Rose Leopard

by Richard Yaxley

  They seem smaller than I remember. Rust smears the blades.

  And when my own tears are done I look up to see a spider in its corner busily spinning the silver quadrants and triangles of its new web. I remember sitting in this very spot with Kaz a week or fortnight or month ago, snared in another splash and stare until my eyes hurt, and the shears remain, glazed soils of our disparate, unholy of time. I remember some more but the spider continues to spin by sunlight and dappled by the earth.

  Seven

  Francesca and I are together, in a church. It is unbearably hot, the citruses of her perfume are overpowering and I am drifting into other places, wallowing in splashes of time.

  Once upon a time, I remember guiltily, I used to have sex with Francesca. On those occasions her nose flared then narrowed, in sync with the movements of her body. At the time, it made her intensely attractive.

  Now we are occupying the same pew and I can smell her.

  The last church I entered was in Sussex, two days before Kaz and I flew home from our not-long-married dream-trip to England. We were pottering around a village called Chelting-ham. We bought punnets of strawberries that we chomped by the river, took photos of old crumbling ivy-swept houses then rented two push-bikes and cycled through the narrow, uneven laneways that the English insist are roads. It was nearing dusk when we happened upon the church; small and mossy, it stood alone in a field of unkempt grass and lemon wildflowers.

  ‘Let’s go in.’ Kaz had already dismounted, despite my protestations. She strode briskly to the two arched doors, turned a ring-handle and entered the gloom.

  Following behind I remember honey-coloured pews, an overly large portrayal of the Crucifixion done in pewter and oak, hymn books flecked with brown spots like an old man’s flesh. And the stagnation; as if this compact body of air had rested here for centuries, last breathed by a country congregation at the most holy wedding of a yeoman and his damsel.

  I ushered her along. We wandered through a side door into the graveyard where there were elm trees shading the headstones in a thinning daylight. The colours of the flower-tops and grass stems were crisper than in Australia, where everything seems to have been mixed prior to origin with white clay and ochre. We walked slowly and read the inscriptions on the headstones. They were bland, traditional, quietly respectful; runes to the deceased.

  ‘Look at this one,’ Kaz said. ‘Alice Margaret Driscoll, 1878 to 1893. A lamb, safe in the arms of the Lord Our Shepherd. Poor thing; she was only fifteen. I wonder what happened.’

  ‘Probably dysentery.’ The church had unsettled me; I was feeling gloomy. ‘Or TB. A bad head cold. Fell off a horse. Who cares?’

  ‘Oh Vince.’ Kaz grabbed my arm, snuggled against me. ‘Come on, grumble-bum. You can do better than that. Tell me a story. Come on, tell me what happened to Alice Margaret Driscoll.’

  I sighed, looked at her glorious hands on my stained jacket.

  We sat together on a grassy knoll beneath the lengthening shadows of the elms.

  ‘Alice Margaret Driscoll,’ I told her, ‘was an unremarkable child in every way except one. She lived in the quaint English village of Cheltingham, her father was a … a shopkeeper with a bad beard, and her mother bottled elderberry jam. She had two brothers named Jack and, um, Eugene, and she went to school and got most of her sums right. All pretty ordinary and predictable.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But she had one remarkable trait. One thing that set her apart from the local yokels, one thing that gave her the chance to rise above the mundane and entirely predictable future that had been mapped out for her at birth.’

  ‘You’re stalling’

  ‘No, I’m scene-setting. Creating suspense, like a good storyteller should. Now, like all remarkable traits, this gift that Alice had could be used for good — or alternatively, it could be used for evil. It all depended upon her character, the inherent self. This was the big question: what sort of person was Alice Margaret Driscoll … really?’

  The English sun dipped further into the horizon, created a thin golden line and occasional splatters of amber. Kaz moved closer, sought my body-warmth.

  ‘What gift, Vince?’

  ‘Well, when she was young it only happened every so often. She had to teach herself to use the gift, which she did by the time she was … oh, around fourteen or fifteen.’

  ‘What gift?’

  ‘Haven’t I said yet? Sorry. Alice Margaret Driscoll could see other people’s thoughts.’

  ‘She was a mind-reader.’

  ‘No — a thought-reader. There’s a difference. Kaz, the mind is a vast unintelligible mass of gobbledygook. Mind-readers have a lot of bogus territory to negotiate. They walk through huge swamps to find the key to the castle. Individual thoughts, however, are more tangible, more considered. More dangerous in the wrong hands, methinks.’

  ‘Okay, point taken. She was a thought-reader. What happened?’

  Pause for reflection, a quick pan of the surroundings. Old graveyards, I thought, are delightfully disorganised. Why is it that new graveyards and crematoriums have to be so planned? Rectangular memories, slots for the deceased — economic rationalism, even there?

  The random strike of death should always be reflected by disorder.

  ‘Nothing much, initially.’ I leaned my head onto Kaz’s shoulder, drank in her aromas like a bee sucking pollen. ‘A little blackmail amongst friends. Did you know that Jean Arthurs likes Peter Ponsonby? Or that Angus Brute wants to do it behind the barn with Jezabel Smithers? Or that Will Hornboy-Taylor has done it behind the barn with a rather accommodating sheep? Pretty harmless stuff — until she thought-read her mother.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And discovered a closet overloaded with skeletons, each one of them vigorously rattling the door.’

  Kaz grinned, moved our hands together, locked our fingers.

  ‘Go on then. Rattle away,’ she said.

  ‘Right. As it happens, Mrs Driscoll was not really Mrs Driscoll. Her real name was Fanny May, former servant to the real Mrs D. When Alice hopped blithely into her mind, she’d been remembering years before — a hotter-than-Hades lustfest with Mr D, a.k.a. Geoffrey Brian.’

  ‘So Fanny May and Fanny did?’

  ‘Exactly. Ah, the winsome folly of youth. Anyway, Alice fossicked around Fanny’s sick little labyrinth and discovered more. Just after she was born, Alice’s mother mysteriously carked and canny Fanny assumed the mantle.’

  ‘Weren’t people suspicious?’

  ‘No — because the Driscolls had been travelling o.s. for years. Mrs D was an ex-Spanish flamenco dancer who used to entertain African pirates in Byzantine cafés. No one in Cheltingham had ever laid their crusty pus-ridden eyes on her.’

  ‘She was murdered?’

  ‘Mm, but not by Fanny or Geoffrey. Turns out that Mrs D was killed by Fanny’s ex-boyfriend, a Moroccan hashish dealer named Yumut Kan. He was a jealous type who stalked Fanny, saw her legs-akimbo with old Geoffrey and thought he’d come back that night and do her in with a sapphire-encrusted tungsten scimitar.’

  ‘Fanny May and Yumut Kan. Lovely.’

  ‘Notice the sapphires? Your birth-stone. Purely coincidence, of course.’

  ‘You’re a darling.’

  ‘Thanks. Anyway, when Mr Kan worked out he’d got the wrong bedroom and stabbed the wrong babe, he committed hara-kiri by drowning himself in a vat of liquefied dope. With the gendarmes closing in, Fanny and Geoffrey fled to rural England with baby Alice and their secrets. Time passed and everything was dandy (and occasionally randy) until Alice’s gift was revealed — and Geoffrey remembered his wife’s dying promise that she would be avenged. I will be avenged! — she said.’

  ‘So Mrs D flamenco’d her deep and dark desires via Alice’s mind?’

  I grinned, squeezed her thin shoulders.

  ‘Right again. Very good. All of which scared the pants off Fanny and Geoffrey — who couldn’t believe their luck when they found young Alice, dead beside
a babbling brook on her fifteenth birthday.’

  ‘Fell from her horse? Shot by a cross-bow? Head held and mercilessly drowned?’

  ‘None of the above. Fifteen-year-old Alice Margaret Driscoll had been stabbed through the heart with a sapphire-encrusted tungsten scimitar. Seems that, as well as holding half of ordinary Cheltingham to ransom, she had been blackmailing a new young stable-hand by the name of Mohammed — Mohammed Kan.’

  We were silent, cocooned together in the near-darkness. I felt Kaz drop her hand, squeeze my groin a few times like she was siphoning milk from a cow. I was gazing vaguely at the newly arrived stars, trying to find a pattern, play dot-to-dot.

  ‘Maybe a bit contrived,’ she told me eventually.

  ‘I told you before,’ I said. ‘I’m a good writer but a lousy story-teller’

  I loved that trip — most of it, anyway. I loved it because we did it for a reason: we were both bewitched by this innate sense of expatriate connectedness that Australians have for England. Perhaps it was socio-biological — a sort of early-twenties version of the midlife crisis — or perhaps a consequence of seeing too many repeat episodes of The Good Life, but the mythology of the mother country had cut deeply into us.

  ‘It’s romantic,’ Kaz had said, gazing at a brochure picture of a green empty field.

  ‘And it’s not America,’ I told her, thinking of sitcoms.

  We pored over magazines, books and travel journals; we transported ourselves and imagined another life where we saw and smelled and lived the history of the place. England, we decided, would be thick and aged, as musty as unopened tomes in a monastic library. There would be a depth and saturation of colour, unlike Australia which is so bleached, so drought- and flood- and sun-evaporated. We thought of ourselves becoming participants in Enid Blyton-world, snuggled in fuggy bed-sits, roving the verdant hills and dales, drinking tea and smiling benignly at the ghosts of marauding Normans and Saxons. We would be like adopted children, returning to a long-ago home that they could never recognise and to parents they could never know — but were instinctively drawn to anyway.

  ‘It’s dingy,’ Kaz said. Day three, and we were holed up in a pub in southern London. Outside, a thin irritating rain wept into the thin irritating streets. Inside, a group of fat irritating men were dexterously balancing a number of actions: the playing of darts, the yelling of unintelligible obscenities, the chomping of ‘crisps’, the offering of opinion on the sexual peccadilloes of someone called Marsha, and the drinking of huge mugs of a brand of bitter ale that looked like sump-oil.

  ‘Dingy and dense,’ she continued. ‘Notice how close everything is. People, buildings, the bloody weather — it all sort of caves in on top of you.’

  ‘We’re in London,’ I explained. ‘It’s a city. Cities are always dingy and dense.’

  ‘But this is different,’ she insisted. ‘It’s closeted. I feel like there’s barely enough air for all of us to breathe.’

  ‘Kaz, there’s plenty of air —’

  ‘I know, I know … but it’s like, like we’re specks of soil jammed together in a tiny space. Ingrained dirt and no room to move. I feel trapped.’

  I crumbled a wedge of Stilton from the lunch-platter that we were sharing. She was right of course. Within the bowels of London, old wet stinky London, everything seemed to fall in and fall apart. There were no clean edges or sharp corners; all had turned to decay.

  Days later and more accustomed to the city, we stood within the subdued light of Westminster Abbey, the echoes of our footfall still ringing in our ears. We stared at the vaulted ceiling, were respectfully silent before Henry’s Chapel and marvelled at the moon-like phosphorescence that seeped through the clerestory windows and cushioned the architecture. Because I dared not wake the entombed monarchs, I found myself walking on the sides of my feet like I was on hot sand. I kept my body stiff, barely moved my arms for fear of disturbing the venerable air. At one stage I stopped, peered down and realised that I was standing blithely on the grave of some noble bone-bag who had died nearly 592 years before.

  ‘If there is a God,’ Kaz whispered conspiratorially as we passed Elizabeth I’s beatific and rather omnipotent smile, ‘then She is definitely here’

  ‘There’s no God,’ I told her quickly but she didn’t answer. She was too busy looking upwards at the swooping Cupids, angels trumpeting through cumuli-nimbus, gilt-edged gargoyles staring defiantly.

  ‘Answer me this,’ I said later over chips and a kerbside doner kebab. ‘Why were we so quiet in there?’

  ‘Were we? I didn’t notice.’

  ‘We were funereal. Kaz, it’s just a bloody church. Just a tomb for all the dead white males that have ravaged this cold sod of a place. Tell me why we were so quiet?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kaz scratched her chin then selected the longest saltiest chip.

  ‘I hate churches,’ I told her churlishly. ‘I don’t want to see any more.’

  Kaz shrugged, waved vaguely at the Abbey door. ‘There’s such a weight in there,’ she said, chewing pensively. ‘Don’t you think? A sort of historical heaviness. It sits on you and then presses you down so much that you don’t want to say anything, in case one of those dead white males wakes up and points the finger.’

  ‘Exactly! That’s why I hate churches. They are so full of weight.’

  ‘Even for you, who doesn’t believe?’

  ‘No — worse for me who doesn’t believe. Weightier still. Me going to church is like a vegan going to the butcher. On one hand I’m fascinated that people can be sucked in by a few dodgy stories, nice carvings and some strategically placed coloured glass — but I’m also oppressed. I feel like there’s a secret out there and even though it’s meaningless pap I still want to know what it is.’

  The rain slanted in on us again, blurred London’s parade of neon.

  ‘Have a chip,’ Kaz said to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said to her.

  Meaningless pap, dodgy stories. Someone is telling stories now. I open my eyes, see that it is Stu. BIG Stu is telling BIG stories. We are in a church, the first one I have visited since Sussex. I am in the centre of the front pew near citrusy Francesca. Obviously this is a place of some importance. I am a person of some importance. Around me, a gathering stares. I recognise some of its parts: a magazine editor, some cousins, one ex-schoolfriend. (Brianna from St Chrissy’s? Still drinking Midori?) I am also flanked by Milo and Otis, Bernice, Amelia. Garten is nearby. None of them touches me. Their faces swim together, become a collage of drained flesh and eyes dead as road stones.

  In front of me, Stu stands behind a podium. There is a cross carved into the dark wood. Stu is still talking to the gathering. There are tears spiking his cheeks. He mentions Kaz by name. He mumbles something about remembering the good times. He says, ‘Everything that is done in the world is done by hope’ Then he apologises for quoting Martin Luther in a Catholic church. No one says anything so he starts telling a new story about first meeting Kaz. He uses words like bounce and bubble and infectious. I find the last word to be a curious choice. He talks some more, and after a while there is subdued laughter. I think — this is also curious, in a church. People do not laugh in churches. I want them to stop and then they do and I feel strangely powerful, as if my will has been exercised.

  A man in a long gown stands and tells more stories. I do not know him. I do not know why he should talk about my wife. He looks rheumy and old. I dislike his manufactured air of pomp. I dislike his ears because they are filled with coarse grey hairs that curl like question-marks. He tries to catch my eye but I refuse to let him. Instead I stare at Francesca’s long, horsy nose. It is smooth and red and shiny like plastic, and it makes me think of sex again.

  Long Gown begs for everyone to pray. It seems supercilious rather than contrite. The gathering stands obediently and reads Bible-story stuff from a booklet. There are ribbon-shapes on the booklet, and a photocopied image of Kaz on the front cover. I think: Not the best choice of images. Why didn’
t they ask me? The gathering reads out of time, so that the words drop tunelessly between the pews. It all sounds like autumn leaves being swept into a gutter. This also annoys me. It shows a lack of respect for words. Kaz and I both love words. It is our mutual belief that they should be respected.

  Long Gown thanks everyone then muzak begins, piped from somewhere that I cannot see. I crane my neck, look for speakers. This must be a modern church; the speakers are hidden. Suddenly people are grabbing my elbows, making me stand, pushing me forward. I realise that there is a coffin in front of me, carried by six men. They look vaguely familiar. The coffin is ornate, silver-handled, topped with a cornucopia of flowers. There is a pressed arrangement at the back, facing me. Kaz liked pressing flowers. She has albums filled with dried petals and sprigs. We keep moving and the muzak plays louder then suddenly we are into the sunshine, taunted by the mingled scents of cut grass and heated bitumen. The coffin is slid gently into a hearse by the six men and then the hearse drives off. I think what a bad job that would be — to be the driver of a hearse. I turn my head and see BIG Stu shaking hands with Long Gown. Someone hugs me; it is a woman who smells like old vegetables, potatoes left in a cupboard. I do not think that I know her. Clouds pass overhead. A snaky breeze springs from the nearby ocean. More people hug me. Most of them are sweating or crying or both. The children are clutching Amelia. She is stroking their hair, whispering to them. For a brief moment I hope that she is telling them good stories. Then I feel a drift beginning — people drifting towards their polished cars, the church drifting away behind me, muzak drifting on the snaky breeze. I am light-headed. I need a cool place, long deep shadows and beer. I loosen my tie, realise that I have stayed in this spot for a long time. I am manacled to this small hot part of the earth while everyone and everything else drifts on the sluggish, insipid tides — moving slowly away from me.