Ritual

by Jo Mazelis

  The sailor’s daughter had filled her mouth with bread and her jaws worked at it energetically. She nodded then lifted the cup to her lips and drank. Some of the wine escaped her lips and dribbled over her chin, down her neck falling onto the collar of her white wrap.

  ‘Shall I call him down to sup? Wake him from his rest?’

  The sailor’s daughter barely paused except to cram a chunk of cheese in her mouth, then nodded.

  Margaret crossed the room pausing to look down on Esmerelda who still slept, her thumb jammed in her mouth, while her shut eyelids rippled with visions from a dream. Then once more from the corner of her eye Margaret thought she saw a grey movement as if someone had stealthily passed by. She shivered and wondered if she was not sickening for an illness, as in a fever the world may seem corrupt and horribly altered.

  She went upstairs to her father’s chamber and pushed the door open. He lay upon the bed, deep in sleep, his chest bared and his breath so shallow and slow that she scarcely perceived it.

  ‘Father?’ she said in a low voice. She crept closer afraid that he would not waken, yet somehow also afraid that he would; for he would be ashamed to be caught there after such lust and idleness. His arms were flung out on either side of him and his palms were open to the heavens, his sinewy fingers curled partly open like the petals of certain wild flowers at dusk.

  ‘Father,’ she said again, watching his face intently. Then her gaze drifted to his chest and she saw a small wound over his heart and as she looked a bright red bead of blood appeared and slowly trickled into the gulley at the centre of his chest where it stopped in a narrow pool.

  She looked about her as if searching for some other witness to this strange occurrence. Her eye caught sight of the carved whalebone spoon on the ledge where she had last seen it. Its handle had once been round like the blunt head of a seal but now it was a sharp point more like the long beak of a bird and at its tip something red shone wetly as if it had just been dipped in fresh blood.

  ‘Father!’ she cried out and shook his shoulder in terror. ‘Wake Father, for pity’s sake!’ She was certain he was dead; murdered by the sailor’s daughter with that carved object that was named a spoon but was really an evil device. Made by distant creatures who were ungodly, heathen, misshapen and called Belial, Azazel, Satanail. It was a diabolical thing, capable of puncturing the flesh with swift poison.

  ‘Daughter?’ His gentle voice seemed at first distant, as if he were speaking from faraway. ‘It is a false voice,’ she said to herself, ‘Beelzebub can take the guise of the good and make all seem sweet with his tongue.’

  ‘What ails you, child?’ He was sitting up in bed, pulling up the covers to hide his naked chest.

  She could not speak. It seemed as if her words would go into the air like hooks and all they caught would be sucked back into her throat on an intake of air. She shook her head and turned from him, going on swift feet down the stairs so fast she had the sensation once again that she was flying.

  How strange then, how wondrous was the scene in the kitchen, for there sat Esmerelda on her stepmother’s lap, her laughing face uplifted, cheeks plump and glowing, her eyes bright and dancing. There is such music in a child’s burbling giggle it lifts the heart, she thought, and wondered at it. Moments before she had been cast down and full of fear. She had judged the sailor’s daughter to be selfish and indolent and dangerous, now she saw how the false mother dandled her stepchild on her knee and laughed and smiled and fed her currants.

  You should be happy, Margaret said to herself, this is what you yearned for and now the happy day has arrived. Yet a greater fear stirred in her agitated heart which could be likened to the moment cream becomes butter and its elemental nature is entirely changed and can never be changed back. Her fear was that of a deposed king – she would be toppled from her rightful place and neither love nor consideration nor obedience would anymore be hers.

  Her father came downstairs and stood at the stair door hearty as a king with his hands on his hips, stopping to feast his eyes on the domestic harmony before him.

  ‘And what have we here? A pretty sight indeed!’

  Silently and almost unseen Margaret crossed the room, lifted the latch on the door and stepped outside.

  The yard was quiet, and made strange by the snow that covered everything. I must make my own way in the world, she thought, and turning, meaning to go back into the house, she perceived a figure stepping from behind the high hedge in the lane. He was wrapped in a grey cloak that mingled with the deep shade under the trees. Only his face showed white, his domed brow, black eyes and blacker eyebrows, his long nose and grey streaked beard. She knew him at once; it was the sailor.

  He stepped towards her, the snow creaking underfoot, half of his face was smiling, but only half for an old wound had paralysed the right side and a long silvery scar marked his cheek from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

  ‘So you are his eldest girl, then?’ he said.

  She nodded and gestured for him to follow her into the house.

  ‘There’s time yet,’ he said. She frowned wondering at his meaning.

  ‘I have been to places you wouldn’t dream of. Seen things beyond the world’s telling. And this,’ he said, ‘I brought for you.’ From under his cloak he took an object that glowed white and was as slender as Margaret’s forearm. It was like the whalebone spoon that had so entranced her father, but smaller. ‘See here now, girl, there’s a leaping stag and here a lizard, there a running hare!’

  She took it reluctantly from his outstretched hand, sensing trickery.

  ‘My poor wife died these five weeks past,’ he said and clasped her hand. ‘Like your poor mother was taken from thee. His wife from him.’ He nodded towards the house. ‘So now there is a tally to be made. One for one is fair exchange and the empty ship needs ballast.’

  Understanding at last his meaning she pulled away violently, drawing both her hands back and, without thinking, sharply pulling the tip of the carved spoon to her breast.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried, for she felt a sharp pain. She looked down at the place on her apron over her heart and saw a tiny spot of blood; dark and small as if an insect had alighted there.

  ‘That’s once,’ he said and, leaning forward, kissed her.

  THE FLOWER MAKER

  Amanda was nine years old. She lived with her mama and papa in an apartment on the Rue St Denis. Mama, Papa, little mouse, Amanda and her collection of beautiful German dolls. It was 1940. Mama wasn’t well. She had a bad head and lay most days in the shuttered room at the end of the hall. The door was always closed. Their maid, Julienne, came every morning to clean the house and wash their clothes and to tell Amanda that she was a very bad girl, a spoiled girl. But Amanda tried hard to be good. She whispered, she tiptoed so that she wouldn’t wake Mama. She never made a mess, was careful not to scatter crumbs when she ate her bread and she folded her clothes and put them away in the dresser when it was time to go to bed.

  As it was the Christmas vacation and Mama was still not well and Papa had to go to his office, Amanda spent most of her time alone in her room. From her window she watched Monsieur Arbot across the way. As the weather was wintry and dark, even in the middle of the day, he had the gaslight on in his little shop. There were not so many flowers then, because it was winter, because of the war.

  Lately he had been selling flowers made of tiny scraps of fabric; the silk and satin and tulle of long-ago ball gowns, the silvery slippery linings of expensive coats and jackets. Amanda had seen a dark-haired woman go in there once, twice, sometimes three times a week. She carried a large loose package wrapped in newspaper and string. And although the parcel was big it was easy to see that it was light; like a piece of imprisoned air. The woman had a face that was very narrow and pale, with a small pointed nose and big eyes with dark shadows under them. She did not have a winter coat, just an old shapeless jacket that she pulled tight around her thin body. She wore black lace-up shoes, no stockings and no socks e
ither. On her head she tied a woollen scarf that might have once been red, but was now faded to a mucky uneven pink.

  If Monsieur Arbot had a customer inside the shop she waited outside, hugging her newspaper package and moving from one foot to the other as if the pavement burned the soles of her feet. When the customer had gone, she went inside and laid her bundle on the counter, then crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself. Monsieur Arbot stood opposite her on the other side of his counter; he had a small paraffin stove back there and stayed near it for most of the day. Carefully, he unwrapped the package the woman had brought, opening it out so that the artificial flowers lay in a loose bunch before him. Usually, when that was done, he would get a white bowl from the shelf and fill it with steaming coffee from the pot he kept on top of his stove. He put it on the counter top, then nodded at it, which was the cue for the woman to pick it up. She wrapped both hands around it.

  Amanda decided that she would ask her papa for a few copper coins so that she could buy some of the flowers. Amanda, although she was only nine years old, sensed in a barely understood way that she wanted possession of two or three of those strange flowers so that she could understand better the woman who made them, and understand too Monsieur Arbot, and the shortage of real flowers and everything beyond that; everything that seems to radiate outwards from the little flower shop with its soft gas light that turned the snow on the pavement outside yellow.

  ‘Papa, please can I have some money, so that I can buy Mama a present to cheer her up?’

  Papa smiled, though Amanda could see that sadness hid somewhere on his face – perhaps it was in his eyes, or in the set of his shoulders. He leaned to one side in the winged armchair by the fire, lifting one hip so that he could reach into his pockets for the loose change he kept there.

  ‘May I go tomorrow? May I tell Julienne you said I might?’ She was excited now, and wanted time to fly away; for the hands on all the clocks to suddenly give up their slow, barely perceptible progress and spin faster and faster until it was morning.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said and patted her warm little face which he found to be as soft and smooth as the delicate skin on the inside of a woman’s thigh. ‘Yes, tell Julienne I said you could go.’

  The next day Julienne grudgingly unlocked the apartment door and watched as Amanda disappeared down the stairs to the street.

  There was very little traffic in that part of the town; the odd automobile, sometimes an army truck, a horse-drawn carriage or a hand wagon pulled slowly by tired country people

  Amanda crossed the street and when she reached the pavement outside the florist’s she turned to look for her window in the apartment block opposite. She saw it almost straight away even though there were many windows. Her curtains were red, the brightest red there was. She had picked them herself; back before Mama got so sick.

  Before she’d left her room Amanda had put her favourite doll on the window ledge facing out so that the doll could watch her. She saw her doll standing behind the glass, with the red curtains on either side, and remembered the ballet she had gone to see when she was little, Coppelia. Amanda waved at the doll, wishing, but also fearing, that the doll would wave back. She didn’t, of course, but Amanda felt glad to sense the doll’s eyes watching her; nothing could hurt her as long as the doll was there. Or at least if something did happen, if the soldiers or a perhaps a monster came and stole Amanda away, then at least the dolls would know. They wouldn’t think she had abandoned them.

  Thus satisfied, the little girl turned her attention to the display in Monsieur Arbot’s brightly lit window. The snow had almost gone; only grey dirty heaps remained in dark places hidden from the sun.

  She stood looking carefully at the tall metal buckets that held the real flowers as well as the flowers that had been made from fabric. The ledge of the shop, now that she was at street level, hid from view the other side of the counter where Monsieur Arbot warmed himself and where he kept brown paper, string, thin wire and a wooden cash box.

  Amanda pushed open the door to the shop and entered. Monsieur Arbot looked up at the sound of the door and at first wore an expression of bewilderment as he had expected to see a customer at eye level with him.

  ‘Bonjour Monsieur Arbot,’ Amanda said politely, remembering how her mama had always addressed shopkeepers.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Bonjour Mademoiselle.’ But he didn’t smile, merely gazed at the child blankly.

  ‘I want to buy some flowers. For my mama, as she is sick.’

  He grunted miserably in response and flapped his hand both inviting her to get on with her errand and dismissing the child at the same time.

  Amanda went to inspect the artificial flowers first. The ones inside the shop were somewhat forlorn, the fabrics used to make these were dull; brown tweeds and grey and dark-blue gabardine. As objects they still possessed some charm, but lacked the bright triumphant beauty of the ones in the window. Amanda was surprised by this and now understood why only the best ones with the richest fabrics took pride of place in the window.

  She went to look at these next and saw with delight that not only were they just as beautiful close up as they had seemed from afar, but the different fabrics of each leaf and petal brought back distant memories of life before the war, before her mama became ill. The flower-printed crepe, the shiny sky-blue satin, the baby-pink silk and paisley swirls and deep red velvets and gold brocades all seemed to conjure school friends’ parties and her mother’s and aunt’s beautiful ball gowns and shawls.

  Amanda glanced up at her bedroom window once more and saw her doll on the ledge between the curtains. She wondered which flowers took the doll’s interest, but as she could not tell the precise direction of the glass-eyed gaze, Amanda resorted to make-believe, and imagined the doll was staring pointedly at four pink and white flowers which had been arranged on their own in a small cone-shaped container near the window.

  ‘Monsieur?’ said Amanda, ‘how much are those, please?’

  ‘Which? Ah, the tea roses, let me see, how much money do you have to spend?’

  Amanda stepped up to the sales desk and emptied her purse on its surface. The coins scattered and spilled, most of them a dirty dark brown colour, not bright and coppery like new ones.

  Monsieur Arbot slid them one by one rapidly across the surface of the desk and into his palm, counting under his breath as he did so.

  He smiled at last.

  ‘Well, my child, you have only enough for three and a half of those flowers, but as today I am in a good mood I will let you have four.’

  He dropped the coppers into the concealed drawer. Amanda heard the sound of its mechanism open, then the tinkle and patter of coins as they fell inside the wooden drawer and the smart click as it was closed again.

  She knew him so well. Knew how he half crouched behind the counter in order to eat his bread and sausage, then quickly wiped his hands and mouth with a big white handkerchief when customers came in. She knew how he scratched his behind and sometimes dozed off with his head resting on his arm until he was jolted awake by a sudden noise. She knew how he conducted his transactions with the maker of the fabric flowers with hardly a word passing between them, how he was kind to the poor dark-haired woman and gave her coffee so that she might warm herself.

  He came out from behind the counter and lifted the container of flowers from the window, holding them aloft so that she could see them and acknowledge that those were the ones she had wanted.

  He went behind the counter again, as she knew he would.

  ‘I have no brown paper, so will newspaper do?’ he asked.

  Amanda nodded, sensing a lie.

  Indeed later, once Amanda was back in her room, she looked down into Monsieur Arbot’s shop and saw clearly that he did have a roll of brown paper and that he used it freely with his other customers.

  But other dramas would play out first, as while Monsieur was tying a short loop of string around the stems of the bouquet, the door to the shop ope
ned and the flower maker herself entered.

  It was the woman’s habit, Amanda knew, never to enter the shop when the florist had customers to attend to, but here she was, hesitant and pale, her lips a strange unnatural bluish red, her hair lifeless and flat (reminding Amanda of a drowned rat she had once found by the side of a flooded sewer).

  Amanda guessed that the woman hadn’t seen the small child in the shop, hidden as she was by the window ledge and the pots of flowers.

  The woman came forward quickly and seemed barely to register Amanda as she neared the counter. She concentrated intensely on Monsieur Arbot; her eyes, Amanda noticed, were darkly circled and the whites were stained pale yellow just like the snow outside the lit shop window at twilight. Amanda felt both fascination and pity for the woman. There was ugliness in the eyes and the pallid skin; her hands were red, dry and sore looking and the intricate mechanisms of the bones beneath the thin skin showed through yellow-white like chicken bones.

  If the woman failed to notice Amanda, Monsieur Arbot now chose to ignore the child. Amanda stood near the counter holding her wrapped bouquet of pink and white satin flowers before her like a bridesmaid.

  The woman placed a new package of flowers on the counter for the florist’s inspection. He poured her a bowl of coffee. Amanda noticed how her hands trembled as she took it and lifted it to her mouth, clattering the lip of the bowl against her teeth at first, and then drinking noisily. Neither the woman nor Monsieur Arbot had yet spoken.

  He opened the package, but on seeing its contents clucked his tongue in disapproval. The woman continued to suck at the coffee, drawing it into her mouth greedily. Amanda stole a glance at the flowers and saw with disappointment that these were the dull-coloured woollen ones.

  Monsieur Arbot did not open his change drawer, did not scoop up a dirty handful of coppers, did not tenderly place the new flowers in the window display. Instead he retied the package and shook his head slowly.

  The woman was so engrossed in drinking the coffee that she didn’t at first notice what was happening, but when the rejected flowers were pushed back to her side of the counter, she quickly grew alarmed and began to speak rapidly in a language Amanda did not understand. Perhaps Monsieur Arbot understood, but whether or not he did, he was unmoved, his head a metronome, slowly turning from side to side.