It was hard to learn to live with Balarubu. Sometimes I thought she was incredibly single minded—everything was truth and nothing else mattered. Other times I thought it was like being ruled by a bored toddler, playing with me for laughs like an action figure. Drop me in the dirt and tread me in one minute, the next throwing riches at me. It didn’t make things easy with Angie having another strong willed female in my life. And she hadn’t even met my mum yet.
After my conversation with Angie—which I thought didn’t go especially well, but still went about as well as I had any hope of it going—things were pretty strained. There was grit in the ointment. We’d got along before like a couple of really great mates who really got along all the time. Except we slept together too. And not in a sleepover style . That didn’t hurt. Now, this truth thing was in the way in a pretty big way. She couldn’t forget it. The weird thing was that I had told her the truth, and told her I always had and always would, and she was hacked off with me for not trusting her with the truth. Was it my fault the truth was ridiculous? What am I to do about you, Balarubu?
We drove to the east coast. From the west coast. The US is a pretty big place. It was thousands of miles—nearly five thousand. That’s a lot of driving. We put the pick-up on a train to Chicago. That broke the back of the journey. Then I hired a guy to drive for twelve hours while we dozed, then sent him on his way with a couple of hundred dollars. This was a pretty fast way of moving: drive until you’re too tired, then pick up a college kid to drive some more. It still took a while, we ate a lot of rubbish, but we weren’t travelling any more, we weren’t trying to see anything on the way, we were just trying to eat up road, and pretty much all we saw was road. It took us a fortnight, then we were in New York. I put the Hilux in secure storage, the best and most secure I could find, which was in a locked container inside a guarded warehouse, and then we took a cab to a hotel. We had a couple of days before we sailed. We had to buy some fancy duds so we wouldn’t stand out too much on the ship, and we needed lots and lots of expensive luggage. There was a luggage allowance, but breaking it was no problem: they just charged you a packet and I’d already paid. Nothing was a problem on this ship. You just paid. We were getting on OK, me and Angie. I was fascinated by her belly, that was starting to show our baby. She was fascinated by our baby too. But since I told her about the truth and the money, she seemed somehow less keen on me.
In a way that made me love her more. All that money and she cared most that what she thought she had with me was maybe not what she had at all. It just made me want to bang my head in frustration that what she thought she had lost was a man who would be honest with her. And instead she had me. Doh!
I thought roaming New York hitting the clothes and shoe shops would take her mind off things. It didn’t do it. She wasn’t a big city girl. Nogales was a speck in a massive desert. New York, seen through New York eyes, was the humming centre of the Universe—an idea I understood as most people in London see their city the same way, with a kind of pitying condescension towards people unlucky enough not to be born there and dozy enough not to move there. I saw her flinch in crowds as she failed to make headway or to forge forward with the right kind of outta my way pointed elbows confidence that you needed there. It seemed to make her feel smaller. I worried about London and if it was about to affect her the same way. Still, she didn’t really have to hit the centre if she didn’t want to. We were in Midtown Manhattan. In London we would be in a pretty run of the mill suburb.
It worried me though, as I asked the assistant to wrap a glove soft pair of three hundred dollar moccasins; made me fret a little as I asked them to send the cashmere wool pullover to my hotel; prayed on my mind a mite as I had them send an armful of jackets, trousers and shirts and a dinner suit from Barneys to the hotel. I had troubles, but I was living high too.
Something about this money, the problems it was causing, and my caution around any gift of Balarubu, made me try to keep it at a kind of mental arm’s reach. Sure, it made any kind of future possible. It made honesty easier, you’d think. But right now, between Angie and getting it into England, it was a big pain. On the other hand, in my hotel suite, my shopping, eating fancy, seeing the city, it was a pretty soft, well cushioned kind of pain.
Angie was excited on the day we sailed. I wasn’t. I was concerned, worried, edgy. Aware of what I was taking on to the ship, aware that if I was asked what I was carrying I would have to tell them. That would probably mean saying goodbye to the money, and no matter that I hadn’t worked for it, and that it had been, I thought, I truly believed, gifted to me by Balarubu, I had no desire to see it go.
I suspected that getting the money out of the country would be little problem: there are limited customs officers wherever you go, and naturally, the priority is watching what comes in. Also the Queen Mary was a toy for the rich; a floating five star hotel, and no one wants to discourage or inconvenience the rich. Sure enough, we wafted through with no more inconvenience than having constantly to smile graciously at the doffed caps and yes, sir, this way sir, can we help in any way sir?
The suite was amazing, very soft and padded, opulent even, and the ship was colossal and quite staggering. But it really wasn’t very interesting. It was luxurious in a very granny kind of way: like a bingo hall for the loaded; lots of cheesy murals and gilded staircases, buffet restaurants, ice sculptures and cabaret singers. As a package it was as camp as Christmas and as hip as a hip replacement. We stayed in the room plenty, ate room service, and a couple of times a day we watched a movie. After a couple of days, Angie also took to swimming in an indoor pool. I was pretty sure this was not entirely for the exercise, but also to get away from me, because the one time I tried it, I wasn’t comfortable doing lengths alongside the ranks of old women, sedately paddling along, necks arched back to keep the new hairdo out of the water. By the time we came into port, we were meeting to sleep and that was about it. I had tried to make contact with the kitchens, see if I maybe couldn’t wangle something with the bags, but passengers were pretty strictly segregated, and they weren’t having me near the kitchens. Some insurance thing, they told me. Some pain in the neck thing I thought was closer to the mark—the pain, for them, being me.
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