Cosmo Cosmolino (10 page)

Apart from Maxine's tools and furniture, there was not much to be transported; it was all done in a morning, with the absorbed and practical cheerfulness which at the establishment of any household sweeps away misgivings. The furniture, when it came, filled Ray's panel van like an excursion of handicapped children, some supine and passive, some eagerly upright but exhibiting at the windows bizarre body language which snagged the attention of pedestrians and left them puzzled and staring.

‘What do you make of her stuff?' said Janet to Ray on the back verandah, while Maxine, fifty feet deeper in the unreconstructed garden, trotted backwards and forwards outside the shed's gaping double doors, hands clasped under her chin, engrossed in the fresh arrangement of her creations.

‘Her stuff?' said Ray.

‘Her work. The chairs and cupboards, and so on.'

‘I haven't formed an opinion,' said Ray. ‘Yet.'

‘Just at first glance, though,' said Janet. ‘How does it strike you?'

‘Oh, I don't know whether I can really say, at the moment.'

She glanced at him, surprised, impatient. ‘Not even off the top of your head?'

Sweat broke through the skin of his armpits. ‘I'll have to examine it much more carefully,' he mumbled. ‘I'll have to become accustomed to it, and get acquainted with her . . . theories, before I can offer an opinion.'

‘I'm not asking for a final judgment,' said Janet. ‘Just an impression—you know, a gut reaction.'

Dumb, he stared at her.

‘What I mean is,' said Janet, more gently, ‘do you
like
it?'

‘Like it?' he repeated.

‘Is there any of it that you—that you sort of feel good about, when you look at it?' She was speaking in words of one syllable, as if to a child.

He closed his mouth and turned away towards the garden, his thoughts struggling behind a cloud. Again she looked at his feet and saw the pathos of them, how unguarded they were, how feebly shod.

‘I'll tell you,' he said in a rush, ‘if you really want to know. Her stuff gives me the creeps.'

Relieved, Janet laughed, then lowered her voice. ‘Why?'

‘Look,' he said. ‘I'm not very sophisticated, right? Anyone can see that. I haven't had much education. I'm not a talker. But I do know one thing. I know the difference between right and wrong.'

Janet fixed her eyes on Maxine's little figure down there at the shed doors, beyond the mossy lattice and the old tomato stakes: rapt, unconscious of scrutiny, she came and went keenly in her faded flannel shirt and running pants, clasping and unclasping her hands under her chin, hesitating for long moments with her explosive head of hair tilted to one side, pressing a forefinger across her pointed lips, then, with both arms outstretched, dashing into the shed again and out of sight. Janet felt the back of her neck prickle.

‘How the hell,' she said, carefully keeping her tone steady, ‘how can
furniture
be right or wrong?'

Ray stepped closer. ‘What she's got out there,' he said, ‘is not just ordinary furniture. It's got things
carved
in it. Signs, and special holes and pictures.'

‘You mean slogans?' said Janet. ‘Or decorations?'

‘No,' said Ray. His hand crossed his chest and felt for the book buttoned into his shirt pocket. ‘Kind of magic. Superstitious beliefs. And I saw the books she reads. Scary stuff. Cosmic. Don't you know what I mean?'

‘Oh, it's probably just New Age,' said Janet. ‘A lot of people are into that, these days. They seem to believe in everything all at once. It's not very discriminating. But it's pretty harmless, isn't it?'

‘Harmless?' said Ray. ‘You think that stuff's harmless?' He wrestled with the button of his shirt pocket and pulled out a small black book. ‘It's all in here,' he said, riffling the cigarette-paper pages with his thumb. ‘I can show you. It's crystal clear, in here.'

‘Put it away,' said Janet. ‘Here she comes.'

He obeyed. They turned. Maxine was ploughing up the garden towards them, smiling enormously, carrying something tiny on her two extended hands.

‘It's a cage,' hissed Ray. ‘Look, she's built a cage for a rat, or something.'

‘Shut
up
,'
said Janet. ‘Just calm down.'

‘Look,' said Maxine, stopping below them at the foot of the verandah. ‘Look what I made. It's my favourite.'

She held it up to them so that a rocker balanced delicately on each palm.

‘See?' she said, beaming. ‘Can you tell what it is?'

‘Oh,' said Janet. ‘Oh, look.'

She stretched out her hand and brushed the cradle lightly with one finger. A tremor ran through it and on into the air. Janet sighed.

‘Oh, Maxine,' she said. ‘It's lovely. Look,' she said, turning to Ray. ‘See—how beautiful!'

He tried, he really tried to see it with them, to see it as they wanted him to. He urged himself to respond, he stared at it with fierce willpower, but before their avid, demanding smiles his whole intelligence went numb. In vain he applied himself. His store of remarks was empty. Into the space between him and the object, this arrangement of twigs, this box-like contraption on skis, there rolled, in the form of a dense fog, the idea of himself
looking at art
.
The women waited, with their eyes on his stiffening face, then, embarrassed for him and disappointed, they looked away. With his whole body he felt Janet's allegiance shift. The river swung away from him and he was high and dry, bereft again and foolish, on his own.

For consolation he brought his thoughts to bear on their plainness. Maxine's skin was papery, Janet's nose was red, and both of them had something middle-aged and hard about their mouths: unloved, unkissed. He did not need these two ducks.
Ducks
,
he thought. They were waddling away from him, waggling their smelly tail feathers, swaggering down the yard and bumping their folded wings as they went, lowering their blunt beaks over the empty cage, quacking and
clucking together as if they had known each other all their lives.

He flopped upstairs to the room he had chosen, Chips's old one, which he had swept, crouching soberly with Janet's pan and brush, then mopped, having to apply severe push and pull to the encrusted lino. The mattress he had lumped to the tip and dumped, not without raised eyes and a brief murmur in memoriam; and now on the dull green floor he spread his strip of foam rubber and on top of that his sleeping bag, khaki, aired for once, and flattened. He lay down on his back and took out the book. The nubbliness of its black cover soothed him. He opened it at random.

And the Babylonians came to her in the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom
.
Uh oh. Try again.
And he brake in pieces the images
.
Better. Once more.
There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come near thy dwelling
.
Good. He closed his eyes, keeping his finger between the pages. Maxine's piece of art, the twig thing. Now, away from them, he could think about it. Really it wasn't such a bad little job, a box, a cage, a cot or whatever, though what all the fuss and sighing were in aid of he didn't know, it was only a couple of scraps of wood fixed together and was that supposed to be art? Also it was hard to separate his picture of the thing itself from the awful smile behind it, the toothy gash in the face of
someone whose eyes were spinning in her head.
How old were these two women, anyway? Same age as Alby—forty-five at least, ten years older than he was.
And
they looked it, in spite of the bottles in the bathroom, the muck they must have slapped on themselves over the years. He was after someone younger. Someone he could . . . influence, and educate, now he knew what to teach. Someone innocent. A virgin.
Were
there virgins, any more? He turned it up in his book.
A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed
.
Oh, stop. Not to be used like this. He shoved the book into the hood of his sleeping bag, and tried to scour his mind. Sternly; be stern. He herded his thoughts back to the young girls on the church steps with their families: their horsy cruppers, their dry hair scraped back, their skirts, their pink and yellow jumpers, the way they stood close to their fathers and glanced about them with meek and stupefied faces. Chantelle, Casey, Tiffany and Stacey. One of them was meant for him. What he should do was marry. What he needed was a bride. The idea of having to play a part in a public ceremony made him go dead all over, and grimly, to punish himself, he stuck with it, wielding it to discipline his thoughts away from these afternoons in rented and borrowed rooms, to send them briskly down lanes to the back doors of factories, to the gnashing confusion of construction sites, the damp concrete of supermarket loading bays. A job.
A job
.
He looked at his watch. It was twenty to five in
the afternoon, that terrible time of day for the unemployed, when all hope of a fresh start is lost and everything shrivels, loses colour and slides gravewards. He had himself under control now, and sat up on his bag, disoriented, sorry for himself, homesick for something he had not yet found.

And that was when he heard the bird.
Here
,
after all this travelling, outside even this ivy-clogged, broken-corded, sunless window. It started on the same note as before, as always, with no trilling or quavering, and worked its way drearily up a scale of six, where it stuck, but instead of hitting the seventh and eighth notes to round off a proper tune, repeated the fifth and sixth ones over and over again till Ray was nearly tearing out his hair. It refused to—it was too stupid to—he did not know the words to describe what the bird's song withheld from him.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Janet stripped off the rubber gloves and put out her hand to the tap. Gripping the metal, she heard from outside in the garden a bird's clumsy stepladder of notes, vibrato-less, unresolved, and felt her own skeleton fold itself up like the spokes of an umbrella inside its loosened covering of skin. Behind her left shoulder a fissure opened in the room's density. I will die. I will die and leave nothing behind: I will be forgotten.

The back door swung open and Maxine stepped in from the verandah in her rubber shoes.

‘Hullo,' she said shyly. ‘I was out there working, and I thought I'd—Oh, pardon me!'

Janet looked up from the sink. ‘What?'

Maxine stared past her, then gave a small, embarrassed laugh. ‘I must be tired,' she said. ‘It's only the apron. Hanging on the cupboard door.' She shoved the heels of her hands into her eyes and rubbed harshly. ‘Is it all right if I make myself a cup of tea?'

‘Feel free,' said Janet. ‘You live here, don't you?'

She let go of the tap and reached along the bench for the kettle. It was a quarter to five, the hour when children burst into kitchens blank-eyed and mindless with hunger, when schoolbags crash against skirting-boards, when music starts and for ten minutes the house is jostled from within by its own unruly future. The fridge motor, whose purr had been the only thing holding at bay the daily end of the world, cut out. Between the kitchen and the sound of traffic a block away where the tramline ran and the big trucks thundered northward, a chasm opened. The house shifted on its foundations, redisposing its emptiness.

‘I wonder,' said Maxine vaguely, ‘what that little bird is. That sings. Out there.'

‘You heard it too?'

‘I thought it lived at my old place,' said Maxine, ‘but it must have followed me here.'

‘I hear it sometimes,' said Janet, holding the kettle under the dry tap. ‘Don't you know what bird it is?'

‘No,' said Maxine. ‘And I've never seen it. But it tries to sing around this time nearly every day. I made up a name for it.' She laughed, a sound more like a sharp sigh.

‘What?' said Janet. ‘What do you call it?'

‘It's silly, I suppose,' said Maxine, ‘but I call it the failure bird.'

She was pale. The way she stood with her hands hidden inside her bunched-up cuffs made her look tiny and stiff-armed, like a wigged doll propped on a shelf in a toyshop.

‘Have you got any children?' said Janet suddenly.

‘No,' said Maxine.

‘And is that something you . . . regret?'

‘For a long time,' said Maxine, coming forward, still holding her cuffs closed from inside, ‘I thought it must be my destiny not to. But now I'm ready. I've got the message. By the end of next summer I'll have one. I
have
got pretty pressing money problems—but I've made up my mind to, and everything else seems to be falling into place.'

Janet tried to smile. ‘That's nice,' she said. ‘And you've got a bloke? It's all lined up?'

‘I think so,' said Maxine. Two red dots appeared on her cheeks. ‘That is—unless
you've
got plans for him, of course. In which case I'm quite prepared to wait. To wait my turn.'

‘Who on earth do you mean?'

‘Him.' Maxine dropped her head back and pursed her lips at the ceiling.

‘You mean Ray?' said Janet. She turned on the tap. Water crashed on to the floor of the kettle. ‘You mean you've arranged it? Already?'

‘Not in so many words,' said Maxine with a laugh. ‘I wasn't quite sure myself, till I heard his name. But now—here we are—and living in the same house, thanks to you!' She shot back her cuffs and spread her hands in a gesture of wondering beatitude.

Janet swallowed. ‘And—Ray does know about this, I suppose?'

‘Perhaps not with his conscious mind, yet,' said Maxine. ‘That depends on the number of his incarnations.'

‘Sorry?' said Janet.

‘Oh, everybody,' said Maxine, ‘at
some
stage has to do a spell on earth.'