Cosmo Cosmolino (21 page)

‘A what?' said Maxine, with her eyes closed.

‘You know,' said Janet. ‘A pap smear. When the doctor examines your insides, if you're a woman. For lumps. Fibroids, and so on. For, you know—cancer.'

‘Oh,' said Maxine, ‘I never go to doctors. I lost my faith in western medicine years ago.'

‘Isn't that a bit risky?' said Janet. ‘At our age?' Round and down and up again went her oiled hand, sleeking over the site of the thing.

‘My breasts are
full
of lumps!' said Maxine airily, not opening her eyes. ‘And I often feel rather weird before breakfast. But if I'm out of sorts I just take a dose of some special drops that my iridologist made up for me. They drive out the toxins. I won't get cancer. I don't choose to—therefore I won't.' She smiled, with her eyelashes resting on her cheeks.

Sweat popped out under Janet's eyes. Her tongue felt like metal. But she kept up her steady, churning abdominal stroke, round and round and round, remembering to flex her wrist, watching the belly button's neat little knot change from a circle to a lozenge to a circle, and feeling the crisp bush of Maxine's pubic hair graze the side of her hand with every downward pass.

Outside the shed it was too dark to see. Ray was hungry and tired, but needled by a cranky curiosity, he carried the doll back across the garden and into the kitchen.

Its garment was so faded and dusty that even in the lit room he did not recognise it. He laid the shaggy-
legged thing on the bench. Was
this
art? But wouldn't a real artist have given it feet, and a proper face? Its head was blind. It had no nose or mouth. It was as clumsy and inaccurate as if it had been made by a child.

Somebody must be in the house: the pipes upstairs were still ticking. Any minute now Janet would come down in a bad temper, trailing her rug, and catch him here having a snoop. He picked up the bride, to sneak it back; but it clacked. He heard it, a clear enamel sound. He seized the doll by its legs and whacked it hard against his thigh. Dust flew off it in a cloud. He pushed apart the folds of its hood and held it up to the light. It was. It
was
.
His stud. The mother-of-pearl snapstud on the sleeve of his blue shirt.

A bolt of rage shot through him. Witches! Bloody molls! Ganging up on him—ripping the sleeves off his clothes—starving him, holding back his mail—treating him like some sort of sex toy—

He was round the foot of the stairs, cannoning off the landing wall, pounding across the dark upper hall before he remembered his noble resolution: but too late. There was a strip of light under Janet's door. The radio was going softly inside. He heard voices murmuring. He wrenched at the handle and burst through, taking a breath to start his diatribe—

—but the room was warm. It was a curtained cavern, tranquil, pink-lit, full of music; and women were floating in it. One was stark naked on the bed, flat
on her back, showing everything, and the other one, bare-limbed, flushed, damp with sweat, was leaning over her, tending to her, doing something, sliding one hand right down her belly to her—

He shut his mouth. He let the doll fall. He turned on his heel and spun out of the room. Someone squealed. He was halfway down the stairs before the laughter started, and the door was kicked shut behind him.

Alby, for God's sake
come
.
Come down, Alby, and get me
out
of here.

Anointed, dazed with luxury, and wearing under her clothes a pretty camisole and Janet's last pair of real silk knickers, Maxine promenaded down the stairs: but Ray was nowhere to be seen. He must be resting somewhere in the house, composing himself. She would track him down tonight, as soon as she had bought their ticket, when she got home from the meeting. Out the back gate she stepped, pressing one hand flat against the wad of notes in her pocket, and hurried away along the dark street to the tram.

Ray hid in the phone cupboard until he heard the gate rasp shut behind her. Then he climbed the stairs to his room and dropped his boots on the floor and his socks into the dirty clothes carton. It was filling up faster than usual: soon he ought to contemplate running a load through the machine. He thought of digging out his money stash and counting it again, for the glory of
it: he thought of warming himself with a shower and trudging over to the shop for a tin of tomato soup; but he was exhausted. He felt stunned, like a blur, as if he were leaking out of himself through puncture holes, losing outline and shape. He crawled fully dressed into his bag and lay down. Just for a minute, to get warm. These women. They were making him sick. They were crazy and bad. He lay flexing his toes, waiting for them to thaw. The terrible sight, in the pink bedroom. A gold wine-cup overflowing with the—with the lust—the something—they were haughty. They
walked with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes
.
Walking and mincing as they went.

They weren't separate any more, in his imagination. They were a kind of swampy, fluctuating element that he lived in. They took all his clarity away, and left him with a bitter vagueness. His stomach was hollow, but to eat he would have had to creep out of the bag and drag himself downstairs and face Janet in the kitchen, smirking at him over an empty plate. He flattened out Alby's letter under the pillow and turned on to his belly. There were worse things in life than going to bed hungry.

Janet folded the oily sheet and sat down at the table, wiping her hands on a hanky. Poor Ray—the horror on his face. All was lost, of course, though Maxine would never be made to see it; all was lost, and it had never
really been anything else. How would they face each other in the morning? Weak laughter overtook her, and she rested her forehead on the metal body of the typewriter. She tapped a few keys. Her glance dropped off the table edge and encountered, on the floor half under the bed where it had skidded, the bride.

It was the thing she had seen in Maxine's shed, the night she snooped. It was cute. She picked it up and propped it on the table against the wall. It kept toppling. Its dress and hood had faded right out, but they must have been beautiful once—a real cobalt blue. She touched the skirt with her finger. The press-stud under the chin was clever. It was put together with skill. It wasn't a patch on Maxine's real masterpiece, though, the twig cradle.

Still, it was fanciful. Rather decorative. Janet stood up and hooked the light, grassy doll on to the top corner of a picture that hung above the worktable.

This was Maxine's pastel drawing, her gift, and Janet had rushed out at once and paid an arm and a leg to have the thing decently mounted and framed; but the framing had not worked out satisfactorily at all, for the picture was so dark and so densely layered that once enclosed behind the sheet of glass, it vanished. It completely disappeared. No wonder Maxine had trouble making ends meet. The drawing had retreated into its own mystery, and all Janet saw, when she looked up at it from her chair, was herself: her thought-
darkened face, her penitential haircut, and a deep and detailed reflection of the room behind her.

She was not interested in eating. She read on until half-past nine, and then went down to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. While the kettle boiled she stood at the door with her arms folded and looked across the garden for a light in the shed, thinking to offer Maxine a cup; but the shed was in darkness. Where
was
that girl? What was she up to?

It was ten-thirty before Maxine came tripping, empty-pocketed, rose-faced with cold, round the corner from the avenue and down the street toward the house.

She had arrived at the meeting slightly late; but the door was still open, and she saw from Hawkwind's wild-eyed face that it must be his night to fly out: indeed, he was already stuffing fistfuls of cash into his suit pockets, and veering about the crowded room in a fluster of congratulations and farewells. Someone approached her with a hand out. Maxine laid the bundle of notes on its palm. The hand closed; the shoulder turned.

Maxine looked round the room. She was by ten years or more the oldest person present.

She was still hovering just inside the door, furtively filling up on the cheap peanuts the hostess had laid out in bowls on a table there, when Hawkwind passed her at a leaning trot, making for the street; and though he ignored her she caught on his face, as the cold air
struck it, a shift of expression from gratitude to incredulous glee which kicked her pulse up a notch and made her stomach drop like a stone. She craned after him, chewing, but he was gone, elbows up and pumping, shoe soles flashing, and as he rounded the corner to the tramline the fringe of his scarf fluttered back over his shoulder like the tip of a wing.

She was light-headed. The speed and efficiency of it took away her breath. That was Ray's money. I gave it to Hawkwind. There was no receipt. He took it. He left. It's gone. She licked her lips. They were crusted with salt. She closed the door with a soft click and turned back to the room.

It was ominously still.

The eyes of the wingless ones met, and fell away.

One by one, then, they were obliged to report that they had failed again to attract any new recruits to their chapter of the game. Maxine, too, the last joiner, made this confession. Some people present, to her dismay, lost their charm and became quite nasty. They cast dark looks and launched accusations of fearfulness, of loss of faith.
Someone
,
they said, must have imported the virus of negative thinking. It had spread, and was blocking the free flow of energy and love.

The hostess's boyfriend scribbled something in the margin of a magazine, tore it off, and passed it to Maxine. ‘It's an affirmation,' he hissed. ‘For
you
.'

He watched her while she read it. ‘
My attitude to
money needs looking at
.
If I re-evaluate my attitude I can win at this game and learn what money really is
.'
She looked at the man, who tossed back his glossy forelock, challenged her with a large, intense smile, and strode away. Maxine glanced down at her jumper front. It was sprinkled with peanut husks and crystals of salt.

She strove with her vestigial radar to scan the room. It resisted. All she could perceive was a phlegmy, inert quality in the air round people's heads. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, working chewed peanuts out from between her teeth, while the meeting broke up around her into altercations and vain strategies. Silence fell. People stood scattered for a moment; then they gripped hands and formed a circle. They concentrated their energies and directed them: they visualised volcanoes, king tides, inexhaustible fountains and the like. They called on a power for which they had no name. Under her lids Maxine sneaked sideways glances at her companions in their loose, handsome clothes and identical tortoise-shell spectacles. Their faces were stiff with foreboding. Surely,
surely
they must know that the game was dead. They were its corpse. Nothing they said or did would revive it. But they would not acknowledge it, let the thing drop off them, and go home in resignation to their rooms. No—they were going to
soldier on
.

This is stupid, thought Maxine. I am too old for
this.

She let go her neighbours' hands, joined them to each other like children, and stepped quietly out of the ring.

No one noticed she had gone. She crept away to the door, and looked back.

There they stood in their circle, squeezing hands and labouring at their imaginings. So strenuous! So hopeless! She could have laughed; but the sight of their bowed shoulders touched her, and she beamed a kind ray into the room in parting, to bless them. She was about to turn away, when it struck them. They raised their faces; and with a whisper and a rustle, a fuzz of colour sprang out round each person's head. Their auras blossomed for her. They flourished madly, they proliferated and radiated and swarmed like mould. Each skull sprouted its unseemly halo of avarice. Oh, it was pathetic! It was almost beautiful.

Dizzy with wisdom, Maxine slipped out the door and on to the street.

Fresh air.

Breath billowed in front of her as she jogged home. The houses squatted in their winter gardens, bathed in tides of moss-smelling night, and few lights showed. She had had no dinner, but her stomach, packed with greasy peanuts, sat roundly against the elastic of her silk knickers; Janet's camisole too was rather tight, unless it was the cold that made her breasts twinge with every
step. And yet her limbs were
warm
: ripples of warmth beamed out from the core of her, a rose tightly furled in the bowl of her pelvis. She gave a smooth skip, and a twirl.

Was it wrong to feel so cheerful? Surely, after what she had done tonight, she should be heavy-hearted, weighed down with guilt and fear of the consequences? But what she felt, cantering steadily home along the avenues where she was the only one on foot and cars tore the damp air into strips, was a kind of broad, easy calm: a purity. Had she really sobbed, pleaded, rushed about? Janet must have thought she was crazy. A great tide of anxiety had turned in her, and gone out. She had grown all simple and virtuous.

Of course, it would not be an easy thing to explain. Ray loved his money. She tried to foresee his reaction, to think like a hoarder. His insides would knot with rage when he went to his clothes box and found out what she had done. It might take him quite some time to realise what a favour she had done both of them—what an ugly blockage in his nature, and in her own plans, she had cleared tonight.

How
would
she explain? There would certainly be unpleasantness. Ray might shout. Her heart gave a little trip and her skin tingled. Perhaps it would end in serious trouble. Really, for an angel he was not very highly evolved at all. This would test him
severely
.
Oh, she longed for him not to disappoint her . . . but if
he did, if he took this badly, she might have to accept that he was the wrong angel, and let him go. She had pressed him hard, after all: the load of responsibility she had heaped on him had made him stagger.