Hardman was King of Swords, offering to get a hit on the stalker after Odette. Not someone to cross.
Dreamboat was Knight of Cups, with his Sheridan bedspread and knowledge of Odette’s ‘shocking secret’.
NewAgeMan was Knight of Pentacles, warning against whackos out there, (while being one himself?).
Tiger was King of Pentacles, the married man whose wife had perhaps found out about his penchant for shower-sex with honeylicks.
But as she looked from one card to another, she was paralysed, like many a player before her with an ace hand. There was a new problem.
All so good. Which one to play?
Which card would allow her to enter the life Odette had conjured up for herself? Had she found love, or its dark twin? Unlike Calvino’s theoretical meditation on the possibilities of the Tarot, she must not stop there.
She must put on her jodhpurs, launch herself into the world of action, where, if she was not too late, she would rescue Odette.
Confident that she was seeing clearly, as if she were equipped with Dr Singh’s saucer-like eyes, Cicely considered her five requisite suspects. None of them with currently functioning mobile numbers. All of them living interstate, home addresses given. She swigged down the rest of her tea.
The culprit wasn’t going to step forward and suddenly confess, as on TV, spilling the beans for no apparent reason. And with the bond to pay on the shop, she could afford only one interstate plane fare.
So …
Nervously, Cicely straightened her back, took a deep breath, and prepared.
She had brought her wool basket. The same lilac wool. The same piece of crochet. She put it on her lap now, inserted her crochet hook, did a few stitches, eyes closed …
Waited.
The Tarot card, The Tower, which she had attached to the computer screen, fluttered to the ground.
Then, the smell of lilac blossom, the hum of the bee, the taste of lemon drops, the enveloping music of flute and harp coming closer and closer, and then the echo of the bell vibrating through her.
Suddenly an electric charge opened her eyes, made her sit bolt upright.
She looked down at her hands, which no longer seemed to be her own. Observing them as they slowly reached into her basket for some black wool – she rarely used black – and, then, as if with a will of its own, she felt the crochet hook pulling her fingers along …
Stunned, she could only watch, as if from above, the hook and the black wool delve and dive in and out of the lilac, as it controlled her helpless hands with a hot pulsating force …
Exhausted, her hands at last were released and fell into her lap. She moved one finger gently, then another – they were quite pink, but belonged to her again.
She cautiously spread out the crochet. Examined the new black stitches she had embroidered over the previous lilac rows. Gazed in disbelief at what she was seeing.
So this was the true Miss Marple method, the one she had been so mysterious about, had not really wanted to share. All that mumbo-jumbo about listening to the silence seemed now to have been the real red herring. For here in front of her was a single name.
Embedded into her lilac crochet, a black pattern of perfectly formed picots, puffs and popcorns clearly spelt out the details of one man.
PART
Four
Honeylicks
In front of the hall mirror, he plastered down his hair with more gel. He hated anything out of control.
At first, honeylicks had been a godsend.
Using toweroflove.com, he had instigated a pro-active plan in his personal life. The internet was such an efficient means of seduction, with the opportunity it gave to customise one’s image. And as he had predicted, having Odette in bed with him every night had warded off his recurrent nightmare. For a while.
He had found her to be highly suggestible. As if she had found entering another person’s life, his life – completely – quite undaunting. He suspected that she had borderline personality disorder, which he had always found attractive in a woman.
They were supposed to have become everything to each other – friend and lover, forsaking all others. He felt he had at last found his life’s partner. With instant baby.
When they had tied the knot there had been no guests at the registry office. She hadn’t wanted her family there, and he didn’t have any. She wore an empire-line wedding dress to minimise the bulge, though he had been proud of her state.
He had adapted to her ways, give and take. Once he had her installed at his place, he had no problem with the way she preferred natural cleaning products and shampoos in the house, and had willingly thrown out all his sprays, except for his favourite musk cologne. Even the way she refused to have a mobile phone, the way she’d never got her driver’s licence, he had found cute, hadn’t tried to change.
Lately however, he had attempted to analyse why he had picked her, of all the women on toweroflove.
Though he had always researched their expectations – Odette had liked tea, for example, so he had bought a tea set especially – few had wanted to see him again after the first date. But she had been keen.
And soon, he grew used to her being in his home. Whenever he looked up from his computer screen, he would see her, obediently wearing the fishnets and French knickers that he always gave to his girlfriends.
He had skipped the inefficient and expensive courtship stage, moving right on to marriage, drowning any rite-of-passage woes in a sea of Bollinger and gourmet takeaways. Odette’s wage, if you could call it that, from her ceramics, had obviously not allowed her to get so expensively pissed before, and she had been a wild lover, big belly and all, getting on top, which again was something he really appreciated in a woman.
Her growing belly had turned him on, and she had not stopped him playing any of the little games he had always liked. He would insert twenty-dollar bills into her French knickers, smoothing the notes out between her legs so that after a while it was as thick as Kotex down there. The game was that she had to pretend she was being paid for every item of clothing she removed. Odette had seemed as fond of this game as he was, and she had a special silver box where she put the money.
In fact, Odette hadn’t seemed to mind anything he did, as long as she had a cup of tea in her hand. She was very particular about varieties that tasted the same to him.
The doctor had told him that he had been shooting blanks for some time.
In the mirror, he saw that he was beginning to look – no longer young. It was tiring, after all, constantly generating income, generating image. But if he stopped even for one day, the empire he had built up would collapse around him and Joe Hill would get him.
He knew he had to seize the time.
In the nineties, the collapse of communism had enabled those with vision to grab the ball and kick it before the disbanded masses even knew where it was. Before they had a chance to regroup, he and his mates at Image Audit Consultants were hogging the ball.
But everyone has a nightmare, and his had returned, in spite of Odette lying by his side. He sweated at night about the one possible catch in his glorious career path. He knew that the esteem in which he and entrepreneurs like him were held rested on the employee class remaining in shock. It wasn’t the union leaders who worried him. They had been paid off and anyway, they all lacked that essential ingredient. Telegenic looks.
Was he losing his own? He pulled at the skin under his eyes and it did not seem as elastic as previously. The performance incentive he had got in the last round was hardly enough to compensate for the stress of being directly responsible for sacking fifty thousand workers in public health. Still, it was fulfilling to know that he was the most sought after profit-maximiser – lean and mean.
His nightmare had started when he had stumbled across that website. He had learned that the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, were not dead. Everyone knew how things spread on the web. Their slogan struck terror into his heart.
Consc
ious Withdrawal of Efficiency.
In his nightmare, a beautiful martyr rose from his grave and hovered over his bed. It was Joe Hill, young Swedish immigrant to America, a Wobbly executed on a trumped-up murder charge. His politics were not as important as the fact that he was utterly, tragically beautiful. Innocent and photogenic. Image was all, he knew, and if a telegenic rabble-rouser arose once again, his own glory days would be gone.
‘I never died,’ Joe whispered to Ricky, as he sat at his spreadsheets, as he ate his egg in the morning. Joe Hill laughed at him. In his nightmare, the whole employee class, the whole nation, consciously withdrew efficiency.
It was all Odette’s fault.
After the baby, Odette had gone weird. He had asked the doctor about it.
‘Post-natal blues.’
‘How long does it last?’
‘A few weeks. She’ll snap out of it.’
But she hadn’t. She had just settled into her total personality change. Gone were the sexy fishnets, and his plans for her to become his tax-deductible home office manager. She cried all the time. It was upsetting for him, because he did love her and the way she had blended in with his house, his plans. He tried to help. As a trained auditor, he could see that her problem stemmed from her sudden inability to manage her time well.
The household budget, for example.
She would just ring up the local mini-mart – he allowed local calls only – and get meat delivered, because she had developed what the doctor called agoraphobia.
He loved home-cooked meat, but it was expensive that way. Now that he was a family man, gourmet takeaways were no longer appropriate. He began to remember certain things his father had done, adopted a barely conscious mimicry.
One day, for example, he picked up a side of lamb from the market. It was much cheaper and Odette could butcher it herself, as his mother had done, and put it in labelled freezer bags. He downloaded instructions for butchering from the net.
He’d had to do it himself.
Recently she had started saying that she really missed all that pottery stuff that she had left behind in the flat. He shuddered as he remembered how, instead of going to his out-of-town pad as usual, she had once started to make love to him there among the clay debris and shards on the carpet. It had been like making love in an archaeological dig so he had had to manoeuvre her onto the more hygienic futon. And even then there had been that corkboard on the wall, the unexplained knives, the terracotta bust in the bedroom whose hypnotic gaze seemed to follow his every erotic gesture.
Malevolently.
One night there had been enough.
So he refused to get her clay for hand building. Imagine, in her state? Clay all over the house, and she couldn’t even keep it clean now. And what if the baby got into it? And there would be the endless cost of materials. Not to mention the unproductive time.
Anyway, didn’t he deserve her full attention? He had taken on another man’s baby. He had turned a generous and blind eye to the lack of sex, the late meals, the nappies on the floor, the smell of poo and her general slovenly and tearful appearance since the birth of the baby.
But his wife turning back into an artiste would be too much.
After this minor altercation, she had retreated tearfully into the laundry.
Later, going into that room to investigate why he could not hear the washing machine or dryer, nor water running, he found her tacking a sketch to the wall. It showed a stone-age woman with clay up to her elbows. This disturbingly wild-faced woman was bent over a pot she was forming with her bare hands. There was no clear line between where her hands ended and the pot began.
Underneath the sketch was a little poem of sorts.
No art with potters’ can compare
We make out pots of what we potters are.
He left the sketch in place, because the woman had stupendous breasts, and he had been about to leave when he had discovered, behind the door, a huge cardboard box of pot scourers.
Soon they were piling up everywhere, old, twisted, red, green, yellow and blue pot scourers. She must have altered the weekly mini-mart delivery to include them.
What were they for?
He waited until he was going over the receipts, as he did every Saturday night, to investigate her excessive ordering of scourers. She retaliated with an accusation of his excessive use of hair gel. But hair gel was essential to his feeling that he remained on top of things. Joe Hill was breathing down his neck, closer now that, at home, his logical, cool world was crumbling.
He tried to help Odette.
He wanted her to be once again the woman he used to have fun with, the woman he loved. For wasn’t love what he felt when he turned and reached out for her in the deep of the night?
The next Saturday night, as they cosily went over her expenditure together, Odette pacing the room with the baby softly wailing over her shoulder, he had a brilliant flash. He was fond of the baby, proof of his potency for all his mates. When she was older, he would play with her. She could entertain him with her loveable pranks and cute dresses. No point paying any attention to her yet, though, as she was not only boring, but would not remember his efforts.
He turned to Odette’s chaotic records, and noticed a bill from the Trading Post. He squinted at it in disbelief. She had actually placed an ad.
Old scourers, any condition.
Top prices paid for unusual colours.
This called for professional help, and fortunately, he was Top Man at this sort of thing. He would set up a customised Excel spreadsheet for her, where she could document and analyse energy spent – time, motion, money.
Then the sexy tart who had disappeared on him, the lover who used to help him sleep dreamlessly, would appear again.
Poke nights would be reinstituted.
But the next Saturday, the spreadsheet was still blank.
She explained that she had no time to fill it in. But a blank sheet of paper, or in this case, a blank chart, meant only one thing to an auditor.
If action wasn’t recorded, on paper, on screen, it didn’t exist.
He was beginning to despair of ever having another poke night. There had not been one ever since the baby was born. Was it all worth it? Perhaps it was not too late to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Start again. Look online for a more satisfactory arrangement. But he was exhausted at the thought of all that courtship, and the fear that the woman would find out that he could not, in fact, sire an offspring.
No, he sighed, the ring was on the finger, he’d made his bed, as his father used to say, and a man stuck by his word. But look at her, Dad, in the pink chenille dressing gown like the one mum used to wear.
Did he even really want a poke night, knowing how soft Odette’s tummy still was, how leaky her breasts were under the folds of the pink cloth? Why did she have to wear that thing all day? Where were all the fishnets and French knickers he had given her? What did the pot scourer thing mean?
Then he had another bright solution. The pot scourers could become a very good Performance Indicator of housework, as long as the Performance Criteria, the quality and price of the scourers, were established.
To facilitate this requirement of the audit, he told Odette to select any brand she wanted, any colour that appealed to her, but to then stick to it. No more subterfuge. She could order her favourite openly, boxes of them, a year’s supply if she liked.
She chose a multicoloured mega-pack, each scourer with a lump of soap stuck in the centre. This was luxury, as he was also paying for washing detergent, but he held his tongue, as she had grown so touchy. Ironic, that word. She was probably dying for a poke night too, getting crabby about it, but she wasn’t going to get one until she smartened herself up a bit.
According to plan, he tallied the extraordinary number of scourers she used during that week, factoring in projected hours of work against expenditure, pointing out to her the objective waste of resources. Did his attention to the scourers cause her obsession with th
em? Was it undue attention? He decided to play it down, meanwhile deciding to do his best to cheer her up. After all, he was known among his mates and clients for his sense of humour.
Take his eggcup, for example.
Sunday morning and here they were, Odette and Ricky and little Toots, who was dribbling down her mum’s absorbent chenille shoulder, over paler incrustations from previous contributions. She should wipe Toot’s chin, he thought, but he didn’t want to interfere. After all, he didn’t want to be a strict daddy and ruin her childhood. He was a fun guy.
‘See my amusing eggcup Toots?’
It had little legs with striped socks under the fat body, into which Odette was placing the egg. It had little red-gloved hands on each side. This eggcup had been given to him at his high school break up, because he had been known as an egghead. He had taken it in good humour, and they had all laughed together about it, called him a good egg and laughing more. It meant a lot to Ricky, evidence that his sense of humour was recognised.
And it was a practical eggcup too. It had a little inverted hat near the feet where he could store all the shell from the lid of the egg once he had eaten out the brains. He was not neurotic, but he had a thing about being careful with eggshells. A schoolmate of his had choked to death when some shell went down the wrong way. He cracked the egg carefully, trying not to look at Odette. She was standing near the sink with Toots, but he could see out of the corner of his eye that she was still crying.
She had started crying in the middle of the night when the baby had woken up for the fifth time. He was the one who had to get up in the morning and go to work to keep the whole shebang going, but he didn’t complain at being disturbed five times, did he?
Look at her Dad, Mum was never like that was she? Letting her tea go cold, patting the baby’s back, her eyes on that little portable kitchen TV. The sound was turned down, but he could see it was a report about some country with veiled women. He hoped she realised how well off she was. Those women really had something to complain about, after all, with those dreadful men who lock them up all the time.
Madame Bovary's Haberdashery Page 16