by Regi Claire
Her father had begun to cough. Doubled over, he spluttered smoke, and she was nearly bounced off his knees. Then she saw he wasn’t coughing; he was trying hard to hide his laughter from her, rocking her up and down playfully, up and down, to make her squeal. That’s when her mother had stormed in saying, couldn’t they keep the noise down, honestly, Peter, you know I’m doing a manicure next door, and he’d snapped the book shut so fast one of Celia’s fingers got trapped between the pages.
Once her father was gone, of course, and the dining room redecorated as the Beauty Room, Celia had realised he must have disliked her mother’s occupation. She’d felt obscurely pleased, and had loved and missed him all the more – despite his preference for Walter when it came to treasure hunting in caves.
She slides down deeper into the bath now, trawling her arms and seaweed legs through the water to seek out the last pockets of heat. The three flames flare up as one. For an instant they throw a shadow against the door – a figure with an hourglass waist and shoulder-length hair, unmistakably real.
Yes, the third candle is in memory of her mother.
Red: for those final weeks when the thin blood refused to be stemmed and came dripping slowly, steadily, staining paper tissues, pillowslips, sheets and the fronts of her nightdresses.
Red: for the seething fleshliness she’d always kept under wraps – apart from the night of the Maskenball and that Sunday afternoon in August, the afternoon of the skin belt.
And red for the pain she inflicted, even on mere things.
The small roll of glass wool had been lying in a skip, only Celia didn’t know it was glass wool then – she couldn’t have been nine yet. Such a nice fleecy rug it would make for Charlie’s kennel, she’d thought, grabbing hold of it. By the time she got home her hand had felt like a pin cushion, and flexing it was torture.
The kitchen door down the corridor was open and she could see her mother, hair over her face, standing at the table. She was stoning cherries. Cherries from Margaret’s garden. Her white rubber gloves were stained crimson, her arms spattered beyond the elbows. Spurts of juice were trickling down the fat smile of the ladle-licking chef on her plastic apron, puddling into the sheets of newspaper at her feet. Two large woven baskets were placed on chairs, heaped with fruit from which her mother had already removed the stalks and the odd leaf. With the sunlight trembling over them, the cherries looked strangely animate, fresh and pouting as babies’ mouths. The gadget her mother used for the stoning had lost its silvery colour; it was oozing blood and shreds of flesh like a witch’s cauldron. The smaller of its two spouts was spitting teeth into a bowl with gravelly shrieks.
Celia couldn’t bear to see or hear any more and turned away, crying out as a spasm of pain gripped her hand.
Her mother’s hair flew up. ‘What on earth –?’
‘I wanted it to be a rug. To keep Charlie warm. But now I can’t even move my fingers.’
Her mother didn’t fuss, she never did. Just glanced from her to the glass wool on the floor, then crossed over to the sink, took off her gloves and apron and washed the splotches off her skin. There didn’t seem to be a trace of blame in her words when she said, ‘Why not leave Charlie alone, Celia? I’m sure Frau Gehrig is perfectly capable of making him comfortable. He’s old and arthritic, you know that. The poor thing’ll die one day soon, rags or no rugs. There’s nothing you can do about it.’
While her mother went to get the tweezers from the Beauty Room, Celia wept a little, thinking of Charlie in his bare kennel and how he’d begun to snuffle around the backyard all stiff-legged, dribbling pee on the ground, and how she couldn’t help him, ever. Then she was told to sit down next to the balcony door. In the summer sun her palm and half-clenched fingers appeared to be studded with the glitter of pain.
‘Don’t, mum, please! Let me do it myself, it’s less –’
‘Keep still now, they’re almost out.’
‘NOOO! Aow!’
‘Silly Cel, don’t be such a baby.’
‘You’re hurting me! MUM!!’
‘Almost there, just a –’
‘AAAOOOOWWWWWW!!!’
At that moment Walter came in from school. He dumped his leather satchel beside a kitchen chair and surveyed the scene. ‘Little sis in trouble again?’ he asked. Lifting the glass wool between thumb and forefinger, he dropped it into the bin. Then suddenly yowled, his face contorted.
‘Walter?’ Their mother sprang up from where she’d been kneeling, ‘All done, Celia – go and wash your hands,’ and, tweezers flashing, rushed towards him.
‘Only joking, Gabrielle,’ he replied, coolly. ‘Just checking you’d do the same for me. So, what’s to eat?’
‘Mon dieu! You are wicked!’ Laughing, she had opened the fridge and produced some juicy cuts of Buurehamme. Afterwards she carried on with the stoning.
They had cherry tart that evening. The kitchen was filled with a sugary lacerated smell and the last few rays of the sinking sun seemed to bleed all over its cupboards and walls. Celia, her hand salved and bandaged for the night, ate slowly, trying to ignore the looks of complicity and amusement between Walter and her mother, their banter and broken conversation in French peppered with phrases like ‘tu sais’ and ‘si tu veux’ and ‘mon chéri’. Trying to ignore the bloodied lumps of cherries on her plate, limp and sullied. Concentrating instead on the yielding sweetness in her mouth.
The bathwater is freezing and Celia shudders involuntarily. She has been chewing on air and there’s a bitter taste on her tongue. Her eyes ache from having stared at the red. candle so long.
Red.
Like anger and cruelty.
Like misunderstandings that grow and fester. And erupt.
Blood red.
Then her right leg tears free of the seaweed, out of the bath: NO! and splashes back in. NO, DAMMIT! SHE DOESN’T NEED THOSE MEMORIES! She couldn’t care less where the water goes just now. She’ll mop it up later. The candles gutter. They hiss at each other. Wax slops over, runs down into mingled roots and shoots, red, black and white. A few drops have fallen into the tub, tiny free-floating islands jostled by waves and seaweed.
Only the black candle survives – due to being bigger, perhaps.
10
IT’S NEARLY DARK when Celia gets back from the ice rink next day. Another first. She had to hire skates. To begin with, she’d felt like a toddler trying to walk. Then, once she dared let go of the handrail, like an ice-pick on legs, steel blades hacking into the slippery surface for extra balance. In the end she’d managed to do figures again, even some slow-spun pirouettes, and hardly knocked into people. Not bad after almost twenty years. It was the cold that drove her home eventually. Too much like being in a deep freeze. The cold and, perhaps, the music too, treacle-dripping from the speakers through a maze of Valentine-Day fairy lights and heart-shaped balloons on to the heads and shoulders of couples gliding round, glove in glove.
The phone starts to ring just as she is savouring the thick salty dregs of the minestrone she’d cooked to get the chill out of her bones. Celia sighs. She is sitting slumped on the floor-level mattress in her bedroom, the now empty soup bowl in her lap, on the night table a glass of Féchy and a plate that holds her Valentine treats from Bänninger’s – slices of Tipo di Milano salami laid out around a small mound of purple grapes, a pile of white asparagus topped with a swirl of mayonnaise. The portable TV in a corner of the bookshelf is giving the news round-up.
With another sigh she unslumps herself to fetch in the phone on its extension cord.
‘Hello,’ she says, a little breathlessly, flicking the ‘mute’ button on the remote control. The weatherman gulps like a fish out of water, nods and twitches his head at the map with its pig outline. (Sun symbols in the south, clouds with cartoon snowfalls for the rest of the country.)
‘Celia?’ The old man’s voice is hesitant.
‘Uncle Godfrey! How are you?’ (Night temperatures around freezing in the Mittelland, up to minus ten in exp
osed areas.)
‘I phoned earlier but there was no reply,’ he whines. What’s the matter with him? He doesn’t normally talk to her like this, petulant like a jealous old woman.
‘I spent the afternoon at the ice rink, that’s all. I was going to call you myself, later.’ (Danger of avalanches in the Alps.)
While he inquires, rather nervously, about the details of the Thirtieth Day, the memorial service he had requested for his sister, Celia takes a sip of the Féchy. The weatherman has vanished and it’s the local news now, with a frozen-looking reporter in a suede jacket and flowery skirt at the Carnival Parade.
‘A week on Tuesday, Uncle. Seven thirty in the evening. I’ll speak to you beforehand, don’t worry.’ She reaches for the plate with her Valentine treats, selects a piece of asparagus and licks off the mayonnaise, ‘You don’t mind me eating, do you?’ The asparagus is short and fat and succulent. It oozes apart deliciously when she squelches her tongue along its length, leaving the head, smooth, taut with the faintest trace of roughness, for last.
‘No, no, of course not. Bon appétit! It’s good to hear you’re well and … and … how is the flat doing, the decorating? Everything all right with you, Celia?’ Followed by a grunt.
For a moment the slice of salami wadded between her thumb and forefinger reminds her of liver-spotted skin. Whyonearth is her uncle so uncharacteristically concerned about her?
‘Sure I’m fine. Or shouldn’t I be?’ She closes her eyes, then shoves the salami into her mouth and chews with determined savagery. It suddenly dawns on her what’s wrong with the old man. He sounds guilty. Guilty? What about?
She watches the TV camera panning across the riot of colours: the costumes and bunting, the snow glittering in the watery sunlight against the red roof tiles of the Bürgerhäuser, the verdigris dome of St Nikolaus’s. Hundreds if not thousands of people are lining the main street and surging around the Sämannsbrunnen like a new crop that’s wildly propagating. Some of them grimace, a few smile and wave, craning their necks, others throw confetti. The floats start off with the Lady leading the Lion on his gold chain – as if the two of them had stepped straight out of the town’s coat of arms.
Celia leans her head against the wall. Quite composed now, she states: ‘So, I suppose you’ve heard from Walter. Complaining about me, was he?’ Her tongue squishes an asparagus against the roof of her mouth. Then another.
Finally he stammers, ‘Well, yes. Yes, Walter did get in touch. He phoned me after your row. Terrible, terrible thing to have a row like that, Celia.’
He pauses and Celia slowly counts to ten, fighting to contain her anger. The TV camera has skimmed across the crowd again, capturing someone in a carmine robe beside a chic older woman with red hair – Margaret, Lily’s mother! – before it zooms in on a muffled-up man in a wheelchair who is peering at a float of rappers and breakdancers and clapping his thin parchment hands to the silent beat.
Just as quietly, Celia munches a few grapes, having decided to bide her time.
‘If only poor dear Gabrielle, God bless her soul, had been a little more … forgiving,’ her uncle says in a shaky tone. Then he clears his throat. ‘I think it’s up to you now, Celia. You’ll need to show your brother that you don’t intend to … perpetuate things.’
A gigantic poison-green crocodile on three sets of legs is clacking its long plastic teeth at the TV camera.
‘Walter’s obviously not told you everything, Uncle. Because I did offer him a fairer share of the money, but he wouldn’t bloody listen!’
Forgodsake, why’s the man defending Walter? She’s done her best to be accommodating, dammit – pretty generous of her, too.
‘I am sorry, Celia dear. I ought to have talked about this sooner. Sorry. I just didn’t feel –’ There’s the crash of a door and his voice drops to a whisper: ‘That’s my Housekeeper from Hell back from the Carnival Parade. I’d better hang up. Bye.’
Why is he so anxious to get off the phone? The new home-help must have overheard dozens of his conversations by now. Unless – here Celia’s frown turns into a smile and she bursts out laughing – unless the woman has designs on him and he’s retaliating with evasive action, safeguarding his seventy-six years of bachelorhood. Whatever, she’ll ring him back some other time.
As for Walter, she has already posted her letter to him and Lily; the ball’s in his corner, et voilà. She presses the ‘mute’ button, drains her glass of white and finishes her meal.
The house is old and at night it creaks. It seems to creak at the touch of a moonbeam, the settling of a snowflake, a few scatters of needle-thin rain.
Now, though, a different kind of creaking has started. Celia can’t ignore it. Not after she’s been roused from her sleep by Rolf and Carmen’s homecoming, their laughter as they’d stumbled up the stairs, crooning snatches of songs. The creaking is getting more vigorous by the second. There are no voices, just the breathless straining of wooden slats near breaking point.
Like a child’s rocking horse. A rocking horse. Rocking and rocking. This is how Celia tries to stop herself from getting all hot and tangled up in the bedclothes. But it’s no use tonight. The horse is clattering out of control. It scrapes and bangs against the wall. Celia’s lower legs twitch. They kick instinctively, like in some reflex test. Then she can’t bear it any longer. She jumps out of bed and puts on the kingfisher-blue kimono (Franz’s last present, brought back from a climbing expedition in the East).
In the lounge the snow light filtering through the window clashes with the purple shadows of the ceiling and the warm yellow glow from the corridor. As she pads past the faintly luminous sheets spread over the furniture, she has a distinct sense of déjà vu. And, gazing out at the street and gardens freshly coated in white, at the flounces of ice crystals along tree branches and the curved necks of streetlamps, it’s easy for her to picture her mother in that ghostly Carnival dress of long ago, silhouetted against the plum-coloured curtains of the casino. For all Celia knows, her mother never even realised she’d been spied on.
She is about to turn away from the window when her eye falls on the apartment block opposite. Its tenants are a ‘strange sort’, as her mother used to lament – with what moral right, Celia has no idea – the police and social workers visit freely, removal vans and self-drives clog up the bicycle lane most weeks. Last October they had a sale on in one of the first-floor flats: EVERYTHING MUST GO a notice screamed in red capitals. Deli-Doris, who’d been and got herself a ‘virtually new’ mattress for her massages, told Celia that the couple had done a moonlight flit after falling into arrears with their rent and credit payments.
Nothing suggests any hurried departures tonight: most of the lights are out or the shutters down, and the balconies look like sad cold swallows’ nests vacated for winter. But one of the windows on the top floor, with a close-meshed net curtain, has suddenly become brighter. As if someone had been standing there a minute ago and wasn’t now. Celia blinks: beyond the streetlamps’ haloes she can feel the presence of veiled stars. When she glances over once more, the window is dark.
11
EARLY MONDAY AFTERNOON, and Celia is aware she’ll be going back to work very soon now. Even her food has begun to remind her of the office. That turkey mince she’s just thrown out because it tasted like wood shavings – Lapis would have chomped it up in a flash.
But first she needs to make a start on the Beauty Room. The gold letters on the door advertising BEAUTY TREATMENTS are tarnished and Celia greets them with a surreptitious spit, no polish, before she goes in.
The room smells. Not so much of treatments or stale air – it smells of women. All the women ever ministered to by her mother have left traces behind. Bits of themselves. Droplets of sweat, spittle and perfume soaked up by the pale-blond carpet, the natural-finish wooden shelves, the birch veneer of the vanity cabinet, the picture frames and ivorine wall-coverings, giving the place a jaundiced restless look. Hairs, scaly bits of skin, slivers of nail that hooked themselv
es into the fabrics – cushions, towels, beauty caps, make-up capes, curtains, upholstery and carpet pile – with no intention to let go, like stings or the heads of ticks.
It’s a complex smell, slightly sickly, and in its very sickliness reminiscent of beeswax. Or honey. And honey, of course, is ‘bee vomit’. As Celia’s biology teacher had announced one fine day, his eyes swivelling round the class sharp and black as an insect’s, with a sneering satisfaction at their shocked disgusted faces.
Every so often afterwards Celia’s grandmother tried tempting her. ‘How about a mouthful, my dear?’ she’d say, her Cupid bow lips parted in a smile. ‘Honeycomb on croissant, sweet and crunchy.’ Strewing a few flakes of pastry on a chunk of the thickly dribbling hexagons, she’d hold it out from her knobbled fingers like the hag in her gingerbread house.
Celia crosses the Beauty Room to open the window and the balcony door. Then, for the sheer hell of it, she rips off the lace curtains. A thin cloud of dust rises from her hands towards the tulip cornice, blurring the winter brightness before being driven out by a sudden sweep of wind, like a last exhalation.
It’s a snow wind, she can tell, scouring down from the Voralpen to make the timid hills of the Mittelland cringe. It tears and grabs at her long hair, scratches her skin with sandpaper sharpness. Perhaps it’ll blunt her features too, just as it’s blunted those razorblade edges of rock. She has never liked the cruel slant of her cheekbones, the jut of her chin; has always felt that between the two of them they seem to trap and fold up her face.
When still in primary school, she’d refused to have her shadow profile drawn on the white sheets of paper Frau Wickli had tacked to the classroom wall. While Lily stood motionless, head tilted back to show off her pretty snub nose to best effect, Celia had twisted her own face away from the hot light angled up at her. Twist-twist-twisting so there’d be no charcoal lines, slovenly, inept, exaggerated, to smear her out of existence …
