The Great and Secret Show. Clive Barker
for Szechwan restaurants brought two such establishments, both sufficiently patronized to survive the competition. Style stores flourished, offering Deco, American Naive and simple kitsch. The demand for space was so heavy the Mall gained a second floor. Businesses which the Grove would never have supported in its early days were now indispensable. The pool supply store, the nail sculpture and tanning service, the karate school.
Once in a while, sitting waiting for a pedicure, or in the pet shop while the kids chose between three kinds of chinchilla, a newcomer might mention a rumour they’d heard about the town. Hadn’t something happened here, way back when? If there was a long-standing Grover in the vicinity the conversation would very quickly be steered into less controversial territory. Although a generation had grown up in the intervening years there was still a sense among the natives, as they liked to call themselves, that the League of Virgins was better forgotten.
There were some in the town, however, who would never be able to forget. William was one, of course. The others he still followed as they went about their lives. Joyce McGuire, a quiet, intensely religious woman who had brought up Tommy-Ray and Jo-Beth without the benefit of a husband. Her folks had moved to Florida some years back, leaving the house to their daughter and grandchildren. She was now virtually unseen beyond its walls. Hotchkiss, who had lost his wife to a lawyer from San Diego seventeen years her senior, and seemed never quite to have recovered from her desertion. The Farrell family, who had moved out of town to Thousand Oaks, only to find that their reputations had followed them. They’d eventually relocated to Louisiana, taking Arleen with them. She had never fully recovered. It was – William had heard – a good week if she strung more than ten words together. Jocelyn Farrell, her younger sister, had married and come back to live in Blue Spruce. He saw her on occasion, when she came to visit friends in town. The families were still very much part of the Grove’s history; yet though William was on nodding acquaintance with them all – the McGuires, Jim Hotchkiss, even Jocelyn Farrell – there was never a word exchanged between them.
There didn’t need to be. They all knew what they knew.
And knowing, lived in expectation.
i
The young man was virtually monochrome, his shoulder-length hair, which curled at his neck, black, his eyes as dark behind his round spectacles, his skin too white to be that of a Californian. His teeth were whiter still, though he seldom smiled. Didn’t do much speaking either, come to that. In company, he stammered.
Even the Pontiac Convertible he parked in the Mall was white, though its bodywork had been rusted by snow and salt from a dozen Chicago winters. It had got him across country, but there’d been a few close calls along the way. The time was coming when he was going to have to take it out into a field and shoot it. Meanwhile, if anyone needed evidence of a stranger in Palomo Grove they only had to cast their eye along the row of automobiles.
Or indeed, over him. He felt hopelessly out of place in his corduroys and his shabby jacket – (too long in the arms, too tight across the chest, like every jacket he’d ever bought). This was a town where they measured your worth by the name on your trainers. He didn’t wear trainers; he wore black leather lace-ups that he’d use day in, day out until they fell apart, whereupon he’d buy an identical pair. Out of place or not, he was here for a good reason, and the sooner he got about it the better he’d start feeling.
First, he needed directions. He selected a Frozen Yoghurt store as the emptiest along the row, and sauntered in. The welcome that met him from the other side of the counter was so warm he almost thought he’d been recognized.
‘Hi! How can I help you?’
‘I’m … new,’ he said. Dumb remark, he thought. ‘What I mean is, is there any place … any place I can buy a map?’
‘You mean of California?’
‘No. Palomo Grove,’ he said, keeping the sentences short. That way he stammered less.
The grin on the far side of the counter broadened.
‘Don’t need a map,’ it said. ‘The town’s not that big.’
‘OK. How about a hotel?’
‘Sure. Easy. There’s one real close. Or else there’s a new place, up in Stillbrook Village.’
‘Which is the cheapest?’
‘The Terrace. It’s just two minutes’ drive, round the back of the Mall.’
‘Sounds perfect.’
The smile he got in return said: everything’s perfect here. He could almost believe it too. The polished cars shone in the lot; the signs pointing him round to the back of the shopping centre gleamed; the motel facade – with another sign – Welcome to Palomo Grove, The Prosperous Haven – was as brightly painted as a Saturday morning cartoon. He was glad, when he’d secured a room, to pull down the blind against the daylight, and lurk a little.
The last stretch of the drive had left him weary, so he decided to perk his system up with some exercises and a shower. The machine, as he referred to his body, had been in a driver’s seat too long; it needed a working over. He warmed up with ten minutes of shadow sparrings, a combination of kicks and punches, followed by a favourite cocktail of specialized kicks: axe, jump crescent, spinning hook and jump spinning back kicks. As usual, what warmed up his muscles heated his mind. By the time he got to his leg-lifts and sit-ups he was ready to take on half of Palomo Grove to get an answer to the question he’d come here asking.
Which was: who is Howard Katz? Me wasn’t a good enough answer any more. Me was just the machine. He needed more information than that.
It was Wendy who’d asked the question, in that long night of debate which had ended in her leaving him.
‘I like you, Howie,’ she’d said. ‘But I can’t love you. And you know why? Because I don’t know you.’
‘You know what I am?’ Howie had replied. ‘A man with a hole in his middle.’
‘That’s a weird way to put it.’
‘It’s a weird way to feel.’
Weird, but true. Where others had some sense of themselves as people – ambition, opinion, religion – he just had this pitiful unfixedness. Those who liked him – Wendy, Richie, Lem – were patient with him. They waited through his stumblings and stammerings to hear what he had to say, and seemed to find some value in his comments. (You’re my holy fool, Lem had once told Howie; a remark which Howie was still pondering.) But to the rest of the world he was Katz the klutz. They didn’t bait him openly – he was too fit to be taken on hand to hand, even by heavyweights – but he knew what they said behind his back, and it always amounted to the same thing: Katz had a piece missing.
That Wendy had finally given up on him was too much to bear. Too hurt to show his face he’d brooded on the conversation for the best part of a week. Suddenly, the solution came clear. If there was any place on earth he’d understand the how and why of himself it was surely the town where he’d been born.
He raised the blind and looked out at the light. It was pearly; the air sweet-smelling. He couldn’t imagine why his mother would ever have left this pretty place for the bitter winter winds and smothering summers of Chicago. Now that she was dead (suddenly, in her sleep) he would have to solve that mystery for himself; and perhaps, in its solving, fill the hole that haunted the machine.
Just as she reached the front room, Momma called down from her room, her timing as faultless as ever.
‘Jo-Beth? Are you there? Jo-Beth?’
Always the same falling note in the voice, that seemed to warn: be loving to me now because I may not be here tomorrow. Perhaps not even the next hour.
‘Honey,