No Cherubs for Melanie (27 page)

Bliss sat back and studied an early picture of Margaret, her cracked little mouth holding his attention
There was something so defining about the mouth, he realized, every one marginally different despite fulfilling the same multiplicity of functions. From rosebuds to letterboxes, round, square, or slashed, every mouth could allure or repel, attack or entice. Life in the absence of most bodily organs could at least be tolerable, but life without a mouth…? But Melanie's mouth had not helped her survive. Losing himself in the picture, Margaret's deformed little mouth became Melanie's, and he saw only the tiny dead lips that he had pursed his own around in a vain attempt to rekindle her life.

Bliss shook his mind clear of the image and returned to the book. One ill-conceived photograph had been shot through the bars of the hospital cot turning Margaret into a mutilated little prisoner, and he wondered how the usual stream of visitors had been prevented from registering shock at such a sight. Waylaid, he guessed, probably by the ward sister or staff nurse. Whispered warnings in the vestibule or ward office: “Harelip. Don't mention it, don't upset the new mum.”

“What lovely eyes,” visitors would have cooed. But not the mouth — anything but the mouth.

Every photograph, it seemed, was a commemoration of something new in Margaret's life: new trike, new dress, new school. Then came Melanie. Bliss turned the page and flinched in horror. There was a picture a tiny baby not unlike Margaret, only this one didn't have a split lip. This one didn't have any lips at all. Someone — Margaret, he assumed, without overtaxing his investigative prowess — had painstakingly cut the entire face out of the picture with a scalpel or craft knife. He gagged. There was something sinister and repulsive about the tiny faceless body and he shivered uncontrollably. Even a grotesquely mutilated face could be loved, but not even a mother could love someone without a face.

Revolted, he quickly flicked to the next page, and the next. More horrors. Margaret had painstakingly cropped Melanie's face out of every picture, as though she were trying to cut her sister out of her life. If only life were so simple, he thought; how he would love to be able to carve George's face out of Sarah's life's pictures.

The parade of horrifically mutilated photographs ceased after Melanie's sixth birthday, a day on which twenty or so other six-year-olds in party dresses and bow ties had posed smilingly around a cake, with the flames of six candles flexing spookily from the breath of the mouthless, faceless creature in the centre.

Bliss skimmed back through the book. Something else was missing in addition to Melanie's face. There were no pictures of Betty-Ann. Had she been ashamed of posing with her disfigured daughter or had Margaret dispensed with her altogether, not content just to eliminate her face from the scrapbook?

Then he came to the last page and there was a picture of Melanie's face, the only one. A picture so macabre that Bliss caught his breath, tasted bile in the back of his throat, and had to swallow hard. Slamming the book shut he held it away from him like a dirty diaper while he prepared himself for a second look.

He had seen worse, he said to himself — much worse, in real life, not just pictures. Still, he steeled himself before re-opening the book. Curiosity finally overcame his distaste and he found Melanie's cherubic little face peeping out at him through a hole in the lid of a coffin. It was one of the decapitated heads from an earlier picture, though he didn't know which, and had been pasted within a carefully drawn of a casket. The words “That will teach you,” had been scored with a sharp pen and heavily outlined in black, like an engraved legend, below the coffin. Only Margaret could have done this, he
realized, but why? He looked closer and felt himself going cold. A thin black pen line scarred Melanie's upper lip. Immediately the scene at Melanie's post-mortem sprang into his mind. The pathologist had made light of it — a little jagged ink line drawn to resemble a faint scar above Melanie's lip. “She's been mucking about with a pen,” he had said. “Punk make-up.” Bliss, unaware of Margaret's deformity at the time, had thought nothing of it; he had not even noticed it while trying to resuscitate her. Indeed, had he not been standing beside the pathologist under the bright operating room lights he might never have seen the tiny mark. No mention was made of it in the pathologist's report to the coroner; it seemed hardly worthy of comment at the time. Kids were always drawing on their faces; it usually wasn't fatal.

His mind now reacted in slow motion. He digested each morsel of information, and could draw only one reasonable conclusion, but he delayed acknowledging it for as long as possible. In another life, in another world, at another time, he might have cottoned on. But here, on Margaret's island, in Margaret's house, his mind refused to admit that he had been so totally wrong about her. The notion of little schoolgirls murdering each other was so entirely out of context with his experience of life that he momentarily found himself worrying about his cat. Just thinking about Margaret holding her sister's head under water gave him a jolt. He needed something to steady himself; a cigarette would come in handy. Coffee? There was none. Whisky? He stretched his hand back under the couch and came up with the bottle — empty. She must have finished it before she slipped into his bed and his arms the previous night. Dutch courage? he wondered.

Feeling numb, he forced himself to re-evaluate the morbid picture and finally dismissed it as surrealist doodling. Perhaps it was merely a strange way of commemorating
Melanie's passing; Margaret's way of dealing with the survivor guilt, he concluded. She might even feel that it should have been her who died. Maybe she would probably have been happier to die than Melanie.

With the grotesque picture rationalized, he closed the book and turned his attention outward, scanning the now familiar room. Far from comforting him, the depressingly decrepit surroundings weighed him down further. He was missing something and he knew it. Then it dawned on him what was lacking in the room — everything. The detritus of life. The trinkets of success and failure, the baubles of existence. Family photos, plastic mementos, plaster dogs with chipped ears. More especially, for someone living so far from home and family, there was nothing on which to hang memories. Apart from the books and cassettes, it could have been a hotel room, albeit a dingy one.

Bo barrelled in announcing Margaret's approach. Bliss stiffened, feeling traitorous. Snatching the fallen envelopes off the floor he started to cram them back into the scrapbook. Which way? Which page? He didn't know. She won't notice, he told himself. She must have stuffed them in the book hurriedly on their return from the settlement. Why? But he did not have time to work out an answer before she called, “Dave,” with an excited tone that suggested she had something interesting to divulge. In a panic he jammed the envelopes back into the book haphazardly, hastily retied the shoelace thong, shoved the whole package back under the couch, and readied his face to greet her.

“Dave,” she called again as she entered the room.

He turned with a fixed smile. “Hello,” he said. Every impulse in his body attempted to pull his face into a different expression. She sensed something was amiss and her eyes narrowed questioningly.

“Hi,” she responded guardedly, her excitement lost, then she busied herself fussing with Bo. A fog instantly clouded the atmosphere between them. Bliss, assiduously avoiding eye contact, found himself absorbed by her hands as she stroked and soothed the dog, and he imagined them throttling her sister. His brain was a whirlpool of thoughts. Images flashed through his mind faster than film falling on a cutting room floor.

Margaret's body language, fluid and carefree when she arrived, was now calculated and sluggish. In a few seconds of silence they had become strangers again.

“We both know what we nearly did, but let's pretend otherwise,” she seemed to be saying as she kept her eyes averted and her attention focussed on the animal.

Attempting to avoid confrontation they ran out of conversation before they even started. “I should get dressed,” he said, looking sheepish, suddenly feeling vulnerable wrapped only in a blanket.

“I'll make some tea,” she replied unenthusiastically.

Consternation drew him toward the bedroom; he needed space to think, to plan. She knows, he thought — feminine intuition. “Don't follow,” he silently implored. She didn't.

He sat on the bed, analyzing Margaret's demeanour and concluded he was simply being melodramatic. She's probably just wondering what happened in the night. She was physically and mentally exhausted from fighting the fire; she was frightened and tipsy. But surely she would know whether or not she'd had sex?

He pulled himself up sharply. “What are you playing at? Frigging mind games, prevaricating, thinking about anything other than…Can't you see what she's done?”

Challenging himself to do something positive, to find some evidence, he whipped open the closet and picked through the clothes. These aren't her clothes, he reluctantly
admitted. They aren't anybody's clothes — certainly not anybody living in today's world. It was full of Salvation Army rejects. His eyes scanned the room, taking in the few scraps of old furniture and the bare walls. It was a bachelor's bedroom — his bedroom
après
Sarah. A male's temporary shelter, unworthy of lavish attention — of any attention — just waiting for a woman to step in and take command. Like the living room, there was nothing personal, nothing feminine. No gummed-up cosmetic bottles, no perfumes, no collection of creams.

“Is there any part of your body that doesn't have its own cream?” he had once griped to Sarah during a discussion about her spending habits “Yeah, my ass,” she'd shot back. “And you make it so sore I'd better get some.”

They had collapsed in laughter onto the bed, but Bliss wasn't laughing now. His mind raced through the house. Apart from the bathroom it was a time capsule from the 1950's. Cobwebs and dust as thick as icing sugar plastered everything. The books on the bookshelves were just a job lot from a flea market put there to entertain guests on a wet weekend. The cassette tapes — Mahler — were hers, she had admitted as much, but she had no tape deck and she'd claimed to hate them. The food in the kitchen's store cupboard was nothing more than emergency rations. “Dog food!” he mentally exclaimed, with the sudden realization there wasn't any.

Then the clincher — sanitary pads. None!

Two and two had finally made four. Margaret was as much a visitor as he was. This was nothing more than a holiday cottage. She didn't live here. No one lived here. The realization disheartened him. If this wasn't really her home then everything else about her was suspect.

By now his world was beginning to tilt. Conscious from the moment of his arrival that there was a degree of unreality in his surroundings, the whole universe now
seemed to be spinning out of control. What should he do? Go back out there and confront her? Ask her outright, “Where do you live?” Pull out the book, stick it under her nose, and say, “Explain this if you can.” But then he cautioned himself. “Remember the lawyers' rule: never ask a question to which you don't know the answer.” His whole world was turning black again. What was going on? He felt as if he had got onto an icy hill and whichever way he spun the wheel or applied the brakes he couldn't prevent himself from sliding toward a brick wall at the bottom.

He made up his mind; he needed answers, however unpleasant. Plus, he needed to straighten out his own feelings. He felt dirty, he shouldn't have shared a bed with her. It had been wrong in any circumstances. It was as if he had deceived her although he couldn't explain why. Delving back into his suitcase he pulled out his detective's uniform of blue pinstripe suit, even began brushing off the jacket before asking himself whether he intended to interrogate her or make her wet herself laughing. Slinging the suit back into the case he hurriedly dressed in shirt and slacks and marched confidently back into the living room.

She was gone. He fished under the couch. The book was gone and with it the letters. He glanced around the room and his testicles scrunched again. “Oh, shit.” The rifle was also gone. Another fire ignited — this time in his mind.

Detective Chief Inspector Bryan warily nudged the café door with his shoulder, reluctant to grasp the handle for fear of contracting something nasty. This must be the place, he thought, recalling Samantha's description: “That brown-collar greasy-spoon on Snuff Street where Dad used to meet his grass. It's the
Hurricane
I think.”

The sign on the door read
Typhoon Café
; calling itself a greasy spoon would have been false advertising.

“Over here,” she shouted, half concealed behind a high-backed plywood bench.

“Nice place,” he said, turning up his nose as if he'd caught the scent of a bad fart.

“It was close,” she replied, keeping her head down, obsessed by her skirt, repeatedly smoothing the shiny fabric over her thigh. For her dinner with Bryan she had dolled herself up, telling herself, the way her mother would have, that she should try to look her best. But this time worry overcame her desire to
impress and she had thrown on a tired polyester skirt and sloppy brown sweater to match her dowdy mood. Her face was so taut she looked as though she'd left on a face-pack. Her hazel eyes, just too far apart to be considered stunning, were dulled by a lack of sleep. “Do you want something to eat?”

“In here!” Bryan exclaimed.

“Don't be so stuffy. It's not that bad.”

“I've closed down better places,” he joked, wrinkling his nose. “What is that damn stink anyway?”

Samantha's churning mind couldn't be bothered with such trivia galloped away with her mouth leaving Peter Bryan breathless and confused. “He hasn't called … It's Sunday and he hasn't called. He definitely said he'd call as soon as he got it. It's Sunday,” she repeated, as if Bryan should understand the monumental significance of the day. “I sent it Thursday morning for fuck's sake. First thing. He promised to call when it arrived… It's not like him…Well all right, it
is
like him. I called the bank, ‘No record,' they said. No record? ‘How can you say that?' I said. No record! ‘Administrative error,' they said. I said, ‘Fucking sort it then.' D'you know what they said?” Bryan, dazed by the verbal onslaught, had been left standing at the start; his bewildered expression clearly said so. “They said they'd need a week to find out what happened. ‘A week?' I said, ‘He could've starved to death by then!'”