The Good Mayor: A Novel

by Andrew Nicoll

  Mamma Cesare made a watery smile that said, “When summer comes, it won’t find me waiting.” But she swung her feet to the floor without saying anything and picked up a big key from a dish on her dressing table. She gave a watery sniff. “Listen, you remember a long time ago, I told you that people tell me things and I listen?”

  “I remember, yes,” said Agathe.

  “I want you to meet some friends of mine. Help me move this.” Mamma Cesare’s dressing table stood where it had always stood, jammed into the only spare corner of the room, half across a plain pine door. She bumped at it with her hip, rattling the pins in the pin tray, jingling her potion bottles together, knocking over her wedding photo in its worn frame, until it moved away from the wall a little. “Come, come! Help me. I’m an old woman.”

  “In the cupboard?” asked Agathe. “You want to look in the cupboard?”

  “Not a cupboard, silly girl—it’s a stair.”

  Agathe gripped one corner of the table and tugged it forward. It moved quite easily, the way it would for a strong young woman in good health.

  “Good. Enough. Now we can go in.”

  Agathe expected a creak. She was looking forward to a passage hung with cobwebs and squeaking with bats but Mamma Cesare would never have put up with that nonsense. The light from her bedroom spilled through the half-open door and fell on a broad passage, hung with faded red brocade and a flight of curved stone steps rising into the shadows.

  Mamma Cesare took Agathe’s hand and led the way. “You come and see,” she said.

  Agathe brushed against a velvet rope that hung, like a handrail, at the wall and, higher up, golden shapes glinted as she passed, tridents and lion masks supporting the glass globes of old gas lamps. Then, as the dim light from Mamma Cesare’s bedroom faded to nothing behind her, a rainbow glow grew up ahead—golds and reds and blues and greens, pouring out on to the dark staircase through a stained-glass doorway alive with roses and lilies, swirling with foliage and, at the centre of it all, two faces side by side, one sobbing and one laughing.

  “It’s a theatre!” said Agathe.

  “Of course,” said Mamma Cesare. “You were expecting maybe a fish market?”

  “But I’ve lived here all of my life and I’ve never heard of this place.”

  Mamma Cesare snorted. “All your life. How long is that? Since the day before yesterday—and you never heard. The day after tomorrow and you forget.”

  “Can we go in?”

  “Can you think of any more silly questions?” Mamma Cesare leaned against the door and pushed her way through.

  It was like walking into a jewel box two rooms high and dripping with golden flowers and bunches of fruit. All around the stage, fat little golden cupids were skewered to the walls like butterflies in a case, frozen in attitudes of amazement at the astounding things about to happen on stage, surely, any moment now. Half a dozen rows of red velvet seats reflected back from foggy silver mirrors that hung on the walls, all misty and crackled like a glass snowstorm, and lamps glowed from a rococo octopus of a chandelier high in the roof.

  “It is beautiful,” said Agathe.

  “Beautiful,” Mamma Cesare agreed.

  “A beautiful, tiny, secret theatre. Who else knows about this place?”

  “You, me, Cesare. He pretends he has forgotten.”

  “How could you forget this? It’s wonderful.”

  “He does. When he is just a little boy, it frightens him so much that he never comes back. Shut the door, lock it up, put the table in the way, pretend it’s not here. People do that, you know. People, sometimes, they lock the door and pretend.”

  If Agathe recognised herself in that, she refused to admit it. She said, “But it’s lovely here. Why doesn’t he like it?”

  Mamma Cesare took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. “That first day, when we open that door, everything is black. Everywhere, cobwebs and dust, lying like fur on the floor and hanging down, here, here, here, everywhere old boxes and paper and rubbish. Little Cesare, he runs away and doesn’t come back. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the theatre people.”

  “Theatre people?”

  Mamma Cesare took Agathe by the hand and led her down to the front row. “Here,” she said. “Sit here beside me and tell me what you hear.”

  Agathe listened. The place was silent. “Nothing,” she said. She cocked her head and listened again. “Still nothing.”

  “Maybe later,” said Mamma Cesare.

  “What am I listening for?”

  “You listen. I talk. Me and my Cesare, when we leave the old country, you think we want to come to Dot? What’s a Dot? Who heard of Dot? We only know America! You go to America, you work hard, you make lots of money and, one day, little Cesare is President of the whole States American. So we walk. We walk for days and days, my Cesare and me, and we come to the sea and we find a boat for America.” Mamma Cesare raised a stern little finger. “No questions. Don’t talk. Listen. What do you hear?”

  “Only you,” said Agathe.

  “Use your other ear! Two weeks we are on that boat, rolling round and bouncing up and down, but at least we have calm weather—that Cesare, such a man!” Mamma Cesare laughed until she coughed and coughed until she choked and pulled herself up with a wheeze.

  Agathe looked worried. “You’re not well. We should get you to bed. I’ll make some tea.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Listen. Keep listening.”

  Agathe nodded and held the old lady’s hand. She was concerned. “I’m listening, I’m listening.”

  “Two weeks on the boat, then, one night, the captain pulls back the covers on the hold and he shows us America. But the police are everywhere, he says. So we go down into his little boat and we row to the beach and my Cesare, he carries me through the waves and everybody is kissing and shaking hands and saying goodbye and then, in the morning, here we are in Dot.”

  “Not America?”

  “Not America.”

  “Oh, God. What did you do?”

  “We work. We work and we work and we work. I wash every floor in Dot, every shirt in Dot, every turnip in Dot and, for three weeks, we are so happy to be in America and then, a little bit at a time, we find out that we are not. What do you hear now?”

  Agathe was frowning a little. “I thought I could hear a band.”

  “I see it in your face.”

  “Go on with the story.”

  “One day I wake up and I know the truth but this is what people do. They know things and do not believe them. I say nothing to Cesare but Cesare knows and he says nothing to me. Then, when we are lying in bed, so tired from turnips, he tells. And we cry.”

  “There it is again,” said Agathe. “The band. Can you hear it? They must be out in the street.”

  “Maybe,” said Mamma Cesare. She turned her head to listen and her fingers began to move, as if in time to the music.

  “You hear it too,” said Agathe.

  “Maybe. So you want to dance or hear my story?”

  “Story,” said Agathe.

  “After that, we are so angry that we work even harder. We got a nice room over a little shop. Then the shop gets empty. We rent the shop and we start to make coffee and it’s like nobody in Dot ever tasted coffee before. Everybody loves us. And then, one night, late at night, after work, I go for a walk and here is The Golden Angel, all empty and broken and dirty, with its windows all boarded up and the theatre people, they come out and they tell me I can buy this place for nothing because nobody wants it and nobody comes near but I can have it if I clean up the theatre.”

  “I’d have told them to clean their own theatre.”

  “They can’t. They need me. They know everybody in Dot. They know everything about everybody and they pick me. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because we are the same. You ever hear of a pogrom? One day, a long time ago, the theatre people hear there is a pogrom coming so they pack everything up, the band and the menage
rie and the fire-eater and the singers, all the wigs and the costumes and the furniture and they leave. But they never get to America and they come back.”

  “They should make their minds up.”

  Mamma Cesare said, “And you should maybe be a bit respectful.”

  The glow of the theatre was shifting like a sunset. Overhead, the chandelier was dimming and there was an expectant flutter of golden wings as shadows crept across the walls. It seemed to Agathe that most of the light in the theatre was coming now from the stage, as if the footlights had sighed into life but, towards the back, there remained a murmur of shadows. “They came back,” she whispered.

  Mamma Cesare took her hand and held her down into the chair. “Nothing to be scared about. I am strega from long line of strega. I have the gift. My boy Cesare has the gift. And you. They like you. They look out for you. They worry for you, that’s all.”

  “They came back!” It was all Agathe could say. She could hear the band quite clearly now, there, on the stage, not far off in the street but right there.

  “Shh,” said Mamma Cesare. “Same thing happens with them. Bad captain. One day, he puts them down on a beach and says, ‘This way for America. With your drums and your performing dogs and your tambourines, you walk a little way and here is America.’ It’s a sandbank. And he sails away and the tide comes back and everybody drowns—all except for one little girl. This little girl they wrap up in a velvet blanket with red and gold stripes which is belonging to Mimi the Wonder Dog and they put her in a drum and she floats away. Now they come back here to wait for her.”

  “But she must be dead.”

  “Don’t tell them. It would make them sad.”

  Agathe was squirming in her seat.

  “Sit still before you wet yourself,” Mamma Cesare advised. “Look. Just watch. Look.”

  Mamma Cesare knew the theatre people well. She knew their names and their stories. She could see them clearly but, for Agathe, it was like watching a photograph slipping into a bath of chemicals. Slowly, little by little, the image of them formed on stage, the beautiful dancers with their long legs and spangled tights, the strongman in his leopard skin, the dogs leaping through paper drum skins, the jugglers with their Indian clubs but she looked too long, left them too long in the developing fluid and the image thickened and darkened and disappeared.

  “They’ve gone,” she said.

  “No. Stop looking, then you see.”

  “I can’t see.”

  “Well, they see you. They want to meet you for a long time. And they tell me that man, the painter, is never going to make you happy.”

  Agathe looked down at the floor and said, “I know. I left the painter.”

  “No, you left the paperhanger. You went to the painter. You think I don’t know? You think they don’t know?”

  On the stage, Agathe noticed the theatre people standing still, no dancing, no juggling, looking out at her. A blue blur, like a moving flame was flitting amongst them, the way a bird shifts from twig to twig and Agathe felt a heat of love and sympathy as it passed.

  Mamma Cesare pointed angrily at the stage. “They know. You had a good man and you got rid of him.”

  “Stopak was no good!”

  “Who’s talking about Stopak? Look at them. Look at the stage. You think they don’t know? You think your granny doesn’t know?”

  “Granny!” Agathe gawped at the blue light on the stage. “Granny, is that you?”

  Mamma Cesare was exasperated. “Stupid girl! That’s not your granny. That’s my Cesare. You don’t see his moustache? Oh, you make me tired. Bed now. Bed. You go now. And remember.”

  Agathe whispered, “But my granny had a moustache.”

  GATHE RODE HOME ON TOP OF THE TRAM, letting the cold wind batter at her as she went and trying hard to make sense of all that she had seen and heard. “But my granny had a moustache,” she said, time after time. “My granny had a moustache,” until it sounded so ridiculous that she started to laugh and, by the time the tram reached Green Bridge, she had realised that the whole thing was nonsense. It was obviously nonsense. It couldn’t be anything but nonsense. She was tired—that was all. Overwrought. A haunted theatre! A spooky strongman with pink tights and iron barbells! Nonsense.

  What was so wonderful about lifting the ghost of a heavy weight and, anyway, where would the ghost of barbells come from? Or the ghost of Granny’s moustache? The thought of it was so ridiculous that she burst out laughing again but she stopped when the tram turned along Ampersand Avenue and there, coming out of The Three Crowns, she saw Hektor. He was drunk, shambling like an ape with his hands in his pockets, almost bent double to the pavement as he waltzed from wall to gutter and back again. Agathe looked at him with horror and disgust, just as she would have looked at any shabby drunk but then she remembered that she loved him and how ashamed he was for whatever it was that he had done and she remembered how it felt to kiss him and she felt sorry for him. Poor Hektor.

  Agathe hurried from the tram at Foundry Street and ran, clippity-clip, through the tunnel, over the cobbles, down Canal Street and back to the flat. She lay in bed against the wall when Hektor came in, plump and pale and feigning sleep, while he blundered round as only a drunk trying to be silent can.

  Even when he knocked over the chair, she pretended not to notice and, when he threw back the covers and came to bed like a falling tree and passed out on his back, Agathe only waited for a moment to tuck the blankets around him and wrap a leg over him and kiss him. The bristles round his mouth had a familiar prickle about them.

  “My granny had a moustache,” she said and she kissed him again and fell asleep.

  She was still there, tangled in him, legs and arms jumbled together as if they had gone to sleep in a paupers’ grave, when the alarm clock went off.

  Agathe rolled to the floor. Hektor did not stir. She washed and dressed and, when she returned, he had curled into the empty warmth she had left behind, his body filling the shadow of hers pressed in the mattress.

  There was nothing to eat, no breakfast to make, nothing to do but go to work, but she needed money and the only money was in Hektor’s trousers. He had managed to fling them over the hook on the back of the door before he went to bed and, when Agathe reached stealthily into the pockets, the heavy buckle of his belt rattled against the wood.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Shhhhh. Go back to sleep.”

  But he didn’t go back to sleep. He half sat up in bed, looking angry and sick. “Are you going through my pockets?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I just need some money for the tram. I have to go to work.”

  “Get your own bloedig money.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t go through my pockets. You don’t do that to a man. Have a bit of respect.”

  Now she was getting angry. Now she was beginning to feel a little afraid so she calmed herself. “Hektor, I’m not going through your pockets. I just need the tram fare.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “But I gave you all my money yesterday.”

  “Well, it’s gone and you’re going to have to get some more. A lot more.”

  There was a dark edge in his voice now, enough to make her worry about how she answered him. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Hektor rolled down into the bed again, turned away from her so the curl of his lip was magnified through his whole body. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” he mocked her in a stupid, whiny singsong. “Look, I’ll make this so simple even you can get it.”

  He threw back the covers and walked towards her.

  Even yet, months after the first time, Agathe felt something gush through her when she saw him move that way but, this time, it was different and she found herself shrinking back into the corner by the sink as he drew near, flinching as his hand shot out past her head to grab his trousers from the hook.

  Hektor’s pockets were sagging and swollen with loose change after a ni
ght in The Three Crowns. He jabbed an angry fist and brought up a handful of coins and forced them on her. “Here, take it! Want more?” And he did the same again so that Agathe was left standing there with money spilling out of her fingers and bouncing on to the floor.

  She cradled her hands over the table and put the money down in a rough heap. She said, “Hektor, just enough for the tram—that’s all I need.” And she began picking a few coins out.

  “Well, I need more. I need money for paints and canvas and a man’s got to be able to buy his mates a beer or is that not allowed any more or something?”

  “No, Hektor. It’s allowed. Of course it’s allowed.”

  “Right, then.”

  He was still standing in front of the door, naked, holding his trousers in his hand and Agathe would have stayed all day waiting by the table rather than try to push past him and go.

  Finally, after a few moments of silence, he put his trousers on.

  “I’d better go,” she said.

  “Yes.” She imagined pages of embarrassed apology in that one word—as if he had come to his senses after a drunken party burdened with hazy memory of some shameful incident. He stood aside and even opened the door for her, looking at the floor like a little boy standing in the naughty corner.

  Agathe picked up her coat and bag and hurried past him.

  “Wait a minute!”

  Her heart sank.

  “Don’t I get a kiss?”

  She turned back. “’Course you get a kiss.” She kissed him.

  “A proper kiss.”

  She kissed him again, right there on the doorstep and he tasted of bile and dry morning-mouth and unbrushed teeth and he smelled of beer and old cigarettes and sweat and man and she wanted more and more of him until he had to push her off and say, “Go. Go to work or come back to bed.”

  “Work,” she said. “Money for paints.”

  All the way to work, running up Canal Street, waiting at the tram stop, jostling along Ampersand Avenue on the top deck, Agathe had the taste of him in her mouth. She searched it out on the tip of her tongue, tracing every fragment of it and wondering what it was that made her afraid of Hektor and yet more afraid to pull away. She had never been afraid of Stopak—not once in all those years—and she could think of nothing about Mayor Tibo Krovic that would ever make her frightened. But Hektor did. There was something. Maybe because he was a man, a real man, a man’s man, the kind of man she’d never known before. But such a boy too. A little boy ashamed to tell her the truth about what he had done and why he needed the money. “Silly boy,” she thought. She would pay his fines and be glad to do it and he need never even say, “Thank you.” Just knowing—that would be her reward.