Collected Stories (31 page)

Florence Nightingale is lying on her side, facing the door, attempting to smile. The-man-who-won’t-give-his-name seems very slow and very old. He rummages through the pile of clothes beside the bed, his breathing the only sound in the room. It is hoarse, heavy breathing that only subsides after he has found his underpants. He
trips getting into them and Finch notices they are on inside out. Eventually the-man-who-won’t-give-his-name says, it is generally considered good manners to knock.

He begins to dress now. No one knows what to do. They watch him hand Florence Nightingale her items of clothing so she can dress beneath the sheet. He sits in front of her then, partially obscuring her struggles. Florence Nightingale is no longer trying to smile. She looks very sad, almost frightened.

Eventually Finch says, this is more important, I’m afraid, more important than knocking on doors.

He has accepted some new knowledge and the acceptance makes him feel strong although he has no real idea of what the knowledge is. He says, Fantoni is planning to eat Florence Nightingale.

Florence Nightingale, struggling with her bra beneath the sheet, says, we know, we were discussing it.

Milligan giggles.

The-man-who-won’t-give-his-name has found his dressing gown in the cupboard in the corner. He remains there, like a boxer waiting between rounds.

Florence Nightingale is staring at her yellow dress on the floor. Glino and May bump into each other as they reach for it at the same time. They both retreat and both step forward again. Finally it is Milligan who darts forward, picks up the garment, and hands it to Florence Nightingale, who disappears under the sheets once more. Finch finds it almost impossible not to stare at her. He wishes she would come out and dress quickly and get the whole thing over and done with.

Technically, Florence Nightingale has deceived no one.

Glino says, we got to stop him.

Florence Nightingale’s head appears from beneath the sheets. She smiles at them all. She says, you are all wonderful … I love you all.

It is the first time Finch has ever heard Florence Nightingale say anything so insincere or so false. He wishes she would unsay that.

Finch says, he must be stopped.

Behind him he can hear a slight shuffling. He looks around to see May, his face flushed red, struggling to keep the door closed. He makes wild signs with his eyes to indicate that someone is trying to get in. Finch leans against the door, which pushes back with the heavy weight of a dream. Florence Nightingale slides sideways out
of bed and Glino pushes against Finch, who is sandwiched between two opposing forces. Finally it is the-man-who-won’t-give-his-name who says, let him in.

Everybody steps back, but the door remains closed. They stand, grouped in a semicircle around it, waiting. For a moment it seems as if it was all a mistake. But, finally, the door knob turns and the door is pushed gently open. Fantoni stands in the doorway wearing white silk pyjamas.

He says, what’s this, an orgy?

No one knows what to do or say.

Glino is still vomiting in the drain in the backyard. He has been vomiting since dawn and it is now dark. Finch said he should be let off, because he was a vegetarian, but the-man-who-won’t-give-his-name insisted. So they made Glino eat just a little bit.

The stench hangs heavily over the house.

May is playing his record.

Finch has thought many times that he might also vomit.

The blue sheet which was used to strangle Fantoni lies in a long tangled line from the kitchen through the kitchen annexe and out into the backyard, where Glino lies retching and where the barbecue pit, although filled in, still smokes slowly, the smoke rising from the dry earth.

The-man-who-won’t-give-his-name had his dressing gown ruined. It was soaked with blood. He sits in the kitchen now, wearing Fantoni’s white safari suit. He sits reading Fantoni’s mail. He has suggested that it would be best if he were referred to as Fantoni, should the police come, and that anyway it would be best if he were referred to as Fantoni. A bottle of Scotch sits on the table beside him. It is open to anyone, but so far only May has taken any.

Finch is unable to sleep. He has tried to sleep but can see only Fantoni’s face. He steps over Glino and enters the kitchen.

He says, may I have a drink please, Fantoni?

It is a relief to be able to call him a name.

The-man-who-won’t-give-his-name has taken up residence in
Fantoni’s room. Everybody has become used to him now. He is known as Fantoni.

A new man has also arrived, being sent by Florence Nightingale with a letter of introduction. So far his name is unknown.

The mornings in the Lost and Found were better than the afternoons. In the mornings she didn’t think about the afternoons, yet the knowledge of their coming hung behind her eyes like great grey cloud banks that would soon blot out the sky.

Few people came to the Lost and Found at any time. Sometimes in the mornings they would have a businessman looking for an umbrella or a schoolgirl looking for a lost coat. But few came to collect the great library of treasure that was stacked in its high dusty canyons. Sometimes in the mornings she would simply wander through the great grey alleyways between the metal shelves and then she would visit her favourite objects: the cases of butterflies that were stacked in the high shelves above the railway goods yards, the old gardening books on the top of the ancient gramophone, the strange and beautiful building materials that lay in a tangled heap just near the loading dock. She would sit here sometimes, perched on a bag of concrete looking at the big lumps of four by two and imagining what she might do with them if she had a chance. The wood was grey and heavy, each piece marked with the name “Williamson” and she often wondered who Williamson had been and how anyone could be so careless as to misplace such a wonderful treasure. She longed to steal that four by two, to grow even taller than her five feet ten inches and somehow put it under an overcoat and walk out with it in the same way that Jacobs walked out each day with watches and transistors and small items of value. Mr Jacobs used the Lost and Found as a private business, as if the whole sawtooth-roofed warehouse had been built by the government for the express purpose of making Mr Jacobs rich.

Mr Jacobs didn’t give a damn for butterflies or books or four by two. He cared solely for money, and he cared for it with a fierce energy that she found alien and disturbing.

In the mornings when he spoke to her he often talked about
money, its value, its uses, the freedom he would purchase with it. In two years, he predicted, he would no longer use his battered brown briefcase to smuggle goods from the Lost and Found, but instead use it to collect rents in the afternoons. In the mornings he planned to stay in bed.

Mr Jacobs was a small neat man who combed his hair flat with Californian Poppy hair oil. In his grey dustcoat he could look almost frail. In fewer clothes he revealed the alarming strength of his muscular forearms, disproportionate arms that belonged to a far bigger body than his. Sometimes she saw the arms in nightmares. Yet when he arrived in the morning wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase he looked to her like a respectable businessman. She was always shocked, in the mornings, to see how respectable he looked, and how his eyes, peering behind his rimless glasses, had a soft, almost mouse-like quality. He looked like a character from one of those cartoons which feature henpecked husbands. If you hadn’t known Mr Jacobs you could have imagined him saying “Yes dear, no dear”, but then you wouldn’t have known about the forearms, nor the afternoons, nor his angry bachelorhood. A wife, Mr Jacobs said, was a waste of money.

She had never known anyone like Mr Jacobs, but she had little experience of people. When she was a child they had lived in a poor mining area where her mother’s lovers had tried to gouge some unknown wealth from a bleak clay-white landscape. Around their tin shack were the high white clay piles of other men’s attempts. The ground was dotted with deep shafts and for her first four years she had only been able to play in a special leather harness which was strapped to a length of fencing wire. She had run up and down the wire like a dog on a chain, safe from the dangers of mine shafts. It must have been there, in that white hot place, that she had learned how to go somewhere else, to dream of green places and cool clear rain, to ignore what her eyes saw or her body felt.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else. Her mother had not liked it. Her mother’s lovers, in varying degrees, had been enraged or irritated by her withdrawals. She had learned not to hear their words or feel their blows. Now, at nineteen, her long thin legs still bore the ghost of their rages, the stripe of a heavy piece of wire, the spot of a cigarette. Yet they had not touched her.

Now it was morning in the Lost and Found and Mr Jacobs was talking about money again. He was sitting at his desk behind the great grimy counter and she was leaning against the wall, hugging herself with her thin arms, her head on one side, her waving fair hair falling over one eye as she watched Mr Jacobs with curiosity. She asked her ritual question with the untiring curiosity of a child who wants to be told the same frightening story once again.

“Mr Jacobs, would you really do anything for money, really?”

“You bet.” He lit a long thin cigar and put his feet on the desk. Each time he put the cigar to his mouth the terrible forearms emerged from his grey dustcoat. She thought of octopuses lurking beneath rocks in shallow pools.

“Would you walk naked in the street for a thousand dollars?”

“I’d do it for five hundred, doll.”

“You’d go to jail.”

“No, I’d be fined. I could pay the fine and still make a profit.”

“Would you drink, you know …” she faded off, suddenly embarrassed by what she had said.

“No, I don’t know.” He smirked. She hated his smirk. He knew what she meant because he had said he would do it before. He had said he would drink piss if there were money in it. She wanted to hear him say it again.

“You know, drink ‘it’.”

“Piss, would I drink piss for money?”

“Yes.” Her pale face burned. “That.”

“How much piss?”

“A teaspoonful.”

“Forty dollars.” It was strange the way he said that, the same tone of voice that he used when he was quoting a price for unredeemed property. It meant he was cheating. It meant, she thought, that he would probably do it for ten dollars.

“I’d do a pint for eighty.”

“What about the other?”

“What ‘other’?”

“You know.”

“Shit?”

She nodded.

“That’d be more expensive. I’d want a hundred and fifty for that.”

“What about dog’s stuff?”

“Two hundred.”

She shook her head, appalled at the thought of it.

“You don’t believe me?”

“I believe you.” She pulled a face. She couldn’t help it. The thought of it. The strange respectable little face, the neat clipped moustache smeared with stinking muck.

“Don’t pull faces at me, young lady.” She heard the tone in the voice and began to drift away. It was the nasty voice.

“I wasn’t,” she said, and then, seeing the rage growing on his face, corrected herself. “I was, but I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

The confession pacified him. “Look, sweetheart, you don’t live in the real world. In two years’ time I’ll be free, just collecting rent.”

“Who’ll come here then?” Maybe, she thought, there will be someone nice. The thought cheered her. It had never occurred to her before.

“I’m fucked if I know. Somebody. You’ll be stuck here and I’ll be free just going around collecting rent.”

“Oh,” she said, “I won’t be here either.”

He laughed then. “You’ll be here, my little biddy, until you’re a shrunken-up old woman. How will you get out?”

She smiled then, so secretly that he started to get angry again.

“What are you smiling about?” He took his feet down off the desk.

“It’s nothing,” she said, but she was already edging her way along the wall, trying to escape. She couldn’t tell him.

“Tell me.” He was standing now and moving towards her. There was really no point in running. She would have to tell him something. Tell him anything.

“Tell me.” He was beside her now. His hand took her wrist. What would he do? She began to retreat. She started collecting coloured stones under water. She liked doing that. Swimming through the pale green water with the bucket, a beautiful turquoise bucket. The stones lay on the bright sandy bottom.

He was twisting her wrist. It was called “A Chinese Burner”. He had told her that before. He put two hands around her wrist and twisted different ways.