No Cherubs for Melanie (24 page)

“Isn't it supposed to be?”

“Only for people who believe in fairy stories.”

Bliss closed his eyes for a moment. Did he believe in fairy tales? “It wouldn't work anyway,” he concluded, without finding an answer. “Sarah wouldn't take me back.”

“So what do you intend to do?”

“If I had my choice at this particular moment, I'd quite like to stay here with you.”

“You can't do that.”

“I thought you'd say that.”

“You were right then.”

Kicking himself for getting drawn into disclosing his personal problems, annoyed that she had turned the conversation around, he plunked himself down on a fallen tree trunk and said, “What about you?”

She thought hard for a second as if contemplating telling him to mind his own business, then sketched in the details of her life in half a dozen words, steering well clear of any mention of Melanie. School? “Hated it.”
Friends? “None really.” Likes? “Swimming and Bo.” Dislikes? Her simple shrug could have meant nothing, or everything. Life in general? “All right.”

“Mahler?” he enquired.

She screwed up her nose. “I don't like Mahler. He's too painful.”

“Oh. I thought… I noticed your tapes.”

She froze momentarily with a puzzled look then caught on. “Oh, those. I got them years ago. I saw a movie once…” She shrugged off a brief attempt to remember the title. “Anyway, some snooty character said ‘I could die for Mahler' in a terribly posh voice and I thought it was so chic I went out and bought the lot.

He laughed. “Tell me about your work.”

“I don't work…” she began, then backtracked. “Oh. You mean the animals.”

He nodded and stared into the undergrowth. He was disappointed by the lack of furtive scurries. Where he had expected to find a teeming menagerie, he'd walked into a movie-set forest and was waiting for the director to shout “Action.”

“Yeah. What have you done with all the animals?” he enquired light-heartedly and was stung by the sharpness of her reply.

“What do you mean?”

“I just wondered where they were, that's all.”

“Oh,” she waved vaguely, “all over the place. They keep out of the way when they hear someone coming.” She spent the next few minutes chatting animatedly about her animals. A family of orphaned mink were apparently doing very well. A porcupine with a broken leg was on the mend. Squirrels, chipmunks, skunks, and white-tailed deer were all recuperating in the relative safety of the island paradise.

“And Eddie the eagle?”

“Oh yes. He's fine.”

“What will you do with him?” he asked innocently.

Her crustiness returned. “What do you mean?”

“Well… When he's better, what'll happen to him?”

“Oh, I see. I'll release him in the wild.”

Bliss's attention was caught by the rising sun glinting off the lake through the trees. He was hopelessly lost; the tangled woodland was more confusing than Hampton Court maze. For all he knew they could have been walking around in circles. He chided himself. It was an island. That's exactly what they had done.

“We should get going,” she said, as he made a move toward the lake.

“Just a sec,” he shouted, pushing a path through the thick bush to a secluded cove with a white sand beach carved into the rocks.

“C'mon, Dave,” she cried, agitated, not following. “We have to go.”

He hopped down onto the fine sand and skimmed a few pebbles. “Five,” he counted triumphantly.

“Dave, please,” she implored.

“Hang on, I want to try for seven,” he called, flipping another stone.

She perched on a rock above him, hugged her knees and playfully called, “Try for eight,” momentarily forgetting the time.

Bending to grab another pebble his eye was caught by a cigarette butt just six inches from the waterline. Margaret's, he thought stupidly, even going so far as to check the end for lipstick before realizing that she neither wore lipstick nor smoked. But hadn't she also claimed not to drink?

He picked up the stub reflectively. Fresh, he noted with surprise.

“Let's go,” she called, already on the move.

Flicking the butt into the water, his attention was drawn to a long groove in the silt just below the surface. “A canoe's been here,” he shouted.

She was already in the forest and he rushed to catch up. “Must've been those Indians from yesterday.”

“No,” she replied adamantly. Then she softened. “Probably some picnickers up from the city.”

They must be brave, he thought, remembering the hand-painted sign firmly planted in the middle of the beach. “Private: No hunting, fishing, or trapping.” And the words, “Trespassers will be shot,” had been underlined with such ferocity that Bliss, for one, believed she would do it.

As they wormed their way back along the twisted trails, concern distracted him and he wandered off the track. Realizing his mistake and seeing that Margaret had changed direction he veered at a tangent to head her off.

“Stop!” she screamed.

He took another step.

“Stop! Stop! Stop! Stand still. Don't move,”

“What is it? He shouted, his eyes frantically searching for a cougar, rattlesnake, or bear. A hundred imaginary claws ripped into his back and spun him around. A swaying stalk became a venomous fang biting his leg and making him leap.

“Don't move, Dave. Stay still,” she yelled. “I'm coming.”

Nothing she said allayed his terror and he glued down the hair on his neck with a perspiring hand and his face tingled with tension. Then she was behind him.

“Come this way,” she called soothingly.

“What is it?” he enquired, his voice barely controlled.

“A bear pit.”

“A what?”

“Just ahead of you there's a deep pit. To catch bears. I didn't really worry about them until two people were mauled to death on Onongo Island,” she waved vaguely off into the distance. “They were trapped with a big male that hunted them, stalked them. Set out to kill them for invading his territory. So, if a bear gets on this island…”

He didn't move. “Show me,” he said.

Selecting a sinewy switch from a nearby bush, Margaret stepped forward with the breathtaking care of a ballet dancer, prodding the ground as if searching for a land-mine. Ten feet ahead of him the switch sank into the ground. Bending down she carefully brushed aside a thick layer of skeletal leaves and debris revealing a lattice of slender branches. “Be careful, Dave,” she called motioning him forward and parting the branches.

“Shit,” he breathed peering into the deep pit to a floor spiked with sharpened stakes.

“Eight feet,” she said, guessing his next question.

“This is scary. Are there any more?”

“They're all over the island.”

He gulped, recalling his unescorted foray into the forest's fringe the previous morning.

“That's why you shouldn't leave the house without me.”

He had no intention of doing so again.

“We must get a move on if we're to get to the settlement and back today,” she continued, steering him back to the trail.

“I just hope Samantha's at home.” he said, falling in behind, carefully placing each foot exactly where hers had been.

The fleet was in when they reached the settlement. Dozens of canoes and motorboats littered the beach. Fishing nets swung in the breeze. Bloated cats siesta'd on the shore.

The men, after a hectic morning fishing, took their siestas more earnestly, over a few pints in Stacy's store. Bliss's arrival a few days earlier had not gone unnoticed in the isolated community and speculation was rife. Jock, the Glaswegian odd-job man, knew little but fantasized freely. According to him, Bliss was Margaret's estranged husband, from whom she had fled shortly after her wedding, having realized the folly of marrying an older man. Alice's assertion that he was Margaret's father had been offhandedly dismissed; there was little entertainment in the arrival of a father.

Bliss's mind exploded with nostalgia as he stood framed in the store doorway. The smells from inside transported him back to the corner store in Dorking, just
six houses from their terraced house at a time before supermarkets, with their hospital-corridor odours of floor polish and disinfectant, aircraft hangar lighting, ‘in-your-face' displays, and financial advisor personalities. Closing his eyes for a second, vivid recollections flooded his mind. Eight years old again, he mentally walked back into the corner store and smelled the pungent bouquet of traditional herbs — parsley, sage, and thyme — the acetone of pear drops, the flowery fragrance of perfumed candles and soaps, and the earthy scent of vegetables. Fruit —oranges in particular, some on the turn — wafted the air with heady sweet fragrance. And golden, ripe bananas, not rock-hard green sticks, hung in cascades from bright steel hooks. Their were no cucumbers in condoms, no plastic-skinned sausages, spray painted apples, flavour-injected chicken, or hormonally inflated tomatoes. Only real food with real smells

Leaping back to the present he opened his eyes and met the stares of twenty men. The air quivered with tension, but a shove from Margaret propelled him forward and broke the spell. Conversations, temporarily interrupted, recommenced. Glasses, paralyzed mid air, unfroze. Time paused, then moved on.

“Hi Maggie,” mumbled a cacophony of voices.

“Pete, Ross, Gill, Buck,” she intoned with a nod and worked her way around the room, acknowledging each in turn, ending with the man behind the counter. “Stacy.”

“This is Dave,” she said to the room without elaboration.

Stacy waddled out from behind his counter to greet him. He looked, thought Bliss, as though he'd suffered a catastrophic internal collapse, as though his lungs and heart had crashed into his belly leaving a sunken chest and slumped shoulders. He was all gut, with a wide leather belt buckled under the mass, and the crotch of his
trousers hung round his knees. Giant's suspenders looped up and over the bulge of his stomach, like a couple of bungee cords, straining to hold it in place. Bliss waggishly wondered if he removed the swelling at night, like a store Santa Claus, and extended a hand in greeting.

“How are you?” asked Stacy ignoring the outstretched hand. “You wanna coffee?”

“Please,” said Bliss, his eyes taking in the room, examining it properly for the first time. His previous visit had been an unreal affair, with his mind focussed exclusively on Margaret, but now he had a different perspective. He drank in the scene like an artist preparing to sketch. The streaks of autumn sunlight, turned ochre by years of window grime, were augmented by a few sixty-watt light bulbs under white enamel shades. Smoke from a dozen cigarettes hung in the air and gave the picture a fuzzy edge. The aroma of beer and spirits, combined with fruity, spicy smells, somehow rustled up the aura of Christmas. The twenty or so occupants — all men, most misshapen, many in lumberjack shirts and jeans — were clumped around the long counter and could have been partygoers, Bliss thought, were they not so serious, surly almost.

Stacy busied himself with a hissing espresso machine while he talked to Margaret but tried to include Bliss. “Are you two goin' back today?”

“Uh huh,” she nodded.

“You shouldn't leave it too late — Could be a storm.” A Forrest Gump-like figure, with a Blue Jays baseball cap tightly jammed on his head, parroted, “Could be a storm.”

“How're doin' Bob?”enquired Margaret, turning to him with an encouraging smile.

The man's careful consideration of several possible responses was accompanied by a variety of facial grimaces
as though he were giving clues in a game of charades. With his reply finally selected, he adopted an appropriate face and spoke in a slow vibrato, sounding like a cheap bass loudspeaker. “I'm doin' real good Maggie. Who's your friend?”

Time stopped. Life was suspended as twenty men awaited the answer.

“Just a friend,” she intoned after a thoughtful pause, giving nothing away.

Bliss moved to the phone, dragging twenty pairs of eyes across the room with him, and dialled Samantha's number. Her answering machine greeted him cheerily as the room behind him held its breath.

“I'll call again in half an hour,” was all he said, realizing it was barely six o'clock in England. He turned back to the room. Eyes scattered, conversations were forced back to life. Margaret chatted to a couple of the men, sipped her coffee, and scanned an old newspaper that was on the bamboo table where he'd first seen her. Bliss killed time browsing around the store, his eyes drawn to the ornate ceiling along the old wooden shelving that climbed, ladder-like, on all four walls. But the stucco ceiling turned out to be fraudulent under closer scrutiny, nothing more than whitewashed, embossed tin-plate tiles. A forerunner of Styrofoam, he guessed, though certainly more attractive. Then he surveyed the familiar products and brands on the shelves and felt a sense of belonging. Cadbury's, Kellogg's, Nestle's, and Heinz vied for display space with Lipton's, Maxwell House, Nabisco, and Knorr.

A turn-of-the-century Morse code key stamped
Marconi & Co.
caught his eye, its finely knurled adjusting screws and mother of-pearl finger plate turning a purely functional instrument into a work of art.

“How much?” he called to Stacy, holding it out for him to see.

“What's it got on it?”

“The label says $2.20,” he replied, with no expectation of negotiating a price anywhere near the original.

“Give me two bucks then,” said Stacy, cheerfully taking a ten percent mark down on a ninety-year-old artifact. Bliss, bemused but not inclined to argue, stared hopefully down at the top of Margaret's head.

“Put it on his tab,” she called to Stacy, without looking up from the paper. “He already owes you fifty so another couple won't make a difference.”