Full Stop Read online

  Joan Smith

  Full Stop

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  One

  The heat was so intense that Loretta felt it on her skin like an invisible presence, folding her unwilling body in its damp embrace. She had been in the taxi for only a few minutes but a patina of sweat was already forming on her bare arms, while a remorseless wave of heat seemed to be directing itself on to the back of her neck. The taxi was old and cramped, with black plastic seats; Loretta felt as though she were trapped in a small room with a fan heater going full blast, yet without any possibility of turning it off. She had paid no attention when her Californian friends had warned her that July was the worst time of year to visit New York, knowing that if she did not stop off there on her way home from San Francisco she was unlikely to get another chance for months, if not years. Brushing their objections aside, she had booked an air ticket whose only condition was that she had to spend a Saturday night in New York before continuing her journey to Heathrow, and deliberately avoided the weather section in the San Francisco Chronicle. She found out what she had let herself in for a few minutes before her plane came in to land, when the pilot welcomed his passengers to New York and reeled off some alarming statistics; it was 92 degrees in the city, he announced cheerfully, with 75 per cent humidity.

  ‘I hope you guys like it hot,’ he finished as the ‘fasten seat-belts’ sign came on and the cabin staff patrolled the aisles checking that hand luggage was stowed away and seatbacks were in the upright position. Loretta didn’t know much about humidity but she guessed that 100 per cent was rain, and that 75 per cent was much higher than she had become accustomed to in breezy San Francisco.

  She took out the money to pay the bridge toll and lay back in her seat with the folded dollar bills in her hand. Her eyelids fluttered and closed, swollen from lack of sleep and the recycled cabin air which had dehydrated her skin and irritated her sinuses. Within a couple of minutes she was in a fitful doze, half aware of where she was but also experiencing hallucinatory snatches of conversation from the previous evening when she had attended a farewell party in San Francisco thrown by her colleagues at Berkeley. She was still in this waking dream when an overtaking car gunned its engine and her left foot shot out, frantically seeking the brake. For a few panicky seconds she trod air and it was relief when her shin collided with the hollow plastic bench seat in front, jerking her back to reality. Her heart beating wildly, Loretta took a deep breath and sat up straight, forcing herself to stay awake for the remainder of the journey. She had slept a little on the plane, not as much as she would have liked because the man next to her got up to go to the loo or summoned a member of the cabin staff with some trivial request every time she settled down. Halfway through the flight she had considered offering to change places with him, giving up her aisle seat in return for an hour or so’s uninterrupted rest, but then a baby began to grizzle in the row behind, its thin but persistent wail putting sleep out of the question.

  The taxi slowed as the traffic got heavier, giving Loretta time to read a poster suspended from a bridge: ‘We haven’t suffered enough!’ it announced enigmatically, ‘Re-elect Cuomo.’ The taxi swerved into a faster lane and her bag slipped off the seat, disgorging its contents on to the floor. Loretta leaned forward with a ‘tut’ of annoyance and saw that her purse had come open, sending nickels, pennies and dimes in all directions. It took her a while to retrieve them all and when she sat up the car had left the expressway and was bowling along a high-sided suspension bridge. With an inkling of what she was about to see, Loretta turned her head and got her first, heart-stopping view of Manhattan.

  The familiar skyline floated in a light mist, defying her knowledge that she was looking at solidly-made constructions of steel, glass and concrete. Loretta’s tiredness evaporated as she stared in wonder and delight, trying to make out landmarks like the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. One skyscraper blended into another, creating a jagged line which appeared resolutely two-dimensional – like the studio backdrop of Oxford used in TV current affairs programmes, she thought inconsequentially. The image was so over-used in films and on postcards that she could hardly believe it retained its power, yet what she felt, winding down the window and craning her head to get a better view, was an almost sexual charge of excitement. She marvelled at how compact and shining the island was even as she experienced the illusion that it was rushing towards her, individual buildings becoming solid and visible through the heat haze. She guessed she was on the Triborough Bridge, whose right-angle course into the city she had followed on a map of New York a few minutes before coming in to land. The only one she had previously heard of was the Brooklyn Bridge, familiar because she had recently seen a revival of A View From The Bridge in San Francisco, but she now knew that LaGuardia airport was in Queens and linked to Manhattan by the Triborough. She reached in her bag for the map, wanting to get some idea of how long it would take to get from here to Toni’s apartment, and recalled as she did so that the taxi driver had merely grunted when she gave him the address at the airport. She felt a momentary flare of anxiety, a familiar but unwelcome reaction to the fact that she was travelling alone in a foreign country, even an English-speaking one, and dismissed it with the common-sense observation that there couldn’t be a single cab driver in New York who hadn’t heard of Riverside Drive.

  She had an uneasy sensation that she was being watched and her eyes flicked up to the rear-view mirror just in time to catch a fractional movement of the driver’s head as he returned his gaze to the road. She frowned, recalling the other warnings she had been given by her Californian friends when she had announced her intention of stopping over in New York. They had talked endlessly about the soaring crime rate, about teenagers who carried guns to school and shoot-outs between crack dealers, until a weekend trip to Manhattan began to sound about as safe as a guided tour of the headquarters of a Colombian drug cartel. One woman, a history lecturer at Berkeley, had graphically described an encounter with a psychopathic cab driver who sped off in entirely the wrong direction when she asked him to take her to a conference at NYU; the cab screeched to a halt, she said, only when she flung open the passenger door in heavy traffic at considerable risk to life and limb.

  Loretta told herself she was being silly, that the driver was probably just checking that she was all right; she knew she was paler than usual, having caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror in the airport loo, her features flattened by tiredness and her pallor accentuated by the washroom’s harsh strip lighting. She wished she hadn’t stayed so late at her farewell party the night before, leaving herself very little time to finish packing, but she had hung on in the vain hope that Sean would arrive. Their affair had lasted only a few weeks and it had been comfortable rather than intense, an agreeable summer diversion, but she was dismayed when he told her he had to work late on Wednesday night, and if he got to the party at all it would only be towards the end. Loretta was as cross with herself as she was with Sean when she finally accepted that he wasn’t going to appear and took a taxi home to Cow Hollow. Her bedroom looked like the aftermath of a burglary, clothes strewn in piles and every pair of shoes she owned sitting on the floor waiting to be stuffed with tissue paper; she had had to make a hasty, late-night decision about what to take with her and what to leave for her landlord, Alberto, to airfreight to England after her departure. The problem was that she had no idea how long the box of books and her trunk would take to arrive, and she needed several of the books for an article which had to be finished with
in two weeks of arriving in Oxford.

  Trays of food had circulated at the party but all Loretta had managed to grab was a couple of chewy white parcels which tasted faintly of prawn and some focaccia smeared with roast garlic. The garlic had left a peculiar taste in her mouth and she also had an uncomfortable furry sensation on her tongue caused by drinking too much wine on an empty stomach. She was no longer used to over-indulgence, having become accustomed after three months in San Francisco to raised eyebrows every time she poured her second or third glass of alcohol, and she still remembered the expression on Alberto’s face when she had arrived home from her first trip to Safeway’s with a case of red wine. It had crossed his mind, he admitted when he got to know her better, that the charming English academic with perfect references to whom he had rented his spare bedroom was secretly a lush.

  Loretta moistened her lips, longing for a cool drink or, even better, a cup of tea. She became uncomfortably aware that the driver was watching her again, his eyes in the rear-view mirror as cold as stones, and she had to suppress a childish urge to stick her tongue out at him. Instead she turned sideways, resting her arm along the back of the seat, and stared out of the rear window, simulating close interest in the long expanse of bridge stretching behind the cab. Her ears picked up an odd noise, like the beginning of some large industrial process, and a moment later she realised it seemed to be emanating from two sinister figures on bikes who were rapidly gaining on her cab. The noise rose to a roar, puzzling Loretta until she realised that the heat haze around the riders concealed the fact that there weren’t two bikes but a dozen, riding in two-by-two formation and taking up as much of the road as the stretch limos she had seen waiting in line at the airport. The big machines gleamed with chrome, their riders’ arms spreadeagled to grasp handlebars bristling with wing mirrors, and Loretta observed their progress with involuntary fascination, intrigued by a display of masculinity which was at once menacing and comically absurd. Suddenly the lead riders broke formation, fanning out to surround her cab like a cloud of buzzing, malignant flies until the noise level was unbearable; as Loretta lunged to wind up the open window, which was admitting acrid fumes as well as the ear-splitting roar, she remembered reading somewhere that the Hell’s Angels habitually ripped the exhaust cylinders off their Harley-Davidsons precisely to achieve this intimidating effect.

  ‘Uh,’ she gasped, falling back against the seat. The bikers stared unnervingly ahead, close enough to touch and pacing their engines to the speed of the taxi without acknowledging its existence. Loretta thought of the rock stars who used to arrive at open-air festivals with a similarly alarming escort, the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, and her mind leapt effortlessly to Altamont, and the murder of a member of the audience by a gang of Angels. Her earlier anxiety returned, focused outside the cab this time rather than inside it, and her hand grew clammy on the forgotten dollar bills.

  ‘What?’ she demanded, leaning forward as the cab driver muttered something unintelligible. ‘What did you say?’

  Instead of replying he put his foot down on the accelerator, a hopeless gesture as the old car had nothing like the speed of the big bikes. Loretta clutched her bag to her, thinking of her credit cards, her air ticket, her passport — not that they could do much with that — and the sizeable sum in dollars she had withdrawn two days ago from her bank in San Francisco to see her through the weekend. Apart from anything else, getting it all replaced by Sunday evening, in time for her flight home, would be a nightmare. She turned and glared at the man immediately to her left, her fear overlaid by a healthy burst of anger, and at once her expression changed. Uncertainty flickered across her face, followed by astonishment and then outright amusement: the biker was old, grey-bearded even, more ZZ Topp than Easy Rider. Wispy hair straggled under the rim of his helmet, curling over the collar of his ancient leather jacket, and Loretta almost laughed out loud at this proof that even the Hell’s Angels were subject to the laws of time. His companions were of a similar vintage, she now saw, and their uniformly senescent appearance made her wonder what had happened to their children — whether they were busily rebelling against their parents by getting Harvard MBAs and working on Wall Street. As if they had picked up her silent ridicule, the front bikes abruptly accelerated, signalling a rapid advance and leaving the yellow taxi to rattle on its way unmolested for the remainder of the journey into Manhattan.

  ‘The mother-fuckin family’, Loretta read as they streamed past, and a line of smaller letters which announced that the bikers belonged to the LI — which she took to stand for Long Island — chapter of Hell’s Angels. Feeling a small professional irritation at the omission of the final g — the mother-fucking family, she wanted to call after them, or at least point out the need for an apostrophe — she did not catch the clipped remark her driver suddenly flung over his shoulder. A moment later she realised it was not an attempt at conversation, simply a request for the bridge toll, and she handed over her three dollars with relief. They headed into the city, somewhere in East Harlem she supposed, and she began looking at the buildings with real interest although they were for the most part modern and undistinguished. Her driver had relapsed into silence, concentrating on the heavyish traffic, and Loretta wondered how long it would take to get to the Upper West Side; from previous visits she recalled a road through Central Park but she had no idea whether it came out anywhere near Toni’s apartment. The cab stopped at a red light and a black woman swung across the road, banging her fist on the bonnet of Loretta’s taxi as she passed.

  ‘Bitch,’ the driver said under his breath, without real force, as though it was the sort of thing that happened all the time. Although the woman couldn’t possibly have heard she turned and made an obscene gesture, revealing the legend on her shrunken T-shirt: ‘I wanna sex you up’. Loretta gave her head a disbelieving shake and leaned forward as the taxi moved off, reading the driver’s name on the laminated licence on the dashboard — it sounded French, confirming her impression that he was from Haiti — before reminding him of her destination.

  ‘Riverside Drive and 73rd,’ she said on a faintly interrogative note, and he grunted exactly as he had at the airport. Loretta sat back in her seat and wiped sweat from her forehead, deciding it was even hotter in the city than it had been on the expressway. Her eyebrows were wet, not just damp, a phenomenon she had never encountered before. She thought of the play she was going to see that evening with Toni, she had forgotten what it was called, and hoped that the theatre would be air-conditioned. Her original suggestion, David Mamet’s Oleanna, had fallen through because the play was no longer on in New York.

  ‘You haven’t missed anything,’ Toni had told her on the phone, ‘the guy’s blown it this time,’ and Loretta had left the choice of a substitute to her. Through the car window she saw that the cross streets had declined from the hundreds to the nineties, and by craning her neck she was able to get a view of distant treetops which might, she thought eagerly, be her first glimpse of Central Park.

  ‘Loretta! How was your flight?’ Toni surged forward as Loretta turned the corner from the lift, hugging her and firing off half-a-dozen questions without giving her time to answer. She looked just as Loretta remembered her, slender and elegant with dark blonde hair pulled back from a face which was just too gaunt to be beautiful. Toni’s paternal grandparents were Italian immigrants from Reggio-Calabria who arrived in New York at the turn of the century; her father, who was born in the city, still ran his own restaurant in the East 20s. Loretta had never eaten there but she had read a carping review of it in her guidebook, which complained that the food was old-fashioned and the portions too large.

  ‘Did you take a cab from La Guardia? You didn’t have a problem with the traffic? I didn’t expect you yet’ — she glanced down at the watch on her bony wrist — ‘butit’s fine, come inside.’ She slipped an arm round Loretta’s shoulders and walked her towards the open door of apartment 15G. ‘You’ve never been here before, huh? I warned you it was small.
Down, Honey, down.’

  This last remark was addressed to the ugliest dog Loretta had ever seen, a thick-set animal which appeared, at first sight, to be made of concentric circles of bulging doggy fat.

  ‘Honey,’ Toni exclaimed, pulling the dog away from one of Loretta’s shoes which it had begun to worry with ferocious growls. ‘It’s OK,’ she went on, hauling the animal into the apartment by its collar, ‘she has a thing about leather. She’s only a pup and she gets kind of over-excited.’

  Loretta followed nervously, not at all reassured, and hovered just inside the door.

  ‘Honey, on the couch, good girl. Come on in, Loretta. Are you in a hurry to go somewhere?’

  ‘No, course not.’ Loretta put down her weekend case and glanced round the L-shaped room, immediately perceiving that there was nowhere to sit. The room looked like a simulacrum of her own the night before, with clothes everywhere and a dress spilling out of a brown paper bag which Loretta recognised as from Bloomingdale’s. The dog lumbered up on to the sofa, collapsing on to a green silk blouse and panting with its jaws gaping open. Toni pulled the blouse from under the dog, not before the soft fabric had become spattered with saliva, swept a pile of clothes off the only armchair in the room and motioned to Loretta to sit on it.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said distractedly, ‘I haven’t finished packing.’

  Loretta surveyed the room, taking in the wide double bed which filled the alcove formed by the short bar of the L. It was at least cool in the flat, although the air-conditioning unit set in the bottom of one of windows was irritatingly noisy. Toni seemed to be feeling the heat, flopping down on the bed and brushing back wisps of hair from her face. ‘What a day,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I thought you weren’t going till tomorrow,’ Loretta said, wondering why Toni was getting ready for her trip to Long Island a day early. She had already noticed that the sofa’s deep red cover, an oriental design which echoed the rugs hanging on the walls, was thick with dog hair and crumbs of soil; it was just as well, she thought, looking down at her chair, that she had travelled in jeans. Suddenly the dog sat up on the sofa, apparently taking a slight movement on Loretta’s part as an invitation, and Toni murmured its name warningly. Shooting her a reproachful glance, it subsided into panting rolls of flesh.