Cosmo Cosmolino Page 18

  Keenly he returned her stare as she stepped towards him. But the knot in her belly gave a deep, wriggling flutter, and uncoiled. Ouf! The power of it doubled her up, and she staggered forward into the gutter, almost head-butting him.

  He seized her by the wrists and steadied her.

  ‘Whoa there,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

  Confused and suddenly queasy, she waited, bent over, for the pulse to kick again; but it subsided, and she straightened up. He let go. His arms dropped to his sides, and hung there in lightly flexed curves.

  ‘Does Janet still live here?’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Raymond.’

  At once she saw his toughness. He was wirier than Ray, faster of mind and metabolism, longer-thighed, broader-backed. He meant business. She stared at him with respect. The street behind him glittered with sun: its brightness stung her. There was no time now to think. This one knew no fear. He was here to rectify.

  ‘They’re still asleep, I think,’ she said. The tremor in her voice surprised her.

  He strode past her, through the gate and up on to the verandah. Maxine thrust her hands into her cuffs, wheeled about, and fell into step behind him.

  In his heavy boots he was already over the step and into the kitchen. He paused at the fridge and opened it. It was empty. He kneed it shut, and took two more steps along the bench to the breadbin. While Maxine watched, he slid up the lid and saw the carpet of stale crumbs on its floor.

  ‘Crikey,’ he muttered. ‘Hasn’t anyone been to the market? A bloke used to be able to get a feed here. At any hour of the day or night.’

  ‘We’ve all been rather busy,’ said Maxine. ‘Everyone’s been working so hard—’

  He turned and raked her with a silent look. She strained for his aura, but there was not even static. His eyes were red with fatigue.

  ‘Strike a light,’ he said. ‘People ought to eat.’

  ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ she said. ‘I could run to the shop.’

  ‘Good on you,’ he said. ‘I’d love a great big meaty cup of something. Get coffee. Get bacon. Get milk. Get bread. Spare no expense. Here.’ He pulled a handful of coins and notes from his jacket pocket and held them out to her. ‘Look at that. You’ve cleaned me right out.’

  He grinned. She saw that some of his back teeth were missing.

  ‘Will I wake the others up first?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘They’ll come slinking down once they smell bacon cooking.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ said Maxine, turning round at the door with her hands full of cash. ‘I’ve been told about you. You’re Alby. You’re Ray’s brother, aren’t you.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He picked up a sheaf of junk mail, and leaned back expansively against the bench. ‘I’m his no-hoping brother. I’ll be taking him off your hands today.’

  Today. Something revved inside her, an excitement. She tried to take a hostly tone.

  ‘Oh, there’s absolutely no hurry! No hurry at all. Stay a while. We’d hate to lose him. We’ve become awfully attached. To Ray.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Alby. He leafed through the brochures. ‘Still—he’s been expecting me. And I’m late, as usual. Is he crooked on me, do you know? It took me longer than I thought to organise transport—rent it, and that.’

  Maxine dawdled, twiddling the door-handle. ‘What’s in your truck? You haven’t got any washing in there, have you? That needs doing?’

  ‘I’ve got furniture,’ said Alby. ‘Ray’s supposed to have the money, and I’ve brought the gear. That was the arrangement, anyway.’

  Maxine bit her lip and bolted, with her loose pockets jingling, out the gate and on to the street.

  There stood the truck, awkwardly parked with its back to the house, on the paving stones disrupted by thick ridges of root. It was old and unstable, and under the black-trunked, leafless elms it was very, very red. Its redness leaked out into the surrounding air, tingeing and staining everything, imbuing the morning with a hectic flush: the truck seemed to be bobbing there, in the sharp early chill, like a barge tenuously moored to the bank of a current that was urging it to keep moving, to untie and swing out on to the stream and be gone. Maxine shoved her hands into her sleeves and danced on the spot. Too late to think, to soothe, to explain. Get ready. Something big was going to happen. Nothing could stop it now.

  Alby made himself wait till her footsteps drowned in the river of early traffic. Then, holding his breath, he stepped through the kitchen door into the living room, the central room of Sweetpea Mansions.

  These ten years, no matter where he travelled, he had kept a picture of the household folded in his mind, as an image of the way a life might be lived. He treasured the tomato plants heavy with fruit, the trim rows of lettuces; the washing flying high and fading on the line, straw brooms with their driving rhythm, the casual giving and lending of everything you needed, the unlocked doors and windows through which fine breezes wandered: surely he must have lived through a winter here, but all his memories were of warm air and thin clothing, and every day was Saturday. Any room you peered into had its little drama going on: two women haranguing some poor bastard about housework; a couple of blokes in armchairs with cups of tea on the floor beside them, arguing about a strike or a distant war, or working away on acoustic guitars, learning and teaching; a girl in a floppy, flowery dress mending a bike or covering page after page of her diary, never needing to cross out, or reading the long summer afternoon away with the book propped on her chest, while round the next half-open door a lover, pale with jealousy, leaned over a table to snoop on a letter; upstairs in their wide front room the kids—whose were they? which ones actually belonged to the house?—paraded about in dress-ups making imperious gestures, or crawled naked up the bunks, or madly scribbled with the pencils, colouring in; along the hall someone waddled backwards on her haunches, painting the skirting-boards blue, or teetered on a ladder with a roller tray and the radio; if you tapped on the bathroom door you would be screamed at by someone inside who was trying to develop photos; downstairs a visitor picked out a walking bass line on the gutted pianola; on the back verandah somebody’s boyfriend since last night sat grinning, head bowed, caped in a towel, submitting to the application of shit-brown gobs of henna; and three times a day the food hit the table, great crocks and tureens of it, coarse with garlic and beans, weird salads hacked to chaff, onions, brown rice, the occasional sausage, vegetable curry that burnt your mouth when you gulped it and later tortured you with farts—but filling! In this house you could fill up, you could eat and hold out your plate for more, and everyone welcomed you, at first; everyone loved you, provided you could crack a joke or stagger round the yard on stilts or grab a guitar and play.

  But in the end Alby didn’t match up. He wasn’t ready for it. Picked up at some gig, he had drifted in from nowhere, without the necessary training, without consciousness, and they took him on sufferance, because he was charming; but he continued to say chick, to say cunt, to say wog and abo and make them flinch; he couldn’t cook and wouldn’t learn, he paid no rent and offered no kitty, he’d never handled a broom in his life and he tossed his dirty clothes at the women and expected them to wait on him hand and foot: so no matter how eloquent an advocate he had in Janet, after many a warning they turfed him out, without ceremony, just a list of his crimes left for him on the dining-room table; and on the pavement beside him landed Chips, toothless, addicted, stinking—a real hard case.

  Expelled, they wandered away; and then it was the downhill run: people’s couches, then floors, then, when Chips got so foul, so brain-damaged that no one would have them, it was squats, tram shelters, parks, once a disused chookpen, and the odd flophouse that Alby could sneak Chips into when the nights sank towards freezing. Alby stuck with him right to the end, trying to be a reason for him; but within nine months Chips had dropped his bundle. He
folded the tent. And when he died, somehow Alby couldn’t seem to get over it. In a blur that lasted years he drifted; he dragged himself up and down the eastern seaboard, scrounging and scavenging, busking, in and out of no-hoping blues bands, losing his hair and the occasional tooth, always lugging his big guitar, until one night, up north, a bunch of bible-bashers including his own brother, who were doling out food in a doorway at three a.m., collared him and gave him a solid boot right up the arse.

  In his exhaustion, and to please poor old sadsack Ray, he pretended for a while to go along with it, toning himself down, twanging their hymns, and they thought they had him straightened out about booze and sex and talking dirty—not that a woman had looked at him without disgust for as long as he could remember; but the day they took him to the beach he was still secretly stubborn, still clamped around the last sour pod of resistance. Even while they were leading him out through ankle-deep water and into the shallows, all he could think of was his trousers, his only good pair, the money he had paid for them.

  He saw the first wave coming and dug in his heels. He leaned back against the pinching fingers, but they gripped his biceps and pressed him forward and down. His mouth clamped shut, two sharp streams shot up his nostrils, and his knees bent and drove into the sand. The wave boiled him alive, the cream of ocean rioted in his skull, but the hands did not loosen: they doubled and trebled, they gripped tight. Back drew the wave, sucking sand from round his knees and freeing his head: he opened his mouth and gobbled for air. A man was shouting, women were singing shrilly, a banjo chunked its iron chords. The hands raised him up, stood him on his feet and let go. Staggering in the drag of the undertow, his sinuses burning with an icy fizz, he dashed the hair off his face and opened his eyes. He saw in one explosion the sparkling world, the striped sails beating, the bottomless blue of the sky. Something was dissolving his face. Scalding tears gushed out of his eyes and ran in sheets down his cheeks, softening his mouth and melting its hard muscle until unbearably it burst open and his own voice set up a hoarse babble of sound which he had never heard or made before but which must mean something, for when he turned, jabbering and dripping, to face the curved line of people up to their thighs in foam, they heard his cacophony and threw up their arms and struck their palms together to show him that at last, at last he had done something properly: at last, after all this time, he had got the whole thing right.

  Even now, though, years after he had been saved, the house still visited him in dreams; and while its layout would metamorphose in a multitude of ways, revealing here a bright attic he had somehow never noticed, there a splendid prospect of rivers and pastures out a window which had previously given on to a brick wall, it was always the same house: he knew it every time, and entered it with joy. Every other set-up he lived in, no matter how correct and courteous, how Christian, felt timid by comparison, apprehensive, without adventure. What was the quality he longed for? Hilarity. A full-frontal spontaneity. A fearless trust that whatever cropped up might be made holy: singing wildly without words. It’s the drugs you miss, he told himself, always alert to his own bullshit; it’s the sex, the women and girls strolling around half-naked. It’s a hippy fantasy of radiant idleness. But the house lived on in him, an oasis of deep and complex blossoming, all the while his spirit, as they called it, was being cleaned and straightened and dried out to uniform beige. The house hung on, and he boasted to his brother about it and persuaded him to go on ahead as a kind of buffer: for in his heart he believed against all odds that he could go back, knowing what he knew now: he took the punt and believed that the warmth and the music of it, if only it was still there, embodied what he was starved for, something to do not with religion and spirit, but with soul.

  And now look at it. Look at the state of this room.

  The white table under the window, where they used to eat, still collected the light; but the couch with the tartan rug, down at the far end of the long room, had sagged and grown shabby, and the walls were stained with red dribbles. A huge crack ran across the ceiling, right through the beautiful moulded rose, as if the foundations had shifted, and in the corner where the canary-yellow pianola used to stand there was only a mean little CD player and two lethal speakers.

  He propped in the doorway, open-mouthed. All the colour had leaked away, the brightness. The truth of it was gone.

  Serves you right, you stupid bastard. What did you expect. But it hurt him. His legs trembled with shock.

  Steady on. He had been on the road all night: his eyes were crossing, the engine was still churning in his ears. He was probably hallucinating. Take it easy. Wash, eat, and look again.

  Unbuttoning his jacket with clumsy fingers, he dragged himself across the room and headed for the stairs.

  Under the doona, Janet heard slow steps come round the top of the staircase and trail away along the upper corridor. She cursed. Maxine’s endless, dreaming showers were famous for emptying the tank of hot water, not to mention clogging the plughole if she shampooed her unspeakable hair. Janet allowed her five minutes. Ten. Twelve. The water was still gushing and tapping in the pipes. She tossed away her magazine and dropped her feet off the edge of the mattress.

  And smelt bacon.

  Saliva rushed into her mouth. She smelt coffee. She smelt toasting bread. This could not be. It could not be. Ray was cooking. Ray was rattling the pots and pans. He was down in the kitchen making breakfast.

  She set off for the bathroom at a fast clip, whisking off her nightdress and dropping it as she went. Steam was billowing out under the door like dry ice at a bad gig. She drummed her knuckles against the panel and barged in.

  The smell was wrong. The top layer was her own shampoo, her expensive skin soap, as usual—but behind the fogged-up glass screen was a larger, darker, lankier shape than Maxine’s; and the deeper reek in the room was the smell of a man.

  Janet turned to flee, but the dark form froze, with its elbows curved high round its head like a dancer’s, and spoke.

  ‘That you, Raymond? Who’s there?’

  ‘Alby,’ said Janet. ‘Alby. Is that you.’

  He stood rigid under the thundering cascade, wigged and shawled in perfumed foam. He should cover himself. He should cover, or turn—but Janet had never had any shame, and she had none now. Without a stitch on she stepped up to the side of the bath and folded back the screen. Drops pattered on to her up-turned face. They stared at each other. They stared, and they saw. Alby dropped one hand to his genitals as if to shield them, but she stood there carelessly, her arms loose at her sides, and with a curious gentle smile she skimmed her eyes as soft as fingers up and down his filleted carcase; in a minute he would have to open the cold tap on to himself, although her body showed so sorrowfully what time can do to a thin woman: the boxy hips, the knotted knees, the little breasts hanging unevenly on the framework of the ribs.

  ‘Janet,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘What happened to the piano?’

  She brought her eyes to bear on his face, and kept them there. ‘Remember Philip?’ she said. ‘It was his. He took it.’

  ‘Where is everyone?’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to eat. Where are the kids?’

  There was a long pause. The water was hot, but he was shivering.

  ‘Alby,’ she said. ‘It’s ten years.’

  ‘I got a fright,’ he said, placing his free hand over his heart. ‘Everything’s the same—but changed.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you to remember anything at all.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Alby. He turned his front away, and pushed his face into the stream of water. ‘Pass us a towel, old girl. I don’t have to do this any more.’

  She laughed quietly. ‘Me either. You can use the striped one. Call me when you’ve finished.’

  The hall, as she ran along it and stooped mid-stride for the dropped nightgown, was rich with the smell
of bacon frying.

  Her room was stuffy. She zipped up the blind, threw open the lower sash, and, turning back to order the mess of bed and table, caught in the tail of her eye a large dense scarlet mass down there in the street: a truck parked under the bare tree, its flank blasted with cold morning sun.

  She heard the taps snap off, and the air and water go chugging back along the ancient pipes.

  I don’t have to do this any more. Me either. Put like that, it was quite a simple proposition. It had dignity. It was a relief. Janet laughed. Waiting to be called, she glanced up at the bride where it hung, hooked by its cape to the corner of Maxine’s invisible pastel. Janet raised her hand to take it down. Her reflection too reached up towards itself, out of the blurred lake of black. The glass gave back to her, tilted, her whole length, foreshortened, naked, with one arm stretched upwards in a mysterious gesture—drowning? volunteering? Her fingers touched the grass of the doll’s wild legs. She paused—and behind her left shoulder, just outside the range of the reflecting glass, the column of darkness shimmered into position.

  She felt it manifest, towering, svelte, featureless. If she took one step to the right it would follow: she would be able to see it in the glass: but if she looked, if she acknowledged it and turned to face it, her defences would be breached: without a word being spoken her swaddling of scepticism would burst open, and some appalling and total submission would be demanded of her, a surrender of self with no hope of back-tracking. In terror, she closed her eyes.

  The column hovered nearer, almost singeing the skin of her shoulder. She dropped her arm and clung to the table edge with both hands. Tears of bliss pressed behind her eyelids and she clenched, she clenched them back; she held them in. She heard herself panting, roughly, like a wrestler, like a labouring woman: she stitched her lips shut with her front teeth and hung on. How long did she struggle? She felt the vast patience of the thing, its utter imperviousness to argument; but she fought it, with a mad pugnacious hubris she pitted herself; and at last a tremor rippled through the pillar, a slow, long shudder; and then it thinned, faded, and was gone.