Several ladies who had been fingering her latest wools left the shop without buying. Emma Ball put down the blouse and knotted and cut the thread with her pearl-handled scissors. She ran her hand over the cloth.
Like Emma Bovary, this modern Emma loved fine fabrics, and, thanks to the modern day equivalents of M Lheureux who had encouraged her desire to spend with seductive offers of wear-now-pay-later, she had a debt problem. Her credit card averaged fifteen hundred in the red, with an interest rate of twenty-two per cent.
After work, as she approached the back door of her rented red-brick bungalow, with her two green crocheted bags of shopping, she heard maniacal laughter from the kitchen. That laughter indicated the presence of Bandit, Patchouli’s current boyfriend.
She opened the door and saw Bandit and Patchouli sitting hungrily at the kitchen table, not laughing now, a deliberately mournful tableau to greet her. She plonked the two bags of shopping on the table.
‘Did you get any Rocky Road?’ asked Bandit.
Before she could reply, Emma heard a faint noise she couldn’t identify. She listened again. A soft miaow from the cupboard under the sink. Had they locked Jellicle Cat in there? Tentatively, she crossed the room and opened the cupboard door, noticing as she did so the smear of grime that covered it. Two particularly confident and rat-like kittens lightly padded out. Sniffed her shoes.
Emma turned to Bandit.
‘Get them out. You’ve already dumped three here.’
‘They’re just visiting the others.’
‘They dig up the garden and piss on the herbs.’
‘They are not even cats,’ Bandit scoffed.
‘What …?’
‘They’re gestates,’ he whispered conspiratorially, meeting Patchouli’s eyes.
Emma turned her attention to unpacking the shopping in a way that would hide the Rocky Road from him.
‘Another life-form,’ he confided, lowering his voice even further, as if the kittens might hear him revealing their identity and whip out a ray-gun. Then he spotted the RockyRoad hidden behind the sugar and grabbed the bag. Emma snatched it from him and an undignified tussle ensued, which she won.
‘Your other cats scare away Jellicle Cat.’
‘Jellicle’s a pussy.’
They collapsed into giggles at this, holding their bellies and rocking around the room while Emma seethed.
‘Take them with you and get out.’
Outraged at the injustice and cruelty of it all, Bandit picked up the kittens protectively and slung them into his backpack. They did not move like kittens in a sack at all. (Had he given them one of the many drugs he dealt in, to supplement what he called his ‘insane money’ from the government?) He headed for the door and Patchouli followed him out, not saying goodbye, a sign that she was sulking.
After they left, Emma put the rest of the shopping away, washed down the sink cupboard with Pine O Cleen, then ate six inches of Rocky Road.
Before Bandit, she and Patchouli had always watched romantic videos together at night. Emma Ball turned on the set now and sat back on the couch with a hot chocolate and the rest of the RockyRoad, trying not to feel lonely. Of the classic Hollywood movies, Emma’s favourite was ‘Madame Bovary’ with Jennifer Jones. In the film, when Rodolphe abandons Emma, she is waiting at dawn by the side of the road, with her bags packed, ready to elope. Rodolphe just doesn’t turn up.
In the novel, however, the scene is different. Rodolphe just sends une lettre de rupture. (If Flaubert had thought of the roadside scene, however, Emma believed he would have used it. A real tear-jerker.)
Tonight she watched this movie again, starting from the opening credits. Whenever Patchouli was here, she insisted on fast-forwarding it until the arrival of Rodolphe.
‘It’s all boring housewife stuff until he comes along …’
And they would weep once more for Emma, who only desired, after all, what they both did.
A little romance.
A little credit.
In bed that night, Emma Ball dreamed that she opened the kitchen cupboard door to a swarm of slinky cats, dozens of them. But a ‘swarm’ was bees. She supposed, in that editorial way common in her dreams, that she should really say a ‘pack’ of cats, like lions. No, that was a ‘pride’. But the way these cats pressed together and moved their backs in unison, it felt like a menacing swarm.
Emma Ball worried about being taken over by cats. She also worried about white-tail spiders in the folds of the bed sheets. She had warned Patchouli, who rarely made her bed, that if one bit her on the finger, her whole arm from the elbow down would turn white and then rot and have to be amputated.
Emma worried about sneezing. She told Patchouli that when she sneezed, she should sit or stand with her back perfectly straight, otherwise it was well known that a sneeze could injure the spine irremediably.
(She could not have known that ‘irremediably’ was a word Patchouli and Bandit repeated to each other when they were doing their hilarious impersonations of Emma for each other. She was such a dork.)
Emma also worried about the hairdresser. She told Patchouli that if ever (not likely) she went to have her matted hair attended to, she was never to lean her head back too far into the wash bowl as the unusual posture could burst a main artery in the neck. Instant death. It had been in the paper. It even had a name. Hairdresser Syndrome.
Only in her haberdashery shop did Emma’s life seem to be in order, surrounded as she was by her shelves of systematically arranged yarn, sorting today’s new stock of purple twelve ply and pale pink crepe.
Here, she could even deal with an attack of twitching eye by opening her secret drawer behind the counter and gazing upon its soothing contents. Bright, high quality paper from Lheureux Inc., who slipped shiny, tempting brochures, personally addressed to her, into the shop letterbox. These brochures announced good news each day, told her that she had been specially selected in her area to receive opportunities of a lifetime. And so on.
Emma sat down behind the counter and respectfully opened the latest offer, written on pale blue shiny paper with delicate clouds floating across it, inviting her to dream.
UP TO $20,000 COULD BE YOURS TOMORROW.
SPECIAL TELEPHONE APPROVAL NOW.
JUST RING 1800 …
TRAVEL TOMORROW!!!!!!
PAY IN FIVE YEARS!!!!!
Glossy brochures offered this modern Emma everything Mme Bovary had once dreamt of. She had wanted out from her provincial life, wanted romantic travel and sacred love. She had believed that happiness existed, as naturally as exotic plants, only in foreign places. Happiness dwelt in Roman ruins, sultans with long bone pipes, virgin forests and above all in the grand boutiques of Paris, with Rodolphe by her side, opening all the threshold doors.
Miss Emma Ball sighed and folded the papers carefully away in the counter drawer with the other offers. Hidden under this pile (she checked to see it was still there, safe from Bandit’s prying eyes) was her everyday credit card, currently out to $1497.90, and her emergency credit card, still unused, which she would start when the first one was over the limit (she knew it would take fifty dollars more). It was good the way you could used one credit card to pay off the minimum due on the other one. She felt she had found a way to cheat the system of Lheureux Inc. It made her feel secure knowing this second card was there.
Thanks to credit cards, she would never have to go through that scene in Madame Bovary that she could never watch without a shiver of horror. Not even the seduction and abandonment by Rodolphe matched its terror for her. It was, of course, the scene where the dreadful bailiffs came to repossess her purchases. (It was even more terrifying than the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett asks for money and is refused.)
If only Mme Bovary had had a credit card, an independent income, her life would not have been so tragic.
That night when Emma Ball returned home from work, the kitchen was empty, but she could smell the familiar odour of Bandit’s insanity.
&n
bsp; She started to fill the kettle at the sink and as she did so, she spied long strands of dyed black hair in the sink. Pieces of Bandit’s dreads. They clung to her hand like killer seaweed when she tried to wash them down the plughole with Pine O Cleen.
Then she yelled out in the direction of the cave that was Patchouli’s bedroom. She emerged, in a cloud of smoke, with Bandit, hand-in-hand, to bravely face the Wicked Witch.
Emma stared. He had outdone himself. He was wearing a vinyl miniskirt and fishnets with red suspenders showing.
‘At least you could shave your legs,’ Emma heard herself snap. ‘If you’re going to wear stockings.’
‘But he’s letting his manliness show,’ defended Patchouli, pulling at the thick, definitely male hairs which carpeted the unappetising gap of thigh between stocking top and hem of skirt.
Emma’s eye, she noted with curiosity, did not start twitching during this encounter. Instead, she heard herself speaking with a new calm.
‘Did you know that a boy with dreads like yours was at the hairdresser’s and he felt something sharp in his hair. He thought the hairdresser had nicked him with the scissors.
‘Well you see what happened was a redback spider had made its nest in his hair which he never washed and the hairdresser had moved the hair and disturbed the nest and the spider bit the boy. The next day he was dead.’
Bandit scratched at his hair, a little frown appearing.
‘You are so fucken rude.’
‘Let’s go, Bandit.’
‘Kill,’ said Bandit.
(Or it may have been ‘cool’.)
In the blessed silence of the kitchen, Jellicle Cat re-emerged and sat in her favourite spot on the window sill. Listening to her purring, Emma put on yellow rubber gloves and pulled out from the plughole the long black hairs that Bandit had shed. She felt oddly detached from this operation, wondering why her eye had not twitched during that last exchange with Bandit and Patchouli. She succeeded in getting the hairs into the kitchen tidy and shutting the lid on them.
And then she realised that seeing Bandit’s hairy legs in suspenders, and knowing that her sister Patchouli was actually in love with him, had pushed her to make a decision.
First thing in the morning, she would close the shop, pay off her everyday Visa card with the rent due for next month, and pay for her ticket, cash. That would leave her with two empty credit cards.
Mme Bovary, who had dreamed of foreign ports, would have envied her and the accident of history that had resulted in capitalism needing consumers cashed up, even women. (But where would she go?) Not that Emma would ever be too rash with her money. She did have a business plan. When she came back, she would apply for the unsecured loan for twenty thousand and pay it back in five years’ time.
She was not responsible for Patchouli, after all. She was an adult. Emma was tired of being the Wicked Witch.
Emma rinsed out a rag, then started on the table. She wiped a smear of peanut butter from her library book, and picked it up. It was a novel by Milan Kundera. She had chosen it because there was a very sexy black and white photo of him on the dust jacket.
Because of that photo, she had decided that her trip would start with Czechoslovakia. Smouldery Europeans, that’s what she needed, a man of her own.
She took Milan to bed that night. He told her that you lived until you were forty, then you wrote about it. Emma liked that—she would not be forty for a few years yet, there was still time to live. She kept turning to the back jacket photo as she read. Yes, a handsome older man waited for her, drinking coffee and talking about relationships, somewhere in Prague.
The search for Milan and his friends (they probably hung out at a certain café) would lend form to her trip. Order. Eastern Europe—disciplined, restrained, cold, ordered (cheap) started to appeal to her. She did not imagine she would fancy extrovert nations, the ones who shout over each other and do not have queues. She consulted her Short History of the World and was impressed to discover that the admirable Czechoslovaks, instead of having a civil war to solve their national differences, had voted peacefully to divide their country into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
*****
As she brought in another postcard from the letterbox, Patchouli noted that her sister seemed to have a thing about wishing wells.
She looked forward to these postcards, as she was having another of her personality upheavals, as she called them. Bandit had been interviewed about his insane money, and he was now an intern, as they called it, in a loony bin. She was finding life without him easier to survive than she had imagined. She felt vaguely guilty about the mess (not to mention kittens) he had brought into the house the two sisters had shared together for over a year. In the peace he left behind, she had started building bowls from bags of clay he had found next to a Brotherhood Bin. It was soothing work, and she remembered the poster in the primary school classroom, of the cavewoman bending over her pot, with the fire next to her.
In the cards Emma sent Patchouli, postmarked exactly two weeks apart, there were village wells in cobbled squares, wells filled in with red geraniums or purple petunias, wells with women in olde worlde clothing, fetching water and smiling for the tourist industry.
Emma Ball had reread Milan Kundera on the plane on the way to Prague, and she imagined from his books that his countrymen were determined, mature and fond of intellectual discussions (in English) in cafés.
She found that indeed they were. But there were other problems.
The day Patchouli enrolled in Art School, an aerogram arrived. It enclosed a postcard showing The Blessed Virgin hovering miraculously over a well.
How are you?
Even President Havel has rebuked his people for their pickpocketing and general thievery towards tourists. I hate it here. I have to watch my bag the whole time. I’ve already had one Visa card stolen and now have only the other one until it is replaced.
I’m glad to hear that Bandit has gone to where they can look after him properly. How are you? Fine I hope. I am trying to have a good time but it’s pretty hard and I cry for no reason a lot.
Found out Milan Kundera doesn’t live in Prague any more. He lives in Paris. Very disappointed.
NOTE: HERE FOLLOWS ONE HUNDRED PAGES OF EMBARGOED MATERIAL (IN WHICH THE HEROINE HOPS FROM ONE BED TO ANOTHER ACROSS EUROPE, RENDERED IN STEAMY PURPLE PROSE).
PATCHOULI ATTACHED ALL EMMA’S postcards to the fridge with Blu Tack, because the fridge magnets which were meant to hold them always slid down the door overnight and the postcards would then be lying in a heap, just where Patchouli needed to kick the door shut.
The latest one was from Budapest.
‘How are you?
A Danish tourist was charged $1000 for dinner with friends at the Dreher Halaszcsarda restaurant in the fifth district. He shouted the band of Gypsy musicians a round of drinks and was charged $3200. Warn anyone thinking of coming here.
I took the subway today. Number 2. Not knowing it is a home for petty thieves, and tourists like me stand out. Also warn people about the number 4 and number 6 lines.
A man saying he was the tourist police asked me for identification. I was showing him my passport when an American shouted at me to get away from him. He said the next thing they ask is to check your money and then they head off with it. I had a drink with the American. His name is Chip and he comes from Boston and he is very neat and well mannered.
Who on earth was Patchouli supposed to warn about the dangerous train lines in Budapest? Perhaps the American would hang out with Emma and lessen her paranoid tendencies. But the next postcard revealed similar angst.
We (Chip and me) took a taxi from the airport and the driver wouldn’t let me out until I paid him $100. Crimes are increasing here against tourists. It’s so nerve-racking walking in the street, always being worried someone is going to rob you. You may wonder why we took a taxi. We were told on the plane not to take bus number 175, airport-city. Organised gangs get on it and steal passports and money
from jet-lagged tourists. Isn’t it disgusting? I am a nervous wreck, and am even considering Italy, though they are so loud. At least there is sunshine.
If you ever come over here don’t go to the Russian market. The rows between the stalls are very narrow and pickpockets love it. Locals just laugh when tourists are robbed. We stay in the hotel room a lot. My other Visa card still hasn’t arrived. Chip is helping me out.
Was she sleeping with Chip, the neat American?
At last. Romance for Emma, even though she had told Patchouli that she found sex unhygienic? Patchouli pictured Emma and Chip in clean hotels, holding hands over room-service dinners. She wrote back asking her to phone. She missed Emma and wanted to let her know about Art School and how she had scrubbed the house from top to bottom, awaiting her return. They would watch videos together, like the old days, now that Bandit was gone.
When the call came it was from Abu Dhabi. Emma sounded very rushed and there was that international echo on the line and Patchouli heard her own voice sounding thin and annoying. But she learned that Emma was on her way back from Italy.
‘It was full of Albanian refugees and wandering Gypsy pickpocket hordes. I’m in the transit lounge duty free but all my credit’s used up and can’t afford anything. Looks like my other card was stolen and that’s my last coin but guess what – I’m married!’
This last news was screeched into the phone just before the disconnect signal. So, Chip the American was on his way home with her. Rich, Patchouli hoped, and above all, hygienic.
****
The taxi from the airport pulled up outside the red brick, spotlessly clean bungalow. Patchouli looked out from the new lace curtains and saw Emma getting out of the back seat. This would be her first sight of Chip and she rushed out to greet them. The two sisters hugged, and Emma admired Patchouli’s clean white tee shirt with its logo, Victim of Pleasure, and her equally spotless white harem pants. A transformation indeed. In turn, Patchouli admired Emma’s fine gold wedding band.
Madame Bovary's Haberdashery Page 14
