Sin City (72 page)

“It shouldn't be allowed, you know, leaving off your bra like that. I don't know how I've kept my hands to myself.”

I push my vest up, take his hand, place it where I want it. “You don't have to keep them to yourself.” I can sense him still uncertain, holding back. “What's wrong?”

“I … I still feel it's just not fair, Carole. I mean, I've put you in a like … difficult position. You can't
not
respond because you're scared to hurt me, and yet you may feel …”

“I feel good. All over. Especially my right breast. Now touch the other one.”

“Like that?”

“Mmm.” I am in a difficult position. I love him touching me, but I don't want to go too far. Oh, he says he understands, but I can't help worrying that he thinks I'm still revolted by his scars. It's so hard to balance everything – my fears, his lack of confidence, my feeling that we still need much more time, contradicted by my desire to reassure him. I lean across, run my hands across his chest, and lower. He's got a hard on. I start inching down his zip.

“No, Carole.”

I keep my hands exactly where they are. “Victor, I want you to believe me. I'm not put off at all, not now. It was just that first shock, and really more you shouting than anything I saw.” I'm lying. Yes, I know I said I wouldn't lie, but this is a good lie, a precious lie, the best one I've ever told. That scarred skin still upsets me, that lumpy roughened prick is still a shock, but they're part of Victor, part of his courage and unselfishness. And my lies are part of loving him.

He's got his eyes shut, as if he can't bear to see himself. I stroke him stiff again. “There was this machine I saw, Victor. It was in some loo – I can't remember where now, and it sold these contraceptives with special raised spirals which gave the woman extra thrills and stuff. They cost a bomb – five dollars each or something. You've got them naturally.”

He kisses me: a brief kiss, but the fiercest yet.

I touch my mouth – it's hurting – slide my body down a bit so my breasts can keep him hard. “Well, it's my special hero prick, you see, and I'm very proud of it.”

He's going limp again. God knows what I've said now. I have to be so careful.

“Don't use that word. Please don't.”

“What, ‘prick'?”

“No, ‘hero'.” He fumbles for his cup, drains his tea.

I push myself against him. I'm feeling quite excited. That kiss … All the sex he hasn't had, all the excitement and frustration dammed up for years and years, seemed to flood and crackle into it. Christ! If it's like that when we actually make love … Are we mad to wait? Wasting precious time? I remove his cup, try and get his hands all to myself.

“No, Carole darling, listen.” He leans back in his chair, as if he needs to put a bit of space between us. “Remember what you said just now about loving the wrong you? I've been scared of that myself.”

I tense. “You mean, you do love the other me, the Jan?”

“No, no. I'm talking about me this time – all this hero stuff. You used the word earlier when we were lying in the garden.”

“I didn't.”

“Yeah, you did. It's a seductive word, I guess. Except all of us are cowards in the end. Heroism always cracks at some point, Carole. I've seen it happen loads of times, even with the so-called bravest men.” He takes a biscuit, a chocolate-coated cream, uses it to gesture with. “There's another kind of heroism, the small and hidden kind that wins no medals – just the day-to-day business of getting on with life without bitterness or bitching; or putting up with poverty or sickness, or battling through the daily grind with a few kind words to spare for fellow sufferers. I guess that sounds really sentimental. It's hard to find the words for what I mean. But I've met more heroes digging dirt and shovelling sand, or lugging round the lunch trays in the hospital, or even commuting on the New York subway, than I ever did in 'Nam.” He puts the biscuit down again, sucks a smear of chocolate off his thumb.

“I don't want to drag up Vietnam again, but you've got to understand – I was shit-scared out there, Carole – really
not
a hero. There were dangers all around us: not just the shelling, but mortars, snipers, booby-traps, maybe ground-up glass in a cup of coffee, or a tiny smiling kid with a gun behind his back. You relaxed for a minute, you were dead. You couldn't even look forward to the next hour or day or week, let alone to going home. That was tempting fate, when each day might be your last, and when so many of your friends had died already.”

Victor traps his hands between his knees. I copy him. I'm itching for a fag still, and all this talk of danger makes it worse.

“Okay, we were all scared. If you haven't been in combat, it's hard to understand – the constant stress, the shakes, the cold-sweat nightmares when you're wrestling in your sleep with bloody stinking corpses. It was far worse for the grunts, of course. They were in the thick of it. I had this friend in the marines who was out there several years. His nerves were shot to pieces. Even two years after coming home, he'd dive down to the ground if he heard a car backfire. I know just how he felt. I was in this restaurant when they were preparing Steak Diane – you know, the one they flame on a little charcoal burner at your table. They lit the match – I shot out of my seat. It was '69 again. White phosphorous …”

“Victor, that's not cowardice.”

“What is it then?”

Imagination. Sensitivity. Honesty. All the things I love him for. I kiss him for reply. His own kiss is half-hearted now.

“I'm not sure you understand, honey. It makes you real damn mean, that kind of fear. You see your best friend maimed or shot to pieces, and you're thinking thank God it's his smashed leg, not mine, or his corpse cold and stiff.”

“But we all think that, not just in wars. It's natural.”

“It's not. It's sick, inhuman. You get so you can hardly feel a thing for thousands dead. You're just scared out of your wits for your one puny little life.” He shakes his head. “I don't care to be like that.”

“That's only because you're nicer than most people.”

“Yeah, I know – a hero.” He winces at the word, suddenly leans forward, takes my hand. “Carole, honey, you ask me can I love a thief, but can you love a murderer? I killed men, Carole, and not just men – women, children, too – innocent civilians. I can't forget that, ever. It's left scars, worse than these.” He gestures to his thighs and stomach, as if dismissing them. “Oh, I know it's not called murder in a war. They dress it up with other names: self-defence, patriotism, defeating the red menace. You shoot a little gook kid and they give you a medal for serving Uncle Sam. You burn down a whole village and …” He breaks off, shakes his head.

“We gunners were so out of touch. I mean, some of our guys never even saw the enemy. They just sat in their air-conditioned bunkers shooting at a map reference fifteen miles away. But this friend of mine in the marines was always needling me about having things too cushy – cold beer on demand and no dismembered corpses underfoot. So I joined him on a few patrols. I just had to see what was going on out there. I was really shaken, Carole, kept asking could I accompany him again, as if I couldn't quite believe it first time round – the heat and stench and rotting limbs, and whole villages destroyed. The rest of the guys thought I was crazy, but it was far too easy shelling all those targets without seeing the results, with no real blood on our hands or boots or consciences.”

He gets up, walks slowly to the window, stares out, frowning, as if at blood and carnage. “I'll never forget it, never. Those villages were poor, dirt poor – just little shacks, with ducks and chickens in the streets, and old bent peasant women haggling for a banana or a cup of rice, and kids who could still smile, though God knows why.” He turns back to me, voice angry, both hands clenched. “Often, we'd just smashed them to pieces – nothing left at all – no kids, no houses, not even any corpses, or none that you could recognise. Just fire and smoke and rubble. Those villages were their life, and we'd destroyed them.
I
'd destroyed them. That's hard to live with, Carole.”

I say nothing. War for me is just a word – or has been up to yesterday; something historical and abstract which always happened long ago or miles away, not exploding in the present in a tiny charring room. Victor feels so passionately about it, even now, when all those years have passed. Isn't that proof he's not a brute, the fact he cares so much, feels so guilty still? I try to point it out to him. He interrupts.

“That's too easy, Carole. We
were
brutes, some of us. I've seen guys slice off ears and fingers from VC corpses, even … private parts, collect them up as souvenirs.”

I shudder. There's nothing left of our blue and golden day. It's grey outside, clouds and darkness building up, winter-time again. “But
you
didn't do that, Victor. I simply don't believe it.”

“No-o.” He spins the word out. “But I could have done. Those guys were normal decent men when they joined up – boys, not men – your age, Carole, barely out of high school, confused and scared and maybe trying to prove themselves. The training brutalised them. I saw one guy fire twenty rounds into a tiny kid of only twelve or so, and the look on that man's face – my God! I can't forget it. It was like he was enjoying it. Many vets admitted they got a kind of thrill from having power – power to rough up peasant women just for the sheer hell of it, or set fire to their houses and burn everything inside, even animals and babies who'd been left behind. The war turned them into thugs, taught them not to feel.”

I grip my cup. That's not so different from the Silver Palm. Young girls starting innocent, learning to be hard, becoming ruthless, callous, enjoying any chance to humiliate or even hurt the clients, relishing their power. Okay, it's not a war, and outwardly everyone's good friends, but I've still seen the equivalent of Victor's tough GIs – bitter female veterans, unable to adapt to the normal world outside.

Victor moves towards his fish tanks, stands between them, one hand on the glass. “They made us still more brutish by trying to convince us we were fighting some lower form of life. I swallowed all that shit at first – that the VC weren't normal human beings with hearts and souls, just slant-eyed commie gooks who didn't value life or mourn their dead. All Orientals were meant to be the same, not just inscrutable – inhuman. Then I saw a village funeral, and the grief was quite incredible. I cried myself, just watching.”

“And you call yourself a brute, Victor?”

He's looking at his morays, not at me, as if he still can't meet my eyes. “I did become much harder, Carole. You had to. I felt I'd lost all touch with that idealistic boy of twenty-two who'd never used a gun except to shoot a rabbit or racoon. I guess that's why I've never been back home again – preferred to forget that kid, forget his high ideals.”

I reach my hand out. “Do you miss your home town, Victor?”

“Sure I do. It's where my roots are, where I still belong. And yet I'm kind of nervous still. If I did go back, people might well gossip, maybe criticise, or …”

“Criticise? What for?”

“Well, some would say for fighting in a pointless war, but more would disapprove of the way I see things now, call me unpatriotic. And then they might object to my having run off to New York, cut my ties.”

I spring up, kick my chair away. “God! They're all the same, Victor. They were like that back in Portishead – all petty tittle-tattle. Why had I gone to London when Bristol was good enough for them, and what a louse I was to leave my poor sick widowed mother on her own. And when I landed up in court – jeez! the uproar. Jan's parents wouldn't even have me in their house and …”

“Hush, darling, it's not like that back home – not at all. In fact, if I'm honest with myself, I guess most of it is simply in my head.

I'm just embarrassed about the way I look, and everybody knowing and …” He slumps down at the table. “I hate that pity stuff.”

I hate it for him. I can suddenly see Laura, a stuck-up bitch like Suzie, walking out on Victor in the hospital. She probably had a doting living father, so she didn't need him, didn't value him. I'll show her, show them all. I'll have him walk down the main street in … in … tennis shorts, and if anyone so much as turns their head, they'll have me to contend with. He
will
be a hero and so will I. I like the word, whatever Victor says. I pull him to his feet.

“Victor, let's go back – together – you and me.”

He laughs. “Come on, honey. Time to change. Shouldn't you try Norah again, tell her we'll be leaving soon, give Angelique some warning that you're bringing someone with you?”

“Okay, in a sec. But, listen, Victor, I'm serious. I want to see your home town. I'd even like to live there, settle down.”

He's staring at me, stunned.

“You don't belong here, Victor. It's not your home, not really. You're a foreigner, like your fish. Even half your plants were brought in from somewhere else. Everything's imported – lionfish, orchids, corals, flowers.” I trace the exotic lilies on the vase. They never grew in Vegas. And I'm even more a foreigner myself. I've been feeling really rootless recently. The fact I've lost my passport seems to have cut me off from England altogether. I'd never get a job there anyway, and I can't go back to Jan's now, and Beechgrove's closing down and …

Beechgrove. I think of Norah, alone with Angelique, nervous of her, shy, maybe scared to ask if she needs the toilet; stuck with George for a whole two weeks before that. It's time she had a let out.

“Victor?” I nudge his arm. “It's not a bad idea, you know. We all three need a home.”