by Regi Claire
Alex has crossed to the fireplace, knife in fist, and stabbed the wall high up, slicing off another strip, expertly, right down to the skirting. He has decided to play along for a bit, not really to humour his assistant nor to tease the Roth woman either – he’s not the teasing sort – but because she annoys him, plain and simple. Annoys him standing there, ignoring them like they’re a couple of dummies. He looks over his shoulder and remarks loudly:
‘No skeletons here, Dominic.’
Dominic laughs.
Of course Celia is aware of being watched and ridiculed, only she couldn’t care less. These days she can do what she wants, can’t she? She’s no longer the kid condemned to write dictation on the blackboard, with her classmates snickering at every mistake. She can turn round and snicker back. Or she can stay where she is, and if she feels like stroking the wall she’ll damn well do it. The surface has a waxy sheen that makes her think of skin …
Such tasteless jokes, though. What do they know about skeletons? Ghosts? About the bones of mice and rats, the shrivelled-up bodies of spiders, beetles, slowworms? That was one of Walter’s specialities when he wanted to give her a fright. ‘Guess what I’ve discovered by the garden wall, sis?’ he’d ask. The first few times she was naive enough to expect a magic frog that would transform itself into her prince, or at the very least a lizard sunning itself on a stone and, if touched before it could flit off into a crevice, obligingly surrendering its tail.
Celia whips round abruptly. The two men, she notices with a certain Frauenpower relish, scurry into action at once, flapping their grubby off-white dustsheets over the armchairs, sofa, coffee table, standard lamp, bureau and bookcases assembled under the ceiling rosette, stacking rolls of paper, tools and tins into neatly useless pyramids.
That done, the decorator smooths and pats his curls, then jerks a thumb at the hump of carpet along the wall opposite the window: ‘You’re better leaving the carpets until the job’s done, lady, or the paint’ll mess up your nice clean floorboards.’ He throws down some dustsheets.
The assistant stares over at her, pushes back his baseball cap and, still staring, mops his brow and drooping eyelids with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
Celia turns away; how she hates amateur dramatics! Why can’t they go now? It’s quarter to five and they promised not to keep her late.
Suddenly a flash of metal catches her eye.
‘Excuse me,’ she says and stoops to pick up the stripping knife. Its hard rubber grip is faintly warm from Lehmann’s hand. ‘May I borrow this for a while?’
She’d laughed out loud at the men’s sheepish scandalised looks. At the threat-and-concern in Lehmann’s voice as he wished her ‘a pleasant evening’ from the street door half a flight below, his Vandyke thrust up at her. Afterwards, like a good girl, she’d laid the knife back down because she didn’t really need it, did she?
Celia leans her head against the coolness of the open lounge door. Her eyes have started to water, she’s laughed so much.
‘You don’t blink enough, that’s what’s wrong with you,’ the optician had told her the previous week, cutting short her descriptions of the bleary featurelessness she’d begun to experience in the flat. He’d wiped his hands on his white lab coat, then noted something down on a filing card, muttering to himself. A sad man he must be to want people to blink all the time, she’d reflected, and smiled to cheer him up. In response he’d taken hold of her head, squirted some fluid out of a bottle straight into her eyes:
‘Come on, Frau Roth. Blink!’ And again, his voice split with impatience: ‘Blink! I said. BLINK! BLINK!’
And now, all by herself, Celia is blinking and blinking, and it doesn’t help. Not one bit.
The room’s a liquidy blur and already the walls are receding. The dustsheets are looming larger and brighter, with an unbearable tint of blue leaking from their folds, as if they had absorbed too much daylight.
Celia wants to shut the door and walk away, but there’s that cold-heavy weight again all around her, like last night. Blink by blink the clutter of furniture beneath the dustsheets changes shape, its jagged outlines slacken, level out, merge into one single mass, more and more familiar. And although she knows this is impossible, she can see it just the same, right in front of her: that oblong object, shrouded.
Celia blinks and blinks.
If she blinks long enough, the room will settle down – she’s got all night.
If she blinks long enough, the furniture won’t pretend to be anything but furniture, and she’ll be fine.
She’s got all the time in the world.
She blinks and blinks, waiting for the rustle as the sky’s turned inside out.
3
BY QUARTER PAST seven next morning Celia is up and dressed.
She’s trying to rouse herself with some icy-sweet orange juice, a couple of microwaved croissants, and Turkish coffee so muddy it can hold her mother’s silver mocha spoon propped up inside the cup – the spiky heraldic handle is a painful reminder of when little Celia didn’t ‘eat nicely’ and had her knuckles pricked with it.
Thankgod those days are over. Glaring at the immobilised handle, Celia starts to lick the buttery pastry flakes off her fingers with small smacking noises. And thankgod she doesn’t have to brave the office just yet.
A cloud-ridden greyness seems to be frozen into place, up against the window and the balcony door. The house is on a corner and she can hear the commuter traffic thrumming along the side street which links up with the ring road and accesses the sprawling electronics plant nearby. The headlights of the passing cars and motorbikes are sallow smears in the early twilight.
‘Don’t come back until you feel ready, Celia dear,’ Eric had said at the funeral, his hand on her arm. His bushy eyebrows were drooping in commiseration.
That was two weeks ago. Good old Eric – an unbossy boss. Celia munches her second croissant, then has a leisurely sip of orange juice. She knows she mustn’t take advantage of his benevolence. Though, to be honest, he can afford to be generous with her; she’s never been off for long periods, has never cost him a penny for any maternity leave and, crossmyheartandhopetodie, she never will.
It’s 7.29 by the kitchen clock and the greyness outside melting at the edges when the decorators’ van turns into the yard, dead on time.
She buzzes them in before they have a chance to ring the bell. The wooden stairs creak under their tramping men’s feet and the wide frosted window between the landing and her corridor tinkles in its frame, the cut-glass garland of roses another fanciful legacy of her mother’s. Then Celia opens her door and here they are: Lehmann with a cassette player poking from a green sports bag, the assistant with a big silvery gadget like some futuristic vacuum cleaner – the steamer, probably.
They mumble ‘Morning’, giving her no more than a cursory glance, despite the nice bright clothes she has put on today. She had bought the gold-yellow blouse and emerald satin leggings at the sales last year, stored them sealed and cellophaned, for best.
As she stands gazing after the men and their slovenliness – paint-splattered overalls concertinaed at the waist – Lehmann suddenly faces round.
‘All right if we fill up the stripper in the kitchen?’ His sharp teeth are smiling at her.
Celia feels herself nod weakly. ‘Sure. Just go ahead.’ He calls the gadget a stripper – a STRIPPER, forpitysake. She tries to smile back – he is good-looking, she can’t deny. But he has already disappeared into the lounge and the door closes behind him.
Too late to tell them about the new dustsheets and what she’d done to the old ones (though howinhell could she explain, anyway?). Celia forces herself to move off down the corridor, walking calmly, not even allowing her hair to bounce off her shoulders. Past the store room, whose door is safely locked and the key deposited on top of the coat rack. Perhaps the men won’t notice the different sheets, won’t notice the flannel bedsheets – her mother’s – which now swaddle the furniture below the ceiling rose
tte. Past the upholstered chair, the telephone table. Just as they didn’t seem to appreciate her new blouse and leggings. Drawing level with the large oval mirror opposite the Beauty Room, where her mother used to see her clients, Celia tilts her head sideways a fraction in silent appraisal of herself.
After the decorators left yesterday, Rolf and Carmen, the young couple from upstairs, had rescued her quite unwittingly from the trance she’d fallen into. Her eyes had been growing numb and helpless when the street door slammed, shaking the thin pane of the landing window, and their voices flared the house alight.
Celia had stopped blinking, stopped doing nothing.
She’d darted over to the heap of tools, grasped the stripping knife once more. Then, slit by slit, slash by rip and tear, she drained that ghostly blue from the decorators’ dustsheets. To reclaim what she knew must be there, really there: nothing more than a sofa full of cushions, one of them spilling stuffing from a hole; nothing more than a couple of armchairs, a standard lamp, a round wrought-metal-and-glass coffee table, a rosewood bureau and three small bookcases displaying the gilt-embossed spines of her mother’s historical romances and some grimy volumes on potholing with Walter’s name inscribed – the latter ones she plans to rip up page at a time for the next paper-recycling collection. In all, nothing more than silk, foam, wool, wood, glass, leather, paper, brass.
But destruction seldom goes unpunished and Celia had ended up polishing and re-polishing two of the bookcases whose tops had got scored rather badly by the blade.
It was while looking for the teak furniture spray, overcoming her apprehension about the store room and searching with clammy cold hands through her grandfather’s various oak cupboards and cabinets, that she’d found the shoes. A dozen pairs of gently bunioned shoes, her mother’s. All of them suede.
Celia had read somewhere about the processing of hides and how suede is in fact the flesh side, scraped and scoured till eventually there’s nothing left to suggest a body, nothing but a surface, velvet-smooth. She herself had always felt an inexplicable aversion to suede, and now it makes her shudder to think of all those people going about their business in coats and jackets, gloves and boots, like animals turned inside out.
Two pairs of the shoes were hardly worn. Others had had their toes chapped bald from shuffling through long winters of ice and grit, hitting against whole townfuls ofkerbs, cobblestones and raised shop entrances. A few were hopelessly old-fashioned (two-toned, with perforated zigzags, check and paisley patterns). But none of them were ‘quite done yet’, as her mother would have stressed.
Well, Celia couldn’t have agreed more. That was to be her job.
She had fetched the mutilated dustsheets from the lounge across the corridor and torn them up completely. Kneeling in the cramped space between the antiques, she’d begun to swathe the shoes in length after length of paint-stained cloth, like so many feet cut off and mummified, when all of a sudden she’d heard a muffled scratching. Someone was tapping on wood, their fingernails scrabbling. Her heart missed a beat. Scrabble-scrabble, silence, scrabble-scrabble, silence. Was there someone in one of the cupboards? Hadn’t she been thorough enough? Scrabble-scrabble, silence. Quietly, half-sick by now with fear, she’d manoeuvred her body out into the corridor … The scratchings got louder, stopped. The silence dragged. Then a miaow – pitiful, plaintive, and coming from outside her front door. Despite her relief Celia didn’t feel like laughing. Schildi miaowed again, more plaintively, before continuing her struggle up the wooden staircase which Carmen had waxed to such treacherous perfection. For a moment Celia followed the cat’s slow progress through her landing window, then she pulled the night curtain and finished wrapping the remaining shoes, in a hurry now. Having bagged the bundles, cleared away the cloth tatters and loose blobs of emulsion, she dutifully tagged and dumped the lot in the waste container out in the yard. Back inside, she locked the store-room door – as if this could shield her from the goblins of her memories.
When she caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, hours later it seemed, her face was scabby with dirt. Raw red lines ran down her cheeks and the exposed part of her throat, joining together in a ragged horizontal where the turtleneck had kept its stranglehold. Celia marvelled at them. She hadn’t been aware of crying.
She had gone to bed soon after, not bothering to mask her window, and slept untroubled by the moon, slept hard and dreamless, like a stone.
* * *
Celia has reached the bend in the corridor. There’s nothing to worry about, she tells herself, the flannel bedsheets must have escaped the decorators’ attention. A little more confident now, she calls back towards the lounge:
‘If you need anything, give me a shout, okay?’
But the men’s cassette player has been flicked on in there and ‘Space Oddity’ erupts in mid-song, Major Tom-ing her like an insult. Of course she can hear them, dammit. Who wouldn’t?
Instead of going into the kitchen to drink up her Turkish coffee, Celia veers to the right, flees down the rest of the corridor to what used to be her mother’s room and has now become the spare bedroom.
Alex and his assistant don’t think twice about the door banging shut somewhere at the back of the flat. It’s a windy blaster of a morning after all, when even a keyhole is enough to cause a draught, and they’ve just put on some music to have more privacy. They’re inspecting the thick yellowed bedsheets with the handstitched monograms that have ousted their own dust-sheets, making jokes about prissy old maids. Then they place a couple of thin plastic covers on top.
‘For ultra protection!’ Dominic points out with a grin.
‘She’ll be getting charged for the old ones,’ Alex says.
Still, as he prepares the wallpaper for the steaming, perforating it with the hedgehog which his wife always says looks like a medieval torture instrument, Alex (who for the last few months has woken at dawn, aching for a challenge) can’t help admitting to himself that the Roth woman isn’t all that unattractive for her age.
Celia has flung herself face down on the bed that’s only a mattress now, disguised with one of the rich damask coverlets her grandfather used to sell in his shop. She is tense and agitated, in a fury of frustration really, and has wrenched off the emerald leggings, wrenched them off so savagely her knickers haven’t been spared either. Her lovely new blouse, shoved into a crumpled mess around her waist, resembles a piece of discarded peel.
To spite the men, she has switched on the clock radio. But it’s still tuned to one of her mother’s classical stations, which is regaling its listeners with the loud hammerings of a spindly-sounding harpsichord. No time to retune it, though; Celia’s hands have already slid to where she needs them most. All she can do now is bury her head deeper in the damask, shut her eyes and get rid of that soft wet tautness, quickly, quickly.
‘Fancy not knowing –’ she suddenly hears Lily yelp again, like that afternoon they’d tried to teach Nita, who at six was two years younger and still in kindergarten.
They were lying on Lily’s bed, skirts up and fingers inside the thick winter underwear.
‘But how? How? How?’ Nita whined, her milk-teeth mouth pouting open and closed as if she was hoping for a sweet.
The curtains were drawn, and in the semi-darkness Lily’s strawberry-red hair shone with static as her head thrashed from side to side:
‘Like this! like this!’
Her breath was coming in shorter sharper flurries, then she yelped that three-word yelp: ‘Fancy not knowing –’ and Celia thrust herself back into the blankets, burrowed down, down deep, until the rough hairiness of the wool burned hot against her mouth, searing her skin, while the headboard creaked and creaked and the bed seemed to gallop like an imaginary horse straight into the wall.
Later they fooled around much more wildly than usual, Lily shouting, ‘Hey, Nita, like this!’ and Celia crying in mock-desperation, ‘But how? How?’ as they did somersaults, then jumps on the bed, trampolining higher and higher, arms outstr
etched, towards the ceiling, watching their shadowy reflections streak up and down in the mirror on the opposite wall. Nita gave up after her first few efforts sent her tumbling to the floor. Lips pursed, she stared accusingly before picking herself up and pushing the heavy jersey her mother had knitted down into her sloppy woollen tights extra carefully. When she had finished, the folds of spare material round her middle bulked almost like real hips.
They’d already compared chests and decided there was nothing much to see, except if you arched the small of your back in a certain way, drew in your belly and tweaked your nipples.
But kindergarten Nita was a rebel even then. ‘Silly-silly-schoolgirls,’ she began chanting, ‘silly-silly-schoolgirls,’ in between smirks.
To shut her up, Lily started a game of prisoner and guard, chased Nita round the room till she was captured, then hustled her into the wardrobe, trying to keep the door closed with splayed legs and arms. Nita escaped, of course, and resumed her chant, triumphant, a born survivor. In the end they’d all been running after each other, getting thrown into the dungeon and breaking out again. At one point, Celia was slammed into the wardrobe so violently most of the dresses fell off their hangers, the slithery fabrics fumbling at her like hands. She’d fought her way out double quick, and wrecked the latch in the process.
When the game slackened off at last, Celia went over to the window to let in the daylight, and almost gave a scream. During their fun the world beyond the curtains had vanished. Not a centimetre was left of the brown rectangle of the vegetable patch, or the grass. The big cherry tree, the fence, the ploughed fields, the copse where Walter and his friends had rigged up a tree house in one of the sycamores – they’d all vanished. Thick ivory clouds of featherdown were shivering up against the glass: Old Mother Frost had trapped them inside that little-girl bedroom for ever and ever, it seemed.
