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  ‘It might be a good idea if you slowed down a little,’ Spike said.

  She ignored him. She felt invincible.

  ‘Steer to your left,’ Spike said, and she complied, imagining in her mind’s eye the curve of the road.

  There was a sudden loud sound of a horn, and she felt the steering wheel being taken over and turned violently. Something big passed them by. Lottie felt the car shake. She slowed down and pulled the scarf from her head.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ she asked, looking behind her at the rear end of an enormous truck. ‘I thought you said the road was empty.’

  ‘It came from nowhere,’ Spike said. ‘One minute the road was clear. The next it was almost on top of us.’

  ‘There must be a dip in the road or something,’ Tina said.

  Lottie pulled over into the verge and they all got out. They were laughing and talking loudly the way you do after a near miss. Lottie yelled with her head back and spun round and round. Tina cartwheeled along the side of the road. Spike pushed at her so that she fell protesting to the ground. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, Lottie’s feeling of exhilaration passed and she felt wobbly and tearful. She walked a little way through the scrub. The light was lemony. She could taste grit in her mouth.

  *

  Tina stretched to relieve the stiffness in her joints and tied her hair back again with the scarf. Spike leant against the bonnet of the car, drinking a Coke.

  ‘What’s going on with you?’ he asked her.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said. He looked as if he belonged on a billboard – the glint of the sun on the glass bottle, the slope of his legs, the way he was looking off into the middle distance as if contemplating the greatness of America.

  ‘The way you keep goading your sister. This stupid idea of getting me to pretend to fall for her to see if it will break up her relationship. You are many things, Tina, but I’ve never thought of you as someone cruel.’

  ‘You don’t understand me,’ she said. ‘You never have.’

  *

  A week or so after their meeting at The Fillmore, he had rung her up. ‘I can’t stop thinking about you,’ he’d said and she had been instantly wary of his openness, the way he was so quick to say how he felt. She would have assumed it to be an American characteristic if she hadn’t already slept with three people in San Francisco who had been far more measured.

  ‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ he had asked her as they sat together on a balcony in the harbour on their first date. He had chosen an expensive restaurant and dressed carefully for the occasion – a pale linen suit with creases around the knees.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she replied, wondering if, after all, it had been such a good idea to agree to meet him. He was undeniably handsome. His shoulders were broad in his jacket and he had a mobile, intelligent face and a sturdy grace that she found sexy, but there was an earnestness about him that made her uneasy. She was accustomed to men who were more polished and more indifferent.

  They hadn’t eaten very much of the slivers of glistening food, piled in artful heaps on black plates, but she had drunk a lot. She was in the habit of getting drunk before she made love. It made the transition from small talk to skin so much easier. In his messy apartment littered with papers and socks and the odd lump of rock, he had kissed her slowly, touching her face, twisting his fingers through her hair, as if he had already found all that he wanted. She remembered feeling impatient at his carefulness. There was something grateful in the way he touched her that threatened her precarious desire. She wanted a reflection of her own, alcohol-fuelled lust – something quick and hard and over and done with. She had pushed him back on the sofa bed and unzipped his trousers, pulling them down only as far as necessary. She had climbed on him, her silky dress gathered at her waist, her hand holding aside her pants so that he could enter her quickly. She wanted to avoid the slow business of undressing – the stripping of layers and the awkward wriggles and pluckings which felt too much like intimacy. Even then he had held back, slowed her down, moved in a deliberate, searching way that had made her cry out and grind against him. Afterwards she had wanted him gone so that she could relax properly, but he had fallen asleep with his arms around her and she hadn’t felt she could wake him up.

  *

  ‘So explain it to me,’ Spike said now.

  ‘You will be doing Lottie a favour if you stop her marrying Dean. She can do so much better.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s any of your business who your sister chooses to marry,’ Spike said. ‘It’s certainly not any of mine! Besides, I would hardly think that you are an expert in successful relationships.’

  ‘By that I take it that you see success as having settled down with someone who bores me with a couple of children who will suck me dry and then spit me out.’

  Spike looked at her and then shook his head.

  ‘You really don’t have a clue,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re taking the high moral ground. I don’t see any evidence that you’ve found your own happy ever after. You’re still drifting around the way you always did.’

  ‘At least I’m open to the possibility,’ he said.

  She was infuriated by his tone of disappointment, and the way his eyes slid over her as if he had hoped for more.

  ‘I’m open to everything,’ she said loftily. ‘It’s the way I live my life.’

  ‘Well good for you,’ Spike said angrily, draining the last of his drink.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Tina asked.

  ‘Nothing at all.’ He got back into the car and stared stonily ahead. He always had a fine line in sulking. He made injured silence into an art form.

  She turned away, looking out into the grassland. Her sister was wandering around, looking like she had lost something. She thought she was probably searching for a shrub to pee behind.

  ‘Lottie!’ Tina shouted. ‘It’s time to go.’

  Chapter 13

  AFTER THE TOWN OF MOJAVE, Route 14 turned into Route 395 and revealed a spectacular display of red mountains, ice-white salt marsh and flashes of yellow flowers. In the distance, the craggy, monumental peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains were the colour of a pigeon’s wing. This new sense of perspective in the landscape seemed to bring with it a lift in spirits. Spike had emerged from his moodiness and Lottie was singing along with Johnny Cash and eating red strawberry laces as she drove.

  ‘I think we should stop at Lone Pine,’ Tina said, consulting her phone. ‘It’s in the Alabama Hills where some of Mia’s favourite films were shot – the dire sarsaparilla-drinking Hopalong Cassidy but also High Sierra and Ride Lonesome.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be crass, but where exactly is she?’ Spike asked. He had been vaguely worried about the whereabouts of Mia’s ashes since he had joined them. He considered the two sisters easily mad enough to have mislaid the urn somewhere or to have it rattling around in the picnic bag with the remains of their lunch.

  ‘Her ashes, you mean?’ Tina said. ‘She’s safely stowed away with the spare tyre.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but . . . what was it she actually died of?’ Tina hadn’t sounded as if she wanted to talk about it anymore, but if he was going along on this trip he felt he should at least know the history of the person they were carrying with them.

  ‘Heart failure,’ Tina said. She turned to look out of the window. The evasive tone in her voice made him think there was more to the story than she was letting on. She looked sad. The light hit her face in a series of beautiful angles. He hated the fact that part of him wanted to reach out and touch her. He thought of the way she had looked at him just before she had left his apartment for the last time. She had stood in the middle of the room, the sun burnishing her, the way it was now, and she had stared at him blankly, as if he were a stranger.

  *

  They passed a hill with the letters ‘LP’ scored into its side, and a cemetery with a white monument and neat gravestones lined up like beehives.
Lottie thought that perhaps it would be better if they had somewhere definite to put Mia. A place with her name clearly marked so that they could return and place flowers. There was something a bit random about driving into the middle of nowhere and leaving her there.

  ‘When I die, I want a great big white angel on my grave,’ Tina had announced, long before death had any real meaning for them. The conversation had taken place after they had wept through a movie in which a burial site had been marked only with some tied sticks. ‘I’d like to be cremated,’ Mia had said, ‘and put under Landing Rock.’ Lottie could remember them mocking her. Mia had been so easy to tease; she’d had a kind of innocent gullibility that was made for taking the piss.

  They drove past a rustic sign announcing the town. Next came a diner called Seasons with a wooden merry-go-round, a number of timber-clad buildings with saloon doors embellished with cartwheels, and some life-sized models of cowboys peeping furtively out from under hats. They found a motel that sat crouched below the mountains, looking vulnerable to the mass above it. After a brief squabble about who was going to get which room, the three of them went to the Museum of Film History next door and watched a documentary about the westerns made in the Alabama Hills. Tina issued her ninth challenge, which was for Lottie to try on Gregory Peck’s cowboy hat. She managed about three giggling, terrified seconds before she whipped it off again and replaced it on its pedestal, just a second before the curator came back into the room. In a shop that sold cowboy paraphernalia, they fingered fringed boots and deerskin gloves. Lottie ignored Tina’s suggestion that she should get Dean some chaps and her comment that ‘he’ll look sexy riding you’, settling on a sturdy leather belt instead. Both Tina and Lottie bought western shirts embroidered with birds and roses. Afterwards, they sat in a bar by the highway. The light was pinkish and soft, and a stream of curvaceous, shining trucks passed by like movie stars.

  ‘What you guys doing tonight?’ A red-faced man with a wide, childlike smile stood over them with a fistful of leaflets.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lottie said. ‘We thought maybe we might go and get something to eat.’

  ‘Well, you might just be in luck,’ the man said. ‘There’s a buffet and a dance three blocks from here starting right about now.’

  He handed them a flyer on which there was a series of footprints that meandered in pairs across the page, interspersed with lurid-looking pieces of meat, as if there had been a crime in an abattoir. Tina was grinning, and Lottie knew that she was condemning the man because he’d pronounced buffet with a hard ‘t’. Here was another example, if she needed it, of Tina claiming to be a go-with-it free spirit, when in actual fact she was a complete snob.

  ‘I think we should go,’ Spike said. ‘You two can put on your new shirts and get the authentic American experience of steak and square dancing.’

  Lottie smiled at him. She liked his enthusiasm and the clever way he managed to keep Tina on her toes. Anyone who could do that had to have a certain resilience and grit. Tina had resisted her every interrogation about what had happened between them – ‘It was nothing,’ she had said, in her most superior voice. ‘Just one of those episodes that happen when you travel.’ As if she thought Lottie had no experience of such things, tucked up as she was in her safe, long-term relationship. Tina had no idea of the depth of Dean’s tenderness, the way he championed even the smallest of her endeavours and listened with close attention to all she had to say. When he introduced her to people he acted as if they were fortunate to meet her, and after a frost he went out in his dressing gown and scraped the windscreen of her car clear. Tina had never been with anyone long enough to understand the things that tied you to each other.

  *

  Showered and dressed in their cowboy best, they presented themselves at a restaurant just off the high street. The tables and chairs had been set up around a dance floor, where three circles of people were being led through sashays and swings by a man with a microphone and a Stetson. By his side, a nimble little woman was playing the fiddle with her mouth set as firmly as the line of her bow. Most of the people were wearing what looked like their work clothes and danced with the abstracted air of people who were as familiar with the turns and bends as they were with brushing their teeth or taking the bins out. The participants caught up each other’s arms with inward, self-absorbed faces, as though the linking and looping were not so much a dance as a social obligation. Lottie felt overdressed in her western shirt and hat, as if she and her companions were intruding on a well-worn ritual.

  ‘I hope they don’t think we’re taking the piss,’ she whispered to Tina.

  ‘You’re too self-conscious, that’s your trouble. Relax a little.’

  There was nothing that made Lottie tense up more than being told to relax by her sister.

  ‘Shall we dance?’ Spike asked, doing a formal little bow that made Lottie laugh.

  ‘I don’t know the steps,’ she said.

  ‘Come and join us,’ the man with the Stetson said.

  ‘Three isn’t a good number,’ said Tina. ‘You need a partner. I’ll sit this one out.’

  ‘Can’t I sit and you dance with Spike?’ Lottie said.

  ‘Nope. It’s Challenge Ten time.’ Tina moved over to the table and began helping herself to fifteen different types of meat.

  ‘Come on,’ Spike said. ‘The guy will talk us through the steps.’

  So Lottie got up and followed Spike. One of the circles broke to let them in, and after a few agonising minutes when she didn’t know which direction she was supposed to be going in, she found herself carried along by the others. Before long she had grasped the basics. When it was their turn to hold the arch at the head of the line, she and Spike grinned at each other.

  ‘It’s fun, right?’ he said, and as the dancers passed under their arms, she felt a new lightness. She loved the pattern of the steps. There was no need here for any of the sort of self-expression she found so difficult on other dance floors. These moves had been done a thousand times in this exact and solemn way. Spike’s arm encircled her waist and then spun her round; she wove in and out of the standing men to find him again.

  ‘You’re good at this,’ he said, before he let her go to step between the ill-fitting jeans and dowdy skirts. Spike looked over to where Tina was sitting. A man was bending over her. She arched her neck up at him and fiddled with her hair (why did she always feel she had to flirt?) and then got to her feet and allowed herself to be led into the circling dance. He watched her leaning into the man, all slanting smiles, touching him on his arm, his shoulder. Her partner was wearing a white shirt open over a ruddy neck and had the victorious air of someone who has just successfully lassoed a wild horse. Spike met up with Lottie again. She looked flushed and pretty in her rose-strewn shirt.

  ‘I think I need a drink,’ she said, and so he took her arm and led her up to the bar. They got cold beers and sat back down at the table.

  ‘Tina seems to be having fun,’ Lottie said. She had a strange way of drinking from the bottle with her mouth sealed over the top of it, so that her cheeks filled and she couldn’t breathe and made a gulping noise as she swallowed. Spike looked for Tina again, and saw that the dance had broken up into pairs. She was swaying in White Shirt’s arms, her hands clasped around his neck. The man in the Stetson was singing ‘Moon River’ in a strange nasal tone. As she turned, Tina caught Spike’s eye and smiled. He didn’t smile back.

  ‘Tell me about Dean,’ he said to Lottie. ‘What is it about him that makes you want to marry him?’

  Lottie pulled her hair away from her hot face. She was just as lovely as her sister; it was only that she was in the habit of thinking she wasn’t. Tina was arrogant to think herself so much more attractive. She did her sister a disservice. He had no intention of capitulating to Tina’s deluded plan, even though he had begun to think that it might be entertaining to make her see the error of her ways. Tina thought everyone was as shallow as she was. He wished there was some other way to
tell Lottie that she was easily her sister’s equal in looks and far superior in character.

  *

  With Tina, he’d thought he’d found the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. The way she always held herself slightly back from him had only added to her charm. He had liked the thought that he might have to work hard to properly discover her. I’ll never be bored, he had thought, as he had watched her sleep one early morning – her face had been animated by some feeling from a dream. He was devoted to the way her hair curled over her ear and her lips, swollen by sleep to a new softness.

  When she awoke, opening her eyes to find him looking at her, she’d seemed startled. ‘Have you been sitting there watching me?’ she had said. ‘That’s slightly weird.’

  ‘Why don’t you move in with me?’ he had said. He leant over and kissed her and she had pulled him to her. The light from the window had set her pale skin gleaming and he had touched her as if he never wanted to feel anything else, or be anywhere else but there with her, her body rising to meet his, the smell of her sharp and sweet.

  ‘Well, will you then?’ he had asked later as they walked around town, trying to find the dress he wanted to buy her for her birthday. He could see it in his mind’s eye – tight-fitting at the waist and made of some luminescent green material, the colour of adamite or agate.

  ‘Will I what?’

  ‘Move in with me, live with me,’ he had said. This step felt like an important one. He had never lived with a woman before. He looked at her. Her green eyes were flecked with gold. She was a marvellous, perfect thing.

  ‘Well, Rachel and Tim are very absorbed with their growing bump. I feel as if I might be getting in the way,’ she had said, and if he had wanted something more than this practical reaction to his suggestion, he hadn’t shown it. He had picked her up in the shop and swung her round.

  ‘We’re moving in together!’ he had said to the shop assistant, wanting to share his happiness.