Prosperity Drive (16 page)

‘I'm not getting into that thing.'

‘But why?'

‘I don't want to,' she said.

Simply that: I don't want to. Well, my girl, we can't always do what we want.

‘Please yourself.' He marched over to talk terms with the gondolier. He was the one with the Italian, he thought victoriously. Kim, reluctantly bilingual, did not want to learn another language.

‘It makes you …' She always wrinkled her nose when trying to explain.

‘Bifurcated?' he ventured. He liked to finish her sentences.

Two choices, Father said. Drowning or drought. He wasted away; some old weakness of his chest. He spent days gasping for air, cracked lips turned beseechingly to a glistering sun. He saw things in the sky, in the shadows of the sea. The sun seemed to drive him mad. Too late, too late, he kept on saying, over and over again. What did he mean? That they were all doomed, or that they should have left sooner, as her mother had pleaded. But Father was a professor, he knew better …

Owen knew she would follow; he was the navigator, she was lost. They had to sit close; that was the nature of the gondola, but he could sense her anger in the tense way she held herself, taking trouble not to allow the thin stuff of her dress to rub against his bare knee. The gondolier poled away silently. Thank God, Owen thought, he's not one of those singing ones. They passed illuminated facades of palazzos, windows fat with umber light, the gay barbershop poles on the dark skeletons of the jetties, and against the skyline the dusty pink outlines of spires and cupolas. He noticed how she clutched her knees with her hands, the knuckles showing white. Her jaw was similarly clamped and her eyes were shut precisely so she wouldn't see what he had wanted to show her.

They buried him at sea. It sounded regal, but it wasn't. They had nothing to wrap him in; the captain and his son picked him up and slung him overboard like a bag of meal. He barely made a splash. She saved his glasses; he had lost everything else. He had lost her already. The captain's son used to stick his penis into her from the back …

How adolescent, Owen thought.

She'd told him, she'd told him all of it. How could he not remember? It wasn't even 24 hours ago. Haltingly … after they had made love. She thought of them as cigarette words. He had reached over her and fished out a cigarette and lit up. Was it because they were lying down together? Was it the incense of the smoke? But the words after love were like the love itself, a safe harbour. She'd hesitated but he'd said tell me, tell me all about it, I want to understand.

‘Jesus, Murph,' he breathed when she had picked her way through the story. It was the first time she had told anyone. ‘It's like
The Raft of the Medusa
.'

‘The what?'

‘Painting,' he said. ‘By Géricault. Terrible thing – a hundred and fifty people piled on to a raft that drifted for twelve days. The occupants turned on one another, well, they were desperate. Even resorted to cannibalism. Géricault painted it all, the degradation, the despair …'

Kim felt a tide of fury. She had squandered this intimacy on him. He couldn't understand, how could he? Or he could only understand like this, in brushstrokes, impasto, the oiled representation of life on canvas.

‘ … but also the hope,' Owen went on, ‘the hope of rescue. On the horizon you can see the tiny little silhouette of the
Argus
that picked up the few who survived.'

She turned away from him and lay on her back. Owen had been her hope of rescue. When she looked up at the ceiling, it was a map of shadows.

At Camp Three in Galang, there was privacy, at least, somewhere to hide even if it was only the dank corner of a tent and the emblazoned protection of the Red Cross, though Mai had fallen pregnant there. One of the Thai clerks. Afterwards Mai told her she thought it might help their application. They all expect it, she said. It didn't help; by the time their Irish papers came through, Lu was nearly two. Their little brother, her mother decreed, so that Mai's honour could be kept intact.

‘We were saved, too,' Kim said, ‘if you could call it that.'

As soon as they docked in front of the railway station she clambered out on to the quay like a fugitive. She stood there for a moment with a look of what Owen took to be sheer spite, turned on her heel and stormed towards the hotel, her damp, ill-chosen sundress sticking to the back of her legs. He is left to pay off the gondolier – a scandalous amount, which he's glad Kim doesn't witness him handing over. Two things soften him as he follows her: the memory of their first days in Venice which makes him secretly blush, and the dim realisation that maybe she's seasick. The canals can be rough and when the
vaporettos
pass they leave a swell which has made even Owen's cast-iron innards lurch a little. I've been an insensitive boor, he thinks, as he hurries down the quilted corridors of the hotel. By the time he opens the bedroom door, he is not only ready to conciliate, he is quickened by desire and the memory of it sewn into the fabric of the room, full now with the spilt gold of artificial light. But she is on the phone again. His goodwill evaporates.

What has passed between them is not irrevocable. Heedlessly Owen will trample on the sensitivities of his oriental wife many times. (It's how his mother with her bourgeois candour describes her daughter-in-law at the golf club, as if she were some exotic brand of tea or spice.) Despite the fact that to Kim she'd said, ‘Call me Irene, we don't want any of that old
mother-in-law business.' But Owen knows Kim's formality will not allow that. You can be the daughter my mother never had, he tells her, and then wonders if that's what Quinny, the maid, was. Perhaps that's what his mother has always wanted? Instead of the four sons she got?

After the honeymoon Owen stops thinking of Kim as his bride, his anything. He comes to regard her, as his mother does, as someone just beyond the radar of understanding. And Kim, as she did the first time, will seal her lips and say nothing. She keeps her silence on principle because once should be enough to talk of these things. Owen will persist in his misapprehension because she
has
talked of it only once; in his mind it is tied up with lust and desire and the tender aftermath of love.

In time, for Kim, the journey and the feelings of shame and repulsion associated with it recede, return to secrecy. It becomes like a deception, something she has withheld. As if Owen had never known. And in a strange way that pleases her.

‘Misfortune?'

The desk clerk smirked. Julia sighed; her name was a joke every stranger thought he was the first to get. But as the clerk scrawled her name on the registration card, Julia realised this would be the last time the joke would be on her. The clerk was a paunchy man with oily black hair and a neat moustache. He peered over a pair of half-glasses. Despite his spotless white shirt, dicky-bow and braces he had a vaguely dissolute air, like the MC of a Weimar cabaret. Or perhaps it was because Valentin – for such his name badge declared him as – was the sole representative of manhood on the premises; the Hotel Nathaniel (formerly the Alhambra) was a women-only hotel. As he riffled through her passport, seeking out the title page, Julia had a chance to take in the foyer.

It was a dim ill-lit cavernous place with a gallery visible in the higher reaches. There were mosaic panels set into the walls and tiles in the risers of the stairwell that turned a corner sharply out of sight to the left of reception. The Eastern echoes of its former existence were repeated in the crazy-paving floor and the fountain which played idly in the centre of the lobby. A battered-looking leather sofa and scarred coffee table were set against the wall opposite the elevators. Stranded in the vast distance of the place they looked like museum pieces or priceless
objets
to be marvelled at but not used.

The foyer was not designed to entertain loiterers. Only a devoted narcissist would sit there, Julia thought, caught between Valentin's sardonic gaze and the glassy reflection of the plate-glass windows that gave on to East 53rd Street. The set of revolving doors at the entrance seemed frozen into disuse and she had had to pick up the semen-coloured plastic phone on the wall outside to get in. Valentin had done the honours, bowing slightly as she hauled her suitcase inside and he made his stately way back to his post. Moving in from the street was like travelling back in time, Julia realised, for whatever renovations had been made to the Nathaniel, formerly the Alhambra, over the years, seemed only to extend to the frontage – the aluminium windows, the tinted glass. The further you travelled into the Nathaniel the more old-fashioned – or decrepit – it became.

There were admonitory notices everywhere. On a silver pod inside the door –
ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO THE FRONT DESK
. A noticeboard beside the reception warned guests not to bring male visitors to their rooms, not to ask for quarters, not to play loud music, not to cook after 10 p.m., not to drink alcohol in the corridors, not to hog the public phone in the foyer and never to ask for credit. The only positive sign was pasted over the lift buttons and scrawled in red marker. P
RESS ONCE
, it said as if the denizens of the Nathaniel needed directions for even the most basic tasks. But even in that Julia felt there was warning. What would happen if you were so bold as to press twice, she wondered.

Between the lifts, a Christmas tree stood. It was the only concession the Nathaniel had made to the season. It was an artificial tree, spindly, white, three-legged and it looked as if it had fallen victim to some terrible wasting disease. The silver baubles on it were frosted with white, bits of which shed like flaky skin on the worn maroon carpet which was placed underneath as if expressly to catch the dandruff.

‘I'll need to keep your passport, Miss Fortune,' Valentin said. A smile hovered on his lips, but he suppressed it. ‘For registration purposes, you understand. I can have it back to you later this evening.' He eyed her speculatively. ‘I'm on all night.'

‘Okay,' she replied, though usually she did not like to be parted from her passport.

That time on the package holiday in Portugal had taught her a lesson. She had left it, just like this, at the hotel desk and had forgotten to pick it up the next morning. She and Eric had travelled over a hundred miles before she realised she didn't have it. Eric had been furious.

‘Jesus, Jules,' he swore as he did a dangerously daredevil U-turn in the hired car, a rackety Fiat. The car had seen better days. The passenger door was arthritically stiff and there were several scrapes and dents on the bodywork as if it had been used as a getaway in a previous existence. Eric took his rage out on the gearstick, and for a moment Julia had a cartoonish vision of it coming away in his hand. ‘You'd forget your head if it wasn't tied on to you.'

Eric had the happy knack of getting everything about Julia wrong. If only she
could
have lost her head … But now there was no Eric and what difference did it make if she had no passport?

‘And you'll be staying how many nights, Miss?' Valentin had stopped using her full name, she noticed.

‘Three,' Julia replied, ‘I've booked for three.'

In case she lost her nerve.

Julia gingerly pressed the lift button. While she had been at the desk, the two lifts had stood with their doors eerily agape though there was no one inside and no one had emerged from them. The doors kept making nervous forays as if they ached for closure but some neurotic hesitancy prevented them. Then suddenly, as she approached, both doors clamped shut as if they had drawn courage from one another, and both
lifts whirred into action in answer to some higher calling. After a wait of several minutes – during which she contemplated pressing again for fear she had not pressed hard enough, except that the notice made her think better of it – Lift No. 1 opened, empty of course, and Julia stepped in, dragging her case behind her. Her reflection in the mirrored walls looked grey and emaciated. Her hair was flat and greasy, though she had washed it only that morning, half a world away. Under the glare of the lift's fluorescence, she felt twitchy as if she were giving off static. After all the contraptions she had gone through at the airport she firmly believed that as soon as she jabbed one of the buttons inside the lift an alarm would go off or a red light would flash over her head and give her away. But after several false starts, the lift lumbered into action. The doors opened clamorously several times on the ascent, unbidden, it would seem, and Julia would brace herself for a new arrival, but there were no signs of life in the Nathaniel. She could have been in a ghost hotel. When she finally alighted and wandered through the dingy corridors on the 12th floor, she could hear from other rooms the tinny babble of televisions and the mournful clatter of plates. She got the impression of caged, solitary lives and behind each door she imagined used rooms smelling of stale dinners and tart body spray.

Room 1210 felt very used. The motif of Middle Eastern splendour had not made it this far and the room was a junk shop of dowdy styles. Yellowing walls, a brown carpet. When she switched on the bedside light it gave off a low-wattage tobacco hue. The bronze radiator growled when she put her gloved hand on it but it was warm, very warm, and she was glad of that. The bed was cloaked in an evil pink nylon bedspread; a rug at its foot was the colour of sick; a wastebasket with a plastic inset was embroidered with a small tangle of hair. She wandered into the bathroom. Where the white tiling halted, the walls were painted in a mouthwash green,
speckled here and there with traces of mould. To match the walls there was an acidy eau-de-Nil drip scored into the hand basin and the mirror sported the tributary of a crack. The perfect place, she thought, to end it all.

Behind the moss-coloured drapes in the bedroom she discovered a full-length glass door. After a lot of tugging she worked the handle free. She stepped out on to a balcony and into the glorious thrum of the bitterly cold night. It was her first taste of fresh air – if such the air over Manhattan could be called – and the cold felt different too. Brisker, cleaner. She leaned over the parapet and far below – well, twelve floors – a lighted centipede of traffic snailed towards a vanishing point between the glow-worm skyscrapers. The melancholy toot of car horns played a symphony; the diva sirens wailed. On the building opposite, an electronic tickertape mouthed a silent red greeting: Season's Greetings 1987. She inhaled deeply – this would be Julia Fortune's last Christmas.