Signal to Noise(12)

She stepped into his bedroom and discovered the same chaotic mass of records, though her father, perhaps in an effort to escape the clutter that reigned in the other parts of the apartment, had cleared a section of the wall and pinned up a large poster depicting palm trees and a sunset. The thick curtains also had a lively pattern of palm trees, this time with flamingos, so kitsch it made her wonder if it was really her father who had rented this apartment.

She remembered when she had been younger and her dad had told her he planned to spend the end of his days on a beach, watching the waves come in.

He never made it to the seaside, though he did spend several years in Guadalajara before returning to Mexico City.

His kidneys had failed him. That’s what had done him in. Not the booze. The liver put up a good fight. It was the kidneys which gave up. Her mother had told her he was on dialysis, but Meche hadn’t phoned him.

Meche took a look in the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was cluttered with pills and expired medications. His glasses sat on the water tank of the toilet.

She walked back to the bedroom, sat on the sagging bed and wondered what it would be like to wake every morning to the old picture of the beach, feet shuffling upon the cold floor. Dying and knowing you were dying.

On the floor, by the bed, half-hidden under a sweater, was the portable turntable. Meche moved the sweater away and looked at it, hesitantly.

Was it the same one? It seemed to be the same walnut case. The one Meche used to have in her room could play full-size LPs, so chances were it was the same one.

Meche grabbed it, put it on her knees and found the sticker on the side. The little heart which Daniela had left there.

That was it. But it just looked so... ordinary and worn now. No magic to it.

Would it still work?

She reached towards a stack of records on the bedside table and picked the first one off the top. The Beach Boys.

The needle went down. Good Vibrations began to play. She flipped the record sleeve around, looking at the image of the five young men. It had been released in 1966. That would have made her father... what... sixteen when it came out?

Meche opened the bedside drawer and found a stack of unpaid bills. There were some loose pages, stained with coffee smudges: notes for his glorious book. A matchbook. Tucked beneath the matchbook, like a postscript, a postcard from Puerto Vallarta. Meche looked at the remittance address but it had never been sent. It was an old Puerto Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta from the seventies, just left there to moulder in the drawer.

She closed the drawer and The Beach Boys finished their song, the needle lifted from the record and the apartment was silent.

Meche sighed and started going through the records, making three piles: throw away, sell and keep. She placed each record in the right pile, trying to maintain the keep pile as low as she could.

The silence was depressing. She could see why her father had kept the turntable by the bed, to liven his nights and mornings. She looked for another Beach Boys record, maybe Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), but it was not to be found. She settled on Hotel California by The Eagles—which was not quite the same thing at all—and pulled apart the curtains to see what the view was like.

But there was no view. The windows showed the grey fa?ade of another building. She dropped the curtains and the flamingos returned, masking the greyness, cheerfully frolicking in a land of palm trees.

She remembered that she was now almost the same age her father had been when he had left them.





Mexico City, 1988





IT’S NOT THAT Meche hated school, because she didn’t. She just hated the people at school, all them crawling around with their petty thoughts and their annoying habits. A few were outright *s, like Teofilo. Others merely bumped into you on the stairs, giggled when you walked by, talked under their breath.

There were some—few and far between—who made it worth attending. Daniela and Sebastian, of course. But also Constantino. Especially Constantino Dominguez. She looked at him across the courtyard as she sat with her friends, eating her sandwich.

Sebastian had once dubbed Constantino the King of the Clones because his friends were always intent on copying his mannerisms and clothes. Sebastian also called him Floro Tinoco on account of the comic book character from La Familia Burron, swearing that Constantino was equally stupid and also built like a tractor. Meche only knew what all the other fifteen-year-old girls knew: Constantino had dirty-blond hair and hazel eyes, and when he smiled, he showed off perfectly straight, white teeth.

Today Constantino was standing next to Isadora Galván, a very common occurrence. They were not an item anymore, but hung out together in the way that the beautiful and popular will gravitate to each other. You could regularly find them in the Pit—which was an empty lot two blocks from school where the smokers liked to gather—and at other high school landmarks.

Isadora was certainly pretty, in a way which Meche could never expect to achieve. She had reddish-brown hair and it curled just the right amount around her shoulders. Her skin was very pale and this alone had earned her the lead in more than one school play while Meche and Daniela had to carry heavy props and scenery backstage.

Meche would have given anything to be like Isadora for a single day.

Maybe she could. If the magic worked.

“I think we should do the spell tonight,” she told Daniela and Sebastian.

They didn’t answer. Sebastian was also looking at Isadora, his eyes fixed on her long legs and her very short skirt. That kind of skirt looked sloppy and unflattering when Meche wore it, but on Isadora it was positively lovely. She supposed Isadora could wear a garbage bag and look amazing.