Gotham by Nick Earls Page B

of the night. Ms Willard, who granted him his rapper name by accident, is recently dead and thought him nasty to the last. He has some friends from the neighbourhood, though he doesn’t see them much and won’t give me names. As is his way, he leaves that recollection whirring in his head a while before diverting me to the present, always the present.
    He tells me a story about the Grammys, which he’s told in several other interviews, and one about a ski trip with Jay Z when he hoped the technique for snowboarding would be identical to skateboarding but it turned out it wasn’t. He mentions a record label party on a yacht where Sean Puffy Combs had a red drink spilt on his white suit and left by helicopter from a pad on the rear deck.
    Each anecdote is brief and unexamined. If he stares too closely at any of this big life, it might disappear.
    He wants the present to write over the past, firmly and grandly. I am to judge him for his now, yet it’s the journey to now that’s of interest to me. A nineteen year old loose in the city, having sex, taking drugs and eating late is no story in itself.
    But it will add up to enough for my purposes, even if it’s served to me as a mixture of rapper’s answers, dead ends and jagged edges. A story is a cohesive thing once it’s written, but the path to it is not.
    It’s dawn when I arrive back at the Beacon. A street-sweeping truck is passing, skimming the kerb. Crates of fruit are being delivered to the supermarket on the other side of Broadway. The van smells of bodies now, of Nati and his girl, of men kept in a small place.The last molecules of sanitiser have been defeated.
    My eyelids feel as stiff as wallpaper. There’s a sheen of grease on my skin. I’m not one for allnighters, even when my sleep reserves are okay.
    The concierge calls out, ‘Good morning, sir’ altogether too heartily. ‘How’s that beautiful daughter of yours?’
    Our circumstances make us everyone’s business here, and he could not mean it more kindly.
    It’s not long after five, but Lindsey and Ariel are already up when I open the door. Ariel is in pyjamas, sitting with toys, watching Frozen , again, on DVD. She looks at me as if I’ve been gone no more than a minute, then turns back to the screen. I hear a bowl clunk on a countertop. Lindsey is warming the morning feed.
    She’s in the kitchenette, with her forehead against the cupboard above the sink. Her hair isover her face, so I can’t see if her eyes are open. She is squishing the packet of liquid around in the warm water, attempting to heat it evenly.
    â€˜Here, let me do that.’
    She jerks into a more vertical position when I speak, and she bumps the bowl. There’s a red patch on her forehead from the cupboard door.
    â€˜Didn’t hear you come in,’ she says, and steps back. She folds her arms and watches me press the liquid around in the packet. ‘All night. Did you know it’d take all night?’
    â€˜Sorry. You know what they can be like, some of them.’
    I hadn’t the heart to tell her it was a twoto-three-day job, compressed into whatever hours last night would give me. No time in the planning of this trip or its execution was the right time for that. But the interview will end up delivering four pay packets, one of them a good one. In a simpler life I would have spread itout, with time for sightseeing, maybe a baseball game. I can still remember the chickpea salad from Zabar’s. We had no commitments that first visit, other than to squeeze as much New York out of it as we could.
    â€˜Yeah.’ She stretches her arms up and yawns. ‘My parents have transferred the last five thousand.’
    This is what we have become, ledger-keepers and scroungers trying to pay for medical treatment. Across town, Nati is hooking up, getting high, dialing the present up as far as it’ll go, and here at the Beacon we have to be