The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  Where is he? Did he miss the tour?

  The guide is walking off at a fair clip now and his lamp, attached to the orange helmet, is like a shaky star they’re hastening to follow. It’s a bumpy meandering experience, the rock rising and falling above their heads, the ground rutted and pitted, sometimes with long flights of rough-hewn steps, ropes or cold metal to hold on to, sometimes nothing at all.

  Perhaps that’s how it happened, in the end, nothing to grip?

  Every so often the guide makes them stop and he switches on his torch to point out joints and bedding-planes in the rock, various types of erosion patterns, some of them big and phallic like Celia’s black candle. ‘No stalactites or stalagmites in this part of the cave system, I’m sorry to say.’ He sounds just apologetic enough to be believable.

  Or did Father die surrounded by those hard icicle beauties maybe, injured and crazy with pain, crazy with hunger and thirst, licking the water off them?

  The guide’s moustache jumps up and down as he talks. Celia shivers, tries not to inhale the pungent carbide smell. She’s getting damper and clammier by the second. Huddling up to Alex, she wriggles her free hand into his pocket, grateful for his fingers which start to rub some warmth into her. He smiles, ‘You okay?’

  On another occasion the guide pokes around in the mud, then proudly opens his fist to disclose a couple of small worms. ‘Genuine cave-dwellers,’ he declares, and laughs.

  Cave-dwellers, forgodsake! What about the dead? One dead body, to be precise? Or simply the skeleton under rotted clothes?

  When the colourless man asks about accidents, the guide grows wary, and vague. Mentions their generally excellent track record and the rescue team on stand-by at all times. ‘No need to be afraid,’ he concludes. ‘this introductory tour is absolutely safe.’

  And the other passages? The ones deeper inside the mountain? What are their secrets? Their dangers?

  Then the hiss and tinkle of the lamps as they all move on again.

  What if the carbide gives out, or the batteries?

  And where is he? Wherewherewhere?

  Suddenly the noise of water rushing towards them. Coming from behind what looks like a boarded-up doorway that cuts off the tunnel perhaps twenty metres ahead.

  ‘Nothing to worry about!’ the guide calls out. ‘Trust me. I suggest we have a short rest here. We’ll douse our lamps and just listen, just feel the darkness. Okay?’

  One by one the flames are blown out; Celia observes the elegant woman fuss a little – until a boy’s puffed-out cheeks lean into view, and then there’s nothing but the crash of water from the other side of the partition. Every breath smells and tastes of darkness. Thankgod she’s got the torch in her pocket.

  ‘This is as black as it gets – blacker than a moonless night,’ the guide jokes, completely and complacently at his ease.

  Poor, poor Father. Celia pictures his spirit trapped in an underworld of cold damp blackness, trapped in the rocky echoes of this man’s self-satisfied laughter. Blinking her eyes open and shut, open and shut, open and shut, she finds it makes no difference, except for the cool draughty sensation on the skin of her eyeballs.

  The tourmaline seems to nudge her breast and sends out a tiny electrical charge when she reaches for Alex’s hand. Is this what affection is all about? Celia wonders, still blinking. A sense of well-being that’s only ever felt in the other’s presence, no matter where or how or when?

  It’s the wind that is causing the furious water noise, throwing itself like a battering ram against the planks. A roaring tearing wind. The instant she walks through the low narrow passage, Celia gets sucked into a force field. She is slammed about viciously, the breath knocked out of her. Nasty. She grabs hold of Alex, then wipes her eyes; they’re watering from the raw violence of the onslaught.

  Alex is glad to feel Celia’s body up against his and wraps himself round her, shoulders hunched like someone dancing a slow number.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he murmurs, kissing her wet cheeks. ‘We’ll be out of here soon, I promise.’

  He frowns to himself. Frankly, he’s had it with caves, he is definitely more of a road-tunnel man. Without thinking, he has disengaged himself and unscrewed the metal top of his Kirsch. He offers Celia the bottle but she flinches away. ‘Sure?’ he asks, before taking a deep gurgling swig himself – abashed now because he didn’t mean to offend her.

  She doesn’t answer, instead pulls out one of those large men’s handkerchiefs. For a moment the fabric flares in the darkness like the wings of some weird albino bat, and he braces himself instinctively.

  Up ahead the other members of the group have gained the top of an incline and are marching off, the glow of their lamps receding in a frail ragged line.

  Alex is getting anxious. After a second slug of Kirsch he says with all the persuasiveness he can muster, ‘We’d better hurry up. He must be waiting for you outside.’

  She seems an eternity stowing away the handkerchief and his legs are beginning to tremble. Let’s go please, Celia, he implores her silently. Then she lifts her lamp to gaze at him, and he sees her face.

  She looks changed. As if the tears just now had washed away a layer of something, though he isn’t sure what. He doesn’t know her well enough. Doesn’t know whether he ever will. Whether she’ll ever want him to. But yes, she looks softer. More lovable. With a shadowy beauty that almost obscures the sharpness underneath.

  ‘Celia?’ He touches her on the arm. ‘Let’s go.’

  Finally, she nods.

  They have nearly caught up with the group when she sees him emerge from a side tunnel, a fuzzy figure in the lamp light.

  ‘Et voilà!’ she exclaims as his palm pushes up and outward in the splayed old gesture, at once swaggering and self-denigrating, she remembers so well. He has put on weight and the cleft in his chin seems less pronounced. His hair is grizzled now, as if sprinkled with permanent snow, but it’s still thick and tightly curled. He’s still handsome and she’s still jealously proud at the sight of him. Despite her anger smouldering deep down.

  He grins, halts a few paces away from her and Alex. ‘So you did come, after all.’ Said in that gravelly foreign-yet-familiar tone he’d used at the Métropole. Celia tries not to show her annoyance – for the sake of Alex, who is hovering uneasily.

  ‘Alex, meet my brother Walter,’ she says, introducing them.

  ‘I expected as much,’ Alex gabbles as they shake hands. ‘How d’ye do?’ He smooths down his already perfecdy smooth Vandyke and, with mounting dismay, watches the lights of the group vanish round a corner.

  There’s an awkward pause, then Walter turns back to Celia, ‘Sorry about Mother, and –’

  Alex, desperate to rejoin the group, announces with sudden panache, ‘I’ll see you both later. I’ll tell the others you’ll be along shortly.’ And he strides off, his lamp dangling wildly, signalling relief.

  As if he’d just accomplished an important peace-keeping mission, Celia reflects. Maybe he has, more likely he hasn’t. And most probably this is the last of his personal services she’ll ever need.

  ‘Your boyfriend’s rather keen to get away, appears to me,’ Walter taunts from a safe distance. Celia lets it pass.

  She hears him gulp. ‘That’s me all over again, isn’t it? Seriously, Cel, I’m happy you’re with someone.’ He takes a step towards her. ‘And I’m sorry about when phoned …’

  Raging bull subdued into grovelling mode, she comments to herself. But she isn’t ready yet to snuff that dull red glow of anger inside her, crackling to get out.

  ‘I was bloody upset,’ Walter continues, grasping her hand. ‘Nothing really to do with the money. Or with you inheriting the flat. It’s to do with her.’ He gulps again. ‘Ever since I left home she treated me like a traitor. As if I had abandoned her, for God’s sake. I was her son, not her husband!’ He spits the words out so bitterly they seem to infect the blackness around them and Celia jerks her hand away.

  She is thinking of th
eir poor father’s trapped spirit. What did he shout or scream or whisper or whimper before he merged forever with that blackness?

  ‘Sorry you got the brunt of it, Cel.’ Now she is being hugged breathless. The zip of his jacket scrapes her cheek. The tourmaline woman is hurting her breast.

  ‘So am I.’

  Their lamps clash together and the metal rings out. The doorbell code was no secret to Walter, of course. And he couldn’t resist jabbing it out as he dumped those tulips on her doorstep – Margaret’s tulips. Compulsively almost, Celia’s mind replays the TV clip of the Carnival Parade with him in his carmine robe standing next to Lily’s mother in the crowd … Lily must have known he wasn’t in Australia when they talked last Tuesday, damnher! And she must have warned her mother not to tell. Doubtless made excuses for Walter, You see, Ma, he’s awfully cut up about Gabrielle’s death – not exactly a cosy relationship, was it? (yes, that’s how Lily would phrase it) – so now it’s all the harder for him, poor darling. He’ll have to sort himself out first. A week or two … Blah blah blah.

  ‘Let go of me!’ Celia struggles free, breathing lungfuls of dark carbide-tainted air. As she releases the figurine from where it got stuck under her breast, she feels an abrupt charge.

  ‘What a fucking coward!’ she shouts, aflame with anger now. ‘Staying away from Mother when she needed you! Staying away from her pain! Her funeral! Didn’t have the guts even to face ME! All those goddamn games! Those cranky calls and flowers! That stupidstupid mask!’ For an instant the slitted eyeholes are right there again in front of her, boring into her from the stony darkness. Ignoring Walter’s protests, she whips out the torch. ‘Abracadabra!’ A click and it’s shining straight into his eyes, bright yellow.

  He cries out, stumbles backwards, blinded, his lamp jangling, one hand raised to shield himself.

  ‘I just couldn’t,’ he falters. He sidesteps the fierceness of the flash. ‘And then it was too late.’

  ‘Too late? Damn right it was TOO LATE!’ She snorts. ‘So you simply regressed? Is that it? Refined your childhood methods? No more dead beetles – flowers now, fake ones?’ She starts playing the torch all over him, tying his body up in spirals, loops and knots of light.

  ‘Celia, please.’ He coughs. ‘I don’t know what came over me. It all got mixed up with Father’s death … This time round I guess I wanted you to suffer … Because you haven’t been told the whole story of how Father died.’

  The beam locks on target. And, for the briefest of moments, it isn’t Walter’s face floating in the gloom of the tunnel but their father’s. Starved and wasted. Skull-like.

  ‘Please.’ Walter looks like an animal at bay. He is tossing his head, trying to push away the glare.

  Celia lowers the torch and it illuminates the drab eroded limestone surface between them. ‘Carry on,’ she says, her mouth suddenly dry with foreboding. A rasping pain in her throat makes her want to retch, and retch. Her lamp is sputtering.

  Walter advances cautiously. ‘I was with him that day. With Father. Here. The floods caught us unawares. Flash floods. We were scrambling towards a wall we needed to scale. And I got to the rope first. It was either him or me. I swear it was. The map was in my rucksack. There was no time. No time. I couldn’t have –’ He checks himself, hesitates, then lifts his arms in clumsy invitation.

  Celia doesn’t notice. She’s reeling, staring at the ground unseeing. Her lamp drops with a loud clatter, flickers goes out, thickening the darkness around them. She makes no attempt to retrieve it. Her empty hand is lunging by her side with the fingers still curved from being hooked through the ring. The other is clamped round the torch.

  ‘He screamed at me to “get up that rope double-quick, or else …” I swear there was nothing I could have done. It was either him or me. Me or him. I swear. And then it was only me. I’ve paid for it. Mother and Uncle saw to that. With the carrot and the stick. Bribery. Smothering. Until I couldn’t bear it any longer.’ He glances at her.

  That’s when Celia wrenches the map from under her clothing and thrusts it into his face. ‘You bastard! Bastard! BASTARD! You left him behind! Took his map! YOU!’ She drops the map. Stamps on it. Lunges out at him with the torch. One fast swing, the beam swiping at an outcrop of rock above, and Walter’s been hit squarely in the midriff. He lets out a yelp and collapses against the tunnel wall. His lamp has rolled off, the flame a mere will-o’-the-wisp before it’s swallowed by blackness.

  Celia feels like crumpling up herself, feels like lying down on the cold insensible stone. She’s choking. Everything’s upside-down. Nothing’s as she thought it was. And nobody, nobody cared. Was Lily in on it too? The loyal wife, disloyal to her friend? Why hadn’t she been told? Whywhywhy? Like a ghostly travesty of that hot faraway summer afternoon in the lounge, it’s herself now that’s holding her mother up by the ankles. Trying to shake the truth out of her. No sound can be heard, no rattling breath, no shouts exhorting to smack, and SMACK HARD.

  Celia’s torch casts a jagged oval of light into the bowels of the cave. The silence is almost total. There are only the faintest of tinklings from the direction in which the group disappeared, ages ago it seems, and the occasional plop of an invisible drop of water somewhere nearby. The darkness is beginning to oppress her, the mass of rock on all sides is crushing: already her head feels fit to burst, her flesh raw and bruised, and her bones creak, brittle enough to shatter at any moment. Is this what it’s like to be entombed alive? Before the thirst, the hunger, the madness?

  Suddenly there’s a groan. The scuffling of feet. Another groan. Godwhathasshedone? He might be injured, might be bleeding, smearing the rocks with ruby-red blood. How cruelly pointless. The past can’t be restored, nothing can bring their father back to life, no one.

  She approaches him timidly, saying, ‘I’m sorry, Walter. You aren’t hurt or anything, are you?’

  He has managed to get up. His face is in darkness but she can sense him shrug. ‘Hope not.’ He giggles in a funny broken way, then tries to clasp her to his chest.

  She pulls away. Father’s death wasn’t Walter’s fault, she reassures herself. It couldn’t have been, could it? Or would she rather have had him dead?

  She is getting very cold, much colder than the cave itself could make her. It’s a coldness that seeps from the marrow of her bones, freezing her from the inside. A coldness that tugs at her scalp, tweaks at every single hair. Walter has taken everyone from her: her father, her mother, her best friend Lily. Here Celia stops herself. This is childish reasoning. Their parents are dead, they’re just memories now, and no one, not even Walter, can take those away from her. As for Lily, she’s moved on of her own free will. Maybe it’s time she herself did the same.

  As Celia lets Walter hug her, the tourmaline woman pinches the soft flesh of her breast. Yes, it urges her, go on, you’re no longer a little girl.

  Walter’s voice is husky: ‘Mother and Uncle wanted to protect me. They said if people got wind of me being involved, we’d be hounded. By social workers, the police, the press. Can you picture the headlines? “Boy Leaves Father to Die in Cave” – or worse? You were too young to be told what had happened, and afterwards it seemed better to let sleeping dogs lie, as Grandmother used to say. Mother made me promise to keep it a secret. “Our secret”.’

  But now she is dead. Dead. She’s dead, the tourmaline woman repeats.

  Celia feels her fingers dig into Walter’s shoulders; she is dizzy with sheer exhaustion. And then the torch slips from her hand.

  ‘NO!’ She staggers away as it smashes on the ground, flicking a final crazy zigzag of light across the tunnel wall.

  O-o-o-o-o, goes the echo, before losing itself in blackness.

  Complete and utter blackness. Walter hasn’t stirred, but she could swear his breathing has changed; it’s become rapid and spluttering. As if he’s drowning. Or is it herself? Is it? A terrible deafening noise fills her ears – until she can’t stand it any more …

  Seconds later she f
eels someone grip her and then she’s being yanked roughly from side to side.

  ‘-ia! -ey! -ia! -ey!’ The voice reaches her in waves, as though from some remote underwater region.

  She lashes out, she punches and kicks. She yells – without a sound.

  Because her mouth is wide open, has been wide open all the time, sucking in air for what must be dear life.

  Once her gasps have subsided, she can hear at last what’s being said: ‘Celia! Hey! Celia! It’s okay!’

  Walter’s arms are around her and he is rocking her to and fro, to and fro. ‘I’ve got a lighter, don’t worry. Those carbide lamps can’t be far.’

  She unclenches her fists, wincing at the stabs of pain from the half-healed cuts. ‘Thanks, I’m all right,’ she says with a huffy laugh. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to be my guide for now.’

  ‘Of course.’ His tone reminds her of his ‘man-of-the-house’ days. As he embraces her more tightly, she has a sudden vision of the snowdrops lying in a wilted heap on top of her letter box. She pretends to go limp herself – nice and compliant, like Lily would – and smirks into the all-forgiving all-encompassing darkness. ‘You deserve a special bunch of flowers, Walter, nothing less would do. Just wait till we get home.’ She laughs out loud and he joins in. Then she throws off his arms. ‘So, let’s see that lighter of yours.’

  Walter mutters something that’s followed by a distinct ‘dammit’ and the increasingly forcible fiddling with a zip.

  ‘In any case, the group’ll have to return here. There’s no other way out.’

  Celia’s hand has slid under her jersey to trace the outline of the tourmaline figurine; the charge coming from it seems weak now, almost non-existent. Slipping a finger inside her blouse, she touches her breast. Her nipple is soft, velvety.