Cosmo Cosmolino (15 page)

To Janet this was
a class thing
,
and out of her guilt she nodded and tried to smile. The skinner's mouth writhed in irony. Janet took her parcel and hurried away. As she came out of the market carrying the meat, the bread, the salad and the wine, the sky closed over and rain began to fall in fat, deliberate drops.

Not only had Janet lost ideas, she found that she had become stupid in the kitchen, and clumsy. The garlic in its papery envelope had softened and turned yellow, the peeled onion spun on the board and would not stand still to be sliced, and when she cursed the knife for skidding on the glistening flesh it repaid her with a stern slash across the fingerpad out of which blood welled and swelled: nothing she did could stanch it. She stood snivelling at the sink, letting the reddened water run down the drain, and listening to the failure bird outside in the garden as it tried with a special, dreary gusto to prop its stepladder of notes among the dripping boughs.

But the blood stopped at last, the dish was slid into
the oven; and at seven o'clock, when the rain had settled in for the long haul and Janet had run out the front to empty the wet letterbox of junk mail and then upstairs to position saucepans under all the best-known leaks, she wiped down the white table with an Ajaxed rag and set about making it beautiful: an ironed cloth, proper cutlery and crockery for three, glasses with stems, two candle stubs in silver holders, and even the serviettes that the household children, echoing their parents, had called ‘serve-you-rights', pink linen ones with drawn-thread borders, dragged like the tablecloth from the utter bottom of the ironing basket.

She uncorked the bottle of wine, laid the baguette at an attractive angle across the middle of the cloth, and stood back satisfied.

It was seven-twenty. Any minute now the others would walk in. But the room was cold. The fireplace was clogged with ash from days ago. Hastily she brushed it clean, then ran out the back door for wood. There were logs in a pile by the door, but no small stuff and no kindling, and when she put out her hand to the spot where the axe usually leaned, it met blank wall. Maxine. Water was welling in rills over the rim of the choked guttering, dropping a curtain between the dry verandah and the rain-darkened garden. Janet draped a teatowel over her head and burst through.

She had to fight the bolt of the shed, lifting and tugging and favouring her cut finger, before the big
door swung open. There was no light at all, but a strange, pleasant perfume, woody, peppery, drifted out of the darkness to where Janet stood, and waiting to be able to see, she breathed it in.

She groped along the wall and found a box of matches on the windowsill. How anyone could live in here was beyond her—a dirt floor, no electric light, a dismal window with bathroom panes—but the peppery scent was seductive and the roof did not leak, and though she saw the axe at once, leaning tidily against a crate, she did not stoop to pick it up. She shuffled forward till her shins were barked by a low table on which stood a hurricane lamp. She put the match to its wick, and holding it high in front of her, stepped into the gesturing forest of the furniture.

A chairback plucked the teatowel from her collar; a table edge jostled her hip. She leaned forward with the lamp and peered between the petrified limbs into the depths of the shed. Along one wall she made out the workbench; on its far end, near a severe-looking narrow bed, the twig cradle, uncharacteristically motionless; and above the pillow, too high and too far in for the lamp to illuminate anything but its general shape, there hovered a little figure, a kind of doll.

Was this snooping? She was, after all, the landlady. She glanced over her shoulder to the dripping doorway, and hesitated. Back in the kitchen the rabbit flesh would have softened by now in hot juices, and loosened itself
from the bones. But she took three steps further in, raising the lamp. The doll was spread-armed, like a crucifix, but the tips of its feet were blurred, somehow, and it was partly wrapped in cloth. A trickle of cold ran down Janet's scalp under her hair and into the neck of her jumper. She could not find an angle for the lamp that would show her what the thing was. She pushed forward again, with her elbows out, turning her hips sideways to get past a curved desk, but a footstool snagged the hem of her skirt. She heard the stitches rip and swore out loud, hopping and staggering against the side wall to get her balance: the whole frame of the building shivered from the impact, and with a rustle the doll tumbled off its hook and plunged out of sight into the darkness of the bed.

If anyone came, Janet would be deafened by the rain. She backed out, extinguishing the lamp and replacing the matches, and struggled, with the axe gripped between her knees, to shoot the bolt home. Her head and shoulders were sodden. The rain fell and fell. The garden was bowed under it. As she turned to run towards the back door, she saw the house suddenly as if it were a stranger's and she the traveller: hollow, bleak, forbidding, although it was lit up from door to top: the only shelter between her and the coming night.

Her axe blows shook the concrete of the yard, and in ten minutes a fire was wriggling and popping in the grate, but still the others did not come.

She ran up to her room and changed into a dry jumper. Any minute now the back gate would scrape: it probably had already, while her head was muffled in the woollen folds. In the bathroom, taking her time, she rinsed and dressed the seeping cut on her finger. She brushed the brief feathers of her hair, dashed on a couple of stabs of lipstick which she wiped off immediately on the back of her hand, and sauntered down the stairs, humming an aria.

The room was empty.

But the kitchen was warm with the smell of cooked meat. She turned the oven down while she made a slow and dignified salad, then with gloved hands she carried the brown dish into the living room and placed it on a board right in the middle of the arrangement. She lit the candles, first one, then the other; she blew out the match; she sat down at the head of the table.

Everything was ready. The oven dish shimmered gently, the salad sprouted its oiled green leaves between the dark bottle and the loaf's cubist crust; and Janet, with her hands clasped on the cloth, her lips discreetly coloured, and her brutal haircut beginning to soften, was not only the creator of this tableau but also its central element. What she was offering was herself.

Nobody came.

Still sitting with upright spine, Janet rolled her wrist towards her and looked at her watch. Half-past eight.

The rain kept falling, the closed windows streamed. Its white noise should have kept at bay all other sounds from the world beyond the house; but a tiny burr of anxiety prickled far inside her chest. She began to twist about on her chair. By its intensity she knew that her discomfort had nothing to do with Maxine. It was an attack of night-time waiting for a man, that most demoralising state, which starts at the incredulous, deflating, forgotten dinner hour and can continue without mercy till first light.

Ugh, the shame of it! Every sound that could possibly herald an approach sprang direct into her head. If tyres sponged or hissed, the car must pull in to the kerb and become his. A voice laughing or calling out goodbye at the corner must belong to him. A tram screeching down the metal to the stop must disgorge his running figure. Nothing had changed. She was still the same old sucker. All a man had to do, to put her at his mercy, was to make her laugh. All dignity, all stoicism was lost. Full of self-disgust, Janet lowered her head on to the tablecloth between her knife and fork, and held it there.

And that was how Maxine found her when she came in on her soft shoes and stood panting in the kitchen doorway under a bush of hair studded with trembling droplets.

‘Janet,' she whispered urgently. ‘Janet. Are you
asleep? Wake up! What are you doing? What can I smell? It's so dark in here.'

Janet sat up with a jerk and whirled around on her chair. Her face in the candle-light was creased and red. ‘Where the fuck have
you
been?' she cried. ‘And where's Ray? Was he with you? Where
is
that bastard?'

Maxine paid no attention. She forged into the room, smiling; her eyes were extra bright. ‘Listen, Janet,' she said. ‘Nothing can stop me now. I've found the answer to all my money problems.'

‘Your
money
problems? Right now I couldn't give a shit about your money problems! Where have you been? The meal's cold. It's spoilt.'

‘Have you got a thousand dollars?' said Maxine, looming over the table in her yellow slicker. ‘A thousand. That's all you need. It's for a game. Well, they call it a game, but really it's a kind of revolution.'

She had left the back door open and the rain's hiss and splatter drowned all other sounds from outside. The candles guttered in the rush of air. Silent, clenching her teeth, Janet steadied them. She reached for the wine and slopped the first big slug of it into her glass. Maxine pulled out a chair and plumped on to it, elbowing aside the table arrangement.

‘
Everyone
from meditation's going to go in it,' she babbled. ‘It's called the Golden Aeroplane. You put in a thousand dollars to buy a ticket, and you have to bring two new friends along to the next meeting.
Everyone pays their thousand, and every week you go up one rung in this kind of pyramid, and then after a month
you
become the pilot, and you fly out—it's called
flying out
!
—
with about $8,000 I think they said. It's going to change
everything
,
Janet. It's going to revolutionise society's attitude to money. I'm going to invite Ray, too. He'll be able to leave his job. I'm going to borrow most of my thousand, but I've got seventy-five dollars in the bank from a clothes-rack I sold last Christmas. Oh, it's fabulous. It's going to
spiritualise
money.'

She wrenched the end off the loaf of bread and began to tear at it with her teeth. ‘I'm starving,' she grunted. She lifted the lid off the cooling oven dish and plunged a hunk of bread into the gravy.

Janet emptied the wine down her throat in one harsh gulp, and whacked the glass on to the table.

‘Maxine,' she said. ‘Are you completely cuckoo? Can't you see it's a scam? Everyone
can't
win. It's not mathematically possible. You will
lose your money
.'

‘No!' said Maxine, fever-eyed, chewing and swallowing. ‘It's
guaranteed
.
They said! It can't fail. The only thing that can bring failure is negative energy. You should see the sort of people who were at the meeting. They're so generous and idealistic. All their dreams are going to come true. The man sitting next to me told me he's going to put his money into an alternative healing centre, out in the eastern suburbs.'

‘Did you have a look in the carpark?' Janet filled
her glass again and began to swig from it, choking as she spoke. ‘Did you? I bet it was full of Saabs and Volvos. Those people can
afford
to throw away a thousand bucks, Maxine, but
you can't
.
Listen to me—listen. You are out of your league. If you do this, you're crazier than I thought you were. You're a barking lunatic.'

Stung, Maxine paused with a piece of bread in her left hand. With her right, keeping her eyes on Janet's face, she stabbed a fork into the dish and brought out a dripping lump of meat.

‘No—
you
listen, Janet,' she said, holding the fork over the cloth like a sceptre. ‘At the door of the meeting you leave your old self behind. It drops off you, if you let it. Somebody gives you a pen and a name-tag, and you have to choose a new name for yourself. A man near me had his arms folded and a crabby look on his face—like you do right now—and on his name-tag he wrote
sceptic
. But an hour later, after the two pilots had collected their money and flown out, I saw that man go back to the table and write himself another name-tag. I had a little peep. It was beautiful, Janet. He'd changed his name to
hawkwind
.'

Janet covered her whole jaw with her hands.

‘I
was
going to invite you as my second friend,' Maxine went on severely. ‘But I see that your scepticism is too strong. Even one guest with the wrong attitude could bring the whole endeavour crashing down. So I'm sorry, Janet. If I'm going to fly out, I'll have to ask
somebody else. I just can't take that risk.'

She shut her eyes and opened her mouth to load in the food, but the smell of it brought her up short, and she lowered the fork and peered at it closely in the light of the fluttering candles.

‘What am I doing?' she said. ‘I can't eat this. It's meat.'

She laid the fork across the nearest plate and looked up at Janet with a shrug and a laugh.

‘Since when,' said Janet in a trembling voice, ‘have
you
been a vegetarian?'

‘Oh, for
ever
,
on and off,' said Maxine. She spun the plate around, to cover the gravy she had splashed on to the linen cloth. ‘And I shouldn't be eating bread, either. Someone told me that any food mould can grow on is really really bad for a metabolism like mine.'

‘Have a drink, then,' said Janet, with heavy irony. ‘At least we can share a glass of wine.'

Maxine shook her head. ‘No thanks, Janet,' she said. ‘Wine's full of histamines.' She brushed crumbs into a pile with the backs of her fingertips, then raised distracted eyes to Janet's face. ‘Where
is
Ray? I can't wait to tell him about this. It'll change his life. Do you know where he is?'

Janet drained her glass again. Then she stood up in her place. Very slowly, drilling Maxine with her stare, she took hold of the bottle and up-ended it over the oven dish. Wine twirled out through the neck and
spread in gouts over the surface of the stew. Maxine hunched her shoulders with alarm; she slid her hands under her thighs and sat on them hard. Janet reached out for the bread. She tore the rest of the loaf in half, then, breathing in sharply through her nose, she raised both arms in a grand gesture and aimed her two bread daggers down towards the plundered pot.