(no subject)
They go out together less and less; on stage, Daniel has to make more of an effort to sync with Paul. Hangovers seem to blur into each other, lasting days and days, counted with the clicking of crockery as their hands shake. Autumn’s rich gold-and-brass chords have echoed away into the concrete steel-limbed ice-shivered winter, and now everything is scabbed over with mildew, decaying slowly into a barren and unfriendly winter. Carlos hugs his elbows to himself and bitches constantly about being too cold, and Sam loses his temper (more often, and more easily) and tells him to either put on some weight or shut the fuck up and quit whining. They don’t speak for awhile. Daniel doesn’t know how long because he’s not around them often enough to really find out.
They’ve evolved a grim, unspoken routine at the end of the nights for checking to see where Paul is. He’s too unpredictable, is the problem. Regardless of their rock-star mythology, they all have cloud-fringed paths that they tend to follow. Carlos is a swallow, flying south to a girl’s bed at the end of the night. Sam, too, heads for sunnier climes, ending up at the improbably fabulous house-parties he has a knack for finding. Daniel follows a set flight pattern too, usually returning home alone at the same hour. Habits spun from chaos, and they can at least be relied upon to answer their phones. Paul, on the other hand, is not migratory. He has spun off-course and off the map, and it’s increasingly difficult to locate him, or to even set about locating him. How do you find someone in a large, foreign city, especially if they don’t necessarily want to be found?
Once or twice they’ve been left waiting for him at a petrol station, the driver drumming his thumbs on the wheel irritably, Daniel sick with worry and frustration and nerves, Carlos jittering about, pissing everyone off, and Sam fuming silently. And it always falls to Daniel to try and find out what happens - it seems like Daniel is the only one who even cares about the why as opposed to the what. But Paul always turns his dirty golden head away and shrugs him off. And sometimes it seems to Daniel that maybe he really is being too nosy, that he should mind his own business, but he imagines a morning when Paul doesn’t come back at all, and that’s enough reason for him to keep trying. At least for now.
He thinks about what it will mean when he stops caring, at his most drunken moments, the ones he deliberately won’t remember in the morning. He knows deep down that he’s always cared most about the band - or so he thinks, anyway, and he always thought that this deep, profound love for his band would extend to his bandmates. He couldn’t imagine a day when the band wasn’t his life, but then, he never imagined a day when he’d be avoiding his bandmates and praying for his hands to stop shaking so he can hold a guitar. The problem is that it’s easy to forget a band is composed of actual people. It’s easy to love the abstract idea of the band, after all, but less easy to love its components. It’s harder than he ever thought to continue to lower himself to the grey grind of the everyday than he ever imagined.
*
But sometimes, he still thinks that maybe they’re going to be okay.
This is one of those nights. They’ve got the evening off, travelling between states, so he doesn’t have to worry about finding anyone the next morning, or wondering if maybe someone will OD tonight (not that it’s actually happened, but you know. It could). He’s taken control of the TV and stuck in a film, and fuck everyone else. He can hear someone rattling around in the kitchen - probably Sam, since Carlos seems to subsist exclusively on the three c’s, coffee, cigarettes and coke, and Paul just never cooks.
“Oh, a movie,” Sam says, sticking his head in the doorway. “What’s it about?”
“A teacher who’s addicted to crack. I’m only five minutes in, if you want me to pause it.”
“Thanks.”
Sam comes in ten minutes later with a huge plate of spaghetti on his lap, while Daniel is flicking through the special features. Just as he’s about to start the film, Carlos sticks his head in the door, and he ends up joining them as well. Ten minutes after that, Paul mooches into the room, and Daniel starts the film again, and they end up all watching it together, which is kind of nice. It’s the first time in awhile that they’ve done anything together aside from play, and Daniel has to admit he’s missed this. Of course, it’s not perfect - Carlos actually falls asleep for a half an hour or so, and having someone eat spaghetti right next to you is always distracting. But whatever, as long as nobody is actually unconscious or talking coked-up bullshit about pathetic fallacy, or pussy, or the secret symbolism of Alexander Wang’s latest collection, he doesn’t care. Nearly halfway through, Sam goes to get a six-pack out of the fridge, and they all sit drinking beer, and it’s almost like they’re friends. On screen, Ryan Gosling tries to confront a dealer, but is too high to do it properly. “I don’t know,” he says. “I know I have to do something, but I don’t know.”
“What’s this character’s name again?” Paul asks.
“Dan. Dan Dunne,” Daniel says.
When it’s over and Carlos has woken up they crack open some more beer and the conversation ebbs and flows, and Daniel feels more comfortable than he has in awhile. He thinks it’s a shame, sometimes, that they all have to work together; maybe they could have been friends otherwise. This is a complete reversal of what he normally thinks, but when Paul is actually making jokes (Daniel forgets sometimes that he actually has a sense of humour) and Carlos attempts to be agreeable and Sam isn’t strained and trying to mediate, they almost have fun. The fifth beer apiece (“Where the fuck are these coming from?” Carlos asks wonderingly. Sam taps his nose and says, “You can always trust your old Uncle Sam to come up with the goods.”) and they’re into a noisy discussion of Europe.
“Fucking love the place,” Paul says decisively. “Except touring. Then it’s hell and I hate it with a passion.”
“I hate it anyway,” Carlos says, maybe just to be contrary.
“I don’t hate it, I mean,” Paul corrects himself. “It’s just difficult. The thing is, it’s so… crowded. All that history. It’s suffocating. It’s forced on top of you and all these people have to live with it, with all that weight. Like in Rome, how they just live like right next to the Pantheon. How could you do that?”
“The Eiffel Tower was always my favourite monument,” Sam says. “I mean the Pantheon is great and all, you know, national pride and all that, but I always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. It’s so hideous, you know? But beautiful as well.”
“Notre Dame,” Paul says. “That’s my favourite one.”
“Why?” Daniel asks.
“Churches. I love the idea that someone, somewhere, put that much effort - that so many people put that much effort - into making something beautiful. And that it’s lasted, and that people still actually go there to pray. It’s, you know. I like that so many people have been there, and not just to gawk at it, but to actually pray. And it had a novel written about it too, which is more than the Eiffel Tower can say.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Sam says good-naturedly.
“I don’t like monuments,” Carlos interjects. “Too many tourists, all cluttering up the place and wearing bad clothes. I mean, you spend, what, half an hour at a monument? If even. It’s all about the vibe of the city. Now Berlin, there’s a beautiful place. It’s got history, too, but it’s got a future. It’s like the perfect woman.”
“What, it’ll let you in?”
“Oh, fuck off, Sam” Carlos sniffs. “You have Bolognese sauce on your nose, by the way. I mean it’s fucking beautiful but it’s dangerous, and it has the best clubs, and the best coke this side of the bordellos of Bogota.”
“All about the party powder, huh. You pretend, but you’ve got no real sense of culture. I can see right through you. I know you watch Beavis and Butthead repeats when you think no one else is here.”
“The Astronomical Clock,” Daniel interrupts.
“What?”
“That’s my favourite monument. The Astronomical Clock, in Prague.”
“I didn’t think you were that obsessed with keeping time,” Paul says, smiling.
“I’m not - I just think, you know, it’s beautiful but it’s not useless. I mean, lots of these monuments, they’re just, you know, there. Half the people who actually live in the city don’t even go to them, or pay attention. You ignore the Eiffel Tower because you see it everywhere, you know? But the Astronomical Clock is actually useful, as well as being really fucking cool.”
“How anal-retentive of you,” Carlos says lightly.
“And also it won’t cause a deviated septum.”
“Nah,” Sam says. “Carlos is like Pete Doherty, they’re probably going to outlive us all.”
“I don’t know about that,” Paul says.
They stay up talking like that for hours - complete bullshit, of course, but they need to speak to each other, need the relief. Daniel can’t remember the last time he’s had a conversation that hasn’t been strained, or loaded with things that needed to be said but weren’t. He can’t remember the last time he wasn’t tense around these guys - even on stage, they don’t fit the way they used to, like the rusting cogs of an old, useless machine. They’re all staying up, prolonging the night, and he thinks maybe they’ve all felt the same way, felt the strain, even if no one will admit it. And yeah, maybe it’s sort of false, and maybe they all skirt around each other with throwaway remarks and sentences deliberately cut out and thrown away, but they need this.
He goes to bed feeling optimistic, which is more than he’s felt in a long time.
*
Three days later he wakes up to the sound of unfamiliar voices. He gropes around to find his watch. It’s a quarter past nine in the morning and his head feels like a shattered glass held together with sellotape. He went to sleep approximately three hours ago. His mouth tastes like sour whiskey backwash and when he stands up his knees tremble beneath him like choirgirls. Daniel pulls on the trousers he abandoned on the floor last night - not that he remembers getting in, really - and staggers out into the makeshift heart of the bus, which is awash in sunlight and smoke. Through the window he can see the forecourt of some petrol station.
There are three people there, on the couch - Carlos, another man, and a hard-faced, pretty girl with bitten nails and old, old eyes. She’s sitting slightly apart from them, staring into space, her eyes slightly glazed, her face a pale moon floating on the surface of her dark hair. Carlos is gesticulating lazily. The place stinks of weed. The fetid, moist smell makes Daniel’s stomach lurch and he wonders for a minute if he’s going to throw up. The windows are closed and the place is smoky and hazy at the edges like a sepia photo.
“Dan!” Carlos says, grinning like an asshole.
“What,” Daniel says flatly, because although there’s no actual rule against having groupies and hangers-on on the bus (and Christ knows he’s done it himself) he hates the idea of sleeping so close to people he doesn’t know. It’s just something he has a thing about. He heads over to the percolator and pours himself a shitty cup of coffee. There isn’t any milk. He drags out a small chair noisily and sits on it heavily.
“Meet my friends,” Carlos says, and then looks at them and amends, “Meet the random people I met last night. This is Charlemagne - isn’t that a charming name?” He indicates the man next to him, who is wearing sweatpants and has a sickly, dangerous grin and a face that is very close to being handsome but not quite there, “And this is Charlemagne’s delightful young lady, who is, he tells me, extremely talented in a number of different areas. They’re both American, some coincidence, isn’t it?”
Daniel goes red on her behalf, but the girl’s expression doesn’t even flicker. She is as impassive as a billboard. And the thing is, is while he’s willing to turn a blind eye to a few things, prostitution makes him feel sick. The idea of buying a warm bed for the night - of reducing someone to a concept, and a cheap one at that, of reducing them to a convenient fuck - is repulsive. He doesn’t give a fuck about the politics of it, or the argument that some women do it willingly; he hates it, pure and simple, and he hates the idea that Carlos is using the money that he earned from Daniel’s precious band to buy this brittle-looking girl with her wrists like wishbones. He looks at Charlemagne with ill-concealed dislike on his face, and then he says, “I’m going to go buy milk.”
In the petrol-station shop - turns out they’re in Portugal, not that he really gives a shit any more - he buys the milk, and when he comes out the girl is waiting for him with a nervous smile hovering about her lips, squinting in the cold morning sun. She’s shading her eyes using her hand as a visor and her hair glints coffee-coloured, shines like a knife. The smell of the country is all around them, invasive and sandy, a hint of fruit and spices. The milk is strange looking, but then, everything is.
“Hi,” Daniel says flatly, and then, “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to throw up now.”
In the alley behind the petrol station, she rubs his back while he retches and extracts a mint from her handbag. Daniel is incandescent with embarrassment, even though she’s only a hooker and she’s probably seen worse. He wipes his mouth and breathes deeply, feeling much better with the remainder of ten Jack-and-Cokes simmering before him on the asphalt. “Thanks,” he says, taking the mint, and then, “I’m sorry about that. I had a late night and all the smoke kind of turned my stomach.”
“Baby, I’ve seen worse. You want to sit down?”
There’s a low wall running alongside the station, and Daniel sits down gratefully, even though if he’s honest he’d rather not be seen in public with her.
“Warm,” she comments briefly. “Much colder in America, this time of year.”
“Yeah,” Daniel says absently, staring into space, wondering when he can leave without being rude. While he disapproves of buying girls, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wants to spend time with them - good luck to them and all that, but he doesn’t like being so close to what feels like failure. Somewhere, in his secret heart, he believes (irrationally, instinctively) that if these girls would only try hard enough they wouldn’t have to sell themselves on the street. They wouldn’t have such a rotten, stinking, fucking sad air about them, like marionettes on cut strings, like ballerinas on broken feet, if they could only try enough. He knows this doesn’t make sense. He knows that when you haven’t eaten in three days and your heart is pumping smack and strychnine instead of blood you don’t see things that clearly. He knows that choice is at best an illusion for them. But he still can’t imagine just giving in like that, bidding your life to the highest buyer and letting someone determine how you live. He doesn’t like to think about it, if he’s honest; it cuts too close to his secret core.
Thing is, he just doesn’t like being so close to failure in case it rubs off. He feels sorry for them, but he also can’t stand to be around them.
“You don’t approve of us, do you? I saw the look you gave Charlie,” she comments wryly. Her voice is a flat Midwestern back-alley of a voice, a voice that’s been stretched and strung between electricity pylons. He wonders how she ended up here, in Portugal.
“I don’t disapprove of you personally,” Daniel protests, caught off guard and startled out of politeness. “I don’t even know you. I don’t even know your name. I don’t… I just don’t agree with prostitution, is all.”
“Holly,” she says, sticking her hand out. Daniel shakes it with slight trepidation, and says, “That’s a nice name. Like Golightly?”
She laughs.
“D’you know, you’re the first person who’s asked me that in months. No, really. Most people just assume it’s not my real name and don’t really give a shit if it’s a reference to anything.”
“Oh,” Daniel says.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” she says. “It’s sort of my name. Hallelujah is really my name. But everyone calls me Holly, so I didn’t even have to change it when I began.”
“Do you tell everyone that secret?”
“Would you tell everyone if your name was Hallelujah?”
“…I don’t know. I guess not.”
“There you go. I don’t tell everyone that secret. I only told you because you blushed on my behalf when Carlos introduced me. That’s pretty unusual in this kind of business.”
“Hey,” Daniel says. “Listen. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about… about us. We’re not - I’m not -”
“The kind of man who hires prostitutes?” she says, with an ironic twist of her mouth, as though she knows exactly what Daniel is thinking. “It’s okay. Neither is Carlos. I just came with Charlie because business was slow and I decided to take the night off. Your band’s honour is safe with me. Carlos is very talkative when he’s high.”
“Tell me about it,” Daniel admits, and then they look at each other and he has to laugh, because, well, what else can he do? “What are you doing in Portugal?”
“Oh, you know, lots of people come here, it’s got some real party towns. I was going through Europe and I guess I never left.”
“Oh, right,” Daniel says. It’s not really an explanation, but it’s not as though he was expecting one.
“Do you want a cigarette?” Holly asks, and Daniel shakes his head no, and then they sit in companionable silence, the guitarist and the whore, in the sunshine outside a petrol station somewhere in a country neither of them really know.
Charlemagne is walking out the door as they return. He waits impatiently for them, head tilted back against the sun. Daniel doesn’t like the look of him - he wishes that Holly, who seems like a nice enough girl, wasn’t mixed up with him. That Hallelujah wasn’t mixed up with him, if that’s really her name. He wishes she would quit. He just doesn’t want to be the one to actually make her.
“Wait,” he says, on some unknown impulse, as she walks away from him. “I never introduced myself.”
“It’s okay, cutie,” Holly says, and smiles. “I don’t really care.” And with that, she climbs into Charlemagne’s car, and they drive away.
Back on the bus, Sam has joined Carlos on the couch and the two are sharing a joint, looking hilariously peaceful in the piano-gold sun streaming through the ugly lace curtains spiderwebbing the windows of the bus. Sam looks mildly ill, and Dan has vague memories of him betting some guy he could drink five shots of tequila in a row without throwing up. He sits down and wishes his head would stop aching.
“Prostitutes, Carlos,” he says briefly, because he should say something.
“It’s all about the money and bitches, Dan,” Carlos says. “Maybe I was a pimp in a past life.”
“You were a madam,” Sam says, and the two of them fizz and dissolve into laughter, stoned off their tits.
“It’s not funny,” he says. “It’s not like I have a problem with you bringing back anyone or anything, it’s just, like, a dealer and a hooker? Christ.”
Carlos rolls his eyes. Sam looks at him blearily and says, “I remember when you used to be fun, Dan. Pull the stick out of your ass and come smoke up with us, okay?” His voice is still sleep-rough and raw, but that doesn’t entirely hide the tone of annoyance. The sun has gilded the contours of his face and arms smooth and brassy, like an antique pocketwatch. His white shirt hangs open at the neck rakishly. Next to Carlos’ harsh contrast of white skin and black shirt, his sharp, sleek lines, they look like men from two entirely different centuries. Sam has one eyebrow raised and is holding out the joint.
“Whatever,” Daniel says, but he takes the joint anyway.
They’ve evolved a grim, unspoken routine at the end of the nights for checking to see where Paul is. He’s too unpredictable, is the problem. Regardless of their rock-star mythology, they all have cloud-fringed paths that they tend to follow. Carlos is a swallow, flying south to a girl’s bed at the end of the night. Sam, too, heads for sunnier climes, ending up at the improbably fabulous house-parties he has a knack for finding. Daniel follows a set flight pattern too, usually returning home alone at the same hour. Habits spun from chaos, and they can at least be relied upon to answer their phones. Paul, on the other hand, is not migratory. He has spun off-course and off the map, and it’s increasingly difficult to locate him, or to even set about locating him. How do you find someone in a large, foreign city, especially if they don’t necessarily want to be found?
Once or twice they’ve been left waiting for him at a petrol station, the driver drumming his thumbs on the wheel irritably, Daniel sick with worry and frustration and nerves, Carlos jittering about, pissing everyone off, and Sam fuming silently. And it always falls to Daniel to try and find out what happens - it seems like Daniel is the only one who even cares about the why as opposed to the what. But Paul always turns his dirty golden head away and shrugs him off. And sometimes it seems to Daniel that maybe he really is being too nosy, that he should mind his own business, but he imagines a morning when Paul doesn’t come back at all, and that’s enough reason for him to keep trying. At least for now.
He thinks about what it will mean when he stops caring, at his most drunken moments, the ones he deliberately won’t remember in the morning. He knows deep down that he’s always cared most about the band - or so he thinks, anyway, and he always thought that this deep, profound love for his band would extend to his bandmates. He couldn’t imagine a day when the band wasn’t his life, but then, he never imagined a day when he’d be avoiding his bandmates and praying for his hands to stop shaking so he can hold a guitar. The problem is that it’s easy to forget a band is composed of actual people. It’s easy to love the abstract idea of the band, after all, but less easy to love its components. It’s harder than he ever thought to continue to lower himself to the grey grind of the everyday than he ever imagined.
*
But sometimes, he still thinks that maybe they’re going to be okay.
This is one of those nights. They’ve got the evening off, travelling between states, so he doesn’t have to worry about finding anyone the next morning, or wondering if maybe someone will OD tonight (not that it’s actually happened, but you know. It could). He’s taken control of the TV and stuck in a film, and fuck everyone else. He can hear someone rattling around in the kitchen - probably Sam, since Carlos seems to subsist exclusively on the three c’s, coffee, cigarettes and coke, and Paul just never cooks.
“Oh, a movie,” Sam says, sticking his head in the doorway. “What’s it about?”
“A teacher who’s addicted to crack. I’m only five minutes in, if you want me to pause it.”
“Thanks.”
Sam comes in ten minutes later with a huge plate of spaghetti on his lap, while Daniel is flicking through the special features. Just as he’s about to start the film, Carlos sticks his head in the door, and he ends up joining them as well. Ten minutes after that, Paul mooches into the room, and Daniel starts the film again, and they end up all watching it together, which is kind of nice. It’s the first time in awhile that they’ve done anything together aside from play, and Daniel has to admit he’s missed this. Of course, it’s not perfect - Carlos actually falls asleep for a half an hour or so, and having someone eat spaghetti right next to you is always distracting. But whatever, as long as nobody is actually unconscious or talking coked-up bullshit about pathetic fallacy, or pussy, or the secret symbolism of Alexander Wang’s latest collection, he doesn’t care. Nearly halfway through, Sam goes to get a six-pack out of the fridge, and they all sit drinking beer, and it’s almost like they’re friends. On screen, Ryan Gosling tries to confront a dealer, but is too high to do it properly. “I don’t know,” he says. “I know I have to do something, but I don’t know.”
“What’s this character’s name again?” Paul asks.
“Dan. Dan Dunne,” Daniel says.
When it’s over and Carlos has woken up they crack open some more beer and the conversation ebbs and flows, and Daniel feels more comfortable than he has in awhile. He thinks it’s a shame, sometimes, that they all have to work together; maybe they could have been friends otherwise. This is a complete reversal of what he normally thinks, but when Paul is actually making jokes (Daniel forgets sometimes that he actually has a sense of humour) and Carlos attempts to be agreeable and Sam isn’t strained and trying to mediate, they almost have fun. The fifth beer apiece (“Where the fuck are these coming from?” Carlos asks wonderingly. Sam taps his nose and says, “You can always trust your old Uncle Sam to come up with the goods.”) and they’re into a noisy discussion of Europe.
“Fucking love the place,” Paul says decisively. “Except touring. Then it’s hell and I hate it with a passion.”
“I hate it anyway,” Carlos says, maybe just to be contrary.
“I don’t hate it, I mean,” Paul corrects himself. “It’s just difficult. The thing is, it’s so… crowded. All that history. It’s suffocating. It’s forced on top of you and all these people have to live with it, with all that weight. Like in Rome, how they just live like right next to the Pantheon. How could you do that?”
“The Eiffel Tower was always my favourite monument,” Sam says. “I mean the Pantheon is great and all, you know, national pride and all that, but I always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. It’s so hideous, you know? But beautiful as well.”
“Notre Dame,” Paul says. “That’s my favourite one.”
“Why?” Daniel asks.
“Churches. I love the idea that someone, somewhere, put that much effort - that so many people put that much effort - into making something beautiful. And that it’s lasted, and that people still actually go there to pray. It’s, you know. I like that so many people have been there, and not just to gawk at it, but to actually pray. And it had a novel written about it too, which is more than the Eiffel Tower can say.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Sam says good-naturedly.
“I don’t like monuments,” Carlos interjects. “Too many tourists, all cluttering up the place and wearing bad clothes. I mean, you spend, what, half an hour at a monument? If even. It’s all about the vibe of the city. Now Berlin, there’s a beautiful place. It’s got history, too, but it’s got a future. It’s like the perfect woman.”
“What, it’ll let you in?”
“Oh, fuck off, Sam” Carlos sniffs. “You have Bolognese sauce on your nose, by the way. I mean it’s fucking beautiful but it’s dangerous, and it has the best clubs, and the best coke this side of the bordellos of Bogota.”
“All about the party powder, huh. You pretend, but you’ve got no real sense of culture. I can see right through you. I know you watch Beavis and Butthead repeats when you think no one else is here.”
“The Astronomical Clock,” Daniel interrupts.
“What?”
“That’s my favourite monument. The Astronomical Clock, in Prague.”
“I didn’t think you were that obsessed with keeping time,” Paul says, smiling.
“I’m not - I just think, you know, it’s beautiful but it’s not useless. I mean, lots of these monuments, they’re just, you know, there. Half the people who actually live in the city don’t even go to them, or pay attention. You ignore the Eiffel Tower because you see it everywhere, you know? But the Astronomical Clock is actually useful, as well as being really fucking cool.”
“How anal-retentive of you,” Carlos says lightly.
“And also it won’t cause a deviated septum.”
“Nah,” Sam says. “Carlos is like Pete Doherty, they’re probably going to outlive us all.”
“I don’t know about that,” Paul says.
They stay up talking like that for hours - complete bullshit, of course, but they need to speak to each other, need the relief. Daniel can’t remember the last time he’s had a conversation that hasn’t been strained, or loaded with things that needed to be said but weren’t. He can’t remember the last time he wasn’t tense around these guys - even on stage, they don’t fit the way they used to, like the rusting cogs of an old, useless machine. They’re all staying up, prolonging the night, and he thinks maybe they’ve all felt the same way, felt the strain, even if no one will admit it. And yeah, maybe it’s sort of false, and maybe they all skirt around each other with throwaway remarks and sentences deliberately cut out and thrown away, but they need this.
He goes to bed feeling optimistic, which is more than he’s felt in a long time.
*
Three days later he wakes up to the sound of unfamiliar voices. He gropes around to find his watch. It’s a quarter past nine in the morning and his head feels like a shattered glass held together with sellotape. He went to sleep approximately three hours ago. His mouth tastes like sour whiskey backwash and when he stands up his knees tremble beneath him like choirgirls. Daniel pulls on the trousers he abandoned on the floor last night - not that he remembers getting in, really - and staggers out into the makeshift heart of the bus, which is awash in sunlight and smoke. Through the window he can see the forecourt of some petrol station.
There are three people there, on the couch - Carlos, another man, and a hard-faced, pretty girl with bitten nails and old, old eyes. She’s sitting slightly apart from them, staring into space, her eyes slightly glazed, her face a pale moon floating on the surface of her dark hair. Carlos is gesticulating lazily. The place stinks of weed. The fetid, moist smell makes Daniel’s stomach lurch and he wonders for a minute if he’s going to throw up. The windows are closed and the place is smoky and hazy at the edges like a sepia photo.
“Dan!” Carlos says, grinning like an asshole.
“What,” Daniel says flatly, because although there’s no actual rule against having groupies and hangers-on on the bus (and Christ knows he’s done it himself) he hates the idea of sleeping so close to people he doesn’t know. It’s just something he has a thing about. He heads over to the percolator and pours himself a shitty cup of coffee. There isn’t any milk. He drags out a small chair noisily and sits on it heavily.
“Meet my friends,” Carlos says, and then looks at them and amends, “Meet the random people I met last night. This is Charlemagne - isn’t that a charming name?” He indicates the man next to him, who is wearing sweatpants and has a sickly, dangerous grin and a face that is very close to being handsome but not quite there, “And this is Charlemagne’s delightful young lady, who is, he tells me, extremely talented in a number of different areas. They’re both American, some coincidence, isn’t it?”
Daniel goes red on her behalf, but the girl’s expression doesn’t even flicker. She is as impassive as a billboard. And the thing is, is while he’s willing to turn a blind eye to a few things, prostitution makes him feel sick. The idea of buying a warm bed for the night - of reducing someone to a concept, and a cheap one at that, of reducing them to a convenient fuck - is repulsive. He doesn’t give a fuck about the politics of it, or the argument that some women do it willingly; he hates it, pure and simple, and he hates the idea that Carlos is using the money that he earned from Daniel’s precious band to buy this brittle-looking girl with her wrists like wishbones. He looks at Charlemagne with ill-concealed dislike on his face, and then he says, “I’m going to go buy milk.”
In the petrol-station shop - turns out they’re in Portugal, not that he really gives a shit any more - he buys the milk, and when he comes out the girl is waiting for him with a nervous smile hovering about her lips, squinting in the cold morning sun. She’s shading her eyes using her hand as a visor and her hair glints coffee-coloured, shines like a knife. The smell of the country is all around them, invasive and sandy, a hint of fruit and spices. The milk is strange looking, but then, everything is.
“Hi,” Daniel says flatly, and then, “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to throw up now.”
In the alley behind the petrol station, she rubs his back while he retches and extracts a mint from her handbag. Daniel is incandescent with embarrassment, even though she’s only a hooker and she’s probably seen worse. He wipes his mouth and breathes deeply, feeling much better with the remainder of ten Jack-and-Cokes simmering before him on the asphalt. “Thanks,” he says, taking the mint, and then, “I’m sorry about that. I had a late night and all the smoke kind of turned my stomach.”
“Baby, I’ve seen worse. You want to sit down?”
There’s a low wall running alongside the station, and Daniel sits down gratefully, even though if he’s honest he’d rather not be seen in public with her.
“Warm,” she comments briefly. “Much colder in America, this time of year.”
“Yeah,” Daniel says absently, staring into space, wondering when he can leave without being rude. While he disapproves of buying girls, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wants to spend time with them - good luck to them and all that, but he doesn’t like being so close to what feels like failure. Somewhere, in his secret heart, he believes (irrationally, instinctively) that if these girls would only try hard enough they wouldn’t have to sell themselves on the street. They wouldn’t have such a rotten, stinking, fucking sad air about them, like marionettes on cut strings, like ballerinas on broken feet, if they could only try enough. He knows this doesn’t make sense. He knows that when you haven’t eaten in three days and your heart is pumping smack and strychnine instead of blood you don’t see things that clearly. He knows that choice is at best an illusion for them. But he still can’t imagine just giving in like that, bidding your life to the highest buyer and letting someone determine how you live. He doesn’t like to think about it, if he’s honest; it cuts too close to his secret core.
Thing is, he just doesn’t like being so close to failure in case it rubs off. He feels sorry for them, but he also can’t stand to be around them.
“You don’t approve of us, do you? I saw the look you gave Charlie,” she comments wryly. Her voice is a flat Midwestern back-alley of a voice, a voice that’s been stretched and strung between electricity pylons. He wonders how she ended up here, in Portugal.
“I don’t disapprove of you personally,” Daniel protests, caught off guard and startled out of politeness. “I don’t even know you. I don’t even know your name. I don’t… I just don’t agree with prostitution, is all.”
“Holly,” she says, sticking her hand out. Daniel shakes it with slight trepidation, and says, “That’s a nice name. Like Golightly?”
She laughs.
“D’you know, you’re the first person who’s asked me that in months. No, really. Most people just assume it’s not my real name and don’t really give a shit if it’s a reference to anything.”
“Oh,” Daniel says.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” she says. “It’s sort of my name. Hallelujah is really my name. But everyone calls me Holly, so I didn’t even have to change it when I began.”
“Do you tell everyone that secret?”
“Would you tell everyone if your name was Hallelujah?”
“…I don’t know. I guess not.”
“There you go. I don’t tell everyone that secret. I only told you because you blushed on my behalf when Carlos introduced me. That’s pretty unusual in this kind of business.”
“Hey,” Daniel says. “Listen. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about… about us. We’re not - I’m not -”
“The kind of man who hires prostitutes?” she says, with an ironic twist of her mouth, as though she knows exactly what Daniel is thinking. “It’s okay. Neither is Carlos. I just came with Charlie because business was slow and I decided to take the night off. Your band’s honour is safe with me. Carlos is very talkative when he’s high.”
“Tell me about it,” Daniel admits, and then they look at each other and he has to laugh, because, well, what else can he do? “What are you doing in Portugal?”
“Oh, you know, lots of people come here, it’s got some real party towns. I was going through Europe and I guess I never left.”
“Oh, right,” Daniel says. It’s not really an explanation, but it’s not as though he was expecting one.
“Do you want a cigarette?” Holly asks, and Daniel shakes his head no, and then they sit in companionable silence, the guitarist and the whore, in the sunshine outside a petrol station somewhere in a country neither of them really know.
Charlemagne is walking out the door as they return. He waits impatiently for them, head tilted back against the sun. Daniel doesn’t like the look of him - he wishes that Holly, who seems like a nice enough girl, wasn’t mixed up with him. That Hallelujah wasn’t mixed up with him, if that’s really her name. He wishes she would quit. He just doesn’t want to be the one to actually make her.
“Wait,” he says, on some unknown impulse, as she walks away from him. “I never introduced myself.”
“It’s okay, cutie,” Holly says, and smiles. “I don’t really care.” And with that, she climbs into Charlemagne’s car, and they drive away.
Back on the bus, Sam has joined Carlos on the couch and the two are sharing a joint, looking hilariously peaceful in the piano-gold sun streaming through the ugly lace curtains spiderwebbing the windows of the bus. Sam looks mildly ill, and Dan has vague memories of him betting some guy he could drink five shots of tequila in a row without throwing up. He sits down and wishes his head would stop aching.
“Prostitutes, Carlos,” he says briefly, because he should say something.
“It’s all about the money and bitches, Dan,” Carlos says. “Maybe I was a pimp in a past life.”
“You were a madam,” Sam says, and the two of them fizz and dissolve into laughter, stoned off their tits.
“It’s not funny,” he says. “It’s not like I have a problem with you bringing back anyone or anything, it’s just, like, a dealer and a hooker? Christ.”
Carlos rolls his eyes. Sam looks at him blearily and says, “I remember when you used to be fun, Dan. Pull the stick out of your ass and come smoke up with us, okay?” His voice is still sleep-rough and raw, but that doesn’t entirely hide the tone of annoyance. The sun has gilded the contours of his face and arms smooth and brassy, like an antique pocketwatch. His white shirt hangs open at the neck rakishly. Next to Carlos’ harsh contrast of white skin and black shirt, his sharp, sleek lines, they look like men from two entirely different centuries. Sam has one eyebrow raised and is holding out the joint.
“Whatever,” Daniel says, but he takes the joint anyway.