We stopped on the mezzanine, collected our badges and programmes. “Don’t forget to sign up for the ghost walk,” said the smiling woman behind the table. “Ghost walks of Old New Orleans each night, limited to fifteen people in each party, so sign up fast.”
I bathed, and washed my clothes out in the basin, then hung them up in the bathroom to dry.
I sat naked on the bed, and examined the contents of Anderton’s briefcase. I skimmed through the paper he had intended to present, without taking in the content.
On the clean back of page five he had written, in a tight, mostly legible, scrawl, In a perfect world you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.
Until walking (waking? calling?) on your own is unsupportable.
When my clothes were pretty much dry I put them back on and went down to the lobby bar. Campbell was already there. He was drinking a gin and tonic, with a gin and tonic on the side.
He had out a copy of the conference programme and had circled each of the talks and papers he wanted to see. (“Rule one, if it’s before midday, fuck it unless you’re the one doing it,” he explained.) He showed me my talk, circled in pencil.
“I’ve never done this before,” I told him. “Presented a paper at a conference.”
“It’s a piece of piss, Jackson,” he said. “Piece of piss. You know what I do?”
“No,” I said.
“I just get up and read the paper. Then people ask questions, and I just bullshit,” he said. “Actively bullshit, as opposed to passively. That’s the best bit. Just bullshitting. Piece of utter piss.”
“I’m not really good at, um, bullshitting,” I said. “Too honest.”
“Then nod, and tell them that that’s a really perceptive question, and that it’s addressed at length in the longer version of the paper, of which the one you are reading is an edited abstract. If you get some nut-job giving you a really difficult time about something you got wrong, just get huffy and say that it’s not about what’s fashionable to believe, it’s about the truth.”
“Does that work?”
“Christ, yes. I gave a paper a few years back about the origins of the Thuggee sects in Persian military troops — it’s why you could get Hindus and Moslems alike becoming Thuggee, you see; the Kali worship was tacked on later. It would have begun as some sort of Manichaean secret society-”
“Still spouting that nonsense?” She was a tall, pale woman with a shock of white hair, wearing clothes that looked both aggressively, studiedly Bohemian, and far too warm for the climate. I could imagine her riding a bicycle, the kind with a wicker basket in the front.
“Spouting it? I’m writing a fucking book about it,” said the Englishman. “So, what I want to know is, who’s coming with me to the French Quarter to taste all that New Orleans can offer?”
“I’ll pass,” said the woman, unsmiling. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Jackson Anderton, from Hopewell College.”
“The Zombie Coffee Girls paper?” She smiled. “I saw it in the programme. Quite fascinating. Yet another thing we owe Zora, eh?”
“Along with The Great Gatsby” I said.
“Hurston knew F. Scott Fitzgerald?” said the bicycle woman. “I did not know that. We forget how small the New York literary world was back then, and how the colour bar was often lifted for a genius.”
The Englishman snorted. “Lifted? Only under sufferance. The woman died in penury as a cleaner in Florida. Nobody knew she’d written any of the stuff she wrote, let alone that she’d worked with Fitzgerald on The Great Gatsby. It’s pathetic, Margaret.”
“Posterity has a way of taking these things into account,” said the tall woman. She walked away.
Campbell stared after her. “When I grow up,” he said, “I want to be her.”
“Why?”
He looked at me. “Yeah, that’s the attitude. You’re right. Some of us write the bestsellers, some of us read them, some of us get the prizes, some of us don’t. What’s important is being human, isn’t it? It’s how good a person you are. Being alive.”
He patted me on the arm. “Come on. Interesting anthropological phenomenon I’ve read about on the Internet I shall point out to you tonight, of the kind you probably don’t see back in Dead Rat, Kentucky. Id est, women who would, under normal circumstances, not show their tits for a hundred quid, will be only too pleased to get ‘em out for the crowd for some cheap plastic beads.”
“Universal trading medium,” I said. “Beads.”
“Fuck,” he said. “There’s a paper in that. Come on. You ever had a jello shot, Jackson?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Bet they’ll be disgusting. Let’s go and see.”
We paid for our drinks. I had to remind him to tip.
“By the way,” I said. “F. Scott Fitzgerald. What was his wife’s name?”
“Zelda? What about her?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Zelda. Zora. Whatever. We went out.
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”
Midnight, give or take. We were in a bar on Bourbon Street, me and the English anthropology prof, and he started buying drinks — real drinks, this place didn’t do jello shots — for a couple of dark-haired women at the bar. They looked so similar that they might have been sisters. One wore a red ribbon in her hair, the other wore a white ribbon. Gauguin might have painted them, only he would have painted them bare-breasted, and without the silver mouse-skull earrings. They laughed a lot.
We had seen a small party of academics walk past the bar at one point, being led by a guide with a black umbrella. I pointed them out to Campbell.
The woman with the red ribbon raised an eyebrow. “They go on the Haunted History tours, looking for ghosts. You want to say, dude, this is where the ghosts come, this is where the dead stay. Easier to go looking for the living.”
“You saying the tourists are alive}” said the other, mock-concern on her face.
“When they get here,” said the first, and they both laughed at that.
They laughed a lot.
The one with the white ribbon laughed at everything Campbell said. She would tell him, “Say ‘fuck’ again,” and he would say it, and she would say, “Fook! Fook!” trying to copy him, and he’d say, “It’s not fook, it’s fuck” and she couldn’t hear the difference, and would laugh some more.
After two drinks, maybe three, he took her by the hand and walked her into the back of the bar, where music was playing, and it was dark, and there were a couple of people already, if not dancing, then moving against each other.
I stayed where I was, beside the woman with the red ribbon in her hair.
She said, “So you’re in the record company too?”
I nodded. It was what Campbell had told them we did. “I hate telling people I’m a fucking academic,” he had said, reasonably, when they were in the Ladies’ Room. Instead he had told them that he had discovered Oasis.
“How about you? What do you do in the world?”
She said, “I’m a priestess of Santeria. Me, I got it all in my blood, my papa was Brazilian, my momma was Irish-Cherokee. In Brazil, everybody makes love with everybody and they have the best little brown babies. Everybody got black slave blood, everybody got Indian blood, my poppa even got some Japanese blood. His brother, my uncle, he looks Japanese. My poppa, he just a good-looking man. People think it was my poppa I got the Santeria from, but no, it was my grandmomma, said she was Cherokee, but I had her figgered for mostly high yaller when I saw the old photographs. When I was three I was talking to dead folks, when I was five I watched a huge black dog, size of a Harley-Davidson, walking behind a man in the street, no one could see it but me, when I told my mom, she told my grandmomma, they said, she’s got to know, she’s got to learn. There’s people to teach me, even as a little girl.