‘Oh shit, Benny, spare us, please. Tell me … what’s an Armenian? Where’s Armenia? You tell me.’
Obviously, Benny did not know. He stared at her as if he could vaporize her. His eyes got narrower and narrower and she stared right back at him. Sarkis did not want to work for either of them. They both stared at each other for a long time until finally, the woman shifted her ground. You could see her surrender in her shoulders before she spoke.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She put out her little white hand towards him and he stepped away from it.
‘Don’t give me shit about this,’ he said. ‘I’m saving you.’
The woman’s face screwed up. She wiped her eyes and made a big black horizontal streak that went from the corner of her eye into her permed curly hair.
‘I’m saving you,’ Benny said again. He put out his hand to her and she took it and held it, and began to stroke the back of it. Sarkis was embarrassed but they were oblivious to him. ‘I’m making it possible.’
‘Honey, it was a nice try, but we can’t stop the Tax Office. She’s back.’
‘I know she’s back,’ Benny said defensively. ‘I saw. Maybe she just came to get her things … you won’t know until you talk to her.’
‘Forget it, Ben.’
‘Try being positive, just for once.’
Cathy smiled and shook her head. ‘Honey, you’re sixteen.’
Sarkis did not want to interrupt. He waited until whatever process they were engaged in – Benny stroking her hand, she touching Benny’s cheek – was completed. But when they brought their attention back to Sarkis, he said: ‘I can sell.’
The Catchprices took their hands back from each other.
‘What can you sell, Sam?’
‘F&I,’ Sarkis told her. From the corner of his eye he saw Benny smile. ‘I’m an F&I man,’ he said.
She frowned and scratched her hair. The hair was good and thick but dry and brittle from home perming. She took a Lifesaver packet from the pocket of her gingham dress, and bit off the top one.
‘Please,’ Benny said. ‘I can use him.’
She squinted at Sarkis and frowned. ‘We can’t afford an F&I man.’
‘You can’t afford not to have one,’ said Sarkis, wanting to be definite but having no idea how to be really definite, rushing her towards the idea of an F&I man while, at the same time, he dragged his own heels, anxious lest he be forced to talk any more about the alien subject.
‘I’m very sorry, Sam, but my mother had no authority to hire you.’
‘Don’t worry about him. He’s mine.’
‘She made a verbal contract with me,’ said Sarkis, remembering his father’s argument with a builder when they first arrived in Northwood.
This made the woman stare at him very hard.
‘Did she get the chance to tell you about her gelignite?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t want to get involved with us, Sam.’
‘I need a job.’
‘How long you been living in Franklin?’
‘Six months.’
‘You better just forget it, Sam. You don’t want this work. Please go away.’
‘You’re the one who should go away,’ Benny said, very gently. ‘You’ve got a reason to go away. We’ve got a reason to stay here.’
The woman looked at Benny and clenched her smudged eyes shut and opened her mouth and suffered a small convulsion or a shiver as if she might be about to weep. Then she turned and walked away across the gravel, holding out her hand to steady herself among the cars as she passed them.
32
In the gauzy rain-streaked light of Tuesday morning, Mort Catchprice became aware that there was an angel standing beside his bed. It had its back to him. It had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and on the cool white canvas of its back were wings of ball-point blue and crimson which seemed to lie like luminous silk across the skin.
In his dream he had been a river. It had been a rare and wonderful dream, to be water, to watch the light reflecting off his skin and so he came from sleep to meet the angel feeling unusually tranquil, and in the minute or so it took before he was really properly awake, he studied the wings and saw how they followed the form of the body, incorporating the collar bone, for instance, into what was clearly a tattooist’s trompe l’œil, one which gave perfect attention to each individual feather, dissolving sensuously from crimson into blue, always quite clear, not at all ambiguous until the upper reaches of the marble-white buttocks where the feathers became very small and might be read as scales.
As he stirred and stretched, the angel turned towards him and was recognized. Then all the heavy weight of the past and present flooded back into his limbs.
He quickly saw that the tattooed wings were not the only thing his son had done to himself – he had also used a depilatory to remove any trace of body hair. His chest, his legs, his penis all had that shiny slippery look of a child just out of the bath.
It was the lack of hair that woke him properly. He understood its intention perfectly and as the blood engorged his own penis, he picked up the blue water jug beside his bed and threw it at the creature. The water spilled yet stayed suspended in mid-air like a great crystal tongue-lick – dripping diamonds suspended above the angel’s dazzling white head.
The angel stepped, slowly, to one side and the jug hit the soft plaster wall and its handle penetrated the plasterboard. It did not bounce or break, but stuck there, like a trophy.
Benny gave his father a rather bruised and blaming smile. ‘You’re so predictable,’ he said.
The crystal transformed itself into water and fell – splat – on to the floor. The alarm clock began to ring.
‘Please,’ Mort said. ‘Please don’t do this.’ But even as he did say, ‘please don’t’, the other cunning part of his brain was saying, please, yes, one more helping.
‘Well sure,’ Benny sat down in the rocking-chair beside the bed and began rubbing his hands along his long shiny thighs. ‘We’ve got some dirty habits.’
His father sat up in bed with the sheet gathered around his hairy midriff. ‘Not any more we don’t.’
‘You know I could have you put in jail,’ Benny said. ‘I wish I’d known that before. Did you see that on ‘Hinch at Seven’ last week? They take you to the Haversham clinic and they put you in a chair and they strap this thing around your dick and show you pictures of men doing it to little boys. You get a hard-on, you’re done. They call you a rock spider and chuck away the key.’
Mort threw the alarm clock. He was not play-acting. It was a heavy silver clock from Bangkok Duty-Free and it hit the boy on the chest so hard it made him rock back in the chair. The confidence left his eyes and was replaced by a baleful, burning look.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to do something if you hurt me.’
Mort was already sorry, sorry because he had been brutal, sorry because he was now even more vulnerable. He could see a large red half moon showing on the boy’s chest. Anybody could examine it and see what he had done. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry isn’t enough,’ Benny said, rubbing at the mark. ‘You’re always sorry.’
Mort knew he had to get out of there before something bad happened. He slipped out of bed with his back to Benny. He bent down by the muslin curtains looking for his underpants.
‘Christ,’ said Benny. ‘Look at the boner.’
Mort tripped and staggered with his toes caught in his underpants. ‘God help me, shut up.’
Benny was standing, grinning. ‘You can’t say shut up to me now. I’m an angel. You like it?’ He stood and turned and wiggled his butt a little.
‘You’ll never get them off,’ Mort said. He did not ask how much the tattoos cost. ‘Where did you get the money, are you thieving again?’