The Good Mayor (4 page)

Stopak threw back the covers. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

“Now? You have to go to the bathroom now?”

“Yes. Now. Go to the bathroom.”

“All right, then. I’ll wait. I’ll just wait. Don’t be too long, you naughty boy. I’ve got so little on I’ll freeze to death without big, strong Stopak.”

Stopak did not come back. After a time, Agathe took off her shoes and climbed under the covers. When she woke up again, Stopak’s side of the bed was still empty and she could hear noises coming through the flat. She got up and wrapped herself in a dressing gown and stumbled down the hall. Under her feet, she could feel the knotholes in the floorboards where they were wearing through the linoleum. There were tearing sounds coming from
the bathroom. Agathe was alarmed. She tried the door but it was locked. “Stopak! Stopak, are you all right? What are you doing in there?”

“I’m fine. I’m working.”

“What do you mean, ‘working’? Stopak, it must be three in the morning. What are the neighbours going to think?”

He came to the door. Agathe could hear him just on the other side of the thin board panel. “I’m just working. That’s all. I thought the place could do with a bit of a tidy up. It’s been a while since we decorated in here.”

Agathe was almost screaming. “For God’s sake, Stopak, it’s been a while since we did a lot of things. Come to bed. Do some of those things. To hell with you and your decorating, Stopak. Come to bed. There’s some men in Dot would be glad of an offer like that.”

“Name one!” he screamed. “Just name one!” But the door stayed shut.

Agathe stood outside in silence for a moment or two until she heard the sound of paper peeling off the walls again, then she went back up the hall, threw her underwear on to the floor and climbed into bed, naked this time, and wept.

N THE MORNING, WHEN IT CAME, THE HOUSE
was silent again. Agathe got up and shambled to the bathroom. The walls were bare and it smelled damp. Stopak had repainted all the woodwork and filled in a lot of little holes in the plaster but he’d left the place tidy apart from a couple of tiny curls of paper Agathe could see hiding under the bath. She shuffled to the sink and groaned at her reflection in the mirror. What a mess. A gorgon. No wonder he wouldn’t. She ran the taps and scrubbed her face clean. Her eyes were still red but there was nothing to be done about that. Agathe was exhausted. She felt as if she had spent the night sleeping on a pile of rocks. Her throat burned from sobbing, her chest was thick, her nose was blocked and swollen to the size of a beetroot and she creaked in every joint. “This is what it’s like to be old,” she said.

But mirror Agathe said, “You’re not old. Don’t let him make you old.”

Agathe reached to the bathroom stool where the makeweight undershirt still lay neatly folded. She picked it up and slipped it over her head. She failed to notice the tiny impacts of the last few lavender blossoms as they fell to the floor. “See! An old lady in an old lady’s undershirt!” It wasn’t true.

The sad red-eyed figure in the mirror was more alluring and erotic than the seductive strumpet she had tried to be the night before.

The thick undershirt clung to her curves like syrup and barely skimmed the outer edge of decency. Agathe could not look anything
less than sumptuous—it was beyond her. She walked flat-footed to the kitchen. She had intended the place to be filled with the smell of bacon and coffee and cinnamon bagels. Instead it smelled of bleach and turpentine from the brushes Stopak had washed in the sink. She groaned, took them out, put them in an old cup and scoured the remains of the paint away. “Oh, what’s the point?” she muttered. “What’s the bloedig point?”

Agathe stopped cleaning. She threw the scouring pad in the sink and put the coffee pot on the stove as she stamped angrily out of the room. She stamped angrily back again and took the coffee pot off the stove.

She left again and sat down on the stool in front of her dressing table.

“What’s the bloedig point?” This was going to take some time. “What’s the
bloedig
point?” She combed her hair furiously. It fell around her face in deep dark coils. “What
is
the bloedig point?” She stood up and went to a chest of drawers, took out a clean pair of knickers, visible knickers, enormous knickers, boiled grey, cheese-holed, comfortable knickers, and put them on.

“Undershirt and knickers. Old lady undershirt and old bloedig lady bloedig knickers! Bloedig! Bloedig! Bloedig!”

Agathe sat in front of her mirror and did her make-up, never halting her mantra of curses except when that tiny little brush, loaded with dark red paint, was hovering over her mouth. Then she cursed inwardly. It meant she had to hold the fury inside until she had blotted the paint away with a tissue-kiss and then, through perfect lips, she spat vile things at the mirror.

Then she felt better. “Better. Yes, a lot better. Get a bit of slap on, girl, and face the world.” In the mirror, the rumpled bed lay like a relief map of the Andes. “To hell with the bloedig bed—let Stopak make it.” She reached into the wardrobe and pulled out her blue dress, the one with the white piping, slipped on her shoes and walked out of the flat.

It was dark on the stair. She walked carefully with one hand on the old wooden banister, one hand on the central stone post. Agathe was glad to reach the street. She stepped off the last unsteady tread
of the stair and she was about to hurry off to work when … “Good morning, Agathe!”

Agathe’s hand shot to her chest. Hektor. She hated Hektor. She hated him because he was gorgeous—all dark and tall and dangerous. Always that same black coat sweeping the pavement winter and summer, his hair all lank and floppy, his face so pale, his eyes so hot like a saint or a devil. Women looked at him and wondered things out loud—women Agathe knew, decent married women who should know better, women who should know the value of a good man with a steady job instead of talking that way about a waster like Hektor. So Agathe chose to hate him, family or not.

She hated everything about him from his unpolished shoes to his ludicrous moustache. It made him look ratty. And he was dirty, stinking of drink and cheap cigarettes. That boy could do with a wash. She looked away quickly from his ice-blue eyes and hated him some more.

“Good morning, Hektor. I’m sorry. I can’t ask you in. I’m going to work.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter.” He flicked a lock of black hair back behind his ear. “I’ve come to see Stopak anyway.”

“Stopak’s not in either. What do you want with Stopak anyway?”

“Agathe, I’m surprised at you. What kind of way is that to talk? You don’t have a cigarette, do you? No, you don’t do that sort of thing. Not you. Not Agathe. And why do I have to have an excuse to come and visit my own cousin? My favourite cousin in the whole wide world. My own darling cousin.”

“Well, he’s not here. I don’t know where he is but I do know this—he hasn’t got any money so you can just leave your darlingest cuzziny-wuzziny alone!”

She moved to go but Hektor refused to stand aside and stayed, smiling down at her as she squeezed past him and hurried on to the end of the road. At the corner of Aleksander Street, she could have caught the tram to work along the Ampersand but it was still early so she decided to go for a coffee at The Golden Angel instead.

Agathe crossed the road and stood by the corner of Green Bridge, waiting for the Castle Street tram. She was watching the
end of Aleksander Street nervously. Sure enough, Hektor came down the street. He saw her. He looked right at her and curled his lip. She saw his moustache hike up a little at one side. Stupid smirk. What was that supposed to mean? Looking at a decent woman like that as if he knew something. He couldn’t know anything. What could there be to know?

The tram was coming and she put out her arm to flag it down. The driver clanged his iron bell to warn that he was stopping and Agathe stepped neatly on to the platform at the rear. As the tram pulled away she looked back and saw Hektor outside The Three Crowns—a rough sort of place with men who would take bets and fight. On Saturday nights, they would spill out on the pavement and spit and quarrel. Agathe saw Hektor walk up to a man in a torn sweater. They spoke. The man gave Hektor a cigarette. He was still looking right at her as the tram crossed the bridge and turned away.

The tram juddered. Agathe turned her eyes to the front. All over Dot people were going to work in the sunshine. Agathe watched them as her tram rolled through the city. A couple who kissed goodbye for the day at the very next tram stop, the woman turning to wave as she skipped on to the back platform. A little boy in shorts kicked a red ball along the pavement as he brought the morning paper home, a yellow dog bouncing on a string beside him. She heard its yaps fade away as the tram hurried along the long avenue that leads to my cathedral. Agathe looked up coldly when the shadow of the vast dome fell across the passing tram. There should have been dramatic organ chords or the sweep of angel choirs. Nothing. She felt nothing. No awe, no protective glow, nothing. Maybe a little anger and disappointment but, apart from that, nothing.

May sunshine filtered through the thin young leaves on the limes of the avenue and Agathe saw, in silhouette, tiny birds flying between the branches. They flapped furiously—faster than the eye could register—and it seemed to exhaust them for they would suddenly fold their wings and fall through the air like tiny, resting torpedoes, fall, fall, fall, for a heartbeat then unfold their wings and flap again. They were everywhere among the trees, flapping, flying, falling.

Agathe craned her neck to watch them as the tram rattled along. “Look at them,” she thought to herself. “Why are they doing that? What can it mean?” And then she felt suddenly foolish and concentrated very hard on the handbag propped on her prim knees. It didn’t mean anything. It was just what they did. Some birds stretched out their wings and glided endlessly over oceans, some had to flap like clockwork toys to go from branch to branch. What can it mean? Nothing! What does it mean for a grown woman to look for a meaning in that? Some birds fly this way, some birds fly that way, the leaves come on the trees, the leaves fall off the trees, a man wants you, a man stops wanting you, a baby’s born, a baby dies. That’s all there is to it. There is no meaning in it. It doesn’t mean anything.

Agathe felt her eyes fill and she hurriedly reached into her handbag for a tiny handkerchief and dabbed away the tears with a folded edge before they ruined her make-up.

The tram conductor clanged his bell. “Castle Street next stop!”

She stood up, swayed to the back of the tram and stepped off. The Golden Angel was just across the junction. Agathe stopped at the edge of the pavement, waited for the traffic to clear and crossed the road. As the heavy glazed doors of the cafe closed behind her, all the noise of the street disappeared, politely excluded as if by some solicitous major-domo. Inside, the place breathed calm and steam and coffee smells and cinnamon and almonds and peace and welcome. It was a coffee cathedral and, in the heart of it, like a vast organ gleaming under burnished copper domes and wrapped in polished brass pipes, the huge, steaming coffee machine spurted toccatas of flavour.

Agathe gave a heavy sigh and took off her gloves. All the tables were full but the high stools along the counter were still not taken. Agathe hated sitting there. It wasn’t ladylike. She felt that, perched there, people would look at her. She was right, people would. Men because they couldn’t help it, women because they knew they couldn’t.

Agathe sat down on the stool at the very end of the counter. It was awkward. She had to hitch her skirt a little higher than she
would have liked. It stretched over her hips a little tighter than she would have liked. People looked. Men noticed the way her stockings wrinkled a little at the heel. Women noticed them noticing.

At the other end of the bar, the owner, Cesare, was standing like a carved figure. Everything about him was black except for his sparkling white shirt. His hair was brilliantined black. His moustache, pencil thin, was carbon black, his eyes, his suit, his tie, his gleaming shoes that turned up at the toe, all black, and the spotless white cloth that hung over his arm only made everything else all the blacker.

He moved to take Agathe’s order but a voice came sharply from somewhere in the depths of the coffee machine. “I’ll do this, Cesare.”

“Yes, Mamma,” he said and he went back to standing very still. Cesare was good at standing very still. He could do it for a long, long time.

And then, from out of the coffee organ, Mamma Cesare appeared. She was tiny, barely able to see over the counter, but she was formidable—a pocket battleship of a woman. Everything that was black about Cesare was iron grey with her. Hair pulled back in a tight bun the colour and texture of iron, iron-grey wool stockings on bow legs, shoes that should have been black but were scuffed down a few shades from constant wear as she waddled for miles every day between the tables and a dress that had been black when she put it on in the first days of her widowhood. But that was decades and countless yester-washes ago.