The Good Mayor (42 page)

And while Tibo sat on one side of the door muttering, Agathe sat on the other with hot eyes. “Home is where they have to let you in,” she said. They were the same words Granny had said as a comfort with the reassuring promise that she would never be turned away, the same words she had said to herself like a prison sentence when she thought of another night in the flat in Aleksander Street with Stopak. And now they sounded like a threat. Home is where they have to let you in. She could not keep Hektor out and she realised suddenly that, more than anything, that was what she wanted to do.

At five o’clock Agathe was still sitting at her desk. She was still there at 5:30. When the cathedral bells struck six, she had managed to put on her coat but she lingered by the door of the office, sitting on the edge of the table beside the coffee machine, unwilling to move. “Home is where they have to let you in,” she said. “But it’s not even my home. It’s his. I can’t keep him out. I can’t stop him coming in.”

She left and all the way home on the tram, sitting on the chilly top deck with her hands in her pockets and her coat drawn around her, Agathe thought of things to say to him, things she might say to keep him from thinking about the money, things she might do. There were things she could do but, after that, he would still want the money and there was none and he would be angry and that would be her fault. Her fault and he would be angry.

The tram slouched towards the end of Ampersand Avenue. The bell clanged. The conductor swung from the back step and yelled, “Green Bridge, this is Green Bridge!” Up ahead, on the right, the lights of The Three Crowns were shining out into the street like the lamps of a fever ward, dismal and yellow and foggy. The music of a broken piano jangled into the street as the door bounced open and Hektor came out. The tram passed slowly. Agathe turned her neck to watch him cupping his hands round a match and lighting a cigarette. A loose bit of tobacco flared up in the flame and he knocked it away. There was a woman at his side, a skinny woman with short hair and too much make-up. She flung her head back. Agathe saw her mouth open in a laugh and fix on Hektor’s in a parody of a kiss. The tram passed so slowly. Hektor reached in his pocket. He gave her something. He gave her money. She laughed again. Agathe saw them running together to the stone steps that lead to the path under Green Bridge, down to the arch where it was dark and out of the drizzle. The tram turned into Foundry Street.

GATHE STEPPED OFF THE TRAM, SUDDENLY
old and stiff and tired, and walked towards the tunnel that leads to Canal Street. The last lamp post in Foundry Street was out, the first lamp post in Canal Street was very far away and she kept her eyes fixed on it as she stepped into the gloom of the tunnel. On a sunny day in summer, when she was happy—and she had been happy, even in Canal Street—Agathe could walk quickly through the tunnel and enjoy the lap of canal water just beyond the narrow pavement and the crocodile-skin sparkles it sent dancing over the arched roof. But not tonight—tonight the pavement disappeared into an ink blot that flowed darkly to faraway Canal Street and the pale flame of that first gaslight. As she walked towards it, the wind blew up startling rustles, dead leaves and abandoned newspapers looking for a place to die, tiny black piles of whispering coal dust that had escaped from passing barges, small animal flitterings which she pretended not to have noticed and, over it all, the cold, final invitation of the canal, sucking just beyond the railings. She hurried on.

In Canal Street, the light of the gas lamp seemed to make the shadows beyond it even deeper. “There is nobody there. There is nobody there,” Agathe told herself, but she stopped anyway and listened when the sound of her heels scraping on the cracked pavement echoed in the tunnel behind her, just to make sure that it was true, that there was nobody there, nobody who walked in time with her, stopped when she stopped, listened when she listened, peered
out of the dirty shadows as she peered in, matched their breath to hers, waited until she walked again and walked on with her, trying not to laugh. “There is nobody there,” she said.

The echoes pursued her all the way to No. 15 where she hurried with the lock and banged the door shut again and stood in the tiny square hall and said, “There is nobody here now!” with a little note of triumph in her voice. “Nobody here.” But then the breath came out of her with a sigh and her shoulders slumped and she remembered that she had no money to pay the fine and she thought of that woman and of Hektor and remembered he would soon be home.

Agathe went to the cupboard in the corner by the sink and reached inside to hang her coat on the hook. Her hand brushed against something on the shelf and, when it fell to the floor, she saw it was her scrapbook with all its pictures of the house she and Tibo had built while they sat at the middle table of three, right in the front window of The Golden Angel.

The book was dusty now, its pages dry and fanned open like the petals of a blowsy rose. Holding it in her hand, Agathe could hardly believe that she had forgotten about it, that she had stayed for three long years in Canal Street and never once, in all that time, had she visited Dalmatia.

She sat down on the floor and began to turn the pages, stopping to look at the things that had once been so familiar to her, that bed, those ormolu doors, the thick wine glasses as green and swirled as seawater—things that seemed to come from another life, things that somebody else had once imagined and forgotten utterly.

Agathe was still sitting there on the floor beside the cold stove when Hektor came home and found her there. He looked at her and gave a kind of laugh, to let her know how pathetic she was. He asked her for the money and, when he did, Agathe forgot all about the things she had planned to say and the things she had planned to do. She simply told him that she didn’t have it but that it didn’t really matter because he had enough to spend on whores. And then terrible things happened.

That’s the price I pay for my twelve hundred years in Dot—I see terrible things and I can do nothing. I can’t help. I can’t divert the falling brick as it tumbles from the rotten chimney into the street; I can’t catch the runaway pram as it hurtles down the hill towards the junction; I can’t stop the woman who makes a pie of rat-poison and feeds it to her children at supper or the pretty girl who kisses the lonely old man as if she loves him. I can only watch or look away—which is much the same thing. And my only comfort is that nothing lasts and nothing in Dot is ever just quite what it seems. Nothing.

In my golden tomb there is an angel feather, laid beside me by some returning crusader—an angel feather which fell from Heaven and landed on his helmet when he was liberating the Holy Places. Or so he said. Actually, it’s a peacock plume which he took from the headdress of an Arab merchant’s wife after he raped her. His version is much nicer. Nothing is as it seems.

Even my legendary beard, lying there long and lustrous in my tomb, is a fake. They took it off a carthorse who died behind the convent I don’t know how long ago. The horse just coughed and collapsed, each leg in a different direction and sent a load of logs rolling back down the hill—and those nuns, how they could swear! Not much of an ending but now his tail is venerated every day. Surely, after so many years in a daily rain of prayer, it must be a holy thing too, like my bones. Nothing is as it seems. Not me, not the beautiful new sister-in-law at The Golden Angel, not the woman in the flat in Canal Street who seems as if she is alone, who seems as if she has nobody to love her or protect her while terrible things happen to her. Look away. Don’t watch. Hide your eyes and remember that nothing is as it seems.

BOUT THE TIME THAT AGATHE STEPPED
off the tram in Foundry Street, Tibo was getting out of his chair in the office. He was frozen in position but the ache in his joints had turned into a scream and, anyway, he was tired of watching the dome of the cathedral with its clockwork exhalations of pigeons. He forced himself to get up and walked, stiff-legged as a scarecrow, out of the Town Hall, through the square and into the Dot Arms. He sat there until closing time, piling up a pyramid of glasses on the table in front of him, speaking to no one until they flung him into the empty street at midnight.

It was quiet. Tibo looked up at the sky. He saw Orion disappearing in a swirl of cauldron-black cloud that was boiling up from the edge of the world and whipping, like torn silk, across the stars. The cloud thickened and darkened. It spread over the sky like ink in water. The stars went out. Tibo tightened the belt on his coat and began to walk and, as he walked, the whole of Dot sighed like a sleeper in the night, drew its blankets over its head and stilled—the whole of Dot except for The Golden Angel. Black clouds filled the sky, piling up, layer on layer from the invisible horizon, behind the houses, above the rooftops, over the chimneys, clotting Heaven until there was nothing left of the sky but a single small velvet O like a surprised kiss, ringed with moonlight and turning slowly, slowly right overhead, as if Castle Street and The Golden Angel had been the centre of the world. And then, when there was nothing to hear but the darkness coiling itself under window sills
and the sound of cats looking, the whole building breathed in. The walls seemed to sag, droop towards the pavement a little. Behind the windows, the blinds fluttered and drew back into the room as if on a breeze and the little acorn-shaped buttons on the ends of their white string pulls tapped against the glass. Up on the roof, the slates pulsed and rattled like dragon scales and, for a moment, nothing happened. Then there came a fluttering of gilded feathers, fingers of coloured lights that beamed out of forgotten windows high up on the side of the building, the sound of drums and organ chords and a faraway band. Downstairs in the cafe, piles of coffee cups danced, plates rattled their way to the edge of the shelf and fell to the floor.

In the parlour, Mamma Cesare’s wedding picture dropped off the wall. In the best bedroom, beautiful dark-haired Maria rolled over in her sleep and said, “It’s just a train passing in the night.” Then she pulled her crisp white nightgown over her head and added, “Make love to me.” And then, while Cesare pretended to have forgotten that there is no railway station in Dot, the whole house breathed out again, a long, whooshing finger of wind that blew out from under every door, that whistled from every keyhole and from the cracks round every window and howled down Castle Street towards the river. Wherever it passed, it sent rubbish bins rolling and tin cans and bits of newspaper swirled before it. It tore at the municipal flower pots, it shredded leaves from the trees, it set gates creaking and doors banging and lamp posts nodding and it shrieked out of town, over the bridge and along the Ampersand towards the sea until it reached Canal Street where it swirled through the tunnel with a noise like a wolf pack and battered at the windows until it reached No. 15. The street was quiet except for the sound of a woman crying in a voice that went from a scream to a howl and sank to a terrified whimper.

The wind blew again, flinging itself against the door, filling the keyhole, tearing at the lock forcing its way into the house, wrenching its way inside until the door bounced on its hinges and, a moment later, Hektor came running out of the flat, his face moon-white, struggling with his jacket as the wind tugged at it like a torn sail and
he ran and he ran, past the last street lamp in Canal Street and into shadow. Far behind him, inside the tiny flat, there was the sound of someone saying soothing things, saying that everything would be all right now and that it was time for bed and things would be different in the morning and changed but, of course, there was no one in the flat—only Agathe. It must have been the wind.

Tibo did not notice the wind. It was just behind him, snapping at his back as he began to walk out through the darkened docks where the women waited. They grabbed him by the arms as he passed and staggered with him from lamp post to lamp post until his silence defeated them and they left him to walk on alone to the lighthouse that had been his friend. As he reached it, the last of the storm from The Golden Angel died away against the heel of his shoe with a gasp that hardly even stirred the sand. All through the night, Tibo stood under the lighthouse. Its pulse calmed him and the sound of the waves healed him and their spray blessed him. In the morning he was sober.