Cosmo Cosmolino

by Helen Garner

  ‘I’m redeemed,’ he said. ‘That’s what it means. The word’s got a meaning. All my debts are paid. But that’s what you don’t want to be told. That’s the thing that you don’t need. Or so you say.’

  The light from the table lamp picked up the bone-form of his head, its ridges, dips and dusky hollows. Janet took one of the cushions off her feet and lay down again, holding it in her arms like a shield, pressing it hard against her chest while her eyes ranged over his face.

  ‘That’ll do for now,’ she said. ‘Thank you. That’ll do.’

  But Ray leaned forward to her over the end of the couch, and she took a breath, for just as his face entered shadow and blurred, she noticed for the first time how the shape of his mouth resembled Alby’s: there was something passionate in its raised peaks and deeply indented corners.

  ‘He can break you, Janet,’ said Ray in a soft, urgent voice.

  Pinned there on her back among the cushions, unable to look away, she shifted her knees awkwardly this way and that, and cleared her throat. ‘I can’t keep fighting,’ she said. She coughed again. ‘That’ll do, Ray. That’s enough for today. For tonight.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, very low. ‘Listen. I used to be a piece of shit. Rubbish. Chucked away into the gutter. I wandered round looking for myself in all the garbage. But he found me. I’m trying to tell you that I’ve been found.’

  Janet gripped her cushion. Their eye-beams collided and tangled. Ray kept going, he kept pushing, hovering over her in the dark of the deep sofa.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Janet,’ he whispered, ‘if you’re full of pride. It doesn’t matter if you’re stiff with it.’

  In the fireplace a last spark exploded. All Janet’s muscles jumped, and melted. She stared up at him. He leaned in closer. Her arms loosened and fell to her sides; her knees relaxed. The sleek cushion, released, slithered off her breasts and tumbled on to the floor. He reached out both hands to where she lay; her eyes glazed and drooped; a charge of warmth flowed from his approaching fingers and brushed against her skin: and then, in the air above her chest, he clenched his fists. He mimed the seizing of lapels, and he gave two brusque shakes, bang, bang, as hard as slaps. Janet’s eyes popped open.

  ‘Don’t pike, sister,’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘This is your chance. Don’t pike.’

  She smelt the meat and onions on his breath. She was afraid she was going to laugh, or sob; but she summoned up what was left of herself, and shot it at him out of her dry eyeballs.

  ‘Pike,’ she said in a choking voice. ‘Who do you think you are. My coach.’

  He dropped his fists and straightened his spine.

  ‘No,’ he said, from high above her, at a proper distance. ‘No, I’m not. I’m nobody special at all.’

  She lay. He stood. Their gazes, blown apart, advanced towards each other’s territory only far enough to respect the border.

  ‘All right,’ said Janet, still breathing shallow. ‘I heard you. We’ll stop. Drop it now. All right.’

  She rolled on to her side and lay curled up, eyes closed, with her hands folded and her thumbs touching her nose, facing the motionless embers. Dismissed, Ray stepped round the end of the couch and turned his back on her, but his feet were unwilling, he had to force himself, and only out in the bare centre of the room did he acknowledge how powerfully his heart was thudding, shaking his chest like a drum and driving the blood right through him so that his whole body focused on her, tight and hard. He heard the little voices gurgling and sniggering in his ear. Go on—go back. What are you waiting for? She’s been around. It’ll be fun. It won’t mean anything. She’s ready for it. What’s the matter with you? Go back. Appalled, he stumbled away towards the stairs.

  But she called after him.

  ‘Put your clean clothes away, why don’t you,’ she said, invisible behind the high back of the couch. ‘There’s a shirt that’s been in that basket for at least a month. Take it upstairs.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ray. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  Ray got to the turn of the stairs, with one arm through the sleeve of the damp parka, before he shook out the shirt and looked at it. He held it away from him by the scruff of the neck—and saw the violated shoulder.

  The bitch—oh, the bitch.

  Something he thought he had concreted over and made airtight cracked in him, and split open. Tears spurted into his eyes, and boiling and gasping, he sat down on the stairs with his head in his hands. What’s happening to me here? What’s Alby trying to do to me? Is this some sort of game, or test? I haven’t got the strength for it. Alby should have warned me. I was not prepared.

  With shaking hands he folded the shirt as best he could, trying to conceal from himself the rag of it, the outraged seam. Then, laying it on the step beside him, he took the book out of his pocket and raised it to his nose. He breathed in a big draught of it and held its cold edges against his lips.

  A shirt, to the saved, was only a shirt. He would never speak about it. He would never complain, never give her the satisfaction—no, in vain might she wait. He would show the world how this was done. He would silently turn the other cheek.

  He rolled the folded shirt round the book, wedged the bundle under his arm, and slowly mounted the rest of the stairs to his room. He turned on the overhead light and stood looking into the grim little room with its bare floor and vine-clogged, unopenable window: this cold box he had chosen to live in.

  He undressed. His heart was still knocking. He switched off the light and crawled naked into his sleeping bag. He was exhausted, but no matter how he turned and settled, his thoughts would not slow down. He reached out for the book, and thrust it under his pillow. Whenever he moved, the sleeping bag’s slick cover rustled like silk against his skin. He tried to lie still. His body pulsed out warmth in surges, and the bag blocked it, collected it in a layer, and beamed it back to him, a troubling cocoon of self-longing. You had to be awake to pray, and he was so tired: in sleep, anything can happen: but he began, murmuring any entreaty that came to mind.

  Janet listened to him plod up the stairs, pause, and head out into the back wing of the house. Then silence. She lay on the sofa shrivelling with shame. She had made a complete idiot of herself; for hours. She had practically set herself up for knock-backs. Even dopy Maxine had wiped the floor with her; and then with Ray she had let her guard down; she had shown her hand, like a lonely farm widow fixated pathetically on her yardman. The thick woven rug that concealed the rips in the couch-back had slipped down and was half-covering her legs; she wriggled under it till it reached her chest. She opened her eyes and noticed, with a dull curiosity, that two hands were still folded on the cushion beside her head. They belonged not to her but to some other woman, one who remembered night words that might be said and was not too proud to say them. What were they? She was too old, too old for this. It would be rhetorical to say O Lord. It would be sentimental to say Our Father. It would be humiliating to say Help me. So she lay on her side with her knees bent and her hands clasped, and she said nothing at all.

  Maxine did not need the lamp to find her way: with practised swings of the hip and shoulder she passed untouched among the furniture, stripped off her clothes in the dark, and dived head-first through the tossed hoop of a flannel nightie into her bed.

  The clash with Janet was already forgotten. Her mind buzzed busily round the prospect of the golden aeroplane game, this fabulous and timely blessing which fate was holding out to her. I don’t even understand how it works! she thought in glee, hugging herself in the dark. It’s like trying to understand a chain letter—it’s like trying to understand infinity!

  This mental sheet lightning that she called thinking could keep her head whirring till all hours of the morning. She brought her attention to bear on her breathing. Its rhythm was haywire, completely off the beam. She set he
rself to count, three in, three out, then in fours, four, four. Her thoughts kept rolling briskly past her like the carriages of a train, clickety clack, clickety clack; but soon, as she counted and breathed and tuned her breaths to her heartbeat, the carriages dissolved into barges which some large engine much further upstream, too far ahead for her to see, was towing steadily along a canal in a long and flexuous line: the barges made no sound in the water but a gracious shoosh and hush, and their wakes pulsed outwards in a V to ripple against the verge of the canal where Maxine lay on her back in tall, flower-studded grass, under a warm blanket of sun. She sighed, and turned on to her side. Something prickly stroked her cheek. She pushed at it with a feeble hand, and settled herself again. But once more it tickled, pressing its point into the skin under her eye. Vaguely she swatted it away, and slept.

  It was the bride.

  Since the day of its creation, dust had gathered in the folds of its blue garment, and its grass-bursts, once dynamic, had withered until they were merely brittle. When blood in a thin red broth flowed again and then again on to Maxine’s wads of cotton, she had acknowledged, sadly, that the bride was not as potent as advertised. Her respectful usages ceased; but she had developed a soft spot for her creature, and while no longer venerating it or looking to it for help, she came to dote on it and to think of it as a toy; it did not occur to her to take it down.

  Now it had been sprung from its perch, and was sharing her pillow.

  Maxine slept on, under the rattling roof of her shed; but her heart was wakeful. Dreams came, and peppered her. She screwed up her face, giggled hoarsely, rocked her head from side to side, but thick and fast they pelted her, in salvos, in fusillades, and each was a variation on the same theme: the baby. She was ready to have it, she was glad, she was not anxious, she was going to have it any minute now, there was the bed, the window was open, the sun was shining, everything was clean and ready, she was alone in the clean bright ready room, the sheet was stretched tight, her helpers had just stepped out for a second to take the air, they were competent, they were cheerful, they were waiting, they would come running the minute she called, it was simply a matter of putting down her tools, she merely needed to stop being busy, all she had to do was lay aside her other occupations, to choose the moment, to acknowledge it, to make up her mind to go to the bed and lie down, to say now—and she would have it, out it would pop, she would give birth to it, it would surge out all blind and bloody into the light, it would be born—and she would sing to it sweetly, Cosmo, Cosmolino, world, little world, and suckle it and pet it and hold it on her knee and teach it, and soon it would be strong enough to crawl away and sit up by itself in the middle of the room and eat an apple.

  Not long after midnight the rain let up. A dry breeze moved in through the propped flaps of Maxine’s door. In her sleep she grimaced and laughed, she sang a husky tune; but so insistent was the phantom baby’s pestering that at last it drove her out of bed.

  Barefoot in her flannel nightdress and still thickly asleep, with one hand reaching sideways to slide along the wall and the other playing in the air in front of her face, Maxine glided through the furniture and past her extinguished hurricane lamp, and stepped out into the rustling sepia universe of the garden.

  Her feet were instantly soaked and so was the hem of her nightdress, but she did not feel it. Her fingertips frisked brick, wire, the bark of trees, and while her face, as it parted the air, kept quailing and flinching in dread of a collision or a precipice, her feet were fearless in their steady progress: on and on she went. There was a house, but far, and to get to it she had to wade knee-deep across a paddock of velvet out of which shoved flowers in blunt, buttery clots. Closer in she encountered a cross-current of intense agitation through which she flailed a passage, sweating and hyperventilating, but soon her fingers found plaster, a building closed round her and took the distance out of the air, and though Spanish combs as tough as spiders squatted in formation on the walls, she surged past them up the levels of a massive staircase so brilliantly designed that mounting it was easier than descending: her throat could not swallow rills of laughter at her power and weightlessness.

  But when she reached the top, where echoes should have ricocheted off stone, the galleries of the castle were clogged with hostile darkness. She was sure, sure that her eyes were open, but she could not see. Where was the baby? How would it know her, and choose her? How would it come to her? There was no sound.

  Ray heard someone laughing. He heard the shuffling of feet. He heard them, and then he heard them stop.

  He lay heavily on his back.

  Taking great pains, as though he were awake, he worked his way through the rooms of his life, rehearsing the acoustics of each one until the place where he was sleeping came back to him and named itself, the dusty concrete chamber where faithfully, once again, he had laid out his pallet. The great ovens beside him were silent now, and the silence, like the darkness of this room without windows, was total. It blocked his ears and kept his thoughts stuffed inside his skull, where they could form themselves only in an intimate, insanely articulated voice, tight as the ticking of a tiny clock.

  She’s come back for you. She’s come from a long way away. She’s been travelling, travelling, always coming after you. She hasn’t forgotten you. She loves you and she wants to lie beside you. Her fire’s gone out. She’s cold and she will always be cold and she needs someone to warm her. Poor girl. Poor girl. It’s not so much to ask. It’s a long time till morning.

  It was wrong, it must be, this visit of the succubus: it was a kind of repeating fit, a nightmare: and yet he could not truly say that he was afraid of her. She was small—only a girl—and she was lonely; and he felt such shocking pity for her. The thought of her sent eruptions of tenderness undulating through him; and at night like this, when the narrow tunic of salvation was off him and his body with its cashmere skin and jutting hip-bones seemed under his fingers so smooth as to be almost pure, almost beautiful, the stone heart woke in him; it became flesh, and lived.

  She was stalking nearer, with tentative steps, feeling her way towards him. Her palm grazed the length of the cement wall, skimming over its protuberances, and her soles brushing the floor (they must be bare, since he had seen her shoes consumed by fire) hardly imprinted the dust, she was so meagre. What form would she take, this time?

  ‘Yes,’ he said, whispering so as not to put her to flight. ‘Come here. Come to me.’

  He heard breathing near him, careful, slow, the little catch in it of her uncertainty; then a voluminous upward rush, and a soft collapse of cloth.

  In one sweep he had the bag unzipped and his legs free of it. He gathered his limbs together, preparing to stand, and threw up his arms to her in the helpless dark, but all he found, where he expected her head to be, was a nimbus, springy, crackling, dry. Before his fingers could probe its centre, two hands, hardened by the desert where she had wandered, seized his shoulders and flattened them gently on to the padded bedding. He let his knees go and lay down, with the backs of his hands against the floor. She must be on her haunches now, beside him: her hair stroked him, her breath came and went on his chest as if she could see in the dark and were studying him, making up her mind where to begin.

  Elated and aroused, made daring by the intensity of his blindness, he opened his mouth to cry out her name, but a palm harder than his own and smelling of pepper and ash covered it, and at the same instant a moist muscle flitted in spirals down his belly, butted against the root of him, and began in a warm exhalation to flick at him, making him bounce and spring. The air popped with sparks which he felt and heard but could not see; then a leg slid across his hips, and she lowered herself on to him as if he were a saddle, guiding him with her fingers into a swelling cleft where he was swallowed and bathed in a silky grip.

  The gag was raised from his mouth and he groaned out loud.

  Once, twice, she rocked, three
times, five; drew back off him, excruciating, hovering over him, holding only the tip of him and threatening to vaporise; for an eternity she hung there, musing, brooding on the chaos with no sound; then she plunged on him again and like a crude boy he sobbed and let go: he burst into her and felt the convulsion go rippling up the quilted ridges he was held in. He smelt the change in her odour: a new metallic sharpness that soured his teeth like lemon without even touching his lips, and freshened every crevice of his sleeper’s mouth.

  Speechless, sightless with the desire to bless, he curved his arms round her, he enfolded her; and for the first time she allowed it. She sighed; she murmured; she laid her head with its tickling aura into the cradle of his shoulder. She rested on him. She let him feel the faithful lope of her heartbeat.

  Then with a brief, firm pressure on his chest, she broke his grip, raised herself clean off him, and was gone. Air flowed over his belly where she had lain. He shivered, and opened his eyes.

  It was a long time since he had let himself go this far without waking at the peak of it; but his body was loose and heavy with a sickly, still-fizzing sweetness, and he was too contented to collect himself for shame. Letting his eyelids droop again, he fumbled for the spread bag and wrapped himself in it, meeting no damp patch, then turned on his side, away from the window where morning when it came would fade the black hooked blanket to a rectangle of grey, and bent his knees, rubbing his feet together. If he lay still, if he warmed his hands between his thighs, he could slip back into it: a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. And he did; and dreamt that he wandered into a city cut by generous avenues, stitched by lanes, and studded with towers and bells and courtyards above whose fountains as they played hung blurred, passionate stars.

  Maxine came to herself in the upstairs hall outside the bathroom. The gentle trickling of the cistern oriented her, and she padded away from the lavatory and down a perfectly ordinary staircase, through the living room and the kitchen, and across the blank, wet garden to her shed.