by Regi Claire
‘Oh hi, how’re you doing?’ Said in a low drawling voice behind her.
Celia’s heart clenches … and unclenches almost instantly. It’s Carmen from upstairs, pushing aside a wet bedsheet and smiling her gap-toothed smile.
‘Thanks, I’m fine – getting there, at any rate.’ Celia plucks at the clumped-up mass of her new fluorescent-red nightdress and presses her lips together in a grin-and-bear-it grimace.
For a moment they gaze at each other. Celia notes how worn out Carmen looks – violet shadows under the eyes, her usually vibrant complexion slack and dingy. Small wonder, of course, with her working half the night at the Bluebeard Club, then having fun at home. Yes, FUN.
She herself could never be a waitress, certainly not in a place like the Bluebeard, full of schmaltzy music and girls on the stage, run off her feet by a clientele of drunks and clumsy bum-grabbers.
Carmen breaks the silence, ‘Good idea to get the painters in. A bit of redecorating can make such a difference. And Dominic’s great.’
‘Dominic?’
‘Lehmann’s assistant. He is a regular at the Bluebeard.’
Celia pictures the man with his hooded eyes wide open, like a lizard’s, in a clean baseball cap, drinking with his friends and smacking his lips at the dancers every so often.
‘Much more approachable than his boss,’ Carmen continues. ‘Quite vain that one, so they say, and something of a softie.’
‘Well, I hadn’t noticed,’ Celia replies, untruthfully.
‘Guess I’d better shut up or I’ll be passing on trade secrets next.’ Carmen giggles and Celia glimpses her new tongue stud. ‘I’m off this weekend, thank God. Carnival’s such a hassle. The punters consider it a free-for-all, if you know what I mean.’
Celia nods yes. Doesn’t she just!
‘Well, if there’s anything Rolf and I can do for you …’ The silver-studded tongue has settled in the gap between the front teeth, full of promise.
Thanking her, Celia can’t help recalling the bedroom noises from upstairs. Can’t help playing them back to herself. The memory has made her fingers dig into the red nightdress. Hastily she shakes out the cotton material and, on an impulse, lifts it up for Carmen to see:
‘How would you like this for a night in?’ she asks with a laugh. ‘I got it half-price.’ She watches her neighbour read the sprawling yellow letters on the front: Babies? – No Thanks! Made in China, it says on the label inside, but Carmen doesn’t bother to check. Her face has changed from an expression of pity (for a woman who has recently lost her mother) to a flush of bewilderment and back to pity again (only now it’s for a woman who doesn’t seem to want to be a mother, which is another thing altogether).
‘Very nice,’ she mumbles without much enthusiasm, shrugging at the three-quarter sleeves, the slits up the sides and the low neckline. ‘Let’s hope it’ll keep you, uhh, warm.’ She waves goodbye, in a sudden hurry. ‘Got to go. Catch the shops before the afternoon rush.’
She departs in the direction of her lock-up section and seconds later Celia hears a key, then the clank of empty glass jars, bottles and tins being thrust into bags for recycling.
Rolf and Carmen are good neighbours really; she ought to be ashamed of herself. They invited her up to their flat on several occasions. Even sent a flower arrangement for the funeral – white lilies, beautifully tied with a black velvet bow.
Of the two, Rolf is probably Celia’s favourite: late twenties, sturdy, with shiny quick-glancing eyes and a toothbrush moustache. He works as an engineer at the large sugar factory that crouches like a grey monster on the western outskirts of Anders, stuffing itself with wagonloads of sugar beets and disgorging black sludge and stink. In his spare time Rolf is a biker. On good days he’ll service his Harley in the backyard, surrounded by tools, spare parts, oil-smeared cloths, cans and sprays, and a gaggle of children from the neighbourhood – while Celia stands watching covertly from behind her kitchen balcony door.
‘Want me to see to your smart little Golf?’ Rolf had offered when she moved back into the house. Since then he’s done quite a few repair jobs, replacing a broken wing mirror, the fan belt and a windscreen wiper, even crawled underneath to fit a new exhaust pipe. He’s a handy man, and very nice.
Several drops of water have plish-plashed to the floor, but Celia keeps staring at the red nightdress spread-eagled in front of her. It feels like she has put herself on the line.
9
BUT THE AFTERNOON doesn’t turn out too bad. At Bänninger’s Celia buys herself some Valentine treats: a small Tipo di Milano salami, a jar of white asparagus, extra thick, and a bagful of sinfully expensive purple grapes.
Just as she is leaving, Deli-Doris, the plump young assistant, offers her a free massage. ‘All over,’ she adds, her brown eyes touchingly sincere, ‘if you want. It’s very relaxing. Soothing.’ She pauses, smiles until her dimples show, then asks with the eagerness of a child, ‘Would you like to try? I’m pretty good by now. Ready for the diploma course in spring, they said at the evening class.’
Nonplussed, Celia stares at Deli-Doris’s hands which are resting on the counter like two soft floury rolls. She laughs quietly to herself and, before the girl knows what’s happening, lays her own hands on top, saying, ‘That’s really, really kind of you. Some time, maybe.’
‘I only thought, seeing that your mother – I mean, ah, I’m sorry.’ Deli-Doris has blushed pimento-red and Celia, more than a little taken aback, saves the situation: So, were Doris and her friends going to be in the Carnival Parade tomorrow then? What, up on the Valentine Float? That should be fun. Be nice if it snowed some more overnight, wouldn’t it?
At that point the shop’s glass doors slide open and in walk two of her mother’s former beauty clients. They start homing in at once, their overrouged cheeks puffed out expectantly, their richly mascaraed eyelashes (‘fly’s legs’, her mother would have said, cruelly apt) flapping rather than fluttering. There is no doubt in Celia’s mind as to what they are after: a detailed account of The End, down to the very last burst capillary.
‘Have fun,’ she says towards Deli-Doris and makes her escape, her hand lifted in a hurried gesture of farewell. God, she’s glad to get out of the place. Out and home. Away from inquisition and the iniquity of kindness.
As she crosses the side street to her house, Celia pictures the half-hour ahead: an instant cappuccino sprinkled with real chocolate flakes, a palmful of grapes and some loud music from the CD still in the player, ‘Love You Live’ by the Stones. Having seen them at the gigantic rock festival on Anders Common the previous summer, she’d become a belated Jagger groupie – too old now, and perhaps never quite young enough.
A second cappuccino and a double dose of ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ – then Celia finally buckles down to the cleaning. But before she has vaccumed more than a third of the lounge, suctioning decade-old dirt and slivers of fresh lining paper from between the floorboards, her jeans and the camisole top begin to stick to her skin. That’s what gives her the idea. After all it’s hot enough; the central heating is going full blast. She strips quickly, with the same urgency and excitement she used to feel during the sun-drenched summers of her childhood with Lily when they’d change into their bikinis behind a tree by the Thur or in one of the sweaty cubicles at the open-air swimming pool. She drops her clothes on to the dustsheeted furniture, then reaches for the extension tube of the vacuum cleaner, looking over to the window for a moment. Snow clouds have gathered into the murk of an early dusk – no one will notice anything different about her in the curtainless unshuttered twilight.
The ceiling casts a purple glow over her naked skin, like a spell, and the tulip figures in the cornice seem to bend their heads in her direction, quizzically, watching her every move. Her breasts swing and slap recklessly, squashing up against her arms and belly, deliciously warm. And every time she stands astride the body of the machine, the hose springs spiralling up between her legs, alive and willing. Suddenly, doing the housework is no longer a chore
she’s subjected to. It’s an act of anarchy. Rebellion even. How, her mother would have disapproved! She always wore an overall for cleaning jobs, and horrible yellow rubber gloves to protect her hands.
Afterwards, on the phone to Jasmin, her Zurich friend, they giggle like mad and when Celia remarks, in a flippant undertone, that she is still naked, Jasmin sighs with envy and vows to try it out herself as soon as she’s alone at home. ‘Or perhaps not alone. Might give my man a bit of a surprise in his study while he’s preparing some lecture or marking papers or – hey, Cel, how about that? – video-conferencing!’
Celia stares down at her thighs sprawled out over the seat of the upholstered chair. They’re nice thighs, soft without being flabby; smooth and unworn. Unwanted, she thinks, in a rush of bitterness.
The Carmen-story rather amuses Jasmin, who doesn’t take Celia’s anti-kid stance too seriously one way or the other. ‘Live and let live, right, Cel?’ is all she advises.
Celia knows better than to bring up the topic of Walter; it would fall on deaf ears as usual. Jasmin refuses to be involved in unpleasantnesses. At the funeral reception she’d actually said, ‘Lucky your brother hasn’t put in an appearance.’ Celia had been too upset and exhausted to be annoyed, and now it doesn’t seem worth the trouble. Jasmin has difficulty dealing with conflict, all the therapy in the world hasn’t sorted that. Conceived after years of doctoring, she’d been fought over the instant her umbilical cord was cut. Years ago, at a full moon Walpurgisnacht Party on Lake Zurich as they were sitting round a bonfire with other women, burning photos of deceitful lovers and, in Jasmin’s and Celia’s case, so-called loved ones, Jasmin had drunkenly announced:
‘You want to hear about me and my parents – well, here goes. If I smiled at Mother, I’d have to smile at Father. If I kissed Father, I’d have to kiss Mother. And so on. I even had to shout and scream at both of them. If I failed, they’d blame each other. Punched each other – often until they were bruised. I felt like the prize in a boxing match nobody could ever win.’
Celia for her part had kept her mouth carefully shut.
She tunes back in to what Jasmin’s been saying about a new client at the private clinic where she works as a physiotherapist. ‘Old goat. Had to remind him the massage parlour was one block down.’
Celia’s laughter makes her breasts quiver. She is getting a little cool now that the surge of frenetic energy has drained away. Her nipples have stiffened, their aureoles the colour of dark wine. Her arm brushes against them as if by chance and the touch conjures up images of herself in the bath, playing with the shower nozzle set at turbo speed. She pushes the pictures from her mind, for the present at least.
Should she maybe tell Jasmin about the masked stranger from the night before? Instead, she ends up asking after Igor Junior, a bright and lively child with the wheat-blond hair and broad Slavic features of his father.
Before they hang up, almost as an afterthought, Jasmin inquires how she’s coping and Celia says, ‘Okay. Ready to treat myself to your seaweed bath – as the climax of my cleaning coup!’
And now, relaxed after a quick tease-and-release thanks to the invention of adjustable shower nozzles, Celia is having her bath.
Three candles are wax-glued to the tub’s enamel rim at her feet. The first one’s a creamy white. The middle one is red. And the biggest, on the left, a deep black-pit black. With the main light off and the shadows trembling on the walls, the windowless bathroom resembles a cave, damp and slightly draughty because of the extractor fan near the ceiling. Celia herself is immersed up to her chin, wrapped in a thick layer of Shiver of Sensuality Seaweed from the waist down.
Jasmin had given her a big trial pack for Christmas. ‘Our latest hit,’ she’d written on the box with a green felt-tip pen, ‘freeze-dried and loves to expand. ENJOY!!!’ And, in a small PS: ‘Igor Junior’s just had his first “shivers”. His comment: “Great. Almost like mucking about in the playground.” – What more do you want!’
Celia moves her legs a little; the loosened rubbery fronds around her body wobble. She smiles, reminded of Deli-Doris: a well-meaning girl if perhaps a bit too trusting for her own good. Celia flips over on to her right and the seaweed floats off her hip like a badly tucked-in blanket. Shadows chase themselves around the walls and ceiling, past the washbasin, mirror-fronted cabinet, toilet, radiator, door, chest of drawers, towel rack, bath, extractor fan. Zigzagging ghosts.
For several minutes she lies motionless, gazing at the wavering candle flames reflected in the water. Some of the wax has dribbled down the rim of the bathtub, tentacle-like.
She’d come across the red and the white candles in the store room the other night – the night of the suede shoes – while rooting around in the old cupboards and cabinets for the teak furniture spray. They were stockpiled in small cartons behind dozens of dried-up woodfiller tubes, re-touching crayons, tins of furniture wax and bottles of polish. ‘Explorers’ Essentials’ it said underneath some uninspired drawings of grottos. Her mother mustn’t have had the heart to use them. But Celia has. After her phone call with Jasmin she’d retrieved the store-room key from the top of the coat rack, then in, seize a carton of red and white candles each, and out again – as if the place was haunted. She’d felt like the little girl she’d once been, darting in and out of their cellar lock-up with its deep dark shelves hidden by curtains, to fetch a jar of her mother’s irresistible fruit preserves for herself and Lily.
For the black candle, though, Celia had trudged all over Anders. She’d tried the Co-op, Denner and Migros, Blumenliebe by the Old Town Steps, a craft centre close to Eric’s that only sold blocks of unformed wax, and even a couple of artsy pharmacies – until, reluctantly, she’d stopped in front of Boutique Exotique, the letters painted topsy-turvy across the shop window. Under her grandfather’s ownership the name Alfred’s Antiques had arched in gold relief above the entrance. She hadn’t been back inside since then.
Pulling the lengths of seaweed tight over her belly, Celia slips on to her buttocks. She’d hesitated in the door, in the midst of an oriental tinkle, and asked towards the counter did they have candles at all? Black ones? The air was thick with incense. How Grandfather would have hated this – for a moment she could almost see him shuffling around the shop, peering with tired distaste at the wind chimes, the mobiles of brass Indian elephants, wooden birds, shiny metal stars and crescent moons, at the lampshades smothered in strings of coloured glass beads like cheap Egyptian headdresses.
The assistant was friendly enough. Tall and lanky, with luminescent green hair and glittering studs in his eyebrows, he unfolded himself from behind the counter. Had one look at her jeans, poncho-style coat and rainbow silk scarf, and said:
‘Black candles, no problem. They’re over here. I’d recommend Black Magic. Burns for hours and smells of you-know-what, even makes you feel kind of giddy. Great stuff.’ He cocked his head, eyebrows sparkling like exclamation marks, and grinned down into her face.
Instead, Celia had pointed to a sign on the top shelf: ‘Black Sugar Loaf – guaranteed hygienic and odourless.’
By the time she’d twigged what the shrink-wrapped stumpy veined candle was really meant for, the man was already rolling it up in lurid green tissue paper colour-co-ordinated with his hair.
This candle is for Walter.
Walter, who will always be five years older than her. Walter with his curls, their grandmother’s chiselled lips, and the sexy cleft in his chin.
Walter, who while still in primary was allowed to accompany their father on his caving expeditions – shrugging noncommittally when asked about them, like a conspirator. Every other weekend they went off, the car boot a medley of overalls, boots, gloves, helmets, rucksacks, torches, carbide lamps, foodstuffs. Off to explore the secret treasures of dwarfs and gnomes, Celia thought. Off to ‘creep and crawl and prowl in the dirt’, her mother said.
Dear brother Walter, the ‘man of the house’, who made her gifts of desiccated beetles and spiders a
nd the bleached bones of mice. Who netted trout at Uncle’s for killing on their kitchen balcony, sprinkling the concrete floor with silvery scales. Who left home at sixteen to train as a chef at the Schlosshotel.
Walter, who lumbered after Lily like a lovesick dancing bear, then claimed her: the bear transformed into a trim young soldier in charge of one of those wall-shaking tanks, seducing her on his blue sleeping bag up in the tree house. Who later took her away for good. Took her away so far she couldn’t come running back even if she’d wanted to.
Walter, who now blames her, Celia, for their mother’s last will and testament.
Celia feels an icy current on her forehead. Is it her imagination or has the hum of the extractor fan got louder? Almost grinding? The candles flicker. Was that the door of her flat opening – and closing? But she locked it, she remembers. Double-locked it, in fact, to be on the safe side. Something she’d never bothered to do before … DAMN THAT MASK!
Then she yells it out at the top of her voice: ‘DAMN THAT MASK! DAMN THAT MASK! DAMN THAT MASK!’ to rally herself back into a Frauenpower mood. She hates Carnival. Hates the way its sweaty drunkenness has seeped into her life, leaving her adrift, and vulnerable. DAMN THAT STUPIDSTUPID MASK!
She calms herself by focusing on the white candle.
This one is for her father.
White like a blank page.
Like stalactites and stalagmites.
She doesn’t have many memories of her father, she was too young, barely at kindergarten, when he disappeared. Mostly they are associated with smells, tastes. The butter on her breakfast croissant tainted by raw onion because he’d yet again flouted the house rules, forgetting to wipe his knife as he prepared himself a midnight sandwich.
Or the clear sharpness of white wine from his mouth, smudged with smoke scrolls. Like the time he was telling her a new picture-book story – some adventure of Schellenursli’s, the boy goatherd from the Alps – while she was perched on his knees, his twisted cigarillo curling smoke round them like the thread of a silkworm. On the page in front of her a nanny goat is stamping its feet, sneering at the herbs and flowers in Schellenursli’s pasture. There is silver paint on the goat’s hooves and bell, its brows are pencil thin, the eyes rimmed bluey black and bristling with lashes.
