Cosmo Cosmolino (14 page)

Maxine melted with sympathy and respect. ‘How do you mean?' she murmured.

‘It's like this,' said Ray wearily. He pushed the paper away. ‘On my first day they gave me a crowbar and told me to chip the cement off this floor. I started doing it the way they showed me, but it was
slow
.
Sometimes I'd get the corner of the crowbar under it and be able to sort of lift it, but usually I could only get about an inch up at a time. My hands got all torn—see? Anyway, after lunch the foreman came to check up on me, so I said, “Look—do you mind if I only do about this much every day? Because it's kind of laborious.” And he yelled at me. He said “Laborious? You're a bloody labourer, aren't you? It's
meant
to be laborious!” '

‘Laborious,' whispered Maxine. ‘Mmmmm. I bet they're really glad they hired
you
.'

She did not get it. Ray sat still, slumped in his fatigue. But Maxine was gazing at him, tilting her bushy head to one side, and with a pleasant surprise he noticed that she was still waiting, that he was actually being listened to, or would be, should he care to speak. Her face had become rounder and younger while he told his tale, and her lips were gently closed, as if not needing to restrain a single interruption. He felt his own face go soft with shyness.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘I went on chipping away, all by
myself in there, and after a week a different foreman came to me and said, “You can stop doing that now. They've decided to knock the whole building down.” '

Maxine neither laughed nor spoke. She merely went on looking at him, with moist and shining eyes.

‘And now,' he trailed off, ‘I don't know whether they're pulling it down or not.'

She listened.

‘At lunchtime,' he said, struggling on, ‘I sit by myself and read my book.'

Still she listened.

‘It's cold out there,' he said. ‘The wind comes tearing across the paddocks.'

He felt the suction of her silence.

‘The other blokes sit in a shed,' he said, ‘scrapping and gambling and throwing food around. They don't take much notice of me.'

Her eyes were giving out a brown fog of devotion: her face was swarming. He felt giddy. He was conking out; he was losing shape; he was sinking into the swamp of her attention. Maxine drew a long, romantic sigh, and suddenly Ray was stabbed with complete desperation. I'll have to grow a moustache, he thought. I'll have to start drinking beer. I'm lonely. My loneliness is unbearable.

‘Are all jobs like this?' he burst out in a cracking voice. ‘I don't know how long I can stand it. Is this what jobs are
like
?'

Brilliantly, Maxine centred herself. She reached out and took his hand, cross-wise, as if they had just been introduced. ‘Tell me, Ray,' she said. ‘What's your sign?'

He jumped, and went rigid, but she had a firm grip on him, palm against palm, a man's grip. ‘My what?' he said.

‘You know,' she said. ‘Your sun sign. What the magazines call your star.'

‘Oh no,' he said with a groan. ‘No, not that stuff. I don't—'

He tried to withdraw the meat of his hand and leave her with only the fingertips, but she hung on.

‘Why not?' she said, glowing at him from under her corona of hair.

‘That's astrology,' he said. ‘That's satanism. The devil comes through that kind of thing.'

Maxine laughed. ‘Oh, Ray,' she said, massaging his hand with both of hers. ‘Ray—you may not believe in it. You may doubt its power. But you can't make it not exist.'

He jerked his hand away, and she let it go without a struggle. He clenched it into a fist in the air, then forced it to relax, and laid it flat on the table. All the tiny hairs of his forearm were standing on end.

‘It's all right, Ray,' said Maxine, leaning back in her chair. ‘You don't have to pretend, with me. I know why you're here. There's no hurry. At least now we've
shaken hands. I think that goes quite far, don't you? Psychically? A handshake?'

Even with his secret palm pressed against wood he could remember the hands that had kneaded him. They were tough, seamed and warm. They would not take no for an answer.

Hunger struck the house-dwellers at different times and with different desires. If there was more than one of them eating at the same time, it was purely by chance. The women did not care. They were content with little where food was concerned, and could dine, standing up at the fridge door, on a raw carrot and a lump of cheese every night for months and never notice the sameliness. But Ray, out of a sober longing for what he had only been told about, wanted things to be done more formally. At nightfall, while Maxine swept up the day's sawdust in her shed and Janet sat in front of the television smartly taking notes for her next article, he would be drawn to the bleak kitchen like a spirit haunting a place where it had once been nourished, and would loiter there in the gathering dark, dissatisfied and morose.

One evening he drifted in and came upon Janet rummaging through the cupboards.

‘We should be congratulated,' she said. ‘We have achieved a totally snack-free kitchen.'

‘We could take it in turns to go to the market,' said
Ray, ‘instead of living like this—bringing things home at random.'

‘A
roster
,'
said Janet. ‘How passé. You can't be serious.'

‘
I
could go,' he said.

‘When men do the market,' said Janet suavely, ‘there is blood on the inner walls of the fridge.'

Ray opened it and stood staring in at the old vegetables that drooped through the wire shelves or lay sadly in mounds below.

‘But I'm always hungry,' he said. ‘Look at this wastage. Couldn't we make soup? Isn't there something called stock?'

‘There is such a thing, yes,' said Janet, keying open a tin of sardines and beginning to squash them on to a stale biscuit.

‘I read in the paper,' said Ray, ‘about these pots that stand on the back burner and never get turned off. People chuck all the scraps in there and it keeps on cooking for generations.'

‘That's in France,' said Janet. She leaned back against the bench and took a large bite. ‘You won't be here long enough. Anyway for that you need a servant. A mother, or a wife.'

‘I don't see why,' said Ray.

‘Because, my dear,' said Janet, muffled by fish, ‘someone has to
be
there. To keep an eye on it.'

‘What about Maxine?' said Ray. ‘Isn't she out in
that shed most of the day?'

‘I wouldn't dream of asking her,' said Janet. ‘A classic stockpot is a
major domestic commitment
.
I'm amazed
-
you can't see that.'

Ray dug in. ‘Alby's got a stockpot,' he said, sliding his eyes her way.

‘
Alby
?'
said Janet. She stopped chewing and her mouth dropped open. ‘Is Alby
married
?'

‘No,' said Ray. He squatted down in front of the fridge and with two hands parted the hopeless vegetables. ‘But he's got a stockpot.'

‘Well. Now I'm really struck dumb,' said Janet. She sounded almost good-humoured. ‘So Alby's got a stockpot, as well as life everlasting.'

Ray pulled out a plastic jar with a red cap and held it up to her. ‘Do you mind if I eat this?' he said. ‘This yogurt?'

‘Go ahead,' said Janet. ‘I haven't had the nerve to open it. It's been there quite a while.'

He thumbed off the lid. The contents were green and strandy, pullulating with mould. On an impulse he thrust it up under her nose. She reared back.

‘Look, Janet,' he said, on his haunches at her feet. ‘Here it is. Eternal life. The un-dead.'

Janet had forgotten how it felt to let go: the seizure of the skin across the nose, the dissolve of the abdomen, the warm collapse of an inner barricade. They stared at each other, once their first paroxysms had subsided,
with tears in their eyes, shocked and loose-mouthed in the sudden intimacy of laughter.

Ray struggled to his feet. ‘That wasn't exactly the truth,' he said, running a cuff across his face. ‘About Alby having a stockpot. I was piling it on. For argument's sake.'

Janet started again. She had to turn away, in a kind of modesty; she balanced her forearm along the bench and bowed over it while he waited, grinning, snapping the sides of the yogurt pot in and out with his fingertips.

Presently Janet pulled herself together and straightened her spine into its customary correct posture.

‘Surely,' she said with enfeebled lips, ‘surely you didn't think I
believed
you.'

‘Well he was
going
to get one,' said Ray. ‘Him and some people he was staying with, last time I saw him. Fellow-Christians. They were. Or at least they said they were.'

Janet began to laugh again, then stopped. In the glow from the half-open fridge door he saw that the grey film had lifted off her. Her skin was flushed, and her eyes glistened under a brow which had lost its shadowy stiffness and was broadening, as he watched, into harmony with a private, tender mouth.

He dropped the plastic jar into the bin and kicked the fridge door to with his socked foot. It shut, snapping off the only light in the room, and the two of them stood side by side against the bench in the dark,
breathing in and out.

* * *

Janet had once read in an account of the Irish potato famine that it takes only two generations for a people to lose its practical skills. In the life of one person, she thought, this process telescopes: it can happen in a season. When she was young she taught herself to cook from books. Although she never cared for it she found it easy enough, even in the big households when her turn came round, to prepare and serve something worth eating, and what the collective children turned up their noses at she got into them by dint of will or trickery. But now, since the night her beetroot soup hit the wall, she had not so much as chopped up an onion. In delicatessens she stood helpless, lacking a single idea to bless herself with, and when approached she would buy in haste the first thing her eye fell on, and go home carrying nothing but a jar of pickled capsicums or a packet of custard powder. She was no more civilised than Maxine or Ray. She too scrounged and scavenged, but in her own house; she ate on her feet and only to stay alive. Pleasure had left her life. What pleasure? There was a sort of gratification in the quick hit of a pasty in a bag, a coffee, a bunch of grapes. What she had lost was the pleasure of serving.

In the bowels of the corner cupboard she found
an old-fashioned oval oven-proof dish, still with a lid, but chipped, stained and encrusted along its edges with nameless scum. She pulled it out and stared at it, tickled by a strange and distant sensation, an almost childish pleasure in its chunky shape and unusual depth. It radiated meaning, like an object from a forgotten dream. She set it on the bench, and with painful slowness, biting on the pen which upstairs in her room flew so readily across the pages, she began to make a list.

But it was only when she reached the market and stood indecisively between the counters in the meat section that she remembered what she had used to cook in the dish. Years ago Chips and Alby, forced one day by communal pressure to take the smallest household child along when they went to busk at the market, had let the little girl wander off alone among the delicatessen shops while they strummed and yodelled under the broad verandahs. They brought her home white-faced and dumb, her plaits standing on end, and from that day on she refused to let rabbit in any form whatsoever pass her lips. The older children picked up on this and turned it into an ideological position, one which Janet felt an irritable urge to foil, and many a battle had been fought over the marinated, filleted, minced and poached contents of the oval dish, fought and lost, for not even the greatest chef in the world can hoodwink the instincts of a child.

Today, though, in the bright cleanliness of the
refurbished shop, the rabbits lay behind glass on glossy enamel trays, stretched out skinned and headless in positions of full flight. The rabbit seller in a crisp pale-blue overall approached with his eyebrows up, and when Janet pointed, he hooked two of the little carcases with a finger under each ribcage and held them out to her, arranged with a merchant's flourish along his inner forearms. ‘Yes,' said Janet. Scrupulously he weighed and wrapped them, and she watched him, so soothed by the intent angle of his head, the seriousness of his attentions, that when she noticed on the wall behind his shoulder a hand-lettered sign that read
rabbit's and hare's
, the apostrophes loosened in her a gush of foolish love for every creature in sight, alive or dead. She could hardly catch her breath for the desire to laugh out loud or break into song.

The rabbit man offering the white parcel grinned at her as if he knew that bliss; but how could he, for she scarcely knew it herself—it must be low blood sugar, some sort of chemical imbalance—and blushing, she swallowed it, holding out the money and feigning sudden interest in a half-open door at the back of the shop, an entry to a darker annexe where something all along had been swaying and swinging in a mechanical rhythm. She stood on her toes and leaned sideways, to see.

It was an old woman, standing between two heaps of corpses and up to her elbows in blood.

Working at speed and with a bitter efficiency, she
seized each furry body from the stack on her right and skinned it in a single savage movement, turning the pelt inside out as fast as a dishwasher strips off a rubber glove, then slung the flayed cadaver on to the pile at her left. She sensed the shock of Janet's focus and raised her speechless face to the light. Without slackening her pace she cast Janet a look that was less a greeting than a challenge, a dark flash from under her heavy, blood-flecked brow.