Earthly Delights (19 page)

‘How is your wife?’ I asked.

‘She’s at the specialist’s,’ he said. ‘They don’t seem to know what’s wrong with her. She gets into these states. Nothing will please her but to try to sell the apartment. Since those letters came,’ he said.

Then he seemed to run out of words. He waited until Traddles had finished christening the bush and went on his way. Poor sad, defeated man. It must have taken Mrs P years to grind him down to his present status of something lowlier than the average worm. He didn’t even bother about his clothes anymore. His tweed coat was frayed at the elbows and there were stains on his tie and on his sleeves. But as he had told Meroe and me, he was into dominance and loved being Mrs P’s slave.

Horatio came back as I finished my drink, chirruped invitingly to me as a signal that he was now ready for an extensive afternoon nap, and we went back to my apartment. There I left him and went to fetch Meroe to tackle the Great Unpacking.

Andy Holliday was a bit more together today. He gave me a picture of his daughter and allowed me to conduct him, and his bottle, down to the Prof’s flat. As I closed the door I
noticed that he was actually pouring a glass for Professor Dion, which at least cut down the amount he was going to be able to drink.

Meroe and I surveyed the apartment. She set down her basket on the TV and said, ‘It’s no use relying on the labels. At least Lady Diana’s furniture is here and she loved cupboard space. You start in the kitchen and I’ll see what I can do with the clothes.’

Boxes, naturally, were mislabelled or unlabelled until you turned them over and found that the labels were on the bottom. We called out discoveries to each other. The moving men appeared to have just dumped everything down where they felt like it and poor Andy had been too miserable to protest. Thus Meroe found the dishes neatly stored in the bathroom, and I found the linen offloaded into the kitchen. We swapped boxes and carried on the kind of long distance conversation only possible between two good female friends.

‘I’ve got the computer,’ I cried. ‘And the printer.’

‘Good, the telephone jack is just behind that polished wood table. I found it when I was looking for a power plug.’ There was a ripping noise. ‘And I’ve got the phone and the answering machine.’

‘I’ll come and get it in a minute. Are you doing shoes? I’ve got a whole box of shoes here.’

We shoved and sorted. Meroe, who is very neat when she isn’t being amazingly messy, hung every shirt and suit in a huge wardrobe which Lady D had had especially built, tall enough to take ball gowns, she said. It was also big enough to take a bag of golf clubs, a very old hockey stick, a huge pile of
Playboy
magazines and a basketball. The bedroom was taking shape. We made his bed with new sheets and his own doona, instead of the sleeping bag in which he had been reposing. In
the built-in drawers we placed diaries, coins, a finger ring with a university crest on it, a bunch of keys, spare reading glasses and a pile of cards, including those for a dentist and a doctor, which he might need again.

The kitchen was simple. We just had to put away the cutlery, the crockery and the two pots (a saucepan and a frying pan) and install the microwave. The fridge contained nothing but my fruit cake and some long-life milk and the freezer was full of frozen meals and bottles of Stoli.

I was stacking books in a bookshelf (mostly paperback thrillers) when I heard Meroe say, ‘Oh!’ in a sad, broken little voice.

In eight cartons Andy had packed all of his daughter’s possessions. Her school books, her pink diary with a lock on it, all her clothes. Her seven stuffed toys, including a big white teddy bear with a lot of personality. Her bottle of Charlie perfume had leaked and hung heavy in the air.

‘We’ll put all of her stuff in the second bedroom,’ I said.

‘And shut the door,’ agreed Meroe. ‘But I’d swear she isn’t dead,’ she added. ‘Not from these things.’

‘She owned these things before she ran away, and she was alive then,’ I reminded her. ‘By the way, I met a pretty Goth in your shop the other day. Ruffled shirt. Long blond hair. You don’t see long hair often.’

‘Lestat,’ said Meroe, shutting the door to Cherie’s room. ‘The “my gift is death” Lestat. Changed his name by deed poll. Lives in a penthouse somewhere. Believes he is a vampire. OD’d on vampire films and may not be entirely sane.’

‘No shit. What does he buy from you?’ I asked, fascinated.

‘Spells,’ said Meroe. ‘He’s looking for a spell for eternal life. He buys all the most abstruse books on ritual. He’s on the mailing list of most of the rare and occult booksellers in the world.
He’s a customer I could do without, to tell you the truth. He gives me the creeps.’

‘But you’re a witch!’ I exclaimed.

‘Doesn’t mean I can’t have the creeps. Vampire films don’t do some people any good,’ she added, rummaging for more underwear. ‘There, that’s all the clothes, I think. Do you want to set up the computer while I connect up the wires?’

‘Deal,’ I said. Meroe crawled on the floor while I read the manual and eventually we had everything up and working; all the essential machines, the phone, the stereo, even the DVD player.

We put his toiletries in the bathroom, including a bit of shaving soap which had hairs in it, and a worn-through soap-not-really-attached-to-the-rope-anymore. His aftershave was Brut. And he had a lot of mouthwash from when he still met people who didn’t know that he was a drunk. His towels were, however, new.

And then we could survey Andy Holliday’s life. He had a lot of cassette tapes and a fair number of CDs. He didn’t read much and when he did he read Michael Crichton, Wilbur Smith and true crime. A lot of true crime. His video collection leant heavily towards the pornographic and the thriller/action hero Schwarzenegger/James Bond/Van Damme sort of thing.

He had eight bottles of scotch and one bottle of wine. And no mixers.

‘A man with a little imagination,’ said Meroe, stacking paper into the printer.

‘Just enough to give him nightmares,’ I agreed.

‘A drunk,’ she said, opening her basket and taking out a flat brass dish. She poured some sort of gum into it and set it alight.

‘A man in total despair,’ I said. I packed stationery and paperclips and all the junk an office needs into one desk drawer and laid a huge pile of correspondence on it, as there was no room in the drawers for so much paper. In the mass were unopened envelopes and I sorted them to the top. Tax Department. That was a bad sign. Three of them. I could not resist the impulse. I took the paper knife, a silver one with an inscription, and slit the envelopes, tossing them into a recently discovered wastepaper basket.

My eyes widened. They were cheques. The Tax Department was actually paying Andy Holliday money and he didn’t care. They had never been cashed. That’s the best description of total despair I could have come up with offhand. This man was in a very bad way.

The smoke was swirling upward from Meroes’s burning resin and I sat down to watch her do her cleansing ritual. It seemed simple. She just walked into the middle of the room, gestured with the smoke to the four corners, then chanted something in an unknown tongue and moved into the next room. I followed and she said to me out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Open the door onto the balcony,’ and I did. Fresh air failed to blow in, but the sweet smoke billowed out. Meroe put the dish down on the balcony floor and said, ‘That’s the best I can do. The man is a jangle of terrible pain.’

‘We can keep him alive for the moment,’ I said. ‘And maybe we can find his daughter.’

To that end I took the picture to the Lone Gunmen and asked them to do me a hundred flyers. I also took them a six-pack of Arctic Death and a promise of more, plus proper payment for their labours. They were all together for a change. They accepted the bottles and promised the flyers for tomorrow, no probs, Corinna. Collectively, they looked
worried, even guilty. None of my concern. Perhaps they had been spammed by all those people who promise to enlarge my penis. Any nerd is going to find that worrying.

Then I went to rescue the Prof from Andy Holliday, who must have had more than a medium adult dose of drunken misery for one day.

But when I got to Dionysus the Prof was ending a funny story with a gesture of his elegant hands, ‘… but on Thursday it’s your turn in the barrel!’ and Holliday was laughing. Not hysterically, not a fall-off-the-chair-and-wet-the-pants laugh, but definitely laughing. Also, the level in the bottle had not fallen like the tide.

‘M’sieur’s apartment is prepared,’ I said, and Holliday got up. He thanked the Prof for a very amusing visit and went with me like a lamb. Then he stared as he saw his unboxed rooms. He sniffed the oriental scent of the burning incense. He picked up, and then put down, the remote control for the TV.

‘It’s a miracle,’ he said. ‘You can’t have done all this in one afternoon.’

‘I had help,’ I said. ‘Allow me to introduce my friend and fellow unpacker, Meroe.’

Andy Holliday took Meroe’s hand. I expected to hear violins. His expression resembled a flatfish that had just been dazzled by the physical attractions of another flatfish and belted over the head with an anchor at roughly the same time. I thought it best to leave them together.

Besides, I was grimy and dusty and I wanted my bath. Something with a lot of foam. And, by the look of my hands, unparalleled cleansing power. I was tired of other people’s problems and wanted to get back to Jade Forrester. How was she going to get her hero and heroine back together again?

These things concerned me as I took the lift down, too
tired to take the stairs. Rats. There was Mrs Pemberthy in the lobby, looking frail. Traddles didn’t look too good either. They were both leaning against the lift door, wheezing.

I don’t like Mrs Pemberthy and she doesn’t like me, but what could I do? I took them both into the lift. Mrs P waved her wrists at me, the hands falling loose.

‘My hands won’t do as I tell them,’ she said. ‘And the vet just can’t tell what is wrong with poor Traddles.’

I could tell that Traddles was sick. He hadn’t tried to bite me in minutes. I got them out of the lift and opened the door for them. Mrs P looked so limp that I helped her inside. Mr P wasn’t there.

The Pemberthy apartment was overdecorated in the same way as the sea is wet. Every surface that could possibly be decorated was decorated. The furniture was fussy, expensive copies of Sheraton, and every surface was covered with little knick-knacks. Expensive knick-knacks, like Japanese ivory carvings and those little trees made of gold wire and semi precious stones. They must have been hell to dust.

Mrs Pemberthy fumbled with her shoes and I knelt to take them off. She leaned back in her rose-damask chair and sighed.

‘My milk drink,’ she said. ‘Elias always leaves it in the microwave.’

I had never thought of myself as a lady’s maid but what could I do? The woman looked like death. I went into the kitchen and opened the microwave. There was a dainty rose-spattered mug but the milk within smelt off. I was about to pour it out and make another when Mr P came in and almost grabbed the mug out of my hands.

‘That’s all right,’ he said, and he looked straight into my face. ‘I’ll do it. She likes me to do it,’ he said.

‘The milk’s off,’ I told him.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said again. I was suddenly very uncomfortable. ‘Women like to be waited on,’ said Mr Pemberthy. ‘I could serve you, too. I would like to serve you.’ I noticed that his grey moustache was yellow near his mouth. He was standing way too close to me. It was time for Corinna to be out of this kitchen.

On the way out I asked Mrs Pemberthy for the name of Traddles’ vet. My own Irish charmer was moving to Benalla. Any vet who could put up with Mrs Pemberthy could put up with me. She gave me his card.

Then, at last, I got to go home, run a sumptuous bath and pour in bath foam. I lay in it for some time, considering various things, like Daniel saying that he was falling in love with me, until I was very clean, my fingers looked like I had been taking in washing since childhood, and the water was lukewarm.

I didn’t feel like going out again. I made myself a dish of pasta carbonara with a lot of fresh ground black pepper, drank one glass of wine and went to bed, like the epitaph on a party girl, early, sober and alone. Well, not alone. Horatio, as usual, reposed beside me, purring just above the level of hearing, a very soothing sound …

Unless they are bouncing all over you, climbing the curtains, engaging in an extensive wash with that infuriating ‘pick, lick, lick, pick’ noise or drinking deeply from your bedside glass of water, cats are very good bedfellows.

Morning dawned as usual and I went down to the bakery with my second cup of coffee to hear someone knocking on the outer door. It was Jason and he just nodded, dived into the shower and threw his clothes out to be washed. ‘I might as well have a son,’ I thought, a little nettled. I remembered that I actually had a baker’s overall somewhere and resolved to find
it. It was, of course, in the broom cupboard. I thrust it into the bathroom, averting my gaze.

When he came out clothed in the white overall, I gestured to the muffin mixture while the dough hooks scythed through the flour.

‘Your gingerbread muffins sold out yesterday,’ I said. ‘Today we’re doing apple and spice. Measure out the spices and don’t put them in until you show me. I’ll read you the recipe while you eat.’

I fetched another cup of coffee and some of the leftover bread which Daniel had not come to collect. I had been too tired last night to wonder where he was.

On cue, there came another knock on the door. Daniel stood there, outlined against the black alley. Lestat could take lessons from him on how to appear on the wings of a thought.

‘Bread?’ I asked.

‘Last shift,’ he said. I gave him the sack, Jason snatching another baguette from it as I passed him. Daniel shot the boy a considering look, smiled, took the bread and went.

Thereafter we made bread. Because I was busy and because they are relatively easy to make, I let Jason do the muffins from beginning to end. He was tense with concentration but he managed to combine the mixture without overstirring and glop it into the muffin tins without incident. This takes skill, because it is lumpy. When they came out of the oven he took one, examined it from all angles, then broke it in half and bit into the spicy crumb. Then he smiled.