‘Do not torment me. Oh!’
Sam knelt down and made a dumbshow of elaborately counting the four legs. ‘What’s the matter? Have we devils here?’
‘Cut!’ Luke called out. He switched off the spotlight and raised the lights in the room. The cape unrolled to reveal Stephen, wearing jocks and a white T-shirt, and a grinning Claire dressed in black underwear.
Luke put his hands on his hips and glared at them. ‘I’m really not sure about this scene at all, Stephen.’
Stephen stood up, grinned complacently, and watched as Claire wrapped the cape around her body. It was a very attractive body, I had to admit. He appealed to me with arms outspread. ‘For an Australian audience, you can’t avoid thinking of Caliban as Indigenous. We’re trying to deal with themes of exploitation here.’
‘Without having me as the token blackfella, because I’m not interested,’ Luke put in. ‘And yes, I totally get that we’re having a serious nod towards sexual exploitation on top of all the other forms of exploitation the First-Worlders inflict on Caliban. Just no.’
I looked at Claire, who shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that. It works for me. First I get friendly, then I get drunk, then I get angry.’
Sam laughed. ‘Don’t forget you start angry.’
At once Claire’s eyes flashed, and she all but spat the following:
All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him
By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me
And yet I needs must curse.
Sam nodded. ‘You see? You’re making it too complex. It’s an interesting idea, but it makes the themes too muddled. Just stick to drunkenness and power plays. Also, you’re upstaging me. No one likes being upstaged.’
I remembered something from our first introduction. ‘Sam, I thought you were Ariel?’
She grinned. ‘I’m doubling Stephano at the moment. I think this could work.’
Stephen laughed. It was a good-humoured laugh: complacent but equable. ‘We don’t have a director, either. Whoever isn’t onstage gets to direct. I like the idea. Look, we’re short of money for this production, so we’re trying to do it as a four-hander. If we can raise some more, we can afford more cast members. We’re still thinking that over. Okay, we leave the sexual overtones out? What do you think? Long shorts? I think we need the bare legs.’
Luke rubbed his chin. ‘Yes, we do. Frayed cuffs, just below the knee?’
‘For both of us?’ Claire nodded. ‘I’ve got some jeans I can cut down.’
‘Sure.’ Luke switched on the spotlight again. ‘This one’s borrowed from the theatre department, by the way. A lot of actors rehearse in normal light and get thrown by the reality of spotlights. We’re getting used to doing it as though we were in the theatre. Okay, roll the scene again, but lose the sexual politics. Go!’
He brought the house lights down, and Claire began by slinging on a sizeable backpack and grimacing. Her face grew more pointed, and her eyes flashed.
All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him
By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me
And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch,
Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ th’ mire,
Nor lead me like a firebrand in the dark
Out of my way, unless he bid ’em. But –
She paused, flinging the pack to the floor with a thump of frustration. In a more moderated tone she continued:
For every trifle are they set upon me,
Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me,
And after bite me, then like hedgehogs which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount
Their pricks at my footfall. Sometime am I
All wound with adders who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.
Enter Stephen, still in his jocks and T-shirt. Claire flinched, and continued:
Lo, now, lo! Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me
For bringing wood in slowly. I’ll fall flat.
Perchance he will not mind me.
She lay down, wrapped herself in her cape, and was still.
Stephen delivered his lines with a casual air, speaking easily and well. Then he wrapped himself in Caliban’s cape and he too lay decorously still. I had to admit Luke was right. With added concupiscence the scene had been uncomfortably wrong. Funny, yes. But not in a good way.
The scene wended its way: fast-paced but with appropriate pauses. When Sam reached the line Can he vent Trinculos? she held up both Claire’s legs and shook her head slowly in bewilderment. I laughed. It was impossible not to. Claire edged out from under the cape and faced me.
These be fine things, an if they be not sprites.
That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him.
Back she went to pay homage to the demigods of cask wine, and I watched, fascinated. All three were natural actors: far better than the student performers I remembered from productions run by friends at uni. Attendance was compulsory, but it gave little pleasure at the time. I noted also that the soundtrack was continuous now, with sea sounds and the odd crack of thunder. I presumed that lightning would be added, if funds permitted. But Claire was stealing the show. Her desperate vulnerability was poignant as she uttered the lines:
I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island.
And I will kiss thy foot. I prithee, be my god.
All the more so for her state of comparative undress. I saw whence had come the idea of sartorial vulnerability, but Luke and Sam were right. The infra-cape cuddles would have got laughs, but discordant ones. The scene wound to its conclusion, the spotlight went off, Luke turned up the living-room lights and looked searchingly at me.
‘What did you think, Corinna?’
‘Excellent! You’re doing brilliantly, all of you.’
There was a general easing of tension all around the room. I had to say something like that anyway, but I must have carried enough conviction to put their minds at ease.
Claire and Stephen unselfconsciously resumed their jeans and they sat around in armchairs, talking over the minutiae of the scene. I tuned out a little, looking around the apartment. Serious money had gone into interior decoration. There were expensive-looking prints and artworks on the walls. The kitchen, visible at the far end of the expansive lounge room, was straight out of My Kitchen Rules. The couch looked big and comfortable enough to be a party venue all by itself. I felt emboldened to put the question to Stephen. ‘This is a very impressive place. Is it yours?’
He grinned. ‘No chance. It belongs to my father. He lives out in the Western District, but he comes up for football finals and the Melbourne Cup. He said we could use it while we were rehearsing.’
It sounded like Daddy was a man with more money than he knew what to do with. Yet had they not said they were short of cash? Perhaps this was the extent of Daddy’s generosity.
I stood up. ‘Look, that was brilliant. I have to go, I’m afraid, but thanks for the invitation. That was seriously good.’
They made appropriately modest noises and I made my way back to my apartment. While that had been an enlightening experience, it didn’t cast any light on our manifold mysteries. Our lost soldier and his missing dog. The break-in at Dion Monk’s apartment, the kerfuffle at Café Pandamus. I stared at my hamper. Being unenlightened makes me hungry and thirsty. I was tempted to start without Daniel. Just then, the door opened behind me, and there he was at last: tall, muscular, and smelling of lime and frankincense. I threw both arms around his muscular chest and felt his delicious lips on mine. ‘I am so pleased to see you,’ I breathed into the curls over his ear. ‘I have had A Day.’
He did not ask any questions, but flicked his eyebrows upwards.
‘Oh yes! Please. Ceres will be beautiful at this hour.’ I grabbed my keys in one hand, and
my basket with the other. ‘Horatio? Would you like to come too?’
Curled up on his chair, my beautiful cat blinked at me. He stretched out all four paws and alighted with care onto the floor. The three of us made our way to the lift. Horatio sat in front of it, as if willing the doors to open with his expressive whiskers. The doors slid open soundlessly – not trusting to whiskers alone I had pressed the button – and he allowed us to enter first. Then he parked himself just next to my feet, placing one forepaw on my slippers. Just to make sure I didn’t try anything too adventurous.
It was uncomfortably hot at street level, but up on the roof light breezes played around the shrubs and pots. Horatio ambled up to the mint, gave it a solid examination and looked back at me hopefully. I really must see about getting a catnip plant for him. This herb, he seemed to be telling me, is almost right. But it’s not good enough. Come on, human! Do something about this inexplicable oversight. Having expressed his feelings, he progressed slowly through the garden. Sometimes he stood up on his back paws to smell the flowers. There were roses (four different shades of red and a few fragrant whites), sweet peas, blood-red fuchsias, geraniums, pelargoniums, marigolds, tomatoes and basil. Having given them all the paw-print of approval, he sauntered into the parsley forest. It really was a forest. We had started with a few small plants and with very little encouragement it had become our own little wilderness. Umbelliferous seedpods crowned most of the saplings, but there was plenty of broadleaf left. I handed Daniel my picnic basket.
‘Could you handle this, my beloved? I need more herbs for dinner.’
When I had returned with handfuls of mint, parsley and basil, Daniel had organised two gin and tonics with ice cubes. I had packed my two biggest matching tumblers, handmade by a medieval-inspired potter. After a long day’s labour the last thing I want is to be footling around with dainty glasses. We sat down on adjoining seats and sipped contentedly, inhaling the aromatic spices, the crisp lemon juice, the quinine-flavoured soda, and the pleasant, cushioning embrace of high-quality alcohol. We munched bread, cheese and olives, and admired the perfect afternoon. Every now and again Horatio brushed his tail against us, and we took turns to caress his cheeks and under his chin. He accepted morsels of cheese and lay down underneath my chair.
‘Nu, what sort of day have you had?’ Daniel enquired at length.
I told him, omitting nothing. His eyes registered surprise, but he did not interrupt until my tale wound to its conclusion. ‘So we think the maniac who broke into Professor Monk’s apartment is a religious fanatic who’s after the Professor’s notes. What’s so important about the Gospel of St Joseph, anyway? Assuming that’s what it is.’
‘I’ve had a look at it,’ Daniel said. ‘How these scrolls work is that someone starts at one end, someone else starts in the middle and what you get is a compilation of different versions of the same stories, often in different languages. I can manage the Hebrew bits and it’s interesting reading. We have our own views about the carpenter’s son, which I might tell you about some other time.’
‘Did you see anything in it that might inspire burglary?’ I wanted to know.
‘It depends. Could your young man be a Palestinian sympathiser? Some of the local Arabs in Jerusalem want to lay claim to everything historical. I think their idea is to airbrush Jewishness from Israel.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘We just laugh and tell them no thanks. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the Vatican wanted to hang on to them all and control the release in case inconvenient facts might arise.’
‘So what did Israel do?’
He smiled. ‘We talked to them for a while, but they were quite intransigent. So we decided to release everything to anyone who wanted it. I thought the Catholics had got over it. A fundamentalist Protestant, maybe? What did he look like?’
‘I don’t know. But he smelt bad. And I’m not sure, but I think he was wearing a hair shirt.’
His eyes opened wide. ‘That really is unusual. Did he mention heresy, by any chance?’
‘He talked about erroneous doctrine,’ I recalled. ‘And he did call the Professor a heretic.’
‘Catholic, then. If he really was wearing a hair shirt, that makes him a very unusual Catholic, though. I’ve met quite a few, and not one of them would wear anything like that.’
‘Do we still have a Spanish Inquisition?’
He laughed, but with an undertone of caution. ‘Once upon a time that was nothing to joke about. These days it’s called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The worst they do is post people to unpleasant parishes and tell them they’re not allowed to preach anymore.’
‘Maybe he’s a splinter group of one, like the People’s Front of Judaea? But really: what could there be in this scroll that would upset anyone now?’
‘Would it surprise you to know that Jesus was almost certainly married?’
This sounded a bit Dan Brown to me. ‘To Mary Magdalene?’
‘Why not? She does kiss him a lot in your Bible. And some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are a bit more forthcoming.’
‘Are we talking about children as well?’
‘What I’ve read seems to suggest so. And yes, our Da Vinci Code guy seems to have been right. Mary Magdalene went with St Joseph of Arimathea to the south of France. Though I doubt that the Merovingian kings were descended from them.’
‘That does seem a bit weird. Look, I’m not really any sort of expert on Christianity. It didn’t play much of a role in my life except by accident. But does it matter if Jesus was married and had children?’
He thought about this for a while. ‘Ketschele, how likely do you think it is that a man could reach the age of thirty back then and not be married? Unless he was an Essene.’
‘Who were they?’
‘The people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls were Essenes. They were separatists and mystics, and what we know about them is not all that pleasant. Although there is a definite suggestion that Yeshua – Jesus to you – might have been one of them. When we hear that he spent forty days and nights in the Wilderness, he probably went to stay with them. Think Haredi on steroids. They wouldn’t even share the same city with women, which explains why they finished up around the Dead Sea.’
‘And also why they died out?’
‘That too. But we knew about them before the Scrolls, from Josephus. He was a contemporary historian. He was the only survivor of Masada, and managed to talk his way out of it.’
‘Masada? Sorry, I think I know who the Haredi are. What was Masada?’
My love grimaced. ‘One thing we really learned about Imperial Rome is that you don’t mess around with them. The last Jewish revolt took three years to quell, and Vespasian used four legions to crush it. The last fortress to fall was Masada, and all nine hundred and sixty defenders killed themselves rather than surrender to be crucified.’
‘All except this Josephus character?’
‘All except him. He became a friend of Titus – Vespasian’s son – and wrote two books called Antiquities of the Jews and The Wars of the Jews. He says that some of the Essenes weren’t so anti-woman. Jesus could easily have been one of them. Anyway, I can imagine that some Christians would be very angry at the idea.’
It was my turn to mull over this. ‘But it’s been suggested before, surely? And not just by Dan Brown?’
‘It is … puzzling. Anyway, the Gospel of St Joseph is probably by St Joseph of Arimathea, who put Jesus into his own tomb. I didn’t know he’d written a Gospel, but Biblical scholarship isn’t my forte. Anything new about Biblical times is probably bound to upset somebody. Especially someone as inflammable as our little friend Jordan.’
At that moment, the lift doors opened and Meroe wafted towards us. It is what she does, as if her feet are only touching the ground for the look of the thing. She was wrapped in a blue silk shawl with white clouds painted on it. ‘Blessed be,’ she said with a beatific smile.
I certainly felt blessed, with my
Daniel at my side and my adored cat asleep under my chair.
‘I want herbs for cleansing the Professor’s apartment,’ she explained.
We watched her stately progress as she gathered all manner of herbs I knew and some I didn’t even know were here. She put them into a small calico bag and came to sit with us. I offered her the gin bottle, but she shook her head.
‘Meroe,’ I said, ‘do you have any idea why anyone should want to steal Professor Monk’s manuscript? We’ve talked it over and we’re still confused.’
She folded her neat hands in her lap and closed her eyes. ‘The Rom have many stories about Jesus that you may not know. We left India long ago and went to Egypt. Then we came to Palestine. A gypsy boy is supposed to have stolen the nails for Jesus’s crucifixion. Unfortunately, they found some more. But we have His blessing for that.’
‘Would it surprise you to know that Jesus may have been married to Mary Magdalene?’
She looked at me with her dark eyes unblinking. ‘Of course they were married. After Jesus was taken up, St Joseph took her with him. She had one child, and was carrying another unborn. They went to France, and we went with him. Have you not heard this before?’
Daniel shook his head. ‘This is gypsy lore, known to all your people?’
‘Not to all, perhaps. Why? Is it important?’
‘It may be. What else can you tell us, Meroe? It would seem that there are more stories than we knew about Jesus of Nazareth.’
She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Have you heard the tale of the robin?’
We shook our heads.
‘When Jesus was on the cross, a robin flew down from a sycamore tree and tried to pick out the thorns from His forehead. But the crown of thorns was buried too deep, and the red blood stained the robin’s breast. And that is why all robins have red breasts, in memory of the kind bird. Robins may not be hunted, for any reason. The fowler may take any bird save the hawk, the eagle and the robin.’
The Spotted Dog Page 8