Instructions for a Heatwave (13 page)

The shoot settled itself over the afternoon. Evelyn clicked, then looked, clicked, then looked. She shuffled her feet one way, she shuffled them the other. Aoife darted in and out of the set, changing lenses, replacing film, labeling the used reels and storing them in the bags. She’d be working late tomorrow, she knew, developing them. When Evelyn said, “That’s it,” Arnault leapt down from the counter, enveloped her in an enormous embrace and led her off for a glass of wine. Aoife began the long process of dismantling the tripods, packing away the cameras, taking down the lights. As she was placing the lenses back in their bags, someone came to stand next to her.

“We get left with all the good jobs, huh?”

Aoife squinted up at him. “Certainly do.”

“I’ve got to peel and dice ten pounds of carrots first thing tomorrow.”

“Lucky you.”

“I hope you at least get paid well for this.”

Aoife gave a short laugh. “I don’t get paid at all.”

He stared down at her, aghast. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“She doesn’t pay you? How come?”

She looked up. He was out of his chef’s clothes, in a T-shirt that revealed long, pale, muscled arms. A
FIRE EXIT
sign behind his head seemed to be rearranging itself to warn her:
FIRE SHIT
or was it
HIRE IT?

“Photographers’ assistants don’t get paid, generally. We do it for …”

“The glory?”

“I was going to say ‘the experience.’ ”

“Hey, listen.” He stretched out a leg and tapped the bag with his toe. “I’m sorry I called you English. Aoife,” he seemed to consider the name, grinning. “I get it. That’s Irish, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. For Eve.”

“How do you spell it?”

She chanted her answer: “A-O-I-F-E.”

“Amazing. It’s only got one consonant. It’s like your parents dropped a pebble on a typewriter and just called you what came up on the page.”

She zipped up a bag. “Are you always this polite?”

He grinned again. “How about we go for lunch?”

“Lunch?” she repeated, pointing out of the window at the darkening sky.

“A late lunch,” he said. “Come on, you can teach me more Irish. I can teach you six ways to chop a carrot and the best ways to fake your identity. How can you resist?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got to go to work.”

“Work?”

“Paid work. I do nights on the door at a place in the Bowery.”

“Not that music club? Everyone keeps telling me I should go there. So maybe I will. I’ll walk with you.”

·  ·  ·

Aoife lies on her back, one arm behind her head. Gabe’s head rests on her stomach; she feels the weight of it with every breath. He is trailing his fingers up and over her hip bone, across her abdomen. She touches the newly shorn hair at the nape of his neck. She has never known hair like it: thick, black, standing out in all directions. It is not so much hair as upholstery. Or foliage. She grasps a handful of it and pulls, hard.

“Where did you go?” she says.

“Um,” he objects mildly, “that hurts?”

She doesn’t let go.

“I had to leave, OK? A couple of guys I know got picked up. It just felt too … close.”

She releases his hair. “But where did you go?”

“I told you. Chicago. I know some people there. I went to see them and to wait until things cooled down.”

“And have they cooled down?”

He turns over so that he is facing her. He lays a hand in the dip between her breasts. “Some things clearly haven’t.”

Aoife pushes his hand away. “Gabe, I’m serious. Is it safe for you to be in New York?”

He flops to the bed and buries his head in the sheets. She suspects he is doing this so he doesn’t have to meet her eye. “I’m sure it’s fine. I don’t want to hide out in Canada. I mean, I like Canada but, you know, New York is my town, it’s my place and”—he takes her hand in his, still without looking at her—“there are people here I want to be with.”

Aoife gazes up at a crack in the ceiling. She follows its path from the window frame to the light fitting. “But what about the amnesty-program thing? Evelyn says if you turned yourself in under that, you wouldn’t go to prison. She knows someone whose son did it. He just has to do some kind of community work for—”

“For two years.” Gabe sits up. “I know. But it’s bullshit, Aoife, that program is bullshit. It’s a
conditional
amnesty. That’s not enough—for me or any of the other thousands of men waiting. I’m not submitting myself to some kind of admonishing, finger-wagging, punish-me-until-I-say-I’m-sorry crap. I haven’t been putting my life on hold for almost six years to accept that kind of bargain. No. It’s a full, unconditional amnesty or nothing.”

“I just thought—”

“It will come, you know,” Gabe interrupts her. “The unconditional amnesty. I know it will. It’s just a matter of time now. They have to issue it. It’s the only way. For the constitution to survive
for the next decade or so …” Gabe continues to talk. Aoife creeps up from the bed; she pulls on her dress, she fills the kettle and lights the gas-ring. Gabe is ranting now about the minute differences between draft evasion and draft avoidance. She forgets, sometimes, that Gabe was about to start law school when his number came up. Deferments for graduates had just been abolished and he had chosen, he said, not to fight it—it would have been exercising privilege, using his education and background to get out of being drafted. No, he would tackle it like the “common man,” he said. He would go into hiding. It was the only way he would be able to live with himself afterwards. Aoife wonders sometimes if he regrets this. She is sure Gabe could have talked his way out of being sent to Vietnam; Gabe could talk his way out of most things.

Aoife opens the cupboard where she keeps her food, finds some chopsticks and a box of half-burnt candles. She opens the other and finds a necklace she’d thought she’d lost and a heel of stale bread. She picks up the necklace in one hand, the bread in the other and contemplates both.

“Come back to bed,” Gabe says, holding out his hand. “I’ll shut up now, I promise.”

Aoife smiles and proffers the necklace and the bread. “Hungry?”

He raises an eyebrow. “If that’s what’s on the lunch menu, then no. If we can go out for some of those noodles across the street, then yes. But, first, come here. I need to talk to you.”

She continues to stand by the stove. “About what?”

“About whether you’ve thought about what I said.”

Aoife’s smile fades. Before Gabe went to Chicago, he’d asked her whether she thought they could get a place together. He had sat on the bed, buttoning his shirt, looking up at her, and his face had been full of such hope, such trust that she was a good person, that she was who he thought she was, that she was not
the kind of person to hide things or lie about things, and she had found that she was divided, knowing perhaps for the first time that she loved him, she loved this man with his peculiar, shadowy life and his stubborn principles and shoes with mismatched laces, but also knowing that she couldn’t share an apartment with him, ever, because how could she hide her difficulties from him if they lived in the same place? How could she keep it a secret if he was there all the time? He would see her struggling to decipher a bill. He would catch her asking a neighbor to tell her what the label on a can of food said. He would hear her saying, I’ve lost my glasses, and he would say, But you don’t wear glasses, Aoife, you never have. It was impossible. She had to tell him no but she had to come up with a way that said no but also yes, and how was she to express that?

She is just moving towards him when she is interrupted by a noise. For a moment, she can’t think what it is. A loud noise, one that makes her jump. Then she realizes it’s the phone.

“Don’t answer it,” Gabe says immediately.

“I really should.”

“Don’t.” He lunges for her but she sidesteps him. “It’ll just be Evelyn, wanting to yak on about lighting. Or paper textures. Or whatever the fuck is on her crazy mind.”

“Gabe, that’s mean.”

“I know. I am mean. Come here.” He grabs the hem of her dress just as she picks up the phone.

“Hello?” she says.

The line crackles and roars with static. Someone is speaking, as if from the eye of a storm, their words occluded by an aural blizzard. Gabe is gathering more and more of her dress into his hands and she is still holding the bread and the necklace in her free hand.

“Hello? Who’s there? I can’t hear you.” She shakes the receiver in frustration. “Hello? Gabe, get off,” she hisses, dropping the
heel of bread, which hits Gabe on the head with a thunk. He swears and she starts to laugh.

“… with the car …” she hears from down the phone.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

She is trying to wrest her dress out of Gabe’s grasp and the line buzzes with incomprehensible speech, cross-sounding, insistent, an insect behind glass.

“Do you want to call back?” she says helplessly, into the noise. Gabe has his arms around her now and he is pressing the length of himself into her back. “Can you hear me?”

And suddenly, astonishingly, she can hear her brother’s voice, here, in the apartment in New York, where her clothes lie abandoned on the floor, where there is no food, where she lives alone, where police cars idle at the curb all night long, where nobody comes except her lover, who is on the run from the law. Her brother’s voice reaches out of the receiver and Aoife can hardly believe it and the sound of it brings tears smarting into her eyes and she is finding it hard to listen to what he’s saying, so moved is she by the sheer sound of him.

“Michael Francis?” she says.

“You need to come home,” her brother says.

Early morning in Gillerton Road. The loamy not-quite dark peculiar to big cities is only just giving in to light. The brick terraces are still in shadow, the sky is the color of old milk and the trees along the pavements have gathered up the remaining gloom into their branches. The previous day and the day yet to come hang in a balance, each waiting for the other to make a move.

Today, far away in the county of Dorset, a patch of peat soil that has been smoldering for days will break out in flames. The very ground will blaze and conflagrate. Near St. Ives, a woodland will be consumed by a wall of fire moving at forty miles per hour. But, as yet, no one knows this. The thermometers hang from windowsills, from garage walls, from shed roofs, hoarding the heat, waiting; the firefighters are asleep, faces pressed into pillows, fists closed around nothing but bedsheets.

Strange weather brings out strange behavior. As a Bunsen burner applied to a crucible will bring about an exchange of electrons, the division of some compounds and the unification of others, so a heatwave will act upon people. It lays them bare, it wears down their guard. They start behaving not unusually but unguardedly. They act not so much out of character but deep within it.

A woman at the top of Gillerton Road, a Brownie Guide leader, has started meeting the man who runs the newsagent’s
after he closes his shop. The girl next door, a talented student expected to excel in her A levels, has stopped attending school and is spending her days in Hyde Park, circling around and around the algae-riddled lake on a pedalo, lighting match after match, letting each one burn down to a blackened wisp. A man who lives opposite has bought himself an Italian scooter. He likes the way he can weave its sleek body in and out of the traffic, the way it sings as it accelerates past lumbering buses. He likes the way the hot air and exhaust fumes swoosh over his skin, through his hair. He likes the puttering growl of the engine and the dazzling gleam of the sun off the chrome. And, as most people on the street now know, Mr. Riordan at number fourteen has disappeared, just upped and left, and his family have no idea where he’s gone or when he’s coming back. If he’s coming back.

A fox skitters out from behind a parked van, pauses in the middle of Gillerton Road, then disappears over a garden wall with a circular flourish of tail. An early tube train shudders beneath the paving stones; the reverberation is felt in the houses’ brickwork, their window frames, the floorboards and plasterwork. A percussive, trembling hum travels along the street, passing from one end of the terrace to the other. But the houses are used to it and so are the occupants. Tumblers judder together on kitchen shelves, a carriage clock on a mantelpiece in number four makes a half-strike; an earring left on a bedside table across the street rolls to the floor. Farther down the row a woman turns over in bed; a baby wakes and finds itself inside the rib cage bars of its cot and wonders, What is this, and, Where is everyone, and calls out for someone to come, now, please.