Theft

by N. S. Köenings

  “Wait,” said Eva. “What am I going to do?” Blackie looked at her. “Do?” Now his face was pinched. About to rise, he curled his nose at her, as if she had begun, uncouthly, to smell. “You’ll do nothing at all!” He placed a plump hand firmly on her arm. “For one thing, Fontanella’s quite upset. She’s sure you made it up. And I”—his voice was not unkind but it was firm—“I don’t know what to think.”

  Eva, struggling to sit, caught a pearly comb that had jumped out of her hair. “Don’t go yet, Blackie, please.” Eva’s very face hurt. She didn’t know how she would get up. Blackie pulled away a bit, evaluated her with a tufted raising of his brow. Fontanella’s voice sang out for him. “Maxwell! Maxwell, come away from there!” Blackie sighed, said softly, “Look, my dear, we’ll go over it tomorrow.” Fontanella called for him again, and with a final, puzzled look at Eva, Blackie scampered down the steps.

  Little arty Susan had come out of the toilet then, where she had gone to throw cool water on her face. Strands of ghostly hair—she was pale, this girl, the color of coal ash—clung wetly to her cheeks; the butterfly tattoo that trembled at her neck seemed ready to flit off, for real, at last. She held her head at an odd angle, stood there as if listening for something she could not quite hear. As she moved, careful, to the stage, Susan did not step; she crept. She peered at Eva from behind the mediums’ table. She had something to tell her. But, hearing Fontanella call (“Susan Darling! Come here now. Immediately!”), Susan gave instead a small, halfhearted mewl and skipped back to the main floor.

  Knees atremble, rushing, liquid, legs not quite her own, Eva stood up then and understood that she was being left. Fontanella, black hair out of place, matching blouse alive, looked almost electric. Plump hands desperately at work, palping, sparkling, tapping, kneading in the air as if something had spilled out of it that must at all costs be returned, she told her murmuring charges: “We shall now remove ourselves. Get far from this damn show.” And so she and Blackie led a nearly catatonic Flora Hewett firmly down the back steps of the Overlook Café, each clasping a still hand, while Susan, childlike and unmoored, clutched at the lace trim of Fontanella’s scarf. Before the street door closed on them, Eva heard Fontanella’s voice. “Ah-frick-ahhh, indeed. Who does she think she is?” Then came Susan Darling, tender and unsure. “What could that have been, do you think?” Blackie saying, “Calm yourselves. At this moment we don’t know,” and last, soft but unmistakable, Flora Hewett’s tread, gloomy, solid, thoughtful on the steps.

  Alone in the old function room, Eva tried to move her feet, found that she could, yes, after all, keep her knees in place, and began folding up the chairs. As she gathered the strewn paper plates, folded them in halves, and tossed them in the waste-basket, she thought of Flora Hewett, whose job this usually was, the cleaning up of fruit punch, sugar packets, and the tea bags, when the mediums’ work was done. Flora Hewett had been doing that for years. Eva sniffed. What had she allowed herself to say? What had she done to Flora?

  She folded up the long green velvet cloth that marked the mediums’ table and slipped Blackie’s record from the player back into its sleeve (The Messiah, it had been this time, which everybody liked). What a thing, she thought. What a thing to happen. As she shut off all the lights, the chandelier bulbs ticked. In the dark, Eva closed her eyes a moment, stretched the muscles in her back and legs. She ran her tongue along the tunnels of her mouth and felt something—not quite tangible, an unnamed thing—fall softly into place. So be it, she thought. Sheikh Abdul Aziz.

  Flora’s Evening

  Flora Hewett, oldest paying member of the Thursday Psychics Club, was reliable, firmly of this world, practical and dull. Because she had no talents of her own, she had always liked the scene, all those people, from every walk of life, gathering to listen to the dead. It made her feel that things went on far beyond the confines of what most people believed, which made her less afraid (she was afraid, sometimes, when she thought about her age, that dimness she could sense sometimes encroaching from the edge). The Thursday Club also made her feel that she was needed. At the meetings, she felt recognized, in some small way important. It was she who had come up with the idea of regulars beginning to pay dues, to do away with entrance fees, so that there would be a budget, ensuring rental of the function room from the Overlook Café without any interruption. It was Flora who had thought of bringing snacks and some refreshments, and who, having thought of it, did bring them: the weekly tray of sandwiches and cakes, the urn of boiling water for the tea, the plastic bowl of punch, more recently the sparkling water for the younger ones who had begun, that winter (Susan Darling in their midst), coming from the Art School.

  She had not missed a day in years. And yet, despite her excellent attendance, she had never, no, not once, been selected from the Other Side as the target of deep news; after the initial disappointment, she had come to pride herself on this; it meant, she thought, that no one in her family had been secretive or cruel, or done to death by hate, that her life and her loved ones held no hidden drama. She had taken the position left her: a source of strength for anyone who’d gotten a hard message from Beyond and needed a hand held. She came with tissues in her purse, cologne in a spray bottle, and lavender pastilles, which, she very much believed, calmed a person down just as well as brandy. She gave comfort where she could, and, after everyone was gone, she collected up the plates and cups and went home with her trays. The Thursday Club had always been a joy for her, a hook to hang her days on. But since her George had taken ill and now lay so incomprehensible and helpless in his bed, the Thursday Club was also the one thing that had, predictable and regular, helped her keep her head. Above the Overlook Café, Flora always knew, she’d thought, what she could expect.

  So when it finally happened—so publicly, and strangely, as it never had before—Flora had both stiffened and dissolved; gone leaden and still; dissipated in the air and been returned in a new and unfamiliar shape, rubber or basalt. All those people staring at her as if she’d brought it on herself, or, and this was worse, as if they should comfort her! Someone had put an arm around her; another squeezed her hand. And someone, someone—and she had no wish to know who, a black-dressed girl in work boots or a wild-haired boy in rouge who did not understand, a student, laughing, light—had whistled and applauded! She’d folded all her feelings close within herself and she had not moved a hair, even as The Medium Fontanella instructed all please but the principals to go calmly on their way.

  She would have stayed fastened to her seat forever, chill and like a stone, had Fontanella and her partner, Maxwell Black the Scribe, not come to coax her up. The two of them, followed by peculiar Susan Darling—who had seemed to hover, weightless, in the background—had helped her down the stairs. “Don’t you worry, Flora,” Fontanella had said. “Don’t pay Eva any mind. Don’t you go and do anything about it.” Serious Fontanella, fingers on the cold expanse that was Flora Hewett’s face. Reassuring—this was Maxwell Black, bergamot and olive soap—“We’ll sort this out, my dear. We’ll get you some advice.” The sound of the familiar voices had stirred Flora a little, and she’d managed, one foot before the other, to make it to the street.

  As they went, they discussed the scene among themselves. Flora wasn’t lucid yet, but, as if down a narrow stairwell, or echoing in a cave, some things they said came through. Fontanella thought Eva Bright either scurrilous or mad, that she’d gone off her head. That she’d done the thing quite consciously, on purpose. The weather had been strange, tourists throwing off their windbreakers, cats apreen in warm and clammy sun. Could that have brought it on? Fontanella thought it all in terribly poor taste. It was simply Eva Bright, that arriviste, attempting, because nothing real would do it, to make herself important, special. In any case, they trucked only in ghosts, she said, not in other beings. Not in djinn or demons. “We all go to Church!” she said, and “Other beings, Islamic ones included, are the Devil’s spawn.”

  Maxwell, for his part, took a different ta
ck. He did not think Eva capable of coming up with such a thing alone. “She’s not that clever, Nella,” he did whisper. And furthermore, he was a bit intrigued. A not-quite-human being! Did they not hear sometimes of hobgoblins and sprites? Of succubi and trolls? How interesting, he thought, that this should be a djinn, and that that djinn would come to them from Africa, which had, he said, he’d thought, not a thing to do with him, with them. “Djinn,” he said, though it was nearly like a question, full of wonder, “are not in our cultural makeup. Are they?” Fontanella punched his forearm and gave him a dark look.

  Flora wished they’d stop. She was tired of their voices. She wished they’d leave her be. If they had asked her, she would have had no choice but to say that unlike Fontanella, she knew that it was true. She, decent, plain old unsurprising Flora Hewett, believed immediately and without question in Eva Bright’s Mohammedan djinn. She, careful, quiet Flora Hewett, knew, quite oddly—and not in the usual place in her own brain where she usually knew such things, like: I will make a pie, or I will purchase shoes—that she was going to take action. Whether Eva’s mind had melted with the unexpected sun, whether Eva Bright had done this thing on purpose to bring attention to herself, and whether things from Africa belonged up here or not, it wasn’t a mistake. This message was real.

  Flora understood two things that she did not say. First of all, there was the fact that George Alexander Hewett had indeed been to Africa himself, had stayed there for a while. And secondly, perhaps the most important thing, Flora Hewett had been sent a sign, well before the show.

  Before Sheikh Abdul had asked for her by name and in that voice, before Eva had even startled everyone and groaned, actually while Blackie read his final letter (Adam asks that Mary be good to his mother), a clear vision of her George had come to her. Not unlike a transparency, a watermark on the visual plane of things, it had remained there the whole time, even afterwards, while she sat still in her chair. Dear George. With a great smile on his face! Sitting up in bed and nodding! He had one foot on the floor and was about to set the other down. As if next he’d ask for breakfast. As if he recognized her. And yet in this sad and flattening life, he’d not sat up, not said a clear, sweet word for weeks!

  Flora Hewett had never had a vision—some daydreams, as a girl, later on mistaking dogs for postboxes sometimes, birds where there were none. But never anything like this. She was sensible, distinctly closed to Other Realms, not given to hysterics. Why would she see George right there in front of her, hovering, looking his old self at last, well before the spirit rose in Eva, if there were not something in it? Dear George, who—though he was a hard man, though he was not always solicitous or tender—was nonetheless the light of Flora’s life, the only man she’d had!

  Remembering it so clearly was going to make her cry. Surrounded by her guardians on the sidewalk, Flora had the unmistakable impression that Fontanella wished she would cry, that Fontanella would have taken pleasure from offering her handkerchief and saying, “Now, there, there,” and, while Flora liked to share her tissues, too, she took them from no one. She squared her shoulders, dug a fist against each hip, and insisted she was fine. She shook them off at last once they’d pointed out her car. “Yes, I have my keys,” she said. “Good night.” And they had reluctantly let go.

  In the old, familiar seat, hands clutching the wheel though she’d not started the engine, Flora finally cried, hot tears that filled her eyes and slipped over her cheeks as though a dam had split, face so wet that she could not make out the words on the chip shop’s lit-up sign, though it said “Hassan’s Take-Aways” and she looked for it each Thursday because it was how she knew that she was near enough to the Overlook Café to find a place to park. She felt marvelment and hope. George was sitting up in bed! George was looking well! Had she seen into the future? How she wished he would look well again.

  Bit by bit, her tears ebbed, and in the quiet were replaced by a limpid, lucent glow, the chip shop in hard focus. She knew her certainty was fragile, the kind that follows shock, but hold to it she would: She would do it. Whatever this Abdul Aziz demanded, she would do it all.

  It helped that this odd message—Flora’s first!—had come from Eva Bright. They had never spoken much. Flora did not know her, really. But Eva Bright had been her favorite of the mediums from the start. Eva Bright had a fine face, not yet in middle age but wise, which she did not accentuate with heavy makeup or with fat, prismatic pendants to make a person think, Ah, that person deals in ghosts. Eva Bright was always ordinary, reassuringly so. Modest. Normal. Interested in ghosts because everybody was. She did have some small gift, but she did not seem, as the other two appeared, interested in costumes or in marketing, in making a to-do. Maxwell Black in his old-fashioned, nearly dandy suits, with that walking cane the head of which was a globe in a bird’s claw, and Fontanella, painted, scarlet, purple, black. And could those be real names? Flora did admire the scribe and medium’s flowing, tailored costumes, yes, but was it not a bit over the top? She had not yet made up her mind about slender, wraithlike, ashen Susan Darling, who could sense vibrations, sounds (“and hearts,” she said), in things. “Darling” could be real, of course, but it could also be a gimmick, to make everybody like her. Enjoyment, Flora thought, was one thing. Trust was quite another.

  Once at home, she stood without turning the lights on over George’s bed. How tired her man looked, even in the moonlight. How different now from what he’d always been—so active, such a figure! The square jaw she had always thought so handsome looked too angular these days. His flesh seemed to be thinning, sinking. He’d lost so much weight.

  George’s hands hurt her the most. He had little feeling in them, hadn’t had since falling in the garden, falling without even tripping on the bench or on a rock, or on the slope that held the flowers—falling, simply, snatched towards the earth by something no one understood. He’d done so much with those hands! Built things, played chess with the neighbor, helped Flora with her puzzles, smoothed out folded bills he took from sticky envelopes that always gave her trouble, but which, with precise and steady fingers, he never found a bother! And now he seemed a shell.

  Watching George made Flora wish to cry again, but she didn’t want to wake him. And, she also told herself, did she not have hope, now? She wanted him to sleep a sleep of angels, a full, deep, fearless sleep from which he might awake refreshed and be himself again. Without taking off her clothes and slipping, as she usually did, into a nightgown and the bed jacket she had years before crocheted for herself, Flora lay down next to him and listened to him breathe. She took one of his slack hands in hers and pressed her cheek upon it. His skin was like a violet’s.

  Africa, she thought. It was the one period of his life that George never discussed, his time in the army. He had been out there (though Flora had no idea where that “there” was, on a map, what country it had been), and that, whatever doubts the other mediums had, made it oddly right, this Sheikh Abdul Aziz approaching her for ailing George’s good. She’d only seen the pictures, had not liked to trouble him with questions, and she had let it be a mystery, his secret. But could something from so long ago, she asked herself, some animus (was that the word?), have chosen him back when he was young and crossed the sea to find him? How had the spirit known his name? How had it known her? Flora closed her eyes. George’s breathing (regular, thank God!) rose and fell in waves. She curled her fist against his shoulder, as if to hold him up, and tried to fall asleep. Africa. Spirits. If she had met George at some foreign seashore long ago, or seen him walking down a street, would she not, too, have traveled distances to find him? Would she not, too, have remembered his sweet shape, longingly, for years?

  Eva’s Night

  Eva Bright had never gone to Africa. She did not even know, she thought, a single person who had been there, let alone an African, or anyone who said that they were such. If only she’d been conscious while her visitor had talked! If only she’d been able to discuss the thing with him, the way Fontanella co
uld with the shades who came to her.

  At home again that evening, undressing for bed, Eva wished, as usual, that she were a better medium. Eva, Fontanella often said, was too raw yet, not entirely trusted by those who had passed on. She had come to her gifts late. In her upper thirties she might be, but in Fontanella’s view, she was “Still an infant, just a baby in the jamboree of souls.” Saying this, Fontanella would reach out with her short fingers, those hands that Eva sometimes thought were really well-kept paws, to brush the stern brown fringe from Eva’s brow. She’d tap the combs that Eva wore, one on either side, as if drawing a spell. “You’ll learn from me,” she said, “in time.” Sometimes reassurance of this sort was not really enough. Often, Eva bristled. But she knew that some of it was true: she had so much to learn!

  It was Fontanella who had started up the group ten years before; without her there would be no weekly meetings at the Overlook Café, no introductory lectures on the many paths to spiritual peace (this week from the writings of Patanjali: the way of pratyahara, listening to silence). She was the metaphysicist among them, an excellent clairaudient, the most capable of all. Long inducted, so she said, from a girl into the realms of the Beyond, The Medium Fontanella was more than a mere conduit. She knew exactly what was happening to her each and every time. She could help the speaking souls if they needed her assistance. They came when she called. “Rather like a midwife,” she would say, “I guide, I prompt, I soothe.”