Meanwhile in Dopamine City Read online

  Meanwhile in

  Dopamine City

  DBC Pierre

  For Katz of Friday Night City: it’s always five o’clock somewhere.

  We cannot wait for favours from nature; our mission is to take them from her.

  Ivan Michurin

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  SEPTEMBER

  1 East Palisades

  2 Kinbassa Lounge

  3 Apple Meadow Flashback

  4 Owl Light

  5 Society

  6 Heretics

  7 School

  8 Sunday

  9 A Fibonacci Bacchanal

  10 Slightly Frowning Face

  FACE WITHOUT MOUTH

  36 Breather

  DOPAMINE CITY

  76 East Palisades

  77 Time

  SEPTEMBER

  1 East Palisades

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  SEPTEMBER

  1

  East Palisades

  She looked like a sawn-off tramp. The day was going from bad to ratshit but this was one thing he would fix. A tramp and he couldn’t lie, there was a whiff of pride in his disgust that made it worse. Lon stood his gunk-spangled bags by the fence as she padded up the road on half tiptoes. She was barefoot.

  She didn’t see him, then she saw him.

  ‘What can I smell,’ he said. It wasn’t a question; there was a scent, just not olfactory. A sight-smack of lip gloss, legs and lies.

  ‘Don’t be bizarre.’ Now she dawdled. Her eyes were cuts in the beery light, the swimmy twilight. Sphinx moths were out.

  ‘Smells troubley.’ He blocked the gate.

  ‘Why would it?’

  ‘Trouble in the air.’

  ‘What is your problem? Why’re you home?’

  ‘Tell me who it is because I saw. He bully you into this?’

  ‘Into what?’ She checked her nails. ‘It’s not like anyone’s teabagging.’

  ‘Excuse me? Where did you get that?’

  ‘School.’

  ‘Who at school?’

  ‘Kim Stern.’

  ‘Ms Stern? The teacher?’

  ‘Sex ed. What is wrong with you?’

  ‘They teach teabagging?’

  ‘You’re freaking me out now.’

  ‘They teach you teabagging at school?’

  ‘Seriously freaking me out.’

  ‘You know I’m going to check up.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ she said as if to a vision.

  ‘I live here.’

  ‘So early, duh.’

  ‘Let’s talk about you, out on the road dressed like I don’t know what.’

  ‘I’m trying to go inside. I supposedly live here now too, y’know.’

  He went to the road from the rough-shorn grass and planted work boots apart like a bull rider. He lived on the edge of a suburb, was employed in sewerage till earlier that day, his knowledge of bulls was zero; he just was one of those men who had stridden from the womb in the shape of a husky cowpoke. Even his brow was built for hatshade, down-raked like his eyes and with a national-anthem lofty pitch that could slip from aloof to dismayed; but his lips belonged to a baby boy, and these slightly parted could mesmerise his prey. ‘Tell me who it was.’ He scanned the stubble plain they called the flat, which buffered his town from the world. ‘If it’s someone from Number Fourteen you have to say – we don’t even know who they are.’

  ‘Tch. Is this going to be one of those awkward deals where you just assert your authority or whatever because in all honesty, Lonnie, I have limited interest right now, it’s getting fresh out here.’

  ‘Try Dad.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Technically, Shelby was dressed. White T-shirt big enough to be her brother’s. Three cardinal-red patches of bikini underneath, cherries through fog, and they were wet or something was wet because she was wet. He took a tail of her hair. She was blonde but it shone mauve and wrapped cold around his finger like a swirler in a drain. ‘Is Ember inside? She see you come out like this?’

  The girl crossed her arms and huffed like a freckled boy’s stepmother. ‘What matters here is that I’m trying to do what I’m supposed to be doing according to all the rules including yours, and now it’s you holding me back from doing it.’

  ‘Nanny Mona wouldn’t let you run around like this. If she knew, I’d be right back in court. That what you want? Back to Nanny Mona? Leave Egan and me again?’

  ‘Let me go-ho-ho.’

  Her bones caught his eye in the syrupy light. She didn’t use to have bones but now she had them, under her back, her face, her shoulders. Bone and tender muscle. Character. Structure. Her structure loomed out with her bones as the mosque wailed up from Molan, the suburb to the west, and the day didn’t feel like his life any more.

  She stabbed a toe at the road. ‘So random and bizarre.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Beachwear this far from the beach.’

  ‘Swimming! Remember – Wednesdays? That you pay for?’

  ‘With lipstick? And today’s Thursday.’

  The street lamp pinged on beside them. Another four lamps lit up along the road but theirs for some reason flickered. Shelby’s edges shimmered and buzzed.

  She made a break for the gate. He tangled in his bags.

  The washing machine thruffled inside. TV laughter clanged over it. Ember already on the red, lips as purple as an eel’s.

  ‘Wha—’ She flinched off the sofa.

  ‘See this?’ He pointed at Shelby.

  ‘What? Why are you home?’

  ‘He’s being bizarre.’ Shelby went to the stairs.

  ‘Too much to ask for these kids to be watched? Where’s Egan? EGAN!’

  ‘Somewhere.’ Ember looked around.

  Lon snapped a finger from Shelby to his boots. ‘Come here.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘HERE.’

  ‘What is wrong with you?’

  ‘NOW.’

  Ember scraped over instead. Regarding her: it wasn’t romantic; she minded the heretics for cash. Lon raised the palm of his hand to enact an authoritative fatherly force field; but that force only flows when you’re winning a case, and this one wasn’t won by a mile. The force withered back to a grumpy thirty-six-year-old’s, a newly laid-off man who felt that a girl’s choice of clothes should allow for bumping into a nun.

  ‘WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM!’ Shelby bent double on the bottom stair. ‘I SAID I WENT SWIMMING!’

  ‘Lonnie, what is it?’

  ‘Swimming’s Wednesdays. TEN SECONDS OR GROUNDED.’

  ‘SO UNFAIR! Ember, tell him.’

  ‘The Hub does girls Wednesdays or Thursdays.’

  ‘Seven – six – five – four …’

  ‘STOP IT!’

  ‘Three – two – one …’

  ‘GET AWAY!’

  He hammered up three flights behind her. She flew into her room. Bang!

  Ember followed like a sigh, with the same fallenness as her mood, carefully riding the swing of her behind to keep from spilling her wine.

  A hand-drawn sign on Shelby’s door said STAY OUT.

  Lon opened the door. Click.

  She was in there breathing hard. ‘Go away! This is all over NOTHING!’

  ‘Which way do you come from swimming? You come east, which is not the way I saw you come, and there was someone else down there.’

  ‘Who cares which WAY I COME? YOU’RE IN MY SPACE!’

  ‘Lon.’ Ember tapped his arm.

  ‘You’re not her mother.’

  ‘Oh. Thanks.’

  ‘It’s ridiculo
us!’ Shelby thrashed the bed. ‘If you’re so obsessed with where I am all the time you’d get me a PHONE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON!’

  ‘Don’t count on it now.’

  ‘Yuh, so Egan gets one.’

  ‘Egan wears clothes in public.’

  ‘You need a frickin girlfriend. Take your mind off non-issues.’

  ‘Don’t you swear at me. Tell the truth.’

  ‘Which one if you don’t like the swimming one!’

  ‘The only one.’

  ‘I TOLD YOU!’

  ‘WHERE WERE YOU?’

  ‘STOP IT!’

  ‘Lon, what the hell?’ Ember lowered her wine.

  ‘Stay out of it.’

  ‘This isn’t the way.’

  ‘Oh, this is the way. Surely, surely the way. Keep this family straight till I can bail us out of this hole. Bail out and never look back.’

  ‘If you were really that serious you’d take market price for the house.’

  ‘Yeah, the bank’ll just forget the rest.’ He loomed over Shelby: ‘TELL ME!’

  ‘I TOLD YOU!’

  ‘NOW!’

  ‘GET AWAY! Loser.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘LOSER!’

  Crack! He slapped her. For her own good and with a sudden hatred he would later suppose was love. The noise of it shocked her quiet. Him too. A heartfuck.

  You’d think Ember’s skin was being sucked off her face: ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU TODAY!’ She yanked Shelby out of the room and slammed the door behind them.

  Ribs clenched. Skull rang. The less Lon could afford to lose battles, the more he lost them. He even lost some respect for himself, doubly so because it wasn’t just respect he was losing, it was power. Nothing makes you lose respect more than losing power.

  In a corner of that cotton holocaust he spied a My Little Burro toy. Formerly adored like the Godhead. Mint in its box. My Little Burro. Until recently wrangled by a girl with loud breath and loose socks in a pact with a universe that wanted things shiny in the original box. That wanted things awesome.

  Her skin had been firm when he smacked her. A future adult lurked under her skin. Future old woman with her memories. He as good as slapped an old woman. She might remember that day as she died. Down to the front step he tramped, beaten. Creatures barked over the wasteland flat as the light bruised to ash under clouds.

  Oh, Shelby Shall-be Shel. Shelby-Ann. Could be the name was a problem as well. Racy name. She was provisionally called Annie until three weeks to the day after her mother Diane left Alma Hospital in an unmarked white hearse like a butcher’s van. Vents on the roof spun fast in gusty sunshine. Lon followed sweating in traffic before losing her behind a bus at the corner of King and Wisteria, up past the fire station. News of her death was in his thinking mind, the information was there all right, but it may as well have been in a bank vault because his gut knew he physically lost her behind that bus. That’s when he really lost her. Lost sight and power and care of her. For ever. Some vulture, a stranger driving a butcher’s van, hauled her away in a bag and tried to lose him and succeeded. Her last ride in town.

  The funeral home was a sandy brick bungalow wedged between Amos Disposals and Dan’s Outdoorland on the westbound exit where the speed camera sits. By the time Lon found it she was yellow. He had carried a bag to hospital that morning with aloe vera gel, mini pretzels, more books, fresh underwear – including the pair that said IT WON’T SPANK ITSELF, a therapy meant to run on wrongness – and a hastily framed picture of little Egan and baby Annie like hampers in the crooks of his thick arms. The bag was still on the front seat. She was in a coffin. He never lost the pressure to deliver that bag.

  A hovering black suit processed their credit card within sight of her straw-coloured hair. It was swept up in a way she hated. She really hated that. The suit offered a ‘viewing’ with gauze over her face because ‘some people prefer the distance’, he said. It was wedding veil material – what kind of zombies were they? Lon ripped it off. He wanted to roll her on her side the way she always slept. He wanted to stroke her belly. He wanted to climb in beside her and have the suit nail the box shut. People always come back from these places saying She looked so peaceful, and it’s bullshit: she was a mess. If you saw her like that on any other day you wouldn’t say peaceful, you’d fucking call someone. Her head was small and loose on her neck; it wanted to roll when he stroked it. He settled it back as the terminal beeped and declined his five-grand payment. He’d thought it would. He lied about it. Better to vaguely pretend to have the money, although what were they going to do – stand her outside till he paid? Organs played over his lying and at one point were in concert with air brakes on the road. He looked out and it was another fucking bus. How could he let one between them? How, after hustling and chasing and hitching her up, could everything slip this way?

  This is what he lived with.

  The bag stayed on his front seat because she might still need it. He was ready to deliver it day and night. It sat with its handles neatly crossed until he got body odour and a big enough collection of empties at the gate to freak her mother out when she brought the little ones back. That’s when Shelby got her name. Named after superstar Shelby Mykura because the world’s fastest female would not have let a bus between soulmates.

  *

  A breeze fiddled up. To his left along Palisade Row sat the abandoned Moyle estate, trees bristling out like rearing dogs. That was the way she’d come, from the edge of the flat and not from Molan. He totted up the facts: she claimed she had swimming but that was Wednesdays at Molan Hub. The Hub was reached the opposite way, and nine times out of ten one of the other girls dropped her back. She wasn’t carrying her bag. She was still wet. She wasn’t wearing the one-piece they used for club swimming. Against that, there was just no water around the palisade. Aside from a reservoir breach years ago that had swept through downtown, over the palisade and into these properties’ chimneys, there probably hadn’t been water down here since whatever upheaval had caused the cliff in the first place. Probably also wiped out the dinosaurs. As for the jungle of ash and yew at Moyle’s, it might look like Shenanigan City but it wasn’t a place any stranger would come from further afield in town. Apart from it looking spooky, you just wouldn’t come out of your territory to creep past Lon’s place, or risk your neck on the so-called Palisade Stairs. One thing about company towns: territories as snug as condoms. Comes from a lack of workmates you want to bump into off the job.

  Whoever he’d seen with her must be local. Extremely local. Apparently not Egan, as he would’ve appeared and anyway was allegedly inside. The only other household nearby was Number Fourteen. An unknown quantity.

  She’d been cagey about it.

  Palisade Row was an unusual road, serving only two homes along a lane that led to Moyle’s abandoned mansion. The houses sat at a distance under the long sandstone cliff, like cigar butts clenched in a sneer. Though mostly forgotten by the city upstairs, an outbreak of planning in the twentieth century had led it to suddenly number the properties; not One and Two, but Thirty-Seven and Fourteen, reflecting a hope of one day filling the arc between them. Lon Cush was in Thirty-Seven, the nearest to Moyle’s estate. Who knew who was in Fourteen these days, at the main-road end of the palisade, but he was about to pay them a visit. New people had moved in nearly a year before – he’d waved at one on his way from work once, hadn’t seen exactly who. Foreign. In his mind the wave passed for a knock at their door with a card and some cake and a welcome to the Row, as Diane would have done on day one. He felt bad about the neighbourly thing for a month or so. His Monday-to-Saturday excuse was late shifts, Sundays he blamed fatigue. But look at it: he wanted Shel to grow up like Diane and take cake round on day one. While he found it easier to feel bad for a month than buy cake. This was what he was up against. Then look at flying time: he was finally going round with no cake but with a threat to ram a boy’s head up his ring if he touched her. Which also came at Shelby from the other side
, showed her he had the perimeter. She was his Little Burro, safe and pink in her room; the kid was a stalker from a cheaper house, thirty to forty grand cheaper and still no lawn after almost a year. Which kind of thinking was indigenous to a breed of older parent who saw life in black and white, he was well aware. But this was the time for it.

  Back inside to drop his overalls. No sign of the girls. Canned laughter still played – how bitter. You had to wonder if human sanity hadn’t ended the day the species started living with disembodied laughter everywhere. He was about to change out of his work boots but ended up thinking better of it: ballast if things got pushy. As he hung his workwear behind the door, a shadow slid over the landing upstairs. Egan, apple of his other eye. Lon nailed him before he crawled into his hole: ‘Eagle. You just come in?’

  ‘Down to turn off the TV.’

  ‘And failed?’

  ‘Changed my mind. Didn’t know you were there.’

  ‘What are you up to really?’

  ‘Just reading.’

  ‘Reading what?’

  ‘Mm – The Dog That Said Ely.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know. The dog. Ely.’

  ‘A book from the lie shelf.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘You’re gambling I won’t come up.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘What other books are there? Shoot me some titles.’

  ‘Truant Under Spline, Mesmer the Snail, Hello There Pointless, Is It Safe Yet?’

  ‘There’s no book called Is It Safe Yet? I’m coming up.’

  ‘There is. A safety book.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Mm – Where Donald Found Larvae, Return of Mrs Gremet, The Gremets: A Life in Disgrace, Rowdy Stays at Your Place, The Diabolical Nuns, Bonjour Heini, Eight Steps to Who Cares, Zambar the Avigator, Spell It or Die …’

  Lon paused to scratch his jaw. It was pedigreed bullshit, that’s what got him. Good enough to cancel out the need to read. As if the talent spent in avoiding the thing was as much as he’d gain if he did it. That’s what got him. And the kid wasn’t twelve till June.