The Great and Secret Show

Arleen made her companions hang on her silence for ten seconds. Finally she agreed.

‘Nowhere better to go,’ she said.

ii

Most towns, however small, make themselves after the pattern of a city. That is, they divide. White from black, straight from gay, wealthy from less wealthy, less wealthy from poor. Palomo Grove, the population of which was in that year, 1971, a mere one thousand two hundred, was no exception. Built on the flanks of a gently sloping hillside, the town had been designed as an embodiment of democratic principles, in which every occupant was intended to have equal access to the centre of power in the town, the Mall. It lay at the bottom of Sunrise Hill, known simply as the Hill, with four villages – Stillbrook, Deerdell, Laureltree and Windbluff – radiating from its hub, their feed thoroughfares aligned with the compass points. But that was as far as the planners’ idealism went. Thereafter the subtle differences in the geography of the villages made each quite different in character. Windbluff, which lay on the south-west flank of the hill, commanded the best views, and its properties the highest prices. The top third of the Hill was dominated by half a dozen grand residences, their roofs barely visible behind lush foliage. On the lower slopes of this Olympus were the Five Crescents, streets bowed upon themselves, which were – if you couldn’t afford a house at the very top – the next most desirable places to live.

By contrast, Deerdell. Built on flat ground, and flanked on two sides by undeveloped woodland, this quadrant of the Grove had rapidly gone down-market. Here the houses lacked pools and needed paint. For some, the locale was a hip retreat. There were, even in 1971, a few artists living in Deerdell; that community would steadily grow. But if there was anywhere in the Grove where people went in fear for their automobiles’ paintwork, it was here.

Between these two extremes, socially and geographically, lay Stillbrook and Laureltree, the latter thought marginally more up-market because several of its streets were built on the second flank of the Hill, their scale and their prices less modest with every bend the streets took as they climbed.

None of the quartet were residents of Deerdell. Arleen lived on Emerson, the second highest of the Crescents, Joyce and Carolyn within a block of each other on Steeple Chase Drive in Stillbrook Village, and Trudi in Laureltree. So there was a certain adventure in treading the streets of the East Grove, where their parents had seldom, if ever, ventured. Even if they had strayed down here, they’d certainly never gone where the girls now went: into the woods.

‘It’s no cooler,’ Arleen complained when they’d been wandering a few minutes. ‘In fact, it’s worse.’

She was right. Though the foliage kept the stare of the sun off their heads, the heat still found its way between the branches. Trapped, it made the damp air steamy.

‘I haven’t been here for years,’ Trudi said, whipping a switch of stripped twig back and forth through a cloud of gnats. ‘I used to come with my brother.’

‘How is he?’ Joyce enquired.

‘Still in hospital. He’s never going to come out. All the family knows that but nobody ever says it. Makes me sick.’

Sam Katz had been drafted and gone to Vietnam fit in mind and body. In the third month of his tour of duty all that had been undone by a land mine, which had killed two of his comrades and badly injured him. There’d been a squirmingly uneasy homecoming, the Grove’s little mighty lined up to greet the crippled hero. What followed was much talk of heroism and sacrifice; much drinking; some hidden tears. Through it all Sam Katz had sat stony featured, not setting his face against the celebrations but detached from them, as though his mind were still rehearsing the moment when his youth had been blown to smithereens. A few weeks later he’d been taken back to hospital. Though his mother had told enquirers it was for corrective surgery to his spine the months dragged on until they became years, and Sam didn’t reappear. Everyone guessed the reason, though it went unadmitted. Sam’s physical wounds had healed adequately well. But his mind had not proved so resilient. The detachment he’d evidenced at his homecoming party had deepened into catatonia.

All the other girls had known Sam, though the age difference between Joyce and her brother had been sufficient for them to have looked upon him almost as another species. Not simply male, which was strange enough, but old, too. Once past puberty, however, the roller-coaster ride began to speed. They could see twenty-five up ahead: a little way yet, but visible. And the waste of Sam’s life began to make sense to them the way it could never have made sense to an eleven-year-old. Fond, sad memories of him silenced them for a while. They walked on through the heat, their bodies side by side, arms occasionally brushing arms, their minds diverging. Trudi’s thoughts were of those childhood games, played with Sam in these thickets. He’d been an indulgent older brother, allowing her to tag along when she was seven or eight, and he thirteen. A year later, when his juices started telling him girls and sisters weren’t the same animal, the invitations to play war had ceased. She’d mourned the loss of him; a rehearsal for the mourning she’d felt more acutely later. She saw his face in her mind now, a weird melding of the boy he’d been and the man he was; of the life he’d had and the death he lived. It made her hurt.

For Carolyn, there were few hurts, at least in her waking life. And today – barring her wishing she’d bought a second ice-cream – none. Night was quite a different matter. She had bad dreams; of earthquakes. In them Palomo Grove would fold up like a canvas chair and disappear into the earth. That was the penalty for knowing too much, her father had told her. She’d inherited his fierce curiosity, and had applied it – from first hearing of the San Andreas Fault – to a study of the earth they walked upon. Its solidity could not be trusted. Beneath their feet, she knew, the ground was riddled with fissures, which might at any moment gape, as they would gape beneath Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, all the way up and down the West Coast, swallowing the lot. She kept her anxieties at bay with swallowings of her own: a sort of sympathetic magic. She was fat because the earth’s crust was thin; an irrefutable excuse for gluttony.

Arleen cast a glance over at the Fat Girl. It never hurt, her mother had once instructed her, to keep the company of the less attractive. Though no longer in the public eye, the sometime star Kate Farrell still surrounded herself with dowdy women, in whose company her looks were twice as compelling. But for Arleen, especially on days like today, it seemed too high a price. Though they flattered her looks she didn’t really like her companions. Once she’d have counted them her dearest friends. Now they were reminders of a life from which she could not escape quickly enough. But how else was she going to spend the time ’til her parole came through? Even the joys of sitting in front of the mirror palled after a time. The sooner I’m out of here, she thought, the sooner I’m happy.

Had she been able to read Arleen’s mind Joyce would have applauded the urgency. But she was lost in thoughts of how best to arrange an accidental encounter with Randy. If she made a casual enquiry about his routines Arleen would guess her purpose, and she might be selfish enough to spike Joyce’s chances even though she had no interest in the boy herself. Joyce was a fine reader of character, and knew it was quite within Arleen’s capabilities to be so perverse. But then who was she to condemn perversity? She was pursuing a male who’d three times made his indifference to her perfectly plain. Why couldn’t she just forget him and save herself the grief of rejection? Because love wasn’t like that. It made you fly in the face of the evidence, however compelling.

She sighed audibly.

‘Something wrong?’ Carolyn wanted to know.

‘Just … hot,’ Joyce replied.

‘Anyone we know?’ Trudi said. Before Joyce could muster an adequately disparaging reply she caught sight of something glittering through the trees ahead.

‘Water,’ she said.

Carolyn had seen it too. Its brightness made her squint.

‘Lots of it,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know there was a lake down here,’ Joyce remarked, turning to Trudi.

‘There wasn’t,’ came the reply. ‘Not that I remember.’

‘Well there is now,’ said Carolyn.

She was already forging ahead through the foliage, not caring to take the less thronged route. Her blundering passage cleared a way for the others.

‘Looks like we’re going to get cool after all,’ Trudi said, and went after her at a run.

It was indeed a lake, maybe fifty feet wide, its placid surface broken by half-submerged trees, and islands of shrubbery.

‘Flood water,’ Carolyn said. ‘We’re right at the bottom of the hill here. It must have gathered after the storm.’

‘That’s a lot of water,’ Joyce said. ‘Did this all fall last night?’

‘If it didn’t where did it come from?’ Carolyn said.

‘Who cares?’ said Trudi. ‘It looks cool.’

She moved past Carolyn to the very edge of the water. The ground became more swampy underfoot with every step, mud rising up over her sandals. But the water, when she reached it, was as good as its promise: refreshingly cold. She crouched down, and put her hand in the lake, bringing a palmful of it up to splash her face.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Carolyn cautioned. ‘It’s probably full of chemicals.’

‘It’s only rain-water,’ Trudi replied. ‘What’s cleaner than that?’

Carolyn shrugged. ‘Please yourself,’ she said.

‘I wonder how deep it is?’ Joyce mused. ‘Deep enough to swim, do you think?’

‘Shouldn’t have thought so,’ Carolyn commented.

‘Don’t know ’til we try,’ Trudi said, and began to wade out into the lake. She could see grass and flowers beneath her feet; drowned now. The earth itself was soft, and her steps stirred up clouds of mud, but she advanced until she was in deep enough for the hem of her shorts to be soaked.

The water was cold. It brought gooseflesh. But that was preferable to the sweat that had stuck her blouse to her breasts and spine. She looked back towards the shore.

‘Feels great,’ she said. ‘I’m going in.’

‘Like that?’ Arleen said.

‘Of course not.’ Trudi waded back towards the trio, pulling her blouse out of her shorts as she went. The air rising from the water tingled against her skin, its frisson welcome. She wore nothing beneath, and would normally have been more modest, even in front of her friends, but the lake’s invitation was not to be postponed.

‘Anybody going to join me?’ she asked as she stepped back amongst the others.

‘I am,’ Joyce said, already unknotting her trainers.

‘I think we should keep our shoes on,’ Trudi said. ‘We don’t know what’s underfoot.’

‘It’s only grass,’ said Joyce. She sat down and worked on the knots, grinning. ‘This is great,’ she said.

Arleen was watching her whooping enthusiasm with disdain.