Earthly Delights (11 page)

But now it came to it I couldn’t. Not yet. I didn’t know enough about him, just that I wanted him. I knew that I wanted him badly, but I hadn’t had a lover since James and I split, and I had what was either a sudden failure of nerve or an attack of common sense.

Daniel sensed that I had backed off and just sat down with me on the sofa. It is a large overstuffed sofa and very comfortable, though after a few hours one has to be extracted from it by crane. He held out his arms again.

‘Not rushing into anything, ketschele,’ he said quietly. ‘I haven’t had a lover since Sarah died and I don’t even know if I can remember …’

‘How long ago?’ I asked, snuggling back into his em-brace. His skin, under the shirt, was hot against my cheek. This man would have been in great demand in the cave during the Ice Age.

‘Four years. A suicide bomber took her with him. In Tel Aviv. I wasn’t there and they wouldn’t let me see her when I returned. Then I came back here. I like Australia. What about you?’

‘Not since James. We split and I sort of lost confidence. And I was busy. Bakers don’t keep disco hours, if I ever went to discos, which I didn’t. I’m sorry about your wife.’

‘I was only married a couple of months. We didn’t ever get to know each other. It would have been nice, getting to know her,’ he said.

I didn’t reply but cuddled closer. This was the first real hug I had had since so long ago that I don’t remember. Grandma Chapman hadn’t gone in for physical affection much.

Presently we got up and finished lunch. Then Daniel went away and I put Horatio and me to bed for the rest of the afternoon. It had been an emotional day, and emotion makes me sleepy.

On Saturday morning I woke promptly at four and then did one of my favourite Saturday things. I turned over and went straight back to sleep. Below, the city might wake and the Mouse Police pursue their avocation, but Horatio and I were fast asleep and firmly remained so until about ten am, when we felt that we had slept all that we could usefully sleep and got up in search of some breakfast and maybe a little look at a novel. I was giving up news for Lent. If it wasn’t Lent, I was giving it up for Passover. Or something. I had had enough of the world. It could go its way and I could go mine and we just wouldn’t notice each other, like two cats on the same roof.

Besides, I had the grocery shopping to do, a little light housework to complete, and—eek!—clothes to choose for the evening. What on earth was I going to wear to dine at the Venetia with James? I’d ditched all my office clothes with cries of relief. A nice quiet suit with a flamboyant scarf or pashmina was the right thing to wear, and I didn’t have them. I owned a good collection of t-shirts and track pants, and it was almost
worth wearing them to the restaurant in order to catch the maitre d’ as he fainted, but I am not a cruel woman.

First, the breakfast of apricot jam, cafe au lait and someone else’s croissants (the French artisan boulangerie in Little Collins Street makes the best) and a few chapters of the newest Jade Forrester. Romances with a twist. She specialises in heroes who are small, blond and ugly, and she makes them desirable. There is a lot to be said for tall dark and handsome, however. The Mouse Police came upstairs for a conference with Horatio and they all adjourned to sleep in the sun on my balcony. Nothing is more soothing than watching cats sleep. I had a very comfortable morning.

I was hauling home the grocery shopping (cat food weighs a tonne. I have pointed this out to the cats and they are not at all grateful), thinking of Daniel and approaching my own front door when Meroe caught up to me and relieved me of a canvas bag. Before I dropped the lot. It’s a matter of balance.

‘What have you been buying? Lead shot?’ she asked.

‘Cans of Kitty Dins,’ I said, opening the door. ‘A couple of packets of kitty meat and a big box of dry food. The rest of the stuff is for me,’ I added, stepping inside.

Then I skidded on something, dropped an armload of stuff, and landed hard on my backside. With the noise of my fall, or even before, all available cats had vanished with a whisking noise. I greatly admire the way that they are never there when anything happens. I recall watching Mistinguette, the aged grumpy grey cat who preceded Horatio, walking along the mantelpiece and deliberately edging a big mirror towards destruction—just because she felt like it (as I said, grumpy). I actually saw that mirror fall and when it hit the ground, the lounge room had shattered frame, shards of broken mirror and seven years’ bad luck in it, but a complete
absence of cat. She emerged later from the kitchen, claiming that she had been there all the time, waiting for her inefficient staff to bring her afternoon milk, and was far too old to climb mantelpieces even if she should wish to do so. Which she didn’t. It was the most barefaced piece of cheek I had seen before or since, apart from the children overboard affair.

And that was politicians. I groaned, sat up, rubbed various parts of my anatomy and started to gather up my scattered shopping. Meroe, luckily, had the eggs, the milk and the frozen peas. Frozen peas spread like lava and you keep finding them only after they unfreeze.

What had I slipped on? I retrieved a tin of pineapple from under a chair and found it, a flat sheet of paper, which on my polished tiles had acted like an ice-skate.

‘Prepare to meet thy doom, unchaste woman!’ the paper said. ‘Corinna Chapman, you must die!!’

I handed it to Meroe without a word. Now it was personal. And our very own pet lunatic knew where I lived. Meroe produced one which said ‘Witches must burn! Prepare to die, Miriam Kaplan!!’

Meroe, my stalwart Meroe, was actually shaking. I had a cold hollow where my stomach used to be. Immediate measures had to be taken. It didn’t matter that it was only four in the afternoon and the sun had not even approached the yardarm. I sat Meroe and me down in the kitchen, that ancient female refuge, and poured us both a large glass of brandy. And wonder of wonders, the woman who lectured me on my dull chakras lifted the glass and downed the spirit in one gulp.

‘He knows where we live,’ she said in her dark brown voice, coughing a little. ‘And he knows my real name.’

‘You’re Miriam Kaplan?’ I asked, coughing over my brandy in turn.

‘I haven’t been Miriam Kaplan for years and years,’ she said. ‘Twenty years, at least. Meroe is my craft name and I don’t know anyone now who even knows that my name was Miriam. How did he find out? Who is this creep?’

‘Maybe the curse will kick in,’ I suggested, a little disconnected by the brandy.

‘It has,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s working. Everything he does will go amiss. Therefore these are clues which may lead to his undoing and we ought not be so scared.’

‘I’m not feeling any better for hearing you say that,’ I told her.

‘But you’re an unbeliever,’ she answered gently, pouring another shot of brandy. ‘I ought to have faith in my own karma,’ she said, sipping rather than gulping. ‘I do have faith,’ she added. ‘But I’m scared, all the same.’

‘Hey, me too. Gimme that bottle.’

I put the groceries away. Routine is calming. Meroe and I began to talk about ordinary things, to give ourselves time to recover a little. I wondered aloud why the makers of the stoutest and most admirable cat food container made the cat food that Horatio will not eat. She wondered whether cats could be weaned onto a vegetarian diet and I riposted that this would merely cause them to regard their owner as either (1) a large carnivore who was meanly keeping all the meat for themselves or (2) dinner.

Horatio and the Mouse Police crept back into the kitchen, looking wary. Was I going to do that again, in which case this kitchen was no place for a delicately nurtured cat (or even those who had been dragged up in the gutter, like the Mouse Police)? If I was not intending to do that again, considerable cat food was required to assuage the shock of seeing one hundred kilos of woman and shopping hitting the floor
without warning. The Mouse Police rushed to Meroe with cries of greeting and allowed her to stroke their nibbled ears and their heaving flanks. Horatio levitated onto the table, sniffed my glass, curled a whisker and returned to the balcony, where the last rays of sun were still warming the tiles.

‘We need to tell that police officer,’ I said. ‘We need to check with Mistress Dread in case she’s got one too. And, oh God, what about Goss and Kylie?’

‘I’ll go and talk to them,’ offered Meroe. ‘You get Mistress Dread.’

‘She gave me her mobile number, I’ll ring her,’ I said, unwilling to leave the bright kitchen with the sun on the balcony. Meroe went out and made me lock the door behind her. I rang Ms Dread and found that she had also received a letter though she was strangely unwilling to tell me about it. It sounded the same as ours, with escalating exclamation marks. Sure sign of an unhinged mind, my old English teacher used to say. Not a comforting thought at this juncture. Senior Constable White had been contacted and was expected soon, and told us to try not to handle the letters (some hope!) and to keep them in a plastic folder. I fetched one from my desk and slid both letters into it. Meroe’s also had been slipped under her door without an envelope.

Meroe came back to tell me that both the girls were out but she had managed to slide their letter from under their door and with luck they would never know about it. I added it to the plastic sleeve. It said the same as ours: ‘Gossamer Judge and Kylie Manners, you are unchaste temptresses, you will die!!!’

Three exclamation marks this time, and both full names. Meroe sipped some more. She had dropped her shawl and was staring into space. Then she began to talk, without prompting.
The brandy was loosening my abstemious friend’s tongue and she plunged straight into biography.

‘I was born at the fairground in Geelong,’ she said. ‘My parents came from Poland. No one cared for us, everyone persecuted us, from Hitler onwards.’

‘You’re a gypsy?’ I asked quietly.

‘Half gypsy. My father rescued my mother from a border guard who was going to rape her. Her family was dead. She was trying to get out of Poland and that was frowned upon. He was an Australian aid worker. These Australians, they are everywhere. Walk into any pub in the world and there’s an Australian behind the bar, my father said, nice blokes and good sheilas, work hard, and always go home. Boomerangs. They still call Australia home, eh? So my father came home with my mother and he tried to live like a gypsy but he couldn’t, poor man. Too hard, too bare, too dirty. My mother really loved him so she went to try to live like an Aussie; too soft, too clean, too distant from the earth and the road which was always calling her. So they split and I lived half the year as a good little schoolgirl and half the year as a barefoot gypsy.’

‘That must have been hard,’ I said, wanting her to keep talking.

‘Yes, but good. Most gypsies don’t know another life, most Aussies don’t either. I knew both so I could choose. And here I am. Neither. If you’re a witch you have to find your path yourself; it isn’t either your father’s or your mother’s. For me it was Wicca. I knew some of the old spells, some of the old rituals, I knew about tarot because a Romanian woman taught me to read cards when I was twelve. The old magic is self limiting, just a crude attempt to manipulate the world in accordance with will, as Crowley said. But Wicca isn’t all that
old. Gardner largely invented it in the nineteen twenties. It is wholly of the light. Some of Mamma’s magic goes back a lot further than that, and some of her rituals belong to the dark.’

‘And you belong to the light?’ I asked.

‘Not by preference,’ she said, grinning suddenly with her white teeth. ‘I am a daughter of darkness and I know I’d be good at the left-hand path, so I don’t usually do it. I don’t even do the small, mild curses which most Wiccans allow themselves. When I was mixing up Mamma’s All Things Amiss spell, I could taste its potency, I knew that it was gaining power through me. It’s still gaining power.’

‘Good,’ I told her. ‘In this case I think you can make an exception. This guy has it coming.’

‘So do lots of people,’ she said, her gaze dropping to her hands clasped around the glass. ‘I shouldn’t have done it. I was afraid that this would happen. I’m really, really good at curses.’

‘If I can give up smoking you can give up curses,’ I said. ‘I loved smoking. It was lovely. I’d pull the smoke down into my lungs and feel an instant effect; cleverer, more focused, less tired, less hungry. I still miss it and I don’t do it, so neither will you.’

‘You still have the occasional cigarette,’ she told me.

‘And you can do the occasional curse, when it would do most good,’ I riposted. ‘Now, are you going to tell the lady cop about the curse?’

‘No,’ said Meroe.

‘Then let’s talk about this stalker. He’s got access to the building so it has now become officially serious. Let’s analyse. He’s using a lot of biblical quotes,’ I began.

‘Yes. A fundamentalist Christian, perhaps,’ Meroe agreed.

‘You could say the same of Savanarola,’ I said.

‘Yes, and he deserved a curse as well,’ argued Meroe. I felt cheered. She must be feeling better about her dark side.

‘And he hates all unchaste women and witches,’ I said. ‘So far it’s just the unchaste and the occult, right?’

‘Assuming that Mistress Dread is considered an unchaste woman.’ Meroe sipped more brandy. I wondered how much she was going to drink and where I was going to store her while I went out to dinner. She would probably enjoy the couch and the cats would enjoy having a nice unconscious body to repose upon. But she still sounded perfectly coherent, while I was deciding to knock off the spirits or I wouldn’t enjoy my very expensive dinner.

‘Any more unchaste women in the building?’

‘Mrs Pemberthy,’ she suggested. We both went into what can only be described as a giggling fit about Mrs Pemberthy’s chances of unchastity, especially since Traddles would take grave exception to anyone approaching her.

‘Probably not,’ I said.

‘And so far all he has done is send letters,’ said Meroe. ‘We’ll just have to keep the doors locked and stay alert.’