When Keiko took the fifty copies through to the kitchen, Fancy hugged her, squashing the sheets of warm paper between their bodies, then sat down at the table, divided the pile into two and started folding. Keiko sat down on the other side of the table and got to work too.
“Did you read it?” said Fancy. “What d’you think?”
“I didn’t, in case it was confidential,” Keiko said. She took a drink of her tea and read the front page of the leaflet she had just finished folding: Do you spend your days at a desk, on your feet, up a ladder, or under a car? Use the voucher on the back of this brochure and spend a night in the hands of an expert. Keiko turned the page. Aromatherapeutic techniques to soothe and refresh the tired bodies of busy people—neck, shoulder, back, leg, and feet treatments available individually or in combination.
“It sounds lovely,” she said. “I would like relaxing neck and shoulders, please, since I only sit at a desk typing.”
“You can have a freebie when I’m finished with the course. And Sandra Dessing can stick it.”
“Vinegar Tits?” said Keiko. “How is it her business?” She managed to get that much out before she gave up trying to keep her face straight and started laughing along with Fancy. “You know that’s what Murray called her. I, of course,” she clasped her hands under her chin and gazed upwards, “don’t even know what that means.”
Fancy finished folding and kissed the top of the bundle. “So,” she said, “Murray Poole.” She smirked at Keiko.
“So, Craig McKendrick,” Keiko replied.
Fancy spluttered a mouthful of tea. “I thought Japanese people were meant to be dead polite.”
“Can I ask a question then?” said Keiko. “Since I’m busted already.” Fancy nodded. “What do you know about Murray’s girlfriend?”
“Nothing,” said Fancy, looking away. “I never met her.”
“Oh! It wasn’t a serious relationship then?”
“Can’t have been,” said Fancy.
“Only Malcolm said that Murray wasn’t over her.” Fancy was still staring at the cluttered sideboard. “Can I ask another question?”
“Absolutely,” said Fancy, turning back to her.
“Why did Mrs. Watson’s niece leave?”
“What? Dina?” said Fancy. “She didn’t. Well, she stopped coming, I suppose. She never lived here.”
“But the other girl lived here,” said Keiko. “Tash. Did you live at Mrs. McMaster’s house together?”
“Look,” said Fancy. “What is this?”
“I don’t know,” Keiko said. “A puzzle. I’m trying to make sense of things Murray said to me.”
“Ha!” said Fancy. “Good luck then.”
“Can I ask one more question?” Fancy nodded. “What did Mr. Poole die of ?”
Fancy blinked so slowly that it seemed she did not understand the words. “Nothing contagious,” she said finally. “You’re not worried about the flat, are you? He hadn’t lived there since the boys were at primary school, anyway, when they all lived above the shop together. You’re not worried, are you?”
“No, not about that,” said Keiko. “Just … there was no kind of mystery about him dying, was there? No kind of question or anything?”
Now Fancy turned her head slowly to one side while still staring hard, as though she would be able to get a clearer view of Keiko from the corner of her eye. It made Keiko think of dolls’ eyes or a mannequins’, and she shifted uneasily.
“What the hell has Murray been saying?” Fancy asked, but she went on before Keiko had a chance to answer. “No, of course not. I suppose it was a heart attack.”
“You mean you don’t actually know?”
“I’m trying to think if anyone said for deffo,” said Fancy, screwing up her face in concentration. “I think we just assumed. He was that kind of age, you know, and … Well, that kind of shape. I didn’t get all the gory details,” Fancy groaned. “God, speaking of which”— she fanned out the pile of red leaflets—“I really hope this works out, and I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna.”
“What’s wrong?” said Keiko.
“It’s costing a fortune, for a start,” Fancy began. “And it’s dead, dead hard, but mostly what’s wrong is it’s bloody traumatic and I’ll be a basket case before I’m qualified.” She shuddered. “It’s the anatomy module.”
“Cadavers?”
“God Almighty, no!” Fancy shrieked. “Practically, though. There’s physiology and we had to watch these totally disgusting films all about the muscle groups and that.” Her face was beginning to blanch, the skin around her eyes fading to pale yellow and her lips turning blue. She gulped and went on. “Then the practical work … we have to practice finding all the different muscles and tendons in each other, and you can really feel the gristle and stringy bits moving about.” She stopped and bent suddenly at the waist as though hit in the back of the neck with a sandbag.
Keiko chewed her lip in silence. After a moment or two, with her head still between her knees, Fancy went on.
“And the worst of is that after I’ve been to the class all I can think about whenever I’m moving around is all these, all these … bits. It does my head in. I have to go and lie flat. Once I had to go to the sick room in the college, cos I could hear all the strings in my hips clicking when I was walking to the bus stop and I fainted.”
“Isn’t that going to be a problem when you’re doing the treatments?” asked Keiko, struggling to keep the hoots of laughter tucked down inside.
“Just a bit,” said Fancy, sitting up. She sighed. “As if Old Vinegar Tits Dessing isn’t bad enough.”
“You can practice on me,” said Keiko. “I don’t mind if you faint.”
“You’re a pal,” said Fancy. She was fiddling with one of the leaflets. “Sorry I got weird about Tash. We weren’t here at the same time, to answer your question. She came after me and she was gone before I got back. Usual story—hit sixteen and legged it.”
“But she didn’t return.”
“Not so far,” Fancy said, folding the leaflet into a fan. “She wasn’t happy here. Didn’t fit in.”
“How do you know?” said Keiko. “If you and she didn’t overlap. Oh! Of course, Mrs. McMaster.”
“You’re kidding,” said Fancy. “Pet never speaks her name. Nah, just gossip. I know she had a fella,” she paused, “a boyfriend, I mean, and a job—which was more than I ever got, but she didn’t settle. Piled on a ton of weight before she left and that’s usually misery, innit? Mind you, it was Etta McLuskie who said that and she’s a total body fascist, so who knows?” Despite the price of the red paper and the extra toner, Fancy screwed the leaflet up into a ball, threw it up in the air, and flicked it into the wastebasket with a jerk of her head.
“No more questions,” Keiko said. “I’m sorry I upset you.”
“Me?” said Fancy, wide-eyed. “Why would any of that upset me?”
_____
It was only three o’clock when she stepped out onto the street to go home, but the light, already milky, was about to begin its long fade and the town was hushed, balanced on the moment before the children were let out of school. They would be lining up right now waiting for the bell to release them like breath on a seed-head. Keiko smiled to herself and Murray, coming towards her, couldn’t tell whether the soft light and quiet brought the smile or the smile softened the light and stilled the air around her. He was beckoning her across the road towards him when she noticed him at last.
“Do you still want to see my place?”
“Of course,” said Keiko, asking herself when she had said so.
He led her over the corner of the Green to the pink building, fiddled with a padlock, and then hauled open a door, rattling it right to the end of its runners.
“This is your place?” said Keiko. She tried not to let her thoughts show on her face, but he guessed anyway.
“Nothing to do with me on the outside,” he said, twinkling. “I just rent this one room from old man Byers. He owns it and the colour’s his fault.”
Inside, Murray punched numbers into the alarm panel and then flipped a row of switches.
Keiko stepped into the sudden dazzling light, taking in first size and emptiness, freshly whitewashed walls, enormous mirrors, and ranks of shelves. Then she noticed the canvas-covered hulks, six or eight of them, some on a soft green mat which covered half the floor, some resting on clean, grey-painted ground. She raised her eyes to question Murray’s in the mirror opposite them.
He had taken off his coat and now he strode to the middle of the room, lifted one of the covers by two corners, and swept it up and off with one practised, billowing crack.
“Ta-da!” he said.
It was a motorcycle, black and silver, glittering under the lights. One of the old ones that looked more like a bee or a fly than something made by man. Before she could think of what to say, Murray had swept off another of the covers. This one was yellow with a duller gleam, just as old. The third—red, more paint and less chrome—shone as though water was flowing over it.
“They’re beautiful,” said Keiko. Murray was facing away from her, pulling the canvas from one too big for his matador flick. It was blue and very heavy. So heavy that the paint and chrome bulk of it seemed almost to scrape the ground between its tyres, like an over-laden hammock.
“Harley Davidson,” said Keiko. Murray, rolling the canvas cover up in his arms, lifted his head to one-side with a slow wink and a click of his tongue. She looked towards the last of the shrouded shapes on this bare-floor half of the room, but he shook his head.
“It’s not finished, not fit to be seen.” He laughed. “Nobody’s Bantam ever gets finished. It’s traditional.”
“Not finished?” Keiko echoed. “You mean you made these?”
“Kind of. Well, yeah, I suppose so.”
“So this is what you do,” she said. “You’re really not a butcher.”
“I’m really not,” said Murray. “This is what I do. I strip them down and work out what’s wrong, get new bits, and put them together again. Or hit things with hammers when I’m really stuck.”
“No!” said Keiko. “How could you hit these beautiful things with hammers? “
“You like them, eh?”
“I love them. They’re like sculptures.” He frowned. “Don’t you think so?”
“Oh, yeah, they’re the best. Never thought of them as sculptures.” His eyes met Keiko’s in the mirror. “But I see what you mean.”
Keiko walked over to him to look at the Harley close-up. She didn’t have to be told not to touch it. “How old is it?” she asked.
“Knucklehead. Hard to say, really,” said Murray. “How long is a piece of string? I’m going for early forties. See this?” Keiko craned her head to look down at it from the same angle as Murray. “That’s a cat’s-eye dash. See? The way the lights look? That puts it between 1936 and ’46, but this tank had a two-light dash when it came, ’47 to ’54, so who knows? It’s about two and a half years old, is the short answer.”
He walked over to the black bike like a fly, Keiko following him.
“This one,” he stopped, and arched an eyebrow at her. “Sure you want to hear any of this?” Keiko nodded. “Okay, this one’s a Vincent Rapide, 1948.”
“Really?” Keiko murmured, looking between the splendour of the Harley and this ungainly creature. “That’s hard to believe. It’s so much more primitive-looking.”
Murray made a show of looking around to see if anyone had heard her. “Watch it! That’s a British bike. Postwar austerity. They were short of tubing, so the thing about the Rapide is it’s got no frame.” He crouched down and started pointing. “The rear swinging arm pivots from the gearbox and rear suspension and the steering head for the front forks is attached to the oil tank.” He looked up at her expression. “Not so keen on this one, eh?”
“No frame,” she said. “Everything just bolted to everything else. Is it safe?”
“Completely,” said Murray. “What’s probably bothering you is the front forks.” He pointed. “Brampton forks—pretty spindly compared to the rest of it.”
Keiko nodded. “Yes, you’re right. That is why it looks so peculiar—compared with the Harley.”
Murray laughed at her again. “You’d get lynched if anyone heard you. Seriously, British bikes. I got into a bit of bother when some people heard I’d got a Hog. BSA parts guy in Liverpool assumed I would be selling up and came all the way up here to get first crack at the Gold Flash. Couldn’t believe it when I said I was keeping both.” Keiko shook her head along with him. “Speaking of the Gold Flash,” Murray went on. “You haven’t been introduced.”
But Keiko held up her hands to stop him. His frown flashed down until she explained. “I’ll forget if you tell me any more,” she said. “A Harley Knucklehead and a Vincent Rapide. Cat’s-eye dash, no frame, Brampton forks. We should stop there for today.”
Murray relaxed completely into a smile again and began to replace the covers. Keiko wandered around the back of the room looking at the shelves of boxes and trays hoping that her for today hadn’t been presumptuous.
“So many tools,” she said. “And some of them seem to be exactly the same as the others.”
“Well, you need different spanners for the American and the British bikes,” Murray said. “Different everything.”
Keiko looked at the five identical trays of wrenches and raised her eyebrows.
Murray laughed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “What’s the diagnosis then?”
“Oh, you’re a very sad case,” said Keiko. “I diagnose … doing what you like with your own things in your own place and harming no one.”
Murray laughed even louder. “You totally get it, don’t you?”
“I can’t work unless my printer tray is full and there’s a block of extra paper still in its wrapper too.”
“What could be more normal than that?”
Keiko waited for him to finish tucking the covers around the wheels and straightening the folds. “Murray,” she said. “Can I ask a question?” She pointed to the canvases on the green mat. “Why do these bikes get to be on a rug?”
Murray laughed. “They’re not bikes,” he said. “Have a look.”
Keiko didn’t even try his flamboyant trick with the cover; she was too short and could never carry it off, might even fall over. She just bundled the sheet off the shape underneath, dumping it into Murray’s arms as he came up to join her.
“Ah,” she said looking at what she’d revealed. It was a weight lifting machine—multi-gym? Bench press? She knew the words but not the meanings. Next to that was something like the harness from a glider but without the wings. She frowned at them.
“Not sculptures? Not beautiful?” asked Murray. Keiko looked at him in the mirror. He was hugging the bundle of canvas and there were shadows on his arms showing the outline of the tendons between wrist and elbow. Under his rolled-up sleeves, his biceps and shoulders curved like sand dunes, separated by a dip that Keiko could have spanned with her hands. Stock pot, said her mother’s voice in her head again. Keiko turned back to the equipment and bent her head letting her hair drop forward across her face.
“Have you ever done any weight resistance?” Murray asked.
“I’m a brain in a jar, remember?”
“I can’t agree with you there,” he said. “You’re a fine feat of engineering. Well worth taking care of.”
“That is the strangest compliment I’ve ever been paid,” said Keiko.
“At least you’re laughing,” said Murray. “You didn’t slap me.”
“I’m catching it from you,” she replied, thinking she had never known someone laugh at himself so much, thinking it was a very good thing in a man.<
br />
“Me?” said Murray. “I laugh so I don’t scream.” And, of course, saying this he laughed again. “You can use the gym equipment anytime you like.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Keiko.
“I can show you.” He wasn’t laughing at all now. “Then they can do their damnedest and it won’t get them anywhere.”
“Who?” Keiko said.
“All of them,” he said. “They’re no match for me.”
thirteen
Saturday, 26 October
Fancy dropped Viola off with Mrs. McMaster after breakfast and, leaving Keiko standing to attention behind the counter at Fancy That, walked to the top of the town. Pamela Shand in the Cat’s Whiskers took a flyer, asked for a poster to put in her window, and made an appointment for a peppermint foot massage later that week. All very well and good, Fancy thought, but you’re an incomer and a bit of a flake, so that doesn’t get me anywhere. At the hairdressers, she went right inside (Janette Campbell had a tattoo and couldn’t stand Mrs. Dessing) but she walked straight past Pet’s flower shop, telling herself that she could give Pet a leaflet anytime and Vi wouldn’t want her boring old mum cramping her style on her day at Granny’s.
Meanwhile, Keiko took details over the telephone of two children’s party cakes, booked out a Viking costume for the following weekend and, in the long pauses between calls on her attention, tried to work on her psychological profiles.
suggestibility/skepticism
suspicion/trust
innovation/conservatism
list making/actually doing something
She chewed her pen. You could buy profiling packages, but they were expensive. You could copy them, but everyone said the big professional profiling companies were crazy about protecting their copyright and always sued, every time. So she would make up her own.
If extraterrestrials contacted me, I would: see a doctor / call the police / find a priest / assume it was a hoax. She nodded. If I read that tomatoes caused cancer, I would: stop eating them / stop eating them raw / eat only organic / keep eating them. She tapped her pen on the paper. If I found a letter not meant for me I would: tear it up / open it / put it back where I found it. She crossed that out but immediately thought of another one. If two young women had suddenly left my town, I would: wonder why / try to find them / watch my bac—
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