“I’m not going to kill anyone,” she said.
“A bold, sweeping statement. Would you kill to protect yourself from, say, a vile ravisher?”
Too late for that.
“Or to secure an inheritance, a fortune that you could use on good works if it were liberated from a miser who makes no use of it?”
“Is your mother rich?”
“No, she’s strange. She hasn’t a bean, Miss Alibi. Just this place. Half on the cliff. Half on the beach. She has only her memories. Her disgusting memories.”
“I’m sure she’s not as bad as that. She’s just a woman.”
Arthur leaned forwards, eyes shining. “Just a woman? Just? Maybe … maybe, at that … but it’s no excuse, is it? It’s no reason she should be spared from God’s judgment. Quite the opposite. It was Eve, was it not, who lead mankind into Sin? Eve, the femme fatale and the farmer’s wife. Eve who brought about the Fall. Should not Eve be punished, over and over and over…?”
A thin line of spit, like spider-silk, descended from Arthur’s wet mouth. He repeatedly slammed a pudgy, soft, tiny fist into the palm of his other hand.
It struck Jayne that Arthur Hayslip was hateful, but harmless.
If she killed this stranger’s mother, what would he do for her? What wouldn’t he do for her? Rain rattled the windows. The cabin shook, like a train compartment on an express.
“You don’t know how to do it to a woman, do you?” she said. “You blame her, your mother, but it’s your weakness.”
He drew back. “I am a man of the world, my dear,” he said. “Your sex holds no mystery for me. I know too much for that.”
She tittered. He flushed, red.
“You couldn’t hurt a fly, if you wanted to. You don’t want to murder your mother, you want someone else to murder your mother. But that would be the end for you, the ending you didn’t guess was coming. The twist in the last reel. There would be nothing. Without her, you’d be a dummy without a ventriloquist …”
“Mummy,” he murmured, “mummy’s dummy …”
All at once, she didn’t want to press on. There was no point in it, in making an unhappy wretch more wretched. That wasn’t heroic, that was bullying. She’d been bullied enough herself to hate that.
How many times had she been stripped and stabbed this week? In play, in fun, for entertainment? She had been murdered, over and over …
“Has he asked you to top me?” shrilled a voice from the door. “He asks all the lodgers to top me. All the ones he fancies, at least. Girlies and boysies, he’s not too particular …”
Birdie flapped into the room, trailing a soaked shawl. Her wig shone with rainwater.
She pinched her son’s pendulous earlobe and yanked.
“Naughty Arthur, bothering the girlies …”
Arthur’s face screwed up with pain.
“Lord knows I’ve tried, ducks … but my boy’s just a nasty little shit. No other words for it. I’ll get him out of your hair and you can turn in. He tell you about the hot water?”
“There isn’t any?”
“That’s right. Pity, but there it is. Come on, Arthur … time to say nighty-night.”
Birdie pulled Arthur out of the chair. She was taller than him.
“Be polite,” she insisted, twisting the earlobe.
“Nighty-night, Miss,” he said, through tears. “Nighty-night, Aphrodite in a nightie …”
Birdie took the umbrella and dragged her son back through the cabin door. They disappeared into the rain and darkness.
Jayne shut the door.
Her heart was pounding and her face burned. She was more embarrassed than afraid. She would leave early tomorrow.
For where? They’d be after her, by then. Hitch’s agents. Paramount and Universal. Walter.
Think of that later. After sleep.
The door blew open again and Arthur was there, breathing heavily. He had broken free of his mother.
“What’s in the sack?” he asked.
The question knifed into her heart.
Birdie came up behind Arthur, fingers hooked into talons, screeching …
Scree! Scree! Scree!
Jayne backed away and clutched the sack.
“What would you do for what’s in the sack?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing. Nothing. A negative.”
Arthur smiled wickedly as Birdie dragged him away again, kicking the door shut.
Jayne sat down on the big bed and hugged the sack. It was heavy, lumpy, hard. Useless, yet beyond value. A measure of her suffering, but just deadweight. She threw it away and it lay like an extra pillow.
She would sleep on the other bed, the small one.
If she could sleep …
She went into the bathroom and turned on the light. It was tile-floored. The mirror had a scrollwork border etched into the glass. The claw-foot bathtub bled rust into the cracks between the tiles. There was no shower attachment.
She ran the tap, just to make sure. Icy cold bit her fingers.
At least there were towels.
She breathed mist on the mirror and wrote JANA in it, then watched her name vanish as the exhalation evaporated.
She undressed, not like she did for pictures. Not for show, but to get out of her heavy, sodden clothes. She unpeeled damp, sticky layers — cardigan, skirt, blouse, slip, brassiere, shoes, stockings, panties. She would have to wear most of these again tomorrow, since she’d not thought to bring more than a change of underthings. They wouldn’t dry completely by then.
What was she doing?
The towels weren’t wet but they weren’t warm. The rough nap rubbed her skin the wrong way. She saw herself naked in the mirror. Without moleskin patches. She didn’t look the way she did on film. She looked already dead. Her next makeup artist would be a mortician.
There was a bathrobe. She pulled it on, wrapping it tight over her stabbable breasts, her slashable back, her sliceable limbs.
She turbaned her dried, scraggly hair with another towel.
Turning out the bathroom light, she stepped back into the bedroom.
Arthur was sitting on the big bed, the sack open. He had scratches down one side of his face. His velvet jacket was soaked. His slicker still hung in the cabin.
“What is this?” he asked.
The pie-shaped can lay on the bed, sealed with tape.
“Negative.”
“Answer me,” he insisted, angry. “No word games.”
“Negative,” she said. “Film negative.”
Arthur smiled, the penny dropping.
“Motion pictures,” he said. “Dirty pictures?”
“I’m naked in them,” she admitted. “And dead, like you said. Snatched dead moments. Useless moments.”
He ran his fat fingers over the can. She knew he wanted to see… but it was hopeless: he’d need to make a positive print, run it on a projector …
“It’s the thing you’re chasing after, Arthur. A woman, me, being cut up. It’s the only evidence it happened. The only evidence it happened to me….”
She had stolen weeks from Hitch. Weeks it would take to stage again, with Janet or some other stand-in … if he could ever get it just so, just the way he wanted, which she doubted was possible, or hoped wasn’t possible.
The studio would pay, if Hitch wouldn’t.
Arthur scratched at the tape seal with his fingernails.
Jayne heard Hitch in her skull, ranting at her, raving at his loss … swearing vengeance and retribution and blood … impotent fury. “I shall make sure the chit will never work in this town again!” She’d heard that before … so had everyone. Sure, she could be blacklisted, but blacklists were broken all the time. Being dead to one producer just bumped you up on another’s books. Plenty would hire her because she’d pissed off High and Mighty Cocky Mr. Hitch. Directors without TV shows, who no one would recognize in the street … David Selznick, William Castle, William Wyler … the giant leech and dragstrip doll guys. She’d do all right.