Читать книгу Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence - Michael Marshall Smith - Страница 14

Meanwhile, about a thousand miles away, a man was sitting at a table in a diner called Frankie’s Food Fiasco, situated at the edge of a small town in North Dakota. The man was called Ron – though a lot of people had another name for him.

The restaurant had got its name because it was owned by a guy called Frankie: sometimes that’s the way it is. Frankie was a capable cook, and his diner was regarded as pretty much the only place you’d voluntarily eat in town. Less well known was that Frankie had never wanted to own a diner. He’d wanted to be a movie star. For a while it looked like it might happen, too, after he scored a lead supporting role in a TV series about a maverick chiropodist turned surfing detective, called Undertoe, which by odd coincidence was the first show Hannah’s dad worked on. It was also the only one that had got a second season, and thus constituted his biggest and, kind of, only success. Frankie had played the star’s dour buddy, prone to mutter the word ‘Fiasco!’ whenever things went wrong – which became a moderately popular running gag in society at large for about five minutes.

Once the show got cancelled and he’d realized the world of entertainment appeared not merely willing, but keen, to get along without him, Frankie had enough smarts to head back to his home town, where he used his savings to buy a failing restaurant, largely because he had no idea of what else to do. Through trial and error – and a degree of bloody-mindedness – he’d rewritten himself as a cook, and now if you wanted to eat out in Shendig, North Dakota, Frankie’s Food Fiasco was where you’d go.

Frankie could have been content with this state of affairs, but he was not. He wished he was still an actor, and in the intervening years had developed a churning resentment of the people who frequented his diner. What did they know about the life he should have had? Nothing. Zip. Nada. They just wanted their burgers and wings and fries and beer. They sat and stuffed their greedy faces not caring that the food they were shovelling down had been prepared by a man who, were this a fair and just world, should be lounging on the deck of a beach house in Malibu, stupefied with money and success.

In revenge for this, every night Frankie would, at random, screw up a single dish. He’d put in way too much salt, or a big dollop of hot sauce, or mix untoward ingredients in such a way that the result tasted quite unlike anything you’d generally regard as food. Though it was never explicitly discussed, some of the restaurant’s customers realized the danger, incorrectly assuming it was a recurrent accident. You couldn’t say anything should you be unlucky enough to be served the booby-trapped dish because Frankie was prone to banning people if they got uppity, and you didn’t want that to happen as the only other place to eat in Shendig (apart from Molly’s Café, which was dependably disgusting) was the Burger King downtown. If you received Frankie’s nightly food bomb you forced down as much as you could and politely told the waitress you were full, declining the opportunity to have the remainder boxed – knowing that statistically you were unlikely to get the booby prize again for a while.

Unless, that is, you were Ron.

Ron ate at Frankie’s at least once a week. It was just down the hill from his apartment and he enjoyed the low ceilings, the wood panelling, the fact that the music was never too loud. He also liked the food, though it seemed like his entrée tasted really weird about one time in three. Ron hadn’t heard the rumour about the food bombs. He just shrugged and put it down to fate.

Ron put a lot of things down to fate. He had to. Like the fact that the booth he was sitting in tonight – and he couldn’t move, because the place was packed: people liked to come in when it was busy, as it lowered the probability of receiving a dish that tasted like it had been cobbled together from things that had died out on the highway and then spent a few days simmering in snot – happened to be right under a spot in the exposed piping hooked to the ceiling that had developed a leak, and was intermittently allowing droplets of very cold water to fall on to his head. He’d tried moving to the other side of the booth, but it happened there, too. Except the drops were boiling hot.

Tonight his ribs tasted great, but he was barely aware of them. He was concerned instead with two other matters, the first being that he’d totalled his car that afternoon. It had snowed heavily a couple of days before and while most people had managed to avoid the very obvious icy patch at the end of the road, Ron had not. As he’d recently lost his job at the picture framer’s after dropping (and damaging, cataclysmically and beyond hope of repair) what had turned out to be a rather valuable painting, Ron wasn’t in a position to get his car fixed. Without one, it was going to be hard to find a new job.

The second thing on his mind was his girlfriend, Rionda. Or rather, he realized gloomily, his ex-girlfriend. She worked at the Burger King and was the nicest person he had ever met. She’d seemed to like him too, but their association had been plagued by disappointing events, including him setting fire to her favourite dress when lighting a candle that was supposed to be romantic, and accidentally backing his car over her foot.

She’d put up with most of this reasonably well, but the last weekend had seen a new low point. Invited for the first time to meet Rionda’s parents, Ron became entangled in a series of calamities during a visit to their bathroom that he still didn’t understand, but which had ultimately led to a need for the services of not one, but two teams of emergency plumbers, working in shifts, an estimated refurbishment bill of six to ten thousand dollars, and an odour which experts were now saying would probably never go away. When Ron had trudged away from the house at the end of the afternoon, Rionda and her mother were standing on the porch in floods of tears, and her father had been brandishing a shotgun.

Ron guessed that was probably the end of it.

He sighed and reached for his soda, not realizing until too late that he’d dipped his sleeve in his barbecue beans, at which point this distracted him sufficiently that he knocked his drink over. Not all of it dripped through the hole in the table on to his trousers, but most did.

It was this kind of thing that caused many people, behind his back, to call him Bad Luck Ron.

As Ron was tucking into a slice of pecan pie and wondering why it tasted so strongly of fish, he looked up to see a man standing at the end of the table.

The man was old, with white hair pushed back from his forehead and large hands. He was wearing a crumpled black linen suit. He didn’t say anything. He merely stood there, apparently watching the corner of the booth, the seat next to Ron.

He was looking at it so fixedly, in fact, that Ron turned to look too. The seat was empty, as he’d known it would be.

Well … it appeared empty. Ron couldn’t see the strange, four-foot-high fungus-like creature sitting there, or the expression of utter surprise, tinged with guilt and nervousness, upon its gnarled beige face.

Ron turned back to the old man. ‘Uh, can I help you?’

The man walked away.

Ron watched him head across the diner and out of the door without looking back. ‘Huh,’ he said.

He soldiered on with his pie a little longer, but eventually gave up. It was making him feel nauseous.

After he’d paid his bill, electing as always not to mention any problem with the food, Ron left the diner and stepped out into the freezing parking lot. He was disappointed to see snow was falling again. Driving home would have taken him five minutes. On foot, it would be half an hour up an icy hill. Oh well. Nothing he could do about it.

When he was halfway across the lot a figure stepped out from behind a car. This sufficiently startled Ron that he slipped on a patch of ice and fell down.

From his prone position he realized it was the old man he’d seen in the diner. Dots of snow swirled around the man’s head. Ron thought it must be snow, anyway.

‘Please stand up,’ the man said.

Ron tried, but halfway through the attempt his foot hit the same patch of ice and he fell down again in approximately the same way.

The old man waited patiently.

On the third attempt Ron managed to get to his feet. ‘Who are you?’

‘That’s not a question you need the answer to,’ the man said. ‘Would you turn away from me, please? Carefully, so you don’t fall down again.’

‘Why?’

‘Just do it.’

Ron did as he was told. Something about the old man’s manner told Ron that doing what he said would be the wisest course of action.

‘Thank you. Now hold still.’

There was a pause; then Ron felt a pulling sensation, as if something was tugging at his back. He glanced behind and saw the old man remained several feet behind, so it couldn’t be him.

‘Face the front.’

Ron quickly turned back. The tugging sensation continued for a few moments, getting stronger, as if something had its claws in his clothes, or even skin, and was refusing or unable to let go – and then suddenly stopped.

He heard the old man mutter something, followed by footsteps crunching away in the fallen snow.

‘You may turn back towards me now.’

Ron did so, slowly, surprised to find the old man was still there, now looking at him with a thoughtful expression, his head cocked on one side.

‘I can tell that you should not have received the attentions of my associate,’ he said. ‘I shall chastise him for it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I will give you one piece of advice, in recompense for your troubles. Even when you think you’ve apologized as much as you can, once more never harms. Your story can change. Overnight.’

Ron watched the man walk away across the parking lot to a large black car in the corner. Despite his age, he seemed to have no difficulty navigating the patches of ice that had proved unavoidably treacherous to Ron.

Oddly, the old man opened the back door of his car first. He stood with it open, waiting for a moment, as if for a tardy dog, and then closed it, got into the front and drove away.

Halfway home and already very cold, Ron had an idea. It didn’t seem like an especially good idea, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. He stopped, turned round, and trudged towards downtown instead.

He went to the Burger King, where Rionda ignored him steadfastly for an hour and a half. Eventually, however, she consented to listen as he said sorry for everything, up to and most definitely including the debacle the previous weekend at her parents’ house.

Her parents’ bathroom remained a sore point for Rionda, as the army had visited that afternoon and there was growing speculation that it – and the rest of the house, and possibly the ones on either side – might have to be destroyed in the interests of public safety, but Ron was so patently sincere that she couldn’t help but soften.

He seemed different somehow, too, and when he walked her home at the end of her shift it was Rionda, rather than Ron, who slipped on ice going up the hill leading to her own little house. Ron caught her arm, and she did not fall.

She kissed him.

Five months later they were married.

They will play no further part in our story, but I’m happy to relate that they lived happily ever after.