Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  Harper answers before Gael can say, ‘The usual.’

  ‘With Brandi, it was for noble fortitude and the country thanks her for it.’ Harper slaps Brandi on the shoulder and the other cell applauds. ‘With me and Irish, it was for cuntpunching. But it shoulda been for … duplicity. Whatever it’s called. Get this. Irish glared at the Yeats poem I wrote out in calligraphy for her as if it said IOU. And I said I thought it had its own resonance with Occupy; granted, Yeats isn’t the best choice cuz of his whole “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity” bit. But Irish said that sounded about right! And that the camp was full of the worst sort of ardent idiots – her words – who were so naïve, she said, they believed that one-per-centers actually pay forty-five per cent income tax and–’

  A very large police officer casts a shadow now over Gael and Harper. He is holding up two backpacks. Both unzipped. He looks at Harper as if her puffy features are an anagram. ‘Which one of these bags is yours?’

  She points at the denim one, like a kid pointing at an under-whelming fairground teddy.

  ‘Spot the goon who’d wear triple denim,’ Gael mutters.

  ‘The policeman doesn’t take his eyes off Harper. ‘Who does this bag belong to?’ He lifts Gael’s bag a fraction. Harper goes to look at Gael but the cop gives a tiny whistle through his bottom teeth. ‘Eyes here. Use your words.’

  ‘Gael,’ Harper says, very quietly for her. She can see the torn envelope full of cash inside the backpack.

  ‘Gael who?’ the cop says.

  ‘Fffff … ucked if I know?’ Harper says, come over all ditsy.

  The cop fills his lungs luxuriously, which serves to make him roughly the size of that sculpture of the Archangel beheading Satan.

  Can the heart lift up in the body? It sounds very, very close, now, to her ears. The cop slings both bags across his forearm and unlocks the cell. He calls out a word Gael wasn’t concentrating enough to register. Another cop appears to assist. The Archangel-cop hands Harper her bag and says, ‘Akhil here will give you a glass of water along with your court date. You can take your meds. Follow him, and the law, Ms Schiada.’

  Some light gets eclipsed as he turns his head. ‘Ms Foess? … Come with me.’

  He does not hand her her bag.

  She does not pass go.

  She does not collect thirty thousand dollars.

  II

  When Gael was nine and Guthrie was seven, Jarleth arrived home on Christmas Eve with two piggy banks. He landed the unwrapped boxes on the kitchen table and said: Open. They needn’t have done, because a picture on the side of the boxes showed what lay inside, but he insisted on the ceremony. The price stickers read €9.95. Opening a gift before Baby Jesus’s birthday seemed an odd directive to Guthrie, who looked at his mother, then followed her gaze to the clock. Nine forty-five p.m. Midnight mass began at eleven. ‘Before mass?’ There was an unnerving feeling at Jarleth’s arriving so late and that he was making this fuss. He would hurl a camera under the tree as a clump of wood to a fire. Things were things. They didn’t warrant one’s attention. That wasn’t to say that Jarleth didn’t have things and very fine things; but nearly all he deemed disposable.

  When Guthrie pulled the pig out of the box, his expression fought against itself. Anyone could see that he would have preferred a pottery set with which to mould his own piggy bank, but that would have meant Jarleth’s indulging his notion that it’s worth spending hours making and decorating something that can be knocked together in a factory in seconds for fractions of pennies. Still, Guthrie gamely got up from the table to retrieve his net of gold chocolate coins from the living room and returned to slot them into the piggy bank, one by one, explaining that chocolate doesn’t go off. He might not have any chocolate when he needs some later, he said. ‘What if it’s in here for ages and we run out of chocolate and this is the very last?’ He looked at Sive with eyes as wide as they would go. Sive ran her fingers through the owl’s wing of his hair, but her thoughts were not in the kitchen and a piggy bank of pennies couldn’t afford them.

  ‘And what would you do with it,’ Jarleth said, ‘were it the very last chocolate?’ Guthrie lifted his shoulders to his ears and held them there. Jarleth never gave him enough time. ‘Would you sell the world’s last chocolate?’ Guthrie’s shoulders were still by his ears and soon the muscles would tire and they’d still be there even if it looked as though he’d dropped them. He shook his head. Beware of leading questions. No. ‘What then?’

  Gregorian chant came through the radio. A low, slow unaccompanied sentence – songless – with no beginning and no end. It had the hollow sound of a great medieval cathedral. The chant breathed in and out. One phrase. A pause. Another phrase of a different length entirely, as if the chant were attaching one truth to another and the miracle was its multiplicity of voice; that the truth could be agreed upon and enlarged among a union of men. Guthrie tuned into it. Gael writhed on the bench, wanting him to answer their father. Didn’t Guthrie know that the generosity had been in posing this challenge and not in the present itself ? She nudged him: ‘Would you let a scientist take a sample of it to his lab to study and grow more chocolate?’ She wanted badly to see her father’s face to know if that had been a good idea, but if she looked at Guthrie instead, then if it was a bad idea, at least it would look like she’d said it just for his sake and not for Jarleth’s approval.

  ‘I’d …’ Guthrie squinted at the dust-clogged radio speaker, ‘get all the people who really … really … really really really love chocolate … more than anything ever … and let them all have a lick.’ His eyes refocused and he looked at Gael, who pressed her palms to her face. Guthrie cackled, realizing all the caveats too late.

  Sive had moved to the sink and stood looking out at the dark back garden. To herself, she said, ‘It’s frosting over.’

  When they returned from church that midnight, Sive and Guthrie went straight to bed. But Gael halted halfway up the stairs, spotting her father in the kitchen doorway. When she met his eyes, he directed her into the kitchen with a short curved knife. There, he tapped her unopened piggy bank with it, as if tapping a shameful grade sheet. ‘What to do?’ He began peeling the skin off a red apple and Gael wondered if he would try to keep the peel in one piece to throw over his shoulder for luck. Of course, she had spent all of mass thinking the problem through. She had a very good answer. Smart for her years, by anyone’s count. But Jarleth spoke again before she had a chance to impress him.

  ‘Matthew’s Gospel tells a story you’d do well to know. Called the Parable of the Talents.’

  ‘Talons?’

  ‘Talents. An ancient coin worth a fortune. Worth years of a labourer’s wage. The master has to go on a trip, so he decides to entrust his wealth to three servants till he returns. How much he gives them depends on their ability. So. He gives the first servant five.’ Jarleth held up five fingers. ‘Five talents. To the second fellow, he gives two. The third man gets one. Master mustn’t think much of the third man’s abilities. How do they get on? you wonder. Well, the servant given five goes straight out to trade with them. By the time the master gets home, he’s made five more from the five he’d been given. The fellow given two makes two more. But the servant given only one talent thinks about his master’s dealings, how he normally does things – he’s fearful of the master too, you see. So he goes and digs a deep hole in the soil and buries the solitary talent. When the master returns, the first servant approaches and says: Lo and behold, Master, I’ve turned your five talents into ten. Well done, goes the master. You’re invited into my joy and you’ll know true wealth. Then the second approaches, says how he got on, and he too is congratulated, thanked, invited in. The third fellow goes up with his head hung and says he knew his master to be a hard man, reaping where he didn’t sow and gathering where he scattered no seed. He was cautious, he explained, so he’d buried the talent and awaited his master’s return. He holds the muddy coin up then and says, Here
you have what is yours.’ After a pause, Jarleth redirected his gaze. ‘Tell me now. What does the master think of this?’

  Gael spoke quickly: ‘He might say that he’s glad the man kept his money safe and didn’t risk losing it, but I doubt he said that. But hang on: the second guy did just as well as the first, because he doubled his money?’

  ‘He doubled what he could manage to double. The first doubled a greater amount.’

  ‘But that’s not fair. If the second guy’d been given–’

  ‘ “You wicked and slothful servant!” ’ Jarleth said, stabbing the knife into the apple peel, strewn on the kitchen table. ‘ “You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers and I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” ’ Jarleth considered the white flesh of the nude apple before retrieving the knife and scoring a bruise out of it, which he let drop to the floor.

  The night reflected only Jarleth in the kitchen window. To anyone standing outside, it would look as if he were raving to himself – as if Gael weren’t even there. She tried to stretch her spine to see at least the suggestion of a person becoming equal and to get rid of the tickling feeling in her neck. ‘I thought the Bible was all, be nice to people,’ she said, ‘and help poor people because they’ve got God’s souls just the same as rich people.’ She was trying to relate this back to the piggy bank. The right answer must be not to put money in it because that was the same as burying it in mud. The money put there wouldn’t grow by virtue of being hidden. It needed something like photosynthesis to swell. Holding her shoulders back, she said firmly: ‘If you have the receipt, I want to return it.’ Perhaps he’ll ask what she’ll get in its place or what she’ll do with the refund, she thought, but he had taken just one bite of the apple before it thudded to the bottom of the bin.

  ‘If you do nothing with what you have, you might as well never have had it,’ he said. ‘Your abilities will diminish and waste. But if you make something of them, you’ll gain more and you’ll be rich.’ Jarleth flicked the kitchen light off on his way out. His mood had turned. She followed close on his heels and, when he stopped at the threshold, she ran into his back, as if afraid to step out of his shadow. She flushed. Perhaps, because of this, what he had been about to say was averted like a lawn bowl butting up too hard to the jack:

  ‘Tomorrow, tell your brother to look at the second commandment. Show him the Coca-Cola Company’s invention of Santa Claus. Very magical altogether.’ He was gone and this time Gael didn’t follow. From the top of the stairs, what tumbled down to her was an afterthought, but she took it as principal:

  To get her money back without a receipt.

  The cop doesn’t use the phrase piggy bank, for obvious reasons. He calls it her ‘collection’. But the association presents itself in Gael’s mind as an out and she doesn’t have time to step cautiously. The viable explanations are gone. She can’t say she brought the cash into the country as holiday funds because she checked some box on her immigration card that said goods or monetary instruments exceeding ten thousand dollars must be declared. She can’t mention the cheque, as that could lead the police down a path of discovery towards Wally and Xavier and Guthrie. The most likely story – that she’s part of Occupy’s Finance Working Group and that the cash constitutes donations – would be risky, in case Nina and Lotte are still in their cell. They can’t be relied upon, now that Harper’s poured paprika on the chicken in the fox den. There is only one person who would lie for her out of sheer curiosity and the chance to offer liberation on lay-by – only one person quick and plastic enough to adapt to whatever truth needs to be upheld.

  ‘Last time. Before we start testing the notes for dirt. Who’s your supplier?’ The cop is called Derek. He is so tall, it’s hard to believe he’s sitting down. The sclera of his eyes is cream rather than white and his greying eyebrows pitch up in the middle so it looks like he’s always fighting disappointment.

  ‘If I tell you,’ Gael says, ‘you have to promise you won’t call him.’ She affects to look anxiously at the door.

  Derek leans on his forearms. A vein protrudes down the front of his rutabaga bicep. ‘We would not jeopardize your safety, Ms Foess.’ The brows transition readily to concern.

  Recalling Art’s habit, Gael wipes the table between them with her palms. Then changes tack: ‘I wasn’t brought in for having cash on me. I was brought in for being at Occupy. Fine, for headbutting my friend. But neither of us is injured. We were mucking around. Harper’s not pressing charges. I’m not pressing charges. So the most you can keep me for is, what, forty-eight hours? Twenty-four? And I don’t have to say another word.’

  Derek tips his head back as if to inspect a lightbulb, but his eyes stay fixed on Gael. ‘What country you think you in right now?’

  Gael conjures her best droll voice. ‘The United States of America?’

  ‘Spell it out for me,’ Derek says. ‘I’m not kidding.’

  ‘I’ll play my Fifth Amendment, Derek. Neither of us likes to be disrespected.’

  ‘Constitutional rights are privileges you ain’t got, tourist.’

  ‘I highly doubt that’s–’

  ‘Shut the fuck up and listen.’ His voice is very steady. ‘You had a dozen police eyes on that assault. I don’t know what they call it in Ireland, but in the USA, it’s called battery. When police are present, we don’t need no citizen’s arrest to take you in. Your friend don’t need to press charges. A gross misdemeanour, is what you get. Guess the maximum sentence for assault in the fourth degree.’

  ‘Guess my cup size.’

  Derek looks confounded at this; the vagaries of this one. ‘Three hundred sixty-four days. Occupying the other side of Wall Street. Followed by two-year probation. Fine of five thousand dollars. Now that’s for a first-time offender. We don’t know your record in Ireland, but we working on it. But maybe we don’t need to go there. Maybe we can forget all about it. Give you a 800 number for anger management classes. Maybe you play soldier in the war on drugs and we let you march on outta here with a DAT fore supper. What about it?’

  Gael sighs through her nostrils. ‘Fine, Derek. But you’re going to be disappointed.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘My father, the one-per-center. He pulled his great big house, his cheater’s crash pad from under us in oh-seven, my little brother sick, Mum forced to quit her job, and now he’s here spreading his financier fuckery to the westmost point. So I came over to Occupy to stick a fucking picket up his cul-de-sac. And this is him reciprocating.’

  Derek’s fingers are pressed together against his lips. One eyebrow reaches slightly higher than the other.

  ‘So he finds out I’m at Occupy,’ Gael continues. ‘However he finds out. The news, Mum, on one of his drive-bys. And he turns up with an envelope of cash, the engine on his town car jizzing, and tells me it’s my start in life because I seem to have lost the one he already gave me. To book a hotel room, take a shower, get an education.’ She shivers, goes to say more, but Derek undercuts her performance.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Jarleth.’

  ‘What’s his number?’

  Gael looks annoyed. ‘Do I sound like I’d know it by heart?’

  Derek leaves the room. Only then does Gael notice that she’s still shivering, though it’s not cold. He returns with her phone. They go through the your-move my-move shuffle until Derek gets hold of Jarleth and informs him that someone claiming to be his daughter is being held in the 34th Precinct on a charge of … disorderly conduct … and that she’s in possession of contraband. He hesitated to name the charge. Bluffery. The claim Gael knows best. W
hat is a magician, said Houdini, but an actor playing the part of a magician? She doesn’t doubt she’ll walk out of here with a headache, but whether a pretzel and a cup of water will treat it has yet to be determined.

  ‘I need you to corroborate a story your daughter told us.’ Derek holds the phone an inch from his ear, as if it’s contaminated. ‘If you can’t get in here, Mr Foess, I’m willing to talk it through right now. While I got you on the line. Lemme ask you–’

  Gael can hear the familiar clipped voice informing Derek of Gael’s rights. ‘My daughter was under no obligation to give you my number. She did not consent to this. I’m sending over a lawyer. Don’t say a word, Gael. Don’t consent to a plea bargain. If you can hear me, Gael–’

  Derek hangs up. ‘See …’ He sways his head from side to side. ‘There’s a shame. There’s a real shame. He coulda verified your story an I coulda sent you on your way. Real simple.’ He takes Gael by the upper arm to lead her back to her cell. ‘Don’t go slipping on me. Sound like slippery runs in the family.’

  Feeling distinctly nauseous, Gael averts her gaze from the detainee in the corridor who’s making the officers at his sides carry him, toes dragging behind him like a wedding trail.

  ‘Where’s my phone call?’ Gael asks, remembering how this goes. ‘That was your call. Now I get one.’

  ‘So you can phone Daddy,’ Derek says. ‘Feed him your story.’

  ‘So I can phone Occupy’s legal aid. The number’s on my arm, look.’ She’s not cuffed anymore, but Derek’s grip abjures sudden movements. ‘You didn’t think I’d actually use my father’s lawyer? Make all his Christmases come together?’ Gael glares at Derek as if he’s the ghost of Christmas yet to come.

  She runs through who she’s touched and what she’s eaten in the past twenty-four hours to identify the churn in her intestines. To which squalor she’s touristed too close. ‘I’d like to make that call.’

  Derek leads her past the reception desk into a room with avocado green walls and at least a dozen cops bureaucrating behind computers, radio mics on their shoulders like inert parrots. He seats her at a mahogany desk with a landline and says he’ll get water. He leaves the room. Given that there’s a water cooler within reach, she takes this as an indication he’s stepping back from the case, no longer worth his time or the fine it will result in. On his desk, a pentaptych of photo frames present a cubist portrait of a divorcé. All five photos show Derek with his kids in weekend clothes, doing weekend activities; no spouse in sight; the careless compositions of strangers asked, Could you take our picture? One is a selfie of Derek and his son at a baseball stadium wearing matching Go Bulldogs shirts. The clock on his monitor reads 12:53.