Cosmo Cosmolino (7 page)

Vehemently, too, each night in her crowded shed with its line of tomatoes ripening on the sill, she dreamed of digging and discovering, of vegetables loose in the soil, of a bush covered in red flowers that bloomed on the very edge of a whistling chasm; and over and over she dreamed of a baby, a male child which, giddy with
gladness, she took upon her knee and dandled, stroking his limbs, his plumpness, rubbing her face against his delicious temples; he permitted it; but nothing she did could lift him out of his mood of discontent. He sat on her lap by the high window, this tiny, anxious monarch with his crown and sceptre, and looked out over a landscape of hazy fields, of orchards, towns and forests; a mighty, polluted river wound across his prospect, and up and down its breast long barge-like vessels toiled in silence, laden down with cargo and trailing wakes of oil.

For dream sadness there is only art; and so the next thing that Maxine constructed, using the curliest and strongest twigs stripped under cover of night from the trunk of a neighbour's tortured willow, was a trembling cradle, smaller than a shoebox, lighter by far than any human babe could be; so light that the lightest puff of wind could set it in motion, lilting it on its dainty rockers. She placed it in her doorway and stood gazing at it. The same movement of air that shifted it lifted one corner of a curtain; as fleeting as the skirt of a running child it caught the edge of her eye in the darkening shed, and her heart was suddenly growing too high in her ribcage for her to catch a breath. Was it already too late?

But suddenly, in autumn, that season when the angle of the light changes and without warning one thinks of the past, when at mid-afternoon even the most carefully groomed garden is chilled by the meditative scraping of a cricket, Maxine lost her shed.

A fortnight's notice was all she got, but though news of the property sale chagrined her she held no grudge against her landlord, for she believed that everything was meant, that she was responsible for and had in fact initiated all the events and conditions of her life; and she had no idea that her landlord, with whom she was on nodding terms as she passed his windows on her way home to the bottom of his yard, was in the habit of taking his friends on visits to her shed while she was out working for the rent. They stood at the door, the last group he would usher, with their hands over their mouths or in their pockets, watching him pick his way nimbly to the bedside. He beckoned them to follow. ‘And look, look—these are her little slippers,' said the landlord, but his mockery held a note of fondness, even of respect, though he scarcely knew it; and when he held up for their amusement the fantastically titled tracts she kept beside her bed they hung back, reluctant to disturb the demeanour of the furniture, its silent, dignified postures, the shivering of the tiny cradle. Like a shrine in honour of a god whose name they had forgotten, the dim shed quietened them: it made their own city seem foreign.

Maxine, thinking of leases, bonds, and the hiring of a truck, increased her hours of labour by taking on a new employer, and waited for her next lodging, or the path towards it, to take shape.

Late one morning of her shed's last week, while
she was down on her hands and knees in the house of this as yet unseen stranger, scrubbing at a stain on the hall carpet, a wind sprang up and unsettled the street. She heard the boom of air in chimneys, the venetians' brisk tattoo; plastic bottles whispered on the rim of the bath. Maxine lengthened her back to glance towards the narrow panes of the front door.

The sky looked dry, bright and empty. She was intent, passively alert, but the sounds confused her. Had the council workers opened the fire hydrants? Were dead leaves beginning their seasonal journey down the gutters? Or was it the letter sliding under the door, the step on the verandah? Had somebody called for her? Had her moment come?

Upright on her knees like a pilgrim she crawled to the front door and opened it. There was no letter on the step, and nobody on the verandah, but down at the gate, half obscured by the fronds of the unclipped hedge, stood a man in dark glasses.

His arms were flung out wide. His right hand lightly touched the gatepost. His knees were in the act of straightening, and the outline of his tightened thigh muscles showed as powerfully through the cloth of his trousers as if he were a gymnast who had just that second landed after a manoeuvre on the bar. Even the sinews of his feet, bare but for a brand-new pair of thongs, were bright with tension. Could he be the one? The one for what?

Maxine scrambled up in such haste that her blood did not keep pace, and the street outside shuffled its cards before her eyes. She grabbed the door frame to steady herself, and in the few beats it took for the black edges on things to disperse she saw a kind of tremor behind the man's shoulders, the large relaxed furling of a flag from which the wind has withdrawn itself.

Her head cleared. She craned her neck to see what was on his back, but he brushed a path through the waving hedge strands, and stepped on to the property; there was nothing behind him.

‘Good morning,' he said. He stopped halfway up the path, holding a cardigan folded over his forearm and tilting his dark-lensed face up to her.

‘Hullo,' said Maxine. ‘Are you looking for somebody?'

‘As a matter of fact,' he said in a meek but confidential voice, ‘I've been sent.'

Maxine clasped her hands under her chin and rolled up her eyes. The sky was peachy with autumn: in her relief it seemed to swirl. ‘Sent,' she said. ‘Thank heavens.'

‘Halleluia,' he said casually, looking round him. ‘This is a very lovely house. I expected it would be. But these leaves. Shouldn't somebody take a rake to them?'

The timbre of his voice sent shots of energy coursing through her.

‘I will,' she said eagerly. ‘I'll do them as soon as I've finished inside. Would you like to come in?'

She made a sweeping gesture of welcome, but he did not respond. He stood on the brown and yellow tiles of the path, waiting.

‘Don't you want to ask me some questions first?' he said. ‘I mean who I am, who sent me, and so forth?'

What? Interrogate? Demand credentials? She made an impatient movement. ‘You can tell me that later. Come into the house.'

Still he stood without moving. Some formality had not been observed: what could it be? Perhaps she was rushing him. This must be what men meant when they said to her
You are rushing me, Maxine
.
She took three proper breaths, and began again.

‘Where
do
you come from?'

‘Ah—that would be telling.' He smiled. ‘You'll have to work harder than that.'

‘Is this a game?' said Maxine, taken aback. She had no sense of humour, she was not playful, but if that was what he wanted, she would make the effort. ‘All right. Who sent you?'

‘Look at me,' he said. ‘Have a good look. Don't I seem familiar?'

The sunglasses bothered her. Would it be cheating to ask him to take them off? What were the rules? The trouble was that nothing about him so far rang a bell, nothing at all. Again she felt that her heart was fixed too high in her chest. This was not a game. It was much more crucial: a test, like the exams we face in dreams
and have forgotten to prepare for. She let out a nervous laugh.

‘Don't you recognise me?' he said. ‘Don't I remind you of someone?'

Perplexed, Maxine rubbed the crystals of her necklace. She wished she had bought the pocket stone after all, the four-dollar one that
unified every aspect of life
.
A false move now might ruin everything.

He was young. He was tall. In the power of his teasing his thin shoulders seemed to widen. His hands were invisible, clasped under his neat cardigan. How fresh he looked, almost beautiful, smiling there on the checkered path and waiting for her to take the plunge! A grand confusion of possibilities blossomed in her head. Was he a son, from another incarnation? Was he her father, come back on second thoughts to bless her? Was he her imaginary brother, her male self, soul's husband, cosmic twin? Was he an angelic being of the kind that comes in paintings offering a single lily, the flower whose contemplation furnishes all that is required? Or was he simply the bearer of the key to a shed?

‘I'm sure this is terribly important,' she said, ‘but just for the moment I don't seem to know quite what to say.'

He looked down and laughed: a pleasant sound: a voice with a crack in it, like music. Oh! she trusted him.

‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘It'll come to you. I hope this won't seem forward—would there be anything here to eat?'

‘Of course. Come in!'

‘Thank you. I've been on the road a while.'

Maxine imagined a peppering of galaxies, a tremendous trajectory along the star lanes. She saw a stony track among palm trees, a low horizon fading under a sky of pure green; and at night a woollen cloak wrapped round, the deep chill of a body sleeping on sand. She glanced at his thongs. They were pristine, utterly unmarked by travel. But he was already past her and through the front door, stepping carefully over her cooling bucket, and forging on into the body of the house.

Now if a house can be bruised, this one was. Its height and depth were still imposing, but its windows, propped open with lumps of wood, had to gasp for breath, and plastic bags nested in the branches of the trees outside them. The garden behind was derelict, wild with shrubbery and composed of moribund clods. The bicycle in its shed had grey pancakes for tyres. Indoors, the planet lamps bowed their heads in corners and over the table, and dusty runners lay discouraged in the hallways, drained of the energy to slither, as rugs should, along the floors. Had its enfilade of hollow rooms ever been counted, ever been tamed and put to use? The heart of the house was broken. It ought
to have been blown up and scraped off the surface of the earth.

But houses as well as their owners must soldier on: and what would this pair of lost souls, already off on the wrong footing with one another, charging down the hall towards the kitchen where perhaps a heel of dry bread awaited them, a scrap of cheap Camembert lying shamefully on its face—what would they care about the building's history? All they saw was roof, walls, floor. This was what they needed. Why ask questions? Why search for more?

‘This house,' said the young man in the darkest part of the hallway, ‘is rather large.'

‘I know,' said Maxine with a blithe laugh, skirting round him where he had paused to stare up at the framed pictures askew on the walls of the stairwell. ‘I haven't even
seen
all the rooms yet, let alone cleaned them.'

He gave her a strange look, but she pranced by with the fingers of both hands shoved deep into her uncontrollable hair, fishing out combs and stabbing them into its tangles which now he saw outlined in a fuzzy halo against the light of the doorway she was approaching, the entrance to the central room of the house.

He followed, sniffing her wake with dread, but it was untainted by perfume: it smelt like wood or glue and he wondered why. He wondered too whether this
was a car-stripping neighbourhood, whether he should offer to go round the corner to the shop for a couple of pasties, whether he could take a quick look round upstairs by asking to use the toilet, and whether she was the modern angry type of woman—whether he should time his announcement with care, or just open his mouth and blurt it out.

She bounded in four steps across the central room and out through another door on its opposite side, but he resisted her pace and stopped in the middle of the carpet. Even with his sunglasses on, his eyes began to water and he had to screw up his face. Was
this
the place? The autumn light in the room was dreadful. It bounced in brutal sheets off a large white table that stood right under the window; shafts of it shot out on sharp angles from the backs of white-painted wooden chairs and swam in the curves of white cups, white plates, a white teapot. What he saw and squinted at was a blinding mirage of spotlessness, and yet for all its blaze the room was grubby. The crockery, shoved into piles, was stained with lipstick and gummy with dregs and crumbs; and the chairbacks showed the grey fingerprints of newspaper readers and chip eaters. On the wall near the kitchen door something dark red had exploded, dripped and hardened. All this he registered not in detail but as a general discomfort, a falseness under what proclaimed order; but he did clearly see that the table itself was pocked and snicked. Nailheads
broke its surface, and down the length of it ran a deep groove that someone long ago had tried to plug with spackle; where the stuff had dried out and crumbled he saw the thicknesses of white paint that caked the timber.

He laid his right hand on the left breast pocket of his shirt. The little book was there. It comforted him, and he did not need to open it to find the phrase for this alarming room which, though it pulsated with light to the point where furniture levitated, was only a white-washed tomb, a whited sepulchre.

‘There's nothing here but bones,' cried the woman gaily from the kitchen. She appeared in the doorway with a flat dish in her hands, holding it out to him and beaming like a housewife on a label. ‘An old carcass. Do you want to have a pick at it?'

If only she knew how desperate he was. Not for the food—that he could scrounge anywhere, he was not proud—but for her gesture: the offering, the direct gaze, the smile. Self-pity swarmed through him. He kept his eyes on the dried bones and breathed slowly and evenly. At last he looked up. Maxine saw her own reflection in his lenses: a dish thrust out, behind it a shiny nose, a fading smile, a bush of hair.

‘Is it a bit too awful?' she said. ‘Sorry.' In shame she lowered the plate.

He put out both hands to reassure her.

‘Thank you,' he said. ‘It will do very nicely.'

She laid the dish on the white table and they sat down facing each other over its pitiful contents. So extreme was the light that the shrivelled remains of the chicken seemed about to dematerialise in it: the bones bleached as they stared at them.