A silence as she imagined it.
‘If you won the bet,’ she said finally, ‘what did you win?’
He laughed. ‘Oh, nothing. A hamburger, maybe.’
And they were both laughing. Laughing and laughing. More tears, of a different kind.
Afterwards she said, ‘You know, you’re lucky having all that. I think it’s wonderful.’
‘I wish Dad thought so.’
‘Doesn’t he?’
He shook his head. ‘He wants me to do something worthwhile.’
‘What could be more worthwhile than saving people’s lives?’ ‘He doesn’t see it like that.’
‘Well, I think it’s wonderful. The ocean, the beach, it’s like your own kingdom. Worthwhile,’ and she snorted through her nose, ‘that Dad of yours, he must be soft in the head.’
It was almost as if he’d had an ear to the ground. As if he’d picked up that tremble in the earth, that hushed drumrolclass="underline" the hooves of the enemy. Still far away, but moving in his direction. When he came home after work the next day he found a letter waiting just inside the door. It was postmarked Moon Beach, but he didn’t recognise the handwriting. He took the letter upstairs and lay down on his bed and tore it open.
‘By the time you read this letter,’ it began, ‘I will have left your father.’ There followed three pages of bitterness and accusation, which ended with the words, ‘It will be your father who suffers, not me.’ Signed simply, ‘Harriet Christie.’
His own name thrown in his face like acid.
He let the letter slip to the floor. He tried to laugh, but his laughter sounded forced in that small room.
Loyalty Is Silence
There are times when your life seems to jump tracks. Slow train to fast, local to express. You have the sense that, from now on, you’ll be travelling on a different line, you’ll be seeing different views through the window.
It was November and Jed had just turned twenty-two. Creed opened the glass panel one morning as they were returning from the airport and said, ‘Where do you live, Spaghetti?’
‘Mangrove East.’
Creed shook his head. ‘I need you closer.’
It was exactly what Jed had been waiting to hear, but he kept his voice level. ‘Where’ve you got in mind, sir?’
‘The Palace.’
Jed’s heart lifted in his ribs. The Palace was where Creed lived, in a penthouse suite on the fourteenth floor, so the idea made perfect sense. But the Palace was also the most exclusive apartment hotel in the city. It was located on Ocean Drive, between C and D; it took up the entire block. With its two twin towers of baroque grey stone, it was just about the only building in Moon Beach that wasn’t either white or pale-blue. Its lobby was the size of a railway station, all peach marble and glass and gilded metal. The central chandelier was gold-plated and weighed, it was rumoured, something in the region of half a ton. Everyone had stayed at the Palace. Heads of state, movie-stars, tycoons. Just to be able to give it as your address!
‘You’ll be in the basement,’ Creed said, ‘but it should be adequate.’ He allowed himself a smile. ‘It can hardly fail to be an improvement on Mangrove East, in any case.’
Jed moved that same week. To reach his new apartment you had to use the old tradesmen’s entrance: past the service elevator, down four flights of stairs, along a corridor with a linoleum floor. The basement of the Palace was a lost kingdom of storerooms, washrooms and boiler-rooms. Fat grey pipes hugging the ceilings, dull yellow walls. The air smelt of lagging, paint, damp. And also, ever so faintly, and inexplicably, of marzipan. In the end you came to a door that said (and this was equally inexplicable) 3D. There was no 3C and no 3E. There wasn’t even a 3 A. 3D was unique and without context. It was another dimension. It was Jed’s new home.
There were two rooms, both painted a tired pale-green. There was a bed, a TV, a phone. There was air-conditioning. That was about it. If you parted the net curtains and peered sideways and upwards you could see one tiny piece of bright blue sky, but you might pull a muscle doing it. A constant clash and tinkle came from the kitchens across the courtyard, like the percussion section of an orchestra from hell. At night the boiler took over, roaring and trembling until dawn. During his first week in the Palace he hardly slept.
It was during the second week that Carol asked him to dinner at her parents’ place. As the taxi moved down off the harbour bridge and into the suburb of Paradise, he remembered what Vasco had said, and turned to her.
‘Your father,’ he said, ‘is he really the chairman?’
Carol looked embarrassed. ‘Yes.’
He sat back. Jesus. So her father really was the chairman. Her father was Sir Charles Dobson.
‘Why?’ Carol said. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘No, not really. Vasco said something about it, but I didn’t believe him.’
‘I thought everyone knew.’ And she gave him a smile that resembled gratitude. It was as if, in not knowing, he’d paid her a great compliment.
Sir Charles and Lady Dobson lived on Pacific Drive, a road that wound its way through the canyons, then doubled back towards the ocean to link, eventually, with the South Coast Expressway. The house was one of the white, wedding-cake mansions in the 10,000-block, high wrought-iron gates and video security, and just the hills rising in silence behind.
Jed paid the taxi and stood still. You needed millions to breathe this air. This air exactly, right here. Millions. And suddenly he took the rumours and put them on like a coat. Lifted and dropped his shoulders a few times, he’d seen people do it when they tried on clothes in stores. Not a bad fit. Maybe he really was a cunning son of a bitch, just like Vasco said he was. Certainly he was thinking all those thoughts. Jed Morgan, he was thinking. Chairman.
Dinner was plate after plate of food he’d hardly ever set eyes on, let alone eaten: caviar, bortsch, salmon, duck. And then, as if that wasn’t indigestible enough, the conversation turned to the subject of advertising. The new Paradise Corporation commercial had just aired the previous night. Jed had seen it. It opened with a black screen and a voice that said, ‘This is probably the most frightening place in the world.’ It pulled back slowly to reveal a fringe of green around the black. You were looking into an open grave. The voice went on to say that, when you were faced with something as frightening as death, you needed the right people around you, and the right people were the Paradise Corporation etc. etc. One of the papers had attacked the commercial for being too emotive. People at the dinner table were springing to the commercial’s defence, using words like ‘honest’ and ‘bold’.
‘Well,’ Jed said, speaking up for the first time, ‘at least there weren’t any tolling bells in it.’ All the talk around him suddenly subsided; he felt strangely shipwrecked in the silence. ‘I used to work on commercials for funeral parlours,’ he went on. ‘I used to think that if I heard one more tolling bell, I’d go out of my mind.’
After the laughter had died away, he told a story about one particular commercial that he’d worked on. It was a testimonial for a funeral parlour which had dealt with the victims of a forest fire. He needed the sound of a forest fire running under the voice-track, but he couldn’t find the effect on file. It was seven at night and the commercial had to be presented at breakfast the next day. In the end he had no choice. He had to create the effect himself.