The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [55]
Ivy stares at her, then looks down, her voice low and without inflection when she speaks. “You think I’m gonna be a failure,” she says.
“Ivy, no, no, you’re gonna do really well. I know you are.”
“You’ll see,” she whispers. “They’re gonna help me.”
“Who do you mean?” Ursula asks. This is the first time today that Ivy has said something she doesn’t understand. “Who’s going to help you?”
Ivy clasps her hands behind her back and sweeps the floor with an itinerant, slippered foot.
“My loyal fans, of course,” she says, looking up with that strange artificial smile.
This is a joke. Ursula laughs, letting herself entertain the far-fetched idea that things may actually turn out all right.
Hitmen
The two of them—James T. Couch and James T. Couch’s Irony—adjust their glasses on their nose and peer through the Plexiglas wall at the shadowy forms jerking and bobbing on the cramped, smoky dance floor, James T. Couch looking with interest, James T. Couch’s Irony with feigned interest.
“So this savage girl,” the two of them say. “What kind of fur was it?” James T. Couch sounds like a nervous man trying to sound casual. James T. Couch’s Irony sounds like an unconcerned man pretending to be a nervous man trying to sound casual.
And this, she recalls, was supposed to be the normal one.
“I don’t know, James. Brown fur.”
“But it could be synthetic, right? I have to know that.”
Ursula smiles and clenches her teeth. James T. Couch’s Irony is every bit as industrious as it’s been over the last few days, pressing emphasis onto random words, feigning concern, as though the fur were important to him, as though his reputation were at stake—from which Ursula is invited to gather that the fur is not important to him and that his reputation is by no means at stake, whereas in fact, since the fur flatly contradicts his last report, she knows it’s extremely important to him and his reputation is very much at stake.
“It could be synthetic,” she mutters. She’s due to meet Ivy’s friend Sonja Niellsen here; they haven’t had a chance to talk since she first got to town. Sonja is Ivy’s only friend, so far as Ursula can make out, or at least the only one who visits her—the only nonimaginary one, at any rate. The two of them are planning to get an apartment together after Ivy is discharged, and Ursula wants to make sure Sonja is going to be a good influence. Ivy’s going to need all the good influences she can get. In their latest conversation Dr. Shivamurti admitted to Ursula that if her sister’s coverage weren’t about to run out, they probably would have wanted to keep her in a while longer. She advised her to try to get Ivy into a halfway house, but as it turns out, even the most dubious-looking of these places have yearlong waiting lists. The best that Ursula has managed to find is a couple of day-care centers for the recovering insane, but she’s pretty sure the decor of the places alone will be enough to keep her sister from going anywhere near them. So if Ivy is going to have any hope at all of readapting to the world, Sonja is going to have to be helpful, patient, and understanding.
It’s a delicate situation, and Ursula was hoping for a bit of privacy in which to sound Sonja out properly, but privacy is something she’s had very little of since the day she met James T. Couch, who for some unfathomable reason has latched on to her like a barnacle. The coincidence of his happening to show up here would be downright spooky were it not for the fact that he so clearly belongs in this hellhole of a club. His outfit is even slightly gaudier than usual for the occasion: a pair of tight orange slacks, a pair of Day-Glo high-tops, and yet another of his trademark nonsensical Japanese T-shirts, a garish appliqué of a cartoon car full of cartoon animals, with the accompanying quasi-English slogan The Driving Life: It’s all a fun! His new glasses are an eyeful as well, shaped like television screens, the black frames wider on the outer sides to accommodate a column of costume knobs and dials.
“You’re the picture of