| Dorothy |
[mar. 8e, 2007|04:02 pm] |
I think it was about 3 am the first time that Marie pulled her mottled, rust-infected car to a gravel-spraying halt outside the motel where I lived and worked. I was at the washing machine, buried in laundry, spending my Saturday night washing other people’s sins out of our dirty sheets. Two years ago, a woman had caught her husband entangled with two other men on a bed in Room 8. My uncle hadn’t wanted the brawl to disturb his other patrons and went to investigate, catching a bullet in his stomach. When I found him abandoned on the cold concrete at dawn, he’d bled all night. Rico Perez, a musician who had given up his career to work in hospitality, took over from my uncle. I became the cleaner and laundress in exchange for a room on the premises. I was 14 and alone.
On the icy night that brought Marie into my life, the clatter of high-heels on concrete had brought me out into the laundry doorway. Peering around the doorframe, I had my first glance of Marie. She wore Jackie-O sunglasses and a white fur coat. Red stilettos adorned with tiny, silver chains stretched her leggy frame, from patent-leather heel to perfect blonde hair. Scarlet lipstick bled across pouted lips, the colour replicated on inch-long, fake fingernails. She stood glowing under the flickering, fluorescent light outside of Room 8, trailing her hand absently along the red brick of our building.
I thought I’d seen an angel.
Marie moved into Room 8 and became my life from that moment. I’d arranged my chores around her schedule. She would sleep until 3 pm, leaving for the evening at dusk and returning just before the sun came up. I moved into the room next door, so that there was only a thin wall separating us. I would rather have died by a bullet to the stomach than miss a chance to see Marie. When she left at dusk, I would shut myself in her room and clean. Her room was left until last every night – my reward after cleaning vomit, blood and come from the sheets, tiles and walls. I would spend two hours in her room. The actual cleaning took me ten minutes at most, so I spent the rest of my time examining the belongings and determining the habits of such an exotic creature. I was always awake when she returned before dawn with her night’s conquest in tow. I would lie in bed, listening to them through the thin motel walls.
Empty liquor bottles crowded every surface of her room. Marie loved vodka. And cigarettes – one evening, I’d rescued a black packet that had been thrown in the bin. They were foreign, nothing I’d ever heard of, with two long, thin, gold-tipped cigarettes half-twisted inside it. I pocketed the cigarettes and smoked them in my room that night, imagining myself as one of her lovely companions. I was one of the feminine, beautiful boys or one of the elegant, voluptuous women I could hear in her bed as the sun rose. At least once a week, Marie would leave the magnificent shoes that I’d seen that first evening in their box. They were my favourite of her belongings, and when she left them at home I would take them out their box just to touch the gleaming red leather, the deadly spike heel. They were my size. Although I would often swap my denim jeans and cotton t-shirts for her with her fur and satin, posing for her mirror, I didn’t dare try out the magic of those shoes.
Months flew by in a daze of the usual toil, whilst I distinguished day from night through Marie’s habits. I studied her whenever I could, following her under the pretence of work, listening through the walls. I learnt that beneath the ever-present sunglasses, her eyes were poison green. Yet after about three months of a new lover each night, she surprised me by inviting the same person back to her room for more than a single night. He was scruffy looking, completely different from the pretty boys of past months. Gaunt and unshaven in ragged black jeans, he wore a black t-shirt with the words “Sex Pistols” on it. His black, greasy hair fell in a sheaf over unfeeling, ice-blue eyes. On the fifth day they returned at 2 am, earlier than Marie had arrived home ever before. They woke me with their loud lovemaking and post-coital laughter.
By the end of their first week together, I couldn’t help asking Rico if he knew anything about “the new tenant in Room 8.” Rico leaned in close to share his knowledge. Even after giving up music he kept up with the local news. He told me that the new tenant was Pete and he was the singer of a bend heralded as the second coming of the Sex Pistols, an old punk band, which explained those words on Pete’s shirt. Apparently, he had a reputation as a junkie, although Rico thought that this was just a rumour fuelled by his considerable string of bitter ex-lovers.
Although Rico and Marie adored him, I despised Pete. Marie had changed herself for him. My careful mental catalogue of her habits had been upset by his presence. She lost her elegant composure and became increasingly drunk when Pete was not around. Her furs were replaced with ragged clothing that was sometimes no different than my own bargain outfits. Her sunglasses never left her face and she chain-smoked now, no longer dragging elegantly from her foreign cigarettes, but hurried and puffing on cheap, local tobacco. She bleached her hair platinum blonde, which made it look dead, and tarnished the angelic visage that had captured me during those first weeks. Yet, around Pete, all of the glamour that had been ever-present before his interference came rushing back. She sparkled and shone so brightly for him, making sure he saw all of her glitter and magic. For me, she was a dulled version of herself, but I continued to watch her.
Six months into Marie’s stay at the motel and three months into her relationship with Pete, I found the magazine on the floor. I flicked through it and saw a picture of Marie in her red stilettos and torn fishnets, on the arm of a pale and sickly looking boy. Something about the photo wasn’t right. It took me more than 30 seconds to realise that the girl wasn’t her. The caption to the photo read “Sid and Nancy” – no last names. The resemblance was startling, but the most astonishing of all was the presence of the magical red stilettos. As I put the magazine down, a small square of aluminium foil slipped out of the back pages, scattering a light powder everywhere. I picked up the folded foil and put it back between the final magazine pages. I vacuumed up the powder quickly, not wanting Marie to know that I’d been looking at her things and messing up her room.
Marie began spending entire nights at the motel. First one night a week, then two, then three in a row, until I heard Pete begging her to get dressed and go out on a Saturday night. Liquor bottles had become a rare sight but were replaced with clumps of burnt foil that piled up around the bed if I didn’t clean daily. I also kept finding the teaspoons scorched in the bathroom. Marie was a glamorous, bed-ridden starlet, coveting attention and cigarettes in bed. Some days I was ordered in there to deliver her breakfast whilst she lounged. My heart would nearly stop at the idea of being in her direct presence. I felt that I knew everything about her.
Late one night in June, I was yanked out of dreams of angels in red heels and sunglasses by a terrible sobbing.
“You stupid, fucking junkie,” Pete’s venomous hiss reached my straining ears. “I’m not coming back again.”
The sobbing grew louder and something smashed. I thought I had heard someone fall to the floor and crawl across it. In my mind, I could see Pete begging my beautiful Marie for forgiveness, promising that he would never hurt her again. In my mind, I saw her turn him down and tear away into the night in her car. But the sobbing continued, hoarse and pathetic.
“Please! Don’t leave me. I’ll do anything!” she wailed out after Pete, as I heard his footsteps on the concrete. I walked from my room to the laundry, arms full of clean clothes, and saw her – my angel – collapsed across the threshold of Room 8. Blood streamed from her hands and knees, crusting around pieces of glass still stuck in her flesh. She had crawled over broken glass for her lover. As Pete’s car started, the headlights caught her expression. Empty – like a man dead on cold concrete.
I returned to my room where I listened to her sobs, until five in the morning. They were loud and agonised, but muffled in her pillow. I left her room until evening as I used to, figuring that she would go out and find some new beautiful boy or girl. I did my rounds, leaving mints on pillows and turning down freshly-washed sheets. At nine that night, I finally let myself into Room 8. The room was dark and the light globe blew as soon as I flicked the switch. I crossed the room, glass crunching under foot to turn on the bathroom light. A sharp, but familiar coppery scent filled my nose and mouth. The odour made my head spin as I flicked on the light. Stark fluorescence flooded the room as I attempted to take in what it was exactly that I was seeing. As I blinked, I saw my uncle, lying out on the concrete, in a pool of blood less than 20 metres away. Again, I felt the panic and the trauma of knowing that I was completely alone. All of the memories that I’d submerged came flooding back as bile rose in my throat.
Marie lay beneath the sink, wide-eyed and stiffened, in a pool of blood so wide that the tips of my shoes were stained brown from a puddle that had almost reached the bathroom door. She was wearing white cotton panties that had been soaked dark, and still had the red stilettos strapped to her feet. The chain on the right shoe had come off, scraped against the tiles during her final convulsions. Some of the blood had streamed far, turning her hair brown in sticky clumps, but hadn’t sullied her magical shoes. Her white thighs were coated black and sticky, the tissue – the meat – had collected there as it gushed out of her in a visceral torrent onto the white tile.
I’d thought I known everything about Marie.
I’d never known that she was pregnant.
I swallowed the taste of vomit as I stepped over the body, avoiding the sticky mess that might have been life. I crouched at the feet and didn’t cry. For a few moments, I didn’t breathe. I leaned over and closed her eyes.
I reached down and slipped the stilettos off her feet and carried them into the other room. I sat on her bed and removed my blood-stained work shoes. I slipped my feet into the red stilettos, and stood, never taking my eyes from Marie’s body. A perfect fit. I stood, five inches taller, trying the magic out for myself.
Shutting the door to Room 8 behind me, I began to take my unsteady first steps. |
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