‘You c’n dig around in books or you c’n dig around in swampy peat, it’s all the same to me,’ she said, sarcastically. He liked her for it, but he seemed to be getting nowhere with her. He noticed that his razor scooter was looking dusty and spotty over in the corner of the café. It was looking neglected, like the two bicycles in the hallway at home, like everything in that house. Like everything in my life, he thought.
*
Twenty years later Tristan sat in his own cottage with a woman who had not been a waitress in the corner café in Cromer, but one who nevertheless had bright cheeks and a certain way with her mouth that made you think she thought something she was not saying, something that amused her. He liked that, he liked being puzzled by her, having to guess about her. Their baby was rolling on the floor at their feet, almost under the television.
‘Cakey? What do you mean, it could have been more cakey?’ the woman asked him.
‘Light and sweet, you know, lightness and sweetness, it’s in the temperature of the butter when you make the first crumbling, though you mustn’t handle it too much. Sweetness and lightness, you know what I’m talking about, it’s not easy to come by.’
‘Next time,’ she answered, bending down now to the baby so that the sunlight coming through the window caught itself in her deep ropes and rivers of hair, sparking almost.
‘What?’ she demanded in answer to the way he looked at her.
‘Your hair, it should be in one of those fifteenth-century paintings in the national gallery, you know, a national treasure, something audio guides would tell people about as they stand there wondering what to look at when they look at a masterpiece.’
‘Stop. Stop or I’ll have it all cut off.’
Before he had started on the scone thing, when she had taken the tray out of the oven, he had suddenly mentioned two missionaries who had come to his parents’ home twenty years ago and changed their lives. Almost ruined their lives, he had told her, until the devil had rescued them. She asked him now how the devil could have saved his parents.
He told her that not long after his father had sold their car to give yet more money to the church they’d joined, to help pay for a new organ or maybe a new house for the preacher who had come across from Belgium, for something or other that God needed done, because God seemed to need endless small injections of money, at the time when he was thirteen and so lonely he wanted to die, and so ugly he was afraid to become a corpse because he thought he would be laughed at, he had woken one night with his arm on fire. He could smell the flesh of his arm burning and the retching stink of blackened smoke from it was in his nostrils. His fear made him rigid at first, then he leapt from his bed into the corner of the room and screamed until his mother came in to cradle him. This happened for three nights in a row. His mother reported on the third night that she could smell the burning flesh too just before his screams woke her. They took him up to the local doctor who examined the arm carefully. It was true that it was a little numb and lacked muscle tone. It was true that his heart was racing faster than it should, that his temperature was slightly raised and in general he was listless. But there was nothing wrong, the doctor said, that a good game of football wouldn’t fix.
That week, when his parents prepared to go to the church on the Sunday, he told them he could smell smoke leaking into the house through cracks in the walls, coming under the doors and in between the window panes. He said that if they left the house he would be trapped there with the smoke, and flames would leap up his arm again. He was sweating and shaking with fear. They stood and looked at each other for a long time. Matt and Sarah stood near the doorway to the hall. Matt looked weary. The bicycles were perfectly still, the scarves too. The photo on the wall seemed about to fall. Everything was suspended, the world itself was so perfectly balanced between possibilities that in a moment it might split in two.
‘And that was it,’ he said. ‘They never went back to that church. I think they were relieved. Secretly I think they felt saved. Though they were worried those missionary boys would return one day.’
He did not tell her that they could never speak about it again, that it became something they could never look into or point at. It was as if there was no word for this thing so close by. But they had left something there, something alive and compact, something that waited and never slept.
‘And the devil did that for you? Gave your parents back to you?’
‘Yes, but in exchange for our souls.’
‘Ah, your souls,’ she repeated in that half-poetical way she had of savouring a word. She was scanning the room. ‘Now where did I put my book?’
Market Porter
Greg Bogaerts
Pierre leans on his shiny black cane. It is hot in the middle of Paris near the markets. It is only early, barely seven in the morning, and already he is perspiring, the dirty runnels of thick salt water running down his face. He surreptitiously wipes his puffy cheeks, trying at the same time not to smear the thick pink powder he stole from his wife’s bureau back in the tiny apartment in Montmartre. Pierre plastered it carefully over the lines and pits in his face, hoping to hide his age so that he might continue to get work as a porter in the markets.
Besides, he thinks, as he looks at his powder-blotched hand, I’ve been working here for years, decades. They won’t forget me; they’ll remember what a good porter, a good worker I was. Still am, he tells himself, but he feels the cane slip on the cobblestones made slippery by the congealed lard of slaughtered animals hauled across the narrow square to be strung up for sale.
He almost stumbles, just rights himself in time as some of the younger market porters stroll past. They greet him with familiar hellos, chide him good naturedly, calling him granddad. Pierre despises them, and refuses to acknowledge their existence.
He pulls down his big round straw hat, almost covering his eyes, blocking out the sight of their muscular arms and big hands, their easy animal gait. The men cannot see the anger in his eyes. They cannot see the hurt as well. In his heart Pierre knows they are not being unkind to him; it is just that he is jealous of their youth and strength, their ability to cart and carry heavy boxes of fruit and vegetables and dead animals about the marketplace without the slightest sign of fatigue.
Once upon a time, before that mad Baron von Haussmann tore down the old heart of Paris so dear to Pierre, the porter could work all day, and at the end of his shift he was always ready to take on more work, and ready, always, to make love to his Eugenie when he finally got home and slipped in under the beetling brow of the Montmartre butt and into his small apartment, perched halfway up the Rue Lepic.
Now he is weary and he hasn’t done any work today; he is waiting for some of the produce owners or one of the market overseers to come along and offer him paid toil. Pierre flatters himself that his loss of strength is more than compensated for by his dapper appearance. His cane once belonged to a duke, the antique-shop dealer assured Pierre; his long smock once belonged to a prince, the back-street peddler in clothes promised. The smock is draped about Pierre, hiding, he hopes, his corpulent body. His exotic hat is an object of envy among the other porters, he tells himself, and the hand-tooled leather boots Eugenie polishes early every morning should be enough, he convinces himself, for an overseer or owner to hire him.
And even if he can’t manage the work anymore, he is entitled, because of his years of long and loyal service, to help from one of the younger porters, someone who might serve as an apprentice to him, thinks Pierre, puffing his chest out with importance and pride.
Pierre remembers Monsieur le Grand, one of the big owners of produce in the markets, years ago. Le Grand brought eggs, vegetables and fruit by the crate load to the market every day, and he always sought out Pierre, telling all in the marketplace that Pierre was the best market porter he’d seen, that his blood should be bottled and the other porters, far lesser men, should be
made to drink small sips of the thick, vital, bright-red substance to make them into the tireless worker Pierre was. But not too much of that blood for each man, le Grand always warned; he said that too much richness of strength and determination might harm some of the pale shadows of men who slouched about the market, barely able to stand upright let alone cart a box full of sheep heads across the cobblestones.
Ahh, those were the days, thinks Pierre, and he pulls himself upright, balancing his weight between the cane planted in the cleft formed by two cobblestones and his other hand, which holds the ornate cast-iron lamppost. He stands slightly forward, hoping to disguise his hand gripping the post. He holds on to the ornate metal head of a snake, cast by some mad artist in a garret or a cellar somewhere, he thinks.
That’s the trouble, says Pierre out loud, since Haussmann ruined the city and the Bohemians came to stay, things have gone to rack and ruin. One of the lady shoppers, passing him, gives him a strange look. Pierre realises it is because he was talking out loud to himself. He pulls himself together, grits his teeth, but bites the tip of his tongue so the blood spatters down his fleshy double chins. I must stop talking to myself; people will think I’m mad, he chides.
Only the other day his Eugenie stopped in the middle of dusting, came over to where he was sitting with his legs raised (so that his puffy ankles would go down) and said: ‘Good God, Pierre, you’ve been talking to yourself for the past half hour, and I don’t think it’s that glass of wine you’re drinking. For goodness sake, man, be quiet. I can’t think to do my housework. If you’re going to talk to yourself, go into the bedroom and sit in front of the big mirror. At least that way you’ll have someone to talk to.’
Her mocking words were close to the vinegar sting of sarcasm, and they hurt Pierre. He loves his Eugenie with a passion, even if not much of that passion translates anymore into love making. He got out of the chair with difficulty and left, but not before a parting shot of hot acid words caught him.
‘And if you’re going to use my face powder all of the time then you should go out on the streets with the working girls. At least if you sold your fabulous body we might be able to pay the rent on time.’
Pierre blushes at the thought of her words; the heat is thick like the molasses that arrives in the market in big stone bottles from Africa, and he feels faint. For a moment he thinks the iron snake he is holding has come alive; for a second he is convinced it will bite him and sting him to death. It is a delusion, he tells himself, and forces himself to stand still, not to cry out in fear.
It’s not the first time he’s imagined such things. Last week, on the Sunday, when he was climbing the Rue Lepic to buy bread from the bakery near the summit, he imagined the loaves had turned into sharks and that they were swimming out of the bakery door down the incline towards him. He screamed, afraid they would tear him limb from limb, devour his flabby body with their rapacious jaws.
The baker, drawn by Pierre’s screams, came from his shop and looked with only mild interest at the terrified man. Passers-by regarded him with amused curiosity until Pierre got himself under control, went into the bakery and, gritting his teeth, ignoring the jibes of the baker, purchased some of the man-eating sharks. He took them from the shop, holding the bag at arm’s length, convinced, still, that if he held the warm loaves close, the escaped beasts of the sea would bite him.
Now he forces himself upright once more. His head swims, the cobblestones of the market rise and fall like a big tide, rushing down the Seine during the spring thaw; shoppers float by him, vendors seem to expand and contract as if they are made from some strange plasma, alien forms of life. And they are to Pierre; they no longer know him, no longer care about him.
Suddenly he is brought back; everything stills. The smell, the stink is rank, so strong it brings back images to Pierre’s mind, pictures of the live wild animals that used occasionally to be sold in the market. He turns and sees the big black and yellow striped Bengali tiger in a wooden cage being man-handled across the market square by four burly porters. The animal opens its mouth; the stench hits Pierre like death. The men sweat and curse with the heat and the heaviness of the animal; their fear makes them weak, Pierre can tell, and who could blame them. The long tarnished teeth of the animal are only inches from their bodies.
Then the tiger screams and roars, the noise echoing against the building walls of the marketplace, stopping every man, woman and child in their tracks. Pierre sees the fear etched on every face, and this gives him some solace, some satisfaction he cannot fathom.
The tiger is placed on a stone stand in the middle of the square where it will be sold to the highest bidder, probably a circus owner or a rich man wanting something exotic to roam the parklands of his estate to amuse his lovers and wife. The wooden crate and the animal disappear from Pierre’s view. He is dizzy again and reaches for his moustache, which he regards as his one vanity. The magnificent edifice of hair, plastered with wax under his nose, is his good-luck charm, the talisman he has stroked and worried for years.
He touches it, but there is almost nothing there other than a bare line of greying bristles, and then he remembers, almost sobbing with the grief the memory brings to him. Last week, after work, he’d sat in the cool of evening on the front step of his landlord’s apartment, waxing his moustache the way he did almost every night. But he’d put too much wax on the hair, saturated it so it hardened into a long line of hair and wax.
He’d fallen asleep, and one of the gang of urchins that marauded up and down the Rue Lepic came along, took hold of the mustache, and, with one strong yank, tore the adornment from under Pierre’s nose. The pain was excruciating, but not as painful as seeing the ragged boy, running down the hill, holding Pierre’s moustache above his head, yelling to his grimy comrades that one of the working girls had just donated her muff to his collection of bric-a-brac.
The prostitutes who ply their trade up and down the Rue Lepic and along the Boulevard de Clichy, have a reputation for whipping up egg whites and plastering them through their pubic hair. Sexual tastes come in all shapes and forms in Paris.
Soon, the whole street knew of Pierre’s loss and, for days, he had to suffer the jibes and jokes of his neighbours about escaped hairy caterpillars and the dangers of loss one might have to bear when munching the vagina of one of the working girls. The girls were inspected by government authorities once a week for syphilis. The butcher on the Rue Lepic suggested that a deputation from the street should accompany the inspectors to see if Pierre’s moustache could be discovered and reclaimed.
Pierre has had enough; he can’t keep up his pose of strength and sartorial magnificence any longer. He slumps over his cane, eventually stands up straight, and decides to go to the small café at the edge of the marketplace. Here, he thinks, I will revive myself with coffee and a plain roll. No butter is needed to make it slide more easily down his pelican gullet of a throat.
He sits at a small table and fishes into the pocket of his smock for the franc he is sure is there, but it isn’t. But that won’t matter, he thinks. The café owner has known him for years, they are almost comrades, almost friends. The big, bald, bullet-headed man comes to Pierre, and the porter is taken aback for a second by the look of distrust that creeps like river mud across the man’s face.
‘A cup of black coffee and a roll without butter if you please, monsieur,’ says Pierre in his best merry and bluff voice.
The café owner leans on the edge of Pierre’s table; the man’s hands are enormous and, for a moment, Pierre forgets to be afraid because he is jealous; he would like to have those hands because he would always have work if he had them. But then the fear takes hold of the old porter, and he struggles to meet the cold, hard, iron-grey eyes of the owner.
‘Show me the colour of your money first, monsieur,’ he demands in a voice sharper than the blade of the guillotine.
Pierre reaches to rub his throat,
but he can’t find it among the multiple layers of fat chins that spill down to his grimy white collar.
‘Wh … what do you m … mean, m … monsieur?’ he stammers.
He grins at the man. Pierre looks like one of the African monkeys that used to be sold in the market, creatures that always wore a perpetual grimace as if they were pleading for mercy and compassion from their captors and future owners.
‘I mean that your credit has run out. You owe me at least ten francs for rolls and coffee and you cannot have any more until you pay me,’ says the owner, who turns on his heel, pauses a moment to present the disdain of his back to Pierre, then marches off.
Pierre, blushing bright red, rises, totters away; the markets are a roiling ocean of confusion to him. He searches out his iron pole and takes hold. Hanging his head, he closes his eyes. He does not care anymore about keeping up appearances and hoping for work. He takes no notice when the screams of horror and terror rise in the marketplace. His head still hangs in defeat like the head of one of the bullocks, its throat cut from ear to ear, its body hauled up by a chain for the market butcher to carve steaks from to sell to shoppers.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 20