Theft

by N. S. Köenings

  Without the audience hearing, Fontanella could, with her inner voice, say, “Can you repeat please, dear?” or “Do you mean this or that?” And receive clarification. She could also, if she saw a need, step in and stop the flow—if the message was too difficult or painful, if it was clear to her, The Medium Fontanella, that the receiver was not in any state to hear it all so plainly. If this happened, Fontanella rolled her eyes and held her hands up in the air and said, “My dear. Please wait. You are too strong for me. We cannot understand. Just a portion, please.” And the message would be tamped, reshaped as she wished, a morsel that was right.

  For example, instead of something horrible and dark, like a message from a sister who’d passed on to a sister who still lived: “Your husband beats your boy and plays with him at night, and Samuel won’t blossom till you’ve left the cruel Frank,” Fontanella might instead relate the following: “Your sister Anne is well, she loves you very much, but she has something to tell you. On no account tell Frank. Next week, leave your son with friends.” In the days between, she would make a visit to the mother of the boy and inquire as to the setup of the household. If the husband was infirm (news from the Beyond is not always the most recent), or if the wife depended on his pay and had no relatives to turn to, it wasn’t right to say it all at once. There were foundations to be laid; she kept a list of numbers one could ring up for assistance—as to women’s shelters, suicide prevention, the legitimate addictions, counseling for grief, antidotes for poisons, and the rescue of wild animals who strayed. She kept these up to date and put them to good use. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know so much, not only about ghosts, but about the way the world of living beings worked, that one could be a force, somehow, for the good? For really bringing it about instead of, as Eva felt she did, simply taking messages that she herself did not recall accepting?

  In the neat brick house she’d grown up in, not far, just around the corner from the Overlook Café, Eva couldn’t sleep. Her mouth still tasted strange; her head was like a blender’s bowl, the contents pressed up, sticky, to the sides, the middle all afroth. Cloves. It brought to Eva’s mind the dentist’s office, a sharp memory of being very small with her mouth open and a tall man dressed in white telling her that she should brace herself, prepare for a great pull. Cloves. Isn’t that what they were for, for numbing tender gums? Cloves, she thought. Cloves and something else. What was it? Eva closed her eyes. Cinnamon? Cardamom, perhaps? How odd. Such spices were not what a person thought of, were they, when they thought of Africa. Did they even grow there? Cloves made Eva also think of muscle rubs, somehow of Indonesia. Cardamom brought Christmas cakes to mind. But Africa? She’d have thought of lions first. Bananas. But who was she to say?

  In bed, she breathed as slowly as she could. Twice, her fingers seemed to dissipate, dissolve, she forgot which thumb was where, and she was able to convince herself that her head was where her feet were and her feet up by the lamp; she’d nearly lost the central, orienting sense of her material body’s place. But she could not take that freeing, satisfying leap: her body held her back, her leg twitched, or her dissenting heart did, and her eyes opened again. It was getting late. Outside the world was dead and quiet, thick, the motionless damp green of an unseasonably warm night before the first birds clear their throat. Three o’clock. Then four. Eventually, from between the heavy curtains she could see the day arise, a glowing purplish light peeking at the tassels.

  She gave up, rose to wash her face. Through the kitchen window, she saw the sky outside come white; below the paling sky, the Channel (that dull blue, so reassuring, the dark color of slate) was giving up its mist. A black fleck, a cargo ship, emerged on the horizon. Closer in, from her own street, she heard car engines starting up, shop-front awnings lifted on their cranks. A motorcycle rattled and droned past. She wished she had an atlas.

  Africa. Another ocean farther on. Islands. Amazing, Eva thought. Then, Wonderful. Did it matter who the bringer was, a sprite, a soul, a spirit? Blackie said she’d given out instructions, something to be done. How very odd, how new. It was, she thought, a gift.

  George Hewett’s New Ailment

  In the bed he’d shared with Flora for nearly thirty years, George Hewett, shivering and mute among old pillows and hot water bottles, was a bony raft, barely buoyed by the sheets. He had not spoken since his fall. Had not made any sign of recognition or desire, raised a hand or whispered, even blinked at any question. But it was not a stroke. He had not had a heart attack. Doctor Howard said so, over and again. He was simply, inexplicably, suddenly, infirm. At first, the weakness irked him. He might have been over seventy, it’s true, but that had been no reason, since his entry to what others called old age, to succumb to anything, or to behave as though preparing for an exit. “Right as rain,” he always said. “Stronger than a bull.”

  Until taking to bed after that odd fall in the garden (that fast collapse! that suck! that flattening to the ground!), George Alexander Hewett had been an able man who lifted things, dug holes, climbed up ladders and down, walked three miles each day. He breathed as regularly and strongly, he had liked to tell himself, and Flora, as the old Athenians had, muscled legs apump, racing with that flame. He was strong. Age was nothing to him. Until falling in the garden—he could see it, still, just there by the plum tree, not far from the well, the way his knees had buckled and his spine, how the world had warbled and gone black—George Hewett still felt forty-, fifty-five. He was used to jumping spryly out of bed, so naturally that the word spry, reserved for the surprisingly adept, never came to mind. He’d been a man who did things, who had traveled; he had even, it was said, and so Flora believed, fought bravely in the War.

  At first, his inability to get ahold of things, move them with his hands, or to take steps on his own to any place he cared for, infuriated him. He couldn’t rise from bed, could not balance his own head on his neck, and he couldn’t even push away the blankets when he felt too hot. Oh, he’d been very angry. After several weeks, however, and more marked as days went on, a kind of inward settling, a silence, had occurred; he’d begun to see things differently. A slow but certain shift.

  Perhaps, he thought, there is a goodness here. Perhaps he’d fallen ill for something. Perhaps—this idea startled him, so like Flora’s alchemists, who dealt in messages and in what she’d once shyly called “holistics”!—perhaps his body, this body that had stood him in such dear and marvelous stead, was bringing him a message, a request for a hiatus. There was something nice about so much lying down, a little giving up. It let a person think.

  At the moment, he was glad the house was quiet. Flora must be in the garden, weeding, watering things, he thought, her flowers. These he could recall: daisies, foxglove, and clematis, other bobbing things. Her flowers. He was glad she wasn’t in the house. At present, he wished, most of all, to listen to his thoughts in his own familiar room. The great mahogany bedstead, across from it the two Somali chests, the velvets from Kasai, the model dhows atop the dresser, the spears he’d hung up on the wall against Flora’s misgivings, Flora’s knitting on the chair, the lovingly dried poppies, salmon-colored, flat in their wall frames, the flower press and papers on the sill, the fireplace to his right side, the wainscoting, the lamps—he knew it all too well and he was finding it distracting, static in his mental ears, a clouding in his view. He shut his eyes against them, but he could see it all, still there, on the screen of his own eyelids, though he was really trying, eagerly, to observe a different thing.

  George was not, he thought, about to die. His wish for silence and for being able please to shut out the known world, was not the precursor to an old man’s dream of death. No. Not a thing like that, no easing, slowing down because life had been too long. Lucid, free of all reminders of his actual whereabouts, he wished, rather inexplicably, to find somewhere else instead, some “where” that, oddly, he was certain he contained.

  Something in him opened. If it was a place, what was it? What had Flora said the night before, in
sleep, when he had come awake and found himself staring at the rafters, sweating, listening for birds? She had murmured George’s name, then something about Africa. George sighed, wished that he could bring his two hands to his face and rub his cheeks and chin. Indeed. He had been there, of course, it was where he’d spent the War. But that was before Flora, and he’d never told her much. He was not the sort of man to ask her what she’d dreamed, or to think too hard about what went on inside her, behind that softly wrinkled skin. Her murmurs, nonetheless, had touched something in him.

  As he began to think of old, past things, he heard Flora coming in through the back door, pulling off her boots and hanging up her hat. In her slippers now (that well-known, able padding of his wife’s reliable, hard feet), she moved past their door but didn’t, George was thankful, come inside to see him. He imagined her in the front room, standing at the window. In his vision of his wife, the window at her back was filled with the Atlantic, with a wide horizon framed in swathes of mist. What could she have been dreaming?

  The Mediums Visit Eva

  At ten o’clock, the other members of the Thursday Club (Fontanella clutching Blackie’s arm, Blackie on his cane, accompanied, at a respectful distance, by shy, strange Susan Darling) appeared at Eva’s door. The three filed sternly up the stairs.

  Fontanella sat down first, and in Eva’s yellow kitchen chair began breathing in and out, loudly, through her nose. Blackie sat beside her. Susan Darling stood. Fontanella closed her eyes and tapped her palms against the table’s polished face. She was not in a good mood. Eva, noticing again how long Fontanella’s purchased lashes were, how they brushed the very edge of the medium’s rounded cheeks, thought idly of the tassels at the edges of the drapes. After a long silence, she pushed the plate of Orange Buttons towards her. Fontanella heard the motion, opened up her eyes, and, because she could not help herself, took up a fat biscuit. But she gave Eva a sharp look, as if to say, Don’t think these biscuits move me.

  Blackie covered her free hand with his. “Nella, dear,” he said. Something prim and tender in his voice caused Eva to picture them in bed, fully clothed but pressed against each other, fingers interlaced, Fontanella calling Blackie Max, and Blackie crying, Nella, Nella, as he frothed into her gowns. Blackie said, “Nella, dear,” again. “It’s possible, you know, just, that Eva didn’t make this up. So please, behave.” Fontanella chomped her biscuits greatly, swallowed, and did not wipe the crumbs from her tight lips. She sniffed, and said to Eva, “I didn’t want to come, you know. He made me.”

  Eva felt a turning, sharpness in her stomach. Her ears rang. The biscuit in her fingers broke damply in two. “Fontanella,” she said carefully. “I don’t know what you mean.” Fontanella rolled her eyes. “Eva. You don’t really think we should believe you?” As Eva sighed and Fontanella glared at her, Blackie pulled out a chair for Susan, so that she was not seated at the table properly but next to them, in front of the big window, behind her sky and sea. A shuffling of wind raised her ashen hair, revealing her tattoo, which was, thought Eva, the same color as her veins, pale green, violet, and blue, like the girl herself and her light, arresting eyes. Eva looked at her and was not certain where she stood.

  At Eva’s silence, at everyone’s, Fontanella sneered. “Eva!” she said. “Come on. You sounded like an Arab. Where did you pick that up, I wonder? Skulking by the docks, were you? Very good, it was. Almost like a man. Like a Suhl-tan. Like Haroon Rasheed.” Blackie, whose love for Fontanella had kept him quiet for a while, stepped in then. “Nella, Haroun Rashid was Persian.” Fontanella shrugged. She dropped another sugar in her tea. “Well, like a sultan, then.”

  Beside them, as if in another world, Susan rearranged her hair and looked down at her feet. Blackie shifted in his chair. The silence was exasperating. Fontanella set her cup down with a clatter. “Eva, this is hocus-pocus. Mumbo jumbo. Wanga, juju, junk. It doesn’t mean a thing—aggression only. You made this up to shock us. For a joke. It’s your resentment of me, don’t think I don’t know. You want to do things nobody else can, and this was the only way for you to do it. But to invent a thing like this! You’ve really gone too far.” Blackie patted Fontanella’s hand, but he did not quite agree. “We don’t know, yet, my dear. We don’t know that at all.”

  Fontanella made a caught sound in her throat, looked elaborately away from him and plucked once at her blouse. Her nose puckered and her eyes. She seemed about to cry. “You did this for attention, Eva. You’ve made it all up. I can’t believe it of you, it’s so stupid and so cheap!”

  Blackie sighed, preparing. He’d meant to speak first, after all. He hadn’t meant for Nella to go wild. He cleared his throat. Was stern. “Listen, Eva. Here’s what we’ve come to say. You upset Flora Hewett very much, you know. She’s never had a message before this, and, I’m sure you can imagine, this one was a bloom! A whammy. Really. A foreigner, not even a shade, apparently. A messenger, two thousand years old, an actual ancient from lands we’ve never seen!” Eva set her teacup down. She had been thinking about Flora. “Yes,” she said. “Poor thing.”

  Fontanella interrupted her. “Poor Flora indeed. You must leave Flora alone, Eva. You mustn’t speak to her. You’ve done enough already. This was an awful joke on your part. Something you did on your own. And if you didn’t sit right here” (she pointed at the table, at the counter and the windows) “and practice it beforehand, then it was your own subconscious speaking. Releasing your aggression towards me. Because I know you’re angry with me. You wish I’d tell you that you’re wonderful, when really you’re just learning. You’re an amateur. I can’t believe this of you.” She breathed fast through her nose, wiped her powdery face. “Blackie—though he isn’t saying so” (her eyes blazed hotly at him) “also has some doubts. He does. Where should Flora Hewett find a goat? Not even one but two? It’s crazy. It’s something you made up.”

  In the stillness left by his love’s outburst, Blackie carefully explained that he himself was not sure what he felt. “Eva, listen.” He looked sideways at Fontanella as if he feared that she would strike him. But he had to tell the truth. “I don’t think you could have made this up.” Fontanella threw her hands up in the air, then, boiling, crossed her arms over her black lace-covered chest and stared at him. Blackie did his best. To Eva, he said, “We each have some books at home, you know, describing rituals and things, of people far away. I’d like to consult these.” He also, he said, knew an anthropologist in Leicester, an Africanist, he thought, who specialized in native cults and witchcraft. He would telephone today. “I’m sure that Nella,” Blackie said, voice soft, eyeing his love carefully, “will be patient for a little while, with me.” Fontanella blinked at him. “Generous, old soul that she is,” he said, reaching for her hand, “while I do a little research.”

  Fontanella, though she did not agree with him, was soothed by his sweet voice and his gesture. She did not take his hand, but her next words were more measured. “If Flora Hewett calls you, Eva, you tell her in no uncertain terms that she must not try anything herself. She must wait until next Thursday. And you yourself must not try to contact her. You should leave her alone. Pretend that nothing happened.” Here Blackie agreed. “If it turns out that this really was a djinn, my dear,” he said, “then I—with Nella’s help—will try to contact him next week. This Sheikh Abdul Aziz. When we have more information.”

  Eva listened. But, as clearly as she knew the teacups in her cupboard and the records on the shelf, she knew this: she had not made it up. It did not matter what had come, or who had brought the news. She had not put on an Arab voice, a man’s voice, consciously. She had in her own free mind never once imagined slaughtering a goat. A brain was a strange thing for sure. But was it that peculiar, without some interference from a force outside oneself?

  But there was also something else. What a fuss over something she had done! It made Eva feel chosen, for the first time in her life. If Flora called on her, and even if she didn’t, if ordinary, helpless, unintuitive old F
lora needed Eva’s help, she would give it to her. “Look, Fontanella, Blackie,” Eva said. “And you, too, Susan, though I don’t know what you think of this at all, I need to be alone, if you don’t mind.” She rose and reached for Fontanella’s cup. “If you’ve had enough to drink—and Fontanella, you should take the biscuits home—you’ll show yourselves out?”

  Although Susan Darling stood up first, because she did not need to be told twice, once up on her feet she paused. She passed a hand across her face, and, as if checking it for something, drew a slow thumb down her nose. Eva, puzzled, studied her. Blackie, too, was watching. Perhaps she’d not heard a single word they’d said. She steadied herself at the windowsill and then looked at them all and blinked. And next was pulling out a Walkman from a Guatemalan bag, already heading for the door. As Fontanella turned to ask where she was going, Blackie said, “I’m disappointed in you, Eva. You might be kinder to our Nella. She’s a fragile soul, you know.” When Eva didn’t answer, Blackie sighed. He took her hand and squeezed it in his fist, not caring if he hurt her. “You mustn’t think this is any kind of game. You’ll wait. Promise us, promise us you’ll do exactly as we said.”

  A Talk Near the Well

  To Flora, Eva Bright, bathed and dressed in blue, a light scent of balsam on her, that heavy fringe in place above her ordinary face, with its plain and midsized nose and those steady, unobjectionable gray eyes, looked wonderful. “I’m so glad you got my call.”

  Flora didn’t want to talk inside the house, not where George could hear. She pulled Eva towards her and motioned towards the back. The hallway smelled of lemon, bleach. Flora’s head turned as they went by the bedroom. Eva looked at the closed door, the sheen of polish on old wood, the doorknob’s porcelain shine. “He’s very sharp, you know. It’s not as if his mind were gone. He hears nearly everything.” Flora paused, made a fist and dug her hand into the pocket of her housedress. “That’s one thing that’s no different.” Eva nodded at her, knowing that she didn’t understand, exactly, but to show that she did want to.