Black Glass (21 page)

Those ladies having a night out, should wipe that too. But I kinda like it with that one laughing her guts out jamming her friend's hat down. The giant Ferris wheel, yep keep that, Grace would love that thing. Bright lights head for heights that's her. Guards down there cos it's a Landmark Site, but they let tourists take photos that's what landmarks are for. But too bad if you don't look like a tourist, yeah you gotta be speedy in this business. That fat guard with the Nazi hat turned out to be a whole lot faster than he looked. But not fast enough ha-ha …

You gotta follow your hunches. Like that time one Christmas when I knew Grace was about to turn up outside the chip shop, I said
Greetings young lady
, knew she was there without even turning around like I had eyes in the back of my head. And that time we got a flat tyre near Toowoomba, I see a burned-out car I say to Max we're gonna get a puncture on this road, and he goes bullshit Tally just make sure that wing mirror's not slipping I gotta see behind me. Two minutes later:
Bang!
That's how you build your case, out of clues and signs and omens and I got a bunch of them by now.

Or maybe all I got is a bunch of stupid pictures and a shitty old notebook full of scribbles and stupid little diagrams that don't make any sense. Maybe I got exactly jack shit.

Start thinking like that and you'll get nowhere, Sherlock. Think positive think sideways think latterly or whatever, never surrender. If at first you don't succeed fricken just make a new plan. But how long can a person keep on doing that for? Well that's the question really isn't it.

[Table 12, Dive Bar, The Quarter: Violet | Macy | Lena | Sherri | est. 120 undocs]

Their first cocktails were barely sunk when Violet ran out of cigarettes. She shook her empty packet, made to get up. ‘Just smoke these,' said Sherri, waving red nails at her own full pack, ‘got cartons of the bloody things at home.' But it was still early, and apparently Violet wasn't buying: when she'd reached to pay for drinks, Macy gave her hand a playful slap, said tonight was her treat. Surely it was rude to start scabbing cigarettes as well.

‘Back in a sec,' she said, heading for the bar.

‘Send that drinks waiter over, sweetheart,' Lena called after her. ‘The cute one. We got a drought here.'

Violet wove through the crowd, tight groups and couples huddled around rickety tables, laughter rising over the clanky piano music. The basement club had no windows, and the air was thick with smoke, but no one seemed bothered; even security was smoking, and there were none of those warning signs you saw everywhere. Over at the pool table a girl no older than her leaned down and squinted the length of her cue, lining up a shot.

‘But I'm underage. And I've got no ID,' Violet had said when Macy announced plans for a girls' night out. Macy just laughed: ‘Trust me, you won't need it where we're going. I'll do your face if you want, make you look nineteen.'

An ancient cigarette machine teetered near the bar. Violet tried to catch the bartender's eye, but he was busy manhandling a pink drink into a high glass, stretching the liquid into a long thin stream, plonking in some berries and leaves, hands dancing fast and flashy. Putting on a show, she thought, just like Merlin. Suddenly the guy was in front of her, drying his hands on a towel, eyebrows raised in a helpful way. ‘Hi,' she yelled over the music, pointing to the cigarette machine. ‘Does that thing work?'

He nodded, mouthed a question: ‘You need change?'

Violet held out a twenty. In one smooth movement he whipped the note from her palm and dropped a heap of gold coins in its place. ‘Thanks,' she said, allowing a faint smile. Lena was right, he was kind of cute: young, Italian-looking, metal-band t-shirt and a barbed-wire tattoo round one wrist. Bit of a show-off though.

‘Can I get you anything else?' His smile aslant but eyes round and innocent: definitely flirting. Watch out.

She drew back and pointed over to their table, a circle of light on the far side of the room. ‘My friends asked if you, or someone, could maybe come over. I think they want more cocktails.'

Beneath the spill of the downlights, the three women seemed posed on a tiny stage. Macy was demonstrating something lewd, her mouth stretched wide, jaw almost unhinged; Lena was thumping on the table, her face contorted in mock horror; Sherri was slumped to one side laughing, hat askew, missing tooth a black pixel in her smile.

The bartender turned back. ‘Those your friends?' he asked coolly. Violet nodded. ‘I'll send someone over,' he said, already turning away to his next customer.

In his place the bar mirror now showed a striking young woman with black bobbed hair, wine-red lips and a lost look on her face. No, she thought, that expression was all wrong: she looked like a guilty kid playing dress-ups, like she didn't belong here and expected to get kicked out any second. Violet lifted her chin, set her face tougher, began shoving coins into the cigarette machine, punching the worn buttons hard till the pack dropped into the tray below. Who was he, anyway? Just some dick pouring drinks in an illegal bar. He didn't know anything about her, or her friends. The phrase came unbidden:
neither do you
.

Violet headed back to their table. Beneath a glitterball a very fat lady was waltzing with a boy half her age. They were laughing into each other's faces, their movements surprisingly graceful.
Graceful
: a coldness ran through her, and she sat down fast, tore the pack open and offered it around, Macy shooting her a wink like some old vaudeville dame as she lit up.

Smoking. The scrape and flare of the match, the tip's warm glow, relief swirling through her like water, all this was long familiar — but there was always something else too: a rumble of dread or guilt, a half-buried reflex that sprang to life with every flash of sulphur, that first hit of nicotine.
Ashes to ashes
.

How do you delete a memory? You try to forget but something — a ritual, a smell — yanks it back, out of nowhere. Like the other day, that burning smell just before the hailstorm came. The woody stink of a whole house gone up in flames. Cigarettes too:
Aw, Tallyho … pleeease.
Violet tilted the pack until the bio-hologram leaped out at her, a gory close-up of wrecked tissue, greyish-pink and blackened with disease, a lung cut out of some poor dead person. She stared down at it and drew hard on her cigarette, feeling her chest fill with smoke.

‘Hey, dreamboat!' Macy was snapping her fingers above the image. ‘Don't look at that stuff, too much information,' she said, turning the pack face down. ‘Hello, is anybody home?'

Sherri was asking Violet a question, leaning forward and smiling. With her drawn-on beauty spot, her full red lips and the fedora hat perched on that perfect hair, she looked like a 1950s B-movie actress; the missing tooth only added to the allure, a dental prop for a character who'd taken a few knocks. Lena was waiting too, blowing smoke out the side of her mouth; something faintly vampire-like about her, gunmetal fingernails and slinky black dress, dead-straight hair framing a face that was almost gaunt.

‘Sorry,' said Violet. ‘I drifted off for a sec.'

‘So where are
you
at, darl?' repeated Sherri. Violet looked around her — at the tables of drinkers, the people lined three deep at the bar, the odd couple doing their dignified waltz. The music died out for a moment; the low roar of booze welled up, and a load of pool balls dropped into the table's guts with a muffled
thunk
. Where was she again?

Macy came to her rescue. ‘Violet's in showbiz,' she said. Lena laughed, said, ‘Ain't we all,' but Macy shook her head, said, ‘Not the game.' The women looked at Violet, waiting. Her head felt fuzzy.

‘Not really showbiz,' she said. ‘I work for this old magician guy down the Carnie District, in the Quarter. We do four shows a week. We go on just before Esmeralda, the snake lady.'

Sherri leaned in closer, the trace of a frown appearing. ‘You mean old Merlin — you work for him?' She shot Macy a sidelong look, but Macy just shrugged, like she had no opinion on the matter.

‘You know Merlin?' Violet asked, a note of wariness in her own voice now.

Sherri shook her frown away. ‘Not really. Friend of mine used to work for him, that's all. You know, as his sidekick. Sorry, I mean stage assistant.'

Why hadn't she thought of this before? Merlin was old, claimed he'd been doing magic his whole life. Of course he'd had other assistants, she couldn't be the only one. How many had there been, she wondered, and where did they all go?

‘Your friend,' ventured Violet. ‘Did she work for him long?' Perhaps the girl had gotten fired.

‘A year, maybe bit longer,' answered Sherri. ‘Zoe reckoned the guy's a cold fish, and that doll of his creeped her out. But she always said the money was the deal-breaker. Still, like she said, there are worse jobs. And in the end she took one too.'

‘That's why she left — the pay?' Violet was relieved.

Sherri said her friend had felt trapped and she wasn't getting any younger. ‘That old scam artist makes a good living. With him calling all the shots, and her stuck on some dead-end wage —' Sherri caught herself. ‘Sorry, love. It's a straight job, I know, and they're near impossible to find when you're undoc. Don't listen to the likes of me.' Violet shook her head, smiled, waited for Sherri to finish. ‘In the end Zoe asked him for a raise but the tight-arse wouldn't budge. Said she was lucky to have the job at all, reckoned he had a whole army of gorgeous girls lining up to take her place. So she quit. That's it.'

So the story didn't end badly. But there was one thing Violet needed to know. ‘Did he ever give her any lines?'

Sherri frowned. ‘Lines?'

But a waiter had swooped in at her elbow, a sarcastic-looking guy in a grubby t-shirt and elasticised bow tie, and Macy snatched up the drinks menu. ‘Thank god,' she said. ‘We're dying of thirst over here.'

Moscow Mule. Flaming Goanna. Appletini. Down Mexico Way
.

Sherri half raised her glass, mulled it over and finally held the drink aloft. ‘Ladies, I propose a toast to my new haircut: a hundred smackeroos well spent.' They clinked glasses, Macy warning Violet to meet everyone's eyes or risk a lifetime of bad sex (‘Too late,' said the other two in unison). Lena toasted the uprising. ‘What uprising?' said Macy, and Lena shook her head. ‘Don't you watch the box? The world's going to hell in a handbasket. People ain't happy, trouble is brewing.' Macy snorted. ‘The box is so full of shit.' She raised her glass to make her own toast — a deposit for a one-bedroom unit, halfway there and counting, provided she could stay away from the casino, that is — and downed a third of her Appletini in one swallow. Sherri drank a toast to her sister in Perth, who was getting married soon. ‘I miss her,' she said, her face solemn for a moment.

Violet blocked out this comment. She focused hard on her breathing, willing her heartbeat to calm itself: it was her turn. She thought for a second then raised her glass. ‘To showbiz, I guess.' She let out her breath, pleased she had held it together, not let the bad thoughts in or said the wrong thing; there were nods, clinking glasses and eye contact, and before very long, talk of another round.

The orange-juice dream seemed to go on forever. There were litres of it, splashing around wetly, sloshing into overflowing glasses. Violet drank and drank, but could never get enough, was horribly thirsty. Surfacing from sleep she realised the juice was just a cruel trick, that it didn't exist, but the thirst itself was all too real.

Her room was dark except for a strip of light under the door. Her head pounded like a squeezed fist, pain shooting through her eye sockets with every beat, and her mouth tasted like a birdcage floor — and like something else too, the sour and unmistakable taste of vomit. Violet groped around for the matches. Her hand landed in something cold and slimy.

She opened the door, and light from the hallway revealed the damage: a vomit-spattered towel bunched on wet floorboards, a glass of water knocked over, a suspicious mix of liquid soaking into the edge of the mattress. Someone, Macy probably, had moved the matches and candles as far from the bed as possible. Violet was still fully dressed, but her shoes were placed neatly by the door, her wig hooked over a nail. She had no memory of coming home, but the night swam in her head like a collection of hazy out-takes: Lena and Sherri dancing rock'n'roll style, twirling each other around, sure-footed on the crowded dance floor; a round of flaming shots on a tray, blue fire licking across the surface of the liquid, Lena showing her how to huff out the flame; a bleary-eyed man leaning over their table, staring at Violet, slurring a half-intelligible comment before the older women turned on him, sending him backing away, palms raised defensively; Lena plucking an unlit cigarette from Violet's lips, shaking her head, ‘Wrong way round, goose'; a gentle admonition, a tall glass of water, Sherri helping her into her coat, then up some steep stairs. Then a blank. That's all she could remember.

Now she lit a candle and peered in the mirror. She didn't recognise the girl looking back: spooked raccoon eyes, black rivulets down her cheeks — had she been crying? — hair askew, a matted reddish clump. She had to get herself cleaned up.