Cosmo Cosmolino (11 page)

‘On earth?'

‘Yes—on this particular level.'

‘I don't quite get it,' said Janet, hanging on to the kettle handle.

‘I know it sounds strange, at first,' said Maxine. She repositioned her feet on the floor, preparing to expound. ‘See—angelic beings aren't necessarily aware of their status.'

‘Hang on,' said Janet. ‘Let me get this straight. You're talking about Ray? The bloke upstairs?'

‘Yes,' said Maxine. ‘Who else?'

‘And you're telling me there are angels who don't
know
they're angels? And that Ray's one of these?'

‘Well, he's made it pretty clear to me,' said Maxine, ‘that he's been sent.'

‘Tsk. How could he
not
know, if he's been sent?'

Maxine smiled. ‘Who knows what they are?' she said. ‘Do you?'

Janet made an impatient movement. ‘You've lost me, I'm afraid.'

‘Look—don't get me wrong,' said Maxine. ‘I'm talking about a being pretty low down in the hierarchy. Once you get to a higher echelon—to archangels, the ones that everybody's heard of—well, they're much more likely to know exactly what they are and what their mission is. I'm not important enough to be noticed by one of those. I'd be satisfied with a novice. I could even be a learning experience for him—a beginner could easily be led astray. By human passions. There are things here that are very hard to resist. But I don't imagine Ray will stay long. He'll do the job—as soon as he realises what it is—and then he'll be on his way. The universe is large. I can't expect an actual
relationship
.'

Janet set the kettle on the stove. Sliding the lid into place, she saw the water inside it trembling in concentric rings, and not for the first time she doubted whether any force existed which could warm this chilled, heavy
mass, let alone bring it to the boil and transform it into steam. If I can't believe even
that
,
she thought, in spite of its having been proved to me daily all my life, how the hell am I supposed to live in the same house as this—this—

‘Tell me, Maxine,' she said, straightening up from the lit stove and flicking the dead match at the bin, ‘is there anything at all you
don't
believe in?'

The brightness went out of Maxine's face. She thrust each hand into the opposite cuff, dropped her bushy head, and presented herself again at once, flushed but still beaming.

‘There's sure to be,' she said. ‘I suppose there must be, mustn't there!'

In the next room something gasped and shuffled. They looked up. Coming at chest height through the thickening doorway was a bird, a tiny blue and yellow thing with dotted gills, flat-breasted, smug, helmeted and beaked, its claws neatly clamped to the extended and quivering forefinger of Ray.

‘Help,' he croaked. ‘Help!
Emergency
.
Get this thing off me. Quick, someone—get it
off
me.'

His teeth were showing right back into his cheeks and his eyes were sunken, as if soot had been rubbed into their sockets. He gave a shrill laugh.

The kettle began to tick and shimmer.

‘I can't,' said Janet. She hid her hands behind her. ‘I'm hopeless with animals.'

Maxine glided forward. Her leathery hands shot out of her sleeves. One forefinger stroked the budgerigar's blue bosom, and the other offered itself as a new perch on to which, while she clicked her tongue and kissed the air, the little creature took two brisk steps, whirring and settling its plumage; then, as she raised it gently to the level of her eyes, it fixed her with an expressionless gaze, opened its tucked-in beak, and peeled off a trill of such relaxed and thrilling inventiveness that they forgot to breathe out.

‘That can't be the same one,' whispered Janet. ‘The one we heard before.'

‘Of course not,' said Maxine. ‘
This
is a
real
bird.'

‘I opened Chips's window,' said Ray, ‘and it flew in. I thought it was going to bash itself against the walls. I've got a thing about birds. I hate them to touch me.'

‘But he's yours now,' said Maxine. ‘He came looking for you, and he found you. You have to take him on.'

‘No way,' said Ray. Fervently he shook his head. He was trying to smile, but his forehead shone with sweat. ‘No way known.'

‘Yes!' said Maxine. She approached Ray with her bird hand out in front of her. ‘Come on,' she said. ‘How can he hurt you? You're a hundred times his size.'

‘Its feet are scaly,' said Ray, backing away. ‘I felt them. Look at those holes in its beak. They can fly in your face and peck you. And don't they have lice or something?'

‘Ray,' said Maxine. ‘Take him.'

‘They make a mess!' he cried. ‘They do their droppings!' His back was against the cupboard.

‘Ray,' said Maxine. ‘
Ray
.'

Her hair fanned out round her head. She was so close that he could make out each fierce lock where it sprang coiled from her scalp; but closer to him still, enthroned on her finger, sat the bird, unblinking now and virtuous, so subtly caparisoned in ripples of grey and cream, riding so smooth and high, that he might have been an emperor erect upon his chariot.

Through the curved kettle spout slid the first tuft of steam, stirring the throat of the whistle. It groaned, choked, then cleared itself and gave voice to a flawless shriek. The bird exploded into the air, releasing a jet of shit. It cannoned off the ceiling and plummeted. Maxine was ready. She darted across the room and swooped to seize it where it struggled, half-stunned, to get airborne; but Janet leaned past her and threw open the back door, and before Maxine could clap her hands around it, the bird gathered itself, flashed along the lino, and shot across the doormat out into the dusky garden.

Janet twisted the knob of the stove and the kettle died.

Maxine, sprawled half across the doorstep, got to her feet and slowly closed the back door. The sleeve of her check flannel shirt was streaked with birdshit and
her tracksuit knees were stained. Pointlessly brushing, she turned to face the others, expecting to see them as they usually appeared to her when they were together: two lost souls, two rectangles jarring each other with the jagged light fields they radiated; but in the breathless calm that followed the shrieking they showed new to her, fresher, more vivid. Ray was solid dark red, ah yes, death, a bird outside a room and a body, something he could not speak of which had terribly shocked and frightened him, poor angel; and Janet (if one could ignore a blip the colour of verdigris, a rent in her aura low down at four o'clock, a rupture neatly stitched but impossible to hide) would have been almost presentable for once, except that behind her left shoulder reared a column, more intense than the dimness of the evening kitchen, seven feet tall and shadowy as smoke:
a lord of terrible aspect
.

These matters Maxine had learnt not to speak of. Now she dismissed them, firmly but with respect, and as they faded she arranged her features into what she hoped was a suitable smile, and moved forward into the room.

‘Well!' she said, lifting her chin with her clasped hands. ‘What sort of tea will we have? Ordinary or camomile? There isn't any milk.'

So now three people lived at the house, though nobody could have called it a household: why, they were still
barely acquainted, keeping as they did to their own quarters where they brooded over their private histories, their disciplines, their fantasies and intimations about one another. They never sat down to share a meal. Each of them ate separately, guiltily, in haste, shovelling it down in a kitchen corner or bowed over a newspaper at the white table, bogging in without grace or pleasure, as if the need for nourishment in company were something to be ashamed of, a weakness.

But the twig cradle, left by Maxine on the corner of the kitchen bench, on the mantelpiece or the edge of the bath, could sweeten the atmosphere of any room in which it found itself. Eyes were drawn to it and rested there, talk faltered and thoughts turned dreamy, for it was always in motion, responding with insect-like frissons to air currents that were imperceptible to humans. A single word uttered, a note sung at the other end of the house would be enough to set it off. It was so small: what kind of being could it contain? Only an imagined one, a baby conceived and born on a puff of wind; and having read in one of her cosmic pamphlets that anciently the Amazons, when they had fallen out with their neighbouring tribe of impregnators, would open their loins to the wind in the hope that the seeds it carried might inseminate them, Maxine paid close attention to the weather.

It was the season of winds. Air hissed all day and all night long, tremendous, sharp and dry. It travelled in
off the northern grasslands, the stony rises, the mighty basalt plains, barrelling furiously down freeways, rolling empty cans in the streets, stripping the foreign trees, pressing back dark foliage in which the globes of lemons shone.

Though the shed had its back to the source of the wind, its timbers let the breath through in filaments and slivers, and Maxine lived in oceans of air: by night she floated on streams of it, a foot above her bed; by day, anchored only by the metal tools she worked with, she bobbed on its currents. The rhythm of her saw, the deliberate placement of her hammer blows inserted wedges into the balance of her housemates' sleep. If at an inconvenient hour she ran out of suitable timber she simply pulled apart something previous. Nothing but the cradle was precious to her: it was real art, and though one day it would have to leave her, she would be proud to let it go.

Ray kept well away from the shed. He hated the loony gestures of the furniture, its bossiness, the way Maxine would shape a table to enclose the sitter at it, trapping him like a baby in a high chair or a schoolboy at his inkwell. He was afraid of her driven, absent-minded serenity, and worst, of the way she seemed to have him targeted for something, mooning over him whenever they met in the kitchen, in the yard, or outside the bathroom, asking him batty questions about his travels and his past lives. Dreamy, fanciful,
tolerant, she existed beyond the reach of the order which Ray believed, more and more urgently, he had been sent here to impart to them, his mission: for to him the women were crackers, both of them, a pair of wretched lost souls, worse than orphans.

‘Haven't you got any family?' he said one night at the white table, where Janet sat working out her tax and Maxine sharpened her whittling knife, while he sombrely and self-consciously tried to mend the seam of his tobacco-coloured trousers.

‘Mine gave up on me long ago,' said Janet.

‘All gone,' said Maxine, ‘somewhere.' Out of her hair sprouted the ends of coloured binding thread which, using her head as a third hand, she would thrust into its mass while she worked. ‘But I think I was married, once,' she said, with a high, silly laugh. ‘In America.'

‘What do you mean, you
think
you were,' said Ray.

‘I've forgotten his name,' said Maxine. She pushed aside her stone and seized a hunk of wood she had by her. ‘I suppose I should track him down and get a divorce, or something. One of these days.' The blade entered the grain and peeled back a fine curlicue. ‘But where on earth can he be? And who?' Again she cackled, privately.

Disapproval froze Ray's face into a block. ‘I don't see,' he said, ‘how you could have forgotten something like that.'

‘You'd be surprised what women can forget,' said Janet. ‘Have
you
ever been married?'

‘No,' said Ray. ‘But I'm familiar with the pain.'

They looked at him with interest, then away to their tasks.

‘And,' said Maxine, carving with skill, dropping peelings on to the spread-out newspaper, ‘have you ever seen an angel?'

Ray stared. Maxine glanced up at him with a peculiar, thin-eyed expression of concentration. She looks
cunning
,
thought Ray. This was not the way he had planned to begin on the important subjects. He shrugged, up-staged and discontented, declining to answer.

‘I've seen the devil,' said Janet casually. She closed the accounts book and put the lid back on her pen.

Maxine snickered. Her hands gripped and fondled the butt of wood with sympathy. She touched like a blind person, lacking all sense of decency and with the same inward, voluptuous grin.

‘Where,' said Ray.

‘In Brunswick,' said Janet. ‘He ran out of a shop as I was walking up Sydney Road. He looked straight at me.'

‘How did you know it was the devil?' murmured Maxine, turning the lump of wood against the blade with a slow, deep pressure.

‘By his face. It was tight and smooth, and he had a kind of brutal expression. Brutal and vain.'

‘I can't stand vain men,' said Maxine. ‘Specially the ones with those bushy moustaches. Men with moustaches never give way to you on pedestrian crossings, have you noticed?'

‘When I say “the devil”,' said Janet, ‘of course I don't really mean “
The Devil
”.
I mean he looked evil. Know what I mean? He made my hackles rise. He was probably some sort of crim. Full of bad vibes.'

‘Do you want to know, by the way, Janet,' said Maxine, ‘what I see in your aura?' She carved on with slow diligence. ‘I see that in a previous life you were tortured. If you don't mind my saying so.'

‘Tortured?'

‘Yes. For your religious beliefs.'

Janet snorted with her mouth shut, but Ray saw her eyes brighten: she paid full attention.

‘And I tested it, too,' said Maxine, carving, carving. ‘Remember in the kitchen last week you asked me what kind of wood I made the cradle out of? And I said “
Tortured
willow”? In a very clear voice? Keeping my eye right on you? Well—you froze, over there at the sink.'