There were blotches on the girl’s pretty legs, which rather spoiled the effect.
‘It’s because I’m hot and bothered,’ she ventured. ‘Whenever I get hot and bothered, I get allergic.’
‘Oh.’
‘Dean’s probably run off, you know, when I had my back turned. He’d do that. He doesn’t give a f- . He doesn’t care.’
Birdy could see she was on her way to tears, which was a drag. She was bad with tears. Shouting matches, even fights, OK. Tears, no go.
‘It’ll be OK’ was all she could find to say to keep the tears from coming.
‘No it’s not,’ said the girl. ‘It won’t be OK, because he’s a bastard. He treats everyone like dirt.’ She ground out the half-smoked cigarette with the pointed toe of her cerise shoes, taking particular care to extinguish every glowing fragment of tobacco.
‘Men don’t care, do they?’ she said looking up at Birdy with heart-melting directness. Under the expert make-up, she was perhaps seventeen, certainly not much more. Her mascara was a little smeared, and there were arcs of tiredness under her eyes.
‘No,’ replied Birdy, speaking from painful experience. ‘No they don’t.’
Birdy thought ruefully that she’d never looked as attractive as this tired nymphet. Her eyes were too small, and her arms were fat. (Be honest, girl, you’re fat all over.) But the arms were her worst feature, she’d convinced herself of that. There were men, a lot of them, who got off on big breasts, on a sizeable ass, but no man she’d ever known liked fat arms. They always wanted to be able to encircle the wrist of their girlfriend between thumb and index finger, it was a primitive way to measure attachment. Her wrists, however, if she was brutal with herself, were practically undiscernible. Her fat hands became her fat fore-arms, which became, after a podgy time, her fat upper arms. Men couldn’t encircle her wrists because she had no wrists, and that alienated them. Well, that was one of the reasons anyhow. She was also very bright: and that was always a drawback if you wanted men at your feet. But of the options as to why she’d never been successful in love, she plumped for the fat arms as the likeliest explanation.
Whereas this girl had arms as slender as a Balinese dancer’s, her wrists looked thin as glass, and about as fragile.
Sickening, really. She was probably a lousy conversationalist to boot. God, the girl had all the advantages.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Lindi Lee,’ the girl replied.
It would be.
Ricky thought he’d made a mistake. This can’t be the toilet, he said to himself.
He was standing in what appeared to be the main street of a frontier town he’d seen in two hundred westerns. A dust storm seemed to be raging, forcing him to narrow his eyes against the stinging sand. Through the swirl of the ochre-grey air he could pick out, he thought, the General Stores, the Sheriffs Office and the Saloon. They stood in lieu of the toilet cubicles. Optional tumble-weed danced by him on the hot desert wind. The ground beneath his feet was impacted sand: no sign of tiles. No sign of anything that was faintly toilet-like.
Ricky looked to his right, down the street. Where the far wall of the John should have been the street receded, in forced perspective, towards a painted distance. It was a lie, of course, the whole thing was a lie. Surely if he concentrated he’d begin to see through the mirage to find out how it had been achieved; the projections, the concealed lighting effects, the backcloths, the miniatures; all the tricks of the trade. But though he concentrated as hard as his slightly spaced-out condition would allow, he just couldn’t seem to get his fingers under the edge of the illusion to strip it back.
The wind just went on blowing, the tumble-weed tumbled on. Somewhere in the storm a barn-door was slamming, opening and slamming again in the gusts. He could even smell horse-shit. The effect was so damn perfect, he was breathless with admiration.
But whoever had created this extraordinary set had proved their point. He was impressed: now it was time to stop the game.