I.
Lola is on the front porch, saying goodbye to Jack Wright.
The door is ajar behind her, and she leans against the edge of the frame. Jack shifts from side to side, and his eyes shift constantly too. But Lola feels calm, eerily calm, as if a disaster is about to strike, a huge wave perhaps, and she is ready for it. Ready to be dragged under by its great noise.
‘Well, I guess we’re all done,’ Jack says to her, though he turns his head when he says it, out towards the street, the row of roofs, the potted palms by Mrs Jones’s front door.
‘Yes, Jack,’ Lola says. ‘That’s right. All done.’
It is almost evening and the street lights are coming on all the way down Anderson Terrace. Traffic can be heard building up on Mayfair Road. Birds call out faintly, and Lola notices that the sky is a dull heavy grey, almost green, as it sinks down towards the roofs. That greyness is spreading, she thinks, up and out and down. Everything is getting darker.
Inside, Daisy is watching cartoons. Lola has given her an extra packet of chippies, to keep her quiet. She can hear nothing at all from the living room though. Not the tinny cartoon music or the sing-song voices—or the crackling of the chippie packet, for that matter. She wonders, vaguely, if Daisy might have slipped out the back door and wandered off somewhere down the street, perhaps with her small, square schoolbag on her back. She wonders this, but it hardly becomes a conscious thought, it is more like a soft pulsing in the back of her head, and she doesn’t go and check, just stays there against the door frame, the hard of the wood between her shoulder blades.
Jack digs his hands deep into his pockets. He yawns, which is a sure sign that he’s nervous.
‘You and me,’ he says, ‘we could have made something of our lives together. Do you ever think that? That you and I could have made something?’
He says this to her chest, and Lola instinctively crosses her arms and breathes the smoke in the air, its slight sharpness moving through her nostrils and hitting the back of her throat.
‘I think we made plenty,’ she says, ‘if that’s what you mean.’
She’d intended for it to be funny—she meant, made plenty of love, made a big enough mess, that sort of thing. She thought he’d laugh, and then she could laugh too. They could laugh together and it would all feel okay. But Jack doesn’t laugh, or even smile. He squints at the sky and at a plane’s lights blinking across it. The sky is an inky blue now, flat and smooth as steel. She wonders if he heard her.
‘Well, of course,’ she says, ‘of course I thought that once, Jack. But not any more. Why would I think that now? There’s no point.’ She can feel her voice rising, just a little. ‘If there was a point, Jack, I would think it.’
He leans over and takes her fingers in his, inching his hand forward so that hers is soon totally swallowed. His palm presses against the tips. It is clammy, unnaturally so, Lola thinks, hardly warm at all. How odd, she thinks to herself, that they should end like this; him holding her hand so tight, sweating all over the place.
He says, ‘The point, Lola, is that we’re here, and we’re talking. That is the point.’
His head shakes a little as he says it, a small tremor, and it reminds Lola of a musical instrument—the way the words have a slight lilt as they come out of his mouth.
*
Jack Wright had come over that morning, after Daisy had gone to school, and hadn’t left all day.
That’s not how it was supposed to be, but Lola had given up on trying to control things like that long ago.
Lola and Jack had sat in the front room and talked about Jack’s wife—now ex—and his kids, who were older than Daisy, the youngest in his first year of high school. Lola talked a little about Daisy too, but there was not so much to say, her being just little, and new to school. Jack feigned interest, but Lola could see the blankness in his face when she talked about Daisy, a blankness which he tried to cover up, quite unsuccessfully. She was not his child, after all. Why should he even pretend to care?
Jack had aged a bit, but in an odd way; some of him almost seemed younger. He appeared thinner and taller, wiry, and a little more stooped. His fingers constantly moved to the edges of his eyes, right by the temples, to rub the skin. He didn’t seem to know he was doing this, which Lola thought was a bad sign.
He talked and talked—about all sorts of things, but mainly about his mother, who had just died; his mother, whom Lola hadn’t seen for ten years. Lola hadn’t seen Jack for a year or so either, as a matter of fact. He’d been out of town for a while; just dropped in every now and then to say hello quite out of the blue. But it was a different kind of hello this time. It was a bags packed, boxed up, plane waiting sort of hello. Jack’s mother was dead, and he was off: that was the sort of hello it was.
The funeral had been two days before. Lola hadn’t gone, but Jack told her all about it, whether she wanted to hear it or not. He stared off into space and told her how they’d put pointy shoes on her dead swollen feet, the sound the coffin made when they shut it. She’d looked as young as ever, he said. She’d had a boyfriend right up until the end—she’d always had boyfriends—and still dyed her hair blonde, though it was more like yellow. She had said to Jack on the phone, ‘I think I may die this week, Jack,’ casually, as if announcing the arrival of the mail. He had misunderstood; he thought she meant her hair, the roots.
Jack and Lola had eaten lunch at the table: spaghetti on toast, Jack’s favourite. He pulled her towards him as she was walking past his chair; pulled quite firmly so that she stumbled a little, falling onto his knee.
‘How long’s it been, Lol?’ he whispered into her neck. ‘How long?’
‘Jack, don’t,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t. Not now that you’re going for good. Jack. Please.’
He burrowed his face deeper into the skin, but she could still hear his words, as if they were moving into the flesh, right into her, weaving up the inside of her throat, spiralling up the tunnels towards her ears.
‘I always remember you, when I’m gone,’ he said. ‘Always, Lol, after we’ve been here. The scent of you.’ His tongue flickered across her collarbone. ‘The scent of you.’
He moved his hands squarely up under her dress, pressing the palms against her skin, his fingers searching around up there. She felt her head fall down towards his face, as if it wasn’t hers any more, her own self slipping away. Her mouth was on his skin, and on his mouth, and inside it, her teeth grating a little against his gums and lips. She could taste the remnants of spaghetti in his mouth—that, and the taste of his skin, which was smoky, like a weak fire was trying to burn somewhere deep inside him, unable to really take light.
He was working at her dress with his hands, struggling with it, and the top was half off before it came back to her—a memory, or the reality of things—and she was able to take a hold again. Jack had her bottom lip between his teeth. He was eating her alive.
‘Jack,’ she said, the word sounding slurred and poorly formed, hardly audible against his mouth. ‘Jack, don’t. Jack. Stop now.’
She pushed at his chin with her hand, and arched her head away, her neck on a strange slant, her face angled towards the window. She opened her eyes wide then. Out the window she could see the lemon tree in the back yard, its body heavy with fat yellow fruit. She just looked at it for a while, feeling the heaving of Jack’s breathing all around her, but not listening to it, not paying attention. Jack’s hands still moved against her skin, but slower now, one shoved awkwardly up under her dress—a stray finger hooked inside the elastic trim of her knickers—the other close to her neck, kneading at her, as if she were dough. Through the streakiness of the window the tree did not look as bright as it did from outside, but it seemed impossibly round, all those leaves and lemons forming one solid ball.
‘The trouble,’ Lola said, quite calmly, staring out the window, fixated on that tree, ‘is that you only want me when you’re not with me, Jack. That’s the trouble.’
His hands went slack as she said it, the fingers seeming to recoil away from her skin. Lola felt as if she might cry, as if she could lose herself again, but in a different way. No. Not today. She’d done enough crying about Jack Wright to sink a ship—about him, and at him. She’d done enough of that.
She lifted herself up off his knee—up and away—and only half heard the exasperated sigh that came out of his mouth; only half heard it, she realised later, because he lifted his hands to his face as it slipped out. He knew she was right. What she’d said, he knew, was true.
He cleared the table, and they did the dishes, he humming softly to himself, pretending not to be cross. Afterwards they sat on the two-seater couch, side by side, not saying anything. Jack held Lola’s hand and tried to put his arm round her shoulders, casually, but nervously, as if they were on their first date. His armpit smelt like someone familiar, she thought—the slight tang of sweat, the far-off smell of cheap deodorant hanging in the air—but it could have been the smell of anybody, really. She let herself be held by him, but she didn’t respond; applied no pressure to his hand when he held hers, tilted her head slightly away when his arm curled round her neck.
They had not talked about it, his leaving, even though that was why he came around. They didn’t talk about it all day, and they were only talking about it now because he was—leaving—and there were no two ways about that.
*
Lola sees that the sky is turning quite dark. There is still a yellowy sick kind of green above the horizon, but it is disappearing fast. The street lights are growing stronger, or that’s how it seems. It is really just that the sky is giving up, she thinks; it is submitting to their electric glow.
Over the road Mrs Jones draws up in her car. Her terrier is sitting beside her in the passenger seat. Mrs Jones opens and shuts the doors, and talks to the dog as if it can understand every word. She can see Lola and Jack on the porch, but she doesn’t wave. Her voice fades as she trots up the path, and then the sound disappears completely, punctuated by the slamming of the front door. Lights snap on inside.
They watch her draw the curtains.
‘I would have liked to have gone to the Grand Canyon,’ Jack says to Lola. ‘Wouldn’t you have liked to have gone there? I think of all the places to go that would be the one. Imagine, all that air, right down to the bottom where there used to be water.’
‘You could still go there,’ Lola says, quite sharply. ‘Nothing’s stopping you.’
‘I could,’ Jack says to her, and laughs, as if the thought has never occurred to him. ‘Yeah, Lola, you’re quite right.’
What a fool he is, she thinks to herself. A damn fool.
Overhead, a jet roars, making the whole porch shake. Jack watches it, waiting for it to pass, and then he claps his hands twice, in a brisk, energetic way. He is suddenly bright, as if he has just remembered how great he is in this world.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘I guess this is me, then.’
He starts down the steps, and Lola moves along behind him, right down to the footpath and the road, right to his car.
Jack fumbles in his pockets for the keys, and pulls them out and unlocks the door; opens it. He stands before her, smiling a ridiculous jolly smile. He leans to kiss her cheek, and aims so far from her mouth that he hits her ear and the hair tucked behind it. He doesn’t pause there, not even for a second.
He hops into the car, closes the door, winds down the window. It squeaks, moving down in small jolts.
Lola has a sudden urge to burst his bubble. She hadn’t intended to be nice, telling him he could still go to the Canyon on his own, but it seems to have given him a strange glow, as if he is already there, in the heat. She thinks of him booking a ticket and flying all that way, and driving in some snazzy car, a Cadillac probably, her Jack Wright, the wind blowing in his hair. She can see the cacti all around and the red parched earth, and the road, straight as far as you can see; him driving along it, fast, right to that hole in the ground.
She leans towards the window.
‘You know what you said? About, do I ever think? I used to still think we’d eventually get married, until not so long ago. I kept on thinking that and believing it. That one day we would—’ and then she pauses, moves her foot along the edge of the gutter. ‘I thought that for a long time, Jack,’ she says, ‘but not any more.’
He turns the key in the ignition, and the headlights on, and the lights on the dashboard seem to spring towards his face, highlighting the creases round his mouth and eyes.
He smiles at her, though it almost seems a grimace, showing his gums which look a dark spongy pink, and the edges of the teeth below them, slightly stained.
‘Lola Lollipop,’ he says, smiling all the time. ‘My little Lola Lollipop.’ And then he accelerates, swerving out onto the road and away.
Lola pads up the steps and onto the porch and inside. Daisy is still there, sitting in the living room in the dark, the television flickering blue, making the whole room seem alive. Daisy’s hands are in her lap and the whites of her eyes are lit up. She looks so small on that big puffy couch.
‘It’s dark,’ Lola says to her. ‘Why didn’t you turn the light on?’ And she flicks the switch so that the room is suddenly white, not flickering, not blue. How light swallows up darkness, Lola thinks, and the thought seems achingly meaningful, just for that moment, as if she’s never thought anything like it before.
‘Has Uncle Jack gone?’ Daisy says.
‘He isn’t your uncle,’ says Lola, ‘but call him what you want. And yes, he has.’
She cooks dinner, and runs Daisy’s bath, and makes her bed while she’s splashing around in there. She empties out her schoolbag, finds her lunchbox and bins the remainders. The television is still going in the living room. She can hear the voices blaring down the hallway.
As she’s drawing Daisy’s curtains she looks out the window and sees Mrs Jones and the terrier in the front yard. Mrs Jones’s outside light is on, so it looks as if the two of them are on a stage, the square of grass unnaturally green, the potted palms casting long shadows, the dog crouching, ears back, concentrating hard, looking slightly dismayed. Mrs Jones is congratulating it—though Lola can’t hear the words, her tone is light and joyful, like bells—and fluttering her hands together. The dog is finished. It turns around and bounds inside. Mrs Jones pauses a moment in the cool autumn air.
*
At 9.15 the phone rings. It is Mike McDougall, Lola’s boyfriend.
‘Baby, baby, baby,’ he says to her, and starts singing—the song about Lola, the one he always sings when he rings her up, as if she hasn’t heard it a million times before. Does he know what it is about? Lola thinks. Does he realise the comparison isn’t flattering?
She tries to make appreciative noises nevertheless, but she swings her slippered foot and examines the blunt, dark hairs sprouting on her legs.
Mike travels a lot, selling water filters to companies all over the country. He is calling from a motel. He is already in bed.
‘Tell me about your day,’ he says, once he’s finished with his crooning. He yawns; she can hear him shifting in the sheets.
‘My day?’ Lola says naturally. ‘You know. Daisy to school, Daisy home, Daisy to bed.’
‘Yeah, Daisy,’ Mike says. ‘I called earlier. She said you were down on the road, saying goodbye to Uncle Jack.’ He pauses, just for a second. ‘Who’s Uncle Jack?’ he says. There isn’t even a hint of suspicion in his voice.
Lola doesn’t skip a beat.
‘Oh you know,’ she says. ‘Jack Bauman? Have you met him? Jack Bauman, friend of Joyce’s. Just dropped by. I’m not sure what for.’ She can see a beetle moving across the floor. It may be a cockroach. She flicks her leg out to step on it, and then decides not to; sits back down.
‘Jack Bauman? Doesn’t ring a bell,’ Mike says. He sounds weary. Lola hears him shift again in the sheets. ‘Uncle Jack,’ he says. ‘I like that. Maybe Daisy should call me that—Uncle Mike, I mean. Uncle Mike. Good ring to it, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe she should,’ Lola says. She feels a rushing in her blood, as if it’s devouring itself, a cool swift crackling. She leans her cheek against the vinyl of the chair. ‘I wish I was right there with you,’ she says suddenly to Mike McDougall, lying in his motel bed somewhere in another town. She can picture his strong, leathery-skinned chest, the way his body narrows as it moves down towards the hips. She feels that she can almost see the view from his window, a red neon light flashing on and off, on and off. ‘I wish I was right there,’ she says to him again, in a voice she never uses. ‘I wish I could crawl in beside you and lie with my head on your chest. Wouldn’t that be nice? If we were lying there together?’
Mike sighs, or yawns, Lola can’t tell which. He sounds pleased, though, as if the conversation is winding down, in just the right way.
‘Yeah, doll,’ he says to her. ‘That’d be great. We could settle down and have a hell of a good sleep. Did I tell you I drove thirteen hours today?’
Lola is in the kitchen, cleaning up the dishes, when something makes her stop short. It is nearly ten o’clock and she thinks she’s heard a strange noise, something from outside: that is how abruptly she stops to cock her head. She listens for a moment, but there is nothing. She’s pretty sure of that. If she could see out the kitchen window she would be totally sure, but all she can see is herself, under the yellow kitchen light, strands of fly-away hair illuminated, standing up all over her head like a fuzzy halo. She looks tired and bag-eyed and saggy, and she just looks right into that reflection, not at the cupboards, or the calendar, or the cookbooks that are behind her, all reflected back too, but at her face, right into it.
The sound, she suddenly realises, is coming from inside her, seemingly far away, but inside her, definitely. Maybe the wave has hit, she thinks.
But it’s not Jack. She doesn’t think so anyway. She pictures him baring his teeth at her like a dog, just before he drove away; the way he said, Lola Lollipop. Lola Lollipop, as if she was eighteen again.
No, it wasn’t Jack Wright and his leaving. He was a fool and she was glad.
She dips her hands back into the tepid water and swirls the dishcloth over a plate, slowly. The sound is still in there, a faint rushing, like a dam has broken and a river is moving through her body, up towards her head. She thinks of Mike McDougall, her man Mike, somewhere in a motel bed, snoring probably, his mouth wide open. Thinking of him makes her pause again. She lifts her head and looks at the yellow room on the window pane. It is as if the dark outside isn’t really there. It is only her in this world, in this yellow room. She smiles, just to check, and sure enough her self smiles back, reassuringly.
She thinks about what she said to Mike on the phone. The surge that moved through her body when she said it. It had almost felt like happiness, that feeling, but not quite. It was power, Lola realises. The power to erase a whole day, and to erase any suspicions as well. How many times has she lied about Jack and never noticed it, that feeling? It was the power of sweetness; the conviction of it. It was still moving through her body, that power, filling her up.
And the astounding thing, Lola thinks, is that when she said those words—the ones about wanting to be with him, right there in his bed, her head on his chest—just at the moment they were coming out her mouth she actually believed them to be true.
She looks dead into her own eyes.
‘Fool,’ she says out loud, and the reflection says it back to her. And she doesn’t just mean Jack Wright or Mike McDougall; she means herself too. Lola Jeffries. She feels suddenly sad for them, for all three of them.
She leans forward, bracing herself against the metal of the sink, up to her elbows in dishwater.
II.
Late one February afternoon, Jack called Lola at work—at the Riverside Tearooms—and said he was in town for the night and needed to see her. Urgently.
Lola said no.
This was seventeen years ago, at least. Long before Daisy. Long before Daisy’s weed of a father, Trent Monroe. Long before Mike McDougall and the monotonous drone of his voice.
___
She had looked down at her hands and listened to the sound of Jack’s breathing coming down the line. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘Lol, please.’ And then he had paused. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘please.’
She said no again. There was a long silence. Maybe she didn’t sound like she meant it, not really, because on the third please she said okay, and he didn’t seem surprised at all.
‘Give me your number at the motel,’ she said, looking out the window at people hurrying by on the pavement below. ‘So if I change my mind I can call.’
‘Nope,’ Jack said. ‘You won’t change your mind. It’ll be fine, Lola. Promise.’
She had walked home in the early evening sun, and lay on her unmade bed, looking up at the ceiling. All the windows were closed, shutting out the sound of the cars. Her clock ticked loudly beside her head. In the next room the phone rang three times, and then stopped. She should have a shower, she thought. Change her clothes. Put some foundation round her eyes, which she’d noticed recently had developed blue rings the colour of a dull, hazy sky. She was only twenty-three—too young, she thought, for signs of weariness like that.
Get ready, she said to herself out loud.
But she just lay there, looking up. Quite still.
Jack Wright had taken advantage of her innocence, if the truth be told. That’s not how she’d seen it at the time, but retrospect had put a fresh film on things. She’d met him when she was eighteen, he pushing thirty, and then left him two years later. She hadn’t seen him or heard from him since.
There had been an incident, of course. A long line of them, and then—what was the saying?—the straw that broke the camel’s back. Jack, picking her up from the bus stop one night after she had been away for a week visiting home. The dead look in his eyes. The way he told her, casually, just what he’d been doing while she was gone.
They were driving down the dusty road, the night sky glowing a strange yellow above the houses, and as they turned a corner Jack said, staring straight ahead the whole time, ‘I gotta tell you, Lola. I’ve gone bad.’
She had almost laughed out loud, imagining him as something in the fridge, something overdue for the bin. She kept her hand on his knee, resting lightly as it had been before, and looked out through the windscreen at the patch of road lurching into view, each illuminated square the same as the next, and said, ‘Really?’
She felt that if she lifted her hand, even her finger, off his leg, something irreversible would happen. A crumbling of sorts; a slow unravelling.
Jack kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel.
‘I’ve been drinking again,’ he said calmly. ‘And taking drugs. And sleeping with women.’
Lola moved her tongue round the inside of her teeth.
‘Have you, Jack?’ she said.
‘I have.’
They drove on, the lights from the dashboard lilting up towards their faces. Lola watched the clock flick from 8.11 to 8.12 to 8.13, and then she picked up her arm—that’s how it felt, as if she was picking it up like a kitten, or a small doll—and placed the other hand in her lap, one palm resting on top of the other.
‘Are you sorry?’ she said, achingly calm.
‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘and no. No use crying over spilt milk, I figure.’
He took another corner, and then another, and pulled up behind their flat.
Lola got out and shut the door and walked quickly across the tarmac, feeling the air brushing against her face. She could hear the boot opening and shutting; Jack getting out her bags, the satchel of preserves her aunt had palmed off on her, along with mouldy lemons and shelled peas. He moved up the stairs behind her, weighted down, and set her bags on the floor in the kitchen.
He looked at her wearily.
‘I didn’t mean it as anything,’ he had said. ‘You know that. Let’s just put it behind us, hey?’
*
Lola ate a piece of toast and walked twenty minutes across town to meet Jack at the motel down by the river.
She had showered for longer than usual, scrubbed at her scalp to try to remove the smell of Sheryl’s steaks that always hung around on her hair. She had done it up into a sort of a casual pile on the top of her head—her hair—and sprayed at it profusely. That would help with the smell too, she thought. Somehow, since she last saw Jack (was someone playing some kind of crazy trick on her?) crow’s feet had begun snaking their way towards her temples, and there was an incipient sag around her waist.
People were wandering home, carrying shopping bags on their arms, wearing light sweatshirts and skirts and shorts. They talked quietly to one another. Some walked alone, heads down. It would not be dark for a while yet.
Jack was waiting at the motel entrance, leaning casually against the fence.
‘You came,’ he said to her, perhaps trying to hide the victorious curl of his lip, but not succeeding in doing so. He was wearing pale jeans, worn jandals, one of which he’d discarded on the grass. He was tanned, more so than Lola had ever seen him. She had put a dress on, garishly coloured, its fabric almost transparent. She suddenly wished she hadn’t.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’ she said. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t?’
He started towards her with more purpose than she could ever turn from, reaching out his arms.
‘I hoped that you would,’ he said.
She had felt flooded with an almost appalling relief. It could have knocked her backwards, that flood. Yes—a happiness so close to despair.
Jack’s room smelt musty, even though all of the windows were open, letting in the river air. They drank sherry out of plastic cups, and Lola watched—remembered—the way Jack’s hands moved when he smiled at her, his fingertips always framing his face, pale moons under the nails.
He leaned over, touched his thumb to her mouth.
‘There you are,’ he said.
And before Lola could stop him—before she could even pretend to object—he was on the floor, starting at her toes, working his way upwards. He licked at her fingertips, and at the skin behind her knees.
He said, ‘All I’ve thought about for three years is getting you into bed.’
She shook her head, laughed; but she did believe him. She believed him—almost—completely.
‘And how do we get these off?’ he said to her, or rather to her underwear.
Afterwards Jack said to her, quite out of the blue, ‘Well, I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you.’
They were sitting on the bed, their backs pressed hard against the wall, getting their breathing back to normal.
‘You’ve always been too good for me, Lol,’ he said. ‘Everyone always said so. I know that.’ He didn’t look at her as he said this. The words were directed straight out in front of him, and their bodies weren’t touching at all, just sitting side by side, like the bodies of strangers on a bus.
‘What I wanted to tell you,’ Jack said, and he reached out his hand to her as he said it, though his eyes stayed fixed, looking hard at the cupboards on the opposite wall, ‘is that I got a girl knocked up, and I’ll have to marry her, I guess.’
Lola was looking at her thighs as he said this—the stickiness of them high up, the insides of them covered in a transparent slick. Her veins were pressed right up against the skin so that the colour of them—her thighs—was too pink, nearly purple.
Jack yawned.
‘I’d probably rather marry you,’ he said.
He squeezed her hand, and then let go.
Out of the window, the river looked lazy, a muddy brown, hardly moving at all. Was it the smell of the river that Lola could taste in her mouth, or was it Jack? She leaned across to her half-filled plastic cup and spat into it. The spit wormed around in there for a moment, all white and frothy, and then rose to the top. Lola licked at her lips. The taste was still there. It was Jack, for sure.
‘I’d probably rather marry you,’ Jack said again, monotonously, as if she hadn’t heard the first time.
Lola began to laugh, an awful breathless laugh, like a wheeze.
‘Should I take that as a compliment?’ she said, though the words sounded more like the far-off screech of a bird. ‘Jack? Should I be glad?’
‘I guess I just thought you should know,’ Jack Wright said to her, though his voice now sounded defeated. Lola saw out of the corner of her eye that he was searching for his jeans and, once he found them, through the pockets. Looking for his fags.
The best way out—or so it seemed at the time—was across the river.
Later, Lola wondered why she had thought this when, really, walking out through the gates of the motel and down the road would have been the simplest way home. Maybe she was half drunk, from the sherry.
It was beginning to get dark, and the sky, down low by the hills, was a dirty red. Lola had her dress back on, but somehow had forgotten her sandals. She was damned if she was going to go back for them.
It was simple—she would swim. Jack couldn’t swim to save himself, or so he said.
Lola could see the milky light shining out through the open window of his room. It was not dark enough to seem strong, yet. It looked weak, washed out. Jack, she imagined, would be in there drinking himself into a stupor. Though perhaps part of her thought—part of her hoped—he might just come out across the perfectly groomed lawn and stand there on the bank, helpless, watching her swim away. That would have been nice.
The water was not as warm as she expected, and it was filled with silt. Lola didn’t care. Not about the muddiness, the possibility of eels, or her dress which was billowing around her like a sail. She’d swum in the river before, though never all the way across. If she concentrated, she would make it to the other side in no time. It wasn’t hard.
Jack had taken her head in his hands, palms against the base of her neck, holding her like someone might hold a new baby. That’s what he’d done as he was lying her down. He’d held her head like that, looking at her as if she was something astonishing; something unexpected that he’d found on the bottom of a lake. Lola couldn’t get away from it, that moment. The heat of his hands seeping right into her skull. She shook her head—no—every time it came back to her.
The sky grew dark quickly. It happened faster than she expected. She was already halfway across, although she was slowing herself down by turning round to look for Jack every once in a while. She thought she saw him against the motel lights, coming across the lawn, his shadow stretching out in front of him, but when she looked harder she saw it was only a woman in a short skirt and oversized teeshirt. Jack’s light was still on, anyway, and when she turned to look again the curtains were drawn. He was still in there, for sure.
The red on the horizon had all but disappeared. It had been replaced by a deep blue, an indigo blue. Was that the word for it? It was almost impossible to tell where the hills ended and the sky began. Lola began to tread water, just to rest for a while. She would have to conserve energy to keep her strength up, even though she was a good swimmer. She had heard once about a man who went far out into the sea, so far that he couldn’t possibly make it all the way back, on purpose. She would not want anyone ever to think she had done that.
The sound of voices moved across the water towards her. Perhaps they were coming from the playground in the motel’s grounds. They did sound like children’s voices, high and song-like. She would not allow herself to turn around and look for them, though—to look for those voices. From now on she would not allow herself to look back at the motel at all.
Things with Jack Wright were over, Lola decided. She was done with him. She would swim to the other side, and then she would run home, barefoot but fine despite that. Despite all of it. She would run to dry herself out—and Jack Wright and the sediment of him all over her skin, inside and out, would fly right off her, right out of her.
‘I’m done with you,’ she said to the dark sway of grass on the bank, her legs beating beneath her, head turned away from the motel and its grounds, away from Jack and his curtained window.
‘Do you hear that?’ she called, though who she was saying it to she really didn’t know.
The memory—that small contraction in her chest—of Jack on the bed, looking down at her, tried to slide back into her head, but she shook it out. Jack was a nuisance in her life—that’s what he was—and she would brush him away, like soot.
Yes, Lola thought, and her body felt suddenly light, buoyant in the river. She was done with him, and everything would be just fine. She was sure of it. Jack Wright—he was nothing but history.