Beautiful Ruins (56)

Beneath the castle was a long, narrow park, the city walls on either side. Pat walked the length of the park, looking for a place to sleep, but after an hour he decided he was too old to sleep outside with the street kids and went into New Town, bought a pint of vodka, and paid a night hotel clerk five pounds to let him sleep in a toilet stall.

Next morning, he returned to the coffeehouse and resumed playing. He was doing the old Rets song “Gravy Boat,” just to prove to himself that he existed, when he looked up to see the girl he’d had sex with against the standpipe in his greenroom. The girl’s eyes widened and she grabbed her friend by the arms. “Hey, that’s him!”

She turned out to be named Naomi, to be only eighteen, to be vacationing from Manchester, and to be here with her parents, Claude and June, who turned out to be eating in a nearby pub, to be about his age, and to be less than thrilled to meet their daughter’s new friend. Naomi almost cried as she told her parents of Pat’s troubles, how he’d been “ever so nice,” how he’d been ripped off by his manager and stranded here with no way of getting home. Two hours later he was on a train to London, paid for by a father whose true motivation behind helping Pat get out of Scotland was never in doubt.

On the train Pat kept thinking about Edinburgh, about all those desperate entertainers giving out handbills in the streets, about the buskers and spires and churches and castles and cliffs, the scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had all been done a million billion times. It was all he’d ever wanted. To be big. To matter.

Yeah, well, he could imagine Lydia saying, you don’t get to.

Kurtis answered the door, iPod earbuds plugged into the holes in his round, dented head. When he saw Pat, his face didn’t change—or at least that’s what struck Pat when Kurtis shoved him back into the hallway and pinned him against the wall. Pat dropped his pack and guitar and—“Wait—” Kurtis’s forearm smashed into Pat’s neck, cutting off his breath, a knee coming up into Pat’s groin. Bouncer tricks, Pat recognized, until a wide fist mashed his face and knocked even that thought from his head, and Pat slid off the wall to the ground. From the floor he tried to find his breath, got his hand to his bloodied face, and managed to look between Kurtis’s legs for Umi or Joe; but the apartment behind Kurtis seemed not only empty . . . but trashed. He imagined the blowout that must have done it, Joe bursting in, all the shit between the three of them finally coming out, Joe telling a stricken Umi that he loved her. He liked imagining Joe and Umi on a train somewhere, the tickets paid for with Pat’s five hundred pounds.

Then he noticed Kurtis was in his underwear; Jesus, these people. Kurtis stood above him, panting. He kicked the guitar case, Pat thinking: Please, not my guitar. “Ya fucking coont,” Kurtis finally said, “ya stupid fucking coont,” and he went back inside. Even the air from the slammed door hurt Pat.

It took a few seconds for Pat to get up, and he did so only because he was worried that Kurtis would come back for the guitar. On the street, people gave him a wide berth, wary of the blood burbling from Pat’s nose. At a pub a block away, Pat got a pint, a bar rag, and some ice, cleaned himself in the bathroom, and watched the door of Kurtis’s flat. But after two hours, he didn’t see anyone: no Joe, no Umi, no Kurtis.

When his beer was gone, Pat pulled the rest of his money from his pocket and laid it on the table: twelve pounds, forty pence. He stared at his sad pile of money until his eyes were bleary and he put his face in his hands and Pat Bender wept. He felt cleansed, somehow, as if he could finally see how this thing he’d identified in Edinburgh—this desperate hunger to get higher—had nearly destroyed him. He felt as if he’d come through some tunnel, made a final passage through the darkness, to the other side.

He was done with all that now. He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live.

Pat was shaking as he stepped outside into a cool gust, driven with a resolve that bordered on despair. He slipped into the red phone booth outside the pub. It smelled like piss and was papered with faded handbills from rough strip shows and tranny escort services. “Sandpoint, Idaho . . . USA,” he told the operator, voice cracking, and he worried that he’d forgotten the number, but as soon as he said the area code—208—it came to him. Four pounds, fifty pence, the operator said, almost half his money, but Pat knew that this could not be a collect call. Not this time. He put the money in.

She answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

But something was wrong. It wasn’t his mother . . . and Pat thought, in horror, It’s too late. She had died. The house had sold. Christ. He’d come around too late—missed saying good-bye to the one person who had ever cared about him.

Pat Bender stood bleeding and weeping alone in a red phone booth on a busy street in south London. “Hello?” the woman said again, her voice more familiar this time, though still not his mother’s. “Is someone there?”

“Hello?” Pat caught his breath, wiped his eyes. “Is . . . Is that—Lydia?”

“Pat?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” He closed his eyes and saw her, ridges of high cheek and those dark bemused eyes beneath her short brown hair, and it felt like a sign. “What are you doing there, Lydia?”