Sex and Stravinsky (14 page)

‘When you bairns get a car with four doors . . .’ she says.

Josh hates to travel long distances by car. It always makes him feel sick. Without Caroline’s mother they could be travelling home by train, but Mrs McCleod is of the opinion that public transport is exclusively for plebs.

Rigoletto
. That’s what they’ve been to see. ‘I know how much you like clowns, Josh,’ she has explained to him earlier that evening. And, sure as God, she must also know how much he hates these big, boom-boom operatic affairs. He likes early opera, for heaven’s sake; chamber opera; tightly plotted comedies in which everyone is in love with somebody else’s betrothed and sundry marriage contracts are called into question by a range of incompetent stage lawyers. Foppish drunken halfwits or scheming rogues. He likes it when the entire dramatis personae is cheating, spying, playing dead, and dressing up in other people’s clothes. He likes those stagy assignations in moonlit shrubberies and the constant dropping of love letters in regulation privet hedges, where the wrong people are always destined to pick them up. He likes precipitous conclusions in which all is resolved by timely revelation. A telling birthmark. An ancient nun with a very long memory. A mysterious stranger with a significant secret. A twin brother lost and found. Life redeemed through wit and coincidence, heady plot lines and acrobatic dexterity.

Josh has just produced such an opera. Aged Tutor loves Beautiful Orphan. Hideous Crone loves Aged Tutor. Beautiful Orphan loves Twin Brother X. Twin Brother X loves Hideous Crone’s Daughter. Twin Brother Y loves Beautiful Orphan. Hideous Crone’s Daughter loves Twin Brother Y. A perfect balance of cruelty and choreography. Six people dancing in a box. Dance, dance, for there is only the dance. Josh likes entanglements with rope ladders and chairs. And he’s especially irritable right now, because, on this night –
this very night
– and not half a mile from where he has sat squirming through
Rigoletto
, was the last performance of that wild, astonishing Schoenberg, in which Pulcinella, in a frenzied dance, wrestles the moon from his clothes.

So now, after the opera and from the back seat of his car, Josh is exercising the futile rhetoric of the ineffectual. He’s indulging in a degree of sarcastic carping after the event.

‘Time was,’ he says, ‘when Italian street actors dressed up in clown masks and threw piss pots at each other all over the piazza. Or they beat each other over the head. That was before the French got hold of the idea and – being French – they turned the clown into this toxic, self-obsessed introvert. So they end up with Pierrot. He of the chalk-white face and the painted teardrop. “Look at me. Feel sorry for me. Me, me and me. I’m so lonely. I’m so sad. And, by the way, I’m a psycho. But it’s all because nobody loves me.” ’

Josh is aware, throughout this wind-up, that he actually adores French theatre; that what he’s doing is attacking the Witch Woman’s claim to a French ‘soul’. He’s also aware that Zoe has a white-faced Pierrot doll, given to her by Caroline’s mother. It sits on her bookshelf in the old red bus, alongside the plaster Beatrix Potter figures and the collection of little glass Bambis.

And, yes, they are still living in the bus, but not for very much longer, because, for the second time in sixteen years of saving, Caroline’s dream of the little Victorian house is just about to come true. Within the month, they have ‘completed’ on the purchase of a house. Two up, two down and a lean-to kitchen at the back – and no need, after all, for the fireman’s pole. Caroline’s plan, throughout the period of Josh’s absence in South Africa, is to sand the floors, paint the walls and make improvements to the kitchen. She has plans to re-pot her clematis and honeysuckle, and to run up calico Roman blinds for all of the five sash windows. She will move the necessary furniture and effects while her husband and daughter are abroad.

‘It’ll be easier that way,’ she says. Infallible, put-down Caroline. Meanwhile, the bus will stay in the farmer’s field, to do service as a communal study. ‘And I’ll keep up the vegetable garden, of course,’ Caroline says. Of course.

‘Thank you, Mum, for a lovely evening,’ Josh hears her say. ‘It’s really been a very special treat.’

‘Well, I should say so,’ says the old woman. ‘I won’t embarrass you both with the price of the tickets.’

‘Then the French sell their psycho-clown back to the Italians,’ Josh continues, though he senses that no one is listening to him. ‘And that’s how we get to
Rigoletto
. Hey presto. The clown has become a serial killer.’

Caroline’s mother responds by snapping on the radio, just in time for them to hear the tearful father of a runaway twelve-year-old being questioned about his feelings. His daughter has made it from Scunthorpe to Calais in the company of a forty-year-old penpal, before being recovered by the police.

‘How do I feel?’ the dad is saying. ‘I dunno. Joy. Exaltation. All the adjectives.’

‘Those aren’t adjectives,’ Josh says. ‘Those are abstract nouns.’

‘Think if it was Zoe,’ the Witch Woman says. ‘I mean these people she’s staying with in France. Do you know anything about them?’

Josh lapses into brooding silence. There’s a car game he and Zoe like to play, in which they compete to spot entertaining news billboards, or outlets with idiotic names. Recently, because the signs have got too easy, they’ve given themselves a handicap. All words on the billboards have got to be monosyllabic. So ‘Brad Pitt Haircut Boy Banned from School’ was one they’d had to forgo, though Zoe had quibbled for a while over ‘haircut’. ‘It’s “hair cut”,’ she said.

‘Lottery Dinner Lady Charged with Theft’ was another to bite the dust. ‘Man Mugged at Mum’s Grave’ was one of Zoe’s triumphs, as was ‘School Run Dad has Mug of Gin’. And, right now, as they finally enter the outer reaches of Oxford’s townscape, Josh’s eye catches a gem in the brightly lit forecourt of his mother-in-law’s local Sainsbury’s.

‘
Yess!
’ he says out loud. ‘Yes!! “Cold Flat OAP Found Dead”.’ He pronounces OAP as ‘Ope’.

‘You don’t say “Ope”. You say “Oh-Ay-Pee”,’ Caroline says. She who has never before deigned to play along. ‘ “Cold Flat Oh-Ay-Pee”.’

‘Well, I say “Ope”,’ Josh says.

‘No, you don’t,’ Caroline says. ‘You say “Oh-Ay-Pee”, just like everyone else.’

‘I don’t,’ Josh says. ‘I say “Ope”.’

‘Please,’ says Witch Woman, massaging her temples. ‘Bairns. Bairns, both of you. We’ve had
such
a lovely evening. Give me a break. It’s late.’

Given Josh’s early life experience, it’s no surprise that he avoids confrontation; avoids rejection; prefers emotion contained and stylised, as in those ingenious comedic structures. He prefers life choreographed by acrobats and floating on verbal dexterity. He has long ago shaken off his past, hasn’t he? He has moved on. It’s Caroline who is in thrall to her family, as the Witch Woman’s rapacious and looming presence these eleven years past bears witness. Yet now, what with the trip coming up – his first journey ‘home’ in almost two decades – Josh finds himself intermittently exhuming elements of his past: Hattie Thomas and little Jack, who so inexplicably vanished. He thinks about Bernie Silver (dead) and Ida (dead) and (long-dead) loving Pru. And then there’s the drama department, where now, in the post-apartheid dawn, the conference is to take place. There’s the jacaranda tree beyond the Silvers’ front veranda and back, beyond that – but only rarely and in dreams – he has been surprised of late to find himself groping blindly in a sulphurous, theatrical mist towards a shadowy figure: a distant woman in layers of clothes – clothes that appear to be made of dust – who is always walking with her back to him; walking further and further away; as if back into her own past.

Josh was born in the early 1950s in what was then the Transvaal, a few miles east of Johannesburg. He was the child of a woman who, within three years, had become a half-mad, shoeless creature; a woman who had stopped speaking; a woman to whom Josh, in infancy, knew better than to try and cling. Instead, he was routinely tied to the back of little Dora, the teenage housemaid. By the time of his birth, Josh’s mother was already no longer recognisable as the person she so recently had been; a bourgeois Lebanese convent orphan with a nice little nest egg and a trousseau filled with the best French linen and handmade family lace. Not that Lilette Habibi had ever seen her own money, or handled statements pertaining to its extent, given the cloistered life she’d lived. Her mother died giving birth to her and her father, expecting a son and thrown into confusion by his pretty young wife’s death, gave her over to the care of a nursemaid and then, at six, to the nuns of a teaching order in his native Beirut. Since he travelled a lot on business and had no other children, his daughter spent her holidays at the convent and when he, too, died young – just before her fifteenth birthday –
la petite chère Lilette
simply stayed on at the convent as a cherished and useful, if ambiguous, young spinster; an accomplished young woman with a trousseau and a way with the younger girls.

Lilette, for the time being, was not a novice, for reasons to do with the trousseau, which existed as evidence of her late father’s wish that she should one day marry, but such a significant decision was simply, indefinitely deferred. Meanwhile, the girl always rose at five for the convent’s ritual devotions and she was never without her rosary. Lilette would probably have entered the order, given a little more time. That is, had she not, all unbeknown to her, been possessed of a certain paternal male cousin, whose parents, twenty years earlier, had made the journey south from Lebanon to Johannesburg.

The cousin was an unmarried chancer, a wide boy, who one evening met his like in the bar of the Royal Hotel in Boksburg. His companion, a hang-loose drifter, born to immigrant Greek corner-shopkeepers, was likewise a disappointment to his parents from whom he was now estranged. Both sets of parents had once cherished hopes of pushing their sons into one of the professions; upward and onward in a strange new country where the streets were paved with gold. Both men did indeed harbour dreams of rising, but without the effort of passing professional exams. They dreamed of making it from small-time fiddle to big-time money bags. They dreamed of ways to generate surplus income without bestirring themselves in any area beyond their common inclination to cheat. In this, the convent orphan’s cousin was already a step ahead, since he had moved up from running an eating house for poor black migrant workers, where – by serving up a regular slop of watery stews made from illegally sourced and flyblown meat – he had accumulated the means to run a bed-bug boarding house for the humbler white commercial traveller.

The Greek had not accomplished much, other than to buy and sell knock-off goods acquired from crooked railway employees and then to blow the surplus in a range of brothels and bars. Grown mellow now on cheap Cape brandy, the cousin got a feel-good charge in a moment of inspiration. It came to him that he could play benefactor to his companion by turning marriage broker, and could thereby enrich them both. At fifty-fifty on the convent girl’s inheritance, he could be doing both himself and his new friend a good turn – and the convent-girl cousin as well, of course, because what sort of a babe would want to spend her life with a bunch of old maids dressed up like penguins?

‘Have I got a cousin for you!’ he said, of the relation he had never met, though, via his parents’ photograph album, he had seen an old picture of the convent girl’s deceased but beautiful mother. ‘Rich and beautiful, man!’ he said. ‘She’s a convent girl. You know what I’m saying? Innocent, hey? Pure. Not like some of these dollies nowadays.’

The Greek was nodding sagely. Having some years back tried, without success, to get himself a niche in the girl-running trade, he had found the space already taken by immigrant Romanians and Poles.

‘Bleddy Yids,’ he said wistfully and half to himself, but he nonetheless had some experience of girls, through his role as paying client. He was partial to dainty blonde prostitutes, though he was fussy about their personal hygiene. Being on the short side, he went for ‘petite’. He liked a well-scrubbed, smiley, blue-eyed girl, pink as a newborn piglet. And naked, of course, except for some classy bits and pieces. Tassels, maybe. And a G-string. And pointy high-heeled shoes. He liked the titillating rituals of subservience, especially all the cute doggy stuff.

There was a girl whom he especially liked to visit, who played poodle-doggy for him. She’d wear a little diamanté collar and offer him her lead between her teeth. The Greek appreciated refinements. He liked to pour Babycham into a dog bowl and push doggy choc-drops into her mouth. Good Girl treats, because he knew how much a real lady loved to eat chocolates. The convent girl would be dark-haired, of course, but good-looking like her mother. He could always get her hair bleached, couldn’t he? And the money’d got to be good.

‘Just so long as she hasn’t got a moustache, hey?’ he said, and both of them had a laugh.

Negotiations over the convent girl were duly put into motion, though the business took quite a time; a whole lot of stupid foreign palaver before the bar-room friends could get their hands on some of the money. There were documents to be signed; telegrams to fly back and forth – telegrams which were frequently unintelligible. The dowry had to be established and arrangements made for sums to be transferred, in cautious chunks, via the cousin’s bank account. Proxy nuptials needed to be simultaneously enacted in the presence of respective Catholic priests.