Lolito (12 page)

*

When the refreshment trolley pulls up, I think about asking for one of everything, like Harry Potter in the first book. I could share all of the food with sleeping man and we could get drunk and form unbreakable bonds through the shared feeling of being a deforested forest.

I don’t ask for one of everything.

I ask for peanuts and two cans of pre-mixed Smirnoff and coke. They cost four pounds each. I say ‘four pounds’ out loud while trying to do a smile at sleeping man. It doesn’t work. I look retarded. Doing smiles is hard. Sleeping man wakes up and asks for a chicken sandwich, two Twixes and a Magners.

‘How much?’ he says.

‘Nine eighty-five,’ the woman says.

‘Nine eighty-five,’ I say. ‘Sweet Mary, Jesus and someone else.’ He catches me with his eyes. They have being tired bruises under them. I think about hugging him. People like hugs. I think everyone wants to be hugged at all times but everyone is scared so no one does. Everyone has to sit around being unhugged. There should be people who are paid by the government to sit on public transport hugging people. The people should be called Hugabees.

Head Hugabee.

Hugabee of the Year.

Hugabee Headquarters.

No, that’s retarded. Everyone would sue the Hugabees and they’d get upset and disappear.

I eat the peanuts and drink one of the vodkas. There is a high-pitched female voice leaking from sleeping man’s headphones. He puts the sandwich onto his plastic table and goes back to sleep. The woman in front of us answers a call. She’s excitedly making plans to walk the length of whatever river runs between London and Manchester. She is talking about verdant landscapes and kind weather. She says the word ‘contemplation’.

I want to be excited.

I want to walk along rivers.

Wait, I don’t. That’s boring. I don’t want to contemplate anything. I want to want something instead of not
wanting things all the time. I want to get drunk. I finish the vodkas, get up and walk to the buffet carriage. I buy a miniature Heineken and another Smirnoff and coke. I drink them quickly in my seat, close my eyes and think, see you in London.

26

‘So do her tits fall off?’ Aslam said. ‘Like with the hair?’ He sank a hand into his bucket of popcorn and leaned back. An advert for a film about talking warrior owls was playing on the big screen. We were fourteen.

‘No, you twat,’ Sam said. ‘They cut them off. It’s called a mastectomy.’

‘They actually cut off the tits?’

‘Yeah,’ Alice said. She was holding an Evian bottle half-filled with vodka and coke. It was the first day of the Christmas holidays and we’d taken her to see
50/50
via it having Seth Rogen in and being about not dying from cancer. ‘She says they’ll cut them off and then give her fake plastic ones to stick on so no one will be able to tell.’

‘Etgar would love that job.’

‘What job?’

‘Cutting off tits.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Excuse me,’ someone said. We all turned in our seats. A man whose hair made the shape of a toilet seat was leaning forward. He was wearing glasses but looking over the top of them and he was holding a Styrofoam coffee cup and he was tall. The woman next to him was wide. Her lips were the colour of pomegranates. ‘Would you mind keeping it down?’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘We’ll be quiet.’

‘It’s the fucking adverts,’ Aslam said. I punched him in the shoulder.

‘Sorry,’ I said, again. We turned back to face the screen. A small boy was wandering around New York while inspiring music played. A voiceover said things about life and love and death.

‘Right,’ Aslam said. ‘So do they cut off the whole of the tit or like just the nipple?’

‘You retard,’ Sam said. ‘Why would someone just have cancer in the nipple?’

‘I don’t know. Why would someone just have cancer in the tits?’

‘She might not just have cancer in the tits. We don’t know yet. The cancer might have gone to other bits.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means she might die.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Excuse me,’ the man with toilet-seat-shaped hair said. We turned around again. The wide woman had crossed her arms. ‘I asked nicely, now could you please keep it down? The film’s going to start in a second.’

‘Her mum’s got cancer,’ Aslam said, pointing at Alice.

‘Cancer,’ Sam said, nodding.

‘Of the tits.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ the man said. ‘But I’d still like to watch the film.’

‘I’d like to watch the film too,’ Aslam said. ‘That’s why I’m here. Only the film hasn’t started yet. So don’t shit yourself, gaylord.’

‘Would you like me to call someone?’

‘Yeah, call your mum and tell her she’s a twat.’

I groaned and hit Aslam around the back of the head.

‘You nasty little prick,’ the man said, taking hold of Aslam’s hood and standing up. I looked at Sam and Sam smiled. He pulled the lid off his large Sprite and nodded at me and threw it over the man.

The man froze.

He didn’t know what had happened.

He dropped Aslam and touched his cheek and looked at his hand like it was covered in blood. His wet fringe was pinned against his forehead in thin, grey strands. Everyone started to struggle out down the row of people.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, bringing a corner of my shirt up to the man’s face. I was thinking about him being
on a first date with the wide woman who he would maybe fall in love with and marry and visit in hospital when she was about to die from multiple heart attacks.

‘Off,’ he said. ‘Fuck. Off.’

So I ran after the others. Alice was waiting for me in the aisle. We held hands and left. Two weeks later, Alice’s mum died and we all went to the park and Alice drank until she fell asleep and we carried her home.

27

At the hotel reception desk, I hide four open wounds on my left hand. That happens sometimes. I scratch. I took the Tube from Victoria to Marble Arch and it was easy. We go with school sometimes. It’s hard. I get anxious imagining my cartoon-flat body being peeled off the rails.

The hotel is as shiny as the photographs. It doesn’t feel like a place that’s been built by humans. It’s too big. It feels like a landscape people happen to be passing over.

I say my name and the receptionist gives me a keycard. She says something about breakfast. Each of her hands is half the width of mine. I expect her to stop me. I expect her to tell me that children aren’t allowed hotel rooms. I expect her to accuse me of credit card fraud and do a citizen’s arrest on me.

She doesn’t.

She smiles.

I walk quickly across the marble foyer, to a lift. Floor four. The lift door opens and a blonde woman pushes out an elderly man in a wheelchair. The man is asleep. Orange cubes of food are nestled in his beard.

In the room (421), I hold my hand under the tap and dab it with soap. It stings. My heart is going tripletime, but slowing. Everything is soft in the room. Everything is the colour of biscuits. I lie on the bed and boil the mini kettle for tea. I fall asleep and dream about having underwater sex with a mermaid Macy. The sun gets too close and the water evaporates and she dies. When I wake up I don’t want to move.

*

I’m waiting for Macy in the foyer. We did texts. I said I couldn’t meet her from the station because of work. I said I was wearing a sombre-looking suit that’s outgrown me and she said she was wearing a grey pencil skirt with a black hoodie. There are more people now, shifting across the marble in pairs with luggage on wheels. It makes me think of ducks. I imagine throwing bread crusts at them. I imagine throwing whole loaves of bread at their heads and then apologising profusely while playing staring with the dents in my shoes.

She appears.

She’s wearing what she said she was wearing. She seems to have no luggage. Her calves are narrow and tightly curved. Two swathes of blonde hair are pulled back across her forehead and pinned behind her head. She’s sexy. She would probably be beautiful if beautiful was a word that ever happened in my head.

She puts down her bag and slowly looks around. I am underneath her line of sight. She pushes a knuckle into the corner of her eye, pulls it away and stares at it. A passing man nods and smiles at her. I think, back off. I walk towards her. She’s looking away. I’m very close. Too close, maybe. I take two steps back.

‘Macy.’

Macy spins.

‘Etgar.’

We look at each other’s faces. There’s nothing I recognise in hers. I thought there would be heavy weather. I thought there would be severe disappointment or quiet anger or general upset. None of those are there. Nothing else is either. Her face is a book written in Kanji. There are oil spills under her eyes and brackets around her mouth. I am one pint taller than she is.

I try to make my spine straight and my forearms tense. It is extremely important to try and make myself look like a man. It won’t work. I don’t know. She will decide now what happens next. She could say nothing and leave the hotel and continue her life minus my interference. I don’t know what will help her decision.
Something tiny, I feel. Something tiny will tip her scales and drag her away. The size of my feet or the bruises on my face or the spot next to my left nostril.

Everything is just stuff touching other stuff.

There’s a hand on my hand. It’s Macy’s. I was scratching at the open holes. I didn’t notice. A line of blood has run down the valley between two of my knuckles. She guides my hand into the pouch of her hoodie and wipes it clean. She is doing a mum smile to me. She is doing a
you are not okay and I’m sorry
smile.

I don’t want to say anything.

I don’t want to have to say anything.

I want to stand, unmoving, with my hand in Macy’s pouch while she smiles at me like someone who would not kind of have sex with Aaron Mathews and lie about it afterwards.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Sorry. I didn’t notice. That happens sometimes. It’s – I don’t know. Sorry. Thank you.’

‘It’s okay, hon. Don’t worry. Shall we go up to the room before dinner? I’d like a shower.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Go to groom.’ I pinch myself. ‘The room. Okay.’

We go to wait in front of the lift. I catch sight of the receptionist and see that she’s been watching. When she sees me seeing her, she quickly finds something more interesting between her hands. I feel braver standing next to someone, neither of us being familiar to anyone else here but each other. I don’t know if we are familiar
to each other. I know I’m not a mortgage broker. I don’t know what Macy is. She’s nice. She’s here. We both are.

In the lift, I say, ‘Aren’t you going to leave?’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I’m short.’

‘You’re taller than I am,’ she says.

*

Macy showers while I use the mini-kettle to make tea. Hearing the water makes me not able to not imagine her naked. She isn’t what I expected. I don’t know what I expected. I expected a cold, sex-crazed woman who drank coffees I couldn’t pronounce and understood quantitative easing. Maybe she is that. She doesn’t seem like that. We went into the lift and along the corridor. I don’t understand why she is here. I don’t understand why she hasn’t disappeared.

I put two teabags in two mugs and add water. There’s only Earl Grey. Earl Grey tastes like ugly flowers. I turn on the television. The bald man’s there. I don’t want to listen to him. I don’t want to think. I take a small bottle of pink wine out of the minibar and drink it under the duvet, reading about fighting alligators in
The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook.

When Macy comes out of the bathroom, she’s wearing a black dress that makes her look like a woman from a James Bond film. Her hair is half dry. It has all been
flipped onto one side of her head. I feel like an ant lost in a living-room carpet.

‘What are you reading?’ she says, dropping onto a corner of the bed and tugging a brush through her hair.

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘A book about not dying.’

She laughs. ‘I like Martina Cole.’

‘Me too,’ I say. ‘No. I don’t know what that is.’

‘Are you ready for dinner?’

‘Okay.’

*

Everything feels different when we sit down in the hotel restaurant.The other people are in matching pairs.Wearing their own clothes. Talking about holidays. Drinking after-dinner espressos. Serious people doing serious lives. We are two people who sexed on the Internet. Macy could be my mum. What if I’m adopted and she is my mum? That’s happened before. Not to me. It was on the news.

A waiter comes over and asks if we’d like wine. I nod. I point at two words in the middle of the list. I have decided to not try and pronounce anything ever again. The waiter disappears. Me and Macy hide behind our menus.

Choosing food in restaurants is difficult. I always want to split into several people and eat various meals then vomit everything back up and become one person again to choose my favourite.

Macy chooses quickly. She folds her menu up and leans back, picking at the fabric of her dress like a scab.

The waiter comes back, holding the wine in a retarded claw-like way. He pours a very small amount into my glass. I look at him, confused.

‘Could I have some more?’

‘Don’t you want to try it?’ He nods at the glass.

I nod at him.

He nods again. ‘It might be terrible,’ he says, winking.

I think, yes, it will definitely be terrible, because it’s wine. I don’t understand. I pick up the glass and pour some into my mouth. I try not to wince. The waiter stares at me. I stare at the waiter.

‘Is it okay?’

‘Um. Yes.’

‘Good.’

He pours more wine into my glass, then leans over to fill up Macy’s. She’s biting her lip to keep a laugh from coming out. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I had to try it. Nothing would happen if I didn’t like it. No one likes the taste of wine.

The bottle lands on the table between us. We tell the waiter what we want. I choose risotto. Macy chooses steak. Our menus disappear with the waiter and there’s nothing left to hide behind, except the wine glasses, which are almost windows.