—5—
A cough grabbed my hair, I could swear, down to the down on my labial lips. How long had he been watching?
I spun on my sock-clad heels, the better to berate him. 'There is a door,' I noted.
He was leaning against the door jamb. 'I did knock,' he said dryly, and I felt my chest break out in a hot blush, rising quickly to my neck.
My shoes needed putting on, which took a while. He watched.
I grabbed my bag. 'Hafta go shopping. Wanna come?'
~
Growing up in a place where water is the gift of that miser, life, and dust is the daily ration, my mum's philosophy became my own. Why worry about the colour of your sheets if you are supposed to be sleeping? And if there's enough light to see their hue, what are you doing in bed? And if they smell natural, shouldn't everything?
I have always hated choosing things I don't care about, and sheets fall into that category. So whenever I had to, I bought a set of hospital-grade whites, and wore them till they would come out from a wash as laundry lint. The journal crisis had precipitated the present need to buy earlier than my wont.
And yet again, I wished they sold these in 'dust'. Or, in inner-city Sydney, 'grime' would have been the right colour.
By the time we caught the bus, there was only an hour of downtown late-night shopping left.
I had only asked Brett along because the words spewed out of my mouth. Now I regretted the decision. He wasn't Gordon. The guy sitting in the seat behind me in the standing-room-only 431 Bettawong Point to City was the Prince of Darkness, only a.k.a.'d 'Brett' at his amusement, and he was bound to do ... what? I could not face the thought, so decided that the only way to deal with it, was not to.
But he accompanied me in my grim mission to find, buy, get out, like a labrador on a lead—quiet, compliant, observant, dull.
'Have you eaten?' I asked when we were on the bus home, my sheets the only purchase.
His answer was a cross between 'uehh' and a groan. I looked him in the face for the first time since morning. The skin on his cheeks glowed with a celadon translucence, the sheen of a cold sweat—like the underbelly of a tree frog.
'You're sick!' I told him, as if he didn't know. 'Do you get car sick?' I asked. Did he know what car sickness was? When precisely was his last holiday?
'Uarghh,' he said, and put his head between his knees.
'Burp,' I instructed. 'All the bus drivers are the same. Start, jerk, stop. Want to walk?'
He wagged his head, which I took for 'Yes'.
We got out at the next stop. The air was typical for November—warm and sticky as an armpit, and thick with inner-city early-summer fug: two-thirds emissions and one third frangipani and jasmine flowers. We were a half-hour stroll from home, slightly less to my neighbourhood haunts.
'What kind of food do you eat?' I asked, as we stopped at a light. It hadn't occurred to me that he would eat, until I saw him with the bowl of Weet-Bix and soy milk (though, upon reflection, I could imagine them being served in hell).
'I'm not hungry,' he said.
The light was stuck, so we ran across—or rather, I ran, he plodded, and a cabbie nearly hit him.
He barely made it up the kerb, and leaned right over. I thought he was going to sprawl. Instead, he let me lead him to the nearest closed shop, where we sat on its windowsill.
He looked pitiful. 'What's wrong,' I asked. 'You can tell me.'
'I ate what I was given this morning,' he said, his head hanging. 'But your kitchen doesn't agree with me. And neither do any of the eating establishments in your neighbourhood.
Insufferable snob!
If I were a dog, my ruff would have stood. 'I live,' I informed him, 'and you are holidaying, in Bettawong! Sydney's intellectual cum artistic cum ... and I quote, best eats Mecca.'
My lips had drawn back, tasting blood and flesh and fight, when I came to my senses.
'What do you require?' I asked with a solicitude I felt not an iota.
'No garlic?' he asked in a voice so soft.
A host of black-and-white movies swarmed my brain, all streaked by lightning and scented by the reek of antiseptic garlic purifying the world of fiends. 'I thought garlic was an old wives tale.'
He laughed. It was a low laugh sounding like distant thunder, so it was probably coincidence that I heard glass shattering somewhere near.
He put his hand on my shoulder and turned himself so that we faced each other squarely. 'Angela,' he said. 'One old wife is worth a thousand preachers in the harm old wives have done to me. And garlic does hurt.'
We left our windowsill perch and walked together in silence.
I observed him out of the corner of my eye. He still looked ghastly, but over the worst of his attack. Had he eaten any garlic? Was it just the smell? How did the house affect him? Was he around during lunch? Or did Victor, Kate's dog, whose favourite place was under the kitchen table, breathe on him?
But the Devil wasn't born yesterday, nor was he fiendish in only one part of the world. History and garlic were intertwined. Something didn't add up, but I didn't have the time to learn math now.
Question: Thinking preventatively, should I put a garlic clove in my bag, wrapped, for my protection? Would it?
Answer: Deal with the present, who walks beside you.
I ran my mind over Bettawong's eating establishments with a new criticality. Although they were almost the main business on the street, I could not think of a single one that wouldn't smell of garlic—from Rigamoto FX, all the way to the old Chinese take-away frequented by pensioners and public housing types, to ... crikey. The only place I could think of that maybe wouldn't have garlic was Nippon, across the street from the Higher Light, but it was always closed.
'I could use something to eat,' he mumbled beside me. 'I haven't eaten since morning.'
I glanced at him and tripped on a crack. His walk was almost sprightly, the tree-frog sheen gone. We were by now at the edge of Bettawong, in front of The Last, an ex-cafe that was between tenants. It inspired me.
'What you need is a restorative coffee and cake,' I said. 'But this one's expensive. Do you have money?'
I dug into my bag and began to fumble things around.
He put his hand on mine. 'I have.'
I nodded, being in the middle of a gulp of salivation.
Three minutes later, we were sitting at a table for two in The Troppo.
~
The Troppo's parties—tremendously dear (like everything at the Troppo)—with Chinese finger pulls and magic stone rings, and rattles—parties only for adults—Troppo's was not McDonald's—were what made The Troppo. And I'd heard that if you came just for coffee and cake and paid only a dollar extra, you'd get a little paper parasol stuck jauntily in your slice of cake.
I hoped Brett would shout me for the parasol, too.
We were lucky there was an empty table. It was almost ten o'clock. Come ten thirty, every table would be taken and no one would leave until kick-out time at half-past midnight. Brett looked introspectively quiet, which suited me down to the ground. He was hardly chit-chat capable.
I was blissfully daydreaming when he startled me by asking when someone would come and take our order. I checked my watch. We'd been here only twenty minutes.
'I don't know,' I answered, a tad annoyed, but I looked around to see who was working tonight. A girl with harlequin glasses that she was taking off and fondling, and putting on again. Did they have prescription lenses or plain glass? I watched for a while, deciding 'plain glass'. She was standing by the cash register. I thought of trying to attract her attention, but that seemed so American.
She'd come. They all did eventually.
~
A flicker of flame caught my eye, and I turned my head.
Brett was playing with himself. He had one elbow resting on the table, his arm raised so that his hand was in front of his face. His hand was clenched with his thumb up, and it was flaming like a candle-wick.
Before I could even ... anything, he blew it out.
Then he stuck his thumb underneath his fisted fingers again, and flicked it out Zippo-lighter style. It lit instantly. He quenched it, and lit again. Then he repeated the performance. And repeated it yet again.
'Stop that,' I whispered. 'What are you trying to do?'
'Get some—'
I deliberately turned my back to him, distancing myself in the eyes of everyone in the place. I heard snatches of conversation—'like him trés much', 'she can't smell the ferret, but the whole bloody flat stinks of its fucking pee', 'those little red peppercorns'. And by the cash register, those harlequin glasses were being taken off and put back on again. I smiled to myself, feeling a surge of national pride. Brett was looking weird amongst a typically tolerant group of Australians, which meant that he was playing to a totally inattentive house.
A roar at my back got all our attention. Brett's thumb now threw up a bonfire reaching almost to the ceiling.
That finally got a response. The harlequin glasses dropped to the floor, and I heard the lovely sound of crunching underfoot as their owner rushed to our table.
She leaned toward Brett, breathing down his chest.
'I'm only studying,' she panted. 'But that's the best act I've ever seen. Have I heard of you?'
'I dare say,' Brett said, quenching his thumb with a panache that was sickening to watch. I had never come close to that level of self-assurance.
'My dear Angela,' he drawled, 'Would you be so kind as to order for us both.'
The coffee came, and then the cake, with parasols.
He stuck his finger in his coffee, tasted it, and made a face. He stuck two fingers in his cake (Over-the-Troppo: Troppo's own Devil's food cake Topped with Chocolate-covered Cherries, Filled with Hazelnut Cointreau Cream, and all Surrounded by a Lake of Raspberry Couli) and held his fingers upright, splayed their widest. Then he tasted tentatively, each finger—one from the base up, the other from tip to base—at the same time, running the tips of his forked tongue up and down, down and up those fingers, and licking carefully around, sometimes having his tongue tips meet like mating snakes.
He was doing it on purpose.
'Eat,' he said.
'I'm not hungry,' I answered.
She was standing behind my chair like a waiter in a European restaurant. I could feel her there.
'Eat,' he commanded, and handed me my fork, never taking his eyes from his fingers.
I began to eat, choking back tears.
The coffee was lukewarm.
~
The finger and tongue performance ended. (I have excellent peripheral vision.)
Then the next performance began.
He removed the parasol from his cake and placed it by his plate. Then he played with his cake, using the long nail on his left little finger. I hadn't noticed this nail before, but it was the length of a hatpin.
Every time I stopped eating, he stopped playing, and repeated his command.
When he finally finished moving his food around, he stuck the parasol into it rakishly and sat back to admire his work. I was by this time finished with my cake, having pushed down the last of it.
The mess on his plate was nothing less than something murdered for pleasure.
He was not Gordon. Not at all.
He got up and walked out of Troppo's. I followed him out.
He was going in the wrong direction. Anyway, I needed to stop him. 'There wasn't any garlic,' I laughed (poorly).
'That's true,' he said, slowing down. 'But I'm not a sweet tooth. And I like my hot drinks hot.'
'We have to go back,' I told him gently. 'Home is the other way. 'And besides...' I had to add, hoping he wouldn't be angry, especially as it complicated matters because he hadn't paid the bill, which had never come. 'I forgot my sheets at Troppo's.'
'You don't have to worry about them,' he said, stretching his lips in a rictus of a smile.
He was trying. I felt enormously relieved.
And that was so nice of him to remember the sheets, but where were they? He wasn't carrying anything that I could see.
'You're not going back,' he explained, and began to walk again, away from home.
'What?'
'I can't live there,' he said.
I grabbed his arm. 'But I do.' I could hear my voice shaking. 'We can move if you like. I'll give notice and we can look next week.'
He peeled my hand from his arm, gently but firmly. 'No, my dear,' he said, and began walking again.
His stride was so long that my side cramped.
'But ... all my stuff is there!'
He didn't deign to answer.
There was a time when I was in a cathedral in Spain where the bannerless staircase corkscrewed up to a murk of infinity—and halfway up, I glanced down, towards blackness. I slid down the wall to grasp the stone step and the wall behind—unable to move, too frightened to cry. The next tourists found me, clogging the way. They tried to reason, but I was beyond that. As I heard their steps echo ever more faintly downwards, every muscle in my body locked except my sphincter, which relaxed so completely that half my insides, it seemed, ran down the stairs. Eventually an ambulance crew followed my trail up the stairs and rescued me, as I feigned unconsciousness.
No kind tourists would find me now. No ambulance crew would save me. I forced myself to assess my situation coolly, and was glad that I was able to—that I had matured since the staircase incident.
I'd signed the contract, but the Devil hadn't provided anything. I could break it off, and this Devil business would be just like the staircase incident, just like other times when my body cruelly let me down, just like the journals, just like the book—something to forget and get beyond.
He was five long strides ahead when I stopped. Turning, I strode back over my own footsteps, my mood instantly lightening. Within a block, a wild regret even made me giggle. Those beaut horns and tail—such a waste on him.
As I walked, the air smelt less polluted, more frangipani'd, and my thoughts felt cleared of muck. Tomorrow I would wake and go to work, and tomorrow night, maybe think about saying yes to Gordon.