He flicks the piece of paper so it stands up straight in his hand. Perhaps I should’ve kept it after all.
‘Take this bit kid,’ he says, reading from it. ‘One of those docs you saw, his recommendation, right? “Continued psychiatric intervention”. And hey, for a while you’re doing all right at school.’
He’s no longer looking at the paper. He already knows all this.
‘Things are looking up for you at last. So what happened kid, how’d you end up here, a dead beat who don’t know when to keep his mouth shut and call people “sir”?’
He only pauses for a second.
‘I’ll tell you what happened kid. Your mom decided to move yet again. And you know what? They were considering taking you from your mom to ensure you got the care you needed.’
He lets this new information sink in.
‘Your mom kid; she’s the one who messed you up.’
*
Chapter 11
Mom’s the type who dreams she’d go to hell if she wore a Maidenform bra.
Me, I thought all those women in those ads looked great. Wearing not much more than their Maidenform bra and a cheesy smile.
‘I dreamed I was arrested for indecent exposure’; that’s my favourite.
Mom, of course, sees it as a warning that all her fears are true.
Make yourself attractive and be eternally damned, that’s her motto.
Not that she’s in anyway religious, understand? It’s a handy excuse so she ain’t gotta make the effort to look even halfway decent.
Truth is, if it hadn’t been for those ads (and the pictures flashed around school of Elizabeth Taylor in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof) I’d’ve had no idea what the female form looked like under all those sweaters and pink dresses until I’d started working for Marilyn.
She sure didn’t think she’d go to hell if anyone caught her walking around with nothing on but the sort of thing Mom ain’t even calling clothes.
I’ve already told you there were two Marilyns, right? The one who went down the stores and the Hollywood star, MM.
Well, she might’ve told the whole world she ain’t wearing no bras, but I tell you, I know better! Trust me on this one; she had these special bras that looked like she ain’t wearing anything!
She even wore them when she went to bed, to stop her breasts sagging, she said.
As for Marilyn the shopper, she had the simplest, poorest looking bras you’ve ever seen. On her, of course, they had me dreaming I’d gone to heaven.
And you know those mesh-stockings you only see broads wearing in the movies? She wore those about the house too.
Oh, and here’s another thing I can let you into. Those claims by the studio that she was 37-23-36? Nope; more like 35-22-35, believe me. Bra size 36D, pant size 8. Dress size 12, shoe size 7AA.
Mom hasn’t really what you’d call a body as such. It’s more strips of beef jerky, given human form by the shabby dresses and cardigans holding it all together.
Perhaps she used to look okay before I was around, but I can’t see it.
‘All the appeal of a whipped dog,’ that’s all I can remember Pop ever saying about her. He should know; he did all the whipping.
Even I’d be hard put to say how old Mom is. Anyone would give her at least an extra twenty years if they could be bothered to make a guess.
Makeup doesn’t help, not on a face as creased as frayed kitchen curtains. Whether it’s blue or green eye shadow she uses, it somehow all just highlights the unnatural tones of her wasted skin.
The TV’s on, natch, as I enter the room.
Top Cat – she’s actually watching Top Cat.
Officer Dribble’s telling him off. Wonder if he’ll get out his stick, tell Top Cat he’s a psycho who ain’t wanted round here anymore?
Apart from the TV, only thing on the table is a magazine. Mom’s left it open on an advert; ‘Armstrong Vinyl Floors. Let us help you decorate.’
Nearest we’ll ever get to having a floor like that is when Mom cleans it in someone’s house. Even the magazine is probably an old one. Most likely a Ladies’ Home Journal given to her by Mrs Denham.
There’s no food on the table. None by the cooker neither. Not even a can waiting to be opened.
The only surprising thing is that Mom’s not sitting in her chair.
Suddenly a door flies open, like someone’s gonna come out of Mom’s bedroom with guns blazing. Popping me before I even have time to see who’s gunning for me.
But it’s Mom, rushing into the room. Eyes as wide and glazed as a Cadillac on high beam in a rainstorm.
‘Jack! You’re all right!’
She howls like I’ve come back from the dead.
She hurtles towards me, throwing her arms round my shoulders. Clings on to me like she ain’t done since Pop used to kick her around the place.
This moment of unfamiliar, intense emotion is over in a couple of seconds.
She backs off, embarrassed, instantly reaching for the more reassuring comfort of a cigarette between her fingers. Between her lips.
She lights it up, shaking. She throws her head back as she draws deeply on it, like a man saved from a river gulps in air.
‘It’s good…good to have you back Jack!’ she stammers nervously.
I look around the room, any dumb-ass-jerk capable of realising something ain’t quite right here.
There’s smoke curling from Mom’s bedroom like we should be calling the fire service or Northwestern National Insurance.
I can just see the ashtray on the edge of her crumpled bed, the butts sticking up like she’s been creating a miniature rockery. The ashtray near the cooker’s also full, wisps of smoke still rising from lipstick-smeared ends.
The window is unusually bare, a direct view of the maze of iron fire escapes outside. There’s usually a vase there, filled with whichever wilting flowers one of Mom’s employers has decided are past their best. Mom called it a perk of her job, getting these bent lilies and fading roses.
Today they’re not in the window. They’re in the waste bin beneath the sink, bedded in the broken crockery that used to be the vase.
My eyes slide from the bin to Mom’s petrified eyes.
‘It…it was an accident.’
Her hand shakes so badly ash from the cigarette flies into the air before spilling across the floor.
‘Like Pop used to have his “accidents” you mean?’
She looks at me with the Cadillac eyes.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Who was he?’
I find myself saying it the way Pop used to say it when he wanted to know everything about the men Mom had seen throughout the day. Like every man she came across thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
‘Short hair, dark suit? Did he have a tie-tack? An orange tie-tack?’
Hell, I’m sounding far more like my Pop than I want to!
Mom looks more scared than ever. As scared as she used to look when Pop was having a go at her.
‘T…t…tie-tack? I…I don’t know Jack; I d…d…don’t ko…know if he had a t…tie-tack!’
‘Short hair then! You must have noticed if he had short hair!’
‘Yes, yes! He…he had sh…sh..short hair! And yes, yes, a dark suit!’
I didn’t think it was possible, but she suddenly looked more petrified than ever. She stepped forward, grabbing me fiercely by the shoulders.
‘What’ve you done now Jack? He says you’re in trouble!’
‘Trouble? If I’m in trouble Mom, it’s only the trouble he can cause me!’
She shook me, like I’m the fool here.
‘He said he can help you! Only he can help you!’
The lying-son-of-a-
‘He’s lying Mom.’
She backs away slightly, lets me go.
‘He told me I’d to stop you going around saying stupid things!’
‘You’ve to stop
me?’
I almost laughed.
She’s been drawing on her cigarette so hard it’s already almost down to the filter.
She nervously looks around for the packet. Eyes unnaturally wide, like one of those small, strange animals you see in zoos.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ I say. ‘He won’t hurt you.’
She grasps me hard across my chest with her free hand, the fingers long and gnarled.
‘He could help you Jack! Like Lieutenant Joe Friday! He’d help you Jack!’
Even now she can only see her life in terms of the TV screen. Dragnet. She’d watch it every Sunday without fail. ‘The story you are about to see is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent.’
Somehow, I don’t think the innocent are the ones being protected anymore.
*
Chapter 12
It’s strange seeing the house without being allowed in anymore.
It’s like I need one of those weird gizmos you see advertised on the back of Astounding Tales or Sad Sack comics; those X-Ray Specs that help you see through walls, or something to help you throw your voice and distract people while you sneak in.
Yeah, sure, like those things actually work.
There was nothing more I liked than walking in through those gates. Working in the garden, putting out the trash, cleaning out the garage; I didn’t care what I was doing as long as I was doing it behind those walls.
Now and again Marilyn would come and talk to me. We had something going between us, having so many things in common.
Did you know she used to stutter when she was living in the orphanage? Some old jerk who should’ve found himself in the electric chair, he caused it all.
Course, everyone at the time thought he was the bees knees, Mr Wonderful. When Marilyn told on him, told what he’d done, she had her face slapped for the trouble.
‘It’s only a game,’ he’d said. So why’d he bolt the door, huh?
Eight, she was only eight. And it happened at one of her foster homes.
A family that took in boarders, including this old jerk who should’ve been gelded like you do with filthy pigs.
‘I don’t believe you. Don’t you dare say such things!’ Marilyn’s foster mom had said when Marilyn told her what had happened.
And that’s when she’d begun to stammer.
*
There were other homes, natch.
Homes with closets she was locked in. Homes with people who beat or threatened her or even held her head under water.
And you know what? Eventually, amongst all these scumbags, she finally found someone who treated her right.
A Limey couple who taught her how to juggle, how to play rummy. They even took her real mom out of hospital and let her come and stay with them.
But her mom had to go back. And so did Marilyn.
She was only twelve when she’d started developing those curves that’d make her famous. She married at fourteen, not knowing what a husband expected on a night; just so, she told me, she wouldn’t have to go to no more foster homes.
At fifteen, she was told she was illegitimate.
‘They say you forget the bad things in your life and only remember the good ones,’ she’d say to me. ‘Well, maybe for others, but not for me.’
Thing is, there’s plenty more people than me now saying her death was no accident or suicide.
Friends, people she was working with; there’s plenty of ’em now saying she seemed content with her life, even happy.
None of them’s coming out and saying, yeah, sure, this looks like an accident to me, or, yeah, she was suicidal right enough.
Ok, so the coroner, something something Curphey, he’s making out it was probably suicide. The usual horsesh– that ‘she was psychiatrically disturbed’. But hey, it’s also right there in the papers that he reckons she wasn’t ‘mentally unbalanced’.
Yeah, go figure.
So how’s he end up saying it’s gotta have been suicide? Cos he’s also saying she was too old a hand at handling drugs to have made a mistake. So, hey, it’s just gotta be suicide, ain’t it now eh?
The papers, they don’t believe all this buffalo crap anymore either.
There are big gaps, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner says, in the timetable that night Marilyn died. Her body was secretly taken from its place in the morgue, they reckon too.
You telling me none of this stinks?
Still, all these old jerks, they’re all coming out of the woodwork, looking to make a name for themselves, say how they figure she was crazy.
One old coot, he’s saying Marilyn’s bedroom had no pictures, a sure sign that she was depressed. That there was nothing there to say ‘I live here’.
You kidding me?
She was decorating for christsake!
Art, she loved art! Picasso, she loved him! And some Spanish guys too. Goya I think it was. Some guy called Geko, too, I think.
Some of the stuff she’d ordered from Mexico arrived the day she died! I helped put it all in the garage!
It’s probably all still sitting there right now, going nowhere and doing nothing but getting covered in dust.
How can you get it into the wooden heads of these old jerks that Marilyn was finally making a proper home for herself after being kicked around all her life? I can see that, so why can’t they?
There’s over four hundred books in there, you know that? Proper books too, like I ain’t never heard of.
I’d look at ’em, wondering why there weren’t any pictures in there. Names on the cover that weren’t even proper names. Tolstoy, Camus – what sort of names are they, eh? Italian? Mexican. Beats me.
But Marilyn said I could borrow them, that I should read them. Philosophy. Religion. All the stuff we should read to improve ourselves, she’d said.
You know, when I hear Marilyn singing When I fall in Love, I know it ain’t prefect. Know for sure some Mr Smart-Ass-Music-Teacher would say it ain’t pitch perfect.
But she sings it like she really means it, know what I mean?
It almost makes me cry, it really does.
I walk closer to the closed gates, try the large handle to open them.
The lever just dully rattles, hardly moving.
Like me – I hardly move for the rest of the day.
*
By the time I begin to make my way home, it’s getting dark.
It all seems reasonably quiet tonight.
Course, you can hear cars, but they’re mainly passing along roads a distance away. There are the sounds of people too, some of them quite noisy, possibly even drunk. But it ain’t there all the time.
Listen close and you can even hear a few insects going about their business. Buzzing around in the air, crunching trees and wood fences, or whatever else it is they do.
One buzzes past ridiculously close to my ear. At a speed I didn’t know was possible for an insect too.
A moment later, part of a wood fence by me crunches so violently it throws up splinters.
I’m being shot at!
I duck, throw myself into a roll, like I’ve seen in the movies.
I’m heading for a bush, the only cover close by that I can see. I scuttle across the ground the rest of the way as quickly as I can.
I keep close to the ground, looking around urgently, knowing that a bush is gonna help hide me but it sure ain’t gonna stop a bullet.
And, if I’ve got it wrong about where those bullets are coming from, I probably ain’t even hidden.
The leaves and branches of the bush sharply rustle, snap and break.
The ground beyond me erupts, a rough, narrow furrow of mud magically forming in the grass with a dull splat.
I stop looking around and simply tr
y and bury my face in the stinking soil.
I’m gonna die, I just know it.
*
Chapter 13
There’s a roar of an engine, a sedan coming fast up the road.
On the other side of my bush, there’s a squeal of tyres, the clunk of a door flying open.
I feverishly scramble to my feet, staying in a crouch so I’m still hidden by the bush. I’m getting ready to run for it as soon as I figure which is the best way to go.
‘Jump in kid!’ a harsh voice fiercely bellows. ‘Quick!’
I glance over to the car. It’s Agent Orange, leaning across from the driver’s seat to hold the passenger door open.
I glance everywhere about me, unsure what I should do.
‘Quick!’ Agent Orange repeats, louder than ever.
What choice have I got? I rush over towards the open door.
‘Keep low you fool!’
I dive into the car, Agent Orange already pulling it sharply away from the kerb as I drag my legs in after me.
The door swings backwards and forwards. It finally slams shut as Agent Orange throws the sedan into a screeching turn, heading off down a side road.
‘Stay down kid!’
He presses down hard on my head with his hand, just in case I’m stupid enough to try and sit up.
‘Chances are they’ll have back up waiting in a – yep, here they are! Thunderbird, out-of-state plates.’
The sedan accelerates, throwing me farther back into the leather. I slide uncontrollably across the long seat, Agent Orange fiercely swinging the sedan around another corner.
‘You’ve sure managed to make yourself some wealthy enemies kid. That sniper was a pro. And this car chasing us is top of the range!’
He spins the wheel sharply.
Suddenly we’re bouncing wildly, like he’s taken us down a back alley. Sure enough, looking up through the windshield I see the tops of stained white walls, overhanging trees.
There are a number of incredibly noisy clangs, accompanied by a violent juddering of the car, like we’re striking trash bins and whatever other sh– has been thrown out into the alley.
Agent Orange sniggers gleefully as he glances in the mirror.
‘Boy, this sure ain’t doing the T-Bird’s low suspension any favours, I can tell you.’
I try and rise up from the seat so I can see the pursuing T-Bird. He presses down harder on my head, forcing be back down.
‘What did I tell you kid? Stay low! They ain’t gonna risk shooting me, but get a bead on you and they might just take your head clean off!’
I slide away from him as he flings the sedan into a screaming corner. The sedan bounces, clipping the kerb, hits the road again.