The Screams

The Screams
I am going to need a goddamn cigarette and I do not even smoke. Pour me one of whatever you are having, and pour another for the road, because the plot has finally caught up to where I have been telling you it would.

Upstairs, our girl is cooked.

Forgive me. I mean it in the kindest possible way. She is on her back. Robe in approximately the shape a robe gets into when its wearer has been, in the small careful arrangement of a fortnight of dream-realm tutorials and one quietly devastating bath, thoroughly and professionally dismantled. Hair, a war crime. Mouth, slightly open. Pulse in the soft visible spot at the side of her neck still going thump thump thump like a drum kit in a room next door. There is a stretch of skin between her left ear and her right collarbone that is, I shit you not, glowing. Not metaphor. Lit from underneath like somebody installed a low-watt bulb in her epidermis. I have, in my long stupid career, watched a great many women come down from a great many things, and I have not, in any of those cases, watched a woman come down from that. You do not come down from that. You move into it and live there.

Now. For the better part of four years, our girl was being romanced by a young man named Bradley.
Beautiful kid. Decent kid. Honest face. Means well. If a man’s romantic credentials were measured in commitment and earnestness, the boy would be a goddamn knight. The problem with Bradley, and I am not saying this with cruelty, I am saying it with the soft tired affection a creature of my professional standing reserves for any young man who is about to get posted by a bond he did not know was running, is that Bradley fucks like he is trying to remember the steps to a dance he learned at a cousin’s wedding. He thinks he has it. He is trying. What he produces, every honest time, is the precise category of pleasure the language calls pleasure because the language is, frankly, lazy.

What our girl had at three this morning was not the language being lazy. It was the language being put on fucking notice.I am not going to tell you when the next round happens. I will tell you this. When it does, the dream version is going to look like a dress rehearsal. You are going to need a stronger drink and a private room and possibly a wet towel, and I am going to charge admission, because I am not, my friends, working pro bono for that one.

While we are roasting the Lewis men, allow me to point out that Bradley did not invent his condition. He inherited it. The man currently sitting on the upper deck of a yacht in the Mediterranean holding a glass of cold rosé and complaining about the wifi did not, by any honest read of his wife’s marital countenance, find it either. Four generations of these gilded jellyfish, and not a one of them has located, with his own goddamn hand, the precise small bundle of nerves the architecture of his wife’s pelvis was engineered to deliver to him. Four generations. There is a documentary in this. There is a memorial fountain in this. There is a federal grant in this.
Which brings me, in the soft polite manner of a creature who has been waiting all chapter to do this, to that miserable old bitch in the bone-coloured coat.

I am calling her Bonecoat from now on. Saves us all time.

Hear me out, because I have been turning this over for years, and I think there is a serious thesis in it. Bonecoat is currently running a centuries-long magical war out of a Hyatt suite, a pair of pearl earrings she will not take off in the goddamn shower, and the soft warm dark of a marriage so sexually unsatisfying it has, in the long view, made her into a project manager. I am asking you to consider, just for a beat, the possibility that the entire nine-hundred-year campaign against the woman currently glowing upstairs could have been avoided, in a different universe, by the simple expedient of literally any one of Bonecoat’s ancestors getting fucked properly by the man she married. I am barely exaggerating. The bloodline math of the project is real. The desperation behind the math, however, is at least forty percent untouched clitoris. You can quote me. Carve it into a wall.
Bonecoat needs our girl because Bonecoat cannot complete the bloodline math with her own son. The reasons are involved. I will explain them properly when I am sober enough to do them justice. Today we are pre-gaming.

Now.Across the city from her, in a tower whose lobby has a fountain shaped like a horse for reasons no one has ever been able to defend, my favourite stocky guilt-ridden bastard is having the worst Thursday of his entire law-abiding career.

Craig has been lying to Bonecoat for twenty hours straight. Which would be entertaining, frankly, if it were not also forcing him, as a side effect, to lie to his actual best friend, who is also, technically, his employer, who is at this moment on the upper deck of the yacht in the Mediterranean blissfully unaware that the woman he believes is at a European spa retreat has not, in fact, been at a European spa retreat for any portion of the last six days. Twenty hours without sleep. Three meals untouched. Three Google searches he should not have made from a work computer. He is sitting in his ergonomic chair pretending the screensaver is interesting, and he is, by every honest read of his face, about to crack. The crack is going to be one of my favourite things in this entire book. I will narrate it personally. Bring snacks.

Speaking of cracks.
Tara, the assistant, has decided in the last hour to drive over to the penthouse our girl fled from on Saturday evening. She is going under the soft polite cover of picking up some paperwork. What she is actually going to do, my friends, is gossip. Marva, the housekeeper, who is in my professional estimation the most underrated woman in this entire structure, is going to meet Tara at the front door, pour two glasses of something neither of them is technically entitled to pour, and tell Tara the story of the screams.

You remember the screams. The screams were the morning of the awakening. Marva was halfway down the hall with a heavy-bottomed pan in her hand, approximately three doors away from staving in an intruder’s skull with the soft definite competence of a woman who had been waiting her entire career for the privilege, when she registered, in the soft careful way only a housekeeper of her vintage can, that the noise coming through the door was not, on any reasonable read of it, the noise of distress. It was the other noise. Marva, my friends, put the pan down. Walked back to the kitchen. Drank her morning tea standing at the sink, looking out the window, laughing. She has been waiting two weeks to tell somebody. Tara is going to die. The two of them are going to drink considerably more of what they are not entitled to, and the alliance, which is currently a two-woman operation on a kitchen telephone, is about to gain its third member.
Watch them. I am not going to keep saying it. They are the spine.
Right.
Closing remarks.
Downstairs in this cottage, my favourite Eastern European bookmaker and her Scottish accomplice are at the small round table by the window counting the casino bag. In stacks. With a notebook. Like a pair of medieval madams running a profitable Wednesday in a port town. Mora has not stopped grinning since they sat down. Jean has a pencil tucked behind one ear. Neither of them, by any small honest read of either of their faces, has had this much fun since the spring of 1989, which is a reference I will explain when Mora is ready and not a goddamn second sooner.
The man on the mountain has taken off.
Sundown tonight he lands. Tomorrow he drives. Day after, at the small dark hour after the second sundown, he arrives.
Seventy-two hours.
I am on the porch. The kettle is singing. Marva has the pan story. Bonecoat is unsatisfied. Craig is breaking. The bag of cash is being counted in stacks. The line is travelling.
Try to keep up.