“FUCK OFF!” he’d screamed, screamed high and shrill in a voice that had hardly sounded human, much less like Pablo. He’d swung the bass around fast and hard and nailed Jonesy square in the chest. Still wheezing, struggling to get enough air, Daria had clearly heard the wet snap of breaking bone, and Jonesy McCabe had sailed backwards, colliding in a noisy tangle with Carlton ’s drums. And then Carlton had tackled Pablo, and they’d both disappeared over the side of the stage, swallowed immediately by the mad crush of bodies.
Daria had staggered to her knees again, and people had begun to back away from the stage, clearing out a small, irregular circle of the warehouse’s concrete floor where Carlton was busy slamming his fists repeatedly into Pablo’s face. The Gibson had lain a few feet away from them, trampled, broken, irrelevant.
She stood up, hands out cautious like a tightrope walker, purple-white blotches dancing in her eyes. Jonesy in a limp heap, unconscious amid the jumble of brass cymbals and aluminum tripod stalks. Abruptly, the lights had stopped strobing, and she’d seen the dark trickle of blood at each corner of his mouth. For all she’d known, Pablo had killed him, and Carlton was in the process of killing Pablo. Because of her, because she’d tried to steal something that wasn’t hers to take. Because for once in her grubby life something had felt right. Daria used the rig the bass had been plugged into to brace herself, had taken one step toward Jonesy.
And then the pain had gone off like a grenade lodged somewhere deep inside her skull, perfect agony filling in the place where her brain should have been, drowning body and mind in its searing electric gush. And the last thing she’d seen on the way down to merciful blackout was Carlton, climbing back onto the stage, nose squashed and bloodied grimace, and the shattered Gibson clasped triumphantly in one hand.
4.
Niki set the receiver back into its black cradle and sighed, a loud exasperated sound, and Daria could see that she was really having to work at the half smile, only a weak droop at the corners of her perfect lips.
“That bad?” she asked, and Niki shrugged, stared down at her feet. Her toenails were painted a dark and pearly blue.
“Yeah,” Niki said. “Or worse.”
“Can they fix it?” Daria was sitting at the edge of the bed now, her own feet dangling over the side, not bare, but hidden inside tube socks with mismatched colored bands around the tops. Left, orange. Right, maroon.
“Yeah, if I want to hand over every penny I have.”
“You should get a second opinion,” Claude said from the kitchen sink; washing the breakfast dishes, three cups and three saucers and Ivory liquid suds up to his elbows. “Most of those guys are crooked as the letter M.”
“Yeah,” Niki said, and then, “I don’t know.”
“Dar knows mechanics, don’t you, Dar? The big guy that plays guitar for Vanilla Domination, and that other guy, the one who looks like Nick Cave, except not so ugly.”
Daria was still looking down at her own feet, homely twins and a big hole in one heel so she could see the scar where she stepped on a broken 7Up bottle last summer.
“Yeah, I’m sure I can find someone to take at look at it, if you want.”
Niki stood and stretched, and Robert Smith, white face, blackened eyes, fright-wig do, stared back at Daria from Niki’s belly.
“Thanks, guys, but I’m afraid I’d only be delaying the inevitable. It’s either my bank account or the junkyard. I just have to decide which.”
“It certainly couldn’t hurt,” Claude said, setting a coffee cup down to dry. “Just to be sure.”
Niki shrugged again and then sniffed cautiously at one underarm, wrinkled her nose, and to Daria, even that seemed somehow graceful.
“God, I stink. Would it be okay if I used the shower?”
“Go right ahead,” Daria said and reached for another Marlboro, looking away before Niki Ky did anything else to make her feel awkward, dumpy, like a gorilla at charm school.
“You guys are wonderful,” Niki said. “I just hope you don’t get sick of me before I can get my ass back on the road,” and she picked up the pink gym bag and stepped into the tiny bathroom, pulling the door shut behind her; Daria could hear her wrestling with the useless old lock.
“It hasn’t worked since I’ve been here,” Daria shouted and immediately Niki stopped fumbling with the doorknob. A moment later, the loud, rusty squeak of brass hot and cold water handles and the sudden, wet shissh of the showerhead.
“Well,” Claude said, fastidiously drying his hands with a checkered dishtowel. “I still say she’s better than Keith.”
Daria exhaled smoke through her nostrils, stared through the window at the fiery place in the sky where the sun had gone down.
“Just shut up, Claude.”
She sat there until the sky was almost black, the deep indigo before true night, her cigarette smoked down to the filter and Niki still in the shower; trying not to think about Keith Barry or her father or the delicate itch of spider legs on naked skin. Unable to think of anything else.
CHAPTER FIVE
1.
T he girl with absinthe hair, algae hair, slipped into her fishnets and fastened her garters to the elastic band around the top of the hose. Her doppelgänger in the big gilt-framed mirror followed her every move, looking-glass girl who mocked her style and the nurtured pallor of her white skin. Sometimes Robin tried to outsmart her, misdirection, sleight of hand or foot or the slimmest parting of her lips. Nothing personal, but if the poor girl can’t be more original, she has to expect a little flack, and Robin slid into the velvet skirt, mini-short, and her twin did the same, never missed a beat.
There was no hurry. She didn’t have to meet Spyder and Byron at Dr. Jekyll’s for two hours yet, and she was still horny, even after an hour in bed, masturbating and watching the pictures on her ceiling, the ones she painted there last summer, making this place safe: two ladders and plywood stretched between them, just like Michelangelo.
The hurricane swirl of clouds, black-and-blue as the swollen belly of a thunderhead near the walls and the poppy-red of Nagasaki at the eye, every shade of conflagration in between. Heaven spilling its fire and guts, and the broken angels plunging, wings back and trailing starlight and feathers. And something terrible that she’d only suggested, watching from the still heart of the storm. The angels had skin like statues, eyes like sapphire and dusk, and between their legs, the perfect alloy of man and woman. Not sexless, but genitals that had not yet been forced to take a side.
Ritual in pretended fresco, something against the shadows.
The girl inside the mirror ran one pinkie through the silver ring in Robin’s navel-fresh piercing and the wound still red at the edges-tugging gently, playfully. Robin removed the blouse from its wire hanger, black lace and no sleeves, crimson buttons like drops of stage blood. The gloves were black, too, and lace, and they hid the nubs of her fingernails, the cuticles chewed raw and ragged.
Two knocks at her bedroom door, soft and hesitant, and her mother speaking through the wood.
“Robin? Are you going out tonight, dear?”
“Yes, Mother,” and the girl in the mirror stuck out her tongue, bright and wet against lips the color of ash. Robin’s teeth caught it, held it, supplicant flesh squeezed helpless between her incisors.
“Your father’s working late, and I’m having dinner with Marjorie and Quentin. Don’t forget to lock up, and set the alarm when you leave.”