Like it Matters (6 page)

“But on the list, what name?”

“Kris.”

He shook his head.

“Pick one there for me,” I said.

The guy who hadn’t said anything yet smiled. “Sorry, my brother,” he said. “Not tonight, nè?”

“But, I mean, do you guys have?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But you must organise. You must be on the list.”

“I’ve got a pen here with me,” I said. “How much for you to fix the list? I’ll take anything.”

The first guy who’d spoken to me—he was bigger than the other guy, and he had an awesome afro—walked up very close to the gate. He looked angry.

He leaned with his hands on the metal and his mouth between the bars and he said, “There are cameras. He watches. If you don’t go now I have to chase you.”

“If you chase me, can I buy something from you?” I said

And I seriously didn’t even see him move

But some of his knuckles came through the bars and got me right above the eye. While I was swearing and rubbing my forehead, I heard him say, “Sorry, sorry. Come tomorrow,” and then I heard him on the floorboards walking away.

I went down the stairs and I was feeling so angry I just kicked the shit out of a little tree I saw planted in the lawn. It hurt my foot but it snapped so nicely, and I stood there with my hands on my knees and just breathed and breathed and I felt a bit better.

But then I didn’t feel dizzy and vengeful anymore and I stood up and took my hands off my knees, and I looked at the tree, and I saw it’d been tied to some stakes and so the broken pieces were still floating there, sort of next to each other, not quite touching

And I realised that was probably two years of work I’d just gone and cancelled forever

And that probably made me more of a fuck-up than any- thing else that’d happened all day.

I was in a mist the whole way back up the road—I mean in my mind, with feeling shit about myself, as well as the wet stuff that soaked through my hair onto my scalp, and made me puff water off my lips when I breathed and made it difficult to see anything except shadows and lights.

I really wasn’t in the mood for a miracle.

But sometimes life feels like that—like it’s only got two gears and if it’s not bloodless, it’s frenzied …

Back at the top of the road, near the train station, I saw this special shadow coming through the night and it happened again.

My breath came shallow and I could feel my heart had run right to the end of its chain already, and I stood there under a streetlight and I watched her come closer and I begged god that it’d really be her this time, not another mirage—

And it
was
, it was definitely her—

That was Charlotte and she was coming right at me.

She had her head down and she wasn’t looking around. Somehow, I knew where she was off to

And just when she went past me I said, “He’s not there, hey.”

She stopped.

“I mean, unless you’re on the list.”

She turned around and I saw her face, it looked so soft and full of secrets, and she said, “Oh, it’s you. I remember you. The ice-cream guy? But it’s only seven o’clock.”

I shrugged. “I just came from there.”

“Ja?”

“I wasn’t on the list. One of the dudes punched me.”

“Okay, well. That fucks that plan then.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. Then, “I didn’t know you could go out at night.”

She didn’t say anything. She was chewing her lip and staring down the road. I looked at her wrist and she was still wearing her bracelet.

I said the same thing again.

“Huh? Oh, my dad thinks I’m at a concert.”

“The one down the road there, at the church? I heard it. It sounded jangly.”

“Ja.”

“He’s kind of trusting, isn’t he?”

“No, I’m proud of this one,” she said. “I planned this one all by myself.”

“Ja?”

She smiled and nodded.

“Well, you have to tell me,” I said. “I’m your sponsor, aren’t I? What if I want to talk you out of it?”

“I know this guy,” she said. “Wayne, this musician. And obviously he’s broke, like all the time, so then when my dad started telling me about this band night they had at the youth church, and how I had a beautiful voice and the Lord wants to hear me use it and whatever, at first I just kept telling him to fuck off, but then I got an idea.”

She can sing, Ed!

“I got him to call the church for me and I found out they paid the band, pretty well actually, way more than you’d make playing anywhere else around here. So I found Wayne at the beach one day and I hooked him up with the number, and I told him just not to show up there high, or if he was, just to sit by himself with his eyes closed and his hands together to throw them off his trail.”

“Jeez. This is like a full-on scheme, hey?”

“You have no idea. So I got Wayne in there, and then the first week after that I just mentioned to my dad that maybe the church band thing wasn’t such a terrible idea. And I did little things, like I started singing more around the house, Bible songs and hymns, and I’d pretend I couldn’t remember the words and I’d ask him to remind me. He
loved
that.”

“I’m sure,” I said, and it was the weirdest thing, because she wasn’t trying to be sexy, she was being sort of evil, but this pressure came into my groin and I was dying to hear her go on.

“And then the next week, this was last week, I asked him to take me along to watch the band, and when he picked me up afterwards I introduced him to Wayne, like as if Wayne was the guy who ran the show, and then in the car on the way home I made sure he saw I was playing with a piece of paper with a number on it. It said
WAYNE
in big letters on the paper, but it wasn’t actually his number—”

“It was his dealer’s.”

“Ooh, you’re smart. Anyway, now here we are tonight, my first gig.”

Christ
, the way she was smiling when she said that …

“But how’d you keep him from coming to watch?” I asked her.

“Oh, that’s the best part. It’s a youth church, no over-twenty-threes allowed.”

“Money?”

“Twenty per cent of what Wayne gets, every time he plays.”

“So what you’re telling me, Charlotte, is that you’re some kind of genius?”

“Almost. I couldn’t pull it together to get my name on the list.”

“No, you could’ve,” I said. “You just didn’t. I think you wanted this part to feel like it happened all on its own.”

“Ja, maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s also because he’s put a fucking
PIN
on the home phone.” She laughed. “So what do we do now?”

Just kiss me
, I was thinking.

Kiss me, then who fucking cares about the rest?

“Ja, I was thinking about that. We could walk around and try talk to somebody, except I’m worried anything we find’ll be mostly bicarb and Rattex.”

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “I quit buying drugs off the street long before I quit buying drugs. Also, I only have a couple of hours.”

“Could probably get a bit drunk?”

She shook her head again. “No, my face really wears it when I drink. And I’ll smell like a bar.”

“Okay.”

“So no more ideas?”

I said, “I’m just trying to think of something you’d like.”

“Well, don’t. Just think of something
you
like. And even if I hate it, I’ll fake-like it, I promise.”

“I do a weird thing sometimes. When I can’t sleep at night.”

“Ja?”

“Ja, follow me,” I said.

We went back up the road, past the Christian radio station with the sign in the window saying:

LET GOD HAVE YOUR LIFE; HE CAN DO MORE WITH IT THAN YOU

Past the youth church, past the park, down the road some more and then we took a left and headed up the hill. Ahead of us, all the house lights and the streetlights bled into the air, the mist so bright you couldn’t tell how deep it was. The road was slick and it had streaks of colour on it from the lights. We kept going up the hill, then I chose a street to turn down—Charlemagne, one of my favourites. I told her to close her eyes.

She did, and that gave me an excuse to hold her hand. I led her down the road, looking at the houses—some of them looked like boats in the mist, some of them like castles. No one was home at the one I really wanted to show her so it didn’t look like anything. I chose one just a bit further down the road, one of the castles. “Okay,” I told her. “You can open your eyes.”

The first thing she said was, “There’s no fucking ways you live up here.”

I laughed. “No, my place is much further up the hill.”

“No, I just mean, you know, what’s the point?”

“Is this how you fake-like stuff, Charlotte?”

She gave me a nice, long smile for that one. Then she said, “Seriously, I’m interested. Why’re we here?”

“
Look
at the thing,” I said.

“It’s a big house.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a huge house, it’s preposterously big. But really, just look at it.” I went and stood behind her, my one hand on her shoulder, the other one pointing out in front. “You see how it’s lit from the bottom like that? Those are footlights. And you see how they’ve cut the ivy, so you see those big shadows there from the leaves? It’s like they knew we were coming. And there, about halfway up the wall, those deep orange lights, don’t they just make you think of a castle? Burning torches or something. Rapunzel’s locked away somewhere up there, all night there’s a ghost up and down on the widow’s walk.”

“Ja, it’s nice—” she said, but I didn’t let her finish. I turned her around, then moved behind her again and pointed across to the other side of the street.

“Or else look at that one. It looks like a spaceship. And you see how it’s blue all along the bottom? That’s the pool, right? How fucking bright must that pool be?”

She took her time to say anything. She was twisting a piece of her hair in both her hands, looking nowhere in particular—she was thinking. And she was so lovely I just watched.

In the end, though, she said this thing that I didn’t get at all. Maybe it should’ve been a bit of a flare, I don’t know, but at the time it just added to my fascination with her. She said, “I guess I’m still hoping I’ll have all of this. You know? Someday. I don’t know how, like the details, but I can … I can see myself having it.”

I didn’t know how to respond—how was I going to promise her a mansion?—but I thought for a while and then I said, “Ja, but here’s my point. Who’s enjoying these houses more right now, us or them?”

She said, “No one’s enjoying them more than you.”

I laughed, but I kept talking. “No, seriously though, think about it. Isn’t that the tragedy? No matter what’s going on inside those houses—family dinner in that one, coke party round that pool, maybe somewhere there’s a baby crying or a teenager getting his hand on some real skin for the first time, who knows—the point is, houses like this, they’re built to be looked at. And you can’t live in them and look at them at the same time.”

“But all that stuff—the stuff that happens inside—that’s the important stuff, isn’t it?”

“Ja,” I said, and I knew I’d talked myself into knots but I thought I had it finally. “Don’t you feel so close to it out here though, Charlotte? All of it, all those lives in there. Far away, sure, far away—but also close,
really
close?”

She went quiet and it was like torture.

“Am I scaring you?” I said.

Her eyes were watching one of her feet trace a shape on the wet road. She said, “Listen, um …”

“My name’s Ed. It’s okay that you don’t remember.”

“Ed, this was nice. Not fake-liking anything, this was good,” she said.

Then she smiled at me in a whole new way.

All I could do was smile back, and for a long while, that’s all we did—we just stood there and smiled at each other.

It was a woozy feeling and it got a bit too much for me and I broke off from looking at her and I tried to think of something good to say next. I couldn’t think of anything.

I looked back at her, and thank god, she was the one who spoke first.

All she said was, “Come here.”

O
N THE WAY BACK TO
M
AIN
R
OAD
—

We were going fast because she was worried we were going to be late—

I held her hand and I told her the only reason I was looking for Bruno was because of my new job at Helluva Rides. Like celebrating. She said, “When you do the carousel, please make some of the horses scary. Red eyes. Fangs. Paint some snakes on there.”

When we were a couple of blocks from the church she pulled me into a parking lot and we kissed some more. She kissed quite rough, but it suited her. My insides felt like coals in a furnace and I got the feeling that if you’d brought a match anywhere near my skin I’d have gone up in flames, and I couldn’t believe how long it’d been since I’d felt that, and it freaked me out to realise how much I’d been missing out.

The kiss ended, and she put her hands on my face and looked at me straight on. She said, “Listen, Ed, you’re going to have to go ahead and check if he’s there already. And if he is, I’m sorry, but things might get a bit nuts. Just warning you.”

“Like how nuts? Does he have a gun?”

“No,” she said. She wasn’t smiling. “Just like shouting. And crying. From both sides.”

I held her hands and I told her, “I’m not scared.”

“No?”

“No, I’m—”

I didn’t finish because she kissed me again.

I suppose I should’ve thought more about how to handle everything, but I didn’t think about anything on my way over there. I was just trying to catch up with myself. I had that old feeling of disconnection, of watching myself, except this time I was impressed—

And even though she’d warned me, I guess I just didn’t believe in anything going wrong right then.

I saw it from a far way down the road. Unmissably parked there with its headlights on, and just like in that dream I’d been having about it, there were some lights on the body of the thing. Not exactly like the dream though, because that truck was strung up like a Christmas tree—this was just a couple of guttering bulbs, barely shining at all.