Signal to Noise (5 page)

Only Meche loved him.

She’d been born like him, Meche. Not just the looks—the shape of the eyes, the firm mouth—but his temper and his proclivities.

If he hadn’t had Meche, Vicente might have gone to live at the bar forever, installed himself in a corner and drunk himself under the table. If he shuffled his feet home every night and stumbled out of bed in the mornings, it was because of his daughter.

Vicente went up the steps, trudging back into the apartment. After hanging his jacket he went towards the stereo, running his hands over the turntable. He carefully selected a record, plugged in his headphones and sat on the floor, listening to The Beatles playing in the dark as he smoked a cigarette.

He was almost done with one side of the recording when the door opened and the clatter of heels announced the presence of his wife. She turned on the lights and glanced at him.

She didn’t say anything. Her heels just moved away, towards the bedroom, with a soft sort of indifference which mirrored his own.

Mexico City, 2009

T
HE APARTMENT HAD
shrunk or had been bigger in her memory. She walked in slowly, feeling like an intruder even though she had grown up here. At some point her mother had taken down the old wallpaper and now the interior was painted in soft, institutional beiges.

Meche looked at the photos sitting all around: Natalia as a baby, Natalia as a child, Natalia at the beach. Photos of her mother’s second husband, Lorenzo. Almost like an afterthought, Natalia and Meche, her teenaged face staring at the camera.

“Mercedes,” her mother said as she drifted into the living room and gave her a hug. “Little Meche.”

“Hey, mom,” she muttered.

“How was your flight?”

“Good. Fine.”

“I have had the most awful time getting
tamales
,” her mother said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

“
Tamales?
”

“For the
novena
,” Jimena said helpfully.

“I really wished we didn’t have to do a
novena
,” Meche said.

“There’s no way around it,” her mother said. “God knows your father can use all the prayers he can get.”

“Dad didn’t believe in this stuff.”

“I talked to the baker and we are going to have canapés for the first night,” Jimena said. “He agreed to a discount, seeing as it was us.”

“Good,” Natalia said, patting her niece’s hand. “Meche, you are going to have to go through your father’s things.”

Meche had barely entered the apartment and had just sat down. She looked up at her mother, surprised.

“What?”

“Well, I certainly won’t have the time. I would ask Lorenzo, but it doesn’t seem right to have him going through your father’s clothes. And you know how he was. It’s probably a mess. But some of the records are bound to be valuable.”

Valuable
.

“Maybe you can play some at the party,” her mother said. “I have no idea what we are going to do for music.”

“You want me to go to dad’s apartment and see if he had records that are worth any money?”

“Ay, don’t take it like that,” Jimena said. “You want a coffee?”

Norwegians drank a lot of coffee; strong and black. Meche had never taken to this custom, but she had developed a tea addiction after her year in London.

“No.”

“You might as well sort it out and take whatever you want,” her mother said. “Whatever he had, he left it all to you. Nothing for me.”

There was a pointed bitterness to her words. Meche’s father had failed her so many times and Meche got that—because dumping your family one fine day will certainly create a few grudges. And yet... the asshole was gone. No need to auction off his goods. As far as Meche was concerned, she thought they should stuff all his possessions in cardboard boxes and give them to charity. She wasn’t going to go on eBay and see if someone paid a dollar for a dusty LP. But if her mother insisted, Meche would make an effort.

“I told Meche Sebastian Soto is hanging around the neighbourhood,” Jimena said. “You sure you don’t want a coffee?”

“Nope.”

“Yes, that nice boy.”

“You never liked him,” Meche said.

Meche’s mother chuckled and sat next to her, patting her leg. Her hair was a burnished brown. It matched the furniture. Jimena slipped out, probably to the kitchen for that coffee she yearned for.

“I did like him.”

Sebastian’s new car sure must be something to cause such a tremendous change of opinion in the women in Meche’s family.

“Where’s Lorenzo?” she asked.

“Trying to fix the paperwork and arrange the burial,” her mother said, lifting her hands in the air.

“Maybe I’ll go to father’s apartment tomorrow,” Meche muttered. “Before the funeral.”

At least in her father’s apartment she’d be alone. She didn’t think she could stomach her mother and her cousin at this time.

V
ICENTE
V
EGA’S APARTMENT
was smack in downtown Mexico City, in an old building which must have been quite something two hundred years before, but which was now nothing more than a tired ruin, perched at the end of an alley, waiting in the shadows. It was cold and damp as Meche walked up the stairs and when she actually opened the door to the apartment and stepped in she realized the apartment itself was even colder.

She locked the door and looked around. The first thing she noticed was a tiny kitchen that had no right to call itself a kitchen, dirty dishes piled high. She started by washing them because it was too depressing to stare at the dregs inside coffee cups and the stains of old spaghetti. Once she was done, she stood in the living room, which also served as the dining room, looking at the piles of old LPs her father had accumulated. They were sitting on shelves, but also spilled onto the floor, peeking from beneath the sofas, drowning the side table, resting upon the battered TV set.

She went to the room which served as an office, but really was nothing more than another space used to pile boxes with records, mountains of sleeves and vinyl. In a corner, forlorn, sat her father’s typewriter. When his music career failed, he had tried—and never succeeded in—writing a compendium of the history of Latin American rock-and-roll. Now that she thought about it, her father had never succeeded at anything, except maybe in finding the bottom of a bottle of tequila.

She stepped into his bedroom and discovered the same chaotic mass of records, though her father, perhaps in an effort to escape the clutter that reigned in the other parts of the apartment, had cleared a section of the wall and pinned up a large poster depicting palm trees and a sunset. The thick curtains also had a lively pattern of palm trees, this time with flamingos, so kitsch it made her wonder if it was really her father who had rented this apartment.

She remembered when she had been younger and her dad had told her he planned to spend the end of his days on a beach, watching the waves come in.

He never made it to the seaside, though he did spend several years in Guadalajara before returning to Mexico City.

His kidneys had failed him. That’s what had done him in. Not the booze. The liver put up a good fight. It was the kidneys which gave up. Her mother had told her he was on dialysis, but Meche hadn’t phoned him.

Meche took a look in the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was cluttered with pills and expired medications. His glasses sat on the water tank of the toilet.

She walked back to the bedroom, sat on the sagging bed and wondered what it would be like to wake every morning to the old picture of the beach, feet shuffling upon the cold floor. Dying and knowing you were dying.

On the floor, by the bed, half-hidden under a sweater, was the portable turntable. Meche moved the sweater away and looked at it, hesitantly.

Was it the same one? It seemed to be the same walnut case. The one Meche used to have in her room could play full-size LPs, so chances were it
was
the same one.

Meche grabbed it, put it on her knees and found the sticker on the side. The little heart which Daniela had left there.

That was it. But it just looked so... ordinary and worn now. No magic to it.

Would it still work?

She reached towards a stack of records on the bedside table and picked the first one off the top. The Beach Boys.

The needle went down. Good Vibrations began to play. She flipped the record sleeve around, looking at the image of the five young men. It had been released in 1966. That would have made her father... what... sixteen when it came out?

Meche opened the bedside drawer and found a stack of unpaid bills. There were some loose pages, stained with coffee smudges: notes for his glorious book. A matchbook. Tucked beneath the matchbook, like a postscript, a postcard from Puerto Vallarta. Meche looked at the remittance address but it had never been sent. It was an old Puerto Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta from the seventies, just left there to moulder in the drawer.

She closed the drawer and The Beach Boys finished their song, the needle lifted from the record and the apartment was silent.

Meche sighed and started going through the records, making three piles: throw away, sell and keep. She placed each record in the right pile, trying to maintain the keep pile as low as she could.

The silence was depressing. She could see why her father had kept the turntable by the bed, to liven his nights and mornings. She looked for another Beach Boys record, maybe
Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)
, but it was not to be found. She settled on
Hotel California
by The Eagles
—
which was not quite the same thing at all—and pulled apart the curtains to see what the view was like.

But there was no view. The windows showed the grey façade of another building. She dropped the curtains and the flamingos returned, masking the greyness, cheerfully frolicking in a land of palm trees.

She remembered that she was now almost the same age her father had been when he had left them.

Mexico City, 1988

I
T’S NOT THAT
Meche hated school, because she didn’t. She just hated the people at school, all them crawling around with their petty thoughts and their annoying habits. A few were outright assholes, like Teofilo. Others merely bumped into you on the stairs, giggled when you walked by, talked under their breath.

There were some—few and far between—who made it worth attending. Daniela and Sebastian, of course. But also Constantino. Especially Constantino Dominguez. She looked at him across the courtyard as she sat with her friends, eating her sandwich.

Sebastian had once dubbed Constantino the King of the Clones because his friends were always intent on copying his mannerisms and clothes. Sebastian also called him Floro Tinoco on account of the comic book character from
La Familia Burron
, swearing that Constantino was equally stupid and also built like a tractor. Meche only knew what all the other fifteen-year-old girls knew: Constantino had dirty-blond hair and hazel eyes, and when he smiled, he showed off perfectly straight, white teeth.

Today Constantino was standing next to Isadora Galván, a very common occurrence. They were not an item anymore, but hung out together in the way that the beautiful and popular will gravitate to each other. You could regularly find them in the Pit—which was an empty lot two blocks from school where the smokers liked to gather—and at other high school landmarks.

Isadora was certainly pretty, in a way which Meche could never expect to achieve. She had reddish-brown hair and it curled just the right amount around her shoulders. Her skin was very pale and this alone had earned her the lead in more than one school play while Meche and Daniela had to carry heavy props and scenery backstage.

Meche would have given anything to be like Isadora for a single day.

Maybe she could. If the magic worked.

“I think we should do the spell tonight,” she told Daniela and Sebastian.

They didn’t answer. Sebastian was also looking at Isadora, his eyes fixed on her long legs and her very short skirt. That kind of skirt looked sloppy and unflattering when Meche wore it, but on Isadora it was positively lovely. She supposed Isadora could wear a garbage bag and look amazing.

Daniela, for her part, was busy writing in her diary. Well, writing was an exaggeration. She just drew lots of little hearts with arrows going through them.

Meche snatched the diary away and hit Sebastian on the back of the head with it.

The boy looked at her, irritated.

“What?”

“I said we should do the spell tonight.”

“I can’t go out tonight,” Daniela said.

“Who are you kidding, you can never go out,” Meche muttered.

“No, I mean it.”

“Then we’ll go to your place.”

“Okay,” Daniel said demurely. “Can I have my notebook back, please?”

Meche looked at the diary and tapped her finger against the page.

“This is what we need,” she told Sebastian.

“My diary?” Daniela asked.

“No, dummy. A place where we write down what we do. A
grimoire
.”

“What’s a gri-moy-re?” Daniela asked.

“You should pay more attention when we watch horror movies,” Meche admonished her. “It’s like a recipe book for witches. We’ve got to have one. If we’re going to do this right.”

“There’s really no point in explaining it to her right now when she’s so distracted,” Sebastian said. “We’ll do it later.”

Daniela pouted, but Sebastian was right. Daniela was always going off on a tangent, dreaming away, getting distracted. The only thing Daniela’s brain was able to retain was the cheesy dialogue from those romance novels she borrowed from her sister.

Sebastian extended a hand towards Meche’s juice box. She frowned, but gave it to him in the end. Sebastian was constantly broke, this despite his attempts to earn a few extra pesos by bagging groceries at the supermarket, a job, which, by the way, he was getting too old for: everyone preferred very young baggers and he was reaching the end of his career as a bag boy.