A Jest of God (8 page)

Crack!

What is it? What’s happened?

The ruler. From his nose, the thin blood river traces its course down to his mouth. I can’t have. I can’t have done it. Slowly, because a reason for all things must be found, I take the unresisting page between my fingers and force myself to look at it.

No pictures. No obscene caricatures. Only – two sums completed, out of ten, and those two done incorrectly. That’s all.

He has what we used to call a nosebleed. It won’t stop. His blood won’t stop.

“James, put your head back. It will stop then.”

I cannot say I’m sorry. Not in front of them all,
twenty-six beings, all eyes. If I do say this, how shall I appear tomorrow? Cut down, diminished, undermined, very little left. If I do not say it, though, there’s enough gossip for a month or more, to friends and fathers and lovingly listening mothers –
you know what Miss Cameron went and did?
Did she? And to James, space venturer, first man on the moon?

He is not crying. Maybe I knew I could rely on that. He has dug out from some obscure and unnoticed pocket a tardy handkerchief, never seen before. With it, he is mopping away the scarlet from his face, not dramatically, but very simply and practically, as though this were the only thing to be considered at the moment, to wipe the stained confusion away.

If I could put my hands upon him, lightly, and comfort him. If I could say something. It is not for me to say or do anything. How can one retrieve anything at all? Is it always past the appointed hour?

James – I’m sorry.
But I haven’t spoken the words aloud.

James puts his handkerchief away. His nose has stopped bleeding. The others are looking at me. Everyone within our gates will hear before nightfall. The only thing I can do now is to bring it off as though I meant it to occur, as though I were at least half justified. If I capitulate, they will fall upon me like falcons.

“All right, James. Get on with it. See if you can get through the next few.”

I hear my voice, controlled. I don’t know what I could ever say to him, to make up for what I’ve done. I don’t think I could ever say anything which might make him forget.

The day does end, of course. Am I walking home unusually slowly? I feel as though I were. Summer holidays will begin in another two weeks. This year’s children will be gone then, and
gradually will turn into barely recognized faces, no connection left, only
hello
sometimes on the street. There will be new ones, and I will have to learn their names and faces, their quirks and their responses.

I am trying to recall when I last hit a child. I cannot remember. It was not all that long ago – a year, perhaps. Yet now I cannot remember, cannot put a face and name to it, or a reason. In a year or two, will I have locked today away in some junkbox, never to be found among all the other scraps and trifles?

When did I, the last time, and who was it, and why? I must be able to remember. Why can’t I?

Now don’t start thinking your memory is failing, Rachel. That isn’t so. I can’t be expected to remember everything.

Two weeks. Not very long to make a peace. Not half long enough. Probably that is all he will remember of me, that one instant, the thin wooden stick across his face. “I had a teacher once who hit me so hard my nose bled, no kidding.” And listeners – friends or lovers or his own children – will express astonishment that such acts were allowed in those barbaric old days.

I must stop at the Regal Café and get some cigarettes. I don’t smoke much any more. It is foolhardy to take chances with one’s health, after all. But I do enjoy a cigarette after meals, and sometimes if I have a bad night, I may get up and smoke a couple – never in bed, no matter how wakeful I am. People have set fire to themselves that way.

The café is crowded with slick leather-jacketed youngsters. Behind the counter Lee Toy stands, his centuries-old face not showing at all what he may think of these kids. He has been here ever since I was a child, and he seemed old then. Now he is dried and brittle and brown like the shell of a lichee
nut, and he has two younger men in partnership, nephews, perhaps. They could be sons, and I wouldn’t know. He has spent most of his life here, but in a kind of secrecy, living alone in the rooms above the café. My father told me once that Lee Toy’s wife was still in China, still alive and living on the money he sent, but unable to come here, first because of our laws and then because of theirs. Maybe she is there yet, the woman he has not seen for more than forty years.

Beside the Coca-Cola poster on the wall there hangs a painting, long and narrow like an unrolled scroll, done on grey silk – a mountain, and on the slope a solitary and splendidly plumaged tiger.

I have to walk through the tight knot of teenagers. They don’t make way or part ranks. They remain clustered around the jukebox, boys with their arms around their girls, and the girls, also, each with their arms around some boy. Have I taught any of them, years ago? I don’t want to look directly at them to see who is recognizable and who is not.

They take up all the space. A person can hardly squeeze inside the door. They’re everywhere. I wish I hadn’t come in. I don’t like having to shove past them, having to endure the confident dismissal of their eyes.

At last I’ve got my cigarettes. As I’m reaching out for the change, I find myself glancing sideways and looking into the face of a girl. Lipstick a whitish pink like salve, softly shining skin with virtually no powder, and then everything lavished on the eyes – bluegreen like the sea, underneath, and greenblue lids above, with the lashes thickly black. She is staring at me. What do those plain eyes in their jewelled setting see? I don’t want to know. It doesn’t concern me, what she thinks. Why should it? What does it matter? Who does she think she is?

“Hello, Miss Cameron.”

“Oh – hello.” I don’t know her. Whoever she once was – that’s long gone. Some child I was drawn to, perhaps and may have shown it, and she remembers and can’t forgive it, for she detests now and would like to kill forever the little girl who believed it was really something if the teacher was pleased with the work she’d done.

I must get out of here.

Japonica Street. The days are longer now, and the light lasts into the evening, but Hector Jonas has turned on the neon sign.
Japonica Funeral Chapel.
It winks and beckons, and as I walk up the petunia-edged path, I see all at once how laughable it is, to live here, how funny lots of people must think it, how amusing, how hilarious.

Oh stop. It’s a house. It’s decent. Mother wouldn’t feel at home anywhere else. You’d think she would want to leave but she doesn’t. She always let on to my father that she didn’t enjoy living here. She used to say “Your father’s so attached to this place,” and then sigh delicately. But if he had been able to move anywhere, I don’t suppose she would have gone.

He really was attached to it, though. He had come here and settled in as soon as he got home from the First War. He must have been very young then. He never talked about that time in France, and when the Armistice Day parades were held, he never would go. Mother used to say, “Everyone goes, Niall – it looks so peculiar, for you not to.” He would agree to nearly anything, for quiet, but not to that. He would stay downstairs that day, with the silent company if there happened to be anyone in residence waiting burial, or else alone, and he wouldn’t come upstairs all that night, either, being unable to move sufficiently, I guess. What could have happened to him, all those years ago, to make him that way? When the Second World War came, the Cameron Highlanders marched
through the streets of Manawaka on their way off, because so many of the town boys were in that regiment. I was a child, and excited at it, because they bore our name. I came back and pounded on the door of his establishment, the only time I ever remember doing that. “Dad – come and see – they’ve got pipers, and they’re playing ‘The March of the Cameron Men.’” He stood in the doorway, his face showing no feeling at all. “Yes, I expect they are, Rachel. It has a fine sound, the lies the pipes tell. You run away, now, there’s a good girl.” That’s all.

“You’re late this evening, dear,” Mother says.

“I’m sorry.”

“What’s the matter, Rachel? Aren’t you feeling well?”

“I’m all right. A bit of a headache, that’s all. How are you?”

“Oh, just fine, really. I had that miserable pain again this afternoon, but I lay down on the chesterfield for an hour, and it’s almost gone now.”

“You shouldn’t be up. You go and lie down again now. I’ll see to dinner.”

“No, truly, I’m fine now, dear. A little tired, but that’s nothing serious. I’ll take it easy, though. I know I must, although it’s not easy for me, having always been so active. I just hope you’re not coming down with ’flu. I don’t like these headaches you’ve been getting. Have you got a temperature?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Let me feel your forehead. You’re a bit warm, I’d say.”

“I’m all right, Mother, for goodness’ sake. You go and lie down now. Please.”

“Well, I will then, dear, if you’re quite sure you’re all right. You haven’t got an upset stomach, have you?”

“No, no. My stomach is perfectly all right. It’s just a bit of a headache. I’ll take a two-twenty-two.”

“Yes, you be sure to do that, dear. You don’t take enough care of yourself, Rachel. It doesn’t do to take chances with your health. If you do, you’ll pay for it when you’re older.”

When I’m older. She speaks as though I were about twelve. What a strangely pendulum life I have, fluctuating in age between extremes, hardly knowing myself whether I am too young or too old.

At dinner she eats well. She seems all right. What is the matter with me? Do I doubt her pain? At times I do, and then again at other times it causes a panic in me, and I wonder what I’d do here, by myself.

“You know the Stewart girl, Rachel?”

“Cassie? The one who works at Barnes’ Hardware?”

“That’s the one. I only heard today. You know she’s been away?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, she has been. It’s dreadful for her mother, a nice woman, nothing to write home about, but quite a nice woman, Mrs. Stewart, I’ve always thought. The girl isn’t married and no one even in prospect, so I gather.”

This circumlocution is necessary for Mother.

“You mean she’s had a child?”

Mother spoons the last drop of vanilla ice cream slowly into her mouth, letting it melt and dribble down her throat before she replies.

“Twins,” she says sepulchrally. “What a heartbreak for her mother. Imagine.
Twins.”

I have to resist some powerful undercurrent of laughter. Twins. Twice as reprehensible as one.

“Is she going to keep them?”

“That’s the awful thing,” Mother says. “Apparently she refuses to have them put up for adoption. I can’t fathom the
thoughtlessness of some girls. She might consider her mother, and how it’ll be for her. It was Mrs. Barnes that told me. I said to her, I thank my lucky stars I never had a moment’s worry with either of my daughters.”

Had. Past tense.

Mother took her sleeping pill soon after dinner. By nine, she was sleeping like a baby. I’ve finished the dishes and done some laundry, and I’m ready for bed myself.

Each day dies with sleep.
I wish it did. My headache has gone, but I’m restless. The slow whirling begins again, the night’s wheel that turns and turns, pointlessly. When I close my eyes, I see scratches of gold against the black, and they form into jagged lines, teeth, a knife’s edge, the sharp hard hackles of dinosaurs.

I must sleep.

The blood ran down from his nostrils to his mouth’s edge. He wiped it away as though it were only to be expected. What can I ever say that might make him forget?

I have to get to sleep. I must. The one who grows out of shadows won’t venture near tonight. Even that solace isn’t deserved.

– When Egypt’s queen received Antony, that book said, she used to fall upon him even before he had taken off his armour. Think of that – even before he’d taken off his armour. They used to have banquets with dozens there. Hundreds. Egyptian girls and Roman soldiers. Oasis melons, dusty grapes brought in the long ships from somewhere. Goblets shaped like cats, cats with listening ears, engraved in gold, not serpents or bulls, not Israel or Greece, only golden cats, cruelly knowledgeable as Egypt. They drank their wine from golden cats with seeing eyes. And when they’d drunk enough, they would
copulate as openly as dogs, a sweet hot tangle of the smooth legs around the hard hairy thighs. The noise and sweat – the sound of their breath – the slaves looking on, having to stand itchingly immobile while they watched the warm squirming of those –

The night is a jet-black lake. A person could sink down and even disappear without a trace.

H
olidays are enticing only for the first week or so. After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do. I don’t really know what to do with myself these days. I invent duties and expeditions. I see the children from my last class, on the streets, and they are so busy running somewhere that they hardly notice me.

Already July smells of dust and dryness, and I hope we aren’t going to have one of those yellowing summers, with no rain, and the green seeping away from the grass and leaves.

River Street is almost empty this morning, only a few bicycles buzzing slowly like bluebottle flies, and the occasional kingfisher flash of a car driven by some impatient housewife bored with shopping. Outside the Parthenon Café, Miklos is sponging his windows dawdlingly, spinning the job out to last the morning while his wife waits stoically on the customers inside. The Flamingo Dancehall is shut tight and locked, blinds drawn, but tonight it will be all mauve and green shifting lights, and blare, and couples. In the summer there are dances every night here now. It used to be only once a week, Saturdays, when
I was about seventeen. Sometimes I’d go with three or four other girls, scarcely wanting to, for the peril undertaken, the risk of no one asking a person to dance. But I dreaded not going even more – having to make up an excuse which anyone could see through. What a relief when one actually was asked to dance, no matter by whom. Except if it was Cluny Macpherson from the
BA
Garage, and then I used to want to get out of it, but couldn’t, being unable to say I’d promised the dance as it was obvious I hadn’t. He used to like to dance with me because he liked being a clown. I’ve often wondered how anyone could enjoy that. He was exceptionally short and broad, like a bulldog, and I was my full height then, and must have looked like some skinny poplar sapling. Naturally I’d falter or lose a step and he would croon to the band tune in his carrying voice so no one would miss the joke –
Don’t watch your fee-eet, don’t watch your feet.
Maybe he even thought he was doing me a kindness, teaching me to dance. He must have been thirty-five then. He’s in his fifties now. Probably he still goes to the dances at the Flamingo. What do the cool-eyed youngsters there now say to him? Has his foolery worn a little thin, even to himself, or does he still go on, unaware, or else compelled to be a card, a character, until he drops? What would he say if unexpectedly I turned up there one night? Perhaps we’d twist (is that still current?) for old times’ sake, two caricatures, dog out-reached to tree, the others’ laughter howling louder than the music.