Cosmo Cosmolino

by Helen Garner

  He gave her a strange look, but she pranced by with the fingers of both hands shoved deep into her uncontrollable hair, fishing out combs and stabbing them into its tangles which now he saw outlined in a fuzzy halo against the light of the doorway she was approaching, the entrance to the central room of the house.

  He followed, sniffing her wake with dread, but it was untainted by perfume: it smelt like wood or glue and he wondered why. He wondered too whether this was a car-stripping neighbourhood, whether he should offer to go round the corner to the shop for a couple of pasties, whether he could take a quick look round upstairs by asking to use the toilet, and whether she was the modern angry type of woman—whether he should time his announcement with care, or just open his mouth and blurt it out.

  She bounded in four steps across the central room and out through another door on its opposite side, but he resisted her pace and stopped in the middle of the carpet. Even with his sunglasses on, his eyes began to water and he had to screw up his face. Was this the place? The autumn light in the room was dreadful. It bounced in brutal sheets off a large white table that stood right under the window; shafts of it shot out on sharp angles from the backs of white-painted wooden chairs and swam in the curves of white cups, white plates, a white teapot. What he saw and squinted at was a blinding mirage of spotlessness, and yet for all its blaze the room was grubby. The crockery, shoved into piles, was stained with lipstick and gummy with dregs and crumbs; and the chairbacks showed the grey fingerprints of newspaper readers and chip eaters. On the wall near the kitchen door something dark red had exploded, dripped and hardened. All this he registered not in detail but as a general discomfort, a falseness under what proclaimed order; but he did clearly see that the table itself was pocked and snicked. Nailheads broke its surface, and down the length of it ran a deep groove that someone long ago had tried to plug with spackle; where the stuff had dried out and crumbled he saw the thicknesses of white paint that caked the timber.

  He laid his right hand on the left breast pocket of his shirt. The little book was there. It comforted him, and he did not need to open it to find the phrase for this alarming room which, though it pulsated with light to the point where furniture levitated, was only a white-washed tomb, a whited sepulchre.

  ‘There’s nothing here but bones,’ cried the woman gaily from the kitchen. She appeared in the doorway with a flat dish in her hands, holding it out to him and beaming like a housewife on a label. ‘An old carcass. Do you want to have a pick at it?’

  If only she knew how desperate he was. Not for the food—that he could scrounge anywhere, he was not proud—but for her gesture: the offering, the direct gaze, the smile. Self-pity swarmed through him. He kept his eyes on the dried bones and breathed slowly and evenly. At last he looked up. Maxine saw her own reflection in his lenses: a dish thrust out, behind it a shiny nose, a fading smile, a bush of hair.

  ‘Is it a bit too awful?’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ In shame she lowered the plate.

  He put out both hands to reassure her.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It will do very nicely.’

  She laid the dish on the white table and they sat down facing each other over its pitiful contents. So extreme was the light that the shrivelled remains of the chicken seemed about to dematerialise in it: the bones bleached as they stared at them.

  ‘It is awful,’ said Maxine, with sagging shoulders. ‘It’s awful.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said the man. ‘We’ll manage.’

  He hung his cardigan over the back of his chair, pushed up his cuffs, and seized the bird’s poor ribcage in both hands. With one wrench he parted it.

  ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘A little bit of stuffing left inside.’

  Carefully he divided into halves the scraps of meat and seasoning, and passed her a share. With their whole faces tightened against the light they gnawed on what was there. They ate without speaking, without looking at each other. They had no manners. They put the food into their mouths with their bare hands, swallowing herb twigs, sucking dry shreds of flesh out of every crevice.

  The meal was short. When the food was gone they wiped their mouths, cheeks and fingers on two dirty serviettes that lay among the debris, and sat face to face, each with one elbow resting on the table and one hand cupped round the temple nearest the source of the light.

  Uncertainly Maxine took up the game.

  ‘You would eat better than this where you come from, I suppose.’

  The man laughed. ‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a fair way from here,’ he said, lowering his face. ‘Quite a long way north.’

  He would not give an inch, behind his dark glasses. Was there a way to charm it out of him? But she had long ago lost the feel for that. Nothing about him stirred her memory. She could not strike a note off him. She drew blanks, whichever channel she tried. And yet he kept his face, with its twin eggs of green glass, fully turned towards her with a sort of candour, passive, half-smiling, patient. What was he waiting for?

  ‘Would it be all right if I looked around the house?’ he said at last.

  She was out of the room and round the foot of the staircase before he could pick up his cardigan. Still half-blinded, he wandered into the dark hall with relief. The pictures on the wall meant nothing to him as he mounted, with his thongs slapping lightly against his soles, except that they were cock-eyed on their hooks, knocked skew-whiff by the shoulders of someone running past them. These women who skip: at her age. On the landing a single high-heeled shoe lay gaping on its side against the skirting board. He averted his eyes, hoping there would not be underwear. Maxine was already at the top. She hung over the railing to watch him plod after her. She was racking her brains. For a messenger, a courier of import, he was certainly taking his time.

  On the upper floor, closed doors stood to attention. Under each one slid a slice of light as flat as a sheet of paper. The young man in his glasses perceived this as so much geometry, but Maxine noticed the scars on the timber and the skeins of fluff that drifted across them, and remembered guiltily her work, the long contemplations that housework brings—but first she must be given her news. Why was he holding back? She turned to him in a surge, but he spoke.

  ‘And will you show me inside the rooms?’

  She stared at him. How would they ever get to the point? Impatience ran its sharp currents down her legs and she hopped from foot to foot. But he stepped closer to her, and stood almost touching her belly with the backs of his hands. His cardigan hung from his bent arm, a little screen that covered the front of his trousers. She stopped her jigging. A smell she had forgotten emanated from him, the stab of sweat that stiffens the cotton it dries on. She looked up at him. Under his dark glasses he was smiling.

  Ah—so it was not a shed. It was to be this. The trembling cradle tilted, the corner of the curtain rose and fell. Something throbbed, low in the cup of her pelvis.

  ‘Only a glance,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting anything quite so—’

  ‘Anything so what?’ she said faintly, taking a long breath of him and feeling the strength leak out of her legs.

  ‘So sort of grand.’

  ‘Come in here,’ she said. She floated to the nearest door and pushed it open. He lowered his head and without hesitation entered the room. Maxine followed.

  It was ordinary. What mystery can survive the lunchtime mood of houses? Ordinary clothes, emptied of limbs and torsos, sprawled on an ordinary unmade bed, and the room was thick with silence. Its window was closed, the holland blind was drawn, and the air was exhausted and motionless, muffling the smallest sound: their breathing, the brush of an arm against its body, of thigh against inner thigh. Maxine’s legs had turned to sponge. At his elbow she waited for him to put down his cardigan and open his arms; but he was staring at the sheets. He
was thinking of the dank foam rubber strip in the back of the panel van, the scrub patch beside the highway, the shallow sleep through which again and again the road trains smashed, shattering his dream and jerking him upright, gasping and sweating. Behind him the woman was talking.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘I said, how did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Oh . . . I had the address,’ he murmured. His eyes tangled among the folds of the quilt and pillows.

  ‘I’ve been dreaming about this,’ said Maxine. She sat down on the edge of the bed. Looking up at him under her explosion of hair she began to unlace her boots. The room was dim. Were his eyes slowly closing? They were both in a kind of swoon.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said vaguely. ‘People remember their dreams, I’m told. Specially women.’

  For a second she was jealous—how quickly bad habits sprout again—but of course this was his job, his task in the universe. It was mighty; it was nothing personal. She was aware of a smooth internal softening, a preparation by her body of all its organs, glands and passageways. This is much better than love, she thought, doubled up over her feet with her head at knee level. I was wasting my time when I used to be always falling in love, listening to their ideas about what I should be doing and making. I ought to have been a nun. I ought to have locked myself in a tower to build and think until the angel came for me; but now he’s found me and I’m ready for him. By tonight he’ll be gone and I’ll have what I need and be free again: after all it is not too late. Her left boot was off and she started on the other one.

  He was almost asleep on his feet, but he could hardly push her aside and lie down, in spite of the smell of cotton rising from the bed. It was stuffy: he needed air. He mooned across the room and zipped up the blind and the sash. The freedom of the street below flowed in, clearing his head: a boy cursing on a cruising bicycle, a tram chattering across the intersection a block away, and just outside the room a mass of loose and light-filled foliage shifting easily in the air as it moved.

  He pressed his palms against the sill and leaned out into the slow leaves. Craning to the left along the flank of the house, he could glimpse a strip of wild back garden, and right at the bottom of it the rusting ripples of an outhouse roof. This was all right. This was very, very nice. He could take any amount of this.

  A bird called in the tree, a brief warning stab. He recoiled, then forced himself to hang over the ledge and search for it. There it was; he saw the bead of its eye, right in against the trunk. Only a dove. A pretty little head and pearly feathers. It was not horrible. But he hung there, staring at it, his back cold with sweat; and the noises of the street and the tree’s rustling filled his ears, so he did not hear the footsteps pounding up the stairs, and his back was not protected when the owner of the house, swinging her bag out ahead of her, strode into her own bedroom.

  ‘What? Who let you—Do you mind?’

  A woman on her back on the bed. A total stranger with her head between the pillows—barefoot, and arched to pull off her tracksuit pants—and a man leaning out the window—so casual—but as the bag flew through the doorway his head came round over his shoulder with its mouth open to speak; and though the daylight was behind him and his eyes were hidden by an unfashionable pair of dark green glasses, she knew him at once.

  The shoulder pads rose to ear level. She stamped her foot.

  ‘Not you, Alby! I changed my name. I got married, for Christ’s sake. What the hell are you doing here?’

  Maxine saw the man turn, register, and flinch. Her hips dropped to the mattress. The virtue went out of the day. It was the world again: only the world.

  Hot-faced, she pulled her trousers back up and crawled off the bed, gathering her discarded socks and poking her toe into the mouth of her still-warm boot. For the first time in all these years of solitary walking and working Maxine noticed, eyes down and fingers twirling the laces, how ugly were the shapes into which her feet had moulded the leather. I am middle-aged, and I have not looked after myself, she thought. Angels and archangels do not call for women like me.

  Behind her at the open window the man began ponderously to explain himself.

  ‘I’m not Alby,’ he said. ‘I’m Alby’s brother. Alby can’t come yet. He’ll be down soon. But he’s the one who sent me. I’ve got a message for you, if you’re Janet. Alby sends his love. Love to you, Janet, from Alby.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ said the householder sharply.

  ‘My name’s Ray.’

  Maxine caught her breath. Ray. She dared not look up, in case she had heard it wrong. Again she had judged too quickly and given up too soon. With deliberate slowness, controlling her breathing, she doubled the bow of her second boot and got up to face the staring woman in the doorway. Their eyes met on the level.

  ‘And I thought this lady,’ the man went on pointing at Maxine’s back, ‘well I thought she must be you.’

  ‘And will somebody please tell me,’ said the householder, hands on hips, ‘who she is?’

  ‘I’m your new cleaner,’ said Maxine. ‘I found the key under the brick, like you said on the phone. I’ve already done three hours. It’s going to be quite a big job.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the householder. The anger went out of the shoulders of her black linen jacket. ‘So you’re Maxine. You’re not what I’d expected, at all.’

  Thus they were accounted for. Three such people, in the same room. Nobody spoke. But a nameless breeze slid across the windowsill from the autumn afternoon outside, and brushed each of them in turn as it passed into the house, moving, it seemed, in strands. Those lovely words, it seemed! Already the room was gentler. Janet lowered her bag to the floor and dropped it. Maxine raised her palms to flatten her woolly hair. Ray bent his arm so that his cardigan returned to a polite vertical.

  All at once he spoke.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ he said, ‘I’m a bit desperate.’

  The women turned to hear him. They stood side by side.

  ‘I’ve been unemployed—well, unemployable,’ he said, ‘for a long time. I’m trying to change. To change myself.’

  Janet studied him. Fat chance. A born loser. Just like any number of spongeing no-hopers arriving from the north in thongs. Something about his feet, however, pale and archless and pathetically lacking in experience, made her suspend the blade.

  ‘Don’t you ever take off those bloody glasses?’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ray. ‘Sorry.’

  He let them slip down his nose and drop on to his chest, where they dangled on a woven cord. Ah yes. Janet knew the type. She was familiar with those cow’s lashes, the lids that slid with maddening slowness up and down over the lowered, watery blue globes. She recognised in him another broken-spirited, obedient poor bastard, weak in imagination, lacking in drive, a wimp in whom the flame of life burned low; the sort that battens off the mother in a woman and ends up driving her berserk. Her judgement crystallised, and with a grimace she turned aside—but Maxine stood breathless, under her starburst of hair, lit up with wonder and renewed trust: she was witnessing at last the uncovering of the messenger’s eyes.

  Astonished, Janet paused—and that was her mistake, for the look went flashing from Janet to Maxine, from Maxine to Ray, and now Ray turned it, unmodulated by his glasses, straight back on to the mistress of the house. It struck her like a blast of sound: it rocked her. His pupils were bottomless black. The gaze with which he fixed her was as egoless, as scouring, as unblinking as a baby’s, and the responsibility it heaped on her was as total. No! She felt the tiny fingers latch on, their knuckles whitening with the force of their grip: the feeble flesh, the tender skin, the still unhardened bones—edible, devourable, but one did not. She took one big step backwards, but it was too late. The story had already begun.

  Downstairs, Janet pushed the ravaged dish of chicken bones to one side and rolled
the match-stick blind halfway to the sill: but the kick had gone out of the sun. The clouds passed over. It was afternoon.

  ‘Look,’ said Janet across the table. ‘The house is too empty. I hate the house to be so empty. It’s wrong for a house to be so empty when there are people with nowhere to sleep.’

  ‘That,’ said Ray, ‘is a very moral attitude. Most unusual.’

  ‘Moral?’ said Janet. ‘I’m only moral because I’m unhappy.’

  She gave a short laugh, but he saw that she meant it. A grey film lay over her, and her face, despite bright lipstick, was webbed with shadows. Maxine said nothing. She could not take her eyes off Ray; and besides, from lack of practice she had forgotten how conversations were conducted, and had become the kind of person who sits smiling, smiling, and occasionally uttering a non sequitur or a meaningless exclamation—‘We-e-ell!’ or ‘So-o-o!’ or ‘Uh huh!’, making people jump and stare. Now she picked up the wishbone and held it out to Ray. He shook his head, so she snapped it herself, looked confusedly at the pieces, and slipped them into her tracksuit pocket.

  ‘It’s moral, yes,’ said Ray. ‘But you wouldn’t want just anyone to move in, would you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Janet smartly. ‘No dope freaks, no drunks, no woman-haters. No politicos, no hippies. Above all, nobody in a band. Otherwise, I’m not fussy.’

  ‘Would I do?’ said Maxine, focusing suddenly. ‘I don’t know anything about drugs or politics.’ She gave a brilliant, dippy smile. ‘And I’m sort of floating, domestically, at the moment.’

  Janet shrugged. ‘The place is big. We wouldn’t have to see each other, if we didn’t want to.’

  There was a short pause.

  ‘I did notice,’ said Ray, ‘that there was a shed. That would do me.’

  Maxine sat up straighter.

  ‘The shed,’ said Janet impatiently. ‘You’re worse than your brother. Why do you class yourself so low? This dump’s full of empty rooms.’

  ‘I fancied,’ said Ray, ‘that the shed might be cheaper.’