Cosmo Cosmolino (26 page)

‘Okay. Okay,' he muttered. ‘Okay. I'll go after this Hawkwind. Where does he live? Does anybody know where he lives?'

‘Oh, come on, Ray,' said Janet. She left her post at the kitchen door and returned to the table, unwinding the damp towel from her head. ‘The money's gone. Can't you get it through your skull? You're back to square one.
The money has been spent
.'

Ray dragged a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose with a sharp report. ‘All right then,' he said. He took several deep breaths, and gave a resounding sniff. ‘I'll go to the cops. I'll dob her in.'

‘Huh,' said Alby, sitting down at the table. ‘Don't waste the taxpayers' money.'

‘She's got no
morals
,'
said Ray. He leaned against the wall, exhausted. ‘She's certifiable. She's a witch.'

‘She's not like anyone else,' said Janet, ‘that's for sure. She's like somebody from another planet.'

Alby tapped one forefinger against his temple. ‘She's weird,' he said, ‘but she's kind of brilliant, too. She doesn't care!' He started to laugh. ‘She's so oblivious. You almost have to admire her.'

‘Why should she care?' cried Ray. ‘It wasn't
her
money!' He kicked a lump of plaster out of the wall. ‘I'll fix her—I will. I'll get her for this. I'll get her—just watch me.'

But even as he gloried in it, he was running out of righteousness, and soon he stopped his stamping and stood in the middle of the room with his arms hanging, like a shag. Alby pulled out a chair and Ray cast himself on to it in an abandoned sweep, spreading his arms on the table and laying his head down on one cheek. ‘Why'd you send me here, Alby,' he said dully. ‘It's not my kind of place. It's a nut-house. I don't belong here.'

‘Better get used to it,' said Alby. ‘We've got nowhere else to go.'

‘I'm not living with
her
,'
said Ray. ‘Maxine.
Maxine
.
That maniac. No one can trust her.'

‘What are we going to do about her?' said Alby.

Janet came and sat down opposite them. ‘We have to look after her,' she said. ‘She needs us.'

‘She's not
my
responsibility,' said Ray, half raising his head. ‘You can't expect
me
to . . .'

‘Where'd you find her?' said Alby. ‘Can't we just send her home? Where does she come from?'

‘Same place
you
came from, Alby,' said Janet, ‘when
you
first turned up here. From nowhere.'

Maxine picked her way, eyes down, through the damp, knee-high grass. The jonquils led her down the yard by means of their piercing perfume: metal, citrus, rotting meat: you could hardly call it scent; but her flair, sharpened by the adrenalin of confession, sucked it in. Ah—here they were, the chilly flowers of winter: clumps of cream, tightly clotted as if just that minute extruded through the pale-green, ridged stalks. Their smell sickened her. She knelt to them, holding her breath, and broke them off one by one, working her fingers down to the succulent, squeaky crowns: they came away with a hollow snap. Sap oozed on to her hands and hung in strands. Her stomach rebelled: the knot pulsed its amoebic boundaries, and subsided. She squatted, holding on; then reached forward and plucked, snapped, plucked again. Her breasts, tight and sore, pressed against her thighs, and she tried to straighten her back, to relieve them: but she was so dizzy from holding her breath against the flowers' stench that all
she could do was squat and waddle forward, squat and waddle. The flowers multiplied as she gathered. There were always more. Who on earth had planted them? The wind? Herself, perhaps—they were so familiar, the zigzag stagger of the clumps. Her hands were full. She pressed her knuckles against the ground and rose to her feet. The garden spun. Oh, she would have to vomit—but the house slowed, it settled—and suddenly she saw the others, Janet, Ray and Alby, step out the back door on to the verandah, and stand there quietly in a row, gazing in her direction, peering, studying her with their six eyes. Ray was in the middle, poor furious false angel, and the others were holding him by the arms, as if to restrain or comfort him. She had enough flowers now, flowers for the house, two stout bunches of them, dripping curved trails of sap down the front of her trousers: she raised them in her fists, like trophies. The house would be full of the stinking flowers, every vase and jar and bottle stuffed tight. But first, for this sick feeling, she would take a dose of her drops. In silence she turned and walked diagonally down the garden to the shed.

The air was milky, grey and mild. The sky was clouded. Every few steps she looked back at the verandah to see if they were following. They had not moved. The wind made the sides of their hair stand up in identical crests. Don't follow, don't step down, don't come after. She plodded down the yard, left foot,
right foot, making no sound in the thick grass. She looked back. They had not moved. They stood in a row, their necks craning forward and their shoulders curved. With every step she felt a huge, disappointed love for all three of them growing under her ribs: she could hardly breathe for the weight and sweetness of it: goodbye! The shed rose in front of her, with its double doors ajar and the furniture looming inside—but as she stepped between the doors, her foot flexed its tiny cathedral of bone and muscle and vaulted her lightly into the air.

What?

Into her other sole pressed the iron pattern of the shed roof.

Oh!

She paced along it in two booming strides, and skimmed away.

Angled at thirty-five degrees, pop-eyed and dangling-breasted, both hands flowering, she looked down.

The shed roof—so that's where my bow-saw got to!—was a grey rectangle below and behind her: the house a peaked, L-shaped ripple of green, the truck a scarlet box. The bouquets let loose into her hair a long drool of sap: bewildered, she muffed at it with the back of her wrist, and the turbulence stirred by her arm's bending dropped her twenty feet into a gauche somersault among the chimney-pots: sprouting elbows
and knees, she tumbled like a pigeon, and dodged the antenna only by a jerky jib and tack. But when by instinct she rolled on to her side, stretched out, and thrust forth one arm as she had seen heroes and old-style swimmers do, the air smoothed into a bounding field of congratulation: its sleekness answered hers and taught her the hang of it, surging under her flank, giving purchase to her striding feet and parting to the chunked wedges of her knuckles. Chiffon vapour whizzed along her cheeks. The air was alive: it was her element: she dared a kick-turn and it sang a welcome, making the clutched flowers and every layer of cloth on her body whir.

She banked to fire one last look into the shrinking canyon of the yard. Pedalling madly and dropping her head like a chopper, she plastered both arms along her sides and unclenched her fists to let the seeping jonquils scatter down the rips of wind.
Janet!
she yelled after them.
Your knickers! I've still got them on!—
but too late, too high—for
I
was over:
I
dropped off her like a split corset: there was no more
I
.

With a churning roll and a trample she picked up speed and rocketed, whistling-eared, dead vertical from the city's paltry pencil-clump towards the meniscus of day. Her hair, streaming stiff as a helmet, was suddenly drenched in droplets: shrieking, she burst through the membrane into blinding upper sky.

Now, at a velocity as prodigious and as still as
reverie, she cruised the cloud gorges: outcrops, woolly plains, escarpments, and mighty, toppling towers. She wept with awe to see the merciless delineations of their extremities, fantastical, curly-horned; and then, where the cloud-floor broke, the sea: a wrinkled skin of lead, sheeted with excruciating silver.

Inside her the little creature heaves for joy, her
Cosmo, Cosmolino
,
the errand on which she is speeding: can she endure this purpose? Is this what it has all been for? And does he hear it too or is he secreting it, this wild interior music of gland and sinew, these grids of tough chords on which tremendous explosions leap and scamper, where nameless souls and sacraments outrageously disport themselves?

‘Now what,' said Alby.

He stepped off the verandah on to the concrete and leaned one creaking leather shoulder against a post.

‘She'll come out when she's hungry, I suppose,' said Janet.

Ray shuffled mutinously on the boards. ‘I feel like barging into that shed and dragging her out,' he muttered.

‘Oh, drop it, Raymond,' said Alby. He gave a huge yawn. ‘I'm stuffed. I need a couple of hours' sleep.'

‘You can crash in my bed,' said Janet. ‘Till lunchtime.' She bent over and scrubbed at her damp hair with her fingertips.

But Alby sat down beside Ray on the woodbox. They rested their elbows on their knees and stared at their boots. How low and flat the morning seemed; and the garden disheartened Alby terribly, choked as it was with wandering weeds, nasturtiums, rampant vines and other remnants of vegetable fantasies. The work needed to get the place into shape—the labour!

‘Was it true,' said Ray, ‘that story about the ukulele?'

‘True enough,' said Alby with a sigh. ‘If you believed it. Though maybe I dreamt it. I don't know.'

He raised his head and gazed blankly at Janet. Her hair had half-dried into an unfortunate shape imparted to it by the towel, and her fringe had got squashed: it looked funny, as if it were welded to her eyebrows. He drew a breath to remark on this, but thought better of it. ‘Not much of a morning after all,' he said. ‘Clouded right over.'

‘I've got to work,' said Janet. ‘I've got to “sit on my arse and tap a typewriter”. But first I think I'll clear the decks.' She pegged her towel to the wire and sauntered away into the house. They heard her start to sing, and to rattle the dishes in the sink.

‘One thing about Janet,' said Alby. ‘She's always cheerful in the mornings.' He laughed.

‘Alb,' said Ray. ‘Don't you care at all? About my money?'

With an effort Alby roused himself. He clicked
his tongue and blew out air. ‘You're my brother, aren't you? Do you think I'd heave all my stuff into a truck and drive a thousand K's to pick up a bloke I didn't care about?' He buffed Ray hard between the shoulder blades. ‘Course I care. I know you worked for that money. You shouldn't have left it lying about, that's all. And I got cranky when you put on a song and dance about it.'

Ray blew his nose and shoved the hanky back into his trouser pocket. He stood up.

‘You duffer,' said Alby. He stuck out one foot and kicked Ray lightly in the calf. ‘It's only money.'

‘You don't know what I've had to put up with, in this house,' said Ray. He had his back to Alby; his neck and ears were huffy.

‘Sounds to
me
,' said Alby, ‘as if you had everything laid on.'

Ray glared at him over his shoulder.

‘Look,' said Alby. ‘Janet'll give us a bed for a while—just till we scrape up some more dough. I'll get a guitar from somewhere. Something will turn up. In a couple of months it'll be summer. We'll fix the bike. We'll go to the baths. After tea we'll sit out here and have a beer and listen to the vegies grow.' He got to his feet with a grunt. ‘Come on. Give us a hand to unload the truck. I can't leave the stuff just sitting there.'

Together they stumped out the back gate on to the street. The air was cold and still. Buildings a block
away looked dark but intensely visible, all their detail in sharp focus, as if distance had ceased to exist, and there was an iron quality to the light that meant rain. Ray shivered.

‘Open it up. Show us what you brought.'

Alby hesitated. ‘It's not much chop,' he said. ‘You mightn't like it.'

‘We'll sell it then,' said Ray, rolling up his sleeves. ‘To reimburse me.'

‘
To reimburse me
,'
mimicked Alby, falsetto.

Ray turned away to hide his smile. He punched the truck's rear door.

‘Stand back,' said Alby. He rammed the key into the handle, sprang on to the step, and heaved the rusty roller up to the roof.

Ray elbowed past his legs and peered in; but even before he could make out in the dull light the composition of the load, the smell of it rushed out and swamped him: the smell of pre-used, fourth-hand, of boarding house, of skulking and scrounging, of failure: everything he had come here to get away from. He rested his forehead against the red paint. He felt weak. He wanted to howl. Couldn't they do
anything
properly? Couldn't they get
anything
right?

‘Well?' said Alby, towering over him on the step. ‘What do you reckon?'

Ray could not meet his brother's eye. He could barely speak, for something like shame.

‘It's junk, mate,' he whispered. ‘It's garbage.'

‘What? Oh, it's not
that
bad, is it?'

‘It's not made of wood,' said Ray. ‘It's not even plastic. What
is
it made of?'

Alby scratched his head. ‘I see what you mean about the wardrobe,' he said. ‘But it'll do us, won't it? How about that armchair?'

‘It's
ugly
,'
shouted Ray. He clambered on to the step. ‘It's the sort of thing they have in video shops. In tattoo parlours. The stuff bloody Maxine makes is better than this. What's the matter with you, Alby? Why'd you lug it all this way? You could have saved the truck hire. We could have waited, and got ourselves something decent!'

Suddenly overwhelmed, Alby stepped down on to the kerb, sat down with his boots in the gutter, and dropped his head into his hands.