The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  She is beginning to tremble now, a flutter deep inside. Hurriedly she returns the gem to its compartment; she doesn’t want to drop it. Doesn’t want to think of her former friend either, the friend she lost to her own brother: Lily aka Ruby.

  ‘Celia’s just a short form,’ her mother would lecture Celia whenever she’d misbehaved, her painted-on beautician eyebrows furled out of reach. ‘Remember that. Short for Cecilia. So you’d better be careful. Better watch out for the missing bits. If you ever want to grow up, that is, and become a full person.’

  The warning seemed to be uttered more frequently, recited word by word and with a certain gusto, once Walter started secondary school.

  But howonearth did you ‘become a full person’? The way her mother talked, it must be something deliberate. Like thinking, or doing an exercise. Maybe it simply meant covering page after page with those ‘c’s and ‘i’s from Cecilia till she got cramp in her hand – plain and spidery letters painstakingly drawn, or slipshod scrawls like so many crescent moons, suns half-rising on the horizon, guttering candles, organ pipes … Maybe writing out those letters would be enough and she’d end up complete. A perfect adult specimen.

  Easiest, of course, would be to take the ‘c’s and ‘i’s from the magnet alphabet on the fridge which was always dayglo-daring her to compose some ‘nice little message’. She could put them under her pillow before going to sleep, pray for a magic transformation in the dark, and when she got up next morning, hey presto, she’d be whole. Like Walter.

  The only problem was the tooth fairy – whatever lay under your pillow was hers. Not that Celia believed in such kids’ stuff any more. And yet, her tooth fairy couldn’t be trusted: sneaking in to leave a couple of pricky pencils behind; then a rubber in the shape of a heart, a curvy pink sweet-smelling heart that gave her headaches and blotted her mistakes all over the page; and last, outrage of outrages, fobbing her off with a dozen ancient ink cartridges, sticky and faded-looking after being kept through years of heat, thunder and rain and dry brittle cold, the ink flowing on to the paper thickly, in milky grey splodges the colour of old people’s eyes – nothing like the limpid green she’d asked for.

  Eventually Celia decided on something altogether different. It wasn’t so much a decision really as a sudden insight. She was undressing when she spotted her new orange top where it had been dumped in the deep-sea shadows under the radiator, turned and twisted and glowing faintly, like a crushed sand star. She’d stopped dead, half in, half out of her dungarees: ALICE – she’d call herself Alice. ALICE! It was her name too, wasn’t it? Jumbled up but still her name, and with no letters missing, starting slap bang at the beginning of the alphabet.

  She told Lily next day as they were walking home from school. Lily smiled and, with a glance towards the track where some boys from secondary were doing long-distance running, she said, ‘AAAAALICE,’ caressing the name with her tongue. Then she laughed: ‘In that case I’ll be RUBY. Red-haired RRRRRU-BY.’ For a moment her curls flamed and danced in the early autumn sunlight, in sharp contrast to the grey walls of the new ice rink they’d just passed and which was to open in less than a month. And like dancing flames they licked the side of Celia’s face. No mention of ruby lips, she thought; despite their secret games.

  It was a half-day. Lunch over and homework done, they had the afternoon to themselves. They clunked about on stilts, skipped rope and hula-hooped, shouting out their new names all over the backyard, playing around with echoes, accents, voices – their mothers’, Walter’s, Uncle Godfrey’s, Lily’s father’s, old Frau Gehrig’s from upstairs – and pretend-feelings (clipped chopped-up sounds for anger, excitement or fear, slurred and slow ones for love, or drunkenness).

  They threw their names at the sun and the swallows in the sky. ‘R-u-b-y! Ruuuuuuuuby! Ruby-by-by-by-by-by-by!’

  At the telegraph pole with the Beauty Treatments – Private Salon sign. ‘Ali-ali-ali-ali-ali-ali-alice! Alice-ce-ce-ce-ce!’

  They catapulted them over the latticed fence and into the side street at cars, children on bicycles, at the sour-faced woman with her yapping black poodle from the apartment block. ‘Ru-ru-ru-ru-ruuuuby!’ ‘Al-al-al-al-al-al-al-ice!’

  Kicked them like balls down the slope at the two closed garage doors. Across the yard and into the kennel which had been empty since Charlie’s last trip to the vet’s in spring – ‘Rrrrrrrrrrrrrruby!’ ‘Alicccccccccccccce!’ ‘Rrrrrrrrrrrrrruby!’ – flustering the wild grasses that thrived in the tarmac cracks and narrowly missing the border of sunflowers and long-stemmed roses.

  Suddenly a balcony door squeaked above them, then Celia’s mother appeared round the corner from the Beauty Room and leant over the window boxes of pink geraniums and white petunias suspended from the kitchen balustrade. Her eyebrows had been freshly shaved off; it was her client-free afternoon, reserved for her own personal beauty treatments.

  ‘Alice? Alice? … Now who could that be?’ The lumps of naked skin seemed to be drawn halfway up her forehead.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing, Frau Roth. Just a game.’

  ‘Well, a game’s not nothing, Lily, I wouldn’t say that. Nor would your mum now, would she? Games are fun, aren’t they? Good games, good fun. And I like having fun!’ Her smile was like a bruise. ‘So, won’t you tell me, Lily? There’s a pretty girl …’

  Purring with persuasiveness, the voice asked to be stroked and petted, and Celia knew her friend was going to fall for it. Ten years old and already menstruating, yet so easily fooled by flattery, it just didn’t bear thinking about. Already Lily had taken several steps towards the balcony.

  ‘Well,’ she squinted upwards, ‘when we play this game I am Ruby. It’s because of my red hair, and Mum’s got that lovely ring with a ruby. And … and she –’ here Lily looked over to where Celia had been a second ago, only now she was gone, ‘– she –’ emphasis trying to make up for absence ‘– is Alice. Not in wonderland, though. Never that, she says.’

  From her hidey-hole inside Charlie’s kennel Celia saw the puffy brows glisten. She felt laughter arch above her, like a cat about to spit.

  ‘Just you watch you don’t call her MALICE, Lily. MALICE is the full version, you know.’

  There was the gleam of mother-of-pearl as a hand sliced the air, wagging a finger. Then more laughter, loops and loops of it that dropped right round the kennel and got tighter all the time. So tight Celia had to cover her ears, close her eyes.

  She pictured her mother back in the Beauty Room. Her face would be almost touching the cool silver sheen of the wall-length mirror, pulling away every so often when her breath became too hot and misted the surface. Her fingers would be probing the swollen skin, tapping it gently, gently, their tips soft and fluffy with her favourite Magic-Pink cream.

  Celia squeezed her eyes shut harder. As hard as she could. Then harder still.

  7

  THE MÉTROPOLE IS only a short walk from the bus terminal on Station Square. It’s cold, too cold to snow even, though yesterday’s clouds have left a new blanket of white – turned slush turned ice, not exactly inviting. Celia hurries along the discreetly lit façade of Casino Mall. She dodges a few late-night shoppers with bulky Migros bags, then a straggle of young soldiers in uniform who have emerged reeling from the restaurant-bar up ahead. One of them is standing hugging a dwarf cypress tree by the entrance and, on seeing Celia, lurches heavily towards her, pleading for a ‘Kissie, kissie’. She swerves past him, round the casino into the side street … and straight into the arms of something – a huge lion on its hindlegs. She shrieks. Realising at the same instant it’s not a lion, of course, and apologising, feeling a right fool.

  ‘S’all right, love. That’s the fun of Carnival,’ the man in the costume growls back at her with a boisterous drunken laugh, tossing his shaggy mane before loping off after a small slinky catwoman whom Celia, in her shock-and-embarrassment, had quite overlooked.

  The roars and whoops and firework-bangs drifting down from the town centre begin to
make sense now. She’d totally forgotten about the Fasnacht, the annual Carnival.

  At the bottom of the Old Town Steps opposite Blumenliebe, her mother’s favourite florist’s, Celia pauses for a moment. Over to her left, enclosed by a wall with two ornamental corner turrets at street level, is a terraced rose garden that sweeps down the incline in four wide segments. The garden used to belong to her grandparents, and she and Lily would come here when they wanted privacy. Celia still feels a tug at her heartstrings every time she passes by. Usually she ignores it but she can’t tonight, not after meeting the man in his lion costume.

  The iron railings are freezing to the touch, like tiny sharp teeth they nip into the flesh of her palm as she starts to climb the steps.

  The garden games with Lily had been harmless enough initially: tig, skipping, badminton, ‘circus acts’ of juggling and tightrope walking, even some ‘lion taming’ which involved diving through hula hoops and was inspired by the Big Cat Show they’d seen at Plättli Zoo on Cemetery Hill. Later they had devised a course of beauty treatments for animals. Any neighbourhood pets were eligible and dealt with free of charge – but none of them could ever be enticed back, and they soon ran out of clients.

  Finally they decided on a bear. A fantasy bear. Fat, hairy, and male. In the guises of Snow White and Rose Red they would play tricks on him, tease him with a stick, roll him to and fro. Then tend to his needs. They’d comb and trim his thick rampant fur, clip his nails, file and paint them; they’d tickle his feet, massage him. They’d imagine him grunting with pleasure, writhing on his lair of fresh-gathered leaves, grass and rose petals, belly up. Smiling, they’d converge over his crotch, palms slick with special depilatory oils …

  Celia blows on her blue-chilled hands, rubs them better. Perhaps it was for the very reason the fantasies felt so real that she hadn’t taken Lily’s ‘true stories’ seriously at first, They were all to do with a great old curly bear that kept hanging around her parents’ house, lurking in the bushes and sometimes in the branches of the cherry tree and, on exceptionally dark and windy nights, skulking like a blacker darkness under her bedroom window.

  The following year, though, the stories became undeniable reality. One evening as they sat listening to the radio Top Ten in the open archway of their turret, sheltering from a downpour of summer rain, Lily suddenly punched the off-button and announced: ‘Saw him again yesterday, Cel, after my piano lesson. He seemed as tame as a dancing bear so I let him catch up with me under the bridge by the canal.’ She giggled and leant forward to pull some wet petals from a cluster of overblown white roses. ‘But then he kissed me, just like that. And I … I kissed him back.’

  Celia focused on the rain drip-dropping, through the trellised vines outside and sliding like mercury down the stems of the roses, swelling a little as it slipped over the thorns. The grass blades bent and bounced under its weight.

  Lily gestured with the wad of petals, defiantly. ‘I enjoyed kissing him. He’s good at it.’

  Celia looked at the strings of silver beads falling all around them.

  ‘Much better than any of you. And so grown up, even his tongue’s bigger.’ Lily brought the rose petals up to her mouth and nuzzled them, smiling to herself.

  That’s when Celia knew. Knew beyond a doubt. She was stunned, numb.

  Lily began shredding the rose petals into minute fragments and added, ‘I’m only sorry he hasn’t got a younger brother, Cel. For you. But that wouldn’t work, would it?’ Then she flung out both arms in an embrace, bits of petal whirling round them like confetti, and cried, ‘Oh, what should I do, Cel? What should I do?’

  For a long while they sat in their turret, damp and silent, holding each other.

  That was almost twenty-five years ago. And now the flower-beds are frozen, the scattered snow on them like chapped skin, with long whitish scars where ice has formed. The garden lies deserted, a scrawny late-winter wilderness of twigs and thorns and empty vines clutching at the walls, concealing no one.

  Whatever her advice then, it would have counted for nothing anyway. Walter had made his choice, and that was that.

  Celia puts her hands into her pockets, tries to keep her balance on the remaining few Old Town Steps.

  * * *

  The café is buzzing with life. People are psyching themselves up for the Maskenball at the Festhütte. Celia had no idea the ball was today. Laughter squirts round her, voices somersault and chase each other. Cigarette smoke eddies about the coloured paper festoons, the streamers and lanterns dangling from the ceiling beams. At least she’ll be safe in here. Turbans, headscarves, stetsons, wigs nod and bob, toppling off occasionally to reveal baby-soft ringlets, bald patches or a mildewy fuzz. Safe from memories of the dead. Masks everywhere. Some soldiers, incongruous in their black berets and grey-green uniforms. A mixture of earsplitting Guggenmusik and techno-rock booming from the back room. The perfect exorcism.

  She is sitting cramped in the corner – to her right a radiator that makes her back slide with sweat, to her left a plate-glass window and the car park. In front of her is a Cüpli of red Crimean champagne, her third within less than an hour. There’s one solitary chair at her small round table of snowy Carrara marble: hers. The other four have been claimed and carried off in rapid succession by a witch, two pirates and a ghost, with an ‘Is-this-chair-free-please?’ parrot politeness varied only by the degree of stiffness of their plastic grins.

  But now that she’s here she might as well enjoy herself. Glancing around, breathing with her mouth half open in expectation, Celia attracts the attention of a young woman decked out exclusively in gold – gold-spangled hair, gold-painted face, shoulders, arms and legs, gold lamé dress, gold-lacquered hand-bag and court shoes – who’s just detached herself from a not very suave-looking 007. The Golden Girl stares over quite openly, shamelessly, then winks and blows a kiss from a golden palm.

  Celia twists away at once. The woman has reminded her of Angelina, the apprentice at the office. She’ll be around here somewhere. Celia can almost picture her: waistcoated to bursting point, with a monocle and stick-on beard, her long hair coiled inside the crown of a straw hat – done up as a dandy to mislead her various boyfriends.

  Celia’s thumb and forefinger have begun to glide up and down the delicately fluted champagne glass. Up and down. This is the first time in months she’s gone out for the night. She takes a lingering sip, letting the champagne prickle the roof of her mouth. Then she lays her cheek against the window pane and closes her eyes.

  When she opens them again, a few heartbeats later, there’s Henry, weaving his way through the cars parked outside. Handsome Henry, the courier – as if she’d dreamt him up. She’s sure it’s him, despite the monk’s habit. No one else moves like that, sluggish yet springy. She raises her hand in a wave. But already he’s been captured by a group of emancipated squaws, trussed up in their streamers. In the days before Angelina started spicing up work at the office, Celia had a bit of a soft spot for Henry. Just motherly feelings, of course. He’s too young for her, early thirties at most. And he’s got a wife and kid. Briefly Celia touches her cheek; the skin has gone all clammy where it rested against the window.

  The noise level is rising. She’ll have to stand up soon to keep herself from drowning – unlike the group of pirates at the next table, who’re happily afloat by now. They slap each other’s shoulders, bang fists, practise sea shanties, smoke cigarettes and gurgle beer straight from the bottle, tilting up their masks to disclose tidemarks of soreness along their jaws, nostrils dark and weedy as the insides of dead razor-shells and, in one case, a seal’s moustache. Not a pleasant sight.

  Celia turns away too hastily and almost knocks her glass over. Raking her fingers through her hair, smoothing it down her face and shoulders, she makes a show of gazing out of the window. But doesn’t get beyond a rather intriguing reflection further along: a buxom gypsy girl is adjusting her suspenders, seemingly oblivious of the dark shadow with horns and Tyrolean hat that’s
watching her, leaning right into her cleavage. Then, just as a second shadow with even bigger horns joins the first, she whips a fistful of confetti from under her skirts and, in a swirl of multi-coloured snow, pulls down the front of her top.

  ‘A pair of real devils, no?’ she shouts loudly.

  From behind her curtain of hair Celia sees the pirates shove aside their masks and eyepatches for a better look.

  She has another sip of champagne. A few more drinks, she knows, and they’ll all be ready. Ready to be reckless. Once they’re inside the Festhütte and the Carnival Ball is in full-flaring swing, the men will swagger up to the women with moist dribbling lips. They’ll kiss and suck at the naked flesh of their shoulders, lick off the sweat along the collarbones, their tongues like strips of raw meat poking through the holes in their masks. The women will ease back their heads, expose the silky underbellies of their throats. Their fingers will get entangled in the tunics of Roman emperors and Greek philosophers, squashed up against the paunches of grass-skirted cannibals or lured into cowboys’ trouser pockets for a quick grope. Some women, though, will clamp their chins down on their décolletés, push the men away and, lips moist and quivering, walk off in search of other women …

  Celia shifts in her chair; it’s a metal imitation of rattan and stylishly uncomfortable. Made for squirming, as it were.

  ‘So you did come, after all.’ A gravelly voice, subtly familiar.

  Celia spins round. Stares.

  The mask is arresting in its repulsiveness. Not a face but the absence of it; no lips, nose or cheekbones, just an oval shape coarsely speckled black and white like granite, with mere slits for eyes, nostrils and mouth, too small to give anything away. She can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman; black mittens cover the hands, a black balaclava throat and hair, and the boots, big, black and clumpy, might be oversized. The rest of the outfit consists of an almost jaunty-looking carmine robe with padded shoulders, loose enough to hide even the widest hips, fullest breasts, a weightlifter’s torso and biceps, prosthetic limbs, whatever.