Chapter 9 chapter eight
Gloria opened the door to find another pair of policewomen standing in front of her.They were very similar to the two policemen she had seen on the road before, as if they were carved out of the same mold.
"Mrs. Hart?" asked one of them, the face set for the bad news. "Mrs. Gloria Hart?" Instead of an emergency meeting with his accountants in Charlotte Square, as Gloria thought, he was treated in the emergency room of the New Royal Infirmary after a sudden emergency in his room at the Apex Hotel. Heart attack while he was with someone who seemed to be named "Jojo".Gloria thought Jojo was a clown's name, but that was actually a call girl, that is to say, a whore.
"Let's be blunt." Gloria sighed.
The two policewomen (“Constable Claire DePonio, this is Constable Gemma Nash”) look like teenage girls who have rented police uniforms to go to a masquerade ball.
"Just a phone call away," Gloria told them, and she served them tea.
In Gloria's peach-colored living room, they sat on a peach-dyed floral-covered sofa, primly with Royal Doulton glasses and saucers on their laps, politely sipping Gloria Buttersweet muffins made by Ya.Gloria knew they must have more important things to do, but they seemed to be grateful for the time.
"Sweep it up," one of them (Claire) said.
They were busy, Gemma said, with the "summer flu" in the works, and police officers in Lothian and Borders falling ill "like skittles".
"Your house is so beautiful." Claire admired.
Gloria looked around her peach-colored living room, trying to see it all from a stranger's point of view.If one day these things no longer belong to her, she doesn't know which one of them she will miss.Moorcroft china?Chinese style rug?Ornament from Staffordshire?She loves her collection of items from Staffordshire.
Surely she would not miss the picture hanging over the mantelpiece, one of the many nineteenth-century stag-hunting paintings of a frightened stag cornered by barking hounds — Murdo Miller gave Graham a sixtieth birthday present.Nor would she miss the ugly Scottish Businessman of the Year trophy, which sits prominently on the mantelpiece.Next to the trophy is a photo of Graham and Gloria on their wedding day, and they haven't been photographed together since that day.In the unfortunate event of a fire, and Graham had to choose between his wedding photo and his Scottish Businessman of the Year trophy, Gloria could guess without a second thought that it would be the one of the Resin sculpture without aesthetics.In fact, given the choice between saving the trophy or Gloria, she was pretty sure he would save the trophy instead of her.
The policewoman, Claire, picked up their wedding photo and tilted her head sympathetically, as if Graham was hopeless.She said, "Is this your husband?" Gloria didn't know that she was supposed to rush to the emergency room to fulfill her spouse's duties, but now she was drinking tea from a delicate Dalton cup. Isn't it a bit weird.But as long as Graham was in the emergency room, the name Jojo was unavoidable, and the fact that her husband was in the emergency room became less important when thinking of this name.JoJo is a stain on the honorable death Graham could have accomplished.
Gloria took the photo from Claire and looked at it carefully.
"Thirty-nine years," said Gloria.
Gemma said, "You can get a lifetime achievement award." Claire said, "God, it's been so long, forgive me for being a bad word. It's a pity." She continued, "It happened like that, he was The way we found it, and all of that, it must be hard for you."
"They're scumbags," grumbled Gemma.She was the plainer-looking of the two policewomen.
No matter how heavy the silver frame is, it can't hide the fact that this wedding photo was not taken by a professional photographer.The passage of time has dulled the photo, making it even more apparent that the photographer was a relative of a photographer who was a layman (and it was).Gloria was amazed at the way both parents let them go, which prevented their wedding day from being truly recorded.
Gloria regretted not having her wedding in the traditional white gown, and regretted not decorating the reception well, and if so, she now has a large white leather-bound photo album to look at.Those photos in the album are enough to prove to her that she once had family, and that family loved her more than she thought.The album will feature everyone's best looks, and Gloria is at the center of it all, thin and radiant, without even knowing that her own life is slipping through her fingers.Gloria found it odd that Graham would take a room at the Apex Hotel, which was totally out of his style.
Their wedding was actually brown instead of white.
Graham was wearing the latest suit, the color Gloria would have called "nigger brown" with a grin when she was a kid.Gloria was wearing a fur coat she found in a thrift shop in Grasse Square, the style of the forties, Canadian beaver fur, before people thought about whether it was reasonable to wear leather.Although Gloria would never want to add a layer of animal skin to her skin, she now looks at the leather coat at that time and thinks that although the beaver is long dead, she must have enjoyed it in pre-war Canada Simple and happy life.
If Gloria had had that big white leather-bound photo album, the faces of her mother, father and sister would all be preserved in the photographs.Of course there is also Jill who was the "earliest to go". She came from other places with a group of school friends, drinking and drinking until late at night, and they were still drinking when everyone was asleep.Gloria's brother Jonathan will not be in the picture because he died when he was eighteen.Gloria was fourteen when he died, and she childishly assumed that one day he would come back.Now that she is older, she finally understands that he will never come back, and she misses him more than when he just died.
Gloria watched the young policewomen get back in their patrol cars and drive off, and her mind pictured Graham in a hotel room, lying on a bed with a veneered headboard. On the cheap double bed, while flipping through the TV channels, eating steak and potato chips, as well as a pitiful salad side dish and half a glass of red wine, waiting for a woman to make love to him in a professional way.How many times had he betrayed her in such a dirty way while she was home alone with only the B&0 Pioneer widescreen TV for company?Didn't she ever realize the existence of such a thing in her heart?Just because you're innocent doesn't mean you can be ignorant.
Gloria glanced down inadvertently and realized that she was wearing an alpaca cardigan from Jenners Department Store. It can be said that it is extremely mediocre.If her mother had the money, she would have bought clothes like this, and Gloria was wearing nothing more than that.
This cardigan made for housewives confirmed Gloria's long-held suspicion that she had passed straight from youth to old age, and somehow she had had good times in between. Leng is not able to experience.
This feeling is not new.Gloria often felt that her life was like walking into one room after another, only to find out that other people had already walked out of those rooms.She was born just a year after the end of the war, and the wartime atmosphere still pervaded the home.
His father claimed to have fought "with Monty," as if they were fighting side by side, and her heroic mother was at the front line of the family, growing her own vegetables and chickens.Gloria had grown up feeling that she had missed important times that would never come again (which was true), and that her life had thus become insignificant.The sixties were the same for her.Her formative years were spent in the vacuum between two eras of change.When the social movements of the 1960s were in full swing, she was married and began to wipe down the memo board at home and write down the daily necessities that needed to be purchased.
If Gloria's life could be repeated, she would not have slipped off the bar stool and followed Graham out in the bar on George IV Bridge Street.She will finish her degree and move to London to live.She'll put on high heels and tight-fitting business clothes (to maintain her figure), get drunk on the weekends, and have sex with countless men she can't even remember their names, let alone The way they look now.She checked the time and realized that the auction on eBay had ended.She wondered if she had photographed the pair of Staffordshire Greyhounds.Graham can always screw things up, even when he's on the edge of hell.
As she drove to the new Royal Hospital outside Little France, Gloria practiced the conversation she was going to have with Graham.
Although Gemma and Claire had told her that Graham was now delirious, it never occurred to her that this would be a hindrance to his conversations with others.Graham can always talk, only then is Graham.When she saw him in the emergency room with all kinds of wires taped to it, and at the other end of the line was a bunch of monitors with flashing lights and beeping, she still expected him to open his eyes and say something typical. Grahamian language ("Don't you fucking panic, Gloria").His complete silence was incomprehensible.
The consultant physician in the emergency room told Gloria that Graham's heart had stopped beating because of "overload".His "body function" has been "stagnant" for a long time, so he has entered a state of suspended animation now, and he may be able to recover, or he may not be able to wake up.
"We think," said the consultant physician to Gloria, "that about one man in a hundred dies during intercourse. A man's pulse is ninety beats a minute with his wife and can go up to one hundred and sixty with his lover. "
"What about the call girls?" Gloria asked.
"Oh, that would be a blast, I think," said the consultant cheerfully, "of course he might have recovered more quickly if he hadn't been tied up then."
"Tied up?"
"The girl he was with was trying to wake him up, and she seemed like a pretty creative type."
"Tie it up?" Gloria found that the very creative call girl in the consultant's mouth, that Jojo with a name like a clown, was still sitting idly in the waiting area of the emergency room.Her real name appears to be Tatiana.
"I'm Gloria," Gloria said.
"Hello, Gloria." Tatiana said, the overly familiar word "Lo" made her greeting sound slightly sinister, like one of the female villains in a James Bond movie mouth.
"I'm his wife," Gloria added, lest she should be confused.
"I know. Graham talked about you." Gloria didn't know where in Graham's deal with the call girl her name would appear.Before, after - or synchronously? "Not in sync," Tatiana said. "He couldn't talk while he was doing it." She raised her own expressive eyebrows in response to Gloria's silent question.
"The mouth will be gagged," she said finally.
“Gagged mouth?” Gloria whispered to Tatiana in the hospital café, with a cup of coffee and a Danish in front of her.This is the first time for Gloria to visit the New Royal Hospital. This hospital feels like a supermarket, which makes her feel a little dizzy.
"In order not to scream." Tatiana said lightly.
She unrolled the long roll of raisin rolls and nibbled carefully, reminding Gloria of the squirrels in her garden.
Gloria frowned as she tried to imagine how a person would be strapped to a bed at the Apex Hotel.It's impossible, isn't it? (No bedposts.)
"What will he say to you," she asked, "when he can talk?"
Tatiana shrugged: "This and that."
Gloria asked her, "Where are you from?"
Tatiana said, "Torcross."
Gloria said, "No, I mean where did you come from."
The girl looked at her with cat-like green eyes and said, "From Russia, I'm Russian."
For a moment, Gloria saw the endless birch forest woven with thin branches, and saw the interior of a smoky coffee house in a foreign country, although she felt that the girl's home was more likely to be in some horribly desolate suburb. In a concrete high-rise building in the county.
She was wearing a tank top and jeans, which was certainly not her work attire.
"No," she said, "the props are here." She was referring to the contents of the large bag she carried with her.Gloria seemed to see buckles and leather and corsets, which came to her mind for an eerie moment as the blush-pink Camp corrective corsets her mother had once worn.
"He likes to be subdued," Tatiana said, yawning. "All powerful men do. Graham and his friends are the same. Idyots." His friends?
"My God." She thought of Pam's husband, Murdo.She thought of Pam honking the horn of her brand new Audi A8 around town, going to bridge meetings, hitting the gym, and having afternoon tea at Plaisir du Chocolat, while Murdo was— -how to say?Gloria didn't dare to think about it.
Gloria sighed.Is this what Graham really wanted?Not Windermore or country-casual clothes, not banal brass buttons, but a woman small enough to be his daughter tying him up like a turkey?It was strange that she wasn't particularly surprised that something she had never thought of would suddenly appear in front of her eyes like this.
Gloria noticed that Tatiana had little gold crosses on her ears.Is she religious?Are Russians now disbelieving in communism and converting to religion?It's impossible to ask, no one would ask that.Unless it's not in the UK.While on vacation in Mauritius, a driver took them from the airport to the hotel, and he asked Gloria, "Are you praying?" Just asking, before they stopped his car, and he put their luggage in the back-up The box was only about five minutes old.
"Sometimes," she replied.
It was not true, but she felt that he would be rather disappointed to know that she did not believe in God.
Gloria had never understood why someone would wear a lethal instrument of torture as an ornament.Then simply wear a noose and guillotine.Fortunately, Tatiana's earrings are just two crosses, without a pair of dying Jesus Christ writhing in pain.But wouldn't the pair of crosses annoy her customers?Her father, Tatiana suddenly volunteered, was a "great clown." (So her alias somehow has a reason for it.) People in Western Europe, she says, see clowns as “slapstick fools,” while Russians see them as “existential artists.”Suddenly seized by a Slovakian melancholy, she stooped for a piece of gum and handed it to Gloria, who declined her offer.
"So aren't Russian clowns funny?" asked Gloria, as she withdrew £500 from an ATM in the hospital corridor.Gloria has been withdrawing £500 in cash from ATMs every day for six months.She put the wallet in a black plastic bin bag and put it in her wardrobe, and now has £72,000 in £20 notes.
The money takes up surprisingly little space.Gloria wondered how much space a million bills would take up.Gloria loves cash, real money at her fingertips.Graham also likes cash.
Graham liked cash a little more, letting big bucks pour into the Hart House accounts to take a shower and walk out clean.Graham has tried to avoid the old ways (coin laundromats and sunrooms), but his friend Murdo has insisted on doing so.The Jane Muir and Ballentine cashmere Pam was wearing was actually bought for "funny money," about which she seemed blissfully unaware.Just because you're ignorant doesn't mean you're innocent.
Gloria gave some of the money from the ATM to Tatiana and kept the rest for herself.Anyway, they were both making Graham's money in some way.Women in the seventies used to demand “housework pay,” and sex pay seemed more plausible.After all, chores have to be done whether you like it or not, and sex is optional.
"Oh no, I don't have sex with them." Tatiana said and laughed like it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard. "I'm not idyot, Gloria."
"But they pay you, don't they?"
"Of course. I do their business. Business is everywhere." Tatiana rubbed her thumb and forefinger, doing the body movements that represent money uniformly throughout the world.
"Then why the hell are they paying you?"
"I slap them, tie them up, beat them up. I give orders, make them do something."
"What are you doing?"
"You know."
"I don't know, I can't imagine it at all."
"Serve me in a low voice, crawl on the ground, and eat like a dog."
"Nothing useful, like vacuuming the house?" God knows - after all these years, Gloria could actually spank Graham's ass, make him eat like a dog, and make money off of it! "When I was in Russia, I worked in a bank," Tatiana said wryly, as if banks were the most dangerous place to work in the world.
"In Russia, I was always hungry." Her expression was so vivid, Gloria wondered if it had something to do with her father who was a clown.
In return for cash, Tatiana may have pulled out a small pink card from somewhere inside her bra, with a mobile phone number and the words "Looking for Jojo" written on the back, Handed it to Gloria.Printed in black on the front of the card is: "Felsers - We'll do what you want us to do!" The exclamation point at the end makes it seem like the Fairwos company is in the business of decorating kids' parties Balloons, arrangements for performers.
Or the influence of the clown's father, Gloria thought.She must have seen this slogan somewhere, isn't Ferris a housekeeping company?Gloria had seen the housekeeping company's pink vans around her neighborhood, and Pam relied on them to do the cleaning last year when the cleaner at Pam's house had a prolapsed bladder.Gloria has always cleaned the house herself, and she loves it.Doing useful things like these can make life very fulfilling.
"Yeah, sure," Tatiana shrugged. "If you want them to clean the house, they'll do it." Her somber-sounding accent seemed to give the word "clean the house" a whole new lease on life. Meaning, as if the activity of "cleaning the house" is not to make the house clean, but to make it dirty (if not eerie).
The card that had been snuggled against Tatiana's chest still had her warmth, and it reminded Gloria of picking up eggs.Her mother had chickens in the backyard, and she got eggs from under the buttocks of the chickens, long after the war, when there was really no need for such things.Tatiana stuffed the money into her bra.Gloria also often carries valuables in the armor of her underwear. She firmly believes that even the most arrogant robbers will not dare to violate the Triumph "Doreen" series of 42E bras built by her postmenopausal old lady. solid fortress.
They walked together to the door of the hospital, passing a shop where Gloria bought a glass of milk, a stamp and a magazine.She wouldn't be surprised if there was a car wash behind the house.
The exit on the front of the building is like an airlock that isolates two different atmospheres. People are walking around doing nothing, talking on the phone, waiting for taxis and people to pick them up, or just running out. To take a breath, I don't know whether they came to the hospital to welcome the newborn, to send the dead, or to receive routine treatment.A few patients in hospital gowns were wearing slippers, watching the outside world sadly through the glass wall soaked by raindrops.On the other side of the glass wall, the smokers are watching the world inside with the same dejected look.
Walking out of the greenhouse-like hospital, I found that it was very cold outside.
Tatiana was shaking, and Gloria lent her her long green Danny Mark coat.Without the long coat, Gloria was no different from other middle-aged women, while Tatiana in the long coat glowed with a strange brilliance that didn't seem to belong to Danny Mark's clothes.She crackled her gum, puffed her cigarette now and then, and talked on her cell phone very fast, in Russian.Gloria could not help admiring her.
Tatiana is much more interesting than her own daughter.
"This incident must have surprised you." Tatiana turned to her after finishing the phone call.
"Well, yeah," said Gloria, "so to speak. I always thought he'd go to the golf course, and it doesn't look like he's been there."
Tatiana patted her on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, Gloria, he'll be fine soon."
"You think so?" Tatiana stared into the distance like a fortune teller, and said, "Trust me." She trembled again, this time it seemed that it had nothing to do with the temperature.“I have to go now,” she said, taking off Gloria’s Danny Mark coat with a jerk that was graceful, even stage-like.Gloria wondered if she had ever taken ballet before, but she shook her head and handed the coat back to Gloria, saying, "The trapeze." The last time Gloria saw Tatiana , she was getting into a car that was quietly parked on the side of the road before, and the window glass of that car was covered with black film.Gloria thought it was Graham's car at first, but she immediately realized where he was.
Notes:
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