‘No,’ said Rose, ‘I’d leave them there. They’re happy.’
‘Rose,’ said Laurie, ‘believes a lost sock misses its partner and weeps bitter tears for it.’
‘I do not.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘Of course I don’t believe it literally,’ she said. ‘Don’t try and make me look like an idiot.’
‘Don’t try and make her look like an idiot, Laurie,’ Adam repeated. He didn’t know why. It came out sounding nasty.
‘Will you all stop taking the piss?’ she said, sitting up and throwing the magazine down onto the rug. ‘Anyone wants to take the piss has to get out of my room.’
‘It’s OK, Rose,’ Laurie said, ‘we all know you’re mad, but we forgive you.’
Adam picked up the magazine. ‘Obviously this is where Tattoo should be,’ he said, looking at the pictures. The dolls were weirdly beautiful. Rose lay back against Laurie, whose large gnarly-knuckled hand slid round under her waist and began lazily kneading her stomach under her crumpled blue shirt.
‘Catch you later,’ Adam mumbled, went downstairs and grabbed his ancient Nikon, wandered out into the street and roamed about in the direction of the park. Every now and then he’d stop to take a moody shot of a pigeon or an empty bench. It was a sunny day, dust from the traffic got in his throat. He ambled along, going nowhere in particular, got bored and went back home, lay down with closed eyes listening to the radio still playing the same random pop music it had been playing to his empty room all afternoon. He lived in a tip of squashed paint tubes and discarded rags. Some days he’d get up and dressed and lie back down on his bed, doing nothing fiercely and tremulously till it was time to go to sleep again. After a while he drifted to sleep, drifted out again, drifted back upstairs. Laurie had gone. She was sitting in the middle of all her things. It was getting worse; the stuff was making the room too small.
‘Grab yourself a glass,’ she said. She’d opened a bottle of wine. He lay down on the floor. She fiddled about with some embroidery for one of her frames. A J.J. Cale album played softly. For a long time he stared at the ceiling.
‘You don’t really like him, do you?’ he said.
‘Let it go, Ad.’
‘His breath stinks.’
‘No it doesn’t.’
‘He’s an ugly fucker.’
‘Yeah yeah.’ Rose put down the embroidery, picked up her glass, took a long drink and poured herself another. Closed her eyes. God, it was tiring. Living. Knocking about the world alone, Bloody men, always wanting more. She didn’t want an us. Family stuff. Her own was far-flung and had never been demonstrative. She’d spent her teens and twenties falling in and out of love with a series of boys and men. Sometimes she counted them off in her head. They all ended. Feelings changed, nothing was certain, everything was threatened.
‘He’s got lumps on his face,’ said Adam.
‘Shut up,’ she said.
‘OK OK OK.’ Long-suffering, he got up and walked around the room looking at stuff. The whole of the fireplace wall was now covered half way to the ceiling with shelves she’d made out of bricks and breezeblocks and planks of wood. You could imagine a little lift man going up and down. First floor: shells, plectrums, combs with missing teeth. Second floor: twigs and branches, random bits of wood. Third floor: odd playing cards, buckles, matchboxes, bobbins of coloured cotton. Fourth: things babies throw out of buggies and prams – a little cloth star, a rattle, a mouse with a baby-gnawed nose. Fifth, top: bottles – Tiger Sauce, La Fée Absinthe, Stone’s Ginger Wine, blue, green and brown bottles all standing together, a Manhattan of differing heights. Everything had been touched a million times.
‘Sit down, Ad,’ she said. ‘You’re like a kid with worms.’
He sat down, picked up the magazine and looked at the pictures of the island. ‘Look at us, we’re wasting time,’ he said. ‘Me and you, Rosie. Let’s go mad. Let’s go to Mexico. Let’s go to your weird island.’
She looked up and smiled. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘if you’re very, very good.’
Is This the Ugliest Woman in the World?
Miss Julia Pastrana is surely the most remarkable creature ever to have graced a stage in this city of excess, far surpassing any of the attractions currently on show at Mr Barnum’s American Museum just a couple of blocks away. She has the appearance of an ape but dances like Lola Montez and sings pretty Spanish folk songs in a very pleasant mezzo-soprano while sometimes accompanying herself on the guitar.
The newspaper lay open on a pouffe by her feet. It’s not that I have a particularly beautiful voice, she thought. It’s that they’re surprised I have any voice at all that isn’t a grunt or a howl.
Wearing scarlet boots, a tight-fitting skirt, and silk panty hose, Pastrana sang an Irish melody — ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ — and danced a bolero, looking every bit like the famed ballerina Fanny Elssler and displaying ‘a symmetry’ that would make the most successful ballet dancers envious.
Three nights on Broadway at the Gothic Hall, a big old palace covered in tarpaulin, the canvas a riotous mish-mash of colour. Sea monsters, a man with two heads, a boy pierced with pins, serpents and Cyclops and a scorpion with a woman’s face. In the corners, scenes from cannibal life. And now her picture was up there too, the head wild and fierce, the body a ballerina.
The front stoop of the rooming house was full all day with people waiting, hoping for a glimpse. She heard them, laughing and fooling around, crossing the road to the coffee booth, but she didn’t dare look out. ‘Think about it, Julia,’ Rates said. ‘Who’s fool enough to pay good money if he can just schlep down here and take a look for nothing? Guard your mystery.’
When this was over, they were for Philadelphia.
‘Or we are for Philadelphia,’ Myrtle said, laying out the cards for Patience. ‘I don’t know about you, Julia. You know he’s had an offer?’
‘Delia told me.’
They were in the pink parlour on the third floor, a room full of faded brocade and walls crammed with pictures and playbills of all the show people who’d ever stayed there. Julia was at the window, behind the curtain so she couldn’t be seen, looking down at the coffee booth across the street. A young man leaned against it with a bored air. Myrtle tossed one of her endless thin cigars into the air with her foot and caught it between her lips. ‘Look out for yourself,’ she said.
‘I’m not a slave,’ said Julia. ‘He can’t sell me.’
Myrtle looked thoughtfully at her, the cigar drooping on her lip. ‘Can’t he?’
‘Not unless I want to be sold.’ Julia turned from the window and sat down opposite Myrtle. ‘Can I have one of those?’ she said.
‘Sure.’ Myrtle gave her a cigar. ‘Mine’s gone out. Pass me a spill.’
‘I want to travel,’ Julia said, plucking a spill from a pot on the mantelpiece and lighting it at the fire.
‘Well, you’ll surely do that. They’re all out there, waving their big bucks, you could have your pick of them.’
‘I don’t want to stay with Rates,’ Julia said. ‘Do you?’ She lit both their cigars.
‘For a time, I suppose.’ Myrtle drew on the cigar, opened her lips and held the smoke in the bowl of her mouth. ‘He’s not too bad,’ she said, letting it out slowly, ‘wears thin, travel, believe me. I’ve been on the road since I was nine,’ leaning down, passing the cigar to her toes. ‘Been all over the west, up to Alaska, up in