Paradise Island Page 4

  His brother was causing him some concern lately. Some concern? That was the understatement of the fucking year. He caught Donny watching him in the mirror.

  ‘What?’ Donny said.

  ‘Nothing. Neat job.’

  Donny shrugged.

  ‘You know these people? ‘

  Jimmy shook his head.

  ‘Not personally. Joey made the connection. Husband and wife team. They have a good rep. Looking for new people because, so Joey tells me, their last crew went belly up when the wife put out for some other guy in the team.’

  Donny looked across at his brother, rubbed the stubble on his chin, sniggered.

  ‘She went belly down and the crew went belly up. Maybe we can make her putting out part of our deal?’ He showed his teeth. ‘Maybe she’ll volunteer for a sandwich like that girl in Santa Monica.’

  Jimmy didn’t want to be reminded. That was one of the things causing him some concern. Stuff his brother drew him into.

  ‘She wasn’t exactly a volunteer,’ he said quietly.

  Donny tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Glanced at his brother.

  ‘Maybe not at first,’ Donny said. He did a drum roll on the steering wheel.

  Jimmy guessed Donny knew he was freaking his brother out lately. Couple of incidents that Donny probably couldn’t explain himself.

  Donny had been having bad thoughts, for sure, as if the shitty things in his life welled up all at once. And when they did, he lost it.

  This chump had come into their neighbourhood bar. Greasy guy, nervous smile. One of the guys made him as the weeny wagger who’d been flashing kids in the local park. So they took him outside, four or five of the regulars, and showed him the error of his ways.

  Donny had brought his beer-glass out with him. He rammed it in the chump’s face. And again. Half a dozen times before Jimmy and the others could drag him off, Donny slavering and bellowing. He was gone, man. Somewhere else.

  The chump died – Donny had hit an artery in the neck. That was the real reason they’d left California. And now Donny caught his brother looking thoughtfully at him from time to time.

  Chapter Five

  Ruth was healing.

  That’s what the therapist had told her in her irritatingly calm voice. Ruth wasn’t so sure. Physically, sure, though she still felt raw. Surprising what damage a man drugged out of his head could do over a couple of hours with what lay to hand on a dressing table.

  Mentally, she was a mess.

  A range of emotions controlled her, none of them good. Anger, guilt, self-loathing, despair. When it came to hatred, she hated David more than her defiler. However irrational it was, however much of a feminist she was, she regarded this man as the person who was supposed to protect her.

  At one level she knew it was unfair. Fuck unfair.

  ‘That’s natural,’ her therapist said calmly and Ruth wanted to gouge her eyes out with a rusty nail. Fuck natural too.

  She and David had never really talked about that night six months before. David had tried to explain, to justify and she had forgiven him just to shut him up. Shut him out. He explained he was at first asleep, then held at knife point. What could he have done? Racked with sobs he told her that it had been unbearable for him, hearing her scream, imagining her pain. What could he have done?

  Nothing. But still she blamed him. She couldn’t help it. If he hadn’t been drunk…

  Well, what? Would it have made any difference? David wasn’t a fighter. She doubted he’d ever raised his fists in anger. His gentleness was what had drawn her to him in the first place.

  She was on extended sick leave from her work. She doubted she’d ever go back. The two men had never been caught, which she found deeply unsettling.

  That was one reason she and David had sold the house. The other was she couldn’t bear living there anymore. They didn’t know what to do so put their furniture in store. The big question was whether they could stay together.

  ‘How can I leave you like this?’ he said, which rather missed the point.

  She didn’t know what she wanted. She’d retreated so deeply into herself.

  His drinking was as much of a problem for her as anything else. He protested that he didn’t drink spirits and he didn’t drink before lunch but what did that matter? Once he was drunk, which was most of the time, he was impossible to communicate with. He could turn nasty. Over the years it had made him closed and withdrawn. Now, she had no idea what he was thinking.

  They hadn’t made love since the home invasion, of course. True, she’d been physically incapable but she also froze even if he just attempted to embrace her. Now she was more or less healed, she could contemplate sex again. Sometime soon, to be frank. But not with him. There was too much anger, too much hurt there.

  She wandered through Barbara’s island hideaway. It was oddly laid out. A long corridor from the front door had the outer wall on one side and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the other. The corridor opened out onto an open-plan living room and kitchen. The kitchen was to the left, separated by a breakfast bar from the large living room. Sliding doors the width of the back wall let out into the back garden. Across a creek were the trees and shrubs and beyond them the beach.

  Barbara and her then-husband had bought this place when she was in America playing a bit part in a Burt Reynolds’ movie. It was her Hollywood break except it was the one sure-fire Burt Reynolds’ movie that went into the toilet.

  But Barbara had fallen in love with the location. And, because of some complicated tax deal to do with being a Brit paid in the US, she bought this beautiful clapperboard cottage on a dirt road in the middle of a wood behind the beach for the price of a broom closet in London.

  Ruth and Barbara had been friends since their days at university and then in rep together. Even so, Ruth had been surprised when Barbara had invited them to stay here. Barbara might be close but she was ruthlessly selfish when it came to sharing what was hers – or taking what was somebody else’s.

  Barbara had suggested Ruth and David go there in August.

  ‘You’ll be there?’ Ruth said.

  Barbara laughed.

  ‘Are you kidding? In August? It’s hotter than hell out there. Nobody in their right minds would go then.’ She laughed again. ‘So you’ll fit right in.’

  She leaned across and squeezed Ruth’s arm.

  ‘Relax. It’s air conditioned. You’ll be fine…Well, as long as you stay indoors.’

  Karen and Chris were sitting side by side in a booth of a coffee bar on the first floor of the shopping mall when the brothers walked through the sliding doors at the main entrance. Chris was dressed quietly in jeans and a polo shirt, rubber soled leather shoes polished to a shine on his feet. Karen’s figure was pretty much hidden beneath a baggy trouser suit.

  The younger and bigger of the two men had some shoulders on him. It would take an axe to chop him down. He was a punk with a Mohawk and a safety pin hanging from his nose. He was scoping out the women. His brother was focused and calm, eyes flitting around, checking things out.

  Karen and Chris looked at each other.

  ‘Jesus,’ Chris muttered. ‘That Joey…’

  When they entered the coffee house, they came straight to the booth and without a word slid onto the bench opposite Chris and Karen. Karen slid the paperback they’d put on the table as a marker into her bag.

  ‘That’s a book as well, that Who’ll Stop The Rain?’ Jimmy said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  Karen had already made a judgement on Donny. Was expecting him to spend the meeting staring at her shelf, was expecting him now to make a comment on Tuesday Weld in the movie. But he surprised her.

  He leaned back, smiled gently and said:

  ‘That Nick Nolte, brother, is The Man.’

  ‘Joey recommended you highly,’ Chris said, getting right to it.

  ‘The both of you also,’ Jimmy said, affable. ‘Said you had some easy money lined up.’

  Chris gave
him a stern look.

  ‘It’s never easy but, yeah, I think it’s do-able. Let me lay it out for you and see if you’re interested.’

  ‘Joey said it was something to do with paintings?’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Joey said too much,’ Karen said sourly.

  Chris reached into a briefcase by his leg, put another paperback book on the table. Jimmy could see the envelope tucked inside.

  ‘What are you guys – the public library?’ Donny said.

  Chris ignored him and continued:

  ‘If not, here’s a little something for your trouble and we go our separate ways.’ He kept his eyes on the book. ‘I know I can trust you not to tell anyone else.’

  Jimmy and Donny nodded together.

  ‘You know it.’

  So Chris laid it out. Unsurprisingly, they were interested.

  Late afternoon Parker walked slowly along Main Street, past health food cafes, a Sczechuan restaurant, a yoga centre that also offered women’s self-defence classes, a grocer, several art and craft galleries and various bars. Wafts of incense now and then, blasts of music. Saturday Night Fever, blue-eyed soul, Bruce Springsteen.

  Most of the men Parker passed were in flares and tie-dyes, hair pony-tailed. The place reminded Parker of Santa Cruz, south of San Francisco, another burg where old hippies went to die. He’d seen to three of them himself.

  He passed half a dozen buskers, spaced-out hippies with stringy hair and battered acoustic guitars. All but one were playing Blowing In The Wind as if it were a decade earlier, the sixth playing God knows what. Probably his own composition, which never boded well.

  He passed a record shop, some Mexican disco shit blaring out onto the sidewalk.

  Parker was sweating under all the fake hair. He tried to keep his head down but most everyone he passed looked him in the face and wished him Good Day.

  At the far end of Main Street there was a parking lot and set back behind it on the beach the Catalyst Bar and Dance Hall.

  He headed for the bookshop he’d seen when he first arrived. He entered and looked around. It was his sort of place. Crowded shelves from floor to ceiling. He slipped down the central aisle and browsed for ten minutes or so. He was aware of a shaven-headed guy with a goatee beard sitting on a high stool behind the counter reading a magazine. The man was keeping a casual eye on Parker.

  Parker found a second-hand hardback of Gide’s The Immoralist. No wrapper but in good condition. He took it over to the counter. The man with the goatee beard put his magazine down. Rolling Stone. Some slobby Saturday Night Live comic was on the cover, presumably because he was in a new fart-joke film about frat boys that was doing well.

  ‘Nice shop,’ Parker said. ‘Yours?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Had it long? Looks nicely lived in.’

  ‘Took it on about a year ago.’ The man held out his hand. ‘Grady Cole.’

  Parker took it.

  ‘Frank,’ he said. ‘Always thought I’d like to run a bookshop except I’d go broke because I wouldn’t want to sell the books.’

  The bookseller smiled as he bagged the book.

  ‘A lot of ways to go broke in bookselling. Doesn’t take long to get over that particular inclination.’

  ‘I guess. You were in the business before you opened up here?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ Cole said. ‘And I didn’t open the shop. I took it on as a going concern.’

  ‘Previous owner had enough of the island?’

  Cole frowned a little.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You an islander?’ Parker said.

  ‘Do I sound it?’ Cole said.

  Parker shrugged.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I think I’ve only heard one person with a local accent to make the comparison. Everyone I’ve come across seems to have come from somewhere else.’

  Cole nodded.

  ‘That’s about the sum of it but there are still a few locals around.’ He sealed the top of the bag with sellotape, turning it into a parcel. ‘Just visiting?’

  ‘Island-hopping,’ Parker said, handing over his money. ‘Friend of mine in New Orleans told me about these islands an age ago. Always said he was going to retire here.’

  ‘Popular places, especially if you’re a golfer – or an artist.’

  ‘Keep hoping I’m going to bump into him. My friend.’

  ‘You never know,’ Cole said, handing back change.

  ‘We lost touch.’

  ‘That happens,’ Cole said.

  ‘Don’t suppose he ended up here. His name is Gary Barker.’

  After a moment, Cole shook his head.

  ‘Don’t know the name.’

  ‘Your sort of age. Your sort of build.’

  Cole continued shaking his head.

  ‘Don’t know the man. Sorry.’

  Parker kept his eyes on Grady Cole. Cole smiled back.

  ‘Would have moved here maximum two years ago but probably less?’

  Cole’s smile held but he shook his head.

  ‘Like I say.’

  He handed Parker the book.

  ‘Pleasure doing business with you, Frank. You have a good day now.’

  Parker looked at him for a moment longer then nodded.

  ‘That’s my intention,’ he said.

  Ruth was in Barbara’s bedroom looking around the room at the various prints and photographs on the walls. The prints were of well known paintings such as the David Hockney swimming pool painting A Bigger Splash and a Van Gogh pot of sunflowers. They were unframed but mounted on lightweight cork blocks. The photographs were of her friend on stage and in film.

  Ruth had met Barbara at university in Freshers week at a party for Dram Soc. They hit it off immediately. They discovered they had a lot in common. They’d both been head girl at their schools, though Barbara had been at trendy Holland Park Comprehensive in London so was one of four simultaneous head-boys and girls.

  They had fun together. They went on the razzle, drinking too much down at the Students Union, flirting outrageously. They went on double dates with boys, never got into any rivalries about ones they fancied. Barbara liked the bad boys, Ruth leaned towards the brainy. In the same way, their taste in music differed: Barbara favoured the Stones, Ruth the Beatles.

  They couldn’t but help hear each other having sex with boyfriends in their small, shared room. They compared notes sometimes, though Ruth felt more inhibited both in talking about sex and in letting herself go with a boy when she wasn’t alone with him.

  They applied a shorthand word for certain boys who paid what Barbara described as ‘undue attention to detail’ in the sack.

  ‘How was he?’ one would say.

  ‘Thorough,’ the other would say and they’d collapse into fits of giggles.

  They shared make-up and clothes and burned their bras together. A big step that as, they confided in each other, when they were younger they both thought themselves abnormal because each had one boob a different size to the other. It seemed appropriate to Ruth that Barbara’s boobs were, nevertheless, much bigger than hers.

  They never slept together except as friends and never fooled around. Ruth thought Barbara would have done and might even have suggested it obliquely one night when they were stoned. And there was another occasion but that was mixed up with something else that Ruth had since tried to put out of her mind.

  They experimented with drugs and got the giggles for weeks from one particular evening of hash-cakes. Barbara moved on to cocaine but Ruth was too chicken and soon stopped using anything. Good old, sensible Ruth.

  Only one thing jarred in those university days. In her second year, when they’d moved into a flat together – their own rooms! - Barbara got hooked on an intense left-wing guy called Robert. As was sometimes the case with such lefties, he was a rich kid, slumming as a way of getting back at his wealthy parents for some real or imagined slight. He accepted their gift of a sports car, however. Such a vehicle was almost unheard of
among students but he justified it by saying how old it was.

  ‘The word is vintage, Rob,’ Barbara teased him. ‘Not old.’

  Barbara went off with him on political rallies and demonstrations. At home, they would talk fervently into the night, or, more likely, Ruth and Barbara would listen as Robert expounded, sitting cross-legged and bare-footed, thin roll-up between his fingers, Rizlas and tobacco pouch on the floor in front of him.

  He was into RD Laing and Ivan Illich and Herbert Marcuse. Ruth was more Wordsworth, Keats and Jane Austen, with a bit of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis thrown in. She was kind to old people and children and animals but didn’t want the change the world.

  He spoke articulately but confused Ruth with his ideas. Barbara nodded a lot. Left to herself, Barbara spoke in slogans that Ruth wasn’t sure her friend understood: ‘madness is the family’ was a favourite from Laing.

  Robert had a temper and Ruth discovered that easy-going, laid-back Barbara did too. It shouldn’t have surprised Ruth. Barbara was passionate and in a couple of Dram Soc plays had thrown herself wholeheartedly into scenes of anger. But Ruth witnessed a couple of stand-up rows that ended with things being thrown and kicking, punching and biting.

  It shocked her. Barbara shrugged it off.

  ‘Taming of the Shrew, Ruthy, that’s all it is.’

  Then Robert dumped her. Turned out he’d been screwing around anyway. Ruth had assumed it – free love was part of his lexicon. Barbara seemed to have accepted it in theory but not in practice.

  Barbara locked herself in her room and played head-banging music loud for hours. When she came out, hair wild, there was wildness in her eyes too. She rushed out of the flat.

  When she came home, hours later, her hand was bandaged.

  ‘You okay?’ Ruth said.

  ‘Just a burn.’

  ‘What did you burn yourself on?’

  ‘Acid.’

  ‘LSD? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Not that kind of acid.’

  ‘What kind of acid, then?’