Heartbreak Hotel (17 page)

Nolan carried his toolbox to the door. It was Monday morning.
Hey-ho, hey-ho, it’s off to work we go
. He almost skipped along the hallway. For the first time in months, he could feel his muscles working under the skin. Of course there was the dread that he would cock it up but that was part of the adrenalin rush.

‘Bye!’ he called.

‘Don’t forget my pills,’ Shirley said, heaving herself into position on the settee. She fished under the cushion for the remote.

‘I’ll try not to, Mum, but they might keep me there over dinner.’

The telly blared into life. Shirley turned her massive back to him. ‘That’s nice. So I’ll be having a panic attack and you won’t give a fuck.’

‘Don’t be daft –’

‘I know what you’re thinking. That I should get off my fat arse and get them myself.’

He was, in fact, thinking that. ‘Sorry. Course I’ll get them.’

Nolan went back and kissed the top of her head. As he did so he gazed at her thighs, as vast as bolsters in the grey tracksuit. It was only recently that his mother had ballooned to this size. She had given birth to him at seventeen; photos from that era showed a young girl with stick-insect legs and knock knees. Somewhere, buried in this flesh, was the teenager, with her high spirits and quick wits, with her hopes and dreams, who had danced with him around the kitchen to ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’.

He knew her so well. As Nolan walked towards the pedestrian underpass he could sense her waiting another five minutes, just in case he had forgotten something. By the time he reached the high street she would be getting to her feet and making her way, surprisingly fast, to the fridge.

‘Honestly, it went straight in one ear and out the other,’ said Nina, over lunch. ‘What exactly
is
an alternator?’

Nina was the dark, intense woman who liked listening to
The Faerie Queene
. She ran a dress shop in Whitstable; her husband had recently died and her daughter had bullied her into enrolling on the course.

‘That’s not Nolan’s fault,’ said Amy. ‘I thought he was really good at explaining things.’

Nina tapped Amy’s plate with her fork. ‘You just fancy him, sweetie.’

‘That’s
so
not true,’ lied Amy.

‘Well, everyone else does,’ said Nina. ‘No wonder we can’t remember a thing. I thought my libido had died when my darling husband passed away.’ She sipped her cranberry juice. ‘So dazzling, like a Greek god. And even better because he seems totally unaware of it. That’s because he’s a country boy, bless his heart. You don’t get a compliment from a cow.’

Nina was right, about Nolan’s effect on the assembled women. As they clustered around the open bonnet, eyes had flickered from the rusty and incomprehensible entrails of the engine to the whippet-slim loins of their tutor, encased in faded jeans. To his black curly hair and perfect profile; his tanned forearms and grimy fingertips; to his thick caterpillar eyebrows, tenderly raised when one of them asked a stupid question.

Amy didn’t want to think about Nolan. Nobody would ever love her again; she was destined to be the tomboy mate, the gooseberry, the good-natured confidante of other people’s romances, one of the crew – that is, if she ever worked on a film set again. She would grow old alone, her womb shrivelled to a walnut, surrounded by empty pizza boxes.

Nina was expecting a reply. Instead, Amy turned to the woman on her other side, whose name she hadn’t caught, but she was fiddling with her mobile.

‘I need to speak to my cat-sitter,’ she complained. ‘And I can’t get a signal.’

Voda plonked a jug of water on their table. ‘Depends on your network,’ she said. ‘If you’re Orange it’ll work if you stand on the bypass, next to the recycling skips.’

The woman was gazing at Voda. ‘You look very festive today.’

Voda’s cheeks reddened. Shyly, she touched her earrings. She had several piercings but today the studs had been replaced by dangling silver decorations.

‘Do you like them?’ she asked. ‘India made them. She said I look like a Christmas tree.’

‘So India makes jewellery?’ The woman pointed to Voda’s ears. ‘I love these, especially the little teddy bear.’

‘Actually, it’s a kangaroo.’

The woman put on her specs. Voda obligingly tilted her head. Various other women got up and inspected her earrings. When it was discovered that India had brought along her toolkit several of them expressed interest in watching a demonstration or even having a go at making something themselves.

So that afternoon India took her soldering iron into the dining room and gave an informal class. Other guests disappeared up to the bypass to make phone calls. Amy, however, had an appointment with Nolan for an individual tutorial.

She parked her car in the back lane, next to the garage. There was no sign of Nolan. Bending down, she peered into the wing mirror. She had drunk two glasses of wine at lunchtime and her cheeks – and worse, her nose – glowed crimson. Faint music came from the shed in the neighbouring garden, where apparently a man made lutes.
Love oh love oh careless love …
The boughs of an apple tree hung over the wall, heavy with fruit.
It caused me to weep, it caused me to moan, it caused me to lose my happy home
.

Nolan hurried down the lane, breathing heavily. Amy straightened up.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he panted. ‘Had some errands to run.’

Amy’s heart lurched. His gypsy beauty was, indeed, astonishing – tanned skin, blue eyes, curly black hair. And those eyebrows, with a life of their own, speaking from a different script.

‘It’s my mum,’ he said. ‘She’s not too well.’

‘I’m sorry, what’s the matter?’

‘Angina, diabetes …’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Panic attacks, lactose intolerance …’

He paused. She silently urged him to carry on, for them to just stand together under the apples. ‘Anything else?’

‘Shortness of breath, maybe early emphysema, dropped arches, IBS.’

‘What’s IBS?’

‘Irritable bowel syndrome. She gets constipated, see, with these stomach cramps. Inflammation in the colon or something. Then – let’s just say all hell’s let loose.’ The eyebrows rose up his forehead. ‘Basically, she should lose some weight.’ He shrugged. ‘You don’t want to know all this. Let’s get cracking on that Punto. Been having any problems with overheating?’

‘You bet.’

He opened the door and eased his long, lean body into the driver’s seat. Amy gazed at him as he leaned forward, shoving his hand under the dashboard and rummaging around with his fingers to find the bonnet spring. Weak with desire, she leaned against the garage door. A click and the bonnet slid ajar.

‘Electrics can be dodgy on this model, too,’ he said, climbing out. ‘Want me to talk you through your fuse box?’ He opened the bonnet and pointed. ‘These fuses are called spades, due to its being a Fiat and, like, Italian.’

‘Last time it went wrong one of the sparks fixed it.’

‘What’s a sparks?’

‘An electrician.’ Amy told him that she worked in the movies, that she was a make-up artist.

‘No way!’ This response was always gratifying. Nolan’s eyes widened with awe, with a new respect; she felt a small shift of power between them. ‘You worked on any horror pictures?’

She nodded. ‘
Bognor Vampires. Swimming with Zombies
.’

‘You must be kidding! I got them both on DVD.’ Nolan closed his eyes dreamily. ‘You know my favourite bit of
Bognor
? When the bloke’s in the shed, that actor, what’s-his-name, he thinks he’s safe, and then the vampire bursts through the door and claws out his eye. All the gore and stuff down his cheek, and his eye’s on a string, like, swinging.’

‘I did that.’

‘
You
did?’ Nolan’s look of astonishment was followed by a look of pure devotion.

Amy nodded. Never, in her whole life, had a man gazed at her like that. ‘It’s just prosthetics,’ she shrugged.

‘How did you do it?’

‘First you prep the skin with moisturiser. Then you cover the eye with medical masking tape and lay these thin rolls of wax to make the socket.’

‘What about the blood and gore?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Hang on, we get to that.’

‘And pus?’

‘And pus.’

The car was forgotten. They sat down side by side on the grass verge and talked about horror movies. Somewhere, a bird was singing. Somewhere, a clock struck three. Voices murmured in the garden of Myrtle House; there was a burst of laughter. The high brick wall, however, sealed the two of them off from the ignoramuses. They were alone. The back lane – potholed, weedy, lined with garages in various stages of dilapidation and a few parked cars – was suddenly dear to her. What did she care that her bum was damp? That she had a stomach ache, due to the lavatories being occupied that morning and no chance of a crap? Burrs were stuck to the sleeve of Nolan’s jacket but she didn’t dare do something so intimate as to pick them off.

At one point his mobile rang. He looked at the name, paused, and clicked it off.

‘That was my mum,’ he said. ‘I should talk to her but, know something? I’m not.’ He put the phone in his pocket. ‘She’s on all these meds – sometimes I think it’s
her
who’s the zombie. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think there’s anything much wrong with her. Thing is, she’s on the internet all day, spooking herself with symptoms. She’s got cancer, she’s got Crohn’s disease – she works herself up into such a state she’s back on the Prozac. To tell the truth, she just needs to get out of the house a bit more.’ He stopped. ‘Why am I telling you this?’

‘You got a dad?’

Nolan shook his head. ‘It’s just the two of us.’

‘Maybe she’s frightened. If she got well, you’d leave.’

Nolan scratched at a scab of mud on his jeans.

‘Sorry,’ Amy said. ‘That was out of order.’

Nolan looked up at her. ‘No, you’re right. I’m twenty-eight.’ There was a silence. She felt him sucked away from her, swallowed into his own imponderable future. She had to haul him back.

‘Want to know how to make up a mummy?’ she asked.

‘Pardon?’ The black caterpillars shot up. ‘I don’t think she’d let me.’

‘Not your mummy. A
mummy
.’

Nolan burst out laughing. They sat there, slumped against the wall, shaking with laughter. She had set this up; she was quicker than him, she had realised this.

‘First you paint the skin with gum. Then you layer on these thin strips of gauze –’

She stopped. A car roared down the lane. Gravel spurted as it jerked to a halt beside them. It was a black, open-top sports car; in it sat Bella, one of the students, her blonde hair tousled.

‘Wow,’ said Nolan. ‘A BMW.’

Bella switched off the engine, opened the door and swung round her long tanned legs. ‘Am I early?’ she asked.

Nolan looked at his watch. ‘Blimey, it’s four o’clock.’ He struggled to his feet.

Bella flashed Amy a smile. ‘Sorry. My turn now.’

Bella’s family owned half of Wiltshire. No break-up had been involved in her decision to enrol on the course – who could break up with somebody as beautiful as Bella? The reason was that her parents had bought her the BMW for her twenty-first, on condition she learned how to look after it. Amy had overheard this at breakfast, along with a drawling description of the family’s Tuscan hideaway where Bella had spent the summer snorting coke and skinny-dipping in the infinity pool.

She turned to Nolan. ‘I know fuck all about cars.’

‘That’s what I’m here for,’ he replied, smoothing down his hair. There was something subservient about the gesture. Amy had already lost him.

She snapped shut the bonnet of her Punto. It was acned with calcified bird shit. ‘I’ll drive this back to the car park,’ she said.

Nolan was running his hand along the shiny flank of the BMW with the reverence of a farmer assessing a prize bull. ‘Bet it has plenty of poke,’ he said to Bella.

Bella adjusted the strap of her sundress, which had slipped off her shoulder. ‘Yah. Last week I drove from Wiltshire to Notting Hill in ninety minutes.’

Amy inspected her through narrowed eyes. Posh totty, buffed and polished, glowing with entitlement. Too rich to feel the cold in her skimpy retro-frock.

Amy got into her car and inserted the key. Nolan’s face appeared at the window. ‘Sorry about your lesson,’ he said, squatting on his haunches. ‘Got a bit carried away with all that blood and gore.’

Amy thought: This is my only power over him. Suddenly she said: ‘Want me to make you up?’

‘What?’

‘I’ll do you a make-up, I’ve brought my kit with me. You can have a bullet wound to the head. Or how about a road-crash victim?’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘You kidding me?’

‘No.’

His face broke into a smile. ‘You bet. How about after work tomorrow?’

Amy had lied. Her make-up kit was in London – why would she bring it to a course on car maintenance? Like many honest people, on the few occasions she blurted out an untruth she did so with total conviction.

Her heart pounded. What was she going to do – drive back to London to collect it, a round trip of over seven hours? She stood immobile in the car park. A greyhound, its neck tied with a spotted handkerchief, loped past and raised its leg against a motorbike. At this very moment Bella would be moving in for the kill. Amy pictured her bending over the open bonnet, her breasts two shadowy globes. Nolan’s arm was around her shoulder as, heads close, they inspected a gasket. Woozy with petrol fumes, Bella leaned against him … Suddenly, cupping her chin with his grimy finger, he turned the ravishing trustafarian’s face to his, their lips blindly seeking each other …

Amy rallied.
Don’t be feeble
. A man wearing a bobble hat whistled to the greyhound and climbed into a pickup truck. Suddenly she had an idea. One of her colleagues, Ellie, lived in Wales. Somewhere beginning with two Ls; she remembered Ellie chatting about it to Michael Sheen, who came from Port Talbot, while doing his make-up.

Ten minutes later Amy arrived at the bypass, the only place where those on the Orange network could get a signal. Several of the other guests stood in the lay-by, next to the recycling skips, shouting into their mobiles. Among them was Rosemary, the wind whipping her skirt around her sturdy, pallid legs.