Fall on Your Knees (44 page)

His smile dies upon his lips when the impossibility of what he is hearing hits him. What, is he dead? Is there a thief in the house? Playing his scratchy old records? Why?

He puts on his velvet robe, ties the cord around his waist and creeps down the stairs. He is dead. He must be. There is Giselle.

Beyond the archway, the front room is aglow with candle-light and three shades of Mediterranean blue. Swirling and swaying and quarter-turning, hips beckoning, fingers twining in air, wrists caressing one another above her head, the pearls of her veil swinging to the rhythm of the reeds, the drums and the wailing voices of the love song.

Mahmoud is filled with desire and his heart hurts, stirring again after such a long period of inactivity, never having been particularly athletic. She has seen him and now she is luring him into the dance. Ohhh. He travels through the archway, he does not know how. She bends forward in her circle of firelight, the blue silk wafts open at her breasts in shadow — come closer, the better to see me,
Habibi
. Her eyes are full of fun above the veil and her fingers tickle the emptiness between her and her beloved, closer, closer. “Giselle,” he whispers, reaching out to her. She giggles and he laughs too, not knowing what’s funny, “Giselle,” he whispers,
“Habibti.”

But she slips out of the ring of light and vanishes. He calls her but she does not answer. He picks up a candelabrum, knowing better than to turn on electric lights when seeking a vision, and searches the ground floor; the cellar. He goes back up to the front room. He blows out the candles and turns on the electric chandelier because he can feel she is gone. The record has ended, there’s just the repetitive sigh at its centre — he removes the needle and returns to his bedroom. He opens his wife’s oak wardrobe where all her fine clothes still hang among mothballs. There at the back is the shimmering blue with its whispering veil. He must have been dreaming. But what about the candles? The record? Losing my mind. Or else it was an impostor.
I don’t care
. He reaches out to touch the silk, which is impossible to feel if there is a lifetime of work on your hands. He touches it but does not feel it — just as he saw what he could not have seen.
I don’t care what you were, come back to me Please Please Please Ohhh
.

It’s his last thrill and his last sting of love, as fresh and painful as youth transplanted over time and an ocean. There is nothing left for him now except to die, but that will take a while because he is a creature of habit, and he has got into the habit of being alive.

Thief in the Night

It wouldn’t matter to Frances if Ginger were a cruel man. She would do the same thing. Kindness or cruelty, it’s all by chance and what’s worse anyway? It’s easier to endure cruelty so maybe kindness is worse. The only question is, how do you get a nice man to do a bad thing?

She stops drinking. She wants all her wits about her for what lies ahead. Frances without liquor is a bit scary to her customers. No more cutie-pie patter or kisses for gin, she takes cash up front and services them cold-bloodedly with the communion glove. Dripping with her grandmother’s jewels, she no longer bothers to change out of her coal-smeared Guide uniform, and at the piano she plays Chopin while speaking blues lyrics in a loud monotone despite a chorus of boos. When she strips, she doesn’t sing or shimmy, she undresses like an automaton and bellows in a leaden voice, “‘IRENE GOODNIGHT. IRENE GOOD-NIGHT GOOD-NIGHT IRENE GOOD-NIGHT IRENE I’LL REAM YOU IN MY DREAMS.’” She’s no fun any more, soon they’ll look elsewhere. It’s almost as though Frances despises her customers when she’s sober, and what could be more insulting, because what right has she?

Frances wants three thousand bucks for Lily before retiring as a dive diva so she ups her price. This does not go down well either — some men try to dine and dash while others take the insult out on her face. Boutros has broken one man’s wrist and crushed another’s cheekbone, but Frances doesn’t care if her clients hit her, she just cares if she’s raped — she doesn’t want anything interfering with her plans.

Ginger Taylor has been gone in his truck a week and a half now. Frances has kept his purple house under surveillance. She knows he’ll be back tomorrow because she gets close enough to listen. She has motive. She has means. She watches the moon and awaits her opportunity.

Tonight Boutros follows Frances home as usual. He has given up trying to walk with her because she tells him where to go every time. So he escorts her secretly all the way to New Waterford and watches her slip round the back of the house on Water Street. He waits out front for the glow of her candle to appear in the gabled window at the very top of the house. Tonight as he waits, the headlights of a passing car catch two yellow gleams at the attic window — there’s a demon up there, crouched and lying in wait for Frances! Boutros is halfway to the veranda when he sees her light appear and cast a halo of black fur around two yellow eyes. He watches her come to the window, sit on the ledge and cradle the cat. His face softens. He is glad to see that he is not her only friend.

As yet, Boutros has not caught anyone attempting to ambush Frances on her way home. But if he ever does, the fella will die. Snap. Simple as that.

When Ginger Taylor returns the next day, he lays Christmas in August on the kitchen table. Rolls of white lace trim and coloured ribbon, yards and yards of fabric. A swatch of sun, moon and stars against a smoky midnight-blue, a bolt of emerald polka-dots on iridescent black, spring flowers for the girls, grey flannel for the boys. Candy, pineapples and a whole deer dressed on ice in the back of the truck.

Adelaide’s eyes water at the sight of the fabric. The ladies she sews for buy some fine cloth but nothing so jazzy. She has made gowns for most of the white weddings in Sydney. She uses silk, satin and organdy for her ladies, and her imagination for her family. Often there’s a nice piece left over from a job, but if the lady doesn’t ask for it back Adelaide gives it away to a neighbour because it is contrary to her own professional code to dress her children in leftover piece-work. She’d sooner turn flour sacks into perfect pinafores, and she does. The Mahmouds were Adelaide’s biggest customers till the Teresa fiasco, and when you add that times are worse than ever, Leo has no business throwing money away on all this nonsense.

Madeleine, Sarah, Josephine, Cleo, Evan, Frederick and Carvery swarm at the sweets, shrieking, sharing, fighting, and Adelaide wants to know, “What in the name of time is all this, mister?”

Ginger beams at her. “It’s a whole lot of nothing for no reason.”

She fingers the fabric. “What did you do, rob a bank? You better’ve.” They’ve been saving for the kids for school, how could he?

He heads her off. “I got so happy, Addy, I had to go out and waste some money or else bust, because I love you. Because you are the best woman, you are the toughest, the meanest, the prettiest and I can’t believe that I got you!” He jumps her in a spinning bearhug.

“You’re crazy, you know that? You’re right nuts, and put me down, b’y!” She packs a bony wallop to his soft shoulder. “Put me down till I beat the can offa ya!”

And he does. “Come on,” he says, feinting with a right jab, and she comes at him with a left hook, wiry she is — jab, jab at his upraised forearms and dancing fists, socks him a good one right in the bread-basket, till she has to double over because she’s laughing so hard she might pee, and she can’t see to box him any more for the tears streaming down her face.

“Invite the neighbours,” he tells her. “I’m going to get Trese and Hector. Evan, honey, I want a big fire out back.”

Evan hops to it. He is the oldest at twelve.

Barbecued deer and boiled corn, enough for the neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood is there in the back yard. The sun is down, the fire is high and so is the moon. Hector sits under his blanket wide-eyed and smiling, tapping his foot in reel time to the fiddle of the very old Mr Prince Crawley. Teresa feels well for the first time since she was fired. She had forgotten the sweet joys of society, of just yacking with people, surrounded by kids and food and music. She has made a fish curry fit to cure the dead — renewing her claim to the local West Indian cooking crown — and a tub of ice-cream to cool the flames. She goes so far as to let Adelaide persuade her to sing — “Only for you, Addy, and only this once.” Teresa starts up one her mother, Clarisse, always sang for her and Ginger:

“‘Sly mongoose, Sly enough but the dog knows your ways. Sly mongoose, Sly enough but the cat is on your track —’”

And what good’s a song if you don’t dance it? Teresa is an excellent dancer when wild horses have got her up and moving. Once moving, she is nothing but happy —

“‘The mongoose went in the missus’ kitchen, Took up two of her fattest chickens, Passed them into his vestcoat pocket, Sly mongoose —

The crowd joins in, the going gets wild, Hector is laughing and clapping and the little girls have all got up to join Teresa. Her smile is a mile wide, her hips have gone saucy, fingers snapping, palms percussing, “Go girl!”

“‘You look to me like a mile and a quarter, You look to me like you require some water, You look to me like your blood’s out of order, Drink bush tea, Drinky bush tea —’”

She begins to improvise verses, and it gets hilarious because she makes up all kinds of rhyming gossip about everyone there, and people throw made-up verses back at her. At last Teresa takes the song back to the chorus and everyone sings, then shakes the firelight with appreciation. Teresa hasn’t caught her breath before she notices Adelaide alert as a cat staring at the back-yard fence. Before she can say, “What’s the matter, dear?” Adelaide has pounced — over the fence and down the alley.

Adelaide pelts after the small fleeing figure and catches it easily by the collar.

“What’s going on, eh? Why’re you hanging around my family?”

“Fuck off — ow.”

Adelaide has got the fine art of arm-twisting.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Harriet Beecher Stowe, ha ha — ow!”

Teresa has caught up. Frances sees her. And can’t help but speak to her.

“Hi Teresa.”

Adelaide looks at Teresa. “Who is she, Trese?”

“I don’t know, Addy”

“Teresa.” Frances looks up at her. “Don’t you remember me?”

Frances forgets to lie. She forgets about Adelaide pinning her wrist behind her back, she is tempted to tell Teresa everything. Because Teresa would understand. Teresa would touch her forehead and everything would fall away, all the weight of everything Frances knows and doesn’t know. The terrible weight of her heavy heavy mind.

“Dear God,” says Teresa. She has just seen the double row of precious stones on Frances’s fingers. “Where did you get those rings, child?”

“I found them.” It’s sweet like milk — she called me “child”.

Ginger arrives but stops a little way off. Adelaide turns to him, “It’s her again, I don’t know who she is or what the hell she’s after.”

No sooner said than Adelaide has an answer to the latter question: glancing down at her prisoner, she sees Frances staring at Ginger with a cool cool look on her face.

“Who is she, Leo?” Adelaide says sharply, watching his face.

He looks back at the phony Girl Guide and Adelaide knows the next thing she hears will be a lie.

“I don’t know, Addy.”

Leo has never lied to her before. Adelaide’s talent for seeing through a lie could be called a sixth sense, but she doesn’t figure there’s anything spooky about it. To tell truth from a lie is easy as salt and sweet.

“Never mind,” she says to her husband and his sister. “Go back and enjoy yourselves, I’ll be right there.” But they hang. “Move, will ya Jesus-Christ-on-the-Cross move!” And they do.

Adelaide shifts Frances’s wrist an eighth of an inch and so gets her undivided attention. Then she leans her face close in till they are eyeball to eyeball. Quietly, and with intent, “You come around my house; you touch my babies or my husband, and I will kill you.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Adelaide lets go of Frances’s wrist and returns to her own back yard.

Teresa and Leo have told everyone that Adelaide caught a peeping Tom, a white fella, and put the fear of God into him. Everyone laughs because they pity anyone who crosses Adelaide, and when she comes through the gate looking so grim, they laugh some more. Adelaide marches straight into the house and straight back out with her mouth-organ. She plays “The Old Rugged Cross”. It’s bluesy this way, which is how it sounds best. This one always makes Teresa cry, the way “Ave Maria” does a tired Catholic. Laughing and crying all in the one night, it’s been a wonderful party.

Except for the dirty Girl Guide with Mrs Mahmoud’s rings. How on earth did she come by them? On the black market? In the gutter? The actual thief must be long gone by now. Teresa was too shocked at the sight to think what to do but now she knows there is nothing to be done. No point seizing the rings or telling Mahmoud, he would never believe her, he’s proven that much. And he doesn’t deserve the truth — forgive me, Lord, only You know what we each deserve — anyhow, why get Adelaide all het up about what can’t be fixed? “The Old Rugged Cross” reminds Teresa to turn the other cheek and not to dwell, what’s done is done. Prince Crawley joins in on fiddle, several sing and Hector hums. It ends the evening in just the right way.

Teresa wheels Hector home down the street and shakes off an unsettling question. How did the little waif know my name?

Ginger makes sure he’s in bed ahead of Adelaide. He feels ashamed to be mimicking the sound of sleep as she undresses and crawls in next to him. He’s done nothing wrong, but how could he possibly explain? A little white lie and for no reason. It doesn’t matter.

She watches him for a while, then softly calls him by his secret name — not “Ginger,” another name. It’s private. He stirs a little but doesn’t open his eyes. She kisses his shoulder and lies down next to him. She’d do anything for her family.

The next day.

Adelaide arrives home from Beel’s Grocery with an envelope of bright new buttons.