Cosmo Cosmolino (18 page)

‘Yes,' he said, whispering so as not to put her to flight. ‘Come here. Come to me.'

He heard breathing near him, careful, slow, the
little catch in it of her uncertainty; then a voluminous upward rush, and a soft collapse of cloth.

In one sweep he had the bag unzipped and his legs free of it. He gathered his limbs together, preparing to stand, and threw up his arms to her in the helpless dark, but all he found, where he expected her head to be, was a nimbus, springy, crackling, dry. Before his fingers could probe its centre, two hands, hardened by the desert where she had wandered, seized his shoulders and flattened them gently on to the padded bedding. He let his knees go and lay down, with the backs of his hands against the floor. She must be on her haunches now, beside him: her hair stroked him, her breath came and went on his chest as if she could see in the dark and were studying him, making up her mind where to begin.

Elated and aroused, made daring by the intensity of his blindness, he opened his mouth to cry out her name, but a palm harder than his own and smelling of pepper and ash covered it, and at the same instant a moist muscle flitted in spirals down his belly, butted against the root of him, and began in a warm exhalation to flick at him, making him bounce and spring. The air popped with sparks which he felt and heard but could not see; then a leg slid across his hips, and she lowered herself on to him as if he were a saddle, guiding him with her fingers into a swelling cleft where he was swallowed and bathed in a silky grip.

The gag was raised from his mouth and he groaned out loud.

Once, twice, she rocked, three times, five; drew back off him, excruciating, hovering over him, holding only the tip of him and threatening to vaporise; for an eternity she hung there, musing, brooding on the chaos with no sound; then she plunged on him again and like a crude boy he sobbed and let go: he burst into her and felt the convulsion go rippling up the quilted ridges he was held in. He smelt the change in her odour: a new metallic sharpness that soured his teeth like lemon without even touching his lips, and freshened every crevice of his sleeper's mouth.

Speechless, sightless with the desire to bless, he curved his arms round her, he enfolded her; and for the first time she allowed it. She sighed; she murmured; she laid her head with its tickling aura into the cradle of his shoulder. She rested on him. She let him feel the faithful lope of her heartbeat.

Then with a brief, firm pressure on his chest, she broke his grip, raised herself clean off him, and was gone. Air flowed over his belly where she had lain. He shivered, and opened his eyes.

It was a long time since he had let himself go this far without waking at the peak of it; but his body was loose and heavy with a sickly, still-fizzing sweetness, and he was too contented to collect himself for shame. Letting his eyelids droop again, he fumbled
for the spread bag and wrapped himself in it, meeting no damp patch, then turned on his side, away from the window where morning when it came would fade the black hooked blanket to a rectangle of grey, and bent his knees, rubbing his feet together. If he lay still, if he warmed his hands between his thighs, he could slip back into it:
a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep
.
And he did; and dreamt that he wandered into a city cut by generous avenues, stitched by lanes, and studded with towers and bells and courtyards above whose fountains as they played hung blurred, passionate stars.

Maxine came to herself in the upstairs hall outside the bathroom. The gentle trickling of the cistern oriented her, and she padded away from the lavatory and down a perfectly ordinary staircase, through the living room and the kitchen, and across the blank, wet garden to her shed.

She slipped between the bedclothes and curled up, holding herself in her arms. Her bladder was empty. Its flatness rested pleasantly in the bowl of her pelvis, a comfortable absence of anxiety. There must be a nightie in the bed somewhere, but it could wait. She lay in the dark, broad waking.

In a while, when the blankets had loosened again with her warmth, she felt around on the fruitbox beside her for the matches, and carefully lit the hurricane lamp. Up out of its clean crease slid the bud of flame.
She adjusted it, lowered the glass hall, and drew both arms back under the clothes.

In jerks, it seemed, then with a smoother radiance, the lamplight grew and spread. It washed in stages across the crowded domain, and watching it from her nest, she saw how it hesitated at obstacles: the tiny cradle's tremulous scaffolding, the dense protest of a cupboard door, the flourish of a chairback where a damp cloth hung: how it nosed this way and that, located a passage, and rushed on. Soon the standing furniture, like a flock grazing, was bathed in a steady, mild and shadow-making element. Maxine bunched up a pillow under her neck, and lay surveying her handiwork.

She tilted her head back and looked up for her poor bride.

The shelf was bare.

She had to dive and fumble for the thing. It had fallen head-first down the crack between the fruit-box and the pillow, and there it stuck, undignified, with its blue skirt hitched up around its cruppers and the tips of its grass-bursts gesturing inanely in the dusty gold air.

Maxine laughed. ‘You look silly,' she said. ‘You
are
silly.'

Sitting up, she seized the bride by its straw crossbeam and pulled it up from its hiding place.

The sudden movement brought forth a bubble of hot fluid from between Maxine's thighs. She let the bride slip to the floor, burrowed under the covers and
pushed one finger into herself. She whipped it out, and seeing that it was not blood and would not stain, she wiped the colourless dew on to the folds of the sheet, and lay back down. Her whole body sank into a lagoon of wellbeing. Any minute now she would be too hot, and would have to kick off the top blanket; but her thighs and belly, humming with warmth, struck a perfect temperature and sustained it. Every muscle glowed. She was content.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall. How long this long night was! Perhaps it would go on forever. Maxine followed with her eyes, until their lids relaxed and drooped, the folding filament of smoke sent up towards the roof, but never quite reaching it, by the cleanburning, well-trimmed lamp.

At dawn, a bird began to sing in the saturated garden, a humble riff of notes, repeated in descending triplets.

Janet opened her eyes. She saw the wrong wall, the wrong picture, the wrong pattern of cracks in the plaster. It took her several moments of thick pondering to work out where she was, and to identify the room's queer smell as that of cold ashes. She sat up; she was still wearing all her clothes. The night's mortifications rushed back at her, and she threw off the rug and stepped in her socks to the window.

The rain must have stopped hours ago: the house-sides opposite were sparkling, and the tips of their high chimneys were flushed with a secret, tentative pink. I have become, she thought with sudden clarity, a know-all, a bully and a prig. I am a really unbearable person. Ashamed and sore, fed up with sorriness and shame, she leaned her forehead against the glass.

Her breath coated it with a pearly cloud which came and went, spread and shrank, according to the rhythm of her lungs. She saw that the outline of this haze was new every time, a completely fresh and original shape, and that the vapour itself was composed of minuscule droplets, each of which prismed with colour on the flawed glass as it blossomed and died.

How fleeting everything is, she thought. How soon gone.

With this thought, so hackneyed to her, so unoriginal, came a wave of strange relief, almost a kind of comfort. She moved away from the glass. It cleared; and through it she saw a small bird land on a twig. It flipped, perched, whirred, only a few inches in front of her face. Its movements were not fluid, but were rather a series of different postures which it struck one after another, held briefly, then broke to shift, shift, shift again. Janet's mouth dropped open. She contemplated. The bird was fat, with a pale brown belly and darker wings patterned, like its head, with a row of evenly spaced white dots, as perfect as an aboriginal painting;
and on its back, just above its stumpy tail feathers, she saw a flash of red.

Janet's heart was oddly light, floating high in the cavity of her chest. She turned away from the window and stooped over the couch to plump up its cushions and rearrange the woollen cover; and as she stooped, the dark column swelled behind her and slightly to the left, not touching her, and not visible unless she should frankly turn and face it. This she dared not do; but she straightened her back and bowed her head, in respect, while the column insisted behind her left shoulder, calm as a soldier, tenacious, incorporeal, and endlessly patient.

Was something burning? Maxine rolled over. Yes, but only the lamp, still faithfully simmering on the box by the bed; and already the cactus-shaped flame was superseded by a milky, rose-coloured light that leaked into the shed through the unpolished panes and round the doors which stood partly open. The rain had stopped, and a bird was calling in the garden: a dove, quietly practising its tune. Maxine wound down the wick and blew out the lamp.

The bride, poor scrap, lay in its inky skirt and hood on the ground beside the bed where last night it had slid. The air above it was dead: its energy was used up. Not a buzz, not even a crackle. I will take it apart, thought Maxine; right this minute. I gave it a chance, and it failed. I will pull it to bits and burn it.

She tunnelled into her clothes, pulled on her boots, and picked up the bride by one leg. But halfway through the stand of furniture she noticed a piece of cloth hanging from the tip of a chairback. It was striped, domestic, out of its element. It was a teatowel. In
here
.

She stood still for a moment, thinking, then folded the teatowel into a neat square. She wedged the bride into a cleft of the chairback, and turned away to rummage among some sheets of paper on her workbench, one of which she drew out and rolled into a cylinder. Her face was vaguely smiling, but as she rolled she was already scanning the shed. Somehow she must clear a conduit through which a thousand dollars' worth of energy might flow to her. She let her gaze roam smoothly over her assorted creations. It settled, finally, on the twig cradle. The little thing stood on the very end of the workbench, trembling like a well-bred dog, ready, avid to be made use of, dying to be of service.

No sun reached Ray's window, but through the walls the bird called, and he woke on his side, utterly relaxed, as if while he slept all the knots and tangles in him had been untied. He crept out, and crouched in the greyness to flatten out his sleeping bag. The crux of his body, where hair brushed his thighs and his clump of genitals loosely hung, gave off an intimate, salty whiff. He paused. It was a scent he had forgotten, natural
but at the same time disagreeable, like fish, or seaweed. Puzzled, he sat back on his heels, but where he expected only cold to be, soft cloth caressed his buttocks. He leapt up, and turned on the light.

A threadbare, cream-coloured garment lay on the floor beside his foam-rubber strip. It was patterned with small flowers, and the neck of it was trimmed with tattered and rather grubby lace.

He looked at it.

No.

He poked out one foot and stirred its folds.

No. Not possible. Absolutely not.

He seized his towel off the door-handle and covered himself, then stooped and picked up the garment with fastidious fingers. A woody, peppery perfume rose from it.

No
.
His heart gave one slow, colossal thump, and the shock reverberated along every vessel, right out to the tips of his nails and hair.

He closed his eyes and leaned the point of one shoulder against the cold plaster; but he hardly needed support. The disbelief that was suspended in him threatened to raise him off the floor. He felt so bamboozled, so ridiculous, that it was almost exhilarating. If he had opened his mouth, mad laughter would have come rushing out.

If this were true—if this were possible—then what would—what must—
No
.
Stop now. Follow that
thought where it led, and everything he'd gained and earned, all his plans, would shatter. Swallow it, brick it into a bunker. Never speak of, never think of it again.

He dropped the nightdress and kicked it into a corner. He shook his hands in the air as if to dash them free of something.

But he felt so
well
.

He opened the door and stuck his head out into the hall. The house was silent. The rain had stopped. From two streets away he heard the croon of traffic. He looked right along the upper storey of the house, past the locked room and the bathroom and Janet's bedroom near the stairs, past the two anonymous rooms where once or twice he had peered in at the sad, unsorted debris of earlier households, and as far as the ornate door of the very front room with the balcony, the one that had no lock but was always closed. The mood of the hall was different: the door of the front room was ajar.

Back behind the house, in the garden, the bird worked on its riff again. Nothing else stirred. Ray crept out and along the hallway. Janet's door was open: he braked, but the blind was down, the room was grey-shadowed, and the bed was flat and undisturbed. He tiptoed past the other two rooms and came to a stop outside the front one, between whose door and jamb stood a narrow pillar of yellow. No movement. From inside, a drip of water plopped, then another: plip. He leaned forward against the heavy timber, and pushed.

The room was enormous. Except for a couple of brimming saucepans stationed on the floorboards under leaks, it was completely empty: but its two french windows, though closed, were glossy with morning, for the room faced due east. The intensity of light grew as he entered: it grew and swelled like a vast orchestral chord, and wearing his towel like a loin-cloth he paced forward, grimacing, into the radiance of an exuberant sunrise. An observer might even have thought he was dancing. He wrenched open the right-hand window and burst out on to the balcony.