Firefly Gadroon (6 page)

‘You’re a fucking nut, Lovejoy.’ Maud was still looking at my face. ‘Get on with it.’

Crump. I breathed a deep breath and opened its door carefully.

Maud watched, puzzled. ‘Is that it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing inside? No other places?’

I sighed. She had the secret-compartment syndrome I told you about. I examined it carefully. ‘No.’

‘What the hell
is
it?’

I looked at her sitting there. Aggressive. Trendy. Impatient, full of certainty. Clueless as the rest of them. Everything that everybody is nowadays. And a sociologist to boot. I thought, what’s the use?

‘Just a box.’ I said a mental apology to it. ‘Was that the job you mentioned? You could have opened it yourself.’

‘No. I just wanted to see you do it.
This
is the problem.’ And she pulled out another.

I stared. Another firefly cage? Exactly the same, a small rectangular tower on four round stumpy legs. A front part-door. Side and top netting. But all black as Newgate’s knocker and glittering with an extraordinary dark lustre
I’d never seen before. I reached over and picked it up. Heavy and cold. I looked at one top corner of the little door where it had been chipped by some lunatic trying to lever it open. Good old Big Frank. It’s a wonder he hadn’t used a hammer. I inspected it with a hand lens a long while before the penny dropped.
It was made of coal.
And I mean real coal, the sort you burn in a grate. The netting over the windows, the door and its handle, even the minuscule hinges. The entire thing was coal. Somebody, perhaps the maker, had covered it with black lacquer, presumably to keep it from smudging things, maybe to strengthen it. Coal carvings are occasionally still done, but this small fragile cage was superb, far higher quality than most. Yet it felt modern.

I readjusted my face. A gaping expert’s unconvincing to a customer.

‘Who made it?’

‘Just open it, Lovejoy.’ That cold determination again. ‘And give me a cigarette.’

I glanced at her as I felt at the exquisite little cage of living coal. She sat there almost quivering, her eyes fixed on the object with an eagerness that could only be called lust. I realized she’d bought the bamboo firefly cage hoping it would reveal the way this copy opened. And it hadn’t.

She snapped her fingers at me impatiently. ‘I said cigarette.’

If I was putting up with her for the price of a pasty I sure as hell had no fags. ‘I’ll tell your mother you smoke.’

‘Sod it.’ She rose and paced among the clutter. ‘This place is bleeding perishing, Lovejoy. Light the fire.’

I ignored her and attended to the cage. The coal version had something the bamboo antique had not. If you ran your fingers down its length there was a faint step just palpable halfway. Squinting sideways you couldn’t see it.
Another use for the coat of lacquer, to conceal a carved line round the cage? I took a pin from a drawer and slit the lacquer along the line, feeling my way in fractions. So the carver had copied the bamboo cage exactly the same but different, so to speak. It could easily be lacquered again.

‘Is there likely to be anything inside?’ I asked.

‘How the hell should I know?’ She was sulking furiously now. Our relationship was going downhill. I wouldn’t have minded except she was the one with the money.

It seemed worth looking at the cage from all angles. The box was slightly smaller at the top than the bottom, like two bits of a telescope. I pressed the top down gently. After a faint pause it slid easily into the bottom half a little way and the door swung open. The whole thing was its own key. Clever.

That stopped the sulks. Her lust came back, force nine. ‘Give it here, Lovejoy!’

‘Hang on.’ I deflected her hand and peered in at the little space. Empty. I’d guessed that.

Now, I thought. If a box was meticulously designed to conceal its own hollow emptiness, whatever needed hiding had to be in the walls, right? And since there was no other key . . . I held the little door ajar and pressed the box’s top half down again. I was wrong. Not the walls. It was in the legs. One was hollow.

The corner of the box floor tilted, leaving a triangular hole. Keeping the cage firm I switched the lights off and got my pencil torch to peer down inside the hollow stumpy leg. Nothing except faint spiralling down the wall of the hollow. For a moment I caught a brief flash of mauve, or thought I did. I looked again but only saw the black interior of the hollow cut deep into the leg. I showed Maud.

Just my luck. ‘Whatever was in there’s gone.’

‘Shit.’ She snatched the cage before I could move. She
peered into the minuscule hollow leg of the coal cage and glared at me in disgust. ‘Useless.’ She put the lights on and halted, staring at me. ‘What’s up, Lovejoy?’

‘Nowt.’ But I was clammy and cold for no reason. You feel stupid when that happens.

‘You’re white.’ Maud pulled her coat round her. ‘No wonder, living in this gunge. It’s freezing in here.’

It had been the shadow. Maud’s firefly cage had cast a shadow in the dark room. The pencil torch had thrown a curious blunt dark patch on my wall, very fleeting. I’d only caught it with the corner of my eye for an instant before it vanished as Maud bent to look in the cage. I was shaking like a frightened colt.

I’m honestly not the imaginative sort. No, honestly. After all what’s more stupid than letting yourself get scared of nothing? And a shadow’s nothing. I mean to say, a grown man, for God’s sake. I mopped my face with my sleeve, cold and hot all at once.

A motor-horn sounded twice outside. I started towards the window but Maud snorted.

‘Keep calm. It’s only my gig.’ She was still mad at not finding anything, but what had she expected? She’d still got two glorious works of art, one a genuine antique, the other a brilliant modern copy in a unique material.

‘Gig?’ I nodded wisely, thinking, what’s a gig? Must be some sort of motor-car.

She rammed both firefly cages into her handbag and snapped it shut. My stomach turned at the risk the two beautiful little objects were running, living with good old Maud. I suppose my face changed because she was suddenly amused.

‘These things really turn you on, don’t they?’ She paused suddenly in the hall on the way to the door. ‘Do you want them?’

‘Eh?’ There must be a catch in it. Birds like Maud don’t become instant Sweet Charity for nothing. ‘Well, yes. But I’m a bit short . . .’

‘Your pay for opening the cage,’ she said. There was a pause full of significance. The hall’s only narrow. She came even closer and slowly put her hand round me under my shirt and squeezed with steady insistence.

‘Er, well,’ I said hoarsely. ‘I, er, usually charge, er—’

She lifted my hand on to her breast. Tinker had been right about her. She really was luscious. ‘Which is it, Lovejoy?’ Her voice went into a husky whisper. ‘You can have the cages. Or you can be tonight’s gig. Which?’

Well, I’d already got a motor. A motionless one, but definitely a horseless carriage. ‘The cages.’

She yelped and pushed me back. ‘You
bastard
!’ I fell over the carpet.

By the time I’d got up she’d stormed off, taking the cages with her. I went to the door and saw Big Frank’s car. It was rolling backwards out of my garden, being followed by Maud’s bubble car, and the penny finally dropped. So that’s a gig, I thought. A gig’s a bloke or a bird, or any combination of the two. Well, well. That seemed the end of Maud and me, and the end of my – well, her – lovely firefly cages. A woman scorned and all that. I shut the door as the phone rang.

‘Lovejoy! Where have you been?’ Helen.

‘Hello, love. Look. Can you come round urgently, please?’

‘I thought you’d never ask.’ My voice must have sounded odd because she said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Something for you. Be quick.’

‘What is it?’

‘A gig,’ I said, casually as I could. ‘Oh, love. Can you bring a pasty?’

You must admit, sometimes women deserve gratitude. Like I mean even with Helen staying I woke sweating and shivering now and then throughout the night.

Next morning she brewed up in the alcove and fetched the cups across. I could feel her looking interrogatively at me, but pretended to be reading Kelly on restoring oil paintings.

‘Lovejoy.’

‘Mmmm?’ I turned a page carelessly but she took the book away to see my face.

‘You spent a terrible night.’ She said it like an accusation, but who the hell has nightmares deliberately? No wonder women peeve you.

I said tut-tut. ‘Did I?’

‘Muttering and threshing all night long.’

I lowered my eyes innocently. ‘I’m not used to having company in bed. Makes me restless.’

She choked laughing and nearly drenched herself in instant coffee. ‘Lovejoy! You’re preposterous!’

I watched her fall about. Women are lovely in the morning, faintly dishevelled but warm and soft. Morning women aren’t half so vicious as the night sort. I always find they’re more fond of me. You can get away with more after
a night’s closeness. Odd, but true. Helen’s no exception. She always wears my threadbare dressing-gown to slop about in. It makes no difference to the allure you feel, just seeing her sit on the edge of the bed lost inside the tattered garment. After rolling in the aisles some more she sobered and asked me about shadows.

‘The one you got up to draw on the wall.’

‘Eh? I did no such thing.’

She pointed to the wall near the mantelpiece. I’d thought she was asleep when I did it. And there was me tiptoeing about like a fool with my torch half the night, which shows how treacherous women are, deep down. She’d been watching all the time.

‘You should have been kipping,’ I said coldly.

Helen was at the pencilled outline, head tilted. ‘What’s it a shadow of, Lovejoy? A leaning castle? A window? A book, end on?’

‘Dunno.’

If she hadn’t been an antique dealer I might have told her what was on my mind. The lines showed the firefly cage’s silhouette almost exactly as I’d cast the shadow last night when Maud called. There’s this old iron grate in my living room with a cornice above and a brass rail about head high. A painting I did years ago of the Roman road at Bradwell hangs nearby. Then there’s a space where I used to have my Wellington chest before I flogged it for bread six months back. Then there’s a tatty reddish curtain busily festering in whatever feeble sunlight totters through the window’s grime, and that’s about it. The shadow had stretched obliquely up from the black grate’s mantelpiece almost as far as the corner. Climbing up there to mark it in the darkness had been really difficult. I’d nearly broken my bloody neck. I had the odd feeling I wouldn’t have been so frightened of the odd lopsided shape if it had stayed
exactly like the firefly cage. It was the skewed slanting weirdness of it on the wall that was so petrifying. But why? I closed my eyes. Maybe I was going off my nut. I’d gone clammy again.

Helen came back and put her arms round me. ‘Don’t be scared, love.’

That really got me. I broke away, annoyed. ‘Who’s scared?’ Some women really nark me, always jumping to stupid conclusions with no reason. ‘It’s a . . . a scientific problem, you daft berk.’

‘ ’Course it is, love,’ she said, not turning a hair. ‘You’re right. Sorry, sweetheart. I meant . . . preoccupied.’

That mollified me a bit. ‘Well, all right then.’ But my eyes kept getting dragged to the grotesque quadrilateral on the wall. I’d used crayon and charcoal to. thicken the outline here and there. I’ve been scared of some real things before, but never a bloody shadow.

‘What do you want for breakfast, love?’

‘Er, I’m not hungry . . .’

Her eyes narrowed. She went searching.

‘Ferreting in people’s cupboards is very rude,’ I reprimanded.

She started to slam about, flinging some clothes on. ‘There’s
nothing
here, Lovejoy! Not a single thing to eat.’

‘Isn’t there? Good heavens! I forgot to call in—’

She had wet eyes when she finally stood over me, arms akimbo. ‘What am I to do with you, Lovejoy?’

You feel such a twerp lying down starkers when everybody else is up. Socially disadvantaged. ‘Look, love,’ I said uncomfortably, but she swept her coat and handbag up and slammed into the hall. The outside door shook the cottage to its foundations. I sighed. Unless you count Tinker, that meant I’d alienated practically all mankind, and even Tinker was narked because I hadn’t charged Joe
Lampton over divvying his book. Anyway, what is grub to do with Helen? She only eats yoghurt. I lay there listening and thinking, aren’t people a lot of trouble. Helen’s car started and scuffed away.

The shape scared me. All right, I admit it. Somehow it made my scalp moisten and my palms run. Somewhere it had scared me even worse than now, not as a mere scraped outline done in a wobbly hand during the dark hours, but in a solid terrifying reality, with the great oblique rectangle . . .
I’d seen it before.

I was in the garden in my pyjamas when Helen returned. There’s this unfinished decorative wall I keep meaning to brick to an end when I get a minute. It’s a sitting and thinking wall. She drew the car up. You could tell she was still mad from the way it slithered.

‘What are you doing out here, Lovejoy? You’ll catch your death.’

‘Oh, just watching the birds.’ They walk about on my grass being boring. What a life. Nearly as successful as mine. Helen’s eyes left me and observed the open cottage door behind me. I was frigging freezing. It was an airy fresh morning and the grass wet through.

‘Come back in with me.’ She got out, her arms full of brown bags. ‘Let’s feed you up before we do anything else. I’ll go in first.’

‘Caviare and chips, please,’ I joked, following her. My bum was frozen from the wall. Helen didn’t smile. I always think that’s the trouble with women. No sense of humour.

About Helen: she is reserved, in charge of herself and usually boss of everybody in arm’s reach. She isn’t like Angela, say, or Jill or Patrick, who couldn’t have made it as antique dealers without considerable fortunes from interested donors. She’s a careful blue-eyed cigarette-smoker
you don’t take for granted. And there’s no doubt about her dealing skills, so precisely focused on oriental art, fairings and African ethnology. Helen’s not an instant warm like Dolly. More of a slow burn.