Питер Робинсон - No Cure for Love

“Have you seen the show?” she asked Paula, snapping herself out of the reverie.

“Oh, aye,” said Paula. “We seem to get nothing but American stuff these days. The kids like it. Not that I think they understand it, mind you, but they know it’s their Auntie Sal. It’s not bad.”

“And Dad?”

In the silence that followed, Sarah looked at her sister’s profile and saw the lips pressed tight together, the dry, raw skin of her cheeks. Paula had never been the beauty — always just a little too shapeless, her features just a little too pinched and sharp, hair too coarse and oily — but the years had also been unkind to her.

Though she was only thirty-six, Paula looked in her mid-forties, at least, Sarah thought, with deeply ingrained lines around her eyes and the corners of her thin lips, and a permanent aura of weariness and suspicion. She could do something about herself if she tried — wore more suitable clothes, went to a good hairdresser and chose the right makeup, for example. Her eyes were still beautiful. A lighter blue than Sarah’s, they could light up a room when they weren’t poisoned by distrust and bitterness, a sense of always being hard-done-to, as they usually were.

“He doesn’t watch much telly,” Paula said finally. “Only old films on video.”

“What does he do?”

“Reads the paper. Looks at his stamp albums. Stares into space a lot.”

“Does he get out much?”

Paula shot her a scathing glance. “He’s got bloody emphysema,” she said. “He spends most of his time in a bleeding wheelchair with an oxygen tank strapped to the back. What do you expect?”

Sarah said nothing. She felt herself redden.

“Course,” Paula went on, “it’s the bloody pit that caused it, you know. Over thirty years down that pit, he was, then what do they do? Thatcher’s lot closes it down and chucks him out on the dole, that’s what. On the bloody scrapheap in his prime. A few years later he starts getting shortness of breath. And do you think there’s any compensation? Is there hell-as-like.”

Sarah remembered that her father had smoked about sixty unfiltered cigarettes a day as well as working down the coal mine, but she didn’t see any point in mentioning that to Paula. She also had to get used to the idea that, while Paula might complain about not getting money she felt she was entitled to from the government, any offers of help from family or friends would be taken as charity and dismissed. It was fine for the state to pay out, but not for her sister to do so.

Sarah had been allowed to put down the deposit on the cottages and pay for the renovations when they were knocked into one, but Paula would struggle with the mortgage, with the help of Dad’s pension and her earnings as a barmaid, and she even made it clear that she regarded the down payment as only a “loan.” Stubborn northern pride, Sarah thought. But she knew she might not have got so far without it herself.

They edged away from the difficult subject of their father and Paula asked Sarah about life in Hollywood. Somehow, Sarah got the impression she didn’t have much interest except for the occasional opportunity it gave her to put down the Americans and their ways.

To Paula, Sarah soon began to realize, Hollywood was, quite simply, a fantasy. It wasn’t real; it didn’t exist except on celluloid and in newsprint; its inhabitants were cartoon figures or cardboard cutouts that just happened to look like handsome men and beautiful women. Their real-life exploits were scripted to titillate the masses.

Actually, Sarah thought with a smile, Paula wasn’t far wrong, if only she knew it.

The sun had disappeared behind clouds now and rain was already starting to spatter the windscreen. Paula turned off the M62 south of Leeds and swung north-east toward the York bypass. It was too warm in the car now. Stifling. Sarah found herself fading in and out of sleep.

Rothwell, Swillington, Garforth. She saw them all through half-closed eyes. Run-down housing estates, burned-out cars on patches of wasteland, the odd small park with bare trees and empty flower beds, lots of pubs, squat churches, schools with iron railings around the playgrounds, zebra crossings and Belisha beacons out front, the occasional strip of shops — newsagent’s, mini-market, DIY, grocer’s, turf accountant’s — all in the inimitable mixture of dirty red-brick and dark millstone grit.

The road ran close to the house and shopfronts, separated only by a narrow flagstone pavement. Everything seemed so tiny, so scaled down. It all felt so close, pressing in. Stout old women in threadbare overcoats waited at pedestrian crossings, faces obscured by umbrellas.

Paula cursed the weather and lit another cigarette. Sarah opened her window another inch. The cool draft roused her a little. She could hear the hiss of the wheels along the wet road surface. The rain smelled fresh and sweet. A few drops moistened her cheek.

Paula glanced sideways. “All right?”

“Mmm. Just a bit tired.”

“Forecast says we’re in for a miserable Christmas,” Paula said with relish. “Rain, rain and more rain. Maybe gale force winds, too. And hail. We won’t be having a white Christmas this year. That’s what they say. Course, they’re not always right.”

Sarah closed her eyes and imagined fat snowflakes drifting into the sea and melting. Despite the freak conditions at Manchester, she had no illusions that the weather was going to be anything other than grim; she knew she would feel chilled to the bone day and night, no matter how many layers of clothing she wore or how high she managed to persuade Paula to turn up the central heating. After all, she had lived in England most of her life.

On the other hand, she really didn’t care whether it rained or hailed — at least she knew it was going to be cold . That was all that counted. She couldn’t get at all excited about the Christmas spirit in LA, especially with the unusual number of warm, sunny days they were getting this year. Even the few Christmas trees she had seen appeared to be wilting. She wondered what it must be like in Australia, when Christmas came in the middle of summer.

Sarah rolled the window up again when Paula finished her cigarette. As they headed over the bleak wilderness of the North York Moors, the rain driving almost horizontal and pouring so hard the windscreen wipers could hardly keep time, she slid sideways and rested her cheek against the cool glass. She closed her eyes and smiled to herself.

Paula was cursing a van churning up spray in front, but it didn’t matter. Here, at least, were demons she could deal with, demons she knew. Family. It was hardly going to be a merry Christmas, but she might be able to rebuild a few bridges and, more important, while she was away all her problems back in Los Angeles would disappear. When she got back to the beach house, all would be as if it had never happened.

Or so it seemed as she sat with the cool glass against her cheek and the rhythmic swishing of the windscreen wipers lulling her to sleep for the first time since she had pulled that severed arm out of the bloody sand.

“You didn’t ask me down here just to pick my brains about the college bowls, Arvo,” said Joe Westinghouse. “What’s on your mind?”

Joe and Arvo sat in a bar on Broadway — Joe’s choice — a dim, quiet place for serious drinkers and adulterous couples. It was a vinyl and molded-plastic kind of place, nothing special, but nobody bothered you if you wanted to drink and talk. Or just drink. Nobody came here to make deals; nobody talked on cellular phones or tapped away at notebook computers over cocktails; there wasn’t even a pianist.

Soft elevator music permeated the smoky air like a whore’s caress. The bartender had his back turned; he was polishing glasses and watching a small TV with the sound turned off. The Kings were playing the Maple Leafs in some weird time zone somewhere across the country. Arvo had a soft spot for the Leafs. Detroit was only a couple of hundred miles from Toronto, after all, and LA was a long way from both places. Still, when it came to baseball you could keep your Blue Jays, Dodgers and Angels; he was a Tigers fan all the way.