Earthly Delights (27 page)

Daniel had made coffee for all of us. Jason drank the rest of the litre of water, excused himself, and came back to flood his system with more fluids. The sugar makes it stay in the body longer and be absorbed. It was now half an hour since his ingestion of the first mouthful of Meroe’s Mixture. Any moment now Jason was going to say—

‘I’m hungry,’ he said, right on cue. Daniel rolled his eyes.

‘Oh, to be fifteen again. Have some dry bread,’ he advised. ‘To start with.’

Jason ate his way busily through a whole baguette. Then we went upstairs and they ate lunch, a very tasty pumpkin and pine nut lasagne. I had already eaten. Dessert was a chocolate mud cake which for some reason hadn’t sold. If Jason could digest a meal like that I assumed he had recovered.

‘Now, what about those caraway muffins?’ I asked Jason. ‘You game?’

He took a deep breath. ‘I’m game,’ he said.

I gave him the money for some more caraway seeds and went back to the shop. Daniel stayed to talk to Jason. Goss had come to collect Kylie. She gave me a departing flounce which would have registered about five on the Richter scale. Not as good as usual, that flounce. She must be feeling guilty. Kylie gave me a secretive wave as she left, wages in hand. We would see what Goss would do on Thursday. What did Kylie mean, jealous of Jason? Goss never wanted to be a baker.

We closed the shutters, locked the shop, loaded the sack with bread for the soup van and went into the apartment again. Jason didn’t need any helpful advice about his muffins. He was using the two cups of flour I had allowed him and if they worked, they worked. And if they didn’t, he could try again.

‘It all comes back to Blood Lines,’ said Daniel abruptly. ‘Suze used to work behind it, Jase and his two mates used to hang there. I doubt very much if anyone is selling drugs inside the venue but it’s a part of the city that isn’t very savoury.’

‘Then we’d better go there,’ I said.

‘We’ll have to go in,’ he said. ‘And that means we’ll need costumes.’

‘When do you want to go?’ I asked.

‘Tonight. No time like the present.’

‘That means an improvised costume,’ I said, wondering what in my wardrobe could possibly be considered Gothic. By an educated audience who scrutinised each other’s clothes. What did Goths wear anyway? The only costumes for hire in a costume shop for a woman of my size are sad black tents. Or very large bright tents. No one over size twenty is assumed to have a sex life or any taste.

‘No, it means Mistress Dread,’ Daniel told me. He was grinning. He was also plotting something, but I didn’t know what.

‘Listen, Corinna, we need to make an entrance,’ he said. ‘So we need something special. We need to get into that crypt and we aren’t going to be invited unless we look right to start.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, dubiously.

‘So, trust me,’ he said, and took my hand. I agreed, with reservations, to trust him. This did look like our last resort, so we might as well put our best foot forward.

Mine, it appeared, were going to be wearing boots. High heeled boots.

An hour later, Mistress Dread knelt on the floor and shoved mercilessly. By the sacrifice of a couple of unimportant toes, I too could have the feet of a sex goddess. Actually, when I wriggled them, my toes all seemed to be there. The boots had buttons on them and looked remarkably like the ones which Great-Grandma had worn. They proved comfortable enough when I stood up and tried a few paces across the room.

‘Good. Now, it’s a pity about your dress size, dear,’ said Mistress Dread. I felt resigned. Et tu, Mistress Dread? But that was not what she meant.

‘You’re not big enough. My best spare is a twenty-two at least,’ she said. ‘Still, perhaps we are going to corset you. Ditch the jumper and let’s have a look.’

Daniel was lounging on a yellow damask love-seat. He smiled encouragingly at me. I took off the jumper. And the bra. Mistress Dread turned me around, patted a breast, and pulled at the waistband of my track pants.

‘Out you go, dear,’ she said to Daniel. He left through the inner door with alacrity. What was he up to? Was he enjoying this?

The Queen of the Dungeon came back with a full armload of red taffeta. She flung it over my head with a practised hand and it settled on me. I got my arms through the sleeves.
The dress was a full-skirted number with built-in black petticoats, slashed sleeves and a neckline which could be mistaken for a waist it was so deep. It was a gorgeous shade between venous and arterial blood and as I moved I rustled in the most entrancing fashion. Then she slipped a black leather corset over the dress and began lacing it at the front. I watched in amazement as my breasts rose into those perfect ‘moon-like, blue vein’d globes’ last seen in John Donne’s wet dreams.

‘Tuck in the nipple, dear, we want an M rating, not an R rating, at least at the beginning of the night,’ chided Mistress Dread. ‘Not too tight?’

‘Am I supposed to be able to breathe?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to be able to dance.’

‘Then it’s too tight,’ I squeaked.

The Leather Queen released the laces a little and my breasts stayed where they were. Then she took a handful of my hair, twisted it around and pinned it to my scalp with a long, dangerous hairpin. Spiked bands went round my neck and wrists and she gave me a light black leather whip to hold. She turned me to the wall of mirrors. Then she clasped her hands like a proud mother at the bridal fitting of her only daughter.

Oh my. I was gorgeous. Even without the make-up and the black fingernails. I took a step and the dress rustled. I took up the dress in both hands and inspected my boots. I had a waist! I had the sort of breasts that plastic surgeons weep over because they are so perfect. And I was standing up straight, every inch the Mistress. I slapped the whip against my taffeta-clad thigh. Mistress Dread chuckled. I embraced her.

‘It’s wonderful!’ I said. ‘I love it!’

‘You’ll love it even more with the make-up and the nails. Ask Carol to do them. I mean Cherie. Her poor father could probably do with a couple of hours off.’

‘What’s Daniel wearing?’ I couldn’t take my eyes off myself in that mirror.

Mistress Dread giggled. This was not something she did a lot.

‘I promise,’ she said, and giggled again. ‘I swear that you’ll approve. Now off with the tat and get back into those unsightly track clothes. See if you can take care of the dress. That’s real silk. I’ll take you with me tonight, get you past the door vamp, though in those clothes you’d get in on your own. The crypt password tonight is Faust.’

I had to be helped out of the corset. The dress came off next and I decided to wear the boots home. Daniel emerged from the inner room with a large shopping bag, which he refused to explain. Then we went back to my bakery to see how Jason was getting on with the muffins.

His face told us all. We bit. We tasted. While a perfectly good muffin, the taste just wasn’t right. The seeds were too strong and the toffee taste didn’t come through.

‘Try again with honey instead of sugar,’ I suggested.

‘Nah, gone off the idea,’ he said. ‘What about a savoury one? A herb muffin?’

‘Worth a try. Get over to Meroe and buy all the kitchen herbs she has left—Jason, repeat after me, “kitchen herbs”.’

He grinned. ‘Sure, okay. Don’t want to turn the customers into toads. Toads don’t have pockets. Death Lady fix you up all right?’

‘I’m gorgeous,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got a whip.’

He grinned again. ‘So the next time I get drunk …’ he said

‘You’re in for a good thrashing,’ I threatened.

He ran off, laughing. ‘He seems happy!’ I exclaimed, dropping the rest of my uneaten caraway muffin into the recycling bin.

‘Of course he is,’ said Daniel. ‘Redemption is more intoxicating than alcohol. Now, I must go and tell the Soup Run to find another heavy for tonight and various other things. Watch for me, you, at midnight,’ he said softly into my hair

‘Wait for me at midnight,’ I breathed.

‘I’ll come to you at midnight, though hell should bar the way.’

Then my own personal highwayman was gone and I felt like I imagined the other girls at school must have felt when they’d been asked out by the football captain. Tingly.

I found the toffee saucepan, thinking that a good bout of scrubbing would relieve that tinkling of fairy bells in my head, but Jason had cleaned it religiously. If birds suddenly appeared the next time I saw Daniel, I would know that I was in love. Of course, at that hour they would be owls. Or possibly bats.

I put the saucepan down and went upstairs. I rang Cherie and arranged for her to come and do my make-up at eleven. Then I had nothing to do for the moment and I felt like doing it. I laid my dress and corset on my bed, collected Horatio, and was just about to leave when the phone rang. I was fully loaded with cat and basket so I let the machine pick it up and ascended for a drink and a reverie. In, as it happened, the rose garden. I was dreaming through my gin and tonic when I had a horrible thought.

Who, of my fellow tenants, was James’s revolting associate? Who was painting the signs and stealing the weedkiller? I knew it wasn’t me and I was sure it wasn’t Meroe. And Trudi had cried when she’d seen her violated turf. Professor Dion Monk? A sardonic man with a taste for Juvenal. He might consider it as an interesting social experiment. But he was basically a kind man and in any case, he had a bruised leg during some of it and
couldn’t walk at all. No cultivated man who could walk would have watched Oprah for so long.

Horatio was away in the shrubbery, doing whatever he usually did. Jon? He wasn’t here enough. He’d just come back from Cambodia and now he was in Namibia, he’d had some sort of affair with Kylie, he didn’t have time. Mrs Pemberthy? Too old, too short, and too sick. Nerds Inc?

Now there was a thought. Taz was the same height as me. I could look straight into his eyes, when he would allow me to, which wasn’t often. Would the Lone Gunmen paint rude words on walls for money?

Was the sea damp?

The little deadshits! I would personally staple their genitalia to a moving tram when I proved this! I gulped down the rest of the drink. This was no time for sitting in rose bowers. I passed Mr Pemberthy as Horatio and I left the roof. He was sitting on the edge of the wall. I greeted him civilly.

‘She’s in hospital,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s all gone wrong.’

I told him I was sorry and went on. Horatio was wriggling, which he usually doesn’t. By the time I had placed him on his sofa I was beginning to simmer down because I had spotted a large fault in my reasoning. What did I know about the Lone Gunmen? Nerds. Definitive nerds. They were to nerdness what the Holy Mother is to virginity. There was nothing in the task of painting rude words on walls—apart from the fact that they would have to go out into the open—which would preclude them from being our Mr Fruitloop. Though they would probably have had to read the instructions on the paint can. Then again, they may have been ardent graffitists in their youth. No. One could see Rat, Gully and Taz getting a certain forbidden pleasure out of painting ‘Whore of Babylon’ on Mistress Dread’s shop. And they
might, if sufficiently paid, have poured weedkiller on the lawn and metho in through the air brick of Meroe’s shop. No one said that the Lone Gunmen were more virtuous than other nerds.

But would any power on earth have been able to make them produce a layout as amateurish as the scarlet woman letters? It is difficult for a person who knows a craft to look as if they don’t, like it is hard not to swim if you fall into the sea. Even if the swimmer does an impression of drowning, it’s not going to have the desperate gulp, bubble, help! authenticity of the non-swimmer. The scorn on Taz’s face came back to my mind’s eye. I could have sworn that that was a genuine reaction.

Rats. Just when I had a good solid solution, I had to go and talk myself out of it. Idly, I pressed the play key on the answering machine. I knew the voice. It was James.

‘I can meet you outside your shop at five if you must see me, though I can’t imagine why you want to,’ he said all in one sentence. ‘Got to go, that’s the video phone.’

I looked at the clock. Half past five. I broke the land speed record to the street and met James as he turned the corner of Degraves Street. Always late, that man. I grabbed him by the sleeve and drew him into the alcove of a record shop.

‘James, I have read your prospectus,’ I said icily.

‘Good! Good!’ he said with that well-remembered false heartiness that had edged him so close to being hospitalised with skillet-related injuries. ‘You’re going to invest?’

‘You bastard, James, that’s the place where I live!’

‘At present,’ he said cautiously. ‘You would have an apartment in the new block, of course. When it was built.’

‘I like the apartment I have,’ I said firmly. ‘Now I want you to call off your dog, James. No one is going to sell.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he snarled. ‘You’re plotting against me! You always did!’

He was red in the face and sweating in a very unattractive way. I was close enough to see his scalp through his thinning hair. He had always been proud of his hair.

‘Well no, actually, James, I never did plot,’ I told him. ‘But I’m willing to start.’

‘You needn’t bother! I don’t know why I married you. Pity, I suppose,’ he snapped. ‘You wouldn’t have found anyone else to marry such a fat bitch. You needn’t worry about the Renew proposal. It’s been turned down. No one would invest. No one would sell. It’s dead. Finished. I blame you,’ he said, with a wild look in his eye which made me exit from the alcove into the nice safe street.

‘Sorry about that, James,’ I said, keeping out of grabbing distance. ‘Now call off your tame painter and we can forget about it, eh? Who was it? Which of us was helping you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about! I never did!’ screamed James, and rushed off into Flinders Street, clutching his briefcase to his expensive tailoring.

Well, there went James. I felt better as I strolled back to Insula. It was a pity that he wouldn’t tell me who his accomplice was but James was such a liar that it wouldn’t have helped if he had. The late afternoon sun winked off the blue-green tiles. Kylie was sitting out on her balcony wearing a bikini which, rolled out, would barely have covered a couple of teacups and a saucer. I rephrase. A couple of egg cups and a wineglass. I waved at her. She waved at me.