Year Zero (2000), page 2
"It's just a glitch, the scientists say," Elvis lamented. "There've been glitches before. Ah could tell you some stories ... but ah trust these guys. If it warn't for them, ah'd either be dead already or sixty-four years old and wearin' every one o'them in the bags under my eyes. Don't you worry your pretty little head none."
It was the first time Elvis had called her pretty. Molly knew, of course, that he didn't really mean it. She had been sort of pretty once, but that was before the creases had begun to set in around her eyes and her mouth. She was almost exactly half his age, but if any of the other singles night shoppers ever condescended to notice them they'd leap to the conclusion that she was the older of the two. The fact that Elvis didn't look at all well didn't make him look a single day older. Molly quailed at the thought that he might one day get to see her stretch-marks—but once she'd done quailing she felt a peculiar kind of naughty thrill, because she really did want him to see her stretch-marks some day soon—always provided that his present condition was only temporary.
In the meantime, it was really nice that he was being so polite.
"Well," Molly opined, "there is a limit to the trust you can put in doctors. Believe me, I know. I dare say you have the very very best, but they're only doctors when all said and done, and all doctors are alike in some ways. For instance, they tell you over and over again that things will be all right, even if they know bloody well that they won't. There are some things, you see, that are simply beyond the reach of medical wisdom. Ask Patsy—she knows."
Elvis groaned when Molly said that, and Molly wondered whether it had been a bad move to bring Patsy's name into what as supposed to be an intimate téte-a-téte. If she had learned one thing from all she'd been through, it was that one should never, never, never start talking about other women to blokes that one fancied. It led so easily to their making unfavourable comparisons. Annie had probably talked about Francine to Adam, with the inevitable result that Adam had defected. It probably hadn't helped, of course, that Annie had an unfortunate habit of slashing her wrists and breasts with razor blades as well as a long-held ambition to starve herself to death, but it wasn't until Francine had alienated Adam's affections that Annie had started going on about being abducted from her bed by little grey men in flying saucers.
Luckily, Elvis let the subject drop, and began reminiscing about the good old days, and why Blue Hawaii was a much better film than the critics had ever give it credit for, and what a compliment it was to have your nether regions deemed too obscene to be seen on the Ed Sullivan show.
Molly had actually seen Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, thirty-five years after the event, thanks to VH-I buying up all the old tapes, although the first time she'd flipped into it while channel-surfing she'd mistaken Ed Sullivan for Richard Nixon and had only paused because she couldn't figure out what on Earth had happened to the ex-president's neck. She hadn't much in the way of nostalgic memories to offer in return for Elvis's Hollywood reminiscences, but she tried her best not to be entirely reduced to such empty conversational interpolations as, "Oh yes, I saw that one," and she managed to bite her tongue on the only occasion that the fateful words, "I wasn't even born then!" rose unbidden took her lips.
Fortunately, Elvis didn't seem all that curious about her past, so Molly didn't have to get too close to memories of the more uncomfortable kind. When she showed him the pictures of her kids that she carried in her purse, he barely glanced at them.
"Christine's fifteen now," she explained, wondering why it sounded as if she were apologising. "l had to go to Tooting the day before I first met you to deliver her present. She's with temporary foster parents—the Jarvises. Angie's growing up too—nearly twelve. This picture's two years old, but I haven't got a more recent one. The Jarvises probably have, but they wouldn't give one to me if they had."
"Ah've got a daughter o'my own," he told her. He sounded faintly regretful, but Molly assumed that it was only because of the thing with Michael Jackson. Men always had a problem with their daughters' boyfriends. Sometimes, she thought that it was perhaps as well that her own father had never known that she existed—assuming, that is, that the Old Witch had been telling the truth about that.
Elvis was just as sweet as ever when he said goodnight outside the B&B, although he was obviously in some discomfort. Although Molly felt guilty about thinking it, she couldn't help thinking that he wasn't quite the man she'd imagined him to be. She didn't invite him in, and he seemed a little disappointed about that, but she did let him kiss her. It wasn't nearly as nice as she'd hoped it would be, but she knew that she had to make allowances. He was ill, after all. When the doctors had sorted him out properly, he'd be back to his best, and that would be the time to explore further possibilities.
4
The following week, when Molly met Elvis in Frozen Foods, between the crinkle-cut chips and the chopped spinach, things had obviously got a lot worse. Her heart sank when she saw him, although she had been nursing the fear all week that this was the way things were bound to go.
It seemed almost as if Elvis was visibly rotting. His cheeks were a terrible shade of putrescent grey, and his breath stank. Even so, he was still cheerful. He assured Molly yet again that it was just a snag that the scientists had to work out, and that he wasn't in the least worried.
"After all," he said, "it ain't as if ah can die, now, is it? Ah'm immortal, right? There ain't nothin' the viruses an' all the other parasites can do to me. Anyways, you should see the others. The Cap'n looks as if he really had been sleepin' with the fishes for a fortnight."
Molly was almost tempted to ask whether the temporarily baffled biotechnologists couldn't have laid on somebody to do the shopping for the household, but she knew that Elvis hadn't really come out to replenish the safe house's larder. He'd come to meet her—the groceries and Patsy's incapacity were just the excuses that he gave Bob and Lucky for regularly jeopardising their cover.
Molly couldn't help remembering the way they'd exchanged that first kiss a week before. Even though it had just been a peck on the cheek, the persistent memory of it had put a real dent in her hopes for the future of the relationship. She had realised, on due reflection as she lay sleepless in bed, that his skin had felt curiously fluid and that it had tasted ever so faintly of mould. He hadn't mentioned fungus when he'd been explaining the problem of the immortal parasites but she supposed that everything was included in the immortality deal. As they negotiated the corner that took them past frozen pavlovas and chocolate fudge cakes, Molly was struck by the horrible irony of Elvis's situation, and what it might signify for the future of the whole human race. If the quest to secure human immortality merely managed to preserve and empower all the myriad forms of human corruption, then living forever would be a far greater challenge than dying, and the possibility of getting bored after the first thousand years or so would be the least of an apprentice immortal's problems.
On another occasion she might have been able to follow this train of thought to an interesting terminus, but for the moment she couldn't quite bend her mind to matters of philosophical speculation. She knew that she had more intimate, if not more important, things to consider.
What if Elvis wanted to kiss her again tonight? What if he wanted to come up to her room and fuck her brains out? They were, after all, on their fourth date, and even immortals couldn't be expected to wait forever. Would she be able to bear it? Should she even try?
Molly realised as she posed these questions and paused to pick up a small packet of lard that the answers were already inherent within them. If such uneasy thoughts even needed to be raised, the end had to be in sight.
"An' it ain't just us," Elvis drawled. "Ifn you think we look bad, you should see Al Einstein and Siggy Freud. Ah bumped into'em last week at the clinic. Whoo-ee! Ah've told the big guys over an' over that they shouldn't have gotten so deep into charity work, an' so has Howie, but ah guess it's understandable they have this thing about their brother egg-heads."
"Of course it's understandable," Molly said, feeling a slight pang of irritation. "After all, without in any way questioning the value your own contribution to twentieth century culture, I must say that I couldn't possibly have much respect for people who'd try to save the likes of Robert Maxwell and Howard Hughes while blithely allowing Einstein and Freud to be committed to oblivion. Mind you, I'm a little bit surprised to hear you mention Einstein's name, because there was a programme on 'Discovery' only a couple of weeks ago about a man—Japanese, I think he was—who was trying to find out exactly what had happened to his brain, which had been put in a glass jar after he was buried."
"It was a fake," Elvis explained. "Brains are a dime a dozen. Sex-appeal is somethin' else."
Unfortunately, Molly thought, Elvis's sex-appeal was no longer very evident—and now that she was forced to confront the issue, his brain hadn't seemed much to write home about even on that first magic night when they'd met by the cheese counter. What was so special about Port Salut, when all was said and done? It might have a fancy orange rind but it was right there on the shelf, just like the mild Cheddar and the Dairylea slices.
Even while Elvis was walking her home that night, Molly knew that her dream had begun to fade—that this wasn't the turning-point in her life that she'd hoped it might be. It wasn't Elvis's fault—he really was doing his best, and underneath it all he was a really nice guy, but it just wasn't right for her.
"Ah was better in Jailhouse Rock, o'course," Elvis observed, with the half-hurt, half-apologetic air of a man who had just realised that his audience had lost the thread of his.
"Loved it," Molly said, tokenistically. "Kid Creole too. Loved them all."
"Ah was young then. Really young."
"I wasn't even born," Molly answered, hardly feeling the half-hearted reflexive nip of her teeth upon her tongue. She was immediately swamped with guilt. There was nothing wrong with Elvis that wasn't part of the essential human condition. Perhaps he was exhibiting his corruption a little more clearly than most, but the only difference between him and any other man was that he had lost his balance slightly. It wasn't even a man thing. Exactly the same nematodes and bacteria were patiently keeping house inside her own tissues. Her blood and skin were swarming with uninvited guests too. It wasn't Elvis's fault that he wasn't the ideal man. It was the ideal man's fault that he wasn't Elvis—that even the best man imaginable wasn't really the wellspring of all that was good and exciting and musical. If Elvis was only a symbol of the music, then the music too was only a symbol for something more basic and deep-seated. Music only had the effects it had, on her and everybody else, because it stirred up something inside. It stirred up lust and melancholy, a sense of the sublime and a sense of the ridiculous. It made your ribs reverberate and your heart beat more assertively, and it blotted out so many niggly parasitic distractions and irritations, but no music ever heard or imagined—not even the mythical music of the spheres—could ever be anything but a reflection of the human soul. And what was the soul, if you weren't a religious nut, but the sense of being yourself and not the person the rest of the world wanted you to be?
"I'm trying to get my kids back," Molly told Elvis as they walked back to the B&B. "I've seen Liz Peach, and she thinks I've got a chance. She's a social worker, of course, so she would say that—the lying bastards never say anything likely to upset you—but I think she's telling the truth. I mean, it's not as if I'm Francine, am I? Nobody but a lunatic would trust Francine to look after her kids, but I'm not like that. I'm capable of starting over. I've already kicked my worst habits, and I'm working my way through the bad ones. I know that the world and his wife—especially the wife—think that you can't really start a new life without a new man, and that a man is really all you need, but it's not as simple as that. If I were to stand face to face with the Devil himself and the Devil were to tell me that if I didn't toe the line he'd see to it that I never had another man as long as I lived, I'd tell him that if that was the worst he could do to me, I'd take my chances. I mean, you have to, don't you? You have to get your priorities in order, and we're already out of January and into February and even though it's a leap year, year zero still only has three hundred and sixty-six days in it and I can't afford to let whole weeks go by just waiting. It's not you—you have to believe that. You're great. You're the king. If there were any man alive for me, you'd be him, and if there were any man who'd ever lived, you'd be him too. You really are the king. But I'm not sure that I can do this, Elvis. It's just not right for me."
Elvis explained to her that it was just like Hollywood, where everything worked to a standard three-act formula. In every movie, he said, there was a point where the hero—and he, of course, had always been a hero, even in Jailhouse Rock —was delivered into the pit of despair, where it seemed that everything was lost and that his dream had become impossible of fulfillment. But that was just a phase that all heroes had to pass through, because that was the moment at which every true hero reached into himself and found the hidden reserve of strength of character that would carry him through to victory—and from that moment on, there was no way to go but up, until everything was settled and right and lit up like Las Vegas.
"Jus' give me a chance," he begged. "Jus' one more chance. Ah can be what y'want me to be. Ah'm much better than I seem right now. Jus' give me a chance to prove it." They didn't kiss when they said goodbye, and the way Elvis's shoulders drooped as he trudged away into the darkness made Molly suspect that for him too, no matter how things worked in Hollywood, a lovely dream had begun to die.
5
Molly was surprised to see Elvis the following week, given the appalling condition he was in. She was astonished that Bob, Lucky and Patsy had let him come out to do the shopping—so astonished, in fact, that she figured that they couldn't possibly have any idea that he was here. Nevertheless, he was right where he'd promised he'd be, next to the dumpbin where they put the goods that were past their sell-by dates so that old age pensioners could pick them up dirt cheap.
His trolley was empty, and he was showing no interest at all in the goods on the shelves, so it was perfectly obvious that he had made the trip just to see her. He still wanted his one more chance, even though he must have known that it was absolutely hopeless. He couldn't accept fate, because he was a hero.
In view of that, as well as everything else, Molly felt that it would be terribly unfair to string him along, so she decided to come right out with it.
"Look, Elvis," she said, "I'm sorry but it's just not working. Liz Peach says that I only have a chance of getting my kids back if I can demonstrate to everyone's satisfaction that I'm back on an even keel. She says it's okay to keep taking medication, provided that it's on prescription, but that everything else has to be squeaky clean. The right kind of job would be good, but the wrong kind of man would be as fatal as the wrong kind of speed. From now on, the only whizzing I'll be doing is round and round the aisles of the blessed with a fully-loaded trolley, and not on singles night either. It's not you—it's just that this isn't the right time for someone like me to get involved with anybody. Friends would be okay, but even they'd have to be the right sort. The way Liz Peach sees things, nothing short of an angel is safe company for me right now, and you're a guy whose pelvis was once regarded as an instrument of the Devil from the buckle to the tongue of the Bible belt. I can't see you again. It's over."
He protested, of course. In fact, he protested with an eloquence and fervour that she'd never seen in him before, not even in the very best of his films. For just a few moments, she could almost have believed that he'd meant every word of "Heartbreak Hotel."
Elvis told her that there was always a let-down effect when a person met an idol, whether the idol turned out to have feet of clay or not, because what getting to know someone actually meant was that you had to relate to them as a normal human being, not as something altogether outside the ordinary run of things.
"Tell that to Lisa Marie, " Molly said, although she bit her lip afterwards, in case it sounded too cruel.
As it happened, Elvis didn't understand what she was getting at. He decided to play the sympathy card. He told her that his eyeballs were full of immortal worms. He told her that he couldn't watch the TV news any more because the picture was just a blur of meaningless colour, and that the world was gradually going the same way. He told her that he couldn't sleep and couldn't eat, and that he was just about at the end of his tether with all the immortal parasites devouring his guts as fast as he could grow them back. Without the thought of her to sustain him, he said, he would be a goner. Without the hope of winning her heart, he would have nothing to live for.
"That's not fair," Molly told him, in an injured whisper.
"You can't put that kind of responsibility on another person's shoulders."
He wasn't an unreasonable man, and he apologised for having temporarily forsaken his dignity, but he didn't let up. He just changed tack again. He told her that she had to look beyond the image and the artifice to the lonely human soul within, with sympathy and understanding. He told her that she had to do that, not for his sake but for her own. He told her that she mustn't be afraid of life, that she too had to reach into herself in search of the hero within. He told her that for the sake of her own personal fulfillment she had to make the effort to appreciate that underneath all the glamour and the glitz there was nothing that mattered except a vulnerable human heart, beating in harmony with her own.
"That's half right," she replied, doggedly. "Beating, yes—harmony, no." It didn't seem right to add a comment to the effect that those four words summed up her whole life, although it would certainly have added a delicate spice of wit to what was turning out to be a rather painful conversation.
Elvis protested some more, and then he started pleading again. It was all rather ignominious, and Molly became embarrassed on his behalf. Fortunately, with it being Sainsbury's, and Brixton, none of the passing trolley-jockettes paused to give them a second glance. Molly couldn't help wondering whether it would have been any different if they'd been in a KMart in Tennessee.
