Every day now, there it was, washing its hands, salivating over Ricky’s eggshell. Not that Ricky left much. He always scraped out the shell with little strips of toast.
The blowfly led a lonely life. Avoided going out of the house, like her, but at the same time knowing that it wasn’t wanted in the house either. That it was different from every other being in it. Sometimes when she turned on the bedside lamp, it swooped out, brushing her hand in a disgustingly intimate way.
Or suctioned itself to the laundry wall, a clear white area, inviting attack as she carried in the washing or arranged her scourers. Getting her hopes up. Always moving at the last second, just when she thought she had him. Could it be the presence of the blowfly that made her dread getting up each day?
She googled samovar.
Tea essence brewing all day, sweetened with lemon drops, served to Madame, from the samovar, by her Lady Companion …
Dreaming of an entire samovar of hot tea, she saw Cicely serving it to her, and wished she could trust the cards again.
Had she lost her skill at Tarot interpretation? That would be like losing a best friend. She wished that she had her pack with her now, but they were lost and she suspected Rick of hiding them. Her Knight of Cups? So convincingly romantic.
Ricky had seemed so keen on having the baby. Had her hormones clouded her judgement of him? Moving interstate with an almost total stranger? But it had been so seductive, the compulsion to nest. She would never have believed that pregnancy could make you do even crazier things than lust. Part of her knew how sluggish and brain-dead she still was, unable to plan further ahead than the next load of washing. Yet mother-love was the weirdest thing. She’d only be away from the baby for an hour and she’d want to hold Toots again.
He must have thought that she was too busy with her report to snoop around after him. Mistake. Though she always deleted her own cyber wanderings in case he clicked History, she was stunned now to realise that in front of her was evidence of his own tracks. Very raunchy sites. This was why she had been saved from poke nights. Whatever it took to keep him from bothering her, she smirked, clicking through every site he had saved in Favourites. All the females pointing their bits at the camera, mostly with black bars over the vital spots. Nothing hardcore. You had to pay to take the black bits away, after all. He would never have done that.
Our girls love what they do. Meet Tammi and Cindi and Jo …
They were all gorgeous girls, blonde, dark and redhead. She used to look as hot as that. It was kind of sexy watching them. Reminded her of what it used to feel like. Hundreds of girls, maybe thousands, he’d been looking at. Girls who claimed to just love tickling their fannies with long red nails (ouch). Did he pay to have live sex with cybersluts whose legs are open twenty-four hours a day?
It would be exciting for him, she could see, but only if he could forget it was a lie. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie? Maybe real women, even with babies, were like that. And she was no longer a real woman with her fat tummy and legs closed twenty-four hours a day. But how could they parade for the camera, plus type those gross words on screen at the same time? No, there must be some greasy pimp off-camera, eating hamburgers and typing the text.
Steamed up, she clicked around to see if she could find pictures of gorgeous men. Goose and gander. She came up with man-on-man sex, but that had the effect of making her feel decidedly superfluous.
Even if she’d found a site with a suitably willing man, would she dare, as Cindi invited, tell him what to do to fulfil her every desire? What would that be, anyway? Ah, she would tell him to be her private samovar attendant, serving her never-ending cups of hot tea in fine china cups, and massaging just her shoulders.
The clock was showing that her time alone was nearly up when she spotted what looked like a comic book behind the printer.
Video conferencing.
That’s what the folder was labelled.
She opened it. He had actually been paying money to have cybersex, and he had printed out his dialogues with Tammi and the rest and pasted them into this trophy book. Aghast, she flicked over the pages. His fantasies were pretty ordinary. He didn’t put money in their pants, as he did with her, but straight into their bank accounts. Unless they were sex slaves, and it all went to the pimps.
There were pages of women but especially of Jo, doing naked aerobics or tricks with her very long tongue. She must have been double jointed. They did everything he told them, including saying how much they wanted him and his big thing.
At first, Odette didn’t really get why he, so organised, had been so indiscreet as to print them out. After all, Odette would hate it if she knew anyone was trawling through all her old toweroflove correspondence.
But then suddenly she did get it.
For an auditor nothing existed unless it was on paper.
The next morning, she didn’t say anything about her insight into her husband’s sex life, but, as she looked at him at the kitchen table, he seemed an even more distant nebula on the periphery of her baby-love universe. In her pram, the sleeping Toots whimpered.
Ricky winced, shot the baby an impatient glance.
‘When will that baby start being fun? When will she say cute things?’
Harmless enough remarks. So why did Odette glare at him as he sighed, as he glanced indifferently towards the pram? Anyone would think he had pronounced a curse upon the infant.
She stroked Toots’ cheek to soothe her. Odette realised with surprise that she herself could now survive that look, the blankness of boredom in his eyes. But she could not bear him to show the same indifference to Toots.
She knew how it felt to bore your own parents.
When she had first looked into her baby’s eyes, they had laid claim to her soul. Yet she had had a double vision, for, although they were the same velvety blue, they lacked a certain glint that had always been in Zac’s. She had caught it, along with his hypnotic stare, in her ceramic study of him. Only then had she realised what it had been … an expectation. Of being entertained. That had been the pact she had entered into with most people. A performing seal …
Without warning, she felt herself burning up, blushing hotly from forehead to breast. Supporting herself at the kitchen sink, she wiped her sweating face with the back of her hand, brushing over her left temple.
Pausing.
Repeating the gesture.
On that spot which had been numb for as long as she could remember, she was astonished to feel the cool pressure of her fingers. The skin was tingling.
‘Hey, what’s this? Hot flushes already?’
The light from the window over the sink was too bright and she turned away from it. The sound of his teaspoon against the china of his cup was deafening, his laughter ear-shattering.
She had at last crawled up and out of the cool earthen furrow she had constructed for herself.
Splashing water on her face, she gradually cooled down, feeling that she had burnt away a shell that had encased her.
Toots could grow up to be as boring as she liked. Odette, stepping up and out of her furrow, on a level with the world, would make sure of it.
Just then the blowfly made its fatal error.
Ricky was eating his egg, carefully arranging the broken shell in the hat between the little man’s legs. Ricky looked a bit too pleased with himself for a man who hadn’t had a poke for months. Odette’s anger coursed through her.
Refreshing.
Energising.
She wouldn’t have minded if he had just looked, but he had paid for cybersex in the home-office. And she knew how much money meant to him.
Still leaning against the sink, she watched the blowfly crawling up Ricky’s shirt. It crawled in a slow zigzag, crossing back and forth over his shoulder, pausing at the edge of his neatly ironed, red and white striped collar. If the fly decided to crawl under the collar, it was a goner. She would squash it. She didn’t care if Ricky killed her. She’d been waiting for this opportunity ever since that fly h
ad moved into the house.
In her pram, Toots was breathing calmly, heavily, in her sleep. She knew mother was very busy.
Ricky continued attacking his egg, steadfastly intent now on removing all the yolk and white with his fingers of toast. She took a few steps towards the fly, towards the red and white collar. A swat would be too cumbersome for this precision attack. A roll of newspaper too. No, this would have to be hand-to-hand combat, for he had crawled under the collar.
Because he was such a silent fly, Ricky did not suspect. He went on munching, scraping. She stepped closer, and she felt that Toots, behind her, was now watching with interest.
She moved lightly so as not to disturb Ricky.
WHACK!
Down came her two hands. They fitted around Ricky’s collar and she ground her thumbs into it, deeper and deeper until Ricky choked out,
‘Joe mate, Joe Hill, is that you? I can explain everything …’
Jo?
And that’s all she needed to find new strength. She didn’t stop until she saw grey-green fly slime trickle down from under the collar. Then she slumped down onto the floor, exhausted.
Triumphant.
‘I killed it, Toots,’ she announced, and springing up, washed her hands in detergent at the sink.
Thoroughly.
When she turned around after drying them carefully on the tea towel, Rick was red-faced, choking. Trying to tell her something.
‘Eggshell … in my throat … water …’
But Toots was starting to whimper. Odette turned away from Rick and lifted her from the pram. She sat cross-legged with her and they swayed back and forth together, watching Ricky as, with a spasm, he slumped forward onto the table.
She heard the delicate fracturing sound as the eggshell flattened under his weight, the membrane still intact.
‘I have killed the blowfly,’ she sang to the baby, rocking her. ‘We are safe now.’
Rocking and humming until the baby was soothed and fell asleep, before Odette then tucked her back into her pram.
Ecstatically, Odette made a pot of the Lady Grey she used to drink with Cicely, and dragged a kitchen chair to the back door. She passed through the doorway without any of her usual dread of leaving the house, and sat outside, drinking tea, feeling the slight breeze on her face as if for the first time, staring out blankly into the intense green of the garden.
There was a plum tree in blossom that she had never seen before. One of the blossoms fell into her teacup, and she remembered Cicely telling the story of the invention of tea, when a leaf from the Camellia sisensis had fallen into the cup of hot water held by a Chinese Emperor.
Dazed, she stayed there, immobile, until the blazing sun was high overhead.
Toot’s thin wailing startled her.
Where was she?
Who was she?
Odette felt reborn, bathed clean by the green of the garden, soothed by that pot of tea, drunk uninterrupted. She gently picked up Toots, changed her nappy and carried her into the laundry. Into their private world of blue, red and yellow fairies and dragons, arranged under a giant tea cosy made of two thousand nine hundred and eighty four scourers.
Tentatively, she again tested the cool pressure of her fingers on that previously numb spot above her temple. Again, the tingling of her skin.
Yes, the poison in her had been burnt away.
It had taken her all her life to learn that an infant could never be at fault.
PART
Five
The lady companion
The late afternoon sun wove a patchwork of colour through the tea cosy.
The heat struck Odette’s shoulders, an impersonal caress reaching through the misted windows. She was dreaming about swimming. Her body sliced powerfully through cleansing water …
Then she heard a familiar sound which woke her from her tangled dream. Could it be?
She put the sleeping baby into the pram and emerged into the bright sunlight, as if waking from a spell.
Wheeling the pram, she headed barefoot towards the front door. Stepping on baby’s bottles and crashing past clothes and washing baskets, she reached the kitchen, where, with some bewilderment, she saw that Ricky, who should have been at work, seemed to have fallen asleep with his head on the table.
Why was he so still?
So grey looking?
And why on earth was his face in the eggshell?
She nervously tiptoed past him and went towards the front door. She hesitated. She would unlock it only if she heard that sound once again. Afraid to believe her ears, she put her head to one side, listening.
Three more sharp raps, three slow ones, and then three sharp ones again.
Cicely had half expected to find Odette dead, and had been steeling herself. After all, hadn’t Miss Marple urged her on, telling her that Odette was in danger? The murder of the heart.
But here was Odette, staring at her like a maniac from a horror movie. Her once blonde hair was a mousy tangled mess, her skin blotchy, her pale-lashed eyes enormous.
When Odette hugged her, Cicely noticed that she no longer smelt of patchouli. She sniffed at a new, yeasty smell. Then, over her shoulder, Cicely saw a pram. Saw the baby, looking at her steadily with what were unmistakably Zac’s eyes. Velvety, almost navy blue.
Supporting herself on Cicely’s shoulder, Odette started noisily snuffling. Her brittle artifice entirely burnt away, every gesture seemed private as she started babbling her barely coherent story.
When the storm inside Odette had abated slightly, Cicely unwound herself from her arms and settled this newly fragile, shivering Odette onto a chair, giving her a shawl, putting the kettle on. Odette gulped thirstily at the hot Assam while Cicely located ingredients for comfort food – cheese, Worcester sauce, mustard and bread for a quick Welsh rarebit.
‘My lady companion,’ Odette whispered, warming her hands on the teacup, ‘he was supposed to be my Knight of Cups.’
But it was all topsy-turvy.
Odette was, after all, not in danger from the whacko Cicely had imagined. Rather, Odette herself was the maniac killer, and Cicely had arrived too late to stop her. There was a dead man in the room, to whom Odette seemed blithely indifferent.
Odette was the perpetrator. The murderer, not the ‘murderee’. The culprit, not the victim.
Yet no matter how many different phrases Cicely tried, she still could not grasp it. She watched in silence, as Odette attacked the plate of savoury toast and gulped more tea, still trying to make sense of her rambling story.
She felt relieved, at least, that she had a rescue plan. Odette would soon know the security of living above the shop, which Cicely would name Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery. In the tiny spare room with the sloping roof, a baby cot would just fit in next to a single bed with tight white sheets.
‘… it was, like, so over, just as soon as I got the blue colour of his eyes right. It was like I was released from the spell of his eyes. Far as I know he’s in Nigeria now, but I haven’t heard from him. I’m sorry about siding with him. He put ideas in my head. I really don’t mind about the book …’
‘You don’t?’
‘I kind of like her being immortalised.’
‘Who?’
‘The old Odette. She’s dead now,’ she added. ‘Hey look …’
Toots was clapping her hands – her first trick apparently. She was fat cheeked and sweet, even with those decidedly unfortunate eyes.
As Odette picked up the baby, Cicely couldn’t help thinking with regret of her friend’s lost plan to roar through life, living the life of a male artist, fitting in love around her art.
And, as yet, she still had not got round to explaining the dead man slumped at the table, his arm outstretched, looking for all the world like the trunk of an elephant …
Well versed in procedures at death scenes, at least in fiction, Cicely imagined her next phone call to the police. She would tell the local officer about her previous calls, in her home state, to t
hat nonchalant young man who had been so dismissive of her fears. But this time, she would report that, yes, the something else he had demanded had taken place.
‘We took the baby for a walk around the block. When we came back, we found him. Choked on the eggshell.’
When the local police arrived, siren blaring, Odette would certainly look the part of the distraught, grieving widow.
There would perhaps be delicate questions asked about the dead man’s will. And after giving their contact details, they would be allowed to leave.
‘We’ll be in touch ladies. Don’t leave town,’ they would say.
And that’s exactly the way it happened.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all who assisted in the long process of MBH, especially the invaluable Jenny Darling and Transit.
MAURILIA MEEHAN is the author of four critically acclaimed novels – Fury, The Sea People, Adultery, and The Bad Seed. She has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, The Age Fiction Prize, The Australian Vogel Award and has also won the State of Victoria Short Story Award. Her work has been translated into French, German and Chinese.
More at: www.mauriliameehan.com
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