*
All of a sudden everything calmed down. I understood, with intense relief, that the show was over. I felt myself being lifted up and carried through the crowd, before landing with a thud outside in the pouring rain, face down in a muddy puddle.
19
Road movie
Happiness is a bubble on a bar of soap
that changes colour as an iris does,
and that bursts when you touch it
Balzac
‘Milo, open the door!’
Dressed in uniform, Carole hammered at the door with the force and authority conferred on her by the law.
Pacific Palisades
A small two-storey house, swathed in morning mist
‘I’m warning you, I’m here as a cop, not as your friend. As a member of the LAPD, I demand that you let me in.’
‘The LAPD can go screw itself,’ groaned Milo, half opening his door.
‘Well, that’s exactly the kind of attitude we need!’ said Carole reproachfully, following him into the house.
He was in his boxer shorts and a Space Invaders T-shirt. He was pale, with dark circles under his eyes and hair that looked as though he’d stuck his fingers into an electric socket. The satanic symbols of the Mara Salvatrucha inked permanently onto his arms stood out harshly.
‘Can I just point out that it’s seven in the morning, I was asleep and I’ve got someone here?’
On the glass coffee table, Carole could see an empty bottle of cheap vodka as well as a half-empty bag of weed.
‘I thought you’d given all that up,’ she said sadly.
‘No actually. In case you hadn’t noticed, my life is going down the drain, I ruined my best friend and I can’t even help him when he needs me, so yeah, I had a few drinks and smoked a couple of joints.’
‘And you found some company.’
‘Yeah, and that’s my business, OK?’
‘Who was it this time? Sabrina? Vicky?’
‘No. Two $50 whores I picked up on Creek Avenue. That good enough for you?’
Taken aback, she couldn’t work out whether he was telling the truth, or just trying to wind her up.
Milo switched on the Nespresso machine and inserted a capsule, yawning.
‘OK, so you must have a reason for coming to wake me up at the crack of dawn.’
Carole looked troubled for a moment, but soon pulled herself together.
‘Yesterday I left a description of the Bugatti at the police station, and I asked them to let me know if there was any news of it, and guess what? They’ve just found your car in a forest near San Diego.’
For the first time that morning, Milo looked pleased.
‘And Tom?’
‘No news yet. The Bugatti was pulled over for speeding, but the girl at the wheel just drove off again.’
‘The girl?’
‘According to the local sheriff, it wasn’t Tom driving the car, but a young woman. But the report does say there was a male passenger in the vehicle at the time.’
She listened to the sounds coming from the bathroom. A hair dryer blasted away while the shower was running. So two people really had stayed over.
‘Near San Diego, you said?’
Carole looked at the report.
‘Yep, some place near Rancho Santa Fe.’
Milo scratched his head, making his hair stick out even more.
‘I think I’ll go straight there in my rental car. If I hang around long enough, I might find a clue that will put me on Tom’s tracks.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ she decided.
‘Don’t bother.’
‘I’m not asking your opinion. I’m coming with you whether you like it or not.’
‘What about your job?’
‘I can’t remember the last time I took a day off. Plus we’ll find him more quickly with two of us on the case.’
‘I’m so worried he’s going to do something stupid,’ Milo suddenly confessed, staring into the distance.
‘Him? What about you? What about last night?’ she answered harshly.
The bathroom door opened, revealing two Latina girls chattering loudly as they left the room. One was half naked, with a towel around her head, the other was wrapped up in a bathrobe.
As she stared at them, Carole realised something that made her stomach flip: these two girls looked exactly like her! Maybe a little more common, a little more worn down, but one of them had light eyes just like hers, while the other was exactly her height and shared her distinctive dimples. They embodied what she might have become, had she not dragged herself out of MacArthur Park through sheer force of will.
She tried to disguise how uncomfortable she felt, but Milo had already noticed.
He tried to hide his shame, but she knew it was there.
‘I’m going to go back to the station and let them know I’m taking a few days off,’ she said, finally, to break the awkward silence. ‘You have a shower, drive your girlfriends home and meet me back at my place in an hour, OK?’
*
Baja peninsula, Mexico
8 a.m.
I opened one eye cautiously. The morning sunlight bounced off the wet road and rain-spattered windshield.
Huddled up in a blanket, with stiff, aching muscles and a blocked nose, I slowly came to and found that I was curled up on the passenger seat of the Fiat 500.
‘Nice nap, was it?’ Billie asked me.
I sat up, wincing at the crick in my neck.
‘Where are we?’
‘On a road between nowhere and somewhere else.’
‘Have you been driving all night?’
She nodded cheerfully, as I caught sight of my reflection in the rear-view mirror, and the ugly reminders of the blows I had taken last night.
‘It suits you,’ she said, quite seriously. ‘I didn’t like the look you were working before, all preppy and conservative. You looked like maybe you needed a slap.’
‘You’ve got a real talent for giving compliments, you know that?’ I looked out the window. The landscape had become wilder. The narrow, uneven road led through rocky desert terrain, where tufts of vegetation had sprouted here and there. I saw cacti, agaves with full, plump leaves, and thorny bushes. The traffic was flowing freely, but the road was so tight that meeting a bus or truck was a life-threatening experience.
‘I’ll take over so you can get some sleep.’
‘We’ll stop at the next gas station.’
But service stations were thin on the ground and not many of them were open. Before we found one, we went through several abandoned villages that looked like ghost towns. It was while passing through one of these that we came across an orange Corvette that had stopped by the side of the road, its hazard lights flashing. A young hitchhiker – who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Calvin Klein underwear advert – was leaning against the hood holding a small sign that said ‘out of gas’.
‘Shall we help him out?’ Billie suggested.
‘No, he’s obviously just pretending to have broken down so he can take advantage of some stupid tourist.’
‘Are you implying that all Mexicans are thieves?’
‘No. I’m implying that your desire to get involved with every good-looking guy we come across is going to get us into even more trouble.’
‘You weren’t complaining when it got us a ride!’
‘Look, it’s so frickin’ obvious this guy’s out to steal our money and our car. If that’s what you want, then please feel free to stop, but don’t ask for my blessing!’
Luckily she decided not to risk it, and we continued on our way.
When we had filled up on gas, we stopped off at a family-run grocer’s. There was a basic selection of fruit, vegetables, pastries and dairy products on display in the old-fashioned store window. We bought enough to make a small picnic for two and sat down at the foot of a nearby Joshua tree.
As I sipped my piping hot coffee, I watched Billie with a kind of fascination. Sitting o
n a rug, she devoured cinnamon polvorones and churros covered in icing sugar with great
relish.
‘So good! Don’t you want any?’
‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘In my books you eat like a bird, but, since I’ve known you, you’ve wolfed down everything you can get your hands on.’
She seemed to think about this for a few moments, as if she too had just realised something, then she said, ‘It’s because of real life.’
‘Real life?’
‘I’m a character in a novel, Tom. I belong in the world of fiction and not in real life. I don’t belong here.’
‘What has that got to do with how much you eat?’
‘In real life, everything has more taste, more substance to it. And not just food. The air has more oxygen, the landscapes are filled with colours that take your breath away. Everything in fiction is so bland.’
‘Fiction, bland? I spend my life hearing the opposite. Most people read novels precisely to escape reality.’
She said seriously, ‘You might be very good at telling stories, creating emotions, pain, heartache, but you don’t know how to describe the spice of life, its flavours.’
‘Well, how nice of you to point that out to me,’ I said, realising that my skills as a writer were being put under the microscope. ‘What kind of flavours are you talking about, exactly?’
She looked around her, trying to find an example.
‘Take the taste of this fruit,’ she said, cutting off a piece of the mango we had just bought.
‘What about it?’
She looked up at the sky and closed her eyes, as though offering her pretty face to the early-morning breeze.
‘Or the feeling of the wind on your face.’
‘Yeah …’
I looked sceptical, but I knew she had a point. I was incapable of capturing the magic of an instant in words. It was impossible. I didn’t know how to pin it down. I didn’t know how to enjoy such moments either, and so was unable to properly share them with my readers.
‘Or,’ she said, opening her eyes and pointing into the distance, ‘that pink cloud that’s melting away behind that hill.’
She got up, and carried on, her enthusiasm growing.
‘In your books, you might write “Billie ate a mango”, but you would never take the time to describe the flavour of the mango.’
She carefully placed a piece of the fruit in my mouth. ‘So, what’s it like?’
Stung by her criticism, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the game and tried to describe the fruit as accurately as I could.
‘It’s fresh and perfectly ripe.’
‘You can do better than that.’
‘It has a sweet pulp that melts in the mouth, bursting with flavour, with a scent of—’
I saw her grinning. I carried on.
‘It’s golden, like a mouthful of sunlight.’
‘Don’t overdo it; you’re not making an advert!’
‘I can’t do anything right!’
She folded up the rug and started walking back to the car.
‘Now you know what I mean!’ she called back to me. ‘So try to remember this when you’re writing your next book. Put me in a world filled with colours and flavours, where fruit tastes like fruit and not cardboard!’
*
San Diego Freeway
‘I’m freezing my balls off here. Can you shut the window?’
Carole and Milo had been driving for an hour. They were listening to a news station and were both pretending to be absorbed in a debate about local politics in order to avoid having to talk about what was really bothering them.
‘Well, since you asked so nicely,’ she retorted, winding up her window.
‘What, you’ve got a problem with the way I talk now?’
‘Yeah, actually. Why do you have to be so crude the whole time?’
‘Sorry, I’m not some sensitive writer type. I’ve never written a novel.’
She looked at him, stunned.
‘What do you mean by that?’
Milo scowled and turned up the radio as if he were just going to ignore the question, then, apparently changing his mind, blurted out, ‘Has there ever been anything between you and Tom?’
‘What?’
‘You’ve always been in love with him, haven’t you?’
Carole looked astonished. ‘Is that really what you think?’
‘I think that for years you’ve been waiting for one thing: for Tom to see you as a woman, instead of as a best friend.’
‘You’ve really got to stop drinking and smoking weed, Milo. When you come out with crap like that, it makes me want to—’
‘Makes you want to what?’
But she just shook her head. ‘I don’t know, to… to cut you up into little pieces, so you die a slow and painful death, then clone 10,000 copies of you so I can kill each and every one with my own hands, slowly—’
‘All right, all right, I think I get the picture.’
*
Mexico
Despite the fact that our car refused to go at more than a snail’s pace, we were gradually racking up the miles. We had just passed San Ignacio and, against all odds, our little yoghurt pot was holding up just fine.
For the first time in a long while, I felt good. I liked the landscape, the smell of the road with its intoxicating scent of freedom, the shops without signs and the carcasses of abandoned cars, which gave me the sensation of cruising down Route 66.
The icing on the cake was that in one of the rare service stations we came to I had unearthed two cassette tapes knocked down to ninety-nine cents apiece. The first was a compilation of classic rock gems, from Elvis Presley to the Stones. The second was a pirate recording of three Mozart concertos by Martha Argerich. It was the perfect way to start Billie’s musical re-education.
Our progress was halted, however, in the early afternoon as we drove through some rather wild countryside with no fences or gates. A huge flock of sheep had decided they had nothing better to do than congregate in the middle of the road, with no intention of budging. We were in the vicinity of several farms and ranches, but no one seemed in a hurry to move the animals out of the road.
They weren’t going anywhere: long blasts of the horn and Billie’s agitated gestures could do nothing to shift them. Resigning herself to the wait, Billie lit a cigarette whilst I counted out the money we had left. A photo of Aurore fell out of my wallet and Billie grabbed it before I could do anything to stop her.
‘Give me that!’
‘Wait, let me have a look. Did you take this?’
It was a simple black and white shot, which had a certain innocence about it. In tiny little shorts and a man’s shirt, Aurore smiled at me from a Malibu beach, with a sparkle in her eyes that I had once mistaken for love.
‘Honestly, what is it that’s so special about your pianist?’
‘What’s so special?’
‘OK, so she’s pretty. Well, if you’re into the “perfect woman with the body of a supermodel” thing. But, apart from that, what do you see in her?’
‘Please… You’re in love with a total scumbag. You’re not in a position to give me any lectures.’
‘Is it because she’s so sophisticated?’
‘Yes, Aurore is sophisticated, and cultured. And I don’t give a damn if you think that’s pretentious. I was brought up in a really bad area. It never stopped: everywhere you went, screams, insults, threats, gunshots. The closest thing to a book was TV Guide and I had never heard of Chopin or Beethoven. So, yeah, I liked that I was with a Parisienne who talked to me about Schopenhauer and Mozart rather than pussy, dope, rap, tattoos or false nails!’
Billie rolled her eyes. ‘That’s very nice, but you also liked Aurore for her looks. If she’d been 100 pounds heavier, I’m not so sure you would have been quite so obsessed with her, even with all that Mozart and Chopin stuff.’
‘You’ve made your point, OK? Just drive!’
‘And where should I go exactly? This pile of junk isn’t going to survive a head-on collision with a sheep.’
She took a drag of her Dunhill before continuing to have a go at me.
‘So your deep and meaningful conversations about Schopenhauer, was that before or after you screwed?’
I looked at her, stung by this last comment. ‘If I were saying these things to you, you’d have slapped my face by now.’
‘Come on, I was only joking. I like how you blush when you’re embarrassed.’
And to think I created you myself.
*
Malibu
As she did every week, Tereza Rodriguez arrived at Tom’s house to do the cleaning. For the last few weeks the author had not wished to be disturbed and so had taped a note to his front door telling her to go home again, but he always attached an envelope with her pay. Today there was no note on the door.
Finally.
The old lady hated being paid to do nothing, but, more than that, she was worried about the boy she had watched grow up in MacArthur Park.
Back then, Tereza’s apartment had been on the same floor as Tom’s mother’s place, and directly next door to Carole Alvarez’s family. Because she had been living alone since the death of her husband, the young boy and his friend would come and do their homework at her place after school. It had to be said that the atmosphere there was a lot less volatile than in their respective homes: on one side of the landing a flighty and neurotic mother who ricocheted from lover to lover, breaking up homes as she went, and on the other a tyrannical stepfather who delighted in taking out his rage on his tribe.