Spotted Lily (11 page)

Melodrama has always been my weakness when I am pushed to extremes. I was gesticulating now.

At which point, he tumbled from his levitation onto the uneven piles of books. They skewed and the whole piled-up mass gave, like a mountain of shale shards. I moved too late to protect myself, but my petticoats softened the blow. Brett, on the other hand continued slipping and books kept slewing, till even a Merino ram as film director would have yelled, 'Cut!'

Incredibly Brett kept going, crashing on his back as he tried to stand. On his third try, he levitated enough to cross his legs.

I was so pissed off at him, I could have choked myself laughing. But I hadn't made a sound.

He reached for a heavy volume and tenderly realigned its spine. 'Why did you come?' His voice was terrifyingly calm, and he didn't look at me. Instead, he reached for another book.

Words, unfaithful as ever, deserted me. But my options were limited, seeing as how I was jammed into my chair. He expected an answer.

'Do you have anything to read?'

And I hastened to add, 'Anything new?'

He made me wait for an answer.

Finally—looking at the book in his hand, not at me—he demanded, 'Will you read it?'

I was so relieved. 'Of course! Just please, something contemporary. I must be up-to-date, you know. I'm losing touch in here.'

If he kept up-to-date, his bestseller pile would have, at the top, the best lay-on-the-beach escapism of the year.

'Do you keep up to date?' I asked. Maybe that pile near him, was new only
relatively
. After all, in this collection,
Gone With the Wind
would be new.

With the Devil's provenance and his tendency to misunderstand, he needed pulling towards the present, and to be spoken to in the clearest and simplest of terms.

'
Really
up to date?' I added, to make things clear.

He smiled.

'You'll have the latest,' he assured me.

What a relief. He could be so difficult.

'Now, get...'

Ouch! My sedan chair and I were transmogrified through his door and whirled through the air to my room. He misjudged the height of the doorway, raising a bump on my brow the size of a petit four.

~

As I was bathing my forehead with lavender water, I heard a
whoosh
, and a thud. My reading, delivered.

My head pounded, but not too much that I wasn't pretty bloody excited. You can only look at fashion plates for a world long dead ... you can only look, I tell you from experience, for so long before you want to scream with boredom. I delayed the moment of discovery by mulling over, firstly, what would go with it—my reading, that is.

Historical Romance
: Lavender pastilles.

Ethnics
: Mr Hazumi's sister's Goosy Feels. That's what he called them. Sticky little pastries. The way they shatter against my pallet and melt! Dreamy!

Political Thriller
: Urk. A hot, overflowing dustbin. I  had to trust that Brett had
some
sensitivity.

A Steamy Tangle of Love, Betrayal, and High Finance
: Serge's special Rocky Road with lots of violent-red cherries and hunks of homemade marshmallow caught in a cement mix of white and milk chocolate, stony with chilli-roast peanuts ...

I was naked and dripping by the time I got to genre of
The Unabashedly Commercial General Novel
: Deliciously bitchy core of truth surrounded by layers of chewy speculation. There could only be one match for that: a carton of commercial, trashy, deliciously messy Violet Crumble bars.

The long shower had delayed in the most salivatory way, the Moment.

Now, swathed in a towelling robe thick as a sheepskin, I could wait no more.

Brett had outdone himself.

Racked neatly in tall, tight ranks, was every one of the latest newspapers, I think, in the world, including what looked like printouts from the internet, dammit.

'Brett!' I screamed. 'I can only read English!'

Woosh! woosh!

That gave me some room to move.

What a snide trick. Nasty little mind. 'And stick your dinner up your bum!'

I would have to forgo dinner tonight, but I reconnoitred and there were a few things I had to keep the wolf from the door.

I read in bed.

First, I had the cheesecake from my fridge. Then the stuff in my fruit bowl—rambutans and lychees. The Jordan almonds were next. At the hour when garbos were feeding trash compactors (not that I could hear the outside world), I finished off the last of a box of Pithevers Digestive Biscuits, dry.

Soon afterwards, I went to the toilet and retched, but I couldn't make myself throw up. It never happened when I
wanted
to.

At 9 am, I was still reading and had been chewing my underlip for so long that it was the shape and size of a raspberry. I was sucking on this raspberry, reading an editorial in the
Times of India
, when Brett knocked. Would I like breakfast in bed? He had the tray in his hands. No need for me to get up.

I opened the door to him and took the tray from his hands.

'We can eat together,' I said. 'Do you want to wait till I wash, or can you stand me as I am?'

He laughed. A good sign. 'As you are.'

We sat together in the lounge, me in a rumpled and grubby sheer nightie, and he, fully dressed as usual. He never looked
morning
, only varying degrees of sick and well.

Finally, even the dregs in my cup were dry. Brett had finished long ago.

'Horrible all the stuff going on,' I said. 'This is
precisely
why I
hate
reading newspapers. Always depressing shit.'

'Did you know the stuff going on?' he asked, as if I should have known.

Another circuitous conversation. 'Some stuff.'

But that didn't end it. He was waiting for more.

'It never changes.'

He sat up very straight. 'Oh, yes,' he said. 'It does!'

An ingénue! 'Who are you? Gigi in Paris?' I was too exasperated to be polite. 'People have always fought. They've always killed each other.'

The room didn't help me put my point. Gay sprays of flowers on a cashmere throw were worlds away from the stuff in the papers.

'Your world...' I felt I had to remind him. 'Have you forgotten it?'

He groaned.

'Do I need to remind you?' I needled him, because it was necessary in the circumstances.

He stood up and did one of his party tricks.

'You can't escape that easily!' I yelled. 'I know you can hear me!'

When he didn't reappear, I got in a final word. 'And don't forget! You got your job because of us!'

How dare he make me wallow in the shit people do to each other!

~

This wasn't a time to knock—and I didn't approach that door slow, either. It
banged
open, and
poof! poof! poof!
I grabbed but wasn't fast enough to get
anything
. Then there was only me, the monkish mattress, and Brett's trunk and bag.
And
—a scrap of paper. I sidled over and picked it up in the act of scratching my ankle.  The paper curled in my palm and
yeow!

Scorched.

—17—

Why didn't I go out? So many bookstores, so much free time, even with my appointments and eating and taking baths and sleeping. Or I could have saved my feet and just rung room service. 'The top twenty, yes. The bookstore will know. Just say that.'

I didn't want to go out. He had access to the world of books, literally. Why should I go out, and why should I have to explain anything to anyone? And besides, this was a partnership. He should do his bit.

Once Dad walked all the way home from town rather than ask someone who should have offered him a lift, to give him one. I never understood that mad streak of his, till now.

From the lounge, I punched the house phone with my unscorched hand, and told Justin and Brett to cancel my appointments.

They were most sympathetic that I was indisposed, and quite alarmed when I said no servicing for me. Mr Hartshorn would have his luncheon and dinner, but I was on a water diet, and thank you, no. No need for more water, and I would make do with yesterday's flowers, towels, the lot. Please, I don't want to be disturbed.

They understood
completely
, and sympathy poured out till I felt gluey. From their tone, this was part of the joy of serving us—the artistic temperament, you know. I wondered if they had stolen anything of ours, used tissues and the like, for selling later.

My hand hurt and my head pounded, but that was physical. The bump on my brow was Frankensteinic. What was wrong was more painful than that.

Food didn't appeal. Water, even, was too rich. I went back to my room to read.

When I opened the door, I thought the cleaners
had
been in, but it was soon clear that they hadn't.

The scattered reading material of the night before had disappeared, neatly replaced by the same assortment again—dated a year earlier.

Brett was communicating.

All day I read, and I only just touched the surface. A couple of times I had a drink from the tap. Sometime in the afternoon I took a quick shower.

No one knocked, though I heard Brett's meals being served.

I fell asleep sometime in the night, but I don't know when. When I woke, a pigeon was preening on my windowsill. The world outdoors was busy with itself.

I had slept through the transfer of yesterday's reading and the delivery of today's. These papers were dated five years earlier, which meant that instead of slick internet printouts, there were yellowed sheets, graphically ugly as only grass-roots political and Arts-Council-funded graphic productions can be. Some of today's delivery was in the English language, but not much. Instead, in Brett's handwriting, there were underlined passages, annotated and translated for my convenience, though his handwriting was anything but an easy read.

There was no time to eat, and sleep was a nuisance I tried to fend off.

The next morning, the ink was fresh. He jumped back and forth in time.

~

One day the delivery was an elaborate bronze trunk the size of a wombat, bearing inside on a bed of blood-stain-red leather, an accordion-pleated continuous sheet of skins sewn with sinew, bent back and forth to become an uncut book, bound between boards of gold encrusted with jewels the size of jelly frogs—a book.  It was carefully scribed. In the middle of some words pieces had been cut out of the skin and replaced. Not a letter nor a punctuant could I recognize.

Beside the ancient book lay Brett's translation—a thick wad of paper pages clamped at the spine by a glue that smelt like Brett on a good day, the smell of a hot frying pan.

It was, I suppose, what we would call an epic—of some civilization lost in time (or maybe not. Brett's translation could have been off). Anyway, motivations? Things just happened. Wars just happened. People were just killed or left to starve and die, often for the sake of adventure. One person declared 'ccdor' to another. Brett noted: 'Words fail me. The closest definition of ccdor in your modern language is "filiage".' Luckily, I got the gist of ccdor without Brett's help. Anyway, the person to whom ccdor was given was most often, a right bastard. Poles were stuck up too many arses to count, and repeatedly, guests were given 'filth' to eat, or declared that they were treated to filth, and then they rampaged. The descriptions of rampage filled most of the book.

Between trying to understand why people did whatever, and finding my way through the bramble of Brett's handwriting, I never got to the 'now', if, indeed, the book ever got to the present, whenever that was.

As a factual account, come on! As a novel, it didn't work for me. Not that I had been able to put it down ...

~

I woke with my fingers poking painfully into my eye sockets, the ancient skin 'book' somehow on the floor. Its stance was the same as a fumbled print-out from the bank. I bent to gather it up, but the thing shrunk away, pulled itself together, and settled on its bed. The trunk shut with a bang and aetherized in a huff.

The translation must have been in the trunk.

Momentarily, I felt annoyed not to have reached the end, but only momentarily. One didn't have to read more to know: in the context of a novel, the story stunk and was a bitch to comprehend. However, Brett's removal of it before I reached the conclusion put the story in yet another light—news with
no
end.

Outside, another pallid dawn that I could look at from my window, but not hear. I fell asleep and dreamt of fur-garbed garbos roaming the city, feeding trash compactors wet bucketfuls of cleaved skulls.

~

Full daylight, I woke to the smell of mildew. A pile, delivered right beside my bed. Such a pretty cover, so I dived in, where I went shopping in 'Royal Shops to Shop in'.

Hand-wrought, original in design, and the work of native needlewomen in Kentucky, these useful and finely made Suzanne bags serve and serve and serve. For her, that lucky maid among the fan-waving palmettos, who would her tapestry do in all that Southern sun, there is the great hand-quilted calico bag ... Lined with tan Gros de Londres, these print bags may also be used by those who, strangely enough, adore mending.

Who likes mending? The timelessness of the human condition.

Princess Nina Toumanoff soothes your shopping-bewrinkled brain ... And to prove to all you daughters of vanity that there is a Royal Road to Elegance—even though world conquerors and emperors have to trudge the whole way round to learning—the Grand Duchess Marie at Bergdorf Goodman's is there to talk over with you those personal harryings of chic that assail even the chicest. You know how heavenly it is to have someone of taste talk to you for two or ten minutes, or, unbelievable bliss! for half an hour, all about you. And about nothing but you!

Bliss is true!! Too bad I couldn't give this to Kevin. Prince Kevin!

A treatment under Madam's magic hands is a tremendously exciting experience. Her charm is enormous, her touch expert beyond description and the results—well, look at her! But you must work, work, work, if you would maintain or reclaim youthful contours. Every day, faithfully and intermittently, she makes demands upon a half hour of your time, not a moment less! There can be no loafing in her scheme of things, no going stealthily to bed with neglected face.

Better for Kevin not to know. He would have agreed too painfully for me to tolerate.

Then I got caught in a short story of love and betrayal, and then I got caught in food.

It is evident that the changing conditions of city life are bringing about a new gustatory era for New York. Even now, in some respects, you can dine better in that city, better than you can in Europe—with the reservation, always, that you cannot always have wine with your meals.

Isn't cultural stuff always the same? City always beats country. In my time in Europe, I couldn't afford more than backpackers' spaghetti, but wine with meals? Cheaper than water here. That's the only good thing I found about eating in Europe. And so much for New York. No better than here in Oz. Back in Bunwup, drinking wine was un-Australian. Only one brew was blessed to tickle the oesophagus: piss with a head on it. And why eat when there's drinking to do? Not that there was any place to go out to eat at. But some things never change, and the Anglo world doesn't do civilized alcohol well. Corkage fees in BYOs in Sydney are really outrageous, and I for one, have always refused to take a bottle to a restaurant. Why pay some gel-haired androgyne in a waistcoat to open it and poke it in my face? You're not going to say 'Corky,' for something you bought! But what if it is, and he smells it? I would have liked wine with my meals here at the Restonia, but wine in the echelons attracts sadists. I wasn't going to risk my reputation.

I dropped my eyes.

a very delicate, almost shyly provocative sauce.

The inside of my cheeks broke out in tingles.

But in the very next para, the 'stifled soughing of saxophones' broke in—so blah de dah. Why ever write about music?

Then:

the turban of lobster—
turban d'homard
, so called because it looks like a turban ... a mousse, foam-light and pink and flavorous with the expressed juice of lobster. In the oven it had been baked in the form of a Mohammedan tarboosh, then over it had been poured a delicious sauce of fresh mushrooms, and it had been finished with a sprinkling of splinters of truffle ... The St. Regis's
turban d'homard
is eminently a luncheon dish, but it must be ordered well in advance, since, to obtain the extract for the mouse, the lobster must be forced through cloth in a press, and that takes time.

Oh god! My mouth could have sunk, it was so flooded.

Shoving past dancers,  I reached the raw sexual come-on of  the Egyptian Room where the 'central lotus flower is as crimson as an October moon rising through smoke, while the surrounding ones are golden or mottled to alabaster in dark and passionate hues.' Cute, but it didn't make me wet. When was I last feeling sexy for anyone other than myself? I tried to think but wasn't in the mood for anything but food, food, food. But the author must have been sated, for there was no more lobster or any other mouth-waterer, and dessert was this last paragraph.

To one occasional pilgrim at least, New York's most beautiful night street is Park Avenue ... At the lower end of the Avenue glows the great golden illuminated lantern of the Grand Central tower, a warm hearth at which all the hurrying, chilly world may warm its spiritual hands ... It is all vast, Babylonic. Then, above the lantern, you become aware of a lonely red light high and far away in the darkness, like a hunters' fire on a mountain top, and with a thrill you realise the new age in which you are living. It is the light on the Zeppelin mast on the unfinished Empire State Building ... you dine, under these beetling masses, amid a luxury and show such as Roman patricians never knew ...

He shouldn't have ended like this. I backtracked to the title page—'The Gourmet Trail in New York'. A contemporary theme if there ever was one. Forrest Wilson, author. Never heard of him.
Harper's Bazaar
, February 1931.

Directly underneath this magazine was a stack of news from the same period.

~

What a nasty trick! Did Brett know Forrest Wilson?

I went to sleep and dreamt of a luscious ad in that
Harper's
where the Hawaii Tourist Bureau says: 'Just to eat is an adventure in these tropic isles.' But now, instead of bathing-suited drinkers lounging under the palms, a little girl had crawled in, and the ad was post-modern. Green trees, blue sky, grainy, b/w insert. Actually, where did she come from? I stood under a palm drinking a pina colada, wracking my brain, till it hit me. A poor photo, not enough light—from the NY City Department of Tenements. Some article on housing. Beside her, a man in overalls trundled a cart piled high with fluffy white asbestos. Also a black-and-whiter. This blow-in I remembered. A feature on resources in
Fortune
. Perched on top of the pile of fluff sat a silk-turbaned lobster. I sucked on my drink, wondering where he came from, when he brandished an umbrella and pointed at me. 'I think you might do something better with the time,' he said, 'than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.' A clot of coconut flew up my straw straight into my windpipe, making me cough so hard, I woke, my eyelashes sticky.

The next delivery—musty 1862. The year started with 'DREADFUL COLLIERY ACCIDENT: Loss of Two Hundred and twenty lives'.

They went through the works, and found no living man, but a hetacomb of dead bodies ...

My feet fell asleep, and I didn't notice till my ankles throbbed. I simply couldn't read more, but couldn't stop or do anything else, even eat.

One of the wounded men prayed in the midst of his sufferings, and one of his comrades climbed down from the cage where he had been suspended, and prayed with him till the hour when death released him.

Was this story Brett's communication today? What was he trying to say?
Rage, rage, against the dying of the something or other
rang in my head. Did it ring in his?

'The agony of excitement'—that's what one paper said months later about the public's frenzy for more details of this disaster, fresh daily. I felt their agony.

 On one of the tin flasks was found, scratched in rude characters—probably just at the moment the writer had discovered the full horrors of his situation—"Mercy , O God!"

At which point, though it was not yet noon, I curled into myself for sleep.

~

I lost track of the number of days, but they covered wars, peace, 'acts of God' and man, fashion-oriented days, and days and years when nothing made sense but death and more of it.  Day after day, I read, in an agony of excitement, a feeding with no food other than the stuffing of more and more events, opinions, reactions and after-shocks, down into my bowels.

Then, Brett stopped jumping around in history, and delivered me the present, day by day.

This took up so much of my concentration that I only got out of bed to drink water, excrete, and carry more armfuls of papers to the bed. I stopped going to sleep as such. It just overtook me whenever.

~

A sleek boardroom. The view out the windows: sky and a skyscraper's pointyhead. I'm at a conference table with about thirty men in red robes and tall white hats that I'm sure they could unfold and use to wipe their lips—and one man who must be Chairman, partial to gold.