by Matthew Crow
“Verity, I can steal me some pretend children, but some things can’t ever be faked, and believe me when I say that’s one of them.”
I arrived at the club for our monthly instalment. In the main room Miss Jemima sat in the shade, a lone candle flickering at her table, as she berated a shoal of new looking girls who were becoming more jumbled with each elaborate move.
“Darlings we want them to cheer, not call an ambulance. Ten minute break then back on your marks.”
The girls filed out to behind the stage, limping and moaning. Many accusations were levelled at Miss Jemima whilst I was at The Iguana Den. Some said she was a dictator of the worst kind; others hailed her as nothing more than a jumped up Madame. More often than not tales came thick and fast of the innovative ends her husbands had met whilst the cruellest implied that she had been born a man and shifted gradually over time to her body’s natural instincts. I’m not saying some of them weren’t true (even Chinese Whispers have a nucleus I suppose). Eve, half a bottle down, would often swear blind that they had all been the case at one point or another. Personally I never found her anything but warm and loving to us girls. I suppose I was just privy to her best version.
“How’s Eve?” she asked as I took my seat.
“You mean Doris? She’s just swell. Off to bump into her latest beau with some homemade cookies.”
Miss Jemima swivelled towards me on the hump of her skirts. “You come for your money?”
“I’m doing the rounds. Eve told me to catch hers too, said given the choice between love and money she’d pick love any day of the week.”
Miss Jemima reached into a fold of her skirts and pulled out two rolls of notes, bound individually with a bow of red ribbon. “Won’t pay the bills though.”
“Eve lands on her feet no matter how high she’s thrown.”
“Like all the best dancers.” Miss Jemima pulled back her shoulders as out of nowhere a waiter conjured two glasses of crème de menthe. She picked up her glass and knocked it against mine. “I do hope you girls stay for a while. Life’s more interesting since you came along.”
“I could say the same about you,” I said, taking a tiny drop of the too-sweet liquor, which disappeared in my mouth before I had a chance to swallow.
“More profitable too, you’re our star attraction you know. I put in an extra few dollars, to show my gratitude.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Kindness has no place in business. I like to think of it as a shrewd investment.”
“Truth be told I’d do it for free now I’ve got the taste. Which I suppose is the wrong thing to say to an esteemed businesswoman such as yourself?”
Miss Jemima laughed and tipped the glass towards her lips. By the time it hit the table it had shed its green entirely like trees in fall. “We’ll make a corporate mistress of you yet.”
“Here’s to hoping.”
“To hoping. You take care. And if there’s anything you ever need, just you say.”
“I will. Oh and Jemima, what did you mean, sending us that gun?”
She spread her fan and blew three cool drafts across her face. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. Be prepared for any eventuality, that’s my motto. You girls just make sure you look after one another,” she said as her protégées began to flutter back onto the stage.
Back home our front door was closed. This struck me as odd as whilst resigned to life as an eternally single female, and all the fastidious security checks that it entails, Eve was more free spirited on matters of home safety. Lamps would be left on at all times, taps left running. Once I came home to find a smoking blender still spinning a margarita as Eve sprawled on the bed, unconscious and suckling the teat of a tequila bottle. She felt that to shut the door was rude.
‘What if someone wants to come by but thinks we’re busy?’ she’d ask, tacking the door wide open with a piece of g-string elastic.
‘They could always try knocking. Besides no-one ever just drops by these days, except Doloris, and then you hide under the bed, so you can cut the Stepford Wives routine.’
‘That was once! Besides people don’t like to knock. Best this way then everyone’s happy.’
Eventually I managed to ease her in principle on the subject. Of course she agreed with me in theory, yet the practice still eluded her despite her promises that she would try her best. Obstinate to the last she still recoiled in horror on the occasions I suggested actually locking the door as we left.
Inside all was quiet save for a rustling in the bedroom, like a groundhog scurrying across dry leaves. “Hello?” I called, on the off chance our visitor held the gift of speech.
The scurrying grew quicker, more hurried. I called again but there was no answer.
“Is anyone in there? I got a gun,” I said, my voice bending in the middle as I spoke.
As the rustling grew quieter I slid my feet towards the bedroom door, keen not to alert any intruders with my clod footsteps. With my ear pressed against the door I stopped breathing. The sound had died down, and all that was left was the final reveal.
I flicked the handle and kicked the door with all my might.
It flew open and revealed an empty room. I felt my body relax when a figure burst from behind the door and smashed me onto the floor. I fell backwards with it on top of me and flung my fist into its face.
Eve jerked backwards with a scream and began crawling on her elbows towards the farthest edge of the bedroom. Her eyes held in them a fear so succinct it made me dampen with a feverish sweat. I would see that terrible look once more during our time together.
“Oh... ” she said, holding her hand to her face as she relaxed onto the floor. “Verity, you scared me half to death. God damn it I thought my days were over.”
“Eve, what the hell are you doing? I thought you were trying to kill me!” I rushed over to her and dragged her to her feet. She crumpled onto the bed, her arms wrapped tight around my waist, as I stroked her hair and examined what, I am slightly pleased to relay, was a rather impressive shiner below her left eye.
“Sorry for scaring you,” she said.
“You’re the one looks like you’ve seen a ghost. What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking I got to sort out my problems before they get to be yours too,” she started to cry. “You’re the best friend I ever had, and I can’t even be straight with you.”
“What you talking about, Eve?” I said, wiping away the tears with my bloodied fingertips. “There’s nothing we can’t fix.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said through gentle sobs. “Look.” Eve nodded towards the bathroom door.
I laid her head gently onto the mattress and stood up, again noting how my bones now jarred with each exertion, as though already I was the type of lady who could be rendered incompetent for days after one measly fall. “Nothing going to jump out at me from in there is there?” I said only half joking. Eve shook her head and then buried it into he blankets.
The bathroom was as it should be which in itself seemed suspicious. After such a dramatic build-up I expected a porthole to another dimension, or at very least a maimed corpse to verify my worst fears.
As it was everything was in its place. The sink was caked with eye make-up and the wastebasket overflowing with the red-ends of Q-tips and the dead ends of lipstick. Bottles of scent and suds lined every upright surface and a vanity case sat on the window ledge, open, like the window itself. I was about to turn back to Eve and ask where exactly my attentions should be focused when it caught my eye.
Beneath the window, surrounded by its own halo of lunchtime light, the bathtub was full. Eve’s suitcase was open. This I could only tell by the leathery tips of its edges jutting out from the deluge. For surrounding it the entire tub was full of dollars - twenties, tens, the occasional five - scattered and unfurling like we’d reached the end of the rainbow.
I closed the door and sat back down on the bed. “Eve... Eve, quit playing the ostrich and lo
ok at me will you.”
She shook her head at first and eventually rose to my level, her face red and her features hidden beneath smudged lipstick and puffed skin.
“Eve, there isn’t anything you and I can’t work out. But you’re going to have to talk to me, okay?”
She nodded.
“So why don’t you go bring us a fresh bottle, and we can start from the beginning.”
I heard the clink of glass against glass as Eve tried to situate a bottle that hadn’t been skimmed or outright downed by either one of us. I felt my knee twitch and my head moving towards the bathroom door despite my best attempts to maintain a steely and proper pose. But I’m nothing if not a slave to curiosity and before I knew it was back outside the door, gently peeling it open to make sure that in my surprise my mind had not magnified the true extent of our riches.
Fortunately there were no such worries on that score. And as I surveyed the thousands upon thousands of dollars growing damp in the un-wiped bathtub of my comfortable little trailer I felt a smile trace across the length of my face.
With love,
Always,
Verity
Dear Verity,
It seems that you are not the only one to be presented with death in such elaborate form.
It began three days after my meeting with Michael. I had decided, en route to Caleb’s, to stop for early morning coffee to try and extract any further information Mary may hold on Levi. I had scanned his books in the library. And, as foretold, in each novel a stranger appears, initially glimpsed from behind - the way Levi might have seen me as I sat at the counter while he scribbled in his log - before taking centre stage to the cookie-cutter dramas that unfolds.
The circumstances shift from book to book, but whether he’s the traveller, or the salesman, the charlatan, or the thief, the climax is always some passionate embrace in the most unlikely of surroundings. A kitchen counter, the backseat of a car, billiards tables, alleyways, the forest floor. In the most memorable - and least likely, I have to admit - this very character tail ends a novel by ravishing mother and daughter on separate occasions at two otherwise nondescript family funerals. The things I’ve gotten up to would turn your hair white, I can tell you. I skimmed the novels for the bare essentials, as to get a taste of what exactly all the fuss was about. I suspect they were crafted with little more ambition than as a stopgap between domestic chores for the bored and lonely and, on the whole, female readership. I personally wouldn’t use them for kindling, so decided against checking any of his tomes out of the library lest they mar what is up to now a somewhat impressive anthology.
The car lot was empty. The sign had been turned to open, yet the door was jammed shut. I peeked through the gaps in the dusty window assuming that Mary had skipped the most basic of tasks in favour of more strenuous activities such as mixing the batters and patties that she would spend her day flipping and frying.
I knocked twice and there was no answer.
The windows were fogged from the inside and something was steaming on the hob. I moved round to the side entrance where floor-length windows dressed in red lettering flanked the family tables. Between two letters I pressed my head to the glass. A coffee pot was cracked and spilled on the counter. Two pans smoked, one blew steam gently from its copper base, the other a more choking fog that rushed towards the ceiling and bloomed towards each corner of the room. The after-hours lights shone just enough to allow visibility, though I couldn’t say what I was staring at until I caught sight of a small patch of white at the foot of the counter, from which a bloodied hand curled tightly around itself.
I returned to the front door and kicked as hard as I could. The doors dented but gave nowhere near enough to enable me to enter. Towards the back entrance a muddy dollar bill lay trampled into the concrete and a chain had been bolted around the interlocking handles. Again the door wouldn’t budge so I ran back to the side of the building and selected the smallest window I could find.
My foot passed through the glass with ease though the jagged edge cut straight through my jeans and gifted my ankle with a near perfect bracelet of ruby dots. I kicked the most threatening shards from the empty void and made my way inside.
The air was hot as hell and slick with oil. I leapt over the counter and turned off the gas, which provided a minor respite. Broken plates scattered the floor and were drizzled with red like some intricate art installation. Mary lay on her back, her arms outstretched, her apron pulled up over her head. Dark red had begun to pool around her. I knelt down and pulled the cloth from her face.
How long she had been dead I can’t say. And details within the press are being kept to a minimum while investigations are ongoing. I made my way behind the counter, trying not to slip on the blood and scattered sugar that coated the floor, and managed to call 911.
I sat alone with Mary while we waited for the police. All the while she seeped gently further and further across the floor, her Technicolor diminishing with each passing moment in a tidy circle, which shifted in size and hue like a slowly turned kaleidoscope.
The usual questions were asked. Initially with sympathy, then with a thin air of suspicion, before eventually the two officers arrived at a tone somewhere between officious and jovial. “You did everything you could, sir, I’m sure,” they said, I assume taking my naturally distant demeanour for some sort of emotional response to the morning’s events.
“Everything except get here five minutes earlier,” I replied.
Back home I turned the faucet to its most scalding setting as I worked the suds into my skin. Scouring red welts that lingered long after the blood, which I so desperately wanted to be cleansed of. As the water dripped slowly to a stop and all that was left was steam, I found myself playing over the previous months in my mind, considering the catalogue of minor incidents that had dominated the town’s gossip in the preamble to Mary’s murder. Whether or not I can fairly blame Michael for each crime I do not know. All I can say is that despite the heightened vigilance of the usually lax policemen, a sense of unease pervaded the town as a wave of similar incidents took hold. Bricks shattered shop fronts. Lone women arrived home tearful and shaken after being trailed by dark, driverless cars. A fire engulfed the school kitchen though only after the majority of its supplies had been relieved. Two masked gunmen took the day’s takings of a small but profitable hardware store and a pellet from the window of a passing car had blinded Maxwell in one eye mid-speech. His sight could have been saved, they said, had his writhing not been initially ignored as his tendency to reiterate utmost devotion by speaking in tongues.
I did manage to make it into work that day. A little after twelve, but present all the same.
“We were beginning to worry, boy,” said Caleb as I made my way to the workshop at the farthest edge of his garden. “Thought we’d scared you off.”
“Just been an odd morning is all.”
I told him about the diner, and about Mary’s murder. The whole time he sipped from his coffee cup, immune to the horror.
“Well, aint life a bitch,” he said as I finished and had changed into my overalls. “Chances are we’ll be full to bursting come the day of the funeral. Folk like to see off those that make the news. Can’t say it’s right. But facts are facts and coverage makes custom, chances are you’ll be drafted in to make her coffin too... ”
I felt myself blanche at the prospect.
“... well, only if you feel you’d be up to it, having seen what you’ve seen of course... ”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine to do it, if needs be.”
“You’re on your own today too, did I say that already?”
“No.”
“Richard’s taken ill. It’s his heart you see. He was never a well man, I’m sure he will have told you as much.”
“He mentioned it once or twice.”
“I’ll bet,” said Caleb. “We’ve got a special one for you today son. Real special. Never known the like in all my life.” He placed his empty cup on
the bench and led me towards the back of the workshop.
“What is it today?”
“We have,” he said, pulling a white sheet from a pile of beautiful mahogany. “An advanced booking. A reservation if you will.”
“How so?”
“Someone’s been gifted with foresight. Sadly for them it don’t end so good. Ending quickly if the diagnosis is accurate. Small mercies and the like I suppose.”
“They’re planning their own funeral?”
“Right down to the dimensions. The measurements are on the side there.” He pointed to a sheet of gilded paper on the counter, which held a rich blue ink perfectly detailing measurements and outlines. “Even given us a diagram of where the chairs got to be come the big day, though what use it is to him I don’t know. He’d be none the wiser if we took him down to the scrap yard in a potato sack,” he laughed and made his way towards the doorway, picking up his coffee cup as he left.
“Can’t be the happiest of jobs, orchestrating your own funeral,” I muttered, expecting no reply.
“I don’t know. Might help to take your mind off things.”
“It’s hardly a diversion from the point in hand.”
“Suppose so when you look at it that way. Then again it’s second nature to me, I got my details as crystal clear as I can make them. The little lady, she gets confused by fuss. It’s more for her sake than mine of course.”
“And they know for sure they’re dying, I mean sometimes they make mistakes, doctors. Gonna be an expensive coffee table if they end up seeing the year out.”
He shook his head. “Nothing’s certain in this life kiddo, but this poor bastard’s direction is as near as you’re gonna get.”
“Do you know him?”
“Can’t say personally. I heard of him okay. Everyone round here has.”
“Who is it?”
“The writer.”
I felt my heart skip a beat. “Levi?”
“Only one I know. Unless you count those monkeys down at the Evening Post, which few do by general consensus. Last year they mixed up the birthday dates with the funeral dates. A person’s got to be trying to screw up like that.”