Cosmo Cosmolino (19 page)

How could he not have noticed how high the house was built? Through the bald stubs of a wisteria vine he saw the winter sky roll away across the city and the plain to a horizon where great loaves of cloud lolled against a low mountain range: and up out of this bed of mist and rock rippled band after band of colour, ridges of brick-pink, smoke-grey, lavender, shuddering upwards through the chill air like undulations working their way up from the bottom of a river. Ray's heart was in his throat. Electric power poured through his limbs. He felt a violent, a pagan urge to cry out, to sing, to scramble over the rickety balustrade and beat away above the glittering streets, jostling the birds and shouting canticles of praise.

At least for breakfast there was bread.

Janet hacked it into stale slabs and toasted them
while the kettle boiled. The smell brought Maxine in from the shed, picking her way across the puddled garden with the teatowel up her jumper and a roll of cartridge paper in her hand.

‘I thought you didn't eat bread any more,' said Janet, straight-faced. ‘I thought it made you go all mouldy inside.'

‘Oh,' said Maxine, sliding the teatowel discreetly on to the corner shelf, ‘I might make an exception, just for today. Look, Janet. Look what I brought you.'

She untied the sheet of paper, lifted off the tissue covering, and held it up across her chest like a scroll. Janet turned to look, with the buttery knife raised. It was a pastel drawing, very dense and worked, of a sea- or river-scape: the banks were dusk-coloured, rapidly being obscured by night, though on the water still glimmered steadily a furrow left by a passing boat; and right down the centre of the picture, dividing it exactly in two and frustrating the careless glance, a column of darkness loomed, an elegant, awesome pillar of smoke.

Janet's heart bounced. Her knees trembled. She stuck the knife into the honey jar.

‘I'll buy it,' she said. ‘Will you sell it?'

‘No,' said Maxine. She re-rolled the drawing with deft movements, doubled the ribbon and began the bow.

‘I'll pay you,' said Janet. ‘How much?'

Maxine held it out, neatly rolled and tied. ‘Here,'
she said. ‘I'm giving it to you.'

‘You're poor,' said Janet. ‘Let me pay you.'

Maxine laughed. ‘Take it,' she said. ‘If it means something to you, then I must have done it for you.'

‘But your game,' said Janet. ‘You need money. For your golden thing—the aeroplane.'

‘Don't worry,' said Maxine with a shrug. ‘The money will turn up.' She held out the scroll to Janet. ‘Take it. You've been good to me. It's yours.'

Abashed, Janet took the drawing with both hands, and opened her mouth to ask the next question; but Maxine's eyes glowed, glazed, and refocused past Janet's ear, and a convulsion of amorous eagerness transformed her face.

‘Hullo, hullo, Ray,' she carolled, shouldering Janet aside and rushing up to him. ‘
You
look beautiful this morning. I see you're wearing healing colours. You must have slept well—did the bird wake you? What did you dream of?' She pinned him from under her lowered brow with a dreadful, scorching ogle.

Janet saw him recoil, saw his bright face fade and go panicky. She was stabbed with pity: oh, poor Maxine. She was hopeless—
hopeless
.
She had a bottomless pit of tactical blunders at her disposal. Someone had to help her, to advise her, or she would never get what she longed for. Janet laid her hand on the back of Maxine's neck, and Maxine, glancing up at her like an over-excited child calmed by its mother, subsided.

‘Sit up, for God's sake, you two,' said Janet. ‘Breakfast's ready—sit up.'

So they ate together after all, they offered each other bread, and milk, and coffee; and they were as cordial and uneasy with one another as strangers on the morning after a testing journey who, aware that they may have betrayed more of themselves in the night than they had meant to, scarcely know in daylight where to put themselves, for fear of their own openness, and of what might next be required of them.

Ray got himself quickly back on to an even keel. It had never happened.
It?
What
it
?
He was firm. He would go to the wire on this. But he was always on his guard, ready for the intimacy to be presumed upon, and though Maxine's manner towards him did not change, though she said not a word about the whereabouts of the nightdress, which he had bundled up and kicked out of sight into a corner, the suspense was terrible. It was wearing him out. He slept with a chair wedged under his door handle; but in the public rooms of the house her ardour intensified and became a burden to him, a gauntlet of smiles and strokings which he had to run whenever he staggered in from work exhausted and half-frozen, craving only a hot shower and a feed and a couple of hours to read his book before he crashed into sleep.

She would run him to ground anywhere, she had
no shame: pestering him while he picked gloomily at the bones of the cold rabbit, tapping on the bathroom door, yoohooing outside it while he was in there at the mirror shaving, or sitting on the dunny reading the newspaper; she even followed him along the upstairs hallway when once he tried to visit the big front room again; but it was closed, and to choke her off he had to crouch down in the hall and pretend to be inspecting the timber floor for borers. That impressed her too: now she thought he knew everything.

At the same time she started pressuring him to join some loony pyramid scam that she wanted to be part of. Blokes at work, specially those mad gamblers the Irish labourers, were into it too, but casually, cynically, while for Maxine the scheme carried an idealistic meaning that put the wind up Ray almost as much as her adoration did. He would not touch the game with a barge-pole, and neither, to his surprise, would Janet.

Besides, he had saved, by self-denial and by camping for nothing in Janet's comfortless house, more money than he had ever possessed in his whole life before, and when Alby at last came down to get him out of here, they would be able to go out and rent a place together straight away. This month Ray's savings had broken through the four-figure barrier, and, awestruck by his own self-discipline, he segregated his opening thousand by rolling up the wad of notes in the first thing his hand fell on in the dark, and stashing it in the
dirty clothes carton under the window of his room. For the first time in his life Ray had done something that would impress his brother. Alby would not credit it. Alby would demand to be shown. The thought of this triumph made Ray's head spin with joy.

Maxine, meanwhile, had selected her sacrifice, her precious thing to sell, but she had no buyer. Janet was an obvious candidate: she cherished the cradle, had witnessed its power, and could probably scrape up the asking price; but Janet would also know what Maxine planned to do with the money, and Maxine lost her nerve at the prospect of another blast of that articulate and hostile disapproval. As for Ray: since despite her best efforts he flatly refused to join the game, and because what she needed from him was far more intimate than money, she saw that it would get her nowhere to press him, and soon gave it up.

But all the while, as the weeks passed and passed, her urgency grew. She laid aside her tools, and cleaned all day for money. They heard her on the phone under the stairs each evening, calling the merest acquaintance, the dimmest connection from the most imaginary past, pestering, persuading, pleading: they heard her deep, tearing sighs. What if the pyramid's energy-flow should flag before she could bring in two guests and afford a ticket? She took to carrying the twig cradle, quivering on her outstretched palms, out of the house
and along the streets with her wherever she went; but the world, previously so rich to her with its constant swarm and flutter of meaning, its brilliant auras and suave rainbows of psychology, was daily shedding its glory. A pale whisk in the corner of her eye was only a dirty plastic bag stuck on a branch. The pavements, once alive with phosphorescence, were nothing but grit. Faces were flat maps of weakness and regret, and she read them awkwardly, like anyone else, making mistakes and having to ask questions whose answers disappointed her. Where she had veered lightly, she now marched flat-footed, with her eyes pinned to the ground in case of ordinary luck: dropped coins, stamp booklets or unscratched lottery tickets. Something had got out of hand, but in her obsession she did not even ask herself what it was.

Late one afternoon, in a milk bar far from home, the serving girl greeted her like an old customer. When Maxine hesitated, puzzled, the girl said, ‘Aren't you the one who carries the little—the little—on your back?'

‘Oh, my little back-pack,' said Maxine. ‘Yes, I do.'

‘No,' said the girl. ‘I meant the baby.'

A shiver ran through the cradle.

‘On my back?' said Maxine. She moved up to the counter.

Seeing her mistake, the girl tittered and flapped one hand across her mouth.

‘Sorry!' she said. ‘You were standing against the
light. I was sure I saw a head pop up behind your shoulder.'

Maxine raced home rejoicing. She found Janet upstairs in her room, facing a blank wall and banging away on the typewriter in her lamplit snug of dictionaries and reference books, with an old crocheted blanket wrapped round her to hold a hot-water bottle against her kidneys.

‘She saw it, Janet!' cried Maxine, stampeding in. ‘She saw the baby!'

Janet looked up in alarm. Maxine's hair stood on end round her face, and while she jabbered out her tale in the doorway, the cradle on her palms was buffeted by a heavy surf of agitation.

‘Hey.
Hey
,'
said Janet. She pushed away the machine and struggled to her feet in the tangle of paraphernalia. ‘Put that thing down and come in here.'

Maxine placed the cradle on top of a filing cabinet and, full of trouble and exultation in her looks, came to attention beside the table like a schoolgirl.

Janet laid her hands on Maxine's shoulders. ‘Now listen to me,' she said. ‘Are you quite, quite sure that this is the right thing for you to be doing? Don't you think you might have let it go far enough?'

Maxine dropped her head to one shoulder and gave a slippery smile. ‘Tell me, Janet,' she said in a conversational voice. ‘Why don't you move your desk so you can look out the window? Then you would be
inspired by what you see outside.'

Janet shook her gently. ‘Maxine. Please do not change the subject. I am only a shit-kicking journalist. I am what is commonly known as a hack. For what I write, inspiration is not required.'

Maxine's eyes focused and filled with tears. ‘Oh, don't speak about yourself like that,' she said passionately. ‘It's so
cruel
.'

‘Maxine,' said Janet, with a hard throat, ‘I'm worried about you. I'm afraid you're going to get hurt. Can't you accept that Ray just isn't interested?'

‘I know—he won't join in the game,' cried Maxine. ‘I can't blame him—he works so terribly hard and he's afraid to risk his money. If only I could make him understand that there
is
no risk.'

‘Not that. I don't mean the game. I mean your other plan.'

‘But I can't do that without the
money
,'
wailed Maxine. ‘He can't stick around afterwards to look after me. I've got to make everything ready
myself
.'

‘But even if you do,' said Janet, ‘you can't just
hijack
a bloke! For God's sake, Maxine. Be
reasonable
.'

Suddenly Maxine's cheeks bulged, her nose went red, and she exploded into great, racking sobs. She made no attempt to smother them, but stood with her hands stiffly by her sides, and howled with a square mouth, staring straight into Janet's horrified face.

It was the despondent time of day, when the failure bird dragged its gauche stepladder of notes into the garden and propped it against the nearest tree, making everything within earshot forlorn; but now Janet pulled Maxine clumsily into her arms, and found herself rocking the scrawny, sweating little figure to and fro; a few tears of her own slid into the bush of Maxine's hair; and while she murmured foolish endearments that came percolating up out of some half-remembered reservoir of comfort, her mood of dread dissolved, and she was filled instead with a calm, maternal daring.

Presently Maxine's gusty sobs spaced themselves further apart, and lost their rhythm, and stopped. Janet slid her hands down Maxine's arms to the wrists, and let go.

Maxine wiped her nose and slug-lidded eyes on the sleeve of her jumper.

They looked at each other in silence.

Then Maxine heaved a bottomless sigh, and said with a gasp and a hiccup, ‘Help me, Janet. You've been around. Can't you tell me what I'm doing wrong?'

‘You're asking
me
for advice?' said Janet. Her laugh cracked in two. ‘About a
man
?'

‘Is it my looks?' said Maxine humbly. ‘Can anything be done about them or is it too late?' She closed her eyes and tilted up her face.

Silenced by a helpless sympathy, the kind for which there is no remedy, Janet swung the planet lamp away
from the typewriter and aimed its beam on to Maxine's face. Maxine squinched her eyes more tightly but continued to hold up her head, presenting her face like a lake waiting for a wind; and Janet, in this moment of strange privacy, examined her from forehead to chin, from ear to ear and back again. Perhaps she would soon need glasses, perhaps it was a trick of the light, but she had to focus all her will into this act of looking; she was obliged to lug the grid of her concentration with force over the resisting planes and excrescences of Maxine's tear-puffed face; and her gaze, as she hauled it along from right to left, from bottom to top, trailed behind it a gleaming furrow of meaning, of intense significance which she could neither read nor interpret.