and arranged them by colour and fabric type so they could be used in new pieces that were always being tailored downstairs. It was satisfying work and she loved the beauty of it, and at times she thought she might look in the Berklee College calendar and see what other courses they had besides singing. At those times she thought it would be good to put these hours of work to use, to let them pay for courses as the costume mistress had offered. But at other times she remembered her old resolve: if she could not study singing, she did not want to study anything.

The doctor at the Harley Street Voice Clinic had told her there was not much of a chance he could restore her voice to what it would have been had Donna Palliser not thrown shards of that glass ball. The wait between the injury and his attention had been long, he said, and even had it not been years, even if Wally had come to see him immediately, there was probably not much more he could have done than that which he offered to do now. He could perhaps restore her speaking voice, he said. He could make it stronger, and she could even sing. Perhaps she could sing in a choir, though he could not guarantee it. She could certainly sing for her own pleasure, and if she had any ear for music she would be able to sing according to the tunefulness of that ear. But as for the strength of her singing voice or anything approaching a professional solo career, he could not see that as a reasonable outcome.

“Well, I don’t want you to do anything,” Wally had told him. She did not want her aunt and uncle paying thousands of American dollars for her to sing for her own pleasure. She told her aunt this on the phone.

“But your own pleasure,” her aunt said, “is sometimes the only pleasure you have in this life. You’re over there now. You’re in England. Get the most out of it that you can.”

The doctor did the best work he could and told Wally to rest her voice for six weeks. Then, if she wanted to sing for her own pleasure, she could gently begin with voice exercises he set for her. He told her again that it was possible she could sing in a choir if she chose.

“You don’t have to have a solo voice to be in a choir,” he said. “In fact, there is something about a choir that brings together imperfections in the voices and uses them to make something new, like an infusion of different kinds of tea leaves. It can be quite beautiful.”

He had been a kind man, and Wally had felt his kindness, though he had not done what she wanted him to do and had not said what she had hoped with all her heart he would say.