3

Run-off from a storm the night before swept newspapers, lawn clippings, dog droppings and shredded cardboard into the storm drain at Pico Boulevard and from there out to the fish in Santa Monica Bay. Toward the pier, black smoke piped from a swarm of bulldozers pushing sand into a line of defence against the next tantrum from El Niño. I waded through fifty yards of beach sand and sat at the sea’s faltering edge, where the waves beat themselves into a line of beige foam. For the first time in five years, no one watched me. When I worked up the courage I stripped to my underwear and sprinted into the Pacific. I’d been dreaming of that moment for five years. I dived through the first wave and swam furiously until my body temperature rose to fight the December chill. Past the wave break I trod water in a slow half-circle. The coast curled from Point Dume to Palos Verdes like the tail of a beast backed into a great blue wilderness. I felt almost peaceful.

At my arrest I’d worn eight silver earrings and a dagger nose-stud. All but three of those piercings had fused to scar tissue during my time in the Institute. The jewellery stripped from me at my booking lay sealed in a zip-lock baggie with keys to a car I no longer owned and an apartment I no longer rented. Not much of what I once was still fit what I’d become. I jabbed two rings into the lobe of my right ear and the dagger stud into the left and stored the rest in the side pocket of a leather jacket I’d just bought, along with white jeans, a stretch velvet v-neck and black Converse All Stars, at a retro-fashion shop near the beach. The jacket looked like the last person to wear it had been hit by a truck. I sympathized. I tossed my jail rags into the first trash-can I came to. I felt more free than I had in a long time.

At a row of vending machines I bought a fresh newspaper and walked into the Firehouse Café to wait for my prospective husband to show. I propped the newspaper against a sugar shaker on a table by the window and scanned the headlines. Political scandals, wars and fires raged around the world. In five years nothing much had changed. When a waitress stopped by to fill my coffee cup I ordered bacon and eggs sunny side up with hash browns and a side of ham, another side of pancakes and a glass of orange juice.

The guy at the next table asked, ‘You know what my mother always said to me about food?’ He sat splay-legged, black jeans tucked over Beatle boots, one long leg curled under the table and the other sticking into the aisle like an accident waiting to happen. A wise guy. While he looked at me he spun an empty coffee cup with one hand, caught it, and spun it again, grinning like he thought he was really something. His smile was contagious. It had been so long since a man smiled at me I’d forgotten how dangerous it could be.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Never eat anything bigger than your head.’

I could tell from his accent that he wasn’t from California. I asked, ‘You know what my mom always said to me about food?’

He wagged his head. I let out a belch. It took him a moment to get the joke but then he thought it was pretty funny. He had a peculiar laugh, high pitched and percussive, like a dog with a stepped-on tail. I couldn’t help but want to laugh along with him, even if I didn’t.

‘No, that’s not true. My mom is a lady. She always told me, “Mary Alice, mind your manners.” It’s not her fault I turned out how I did.’

He snapped the wobbling coffee cup from the table and the pinpoint focus of his eyes diffused as though he was suddenly unsure he wanted to be talking to me. I looked like the woman he was supposed to meet but the name threw him. ‘Is that your name? Mary Alice?’

‘Was then. Now, just strangers call me that.’

I dug into the hash browns and eggs the waitress laid on the table. He went back to spinning the coffee cup and watching me. Soft brown hair tumbled down his forehead and over his ears. His hairstyle and square black plastic glasses seemed cut from the sixties, as did the silver pendant that hung down the front of his black T-shirt. Like a lot of people into retro, maybe he unconsciously wanted to look like his parents.

‘Those who know you, what name do they use?’

‘Nina. Nina Zero.’

He sprang to his feet and introduced himself as Gabriel Burns, my prospective husband. I wiped the bacon grease off my hand and when I extended it he flipped the wrist palm down to kiss my fingers at the knuckle. Nobody had ever done that to me before. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

‘This is just business, right?’

He slid into the chair across the table and though he did not speak, his mischievous grin communicated plenty. He brought the empty coffee cup to his lips and stared at me over the rim. The hands wrapping the cup were broad at the palm and the fingers long but small-knuckled. In form, they matched the width of his shoulders and the angular tapering of his torso to the limbs below. The sudden desire to feel those hands on my back reminded me how long it had been since I’d had a man.

I said, ‘I don’t want us to get started here with the wrong ideas.’

‘We don’t have to be so grim, do we? If we can’t giggle over something so silly as getting married in Las Vegas, what’s the point?’

‘Let me see your hand.’

He held it out for me palm up. His veins ran like blue ink beneath parchment coloured skin. I flipped his hand and kissed the back of it, like he’d kissed mine. He laughed at that. He liked to laugh at a lot of things. I asked, ‘You brought the money? That’s not a problem?’

‘Will you take a cheque?’

‘Sure I’ll take the check. Then I’ll pay and go and you can find somebody else to marry in Vegas.’

‘Joke, darling, joke. Where did you lose your sense of humour?’

I could see it pass across his face that he’d forgotten I’d just been released from prison and that was as good a place as any to lose a sense of humour or to have it stolen or beaten out of you.

‘Harry Bendel told me two thousand. Is that right?’

‘That’s right. Cash.’

He snatched a strip of bacon from my plate, asked with his eyes if he could eat it and when I nodded he said we had a deal.