Cosmo Cosmolino

by Helen Garner

  She slipped between the bedclothes and curled up, holding herself in her arms. Her bladder was empty. Its flatness rested pleasantly in the bowl of her pelvis, a comfortable absence of anxiety. There must be a nightie in the bed somewhere, but it could wait. She lay in the dark, broad waking.

  In a while, when the blankets had loosened again with her warmth, she felt around on the fruitbox beside her for the matches, and carefully lit the hurricane lamp. Up out of its clean crease slid the bud of flame. She adjusted it, lowered the glass hall, and drew both arms back under the clothes.

  In jerks, it seemed, then with a smoother radiance, the lamplight grew and spread. It washed in stages across the crowded domain, and watching it from her nest, she saw how it hesitated at obstacles: the tiny cradle’s tremulous scaffolding, the dense protest of a cupboard door, the flourish of a chairback where a damp cloth hung: how it nosed this way and that, located a passage, and rushed on. Soon the standing furniture, like a flock grazing, was bathed in a steady, mild and shadow-making element. Maxine bunched up a pillow under her neck, and lay surveying her handiwork.

  She tilted her head back and looked up for her poor bride.

  The shelf was bare.

  She had to dive and fumble for the thing. It had fallen head-first down the crack between the fruit-box and the pillow, and there it stuck, undignified, with its blue skirt hitched up around its cruppers and the tips of its grass-bursts gesturing inanely in the dusty gold air.

  Maxine laughed. ‘You look silly,’ she said. ‘You are silly.’

  Sitting up, she seized the bride by its straw crossbeam and pulled it up from its hiding place.

  The sudden movement brought forth a bubble of hot fluid from between Maxine’s thighs. She let the bride slip to the floor, burrowed under the covers and pushed one finger into herself. She whipped it out, and seeing that it was not blood and would not stain, she wiped the colourless dew on to the folds of the sheet, and lay back down. Her whole body sank into a lagoon of wellbeing. Any minute now she would be too hot, and would have to kick off the top blanket; but her thighs and belly, humming with warmth, struck a perfect temperature and sustained it. Every muscle glowed. She was content.

  The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall. How long this long night was! Perhaps it would go on forever. Maxine followed with her eyes, until their lids relaxed and drooped, the folding filament of smoke sent up towards the roof, but never quite reaching it, by the cleanburning, well-trimmed lamp.

  At dawn, a bird began to sing in the saturated garden, a humble riff of notes, repeated in descending triplets.

  Janet opened her eyes. She saw the wrong wall, the wrong picture, the wrong pattern of cracks in the plaster. It took her several moments of thick pondering to work out where she was, and to identify the room’s queer smell as that of cold ashes. She sat up; she was still wearing all her clothes. The night’s mortifications rushed back at her, and she threw off the rug and stepped in her socks to the window.

  The rain must have stopped hours ago: the house-sides opposite were sparkling, and the tips of their high chimneys were flushed with a secret, tentative pink. I have become, she thought with sudden clarity, a know-all, a bully and a prig. I am a really unbearable person. Ashamed and sore, fed up with sorriness and shame, she leaned her forehead against the glass.

  Her breath coated it with a pearly cloud which came and went, spread and shrank, according to the rhythm of her lungs. She saw that the outline of this haze was new every time, a completely fresh and original shape, and that the vapour itself was composed of minuscule droplets, each of which prismed with colour on the flawed glass as it blossomed and died.

  How fleeting everything is, she thought. How soon gone.

  With this thought, so hackneyed to her, so unoriginal, came a wave of strange relief, almost a kind of comfort. She moved away from the glass. It cleared; and through it she saw a small bird land on a twig. It flipped, perched, whirred, only a few inches in front of her face. Its movements were not fluid, but were rather a series of different postures which it struck one after another, held briefly, then broke to shift, shift, shift again. Janet’s mouth dropped open. She contemplated. The bird was fat, with a pale brown belly and darker wings patterned, like its head, with a row of evenly spaced white dots, as perfect as an aboriginal painting; and on its back, just above its stumpy tail feathers, she saw a flash of red.

  Janet’s heart was oddly light, floating high in the cavity of her chest. She turned away from the window and stooped over the couch to plump up its cushions and rearrange the woollen cover; and as she stooped, the dark column swelled behind her and slightly to the left, not touching her, and not visible unless she should frankly turn and face it. This she dared not do; but she straightened her back and bowed her head, in respect, while the column insisted behind her left shoulder, calm as a soldier, tenacious, incorporeal, and endlessly patient.

  Was something burning? Maxine rolled over. Yes, but only the lamp, still faithfully simmering on the box by the bed; and already the cactus-shaped flame was superseded by a milky, rose-coloured light that leaked into the shed through the unpolished panes and round the doors which stood partly open. The rain had stopped, and a bird was calling in the garden: a dove, quietly practising its tune. Maxine wound down the wick and blew out the lamp.

  The bride, poor scrap, lay in its inky skirt and hood on the ground beside the bed where last night it had slid. The air above it was dead: its energy was used up. Not a buzz, not even a crackle. I will take it apart, thought Maxine; right this minute. I gave it a chance, and it failed. I will pull it to bits and burn it.

  She tunnelled into her clothes, pulled on her boots, and picked up the bride by one leg. But halfway through the stand of furniture she noticed a piece of cloth hanging from the tip of a chairback. It was striped, domestic, out of its element. It was a teatowel. In here.

  She stood still for a moment, thinking, then folded the teatowel into a neat square. She wedged the bride into a cleft of the chairback, and turned away to rummage among some sheets of paper on her workbench, one of which she drew out and rolled into a cylinder. Her face was vaguely smiling, but as she rolled she was already scanning the shed. Somehow she must clear a conduit through which a thousand dollars’ worth of energy might flow to her. She let her gaze roam smoothly over her assorted creations. It settled, finally, on the twig cradle. The little thing stood on the very end of the workbench, trembling like a well-bred dog, ready, avid to be made use of, dying to be of service.

  No sun reached Ray’s window, but through the walls the bird called, and he woke on his side, utterly relaxed, as if while he slept all the knots and tangles in him had been untied. He crept out, and crouched in the greyness to flatten out his sleeping bag. The crux of his body, where hair brushed his thighs and his clump of genitals loosely hung, gave off an intimate, salty whiff. He paused. It was a scent he had forgotten, natural but at the same time disagreeable, like fish, or seaweed. Puzzled, he sat back on his heels, but where he expected only cold to be, soft cloth caressed his buttocks. He leapt up, and turned on the light.

  A threadbare, cream-coloured garment lay on the floor beside his foam-rubber strip. It was patterned with small flowers, and the neck of it was trimmed with tattered and rather grubby lace.

  He looked at it.

  No.

  He poked out one foot and stirred its folds.

  No. Not possible. Absolutely not.

  He seized his towel off the door-handle and covered himself, then stooped and picked up the garment with fastidious fingers. A woody, peppery perfume rose from it.

  No. His heart gave one slow, colossal thump, and the shock reverberated along every vessel, right out to the tips of his nails and hair.

  He closed his eyes and leaned the point of one sh
oulder against the cold plaster; but he hardly needed support. The disbelief that was suspended in him threatened to raise him off the floor. He felt so bamboozled, so ridiculous, that it was almost exhilarating. If he had opened his mouth, mad laughter would have come rushing out.

  If this were true—if this were possible—then what would—what must—No. Stop now. Follow that thought where it led, and everything he’d gained and earned, all his plans, would shatter. Swallow it, brick it into a bunker. Never speak of, never think of it again.

  He dropped the nightdress and kicked it into a corner. He shook his hands in the air as if to dash them free of something.

  But he felt so well.

  He opened the door and stuck his head out into the hall. The house was silent. The rain had stopped. From two streets away he heard the croon of traffic. He looked right along the upper storey of the house, past the locked room and the bathroom and Janet’s bedroom near the stairs, past the two anonymous rooms where once or twice he had peered in at the sad, unsorted debris of earlier households, and as far as the ornate door of the very front room with the balcony, the one that had no lock but was always closed. The mood of the hall was different: the door of the front room was ajar.

  Back behind the house, in the garden, the bird worked on its riff again. Nothing else stirred. Ray crept out and along the hallway. Janet’s door was open: he braked, but the blind was down, the room was grey-shadowed, and the bed was flat and undisturbed. He tiptoed past the other two rooms and came to a stop outside the front one, between whose door and jamb stood a narrow pillar of yellow. No movement. From inside, a drip of water plopped, then another: plip. He leaned forward against the heavy timber, and pushed.

  The room was enormous. Except for a couple of brimming saucepans stationed on the floorboards under leaks, it was completely empty: but its two french windows, though closed, were glossy with morning, for the room faced due east. The intensity of light grew as he entered: it grew and swelled like a vast orchestral chord, and wearing his towel like a loin-cloth he paced forward, grimacing, into the radiance of an exuberant sunrise. An observer might even have thought he was dancing. He wrenched open the right-hand window and burst out on to the balcony.

  How could he not have noticed how high the house was built? Through the bald stubs of a wisteria vine he saw the winter sky roll away across the city and the plain to a horizon where great loaves of cloud lolled against a low mountain range: and up out of this bed of mist and rock rippled band after band of colour, ridges of brick-pink, smoke-grey, lavender, shuddering upwards through the chill air like undulations working their way up from the bottom of a river. Ray’s heart was in his throat. Electric power poured through his limbs. He felt a violent, a pagan urge to cry out, to sing, to scramble over the rickety balustrade and beat away above the glittering streets, jostling the birds and shouting canticles of praise.

  At least for breakfast there was bread.

  Janet hacked it into stale slabs and toasted them while the kettle boiled. The smell brought Maxine in from the shed, picking her way across the puddled garden with the teatowel up her jumper and a roll of cartridge paper in her hand.

  ‘I thought you didn’t eat bread any more,’ said Janet, straight-faced. ‘I thought it made you go all mouldy inside.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Maxine, sliding the teatowel discreetly on to the corner shelf, ‘I might make an exception, just for today. Look, Janet. Look what I brought you.’

  She untied the sheet of paper, lifted off the tissue covering, and held it up across her chest like a scroll. Janet turned to look, with the buttery knife raised. It was a pastel drawing, very dense and worked, of a sea- or river-scape: the banks were dusk-coloured, rapidly being obscured by night, though on the water still glimmered steadily a furrow left by a passing boat; and right down the centre of the picture, dividing it exactly in two and frustrating the careless glance, a column of darkness loomed, an elegant, awesome pillar of smoke.

  Janet’s heart bounced. Her knees trembled. She stuck the knife into the honey jar.

  ‘I’ll buy it,’ she said. ‘Will you sell it?’

  ‘No,’ said Maxine. She re-rolled the drawing with deft movements, doubled the ribbon and began the bow.

  ‘I’ll pay you,’ said Janet. ‘How much?’

  Maxine held it out, neatly rolled and tied. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I’m giving it to you.’

  ‘You’re poor,’ said Janet. ‘Let me pay you.’

  Maxine laughed. ‘Take it,’ she said. ‘If it means something to you, then I must have done it for you.’

  ‘But your game,’ said Janet. ‘You need money. For your golden thing—the aeroplane.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Maxine with a shrug. ‘The money will turn up.’ She held out the scroll to Janet. ‘Take it. You’ve been good to me. It’s yours.’

  Abashed, Janet took the drawing with both hands, and opened her mouth to ask the next question; but Maxine’s eyes glowed, glazed, and refocused past Janet’s ear, and a convulsion of amorous eagerness transformed her face.

  ‘Hullo, hullo, Ray,’ she carolled, shouldering Janet aside and rushing up to him. ‘You look beautiful this morning. I see you’re wearing healing colours. You must have slept well—did the bird wake you? What did you dream of?’ She pinned him from under her lowered brow with a dreadful, scorching ogle.

  Janet saw him recoil, saw his bright face fade and go panicky. She was stabbed with pity: oh, poor Maxine. She was hopeless—hopeless. She had a bottomless pit of tactical blunders at her disposal. Someone had to help her, to advise her, or she would never get what she longed for. Janet laid her hand on the back of Maxine’s neck, and Maxine, glancing up at her like an over-excited child calmed by its mother, subsided.

  ‘Sit up, for God’s sake, you two,’ said Janet. ‘Breakfast’s ready—sit up.’

  So they ate together after all, they offered each other bread, and milk, and coffee; and they were as cordial and uneasy with one another as strangers on the morning after a testing journey who, aware that they may have betrayed more of themselves in the night than they had meant to, scarcely know in daylight where to put themselves, for fear of their own openness, and of what might next be required of them.

  Ray got himself quickly back on to an even keel. It had never happened. It? What it? He was firm. He would go to the wire on this. But he was always on his guard, ready for the intimacy to be presumed upon, and though Maxine’s manner towards him did not change, though she said not a word about the whereabouts of the nightdress, which he had bundled up and kicked out of sight into a corner, the suspense was terrible. It was wearing him out. He slept with a chair wedged under his door handle; but in the public rooms of the house her ardour intensified and became a burden to him, a gauntlet of smiles and strokings which he had to run whenever he staggered in from work exhausted and half-frozen, craving only a hot shower and a feed and a couple of hours to read his book before he crashed into sleep.

  She would run him to ground anywhere, she had no shame: pestering him while he picked gloomily at the bones of the cold rabbit, tapping on the bathroom door, yoohooing outside it while he was in there at the mirror shaving, or sitting on the dunny reading the newspaper; she even followed him along the upstairs hallway when once he tried to visit the big front room again; but it was closed, and to choke her off he had to crouch down in the hall and pretend to be inspecting the timber floor for borers. That impressed her too: now she thought he knew everything.

  At the same time she started pressuring him to join some loony pyramid scam that she wanted to be part of. Blokes at work, specially those mad gamblers the Irish labourers, were into it too, but casually, cynically, while for Maxine the scheme carried an idealistic meaning that put the wind up Ray almost as much as her adoration did. He would not touch the game with a barge-pole, and neither, to his surprise, would Janet.

 
Besides, he had saved, by self-denial and by camping for nothing in Janet’s comfortless house, more money than he had ever possessed in his whole life before, and when Alby at last came down to get him out of here, they would be able to go out and rent a place together straight away. This month Ray’s savings had broken through the four-figure barrier, and, awestruck by his own self-discipline, he segregated his opening thousand by rolling up the wad of notes in the first thing his hand fell on in the dark, and stashing it in the dirty clothes carton under the window of his room. For the first time in his life Ray had done something that would impress his brother. Alby would not credit it. Alby would demand to be shown. The thought of this triumph made Ray’s head spin with joy.

  Maxine, meanwhile, had selected her sacrifice, her precious thing to sell, but she had no buyer. Janet was an obvious candidate: she cherished the cradle, had witnessed its power, and could probably scrape up the asking price; but Janet would also know what Maxine planned to do with the money, and Maxine lost her nerve at the prospect of another blast of that articulate and hostile disapproval. As for Ray: since despite her best efforts he flatly refused to join the game, and because what she needed from him was far more intimate than money, she saw that it would get her nowhere to press him, and soon gave it up.

  But all the while, as the weeks passed and passed, her urgency grew. She laid aside her tools, and cleaned all day for money. They heard her on the phone under the stairs each evening, calling the merest acquaintance, the dimmest connection from the most imaginary past, pestering, persuading, pleading: they heard her deep, tearing sighs. What if the pyramid’s energy-flow should flag before she could bring in two guests and afford a ticket? She took to carrying the twig cradle, quivering on her outstretched palms, out of the house and along the streets with her wherever she went; but the world, previously so rich to her with its constant swarm and flutter of meaning, its brilliant auras and suave rainbows of psychology, was daily shedding its glory. A pale whisk in the corner of her eye was only a dirty plastic bag stuck on a branch. The pavements, once alive with phosphorescence, were nothing but grit. Faces were flat maps of weakness and regret, and she read them awkwardly, like anyone else, making mistakes and having to ask questions whose answers disappointed her. Where she had veered lightly, she now marched flat-footed, with her eyes pinned to the ground in case of ordinary luck: dropped coins, stamp booklets or unscratched lottery tickets. Something had got out of hand, but in her obsession she did not even ask herself what it was.