Poe's Children (59 page)

God weeps no tears for dead whores, Capri.

I made myself look.

Down.

There, there.

I couldn’t help it: my eyes misted as I stared at the beaded vertebrae that shone like a strand of luminescent pearls, pearl upon shimmering pearl. Concentric layers of secrets. God in heaven, she was so beautiful, even now.

She whispered softly, “It’s best not to linger,”

Then as I kissed her hand I could see

And now I
did
see. Trembling, I slipped my hand beneath the delicate spinal column.

She wore a plain golden ring on her finger

’Twas goodbye on the Isle of Capri

There. On the satin lining.

A plain golden ring, sucked off the hand of a dead man and trapped for forty years in the throat of the woman who loved him.

A plain golden ring.

It was the last verse of the song. The verse I couldn’t remember.

Until now.

And now I remembered everything. The pain and horror in Mother’s eyes, the pleading, the grasping fingers, the choking sound she made as she tried to speak….

It wasn’t horror in her eyes, but fear. Fear that even her own daughter would misunderstand the deaths that had come too soon. And now I knew what my mother had been trying to tell me that copper autumn afternoon so long ago. One word:

“Capri,” she had said.
Capri….

But it wasn’t my
name
she whispered with those lush red lips. Not a beg for forgiveness, a plea for understanding. It was the name of the song: “The Isle of Capri.”

And then, standing there at my mother’s casket, I knew what it was she’d tried to tell me but couldn’t. Couldn’t—because a wedding ring engraved with the name of a murderess had lodged in her windpipe like a piece of candy and stolen her voice.

Forever Cassandra.

And that plain golden ring had never been found.

The police, and the courts, and the press, and the people, had all believed Mrs. Caiola. And why shouldn’t they? She was beautiful, an ice goddess sitting there in the witness stand in her black Christian Dior and veiled hat, wringing her gloved hands, with just the appropriate touch of widow’s wetness in her eyes.

Not the same set of gloves she’d had on when she shot first her husband, then his mistress, before spinning smartly on her high heels and
click-click-clicking
out of the kitchen. Always the perfect lady, that particular pair of gloves had been neatly disposed of. One, two, three. As easy as that. Ring-a-ding-ding.

Except the mistress hadn’t died quite so quickly as the husband. The mistress had time for one last kiss, a kiss that would name her murderess.

Forty years later.

Dabbing her eyes, careful not to smudge her mascara, Cassandra explained to the court that she and Joe had reconciled, that he’d gone to Lana Lake’s to tell her once and for all he wanted nothing more to do with her, that he was suing for custody of his daughter on the grounds that Lana was an unfit mother, and that Cassandra, awaiting his return, had heard the gunshots all the way across the garden. It was Cassandra who had called the police.

Everyone pitied the little girl sitting there in her black woolen uniform beside Sister Constance-Evangeline of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Capri Lake, the daughter of the whore, with her downcast eyes and burning cheeks and hands locked on her lap like a heart without a key.

And what a kind and generous woman was Cassandra Caiola to welcome into her own home, with open arms, the illegitimate child of her husband’s mistress.

It was how Joe would have wanted it, Mrs. Caiola explained. She had never been able to have children of her own. He would have wanted her to raise the child as her own flesh and blood to be a respectable and decent young lady. And everyone’s heads nodded in sympathetic agreement, and Cassandra smiled to herself, and in that moment, the course of my life changed forever.

Forever Cassandra.

A hand clad in an ice-white glove that smelled of Chanel No. 5 closed around a wrist braceleted with ruby tears. I was led numbly down the courtroom steps through a mill of people and reporters and photographers with flashbulbs. There was a controlled yet agonizing wrench of my arm socket as I ducked my head into the shining white Cadillac, and Cassandra Caiola drove us silently back to a house without dancing, without song, without love.

It took time to learn the music of silence.

It took my life.

But little by little, Cassandra Caiola became Mother to me. For I have always lived in the house without music.

God weeps no tears for dead whores, Capri. God weeps no tears.

Little by little, with Sister Constance-Evangeline’s compassionate guidance.

God weeps no tears, Capri. God weeps no tears.

And eventually I, too, wept no more. And Cassandra Caiola at last heard me whisper the word she wanted so desperately to hear—

one sweet word of love

And truly, there was no sweeter revenge for Cassandra Caiola than to hear the word
whore
on the lips of Lana Lake’s daughter. She made me say it again and again, a record without end, until she laughed and laughed out loud and tears sprang to her eyes, because this was music to her ears like no other music could be. It was the only music I ever heard again.

At least, it seemed that way for a very long time. But in the end it was the song that drew me back. The song that gave me my name and flowed in my veins, the song that drew me back to what I had lost. Back to the house of dancing, and singing, and life.

Back to the Isle of Capri.

Thunder shattered a sky as dark as wet satin. The moon was a weeping eye.

“Is that you?”

Not once had I heard her say my name.
Capri.
She couldn’t stand to say it.

“Where have you been all this time? Close the door, it’s cold.”

I said nothing as I shook the rain from my hair. My hair was a light strawberry blond that had never darkened to the luxurious auburn of my mother’s. I hadn’t inherited her beautiful hair, or her talent for dance, or her brazen love of exhibition.

Her fiery temper was, in me, a slow-burning ember.

Red flame melting white ice.

Cassandra Caiola sat stiffly in the straight-backed chair that looked down on Lana Lake’s bungalow. Living her life through the windowpane as she had for forty years.

Rain sluiced through the leaves of the towering eucalyptus trees. Decades of dead leaves and blue gum mulched into the ground with mounds of peeling bark. The house seemed like it was slowly sinking. Dissolving into nothing.

Some nights, the moonlight danced on the minty leaves like silver drops of water, and the breeze swished through them like Daddy’s brushes, and we’d listen to them, Cassandra and I, in our chairs by the window, in the house without music.

And on other nights, like tonight, the wind rattled through the trees and a litter of hard-shelled fruit clattered on the tiled roof like an iron drum, and we’d listen,
ba da da,
in the house without music.

Cassandra’s head nodded in memory. Her eyes were almost closed. The sky was clear now, and I stared at her profile in bas-relief, white as marble in the moonlight.

I thought of the angel and its features of stone, and I wondered what was in Cassandra’s heart. But for stone angels and dead whores there are no regrets, no remorse, no dreams to torment deep into the night. There is no laughter, no music, no dancing. No dream of an Isle of Capri…

In this light, Cassandra’s eyes had no color of their own. They were the color of eucalyptus leaves reflected in Lana’s bedroom window.

“What’s that on your lips?” she demanded.

Crushed red beetles, the juice of wild pomegranates, a whore’s lipstick, Napoli spaghetti sauce, something else, something red—

In my mind I heard a shot ring out as if it were yesterday. I saw Lana run screaming into the kitchen, a half-tied apron on her hips, slipping on blood and chili peppers in a grotesque dance, a balance of life. I saw the spreading crimson stain on the floor as she cradled Daddy’s head in her lap.

I saw her lips, full and red.

I saw the rich, wet kiss of one who had loved deeply.

I had never kissed nor been kissed.

Now I kissed the woman who had been my mother for forty years.

I kissed her with Lana Lake’s fierce burning passion.

I bit her lip until it bled, and then I shoved the plain golden ring hard into her mouth, snaking it around her tongue.

She started to choke. Her hands flew up like twin birds, raking me with the fingers of a murderess, but I didn’t feel a thing. The daughters of dead whores never do.

I kissed her again until she stopped breathing, and her last breath amounted to less than the mouthful of air in my ruined paper heart.

Afterward I stood at the window and stared at my reflection.

I stood there for a long time thinking of nothing, nothing at all.

Then I threw the window open wide and breathed in the exotic, peppery perfume of the dripping eucalyptus. I listened to the music of the rain tap-tapping on the tiled roof of the bungalow like a set of coo-coo crazy drum sticks. The wet wind blew branches against the pane and threw dark shadows against the Chinese screen like the sinuous curves of a dragon, and the shadows danced with the moon.

Black Dust

Graham Joyce

H
alf hidden behind a thicket of hawthorn and holly bushes was a second cave. It astonished him to see it there. As a kid Andy had scrambled over every boulder, probed every fissure and crevice, and swung from the exposed roots of every tree clinging to the face of Corley Rocks. Yet here was a new cave, quite unlike the one in which he’d been holed up for the afternoon. After feeling the mild tremor, Andy needed to get home. But something in this new cave called to him.

Unlike the first cave, a mere split in the rock face which had always been there, this one was dome-shaped, with an arched chamber as an entrance. He drew closer. Squeezing between the hawthorn and prickly holly to get into the cave, it became obvious to him that this second cave went back much deeper. He could see well enough for the first few yards, but after that the cave shadows set hard in a resinous black diamond.

Still it called.

He wanted to move deeper in, but his throat dried and his breathing came short. He rolled his foot in the blackness. A pebble crunched under his shoe.

There was a tiny light, no bigger than a glowworm, swinging at the rear of the cave. It flickered and went out. Then it appeared again. The light shimmered, still swinging slightly from left to right. He heard footsteps shuffling towards him, and then there appeared in the gloom a second light, smaller than the first, and nearer the cave floor. The lights were approaching. Then there was a sound like the low growl of an animal, and it made him think of that dog.

That dog, slavering and throwing itself at the fence, chewing the thick wire mesh. A brute of an Alsatian, but the drooling jaws and yellow teeth had Andy convinced it was part wolf. Andy always kept one eye peeled for the dog while the other, of course, was alert for Bryn’s father.

Bryn appeared in his socks. “It’s all right,” he said. “He’s not here.”

Andy crossed the swarthy yard and removed his shoes at the threshold of the kitchen. Shoes off at the door because of the coal dust. Everyone. The house and yard once belonged to a coal merchant who’d gone bust, and the cinder path leading to Andy’s house was black. The yard was black. The gate was black. The coal dust had even pointed up the cement between the black-red bricks. They had to take off their shoes so as not to trail black dust into the house. Bryn had developed a lazy habit of not bothering to put on his shoes merely to cross the yard, even though his father, with a bunched fist, had once made his ear bleed for this offense.

“Twenty minutes before he gets back.”

The boys went through the kitchen. Bryn’s mother, Jean, looked up from her ironing. “Still down there then, your dad.”

“Yes,” said Andy.

“Twenty-four hours now.”

“Yes.”

“They got oxygen. They got food to them. They’ll get him out.” She pressed her iron into a collar and a jet of steam wheezed into the air.

The two boys went upstairs to Bryn’s room, from where they got the rope, the water bottle, and the tiny brass compass. They didn’t want to hang around. Important not to be there when Ike got back off shift. Sometimes when playing table football or lounging in Bryn’s bedroom, the door would open quietly and Bryn’s mother would whisper, “He’s back. Make yourself scarce.” And with that they always would.

Once when Andy awaited Bryn in the kitchen, Ike had come in from work and imposed himself in the doorway, glowering. Andy had felt compelled to look away. Without saying a word to Bryn’s mum, the big man slumped in an armchair before the fire, and how the chair-springs had groaned. Ike’s skin glowed pink with the scrubbing from a recent shower at the pit, but his body still leaked the odor of coal. A smell like a sulphurous gas, steaming off the man as he stared moodily into the fire. He snorted at the coal dust irritating his sinuses, hawked and spat into the fire, and this movement released a fresh wave of hostile gas.

Andy had on that occasion feared that even breathing might cause offense. Finally Bryn appeared, beckoning him away. Outside the door they had both vented huge sighs.

Of course they didn’t need the compass to find their way to Corley Rocks. A matter of a mile and a half from the mining estate, Corley Rocks was the highest natural point in the old county of Warwickshire. The ploughed earth works of an Iron Age encampment mouldered on the flat field above an outcrop of red sandstone rock, and from there you could take in the green belt of land all round. To the south stood the two giant wheels of the pit-head winding gear, and beyond that the spires and smoking chimneys of Coventry.

The dog started up again.

“Shut it,” Bryn growled as they left the house. “Shut it.” It was exactly the way Andy had heard Bryn’s old man speak to the dog, half-song, half-warning, and it was always effective in subduing the animal. Except when Andy or anyone else tried, in which case the dog simply became more inflamed, hurling itself with stupid energy against the mesh fence.

“Do you think that dog is a killer?” Andy said as they walked up the black cinder path away from the house.

“Probably.” Bryn hooped the rope across one shoulder. “You carry the water bottle.”

The rope was usually for display only. They’d never done any real climbing at Corley Rocks. Everywhere was accessible by scrambling over the smooth, rounded edges of the sandstone. There was only one place where a rope might be helpful, at the sheer face of the rock above the cave, and Bryn was keen to try it. And it had to be admitted: looped across the torso from left collarbone to right hip, the rope looked a treat.

Andy was envious, because carrying the water bottle was shit. But the rope was Bryn’s after all.

They had to pass the entrance to the mine, with its weighbridges and security gates. “Don’t think about it,” Bryn said. “They’ve got air. And food. They’ll get him out.”

It was a hot afternoon in August, and by the time they reached the rocks they were sweating and had drunk all of the water. The cave was merely a fissure, a crack opened in the rock face, but it could be reached by the means of small cavities scooped out of the soft stone, ancient handholds and toe grips. They climbed up and retreated to the back of the cave, welcoming the shade.

Their schoolteacher had said that traces of prehistoric habitation had been found at the cave: flints, stone tools, bones. Someone had even unearthed a huge sabretooth, currently being examined by experts at Coventry museum. People had always lived there, it was said, and before that the rocks themselves had been pushed up by fault lines in the vast coal reservoirs under the ground: the very coal that Andy’s and Bryn’s fathers now mined on a daily basis.

Bryn lifted the rope from his shoulders, causing his T-shirt to ride up. Andy saw below Bryn’s ribcage the flowering of a huge blue and yellow bruise. It looked like one of the purple-leaf cabbages his own dad grew in the garden. He said nothing. He knew. Bryn knew he knew. And it was none of his business; that’s what Andy’s mother had said to his father.

“Not your business, Stan, to go getting tangled up in,” Mina warned her husband. “Not your business at all.”

Andy’s father had wanted to go down to Bryn’s house to have words. Bryn had turned up one afternoon while Andy’s dad dribbled water from the garden hose on his prize-winning leeks. For the old giggle Andy’s dad put his finger over the hose and jet-sprayed the two boys. The giggling stopped when the lads stripped off their wet T-shirts.

“Hell, you’ve been in the wars, haven’t you?” Stan said, turning back to his leeks. Then he did a double take, looked harder, and laid down the hose. Taking in the multiple bruises on the lad’s body he stepped closer. “Let’s have a look at you, son.”

Bryn danced away. “Nothing. Fell off a ladder.”

“Come here, I said. Stand still. Christ, son! Hell’s bells!” He brushed the wounds gently with his callused fingertips. Then he said, very quietly, “Must have been a good few times you fell off that ladder.”

“Yeh,” Bryn sniffed.

Andy’s mother, who’d seen all of this, came out with a clean T-shirt apiece for the lads. Stan was already halfway down the path. She chased after him. “You’re not going down there. Not your business!”

Stan had himself once clouted Andy with a closed fist, but only once, and some years ago. Not a single day had passed when he hadn’t regretted it. “I’ll be back sharpish.”

“You’re not going down there!”

Stan pulled up short. “I said I’ll be back sharp,” he whispered in a way that settled the argument. Andy’s mum returned to the back garden, where the boys had their heads down and the hose was still dribbling water onto the leek-bed.

With the dog going berserk behind the mesh fence Stan had knocked on the door and had taken a step back. It was some moments before Ike Thompson appeared blinking in the doorway, puff-eyed, looking like he’d just been disturbed from a nap. His eyes were lined with coal dust like a woman’s mascara. He sniffed. “Stan,” he said.

“A word in the yard, Ike?” Stan turned his back and walked into the open expanse of the disused coal merchant’s yard.

Ike shuffled in the doorway, slipped on his boots without lacing them, and followed Stan across the yard.

The men knew each other well enough. They’d mined the same districts, notably the 42s and the 56s; they nodded to each other whenever their paths crossed; they’d even once been part of the same Mine Rescue Team; and they knew that their boys were good pals. They just didn’t like each other.

The two miners stood in the cinder-black yard at a distance of about five paces. The dog was barking mad, flinging itself at the fence. “Your Bryn’s up at our house just now.”

Ike was a big man. His grizzled face bore the blue signature scars of coal mining, like someone had scribbled on his face with a ballpoint pen. He stood a head taller than Stan. But Stan was trunk-necked with a barrel of a chest and muscle packed like coiled wire. He had his own mining scar, a blue and white star right in the middle of his forehead, like a bullet wound.

Ike lifted a hand to his mouth, squeezing his bottom lip between a coal-ingrained thumb and a coal-ingrained forefinger. “Yup.”

“Says he fell off of a ladder.”

Ike let his hand drop now he knew what this was about. He glanced to the side, and then back at Stan. “Yup.”

The Alsatian barked, and slavered, and seemed to try to chew its way through the mesh fence. “He won’t be falling off that ladder again, now will he Ike?”

Ike turned to the dog, and in a low, throaty voice, almost a hiss, said, “Shut iiiiiiiiiitttttttttt.” The dog lowered its head and crept back into its kennel. “That it?” said Ike.

“That’s about it.”

“Right. You can go now.”

“Happen I will go. But if that lad should fall off another ladder, then I’ll come down here again. And we’ll have another talk. More serious.”

“Oh aye?”

“Too right, we will. Too right.”

The two men stood off each other for another minute. Then Stan said, “I’ll be seeing you, Ike.”

Stan retraced his steps along the cinder path. He felt Ike’s gaze drilling into him at every step.

“Stop thinking about it,” Bryn said. “They’ll get him out. My old man will get him out.”

Andy knew they would get his dad out all right. He just wished everyone would stop telling him. He hadn’t been allowed to go up to the pit-head, where the wives and grown-up sons and daughters and the rescue teams and the camera crews all congregated, waiting. It had been twenty-four hours since a roof had collapsed half a mile underground, trapping seven miners, one of whom was Stan. The rescue teams had made an early breakthrough, piping air and passing food through to the trapped men, but the rescue efforts had hit a snag when a second roof-fall had threatened. Ike was on one of the rescue teams.

“They’re right under here,” Bryn said. “Right under this spot.”

“How do you know that?”

“My old man told me. He said the seam runs north and under these rocks.”

Andy thought about his own dad half a mile directly below him, waiting.

“You’re not crying are you?” Bryn said. “Not
crying.
”

“Dust in my eye. Dust.” Andy’s fingers found a flake of red stone. He flung it from the back of the cave into the crack of light, and it dropped, skittering down the slope. “Anyway you wouldn’t care if anything happened to your old man.”

Andy wished he hadn’t said that. Bryn started whipping the end of his rope. “He might be a shit but at least he…”

“At least he what?”

“Nah. Come on. Let’s climb the Edge.”

The boys scrambled out of the cave and walked up to an outcrop of red stone known as the Witch’s Face. Bryn hoisted himself over the chin and nose of the Face and wanted to use the rope to get Andy up. Andy objected on grounds of pointlessness. From there they proceeded to the Edge, a cliff overhang directly above the cave.

At least he what?
Andy thought as they clambered up the steep sandstone slopes, between ragged clumps of hawthorn and holly. One day Stan had brought home a second-hand guitar. Andy had pestered Stan for this guitar, but when it arrived he soon found out that the strings cut his fingers to shreds. He’d taken the guitar down to Bryn’s house, and he was exhibiting it to Bryn when Ike appeared unexpectedly, standing in the kitchen doorway, sniffing back coal dust. His eyes fell on the guitar.

Ike walked across the kitchen without removing his boots, gently lifting the guitar from the lad. “What you got here then, lovely boy? Let’s have a look, then.”

Ike sat, effeminately crossed his legs, positioned the guitar across his thigh, and gently thumbed the strings. He played a chord or two and the dog in the yard howled. Ike laughed. “Hear that?” He strummed a few more chords and then picked out a tune. “Christ, these strings stand too high off the frets. You’ll never play this, lovely boy. Nice tone, but it’s a piece of rubbish.”

“My dad got it for me,” Andy said, meaning to sound defensive.

Ike laid the guitar down. “Come on lads, get in the car.”

“Where you going?” Jean had protested.