Live a Little Read online

  ‘My feet are killing me,’ Tina moaned. She took off her shoes and walked barefoot, her feet vulnerable and pale amid the heedless rush.

  They stopped at a bar to eat tacos and drink tequila.

  ‘I don’t think I can move any further,’ Tina said once they were outside again, inspecting the pavement-burned soles of her feet. Spike was all hopped out too, so they hailed a cab and made their way back to the hotel among the hooting, yelling revellers and the occasional silent slide of cream limousines.

  Back at the hotel, revived by the air conditioning and the gleaming hush of the lobby, Tina suggested they go to the casino. They made their way to a red-carpeted, swag-curtained hall, in which people were sitting alone at slot machines or gathered round blackjack tables in intent silence, while dealers flipped cards with clean, cuffed hands.

  ‘What kind of a gambler are you?’ Spike asked Lottie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never done it.’

  As if on cue, Tina rummaged around in her leopard-skin handbag and pulled out a handful of money.

  ‘I’ve got a hundred dollars in five-dollar notes for you to gamble with,’ she announced.

  ‘No. Keep your money,’ Lottie protested. ‘I hate the idea of wasting it.’

  ‘Your challenge this evening or this morning – I’m a little foggy on the actual time of day,’ Tina said, ‘is to spend all of it.’

  ‘What if I lose it all? I don’t even know what to do!’

  Tina ignored her.

  Lottie enjoyed spending money, although her own acquisitiveness sometimes made her guilty when she knew there were so many people living without even the basics. She thought of her last big purchase – the wedding dress, cellophaned and pearly and hanging in the back of the wardrobe, hidden away where Dean couldn’t see it. She had spent more than she should have done on that. She hadn’t even been aware of being particularly interested in such things – she had certainly never been a girl who had dreamed about her wedding and having the whole white-dress-and-speeches rigmarole – but when she had seen herself in the corseted satin sheath, with a diamanté hair clip curved over one ear and buckled shoes that tied with ribbons around the ankles, she had fallen in love with her reflection. She had never thought of herself as beautiful, but there was something so seductive about looking like you never usually did and never would again.

  She quailed a little now at the thought of the dress and the as yet unseen flowers and the hundred and fifty wedding guests who must by now have chosen their own outfits and bought gifts. A wedding was not something you could just cancel. It was impossible. Besides, it was what she wanted. What they both wanted. She knew how Dean would look as she walked towards him in the chapel of his old Cambridge college. Tina had reluctantly agreed to give her away since they knew their father wouldn’t make the journey from Spain and their mother had suddenly and bitterly decided she hated weddings. Lottie could imagine Tina on the day – drunk on champagne, wearing the despised grey silk dress Lottie had chosen. Dean would have that half-embarrassed, half-proud look. He would probably stroke his beard and shuffle his feet and make a joke under his breath to his brother, who was to be his best man. He often became flippant when he was nervous. She knew him so well. Her feelings for Spike, so chaotic she barely knew how to describe them, were only a foolish fantasy. She couldn’t believe that she had told Tina that she was attracted to him.

  Now she shrank from the sight of her sister’s gleeful face. Being extravagant for your wedding was one thing, but actually gambling money away felt wrong.

  ‘I’ll teach you all you need to know,’ Spike said. He took her arm, and at his touch she felt that traitorous agitation again. It wasn’t desire. It was more like a kind of fear. ‘It’s easy as long as you can count to twenty-one.’

  They took up the three empty spaces at one of the semi-circular tables and the dealer nodded at them. He was a florid-faced young man with a receding hairline and a collar and bow tie that seemed a little loose for his neck.

  ‘You kind of scratch the table if you want a hit – which means another card – and you put your palm flat and wave it slightly from side to side if you want to stay,’ Spike explained. ‘The idea is that you have to beat the dealer by getting a hand nearer to twenty-one than he has.’

  Tina bought a handful of five-dollar chips.

  ‘We’re just assisting,’ Spike told the dealer, who nodded again. Lottie wondered if dealers were forbidden to talk.

  ‘Place your bet,’ Spike said. ‘Put one of the chips in that little circle.’

  Lottie’s first two cards were a queen and a six of hearts. The dealer’s upturned card was a king. She looked enquiringly at Spike and he shrugged.

  ‘The decision is yours,’ he said.

  Tina caught the eye of a waiter and ordered whiskey sours for them all.

  Lottie tentatively scratched at the surface of the table and was dealt another card, an eight of spades.

  ‘Bust,’ Spike announced, and the dealer’s hand moved smoothly over the table and took Lottie’s chip away.

  Lottie lost the next five hands.

  ‘See,’ she said despairingly. ‘I told you I would be no good at this.’

  She tried to stand up, but Tina pulled her firmly back down into her seat.

  ‘You haven’t spent all the money yet.’

  Lottie gave a heavy sigh and received her next two cards. This time she won. It seemed her luck had finally changed because she beat the dealer in the next ten consecutive hands. Spike advised her on the finer points of splitting and doubling up, while Tina exhorted her to bet higher. Lottie began to feel a weird calm. The chips piled up slowly. Raised to her feet by whiskey and excitement, Tina cheered her on. Lottie lost two hands.

  ‘Perhaps I should stop while I’m ahead,’ she said.

  ‘Just one more go,’ Tina said. ‘It’s better to leave the table a winner. Put all your chips on the next hand.’

  ‘What, all of them?’ Lottie asked. The silent dealer looked at her questioningly.

  ‘Every single one,’ Tina said, and so Lottie piled them up. She wasn’t even sure how much she was betting. This was tantamount to throwing money away.

  The cards came flicking out of the ‘shoe’. Lottie could barely look. She blinked at her hand. She thought at first that she was seeing things. She appeared to have an ace and a king. Her flattened hand wobbled involuntarily. The dealer turned his card up, and Tina gave an excited scream.

  ‘Now’s the time to quit,’ Spike said, grinning.

  In a daze, Lottie said she was leaving the table and the dealer scooped up the chips and handed her some money, which Tina snatched from her hand.

  ‘You’ve won over two thousand dollars!’ she said, flicking through the notes and extracting a couple for the dealer.

  ‘You keep it to cover some of the cost of this trip,’ Lottie said, feeling dizzy but elated.

  ‘That’s very kind of you – but first we are EATING and SHOPPING.’

  Spike picked Lottie up and spun her around.

  They ate lobster and truffled risotto by a pool, and drank a bottle of the third most expensive champagne on the menu. Afterwards they staggered, giggling, round the shops and realised how little their money could buy in this shining, vertiginous world, where a handbag the size of a matchbox cost more than six months’ wages. Lottie wanted to keep the money but Tina ignored her and bought them each a Dior silk scarf and leather bracelets studded with crystals and a flamingo-splattered tie for a protesting Spike.

  ‘I love and hate Las Vegas,’ Tina said.

  ‘What exactly is the time?’ Lottie asked. The hotel was as it had been when they first arrived, people milling in the lobby, the bars and restaurants still full. The same listless people were sitting in front of the same slot machines. It could have been midday or midnight, or any other hour in between.

  ‘I don’t think time actually passes at all in Vegas,’ Lottie said. ‘When we leave we’ll discover that
it’s still the same date as it was when we arrived.’

  Back in their suite, Tina crashed out in the bedroom, but Lottie was still on a high after her success and didn’t think she would be able to fall asleep. She and Spike drank peppermint tea and watched the lights of the town through their floor-to-ceiling window. From this distance it looked as if the neon was somehow organic – a kind of luminescent moss growing over the buildings and roads.

  ‘I can’t decide whether it’s really beautiful or really ugly,’ Spike said. ‘It’s just the sort of landscape that I tend to try and avoid, but it’s strangely attractive.’

  ‘Imagine a huge meteorite flaming through the sky and landing slap bang on the strip,’ Lottie said. She was curled up on one of the chocolate-brown velvet sofas with her shoes kicked off, the air conditioning cooling her swollen feet.

  ‘They would probably just scoop it out and fill it with blackjack tables,’ Spike said.

  ‘It can’t be long now until you have to peel off and join your team in Mexico,’ Lottie said, deliberately keeping her gaze averted from his.

  Spike thought she looked beautiful in her gauzy blue dress. Her lipstick was smudged on her smiling mouth. He felt a little drunk from the whiskey cocktails and champagne and the sound of Vegas – that swelling, disorientating clatter that he could still hear all the way from the top of the hotel. He thought she was waiting for him to say something. He could see it in the watchful curl of her body and the way she looked away from him when she spoke. He had a brief picture of Tina’s face looking furiously at him from the front of the car when he had complimented Lottie that morning. He knew it was pathetic but he couldn’t help thinking how angry she would be if he and Lottie got together. It riled him that Tina assumed he would do exactly what she told him to. She thought she could control everything.

  ‘I’ll have to go in a couple of days,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be hard leaving you.’

  ‘I know Tina can be an old bag, but I think she’s secretly glad you came along.’

  He smiled at her deliberate misinterpretation of his words.

  ‘I meant you in particular,’ he said. ‘Not you as in the both of you.’

  She put a hand up as if to ward him off and stood up. Her eyes were wide. She looked like a creature that had been caught in the headlights of a car.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please don’t do this.’

  ‘I gather from your sister that you are having second thoughts about the wedding,’ Spike said. He stood up too and came closer to her. He could feel the agitation in her body. ‘If I’ve got the wrong idea, just tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know what I want,’ Lottie said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me. It’s like I have lost myself somehow.’

  She looked so upset and confused, so unlike her usual calm, certain self, that he felt suddenly contrite. He should have learnt by now not to take any notice of what Tina said. She had always twisted the truth.

  ‘It’s just pre-wedding jitters,’ he said, stepping back. ‘Forget I ever said anything. You’re going to go home and marry Dean. I should have known you’re nothing like your sister. Forgive me.’

  ‘What did she say to you?’ Lottie asked. Her arms were stiff by her sides and she looked as if she might be about to cry. He inwardly cursed the booze and Vegas and Tina’s machinations.

  ‘She just intimated that you were having doubts, that’s all. And I got carried away. You’re so lovely and Vegas is so freaky and I’m such an idiot.’

  He thought she was going to say something else. She stood for a moment as if she was poised to flee, but didn’t know which direction would bring safety.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ he said. ‘Don’t give it another thought,’ and she turned away and went into the bedroom.

  Chapter 20

  ‘LOOK AT THE VIEW OUT of the window! And the ridiculous carpet and how deep the bath is.’

  Lottie was wafting her iPad around the hotel bedroom, showing Dean the magnificence of their suite. Tina was still asleep and Spike had gone out somewhere.

  ‘You’re making me feel dizzy!’ Dean said. ‘Stop walking around and sit down and talk to me.’

  Actually speaking to Dean was something that Lottie had been trying to avoid. It was far easier to enthuse about her surroundings than to engage in conversation, but she settled on the sofa and switched the view round so that she could see him. He was standing in the playground of the school where he worked. She could see the climbing wall in the background, and every now and again a hunched young person in a black blazer would lurch past. She noted that he had had his hair cut and her heart was smitten at the sight of the way the barber had tufted his hair into a mini-quiff. He was wearing his blue checked shirt – the one that would never stay tucked in, but always hung an inch or so below his V-necked jumper.

  ‘How was your walking weekend?’ she asked.

  ‘It was exactly the same as it always is. No dog this year and Simon got a stomach upset, but business as usual,’ Dean said, smiling.

  Every year Dean went to a cottage in Scotland with the same group of four male friends. They had been going away for the last fifteen years and had developed a raft of traditions. During the day they walked up hills and in the evening they sat in the local pub drinking an exact five rounds. Lottie often teased him about the ritualistic aspect of their trips – the way they always linked hands around standing stones and intoned the same strange song, which was designed to invoke wandering Celtic spirits. After a long walk they would roll up their trousers and sit on the edge of the bath with their feet dipped in a lavender-infused water. As each year came and went there would be new additions and new stories which were embroidered upon – the day the dog ate a whole packet of butter; the Belgian man they had met at the top of a hill who had caught them mid-packed lunch and remarked that he could not understand the British obsession with ‘ze cheese and ze onion’; the year they all got wrecked and hung naked from the beams in the living room. She had always thought of this with a kind of indulgent tenderness – amused by the way these men tied themselves to each other with habit and history, but now she felt a little impatient.

  ‘Don’t you ever want to go somewhere else?’ she asked.

  ‘There would be a riot if I even suggested it,’ he replied. His smile faltered. ‘Are you OK? You look a little pale.’

  ‘I’m fine. Just had a late night, that’s all. I won a load of money playing blackjack.’

  ‘It sounds as if you are having an exciting time,’ Dean said, a little wistfully. ‘You’ll be bored when you come home.’

  ‘I won’t have time to be bored. We will have exactly five days before the wedding.’ As she said the words, Lottie felt a kind of roiling motion in her stomach, as if she had eaten something that didn’t agree with her.

  ‘I’ve arranged all the flowers, you don’t have to worry about that at least,’ he said. ‘I went for bright in the end. Irises and some orange ones with a name I can’t remember, something like gerbil, but that can’t be right. Long stalks. Like flowers designed by children.’

  ‘Gerbera,’ Lottie said faintly, thinking in a distracted kind of way about how they would clash with the pale pink touches she had chosen so carefully. What did it really matter anyway? It was just a day, and the flowers, whatever their hue, would shrivel and lose their lustre in the end.

  Just then the screen was obscured by a shock of red hair and a grinning face. ‘Who you talking to, sir? You’ll be late for class, sir. Sir, I thought you said mobile phones made people “witless”.’

  ‘I’d better go,’ Dean said. ‘I love you.’ His words elicited a mocking, elongated exclamation from the now invisible student and then the screen went blank.

  A moment later, the door banged shut and Spike appeared with orange juice and bagels crammed with smoked salmon and cream cheese and a new walking stick encrusted with plastic crystals. With another lurch of her stomach Lottie thought of how terrible it would have been if Spike had come back
in the middle of her conversation. How would she have explained it to Dean? How could she explain any of it to herself?

  ‘I thought I’d save on room service by going out and getting breakfast myself,’ he said. ‘Besides, I wanted to get some air, although Vegas doesn’t really do air.’

  He was determinedly breezy and avoided looking at Lottie. Nothing had happened, after all. Spike was right – it had just been pre-wedding nerves. It was common enough. One of her friends had gone to the airport on the morning of her wedding and taken the next available flight regardless of the destination. She’d ended up in Iceland. The friend was now happily married to the man she had abandoned at the altar.

  Tina emerged from the bedroom, yawning and rubbing her eyes. ‘I thought we’d do downtown Vegas for a bit before we leave the city,’ she announced, pouring herself a large glass of juice. ‘See the street art and visit the world’s most famous sex shop.’

  ‘I’d like to see a bit more of Vegas, but I’m not sure about the sex shop,’ Lottie said predictably.

  ‘It is a continuing source of wonder to me, Lottie, that you ever actually relaxed enough to have sex.’

  Tina tried to catch Spike’s eye and share a conspiratorial look, but he was fiddling around with bagels and juice.

  ‘I always think that “adult shops”,’ here Lottie used her hands to demonstrate the apostrophes in an irritatingly pedantic way, ‘are for people who like other people to think they have no inhibitions, when in fact they are so clueless they imagine that strawberry-flavoured panties are actually something a woman would want to wear.’

  ‘Don’t say panties,’ Tina said, shuddering. ‘It is almost as terrible as gusset and moist – words that make the inside of your mouth shrivel up.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Lottie said, shrugging. She seemed out of sorts this morning and there was definitely some sort of atmosphere in the room. Spike had hardly looked at either of them.