“She’s got style,” Hannah said, watching her own skirt stretched tight over Thurston’s narrow hips.
“Good manners,” Lowell said, doing the thoughtful movie-star clench with his jaw, already wondering whether she had a crush on him, already working out how to get in with her people.
It didn’t for a second occur to them that this was a piece of on-and-off homeless, skinny male white trash from the uglier side of town, graffiti maestro, street artist, performance poet and pickpocket, with a mild criminal record (trespass, jaywalking, vagrancy) and no sway whatsoever in the Hollywood Hills. Even if I had told them, right then I don’t think they would have believed it. Just the week before, Thurston had strung a huge banner from the top of the Ocean Palms building, hand-stitched in letters more than two metres tall, FROM UP HERE WE ARE ALL NOBODIES. That wouldn’t have meant a thing to Hannah and Lowell. There was nothing in that for them.
“Can I take your daughter out tonight?” Charlie asked, and they looked surprised as hell that someone so spectacular might know me, but they said yes, of course they said yes.
Thurston kissed them on both cheeks when we left and they didn’t feel the stubble underneath his smooth skin, didn’t notice the bitten-down nails behind the false ones.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” I said.
“No big deal,” he said. “Everyone here is faking it.”
“I suppose.”
“How the hell,” he asked me, taking my arm on the stairs, “does anyone walk in these shoes?”
We stopped at a restroom round the corner from our apartment. He’d stashed his clothes there, his baggy black T-shirt and ancient jeans. When he came out looking like Thurston again, I thought he was a hundred times more beautiful than Charlie, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say so.
He grinned. “They loved me, right?”
“You were perfect,” I told him. “How could they not?”
“Jeez,” he said, “your parents are easy to please.”
Charlotte didn’t appear again. A while later, Hannah and Lowell asked me what happened to her.
I was reading about a sinkhole that had opened up out of nowhere underneath a man’s house and swallowed his bed with him in it.
“I haven’t seen her,” I said.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I get it,” I told her. “Too good for me, right?”
“Such great potential,” Hannah said, like she’d know.
“I wanted to get her parents over at the weekend,” Lowell said.
I suppose they wanted to believe I’d had a friend with connections, that it might almost make me somebody.
“She died,” I told them, and I didn’t care if they bought it or not. “She moved away.”
Lowell’s face hovered somewhere around shock at the further thinning of his address book, and Hannah said, “Well, which is it?”
“Both,” I said. “But not in that order.”
They didn’t bother to argue
Gullible works both ways. Tricking people requires their full co-operation.
“We’re lazy,” Thurston once told me. “We’re happy to have the wool pulled over our eyes, because everything else is just plain hard work.”
I call my mother Hannah because she told me to. When I was about seven, she said it was time to stop being a baby and start using her proper name.
“Otherwise,” she said, turning to enjoy her reflection from behind, “the older you get, the more you’ll age me.”
She is a beauty. You’d have to give her that. Tall and dark and glossy, like some kind of racehorse, with legs and curves that people feel the need to stare at in the street. We are not one bit alike.
I am plain-looking, skinny and flat-chested and small, and it suits me. I live in thrift-shop jeans and secondhand sweaters because they come in under budget and under the radar and they’re just easy. I cut my hair short like a boy for the same reason. I’ve banked myself plenty of time and money by never minding too much what I look like. I think my day is about four hours longer than Hannah’s without all the grooming in it. It’s really quite liberating, not giving a shit. What am I missing out on exactly – make-up, brand anxiety and crippling self-doubt about shoes? Big deal. Poor me. If I was in charge, mirrors would be for making sure there’s nothing stuck in your teeth or sticking out of your nose or tucked into your trousers, nothing more. I’m not likely to start staring into one and wishing I was different.
I used to wonder if that’s why Thurston chose me, because I was unremarkable, because I’d be useful to him that way. Every hustler needs an invisible friend. He laughed at me when I asked him.
We were making him a mask out of old, broken sunglasses, sticking the smashed lenses on to a plain latex face, so that when people looked at him, all they would see was repetitions of themselves.
“I like you, Iris,” he said, holding it up in front of his face, pulling the strap to the back of his head, “because you are you.”
I was fourteen. I’d known him on and off for two years and he was the only thing I had worth knowing. It was the nicest thing he could have said to me. My smile just about exploded, reflected at hundreds of angles by his mirrored mosaic of a face.
Hannah and Lowell think I am determined to be ugly. They think my attitude is aimed at them, out of spite. It’s beyond them that somebody would go a whole day without looking in the mirror. They wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without a layer of light-reflecting foundation and an accessory with a three-figure price tag. Looking good is the actual bedrock of their moral code. Presentation is ethics to them, which is why they bought me the dress. Hannah threw it down on my bed like a gauntlet, this loud patterned thing with a belt. I avoided it, walked around it like you would a patch of vomit in the street. I took a shower, pulled on yesterday’s clothes and went downstairs for breakfast.
It was Saturday, the weekend after Hannah called Ernest and agreed to bring me (I think) for a price. Since then, you could see they’d been shopping. Lowell was pacing the kitchen in a stiff pale suit that made him look like a rectangle, like a man in a cardboard box. Hannah had on a mink silk top and a skirt so tight I wasn’t sure she could move. I think she had to cross her legs the whole time to fit into it. They looked like they’d just stepped out of a shop window. I wondered how many hours the two of them had spent fantasising about the scene at Ernest’s deathbed and the muted, elegant, expensive clothing they could suddenly afford to wear. I wanted to put a match to the hem of her skirt and set it alight, drop a hot coal down the neck of his jacket and watch it swallow up the fabric like a black hole.
“Morning,” I said.
Hannah leaned against the kitchen counter, nursing a cigarette for breakfast. My mother often smokes instead of eating. She’d sell you a diet book about it if someone would let her. Her blown smoke bloomed in the bands of sunlit air that striped the kitchen, vanishing in its shadows, expanding to fill the room.
“Kiddo,” Lowell said, like every morning, in his faked transatlantic drawl. “Nice of you to show up.”
“Where’s the dress?” Hannah asked, and I poured myself some cornflakes before I told her it was still in the wrapper.