‘Get out! Get out!’

She was wiping her mouth, insisting she was really sorry.

‘I know a place you can clean up.’

She was saying.

‘Just near here.’

He went around to her side and helped her out. The stench was making him retch. He dumped her on the side of the road. She put up no resistance and just tried to light another cigarette. He gave her a twenty-dollar bill anyway, U-turned and drove back to Havenhurst, retching the whole way, windows down, sticking his head out of the window. The car would never lose this smell.

He cleaned as much as he could off the car, most of it had been deposited on his lap, and as quick as each retch allowed him he ran into the apartment, started the stream from the shower and got in, clothes and all.

What is it about him that brings out the worst in people?

When he has good intentions in the first place?

If you can call stopping for a blow job being a good intention. He wasn’t really going to do it, it was just out of interest, come on, no punishment now, no guilt. Please. His brain persisted in its independence. Everything he deals with goes to bad. It wasn’t a bad idea to get a blow job. But then vomit. Christ.

Clarissa, Jacob, his father, his mother, Lomita. A hooker. Even with a hooker, he drew a negative outcome in her life. Ever, come on. Did he produce the positive anywhere? He stripped off in the shower, trampling his clothes on the tiles. And decided to bag them in the morning to take them straight to the cleaners. He took a comforting pharmaceutical aid. The introduction of the Z family to the wine and diazepam seemed to do the trick.

Better than the trick that had just been turned.

Chapter Nineteen

The next day found him driving early to the Lorken gallery again.

Having dropped off his clothes at Holloway cleaners, to spend, he decided, as much time as it took, just sitting outside in his car, waiting for the man. He could smell the stale vomit in the air, windows down and disinfectant sprayed on the seats, hers and his, to cover the splatter. But still – could he smell that smell? Breathe in. Yes it was there, was it less now? Now though surely, another breath, less, was it, no, still there? Well, now his imagination was engaged and so he could just be summoning up the smell. Now he would never know. Once that kicked in.

He presumed, or was it assumed, no there was evidence, that this man would make some kind of an appearance at some point in the day.

That was his determined, main occupation of the day. But his preoccupation was, should he ask Lomita? And how could he ask Lomita to the private view of the Basquiat exhibition?