Cosmo Cosmolino (12 page)

Janet laughed outright, but Maxine kept on working, with her shoulders hunched and her eyes on the stub of wood.

‘So,' she said, ‘that's why you don't want to believe in devils or angels. Your painful experiences have made you very, very sceptical.'

Janet glanced at Ray. He had pushed his sewing away, and something was hardening round his mouth. She too closed her lips firmly, and controlled herself. After a moment she spoke, too loudly.

‘And what's that you're making?'

‘Oh, I'm just practising,' said Maxine. She was concentrating her gaze on the wood, but her mouth was curved in a good-natured smile. ‘Keeping my hand in. So that when an idea comes to me, I'll be ready.'

A quietness fell. Then Ray spoke. His voice had darkened, as if something were stuck in his throat.

‘The devil,' he said, ‘is worse than
vain
.
The devil's worse than anything you can imagine.'

The only sound in the room was the gentle dropping of the shavings.

‘You've got a bit of a nerve, haven't you?' said Janet. Her tone was conversational.

‘What?' said Ray.

‘Telling us what we can or can't imagine.'

‘I'm talking,' said Ray, with difficulty, ‘about suffering. Real suffering.'

‘You don't know me,' said Janet in a light, tight voice. ‘You don't know either of us. You don't know what we've done, what's been done to us, what we've lost. What gives you the right to tell us whether or not we've “suffered” enough? Enough for what?'

The wind bumped in the chimney and felt its way along the side of the house.

‘I may not know you yet,' said Ray. ‘But I've been watching you.' He spoke ploddingly and with care, looking her right in the eyes. ‘And one thing I see, Janet, is that your life is ruled by anger.'

Janet snorted again. ‘What
is
this,' she said. ‘A campaign? Now
you're
starting on me!'

Ray pulled the book out of his breast pocket and laid it down on the table between them.

‘I better tell you now,' he said. ‘I probably should have told you before. I know Jesus. Jesus is my personal friend. And I believe he's sent me here to tell you about him.'

Maxine held her knife in one hand and the wood in the other, like a diner interrupted between mouthfuls.

‘Jesus didn't send you here,' said Janet. ‘Alby did.'

‘Alby's saved too,' said Ray. ‘Alby is guided by Jesus in everything he does. Alby's saved from the slavery of sin, and so am I.'

‘Bully for you,' said Janet. ‘And don't give me that jargon. Speak for yourself.'

‘So you deny the workings of the spirit?' said Ray, clenching his jaw and keeping one hand flat on the black book.

‘The spirit?' said Janet. Her mouth twisted into a bitter hook. ‘
I've
had spiritual experiences too, you know.'

Ray leaned forward to her across the table. He was shaking his head. ‘You can't be too careful with those,' he said. ‘Specially if you've done a bit of acid, or meditation.'

‘What—you mean you're going to
warn
me?' said Janet. ‘You are incredible. You really are.'

‘They can come from the devil,' said Ray. ‘Believe me, Janet—they can.'

‘
This
is what I can't stand about you bastards,' said Janet. She was holding her volume low, but her cheeks and nose began to flush. ‘You've got it all sewn up. Would it occur to you to
ask
me about my experience, before you dismiss it out of hand? No! It wouldn't even cross your mind!'

Ray's fists and forehead tightened. ‘But you've got to
test
the spirits,' he said.

‘P'raps she did,' said Maxine anxiously. ‘You haven't asked her.'

They ignored her. Ray was flustering open the pages of his book.

‘It's in here,' he said. ‘Listen—“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world”. John four one.' He clapped the book shut and raised to Janet a justified face.

Janet stiffened. She puffed up. With alarm Maxine saw the air round her smooth-cropped head begin to spark and crackle.

‘You should
ask
her, Ray,' said Maxine, but Ray, deaf with zeal, bored on.

‘The devil's everywhere,' he said. ‘Not just at Brunswick one day and somewhere else the next. He's
everywhere
.
He's here with us right now. He's all around us, prowling, looking for a way to get in.'

Janet spread herself back on her chair. ‘And by what
process
,'
she said, pointing with a theatrical flourish at her own chest, ‘does he enter? How exactly does he get
in
?
To
me
,
for example?'

Ray's eyes were fluttering with strain. He cleared his throat. ‘You won't like what I'm about to tell you, Janet,' he said. ‘On the breath.'

‘Hoh!' said Janet with a rough laugh. ‘We're all damned, then, aren't we! What hope have we got, as organisms? None, it appears. No hope.'

‘No,' he said. ‘No. We've got no hope “as organisms”. But in the spirit there is hope.'

‘Don't
preach
to me, Ray,' said Janet. ‘I am not interested in hearing you
preach
.'

‘Why not?' he said doggedly. ‘What makes
you
too special to hear the word? “To be carnally minded is death. But to be spiritually minded is life and peace”. Romans eight six.'

They were breathing hard, staring into each other's faces. Ray kept swallowing; white showed all round his irises.

‘You can't
split
matter and spirit,' said Janet between her teeth. ‘How can you
split
them? It doesn't make
sense
.'

Flinching and flickering, Ray held her contemptuous stare.

‘Jesus can smash through all those structures,' he said. ‘I feel sorry for you, Janet. You're clever. You've been to uni, and that's going to make it harder for you. Because another way in, for the devil, is through the mind.'

Janet threw back her head and uttered a savage guffaw.

‘Fuck you, then, Ray,' she snarled. She crashed her fist on the table: Maxine's whetstone leapt like a toad. ‘All I've got to recommend me, apart from my body, is my mind. So fuck you, and fuck the devil!'

Maxine jumped up, leaving her knife spinning on the tabletop, and bolted out of the room. They heard her boots pounding away across the verandah and thudding down on to the concrete.

Cold air from the open kitchen door rushed round the corner and flooded into the room. It brought Janet to her senses. With an effort she reined herself in, dropped her eyes, and sat back. She put forward one hand and stayed the revolving knife.

‘Now look what I've done,' she said stiffly. ‘Sorry. I saw red. I'm sorry I spoke to you like that.'

Ray nodded.

‘I shouldn't have bellowed,' insisted Janet. ‘That was rude. I lost my temper. I'm sorry.'

He lowered his face again, and raised it.

‘I said I'm
sorry
,'
said Janet.

‘Yes,' he said, getting to his feet and leaning forward on his hands across the table. ‘Yes, but I'm right, aren't I. You
are
a slave. A slave to anger.'

‘
Oh!
Haven't you got any manners? Can't you accept an apology?'

‘And you use your anger as a social weapon.'

‘Ray. I'm warning you. I refuse. I refuse to be bullied and interrogated here. In my own
house
.'

He swallowed again, with a loud gulp. ‘Your house is very nice,' he said, ‘and it's kind of you to let us live here. But your house won't save you. None of that will save you.'

‘I won't have it.' She heaved herself upright. ‘I refuse. Get off my back!'

He held up both hands, palms towards her, and strained his squinting face sideways as if to ward off a blow.

‘And I'm not going to hit you!' she shouted, jumping back from the table. ‘Not on one cheek
or
the other. How dare you? How dare you set me up?'

The back door crashed shut, and round the corner from the kitchen came whirling and skidding Maxine, Medusa-haired, carrying on her outstretched hands the twig cradle. She braked short of the table, laid the thing on it, and tiptoed back to her chair.

The cradle stood on the thick white paint, between the nest of shavings and the dense black gold-edged book. It stood obedient, exactly where its maker had placed it; but it shuddered with such violence, poised on its fragile rockers, that the antagonists were shocked; and they paused, and lowered their hands and shoulders, and drew closer to the table, and stood by it with their fingers folded, until they were breathing steadily again and the air in the room had stabilised; and then the cradle too became calmer. It became serene, and its movements refined themselves into its customary gentle tremor, barely a quiver, merely a sign that there was life and breath in the room where it was standing.

Even an angel, in our hostile world, needs all the help it can get: so Maxine did not relax her vigilance, and when one lunchtime, browsing high in the stacks of the state library, she opened at random a volume on pagan British mythology and found herself face to face with a drawing of an ancient doll known as a
bride
,
she felt the tingle of meaning, and prepared herself to act.

Footfalls, giggles and whispers rustled like bats in the dome of the huge, star-shaped reading room, but Maxine was deep in the scholar's account of the little doll and its powers. She examined the drawing for a long time, moving her lips as she turned it this way and that; then she slid the fat leather tome back on to its shelf and walked down the stairs, out through
the portico, and home along the bare elm avenues and bluestone lanes to her shed.

She heaved the door open and stepped down on to the packed earth floor. The furniture, tranquil or nonchalantly gesturing, paused in its colloquy and froze; Maxine bustled in and cleared her work bench with one sweep of the forearm.

In the milky light from the four-paned window she fossicked in her basket of wood scraps, palpating the little nubs and knoblets, and chose a good-for-nothing bit left over, a gnarled and knotted chunk about as big as an egg.

Then, standing at the bench with all her materials and scraps within reach, she began to whittle. She was in form and it was easy; but for the dreamy pleasure of it she worked slowly, spinning it out, every now and then holding up the nub to the light from the open door to match it against her memory of the diagram.

First she shaped the nub into an eyeless, mouthless head, then hollowed out its neck to accommodate a thick bunch of dry grass stems that she wrenched from Janet's garden; these she crammed in deep and made snug with a ribbing of coarse thread. Next, by parting the clump several inches further down, she formed two legs and thus, between them, a little grassy cunt. The legs, bound with criss-cross gaiters of twine, were footless, ending freely in enormous, untrimmed sprouts of grass.

Now, half an inch below the wooden head, she lashed at right angles to the torso a second clump of dried stalks, with a couple of turns at the axis to make a firm cross-shape. She tidied each end of the horizontal grass-hank, then grabbed her scissors and chopped the fringed ends off blunt, leaving two handless wrists.

Inward-eyed and breathing through her nose, she gripped the creature in her left hand and groped behind her for a strip of cloth, an old piece of skirt, a rag—but everything her fingers touched was square and hard; so she shoved the grass cross into the waistband of her tracksuit and trotted out of the shed into the crisp afternoon, roving her eye-beams short and long over the disorder of the garden, seeking a garment for her bride.

What she spotted, flapping pleasantly among the towels from a wire rigged along the back verandah, was Ray's old Texan shirt. It was a faded cobalt blue, embroidered with lariats, cacti and desert roses, and it fastened with heavy pearl and metal snapstuds which clacked like teeth with the wearer's every move. It had worn thin in Chips's service, and then Alby's, and Ray, ill-favoured dag that he was, had salvaged it unbeknownst from Alby's rubbish bin when he had tired of it, and had been hoarding it ever since. Ray knew the shirt did not suit him. He was much too plain and prim to carry it off. Even secretly in the bathroom, scowling and pouting before the mirror, he could not live up to
its casual, rakish manliness; but maybe when he got round to finding a job and saving some money . . . maybe by next summer . . . And meanwhile, one of the women would unpeg it and iron it for him; and one day he would have the nerve to put it on and walk about openly in it, offhand, powerful, showing his neck and forearms, exactly like his brother.

In Maxine's busy hands the sleeve came away from the body as cleanly as if they were waiting to be parted. Three sharp rips, and in no time she had wrapped the bride's lower parts in a skirt of faded blue cotton, and swathed its wooden head in a pointed riding hood which dropped to its waist and concealed its stalky bosom.

She ran back to the shed for needle and thread, pulled her little stool out through the open door, and sat in the air cobbling the frayed shirt pieces together and stitching the strip of cuff with the mother-of-pearl stud, as a fetching touch, under the bride's chin to fasten the hood.

She held it away from her with both hands, to look. Was it finished? She propped it against a tuft of grass that grew not far from the shed door, and squatted on the ground in front of it.

It looked weird, leaning there. Its proportions unnerved her: it was only inches tall and yet, though its legs ended in wild bursts of unclipped stalks, so like a human figure. Maxine's calves began to go numb
and her scalp to itch, but she stayed stubbornly in frog position, condensing her gaze on to the faceless nub inside its hood. How was this done? Would there be a message?