Spirit (41 page)

‘You're out of your tree!' Kazan rapped at him.

Jim whooped and screeched and scratched his armpits like a chimpanzee. ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!' and Aunt Beverley joined in with him, laughing in delight.

‘King Kong
liiivves
!' Jim called out, and revved the engine again. Tyres howling, horn blazing, they swerved around the ornamental shrubbery in front of the house, and dipped down the driveway towards the road. As they passed the rows of parked cars, they caught the bumper of a pale blue Rolls-Royce, with a terrible crunching, banging noise.

‘Jim, be careful!' Aunt Beverley screamed.

‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!' Jim retorted, and Aunt Beverley laughed all the more.

‘Free!' she sang at the top of her voice. She leaned back so that the slipstream ruffled and thundered in her hair. The Pontiac squealed down Stone Canyon Road, swaying and dipping from one side of the road to the other.

‘Power!' shouted Jim. ‘Beauty! Madness! Guilty consciences! Tequila!'

‘Chimpanzees!' Aunt Beverley shouted back.

They careened through the gates of Bel Air, suspension bucking, tyres screeching, and fishtailed onto Sunset. As the Pontiac slid from side to side, Aunt Beverley thought for a frightening split second that Jim had lost control, and she clung desperately onto the doorhandle. But still she couldn't stop herself from laughing. A passing fruit truck blared its horn at them, and the driver leaned out and screamed, ‘Crazy loco bastard!' But Jim yelled back ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!' and deliberately swerved the car from one side of the highway to the other.

‘You know what day it is today?' he shouted.

‘I don't know!' said Aunt Beverley. ‘Thursday?'

‘No, no. Today is a very special day! Today is Tlazolteotl's birthday!'

‘Who the heck is Tlazolteotl?'

‘Tlazolteod, my darling Beverley, is the queen of all Mexican magic! She has a white face like death, and a butterfly tattooed around her mouth, because that's the symbol of a dead soul. On Tlazolteotí's birthday, any sinful woman has to go to the crossroads to meet her, take off all of her clothes, and bite her own tongue until it bleeds. Then she has to walk home naked.'

‘What for?' Aunt Beverley laughed.

‘That way, she gets absolution. Takes her clothes off, bites her tongue, Tlazolteotl forgives her.'

‘Does it really work?'

‘I don't know. Do you want to try it? How sinful have you been, Beverley? You said you were feeling guilty, didn't you? What were you feeling guilty for?'

Jim overtook a slow-moving gasoline truck on the long blind curve around the Bel Air Country Club. The truck driver flashed his headlights and blew his klaxon. Jim waved at him and Beverley waved, too.

‘If only he knew who he was blowing his horn at,' said Aunt Beverley.

‘He'd probably pray to St Ignatius to forgive him.'

‘St Ignatius?'

‘Patron saint of the terminally unappreciative.'

They slewed around the next curve, the speedometer needle touching 70.

‘Power!' Jim shouted. He took the tequila bottle from her, unscrewed it with his teeth, and spat the cap out of the car. ‘Beauty!' he shouted, and took a huge swig. ‘Butterflies! Tequila! Happy birthday, Tlazolteotl!'

He handed the bottle to Aunt Beverley. ‘Come on – you drink Tlazolteotl a birthday toast, too!'

Aunt Beverley took a mouthful of warm tequila, swilled it around, and swallowed it. It roared down her throat like soft fire, and she gasped, and almost choked. Jim slapped his thigh and whooped with hilarity. ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo-hoo!'

The speedometer wavered close to 85. ‘Are you ready for redemption?' Jim yelled.

Aunt Beverley had never experienced such fear; never experienced such elation. They were invincible, they were king and queen of Hollywood. Nothing could touch them, nothing could harm them. ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!' Jim gibbered, in a high-pitched monkey's mating call.

‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!' Aunt Beverley gibbered back, pushing out her lower lip so that she looked like a chimpanzee.

And it was then that a huge toiling flatbed truck appeared around the right-hand hairpin bend that takes Sunset Boulevard down through Santa Monica Canyon past Will
Rogers park. It was carrying eight steel girders for the new Regency Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, twenty-five tons of them. It was probably travelling at less than 8 m.p.h.

Jim was saying to Aunt Beverley, ‘Whatever it is you feel guilty about, don't. I gave up feeling guilty years ago.' He wasn't even looking at the road ahead.

Aunt Beverley saw dazzling lights and cried, ‘
Jim
! '

But when Jim looked ahead, the windscreen was totally frosted over, totally opaque with feathers and ferns. He swerved to the right, and hit the nearside embankment, then swerved to the left. The frosted glass was flooded with white light, and he couldn't see where he was going, or where the truck was, or anything at all. Aunt Beverley didn't know if she was looking at Klieg lights or flashlights or the terrible white face of Tlazolteotl, whose mouth was tattooed with the butterfly symbol of a dead soul.

They were less than a hundred feet away from the truck when Jim hit the brakes; but any automobile designer could have told him that a five-and-a-half-thousand-pound automobile travelling at over 80 will take nearly three quarters of a mile to stop, even if the driver isn't bombed on tequila.

Jim cried out, ‘
Mother
!' (Of all things that a domineering and successful Hollywood producer should cry out, in a moment of danger.)

The Pontiac missed the front of the truck by less than an inch, and for a split second Aunt Beverley thought that they were divine. But then the front wheels hit the opposite banking, with a noise like thunder, and the car flew roaring into the air, and she was thrown out and into the night sky. She felt as if she were being wrenched this way and that like a Raggedy-Ann doll in the hands of argumentative children. She thought of screaming, but decided that she didn't want to. She was worried that she was going to ruin her suit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the car dropping into the canyon, and then she
knew that she could fly. This was all going to work out well. All she had to do was land somewhere soft, brush herself down, and then walk back to Bel Air. No problem at all.

She heard the Pontiac nosedive into the ground – a deep, resonant bellowing and banging. I hope Jim can fly too, she thought to herself.

And this was only an instant before she fell head first into the glass studio roof of 3373 Rosita Drive, a purple-suited angel dropping from the sky, with a huge explosive crash. The glass–as she shattered it – caught her just beneath the nose, and sliced off the flesh right up to the bridge. It took off most of her chin, and opened up her left cheek all the way through to her tongue.

She hit the angled architect's drawing-board that was positioned right under the glass roof, hit the chair, hit the floor, breaking both arms, breaking both legs, then rolled in a chaos of blood and glass and tracing-paper until she finished up underneath a model of a new poolside bungalow.

A fat Mexican maid in a pink nightdress came running into the studio. The first thing she saw was the broken roof. ‘Senor Grant!' she cried. ‘
Ha habido un accidente
!'

It was then that she saw Aunt Beverley's bare and bloodied feet under the table. ‘Senor Grant!' she screamed. ‘Senor Grant!
Necesitemos un medico – rapidamente
!'

A tall wiry-haired man appeared, in green-striped pyjamas. ‘Jesus,' he said. Then, very softly, ‘Jesus.'

‘
Esta sangrando mucho
,' said the maid. She crossed herself.

The man crawled under the table and peered at Aunt Beverley closely. Her face was a glistening red mask of blood.

‘Miss?' he said, his voice quaking. ‘Miss, can you hear me?'

 

 

‘Here we are,' said Bronco, turning into the driveway and pulling on the brake. ‘It isn't much, but it's home.'

It was two weeks before Christmas in Scottsdale, Arizona. There was only one cloud in the sky, a small heat-frittered fragment of white that Elizabeth would have described as a shrimp and Bronco would have called Mr Punch. They climbed out of Bronco's ageing station-wagon, and Elizabeth looked around. Bronco's house was a sprawling, ranch-style property set in ten or eleven acres of its own land, although most of that land was dust and heat-baked rocks. Off to the left of the house was a kitchen garden, with gourds and tomatoes and cabbages growing. The front of the house had been cultivated with spiky bushes and prickly pears and other desert shrubs. In the distance, Elizabeth could see the tawny hump of Camelback Mountain, and two or three circling buzzards.

‘I was grieved to hear about Margo,' said Bronco, as he lifted Elizabeth's suitcase out of the back of the station-wagon. ‘I never liked her, in particular. But she's got fire in her belly; and that's pretty rare these days. Most of the editors I meet are time-servers or sycophants. Did I ever tell you about the time that Harold Ross punched me on the nose? Those were the days.'

‘She should make a complete recovery,' said Elizabeth. ‘She'll have scars, of course. But she's been talking to a plastic surgeon, and he's really optimistic'

‘Strange thing to happen, though. A mirror exploding like that. I used to work in a bar once, and sometimes the beer glasses exploded of their own accord. They were moulded out
of really cheap glass, under tension. Maybe that's what happened to Margo's mirror.'

‘Actually, I'm not so sure.'

They had reached the verandah steps. Bronco squinted at her from underneath the brim of his Panama hat. ‘What do you mean, you're not so sure? Do you have some other theory?'

‘I don't know. But the police said that the mirror was smashed into hundreds of triangular slivers, and that each sliver was identical. They said the chances of that happening were countless millions to one.'

‘It could have been the structure of the glass,' Bronco suggested. ‘Sometimes crystals break like that, don't they?' He looked at Elizabeth's expression and tilted his head to one side. ‘But you don't think so, do you?'

‘I can't be sure,' said Elizabeth. ‘But Margo talked about a little girl wrecking her apartment, a little girl in a white dress, just like the Peggy-girl. And in the story of the Snow Queen, there's a frozen lake, which the Snow Queen herself calls the Mirror of Reason, and the lake is broken into a thousand pieces, each of which exactly resembles the other – so that the breaking of them might well be deemed a work of more than human skill.'

Bronco looked at her steadily, but didn't answer. Elizabeth said, ‘The day before Margo was hurt, she gave me a very difficult time at the office. I'd been editing that book
Reds Under The Bed
, and she criticized just about everything that I'd suggested, right in front of everybody.'

‘You think Peggy was punishing her, for embarrassing you?'

‘The same way she punished Miles Moreton, and the same way she punished Aunt Beverley, and those two movie producers who tried to take advantage of Laura.'

Bronco opened the screen door and they went inside. The house was single-storey, but it was spacious and cool, with that distinctive aromatic smell of oak. It was sparsely furnished, but
it was obvious that Bronco and Vita had once been wealthy, even if they weren't so well-off now. There were antique armchairs and antique sofas, and an inlaid bow-fronted cabinet filled with exquisite Dresden figurines. Over the wide stone fireplace hung a huge painting by Everett Shinn of a snowy night on Broadway, bustling with horse-drawn cabs and umbrellas and hurrying theatregoers; and on the right-hand wall there were two paintings of New York tenements by John Sloan, the most celebrated painter of the ‘ashcan' school.

‘Vita's having her afternoon zizz,' Bronco explained. ‘She doesn't like the heat; but then she doesn't want to go back east, either, because of her arthritis.'

He showed her through to a large airy bedroom that looked out over several acres of sandy-coloured scrub, with a view of Camelback Mountain. It was prettily decorated with a brass bed and an antique bureau and a French writing-desk with a vase of sweet peas on it. Bronco set her suitcase down on the bed, and said, ‘Hope you like it here. Sorry as I am about Margo, I'm real glad they sent you instead. At least you understand what I'm trying to write about.' He glanced shiftily sideways. ‘You understand about Billy, too.'

‘Have you seen him recently?'

‘Three days ago, when I went into Phoenix to buy some typing-paper. I told myself, “Come on, Bronco, Lizzie's coming to help you, you've got to help yourself.” So I went into Phoenix to buy some fresh typing-paper. Best quality onionskin.'

‘What happened?'

‘I was standing in the stationery store when I looked in this narrow mirror that was advertising pens, and there was Billy, standing out in the street watching me. He wasn't a ghost. Leastways, he wasn't transparent. He was just as real as you or me. Standing in the sunlight, watching me. And do you know what he did? He wagged his finger from side to side, like I was
doing something wrong, like I shouldn't be buying typing-paper, like I shouldn't write at all, or even
think
of writing.'

Bronco paused, and lowered his head. ‘He talked to me before. He said I shouldn't write any more. One book like
Bitter Fruit
was quite enough. If I tried to do it again, the critics would have my guts for breakfast. Especially since
Bitter Fruit
was so damned long ago. I was a young blade then. Daring, you know? Outspoken. What am I now? Just a dried-up old geezer with writer's block and a nagging wife.'