Cosmo Cosmolino (22 page)

A carefree tram went streaming by, lit and rocking like a boat. Maxine heard the chatter of its wheels and was filled with elation. It was travelling northwards on its smooth and endless rails. How lovely, to take off and speed away! For a moment she envied Ray his poverty. He was light, now: he was empty. He had nothing, while she was all dragged down and hung about with possessions: the furniture, the tools, the bench, the bed, the cradle—

The cradle. Perhaps after all it would be wiser to postpone the moment of truth, at least till she had prepared a soothing explanation. She turned the corner into the side street and approached the house, as always, from the rear. It looked bulky. It was a blank against a cobalt sky faintly smudged with stars. She raised her eyes to its high windows. They were dark. If the others had gone out, she could slip into Ray's room and dig out the cradle from its hiding place.

She stepped quietly across the verandah and tiptoed through the rooms to the stairs. Up she went, treading with care on the outer edges of the boards. All the doors were closed. Each bedroom was a private fortress of sleep. For long moments she stood outside Ray's door. Nothing stirred. The house was so silent that she might have heard him breathing, but for the
bumping roar of her own blood.

At seven-ten in the morning there was a commotion in the street. Maxine woke in her thin-walled shed, with her nostrils full of the stink of exhaust. A truck out there was chugging. It did not pass, but paused, and began to manoeuvre itself backwards, as if trying to park under the trees on the other side of the fence. Out of habit and training, Maxine raised her head. She paid attention. There was meaning for her in the engine's labouring note. This was not just any old truck. Someone was coming.

She crawled out of the blankets and into her clothes. The driver was inexperienced: he was making heavy weather of it. Fumes were being pumped through the slits in the shed wall. She breathed as lightly as she could, and ran out across the yard to the gate. Dragging it back over the concrete, she emerged on to the footpath just as the motor choked and died, and the truck's red cabin burst open to eject a booted, jacketed man in flight. Head forward, arms out, he dropped to the bluestone cobbles with a grunt, jarring his knees, and recovered himself in a footballer's graceful forward stumble.

Maxine drew herself up, hands on hips, and inspected him with narrowed eyes.

He was tall, dried out, masterly. His face was thin and weathered. His eyes crackled with nerve, his fingers were long sinews, and his palms were seamed with the
scars of action. Did she know him? The ghost of something flickered in his face, where his eyes embedded themselves in the skull and his mouth cut into his cheeks.

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.