The Fifties art-house woman has escaped from her first gesture-loop, and is now tearing the leg off a pre-cooked chicken — again and again, of course. Then suddenly this lion, all Seventies and colourful, is ripping chunks of flesh from a dead zebra. Roger’s standing closer to her right side than he was two minutes earlier. Then someone moves up on her left side and nudges it: it’s Mladen the Yugoslavian, and he’s smiling at her, pushing his head forwards to the rhythm of the music. She smiles back and kind of does the same, but brings her upper torso into it more because Mladen’s moving in a way that makes him look kind of like a chicken too, and she doesn’t want to move like that, nor to seem to copy him. Bubbles are still floating down across the bedsheet screen and across the band. She has to admit it does look quite good — and anyway it wasn’t really Nick’s fault that the street-door/disconnecting-cabin-sound interface didn’t deliver: maybe someone other than Jean-Luc picked up the phone, which Nick wouldn’t have thought of, that there’d be maybe forty-fifty people there — well he’d have known that but you know, and anyway she likes him fine and Roger is his friend and Mladen the real Yugoslavian ditto. She turns around and waves up to him, hoping she won’t get Fairy Liquid or whatever in her eyes …
Nick sees her, waves back, then looks away towards a smartly dressed short guy who’s walked in from the antechamber and is also waving up at him. Nick seems to attach more importance to this guy than to her: seeing him, he screws the lid back on his kiddie bubble-tube and starts climbing down the ladder. He walks over to this guy, shakes his hand, yanks a piece of paper from his pocket and hands it to him, which seems to make the smartly dressed short guy all happy. Nick leads him over to her, kisses her on both cheeks and introduces the smartly dressed short guy to Mladen, then to Roger.
“I’ve seen you earlier today,” the smartly dressed short guy tells Roger.
“Oh yes?” Roger says.
“Palmovka. By the car market. You were taking pictures.” His accent is foreign but not Czech.
“Right,” Roger tells him. “I was filming.”
Then Nick introduces the smartly dressed short guy to her. His name is Anton, and he tells her he knows a lot about Philadelphia but not Vermont. She asks him where he’s from but the music’s quite loud and he doesn’t hear her right, because he says:
“Philadelphia. My uncle lives there. We’re going to move there too: me and my wife. We’ll have American babies.”
“Here, check this stuff out,” Nick says, holding up the tube. “It’s called ‘Bublifuk’.”
It’s true: the letters, wet with sticky liquid, swim in pink and blue across the label. International marketing potentiaclass="underline" zero. Mladen says:
“You must go blow that over Ivan Maňásek,” and jerks his thumb towards the antechamber.
“Is that him under the duvet?” Nick asks.
Mladen smiles and nods.
“And who …”
Mladen shrugs.
“We should run a sweepstake,” Roger says. “Give odds. Everyone puts in a hundred crowns to guess who Maňásek is making underneath the duvet and whoever wins gets a year’s supply of Bublifuk.”
“Bubbly fucks for one whole year,” says Mladen, chuckling. “Yuuu!”
“I’d like to meet with Ivan Maňásek,” Anton tells Nick. “Can you introduce me to him?”
“Yes, you said. He seems quite busy at the moment.” Nick, Mladen and Roger are all falling about laughing. Heidi laughs too, to let them know she thinks it’s funny — although she doesn’t think it’s that funny, only having met this Ivan Maňásek one time, when she visited Nick in his top-floor studio with angels hanging everywhere and junk over the floor. Mladen says:
“Bursting bubbles,” and they double over some more. Sure: enough already.
The band are pretty loud: they’re almost shouting at one another. Roger points over at two kids on the far side of the room: David and Jana, twins, whose faces, Roger reckons, look like the faces of the peasants on the hundred-crown note. He’s right: they have that classic kind of Commie-heroic look — and the same face, two versions of it, one male, one female. Heidi raises her voice above the music to agree:
“They’re just like replicas of one another.” Anton says to Nick:
“So do you think Ivan Maňásek will want to take some work on for a client?” and Nick tells him:
“I think so, like I said on the phone. Get him a drink and he’ll take on anything. Is it a portrait?”
“A more religious style.”
“He told me he spent months renovating some old fresco,” Nick says. “And anyway, he graduated from the Art Academy and that’s all they teach them there. The first-year students spend their whole time copying classical and religious paintings, and when they finally get to draw models they make them stand in the same boring postures. One leg forwards, both hands on hips, like this.”
He strikes up a pose. Heidi knows he models for the students at the art school, and has dropped heavy hints that if he could take her with him one day and let her meet the professor and ask him if he wanted a young female model she’d be seriously grateful. But Nick told her each time: “If you want to see my dick you’ll have to take my trousers off yourself,” sometimes adding “With your teeth” which ha ha asshole you try teaching English see if it’s much fun. Nick’s pointing at this black guy Tyrone’s gun and telling a story about some guy with a gun who cheated him at cards on a boat and there was buzzing or humming like the feedback through these amps or something; she’s not really listening, sort of zoning out what with the music and her lack of interest in Nick’s story. She wishes Nick would go away now because Roger’s not really talking to her any more: well, he’s talking to her — but without any flirtiness or exclusivity now. Anton starts telling a joke about sailors on a boat, how they all need new uniforms — a joke Heidi’s heard before; she decides to go crack another beer, but still waits for the punchline before asking Roger, Mladen, Anton and Nick if they want one too …
Back in the antechamber the Cal stoners have abandoned their guitars and started rolling joints. The duvet is still writhing and contorting. More people are arriving through the main door — including Barbara, one of Heidi’s students. She’s got a man with her: an older man, looks slightly surly as he holds her arm; must be her boyfriend. Barbara’s kind of cute in a Czech way: wide face, all innocent. She sees Heidi, says hello and introduces the man she’s with as Jaromír.
“How come you’re here?” asks Heidi.
“I’ve model for Jean-Luc,” says Barbara.
“Modelled,” Heidi corrects her — then, feeling stupid for doing that, corrects her own line: “Models, everywhere! You guys want a beer?”
Barbara says yes; Jaromír nods surlily.
“You can put your coats over with those canvases and all that wood,” Heidi tells them as she opens the fridge door and pulls out — how many? There’s Roger, Mladen, Nick, herself, that Anton and now these two, equals seven. She’s passing the beers on up to Barbara when there’s a sudden muffled but still pretty loud shriek from somewhere in the antechamber. She spins round: it came from underneath the duvet, and it wasn’t a shriek of pleasure. A second shriek, this time less a shriek than the sound of someone being seriously angry, comes out, followed by a string of Czech curses, words she doesn’t need to have come across in Colloquial to get their gist …