Crime

  — Ray, where the hell are you? You said you’d be back –

  — I’m with the wee girl I telt you aboot. She’s ten. Her mother and her are in big trouble. I can’t let them down, Trude, not like I did with Angela and Britney. I just can’t.

  — Don’t they have police here?

  — Aye. I’ve met one of them. It’s him that’s harassing them. So I can’t risk going to them right now, I don’t know the score with this cop. I’ve got to find somebody that’s definitely kosher. I’m gaunny have tae stay here tonight. The morn I can leave the lassie with her uncle; that’s when his boat’s due back. You know what I’m saying?

  — You’re with this young girl now?

  — Aye, Tianna.

  — You’re going to spend the night, spend the night, with this young girl in a hotel?

  — A motel, Lennox says, thinking about the ones they’d passed earlier, stuck alongside the strip malls of Highway 41. — I mean … we’ll be in different rooms, obviously! Fuck sakes, gie’s a break.

  — You give me a break, Ray! Trudi says. — Tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you! Ginger’ll come and pick me up.

  — It isn’t safe.

  — You’re mad. You’re mad and deluded, you – She gasps, suddenly visualising helping him into her apartment, his hand shattered, him gibbering nonsense about the Britney Hamil case, Thailand and God knows what else, and sees her own fingers with his engagement ring, around a real-estate dealer’s circumcised, veiny cock. Her tone softens. — Ray, please listen to me. You … you’ve had a terrible time. I know you haven’t got your pills, Ray. You need them. If you don’t want to come back, let me come to you …

  Lennox is blown away by her about-face. When the anger dissipates, she is genuinely worried about him. He’d missed everything she’d done for him. Failed to see that the hiding in the wedding plans was a manifestation of her own personal stress. His voice croaks, pregnant with emotion. — No, baby. Honest, I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. We’ll go round the dress shops and sit down and finalise the guest list …

  — I don’t care about the wedding! I care about you! Trudi says miserably, thinking of that stupid tryst with the smarmy real-estate guy. Ray loves her. He needs her. — I couldn’t see it, honey, couldn’t see you were still breaking apart inside. I thought you were on the mend. Please come back to me, baby, please!

  Lennox shrinks and sucks in his breath. — I need you to trust me. I’m begging you to trust me.

  You don’t know what the fuck men are like.

  — I need you to trust me, Ray. At least tell me where you are, Trudi sobs.

  — I’m about three hours’ drive west of where you are, across the Everglades, on the other coast, the Gulf of Mexico. That’s as much as I can tell you. I’ll call soon, I promise.

  An excruciatingly long pause follows. Eventually, Trudi’s voice: — Promise?

  — Yes.

  — Okay. Be careful, she says. — Bye for now. Her voice is flat, and when she adds, — I love you, it almost seems to be coming from beyond the crypt in its tired resignation.

  Then the line dies. Lennox stands looking at the receiver, the guts ripped out of him.

  She lies back on the bed, her body aching in that satisfied way it does after a good session at the gym when the adrenalin has been spent and a delicious fatigue sets in. There had been no Aaron which was good and bad news for her, but one guy had hit on her; also good and bad news. There is life without Ray; potentially a very good life. She is young. This is her time. Can she afford to waste it on a guy who might never shape up?

  This obsession with sex offenders. This obsession about sex. The weirdness about sex.

  That stuff he’d said, in the tunnel, when he had his breakdown. About Thailand. About young girls in Thailand.

  Ray has secrets. Not silly little secrets. Big ones. Possibly bad ones. Trudi Lowe shivers and sits up. Takes a sip of water. Moves over and lowers the air con.

  Earlier on they had passed the American Inn, with its one-storey H-blocks, tatty Stars and Stripes flag, and dull, red neon sign which buzzed the word VACANCIES. Its walls looked like they’d housed all kinds of desperation and broken dreams. Now Lennox fancies he can smell the stale sperm of a thousand beasts impregnated into the building’s fabric. It compels him, challenges him to confront it. Tianna looks blankly at it, betrays no emotion as he says in fake breeziness, — Looks as good a spot as any.

  They stop off at a Walgreens to get some bars of soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes. In his weary irritation, Lennox is aggrieved at the discrepancy between the marked and actual price – he still hasn’t gotten his head round sales tax – then they’re back at the motel, ready to check in.

  The desk clerk is a cadaverous old white man. His skin is translucent and his face so weary and pained he gives a sense that you’d be able to see the tumours inside him if he removed his shirt. He asks Lennox for some ID. This time he produces his passport. The clerk’s body stiffens like a hangman’s rope under its consignment as he swivels to produce a simple register, which he requests Lennox sign. As he complies, the old man looks at Tianna, who is going through the garish brochures that sit in an ancient plastic mounting on the wall, below a map of the area that looks like it dates back to pre-white settler times. He turns pointedly to Lennox. — Daughter?

  Lennox meets his stare. — No, I’m a family friend, he states, adding, — We’ll need two rooms.

  The clerk briefly raises his brows, evaluates Lennox for a second, and then lowers a sulky head as he checks them in. Lennox shudders, now feeling that this is not a good idea. But he’s clapped out and desperately needs to rest. He catches a long yawn from Tianna. Wonders how much sleep she’s had over the last few days or weeks or months.

  As they head back outside to check out their rooms, an ochre brass-plaque sun like a logo to life lost is falling before Lennox’s stinging eyes. Underneath it, he notes, through the thin fading light, the welcoming glow of a neon sign of a Roadhouse by the strip mall across the highway. It isn’t that late. A couple of beers – no more – would be great, ensuring that he slept soundly. But he can’t leave her, even if she falls fast asleep. Instead, they go to a drinks vending machine back in the reception, getting a Pepsi for her and mineral water for him.

  Stressing his exhaustion, Lennox tells Tianna he is retiring for the night and advises that she does the same. She hesitates for a second before heading to her lodgings, two doors down from his.

  Lennox’s room is shabby and functional: bed, nightstand with lamp, table and chair, bathroom with toilet, sink and shower. Two battered green easy chairs with yellow cushions containing more tales than anyone would want to hear sit close to a big but venerable television set. Walking across an anaemic carpet scarred with cigarette burns, his parting of the rear window curtains unveils a vista as uninspiring as the freeway to the front. Rows of high-fenced, prefabricated buildings of a storage and distribution estate glisten defiantly in the fading sun, limelight-hogging starlets enjoying their bit-part roles.

  He finds the implausibly tatty handset and clicks the TV on. Turning up the volume to drown out the industrial thrashing of the antiquated air-con unit – a big metal box dug into the wall – he picks a glass from the table and holds it up to the light. It looks clean so he fills it with some water from the bottle and puts it down on the nightstand. He sips at the remains in the plastic container, slumping into one of the easy chairs, leg draped over the armrest, as he regards the telly. Surfing the channels he feels his tight mind unwind and empty, thought spooling into nothingness. Trudi had been okay, better than okay. She was loyal, one in a million.

  A knock on the door tears him back into the shabby room. He opens it to see Tianna standing before him. Her eyes are big and hopeful. — I ain’t tired. Can I sit here a lil’ while and watch TV with you?

  — Sure, Lennox says, — but just for half an hour, cause I’m really beat.

  She sits down in the other chair. He can
really do without the company, but he reasons that the kid has been left on her own so much, he should try and make the effort. Besides, she might feel relaxed enough to volunteer some more information about the Miami crowd, and this Vince in Mobile. Picking up the handset, Tianna settles on MTV. Queasiness rises in Lennox as he’s confronted with the old Britney Spears school-girl video. She was telling the world she was a virgin when they were shooting that one. He was scornful at the time, but it now made some kind of sense. Tianna is transfixed by it. Eventually she turns to him and says: — Do you think Britney’s still hot? I saw her in my mum’s magazine and she looked so fat and gross. Ugh!

  And he thinks of Britney Hamil’s throttled body, lying dead on that table in the mortuary. A child named after a pop star who would outlive her.

  — She’s just had a baby, Lennox says, — give her a chance.

  He’s not comfortable watching it with her, and urges her to change channels on the remote. — It’s a bit old hat, he lamely explains. Tianna moves through the programmes, excitedly stopping at one show. — Beauty and the Geek! she shrieks.

  Lennox finds himself secretly enjoying the dating programme, although he’d’ve preferred to watch it alone. The premise was that these supposed ‘beauties’, most of whom were actually pretty ordinary young, poorly educated lassies, would pair off with the specky, obsessive-compulsive, repressed but intelligent nerds, who usually excelled at business, science or computing.

  At first Lennox’s sympathies are with the awkward, tongue-tied boys, who seem easy meat for the vivacious but crass gold-diggers. Then it becomes apparent that all these guys want to do is to refine their social skills so that they can get laid. The women, underneath the superficiality, often appear to be looking for genuine romance. While keen to find a partner with money and prospects, and wanting to make these geeks dress, look and act cool enough to take good wedding pictures, they can generally conceive at least the possibility of something beyond a shag. Eventually, however, the banal predictability of it all begins to depress him. That Tianna is riveted disturbs him. It soon becomes a struggle to keep his eyes open.

  — Did you like Beauty and the Geek? she asks, as the closing credits roll up.

  — Aye, it was okay.

  — Momma and me love that show.

  He can see Robyn now, a feckless icon of cool motherhood, luminous with broken promises. Casting herself as Tianna’s surrogate, big-wee sister, subjecting the girl to a litany of such reality TV shows, particularly the ones with a dating element. Battering her neurons with the shit that would, in tandem with Robyn’s own behaviour, forge the template of the kid’s world view. As they channel-hop through similar shows, it seems that the television oozes more ennui than the streets and bars, the presenters struggling to deliver sufficiently high emotions to let their subject matters fly. It is as if the TV companies can’t find people quite thick enough not to be a little embarrassed by the fact that they are managing extreme banality, while the real momentous things are out there, in view, but not up for discussion, as if ringed off by an invisible electric fence. A despondent anger settles in his chest. — You should be watching stuff that other girls your age watch.

  — Like what?

  — I don’t know. There must be some stuff. Cartoons?

  — The Simpsons is funny. South Park is neat. I like Family Guy.

  — Yeah, Lennox says. Appeals again: — I’m knackered. I’m going to get my head down. He gestures to the door.

  Tianna is reluctant to leave. Lennox has to get up and open the door, then escort her back to her room. But about ten minutes later, there’s a knock. He knows who it is. She is chewing on her hair and smiling strangely at him. — Cain’t sleep, she simpers.

  Her grin and her body language have a quality that is making him nauseous. He isn’t going to let her step over this threshold. — Look, just go tae your room and watch the telly.

  — Cain’t I get into bed with you? she pleads.

  His heart bangs in his chest, in concert with the rhythm of the air-con unit. He holds the door tight, like a bouncer confronted by potentially aggressive clientele. — No. Why would you want to do that?

  — I guess cause I like you. Don’t you like me? She widens her eyes in appeal.

  — Yeah, but we’re friends. I don’t –

  — It’s because of Trudi. You love her! I finally want to really be with somebody and they love somebody else! she moans, stamping her foot in exasperation.

  What the fuck –

  — No, Lennox says sharply, glancing around outside in panic. The place is deserted. He takes a deep breath. — Look, she’s my girl, but even if she wasnae, you’re a young lassie. Guys my age … he begins, then her years resonate with him, — … guys any age, don’t get into bed with girls your age!

  She looks piercingly at him. — Some do.

  — Aye, Lennox says, — they call them paedophiles. I’ve met a lot of them. Some are evil, others are just weak and pathetic. But they’re wrong: every last one of them. Because they don’t have the right to do that. Now please, he says with force, — go to your room!

  He watches her dejectedly depart and vanish into her billet, then shuts his own door and switches off the air conditioning. The machine winds down in weary, fading clicks of protestation as he climbs into bed. Disturbingly, his thoughts run to Robyn’s lush bush. His brain is at war with itself as part of it, in renegade obscenity, wonders about the daughter, then the hairless genitals of the doomed child in Edinburgh. Although this thankfully offers him no arousal, he curses those thoughts outside of his control. He’s sullied by this baseness and the notion that he’s no better than them.

  A couple of doors down, Tianna goes to bed. Her soul is in distress, brow wet on the sticky, discoloured pillow. She discards the torturous, suffocating sheet to let cool air blow over her stomach, chest and legs, but the room is full of shadows from walls that teem with a million nightmares. Her jacket hung over the bathroom door has assumed the shape of a malevolent hunch-back. She hears a squeak rise from within her and pulls the covers back to her chin, hoping she’ll fall into a quicksand of sleep. And this happens, but minutes later she’s drowning and battles back into a gasping consciousness.

  A few walls away, Ray Lennox is distracted by a fluttering in his ear. Some fucking insect. A flurrying sound. Again. Then it seems to settle. He takes a drink of water from the glass by his bed. Then Lennox sits bolt upright in mordant panic, unable to draw breath. Something is jammed in his throat. He starts to gag. It’s alive, moving and whirring inside him. He staggers to the spore-laden bathroom, eyes burning and streaming like he’s crying blood. He tries to gag up this invader, but can’t. Then his guts erupt in violence, but the burning blast of vomit seems to hit something in his throat and the acid in his bile burns him as it cascades back down into his belly.

  One thought in his head: this is how it ends.

  Desperate now, dizzying and fearful, throbbing head about to explode, he retches again and it all comes up in a racking, forceful cough. He looks into the toilet pan and sees it, more flying hamster than moth; the tiny coal-beaded eyes in the furry golden body, struggling in his milkshake vomit, one rattling wing aloft.

  — Get tae fuck, he half gasps, half wheezes at the huge moth, and yanks the flush, watching the creature spin and whirl like a dervish before vanishing.

  For a few minutes he stays on his knees and pushes his hot face against the cool vitreous surface of the sink.

  Rising shakily and climbing back into bed, the whirring noise still going off in his head, like the ghost of the moth would be for ever part of him, Lennox collapses into an exhausted, fuddled sleep where dark, conscious thoughts meld with deranged dreams. Time passes, how much he doesn’t know. After a broken, fevered narrative, he can vividly see Trudi in front of him, by the side of the bed. She is removing her clothes. — I want you, Ray, any way you want, she is saying. He can almost touch her.

  He can almost touch her because she is he
re.

  The door of his room has opened. He can see her figure backlit by the moon for a second or two till a breeze slams it shut, plunging him back into darkness. He glances at the display on the clock: 2:46. She is – somebody is – getting into bed with him. — You know I love you, her breathless voice whimpers. — You can do anything you want. I know you won’t hurt me.

  Lennox’s body freezes. He jumps up out of the bed and switches on the light. Tianna is there, sitting up, in T-shirt and yellow knickers with a white butterfly stitched on to them. He reaches for his trousers draped across the chair, pulling them on over his underpants. — What the hell are ye playing at!

  She looks up at him with a sad pout. — I cain’t sleep.

  —You’ll have to try cause you cannae stay here! Lennox shouts. She starts to sob. He lowers his voice. An ugly, desperate fear grips him: if the clerk hears her. He can see Lance Dearing, hear him, ‘Why, I jus took her momma out to calm her down, left ol Ray here with the kid. Didn’t figure he’d grab her and take her clean across the state. Guess I kinda blame myself …’ Terror eats at his gut. — Look, just go back and watch the telly. Please, he begs. — You’ll soon drop off.

  She grimaces and shakes her head. She isn’t moving. — I don’t wanna. Please let me stay here, I ain’t gonna try n touch you –

  — No! Go to your room. Now!

  Tianna pulls her legs and the blanket to herself and looks up at him. In an instant the twisted little predator is gone and she’s a gap-toothed kid again. — But I … I guess … I guess I kinda messed things up. In my room.

  Lennox takes a deep breath. — Okay, okay. You stay here. He heads to the door. — I’ll crash at yours and I’ll see you in the morning, he gasps, his throat still raw and burning. — Please. Just try to sleep!