The opening chapter started life simply enough: a person leaves prison to travel to his one (of many) true loves, the wonderful Julianna and to live happily ever afer.
Before leaving, however, our protagonist, Laurie Gonne, is asked to do a favour for his cellmate and carry a letter to a mysterious hotel.
As you can see it didn’t stay that way. Neil and Julianna just got too big for their and my own good.
Dr Neil O’Neil’s voice was in my head. Stuck there like a fog stuck fast to a lighthouse. “It’s a shame to miss a day like this with the sunshine burning you dry when you could be drinking with your pals in good bar, so”, he’d tease through the screaming clamours of the prison landings.
His basso combined with his thin as shoeshine pretence of an Irish brogue irritated me. He always had it at the ready. He had several brogues that he muddled up and deployed sometimes in the same sentence.
“Everyone loves the Irish”, he said, referring to everyone in the United States, because not even the Irish love the Irish all the time. I learnt in prison and similarly from my family that it was considered that you had ‘notions above yourself’ to talk about that sort of thing. “Don’t go playing the martyr, you”, was the purest and most unanswerable admonition.
“Will you not just come for a small one, I have the thirst on me?” he would say.
“Would you have a few dollars to spare, I’m temporarily without funds for now, so”.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph but I’ve the poor mouth on me!”
“You’re a good man yourself, so you are”, he’d say.
He adopted the theatrical Irishman when he needed a little extra charm. Born in New York, he’d never visited what he liked to call The Emerald Isle, The Auld Country, Eire. Any Irishness in him had been diluted by the Atlantic during his ancestors’ boat journey and escape from either starvation or incarceration. The American Dream. Dr Neil’s well-rehearsed accent was enough to fool most people outside Ireland. Actual Irish people weren’t so gullible. Or they were confused by a single O’Neil sentence that travelled up from Cork via Kilkenny before veering off to Ennis, then back across to South Dublin, finishing in Derry.
As I say, Dr Neil O’Neil came from New York; born, bred, educated, deflowered and lost his mind there. We’d met in Manhattan where and when I was modelling for the Austin-Rodney-Reed Agency. Mostly doing magazine fashion shoots, cocaine and anybody who fancied a go on me. Neil and I had been inseparable for a few years after recognising each other’s opaque charms. We weren’t other people. Like teenagers we were certain of this. Teenagers with stacks of disposable cash and limited imaginations as to how to spend it.
I had snogged him in Shalford by St Eades church when we returned to the UK for my parents’ funeral. We’d been on a bench surrounded by gravestones. Had we not been swallowing each other, we could have looked across the river Icene, clement to the many people who had lost themselves in it over the centuries, the millennia.
Shortly after that snog, he had disappeared and I realised what a toadman he was. When Aunt Bernadette had met him, she had huffed at the sight of him. He’d tried his charm on her to absolutely no avail. At the Afters with the quiches, the white bread sandwiches, warm beer and cold red wine; after the bodies had gone into the soil under a hazel bush, I heard her telling him what he was.
“You’re an utterable conman of the worst kind. You’re an unnatural being. Suffice to say that Laurie deserves you. You deserve each other. Now fuck off”, she rarely swore back then.
So, as I walked across the massive concourse to look up at the departures board, his voice and the memories it dragged along were with me.
That “so” just dribbled off the end of his sentences for the sake of his authentic Oirish masquerade, so. The thing is: I was never bored around Dr O’Neil. You’d never hear him moan. He could be laying in the middle of the road outside the Black Cut Lounge & Bar in Flushing, New York with blood running down his cheeks and he’d still be trying to order a cab to the next place. He just never complained. He left that to everybody else.
“Life’s too short, so it is”, he told me once in a pub called the Beehive one late evening after a very bad day at the races – we’d got into a fight and had ran away. We’d chosen the other side of Porthampton in the drabbest of all suburbs to get drunk in. Actually, we’d followed someone sexy who had disappeared, but there we were and it was there that he uttered that drabbest of cliches.
Oh, Julianna my love
Enough history, what about me? My name is Laurie Gonne and I like to float above it all like an angel, a toy balloon, a thrush with a snail in its beak. I was beautiful once, physically. Now I am statuesque, striking, even handsome. When this part of my story began I was a convicted criminal. Convicted, you could argue, for a crime I didn’t really commit. When some professional people did in fact argue this, it resulted in a lengthy prison sentence.
I liked to read, watch and listen to the same things most other people do. This means that people relate to me even if I can’t or won’t relate to them. I can talk with normal people for ages and I still seem to be interested. Reading, watching and listening to obscure stuff gets you nowhere. I know, I tried it when I was a model in Paris. It means nothing. Take Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven for example, she read a lot of stuff and still died obscure, young and broke. Where’s the incentive?
I make sure to keep up with popular sports – soccer mainly. If you can speak a little soccer, you can get by in most parts of the world. It’s the only true lingua franca, vastly outweighing food.
Anyway, there I was in my cell. My cellmate, as thin and scratchy as someone who has been malnourished since birth, was below me. In their own bunk. My eyes were closed but I was not asleep. The landings were quieter and less violent than usual. The occasional dramatic scream or pan crash, nothing more.
I was reminiscing to myself about one of the great loves of my life, probably the greatest; the remarkably beautiful Julianna Górecki. Tall as a cedar. Elegant as a hazel branch. French as a guillotine. She lived in a massive, crumbling Georgian country house in the village I grew up in. It was a house I knew well. It should have been my house. Our house. Me and Julianna. Julianna and I. Instead it was infested by my aunt Bernadette Theresa Glaister. A hypocritical shill for the Holy Roman Church (and also with you) and the three faces of God. A constant charlatan, bully and drunkard. My aunt. My remaining blood relative.
Bernadette was the sister of my mother who died alongside my father two days after I was born. Some people said they’d been drinking and drugging heavily to celebrate. Other people said they’d been flying away from the sight of me. Bernadette had been presented with my pink, screaming, over animated, starving hungry self. She had given me away for my own good and for hers. I don’t blame her for doing that. I would have done the same thing. Not all of us have that parental twitch.
We met afterwards. Bernadette’s Catholic Christianity forced her into that, so she demanded it. Back then the authorities just weren’t that bothered. Especially not in the face of a wannabe nun in full, red-haired, righteous fury, driven by Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and guilt.
Bernadette and I did not like each other. We hadn’t since the first time I’d been introduced to her by my ineffectually loving parents. I was four weeks old. My mother left me with her for ten minutes while she went out to get my father to hurry up and come in. Bernadette shouted at me for getting between her and her ashtray. I remember that shout to every analyst and in every dream I’ve ever had.
“You little shit! Where are you fucking parents, you tiny, useless little cunt! For fuck’s sake”
My mother heard the shouting and rushed back in.
“Take it away. Take it away or I’ll probably damage it by accident”, I distinctly remember Her saying.
Julianna had lived with her for a long time. Her and the house. She managed to bring a hint of humanity to the house, which looked down on Shalford village where I grew up.
Wonderful Julianna, cool and warm, torridly tactile and terrifically remote. I adored Julianna like only a few other men and women I’d encountered. She made me a teen all over and inside. She made me self-conscious in a wonderful way. That’s love isn’t it? A kind of love. I have still never met anybody as satisfyingly distant as Julianna, and I’ve worked extensively in the high-end fashion industry. Julianna then. Julianna now. Julianna forever.
Talking of abandoning children, Bernadette loved the Roman Catholic Church. She still referred to it as that. Despite this, she was also puritanical if you excluded the drinking and smoking and the lesbianism, all of which of course she denied. This habit of fearsome and absolute denialism was a gift from her terror of a father, my bloody grandfather. That old ghost of a bastard had also passed down to her that grand old mad old big old house. As soon as I got out, I decided that somehow I was going to dislodge her from my and Julianna’s house. I didn’t care where or how she went. I didn’t care if was in a taxi or a box. That was my original plan.
A favour
A week before I was due for release, I was chatting away with with my cellmate, a slight and crispy hooligan called Joe. He like to be called The Phoenix but no one ever called him that. Mostly he was called ‘Rat’ or ‘Weasel’. He called himself a safe-cracker but lacked the self-confidence and dexterity to be anything other than a sneak thief at best. He was a slight man. He’d talked to me about his wife and daughters who never came to visit him. He wanted to know why I had no family visitors.
I told him that the last remaining family member I knew of was my terrible Aunt Bernadette – I went into some detail because, what the fuck, I was in prison. I told him that the mad old bag lived in a mad big old house being looked after by sweet Julianna.
“It’s a massive Georgian house all elegant angles outside and a messes within. It overlooks a vast green space with two cricket pitches and a place to play soccer. It has a putting green. It was bestowed on the villagers of Shalford by a retired rear-Admiral had bought it so he could fish from the back garden into the private trout and pike stream. He had died in the house along with his secrets. By rights it should be my house. Mine and Julianna’s”, that’s the way I talked to Jo the Phoenix.
“You should definitely go and see her”, said Jo sniffing the foetid air for a chance.
I sighed a bit too dramatically. I’d been planning just that for years, all through my appeals, during every phone call I’d had with Julianna, always.
“Nah”, I dismissed him out of hand.
“Why not?”
“You should never revisit your past”, whatever, blah, blah.
“Never mind that. Look at you. You’re gorgeous”.
I did. I was. I still am.
“What’s that got to do with it?”, I pretended to be cross. Not angry, just cross.
“Your aunt over in Crosschester, right?”, Jo wouldn’t give up.
We both knew Crosschester. Although it was two different cities when we talked about it.
“Just outside. Shalford, the village, on the way out to the coast”.
“I know it. Nice place. Nice people. Doors always open. Trusting people. Very trusting people”.
They were trusting people all of them apart from my Aunt Bernadette who had stopped trusting anything since the Latin Mass was vandalised into intelligibly native tongues.
“I suppose”, I had different memories of the place.
Thankfully, Jo interrupted my train of thought with some pointless advice.
“You should visit them, make a go of it, you only live once. Use your charm. You’ve always got a shot. Is your auntie in good health? Maybe not. Maybe she’s close to the end. She’s got to have left to house to someone, right? Maybe she’s made no will. That’d mean you’d be up for the lot. Maybe she has made a will and left everything to a cats’ home. That’s mean you’d need to put a stop to it?”, they paused, thinking.
“Maybe she’s left it all to Julianna. That definitely means you’ll need to get in with her for sure unless you want to lose everything”.
“That’s all so completely heartless, you’re really cold”, I snapped. Of course they was completely correct.
I swear to god I heard the Phoenix shrug.
“Sure thing. But you should go anyway”.
I rolled over on my bunk and faced the wall, feeling my own warm breath on my face and pretending it was one of my lovers. I was intrigued by Jo’s insistence though. No one in ‘the joint’ as some of them insisted on calling it, no one kept at you unless there was something in it for them.
The Phoenix mocked the silence.
“Make it up with Bernadette. You’re blood after all?”
I reserved comment.
“Go on, you never know. Love and all that, family and that, it’s got to be worth a shot, and when all’s said and done, you’re worth it”.
“What do you want, Jo?”, I sat up, swung my long, bare elegant legs around so my feet were planted on the cold floor.
There was a lengthy pause.
“Can you take a letter to Crosschester please? I mean, you’re going anyway? It’s in your way. I mean in your direction”.
My first thought was, The Phoenix can read and write?
“What’s in it?”
Of course I meant, ‘what’s in it for me?’ and Jo knew that. That was one of the great things about prison in those days: the honesty. Every interaction was a transaction.
“I’m not telling you what’s in it. I’ll tell you where it’s going though”.
“Useful information”, I said,
“It’s going to The Four Crosses Hotel, you know it?”
I didn’t. So I said I did.
“Your travel will be paid”, a strange formality had crept in.
“OK”
“It’s good. A good hotel. Very good”.
“You can also pay for a few night’s accommodation then”, I pushed.
“I thought you were staying with your darling Julianna”, The Phoenix pushed back.
Negotiation is such a fucking bore, which is why other people specialise in it. Boring people. Nevertheless, I didn’t miss a beat.
“You want a mysterious – so probably nefarious – letter delivered. That’s worth the fare and one night’s accommodation in anyone’s money”.
“Fair enough, one night, single room”.
“Dinner and breakfast thrown in”.
“Why the fuck not. Just make sure the letter gets there. And do not read it. They’ll know”.
“One final question”, I said.
“Go on then”.
“Why are you called The Phoenix?”
“I fell into a bonfire once and it didn’t kill me”.
“Singed you?”
“A bit”.
I decided against further conversation, and against dinner and instead went to the gymnasium to people watch.
