Broken Monsters. Lauren Beukes

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СКАЧАТЬ If it’s good.’

      ‘Isn’t journalism dead?’

      ‘That’s what they tell me.’

      ‘You should start your own video channel. Get advertising.’

      ‘That’s what they tell me too. It all keeps changing. I don’t know how anyone’s supposed to keep up. It’s like learning to salsa in the middle of an earthquake.’ That’s not bad. He should write that down. It would be a good essay. Scratch that, an easy essay. More chum. Maybe she’ll open him up to something. He always thought a muse should be sex on legs.

      ‘You’re old is the problem,’ she says, flicking the turn indicator. She’s wearing black-and-yellow striped fingerless gloves. Her nail polish is chipped.

      ‘Thanks for that.’

      ‘Relax,’ she says. ‘I’m teasing.’

      They drive past the yacht club and she points out the old zoo, all shuttered up, the animals long gone. Maybe they joined in the white flight to the suburbs.

      They pass the long stretch of the main beach. Dishwater waves with white caps are worrying the gray sand. He remembers being a teenager in Rhode Island, lying on his stomach to hide his semi, watching the girls rub coconut oil into their skin, or run shrieking into the waves. Such an assortment of girls. It seemed then that they were all available to him, that he could work his way through all of them, the same way he was going to be able to travel to all the different countries, try his hand at different jobs, all the branching possibilities. Keep your options open, his parents told him, but they didn’t tell him that growing older is about your options shutting down, one by one.

      It’s baking in the car. He struggles out of his jacket and pushes up the sleeves of his sweater. Do men get hot flashes?

      ‘You’re going to have to put it on again,’ she warns him, pulling over into a small parking lot opening onto the grass.

      ‘What, here?’

      ‘You asked me to take you somewhere special to me. Belle Isle is happy childhood memories. What?’ she challenges. ‘You wanted to go urban exploring? Check out the ruins of the American Dream? Maybe you wanted to whack golf balls off the roof of the Packard Plant. Oh wait, I know. You wanted to harvest corn with your own hands from an urban farm in the middle of a dirt-poor neighborhood?’

      ‘Could be fun,’ he says defensively. But she’s right. He’s read all that shit. It’s all been done. The original stories are mined out, and all that’s left is fool’s gold. Or, more appropriately, Detroit diamonds, which is what locals call the blue glass on the street from broken car windows. He feels anxiety slamming into him like the gray waves on the river.

      ‘You been to Secret beach?’

      ‘If I had, would it still be a secret?’

      ‘Come on, grumpy pants.’ She swings open the door and the cold snaps like a rubber band against his face. She leans in. ‘You asked me to take you somewhere I like. Not somewhere you could find a blog post.’

      ‘Maybe that’s a blog post in itself.’

      ‘Very Zen of you.’ She slams the car door and starts walking out to a wannabe lighthouse in the grass. He scrambles out after her, pulling his jacket on.

      ‘Hey!’ he shouts. ‘I hope you’re not luring me out here to kill me!’

      She turns, walking backwards so he has to jog to catch up, and gives him the wickedest grin. ‘Keep up the oral and I won’t have to.’

      It takes them about twenty minutes of tramping along the path to get there. His jacket is useless against the vicious little wind. They turn off the path to tramp through waist-high weeds and springy bushes, until finally they push through, and the grasses part to reveal a scrubby stretch of beach and a narrow channel of dark water that opens onto the river past the bend.

      She spreads her arms like a magician’s assistant. ‘Secret beach,’ she says. ‘Also called hipster beach.’

       Also vastly overrated. There’s no story here.

      ‘What do you think?’

      I think I’ll say whatever will get me into your pants again. Which is the trouble, isn’t it, boychick? Talking your way into things? Like petite Monique. Who had a screw loose. Emphasis on ‘screw’, which allowed him to overlook the ‘loose’. She used to crawl under the table at fancy restaurants to blow him. His cock stirs in his pants at the thought. Or Trish, who had a kid. Although he didn’t like the kid, and the kid didn’t like him. Which is fair enough, because the kid was old enough to see him for what he was, just another tourist stopping off at MILF Island for a cocktail and a picture on the beach before moving on to less complicated destinations. Or Cate, who was everything he wanted. Until … Shut up. Stop it.

      ‘It sure is secret,’ is what he manages. The wind nips and tugs at them, rustling through the grass.

      She frowns. ‘It’s hard to get a real sense of it in winter. They don’t really like people coming here. There are no lifeguards, and there’s a bad rip current just off the point. A kid drowned there a couple of years ago.’

      ‘What’s that?’ He points at the columns of black stones, improbably stacked on top of one another, adorning some of the bigger rocks.

      She shrugs. ‘Art.’

      That’s a generous description. ‘Are they glued together?’

      ‘No. I think that’s the idea, that they’re not. The craft is in balancing them.’ She frowns at the cairns. ‘Hey, these are different to the ones I’ve seen before. Help me.’ She grabs onto his hand for purchase and hefts herself up the rock to see.

      ‘Yeah, look. There are faces. Sort of melted together. Neat.’

      ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ But he can make out the roughest of features hollowed out of the stones, shallow eyes, stretched mouths, as if they’re screaming. How romantic.

      ‘Woah,’ Jen Q says as her boot skids out from under her. Her shoulder slams into the artwork, if that’s what it is – if there’s a reason it’s stacked up out here and not in the Detroit Institute of Art. The column topples like Jenga and the stones plop-plop-plop into the water. He’s still holding her hand, and yanks her back to safety. She comes down on top of him, bringing them both crashing to their knees in the wet sand.

      ‘Jesus. Remind me not to take you into a china shop,’ he says. Which sets her off again, shaking with laughter. He holds her, freezing damp soaking into his jeans, warm girl in his arms.

      This could be alright, he thinks.

       Just don’t fuck it up.

       Writings on the Whiteboard

      The quote of the week (written in red marker on the whiteboard in the detectives’ meeting room): ‘It’s not very СКАЧАТЬ