The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  ‘Tell you what, Angelina,’ she’d heard herself say instead, ‘give me till tomorrow and I’ll see what I can do. My mother’s left a lot of stuff behind.’

  Whythehell had she promised that? The clothes are gone, aren’t they? She got rid of them herself. Nothing more to find now. Nothing – Celia lowers the napkin from her mouth – except what’s inside the locked drawer of her mother’s bedside table. Perhaps it’s time she started looking for the key; the curved gold-plated handle has been leering at her long enough.

  Picking up her knife and fork again, she suddenly becomes aware of the yucca’s extraordinary trunk shape. Just below table level it thickens into a bulge twice its normal size, with a cleft down the middle like builders’ cleavage. Celia can’t help a grin.

  ‘Pardon me …’

  Angelina nudges her on the arm, ‘Hey, he means you.’ Her fork is angled to the right, beyond the yucca.

  It’s the man in the orange shirt. He is leaning towards her, a cigarette between his fingers. His friend’s seat is empty apart from the leather jacket. ‘Pardon me,’ he repeats, ‘but weren’t you at the Métropole Friday night?’

  Celia’s heart misses a beat; the Métropole … She swallows. Why is he asking her that? Surely Granite Mask couldn’t have been him? She’ll act dumb, she decides, it’s safest, usually.

  ‘Yeah, I kind of went astray,’ she admits with a shrug. ‘My ordinary clothes must have stuck out a mile.’ He’s got nice eyes. Violet, almost black. Sultry southern eyes, her mother would have said, and men with such eyes weren’t to be trusted: Better to keep your distance, Celia.

  Celia shifts closer. Until the edge of the seat cuts into her buttocks and she can breathe in his aftershave. Men Only. Franz’s favourite. She asks hurriedly, ‘So, what did you go as? A pirate? Or were you that Apache swinging his tomahawk?’

  Angelina’s staring at her sulkily; she has pushed her plate to one side and is winding a coil of hair round and round the fingers of her left hand, pouting a little and in between pouts slowly sipping her Coke.

  The man laughs, darts a glance at Angelina before he replies. ‘Actually, my pal and I were a couple of devils. Remember us? I thought you were watching …’ He draws on the cigarette, inhales deeply, his sultry eyes studying her.

  The gypsy girl, Celia thinks. For a few breathless seconds it’s like she herself had been that girl – her flesh spilling over the stocking tops, her nipples on display, red and tight as berries, her tongue glistening. The image leaves her feeling oddly disjointed. And excited. She frowns at the man and lets her eyes go blank, then plucks at her skirt, pretends to smooth it over her thighs so she can touch herself there unobserved, picturing Alex.

  ‘I was a clairvoyant that night,’ Angelina chimes in. ‘Never had any peace because everybody wanted their fortunes told. The soldiers were the worst – mamma mia! They kept pawing my crystal ball so much it went all cloudy.’ She giggles. ‘And I’m sure there was a devil in that crowd.’ Blinking her lashes in the man’s direction, she says, ‘Was it you, by any chance?’

  ‘You’d better ask Sergio here.’ With a wink to Angelina he blows some smoke rings at his yellow-shirted companion, who’s just tossed a packet of Camels on the table.

  Celia drinks some of her Rivella. She can feel the heat building up between her legs. Alex, she murmurs to herself, AlexAlexAlex. If she isn’t careful, if she doesn’t ease those muscles –

  ‘Hey, what’s this?’ Sergio exclaims. ‘A human plant or a planted human?’

  Celia relaxes; saved, thanks to a stupid joke.

  ‘Anatomically challenged!’ Angelina is never lost for words. Already her hands are on the yucca to feel and fondle the swelling.

  The man in the orange shirt is leaning over again: ‘Well, Friday night at the Métropole … I was watching you too, you see. Especially after that red-caped guy turned up. A bit of advice: tear off the mask next time.’ He grins, stubs out his cigarette, ‘No offence, okay?’

  His remark has jolted Celia. She wasn’t aware the incident had attracted attention and is annoyed with him for reminding her. For dragging her fear out into the open so it grows like the yucca, big and knotted and spiky. She hunches her shoulders and looks away into the jungle of ivy and climbers.

  ‘Anyway,’ he adds, somewhat doubtful now, his gaze weaving restlessly across her face, from cheekbone to cheekbone, up and down from chin to forehead, forehead to chin. Celia rubs the side of her nose to break the spell. ‘Anyway, we’d better head back to the grind. Nice meeting you. The name’s Paolo, by the by.’ He gets to his feet.

  ‘I’m Celia,’ she says, trying a smile. ‘And … thanks.’

  ‘Pleasure.’ Paolo’s violet eyes are smouldering down into hers.

  As the men pull on their leather jackets, Celia glimpses Angelina’s hand squash a fluttery piece of napkin into Sergio’s cigarette packet.

  17

  THE AFTERNOON AT the office passes enjoyably enough. Several jewellers phone to verify items on the new price list, and Celia completes a tricky matching job for a brooch designed by Herr Q, as he is called behind his back. Q for Queen.

  Herr Q is in his late fifties and one of Zurich’s best-known goldsmiths. Hearsay has it there’s a lift at the back of his plush business premises which goes straight up to his bedroom. A bedroom that beggars belief, if rumour can be trusted. With goldleaf mouldings on furniture and ceiling, solid gold handles on doors and drawers in the athletic shapes of his former lovers, gemstones adorning the edges of the mirror-fronted wardrobe, and a headboard that in moonlight provides enough sparkle to read by, courtesy of the clusters of small diamonds, each of them individually wired to an alarm. Wild rumours, but Celia likes them.

  For this particular création Herr Q has requested green, red and pink tourmalines, all in mixed cut, and she carefully puts together a selection, though not without slipping him three particoloured stones, including a large watermelon type in trap cut – for a bit of extra flavour, as it were.

  Angelina is all smiles, a bright young looking-forward-to-life-after-work smile. Her hair tied back so it crackles like a bundle of brushwood about to catch fire, she hums snatches of Madonna songs while weighing a consignment of cat’s-eye cabochons quickly and accurately. Sergio, the ex-devil from the Casino Mall Restaurant, had phoned her immediately she got back to the office after lunch, and they’ve arranged to meet at seven. It’s the night of her boyfriend’s evening classes, which means he won’t be free till after ten. Normally, this pisses Angelina off no end, but today it suits her just perfetto.

  At break time Angelina operates their new Comtesse de Luxe in the reception area like an old hand. Tipping coffee into the filter, she startles Celia, who’d been thinking of Alex again, almost feeling him inside, by suddenly talking about her own mother and how devastated she’d been at the death, two years earlier, of her mother. The old lady had apparently shared the house with them ever since Angelina was little. The girl is trying to be friendly, and Celia humours her.

  ‘Now Mamma has taken to visiting Nonna’s grave once a week like clockwork – same day, same time as when she died,’ Angelina is saying. ‘But for quite a while before that we weren’t even allowed to use Nonna’s name. If we did, Mamma would burst into tears and rush off. One night she left a pot of spaghetti on the hob and it boiled dry. Like a burnt-out bird’s nest it looked afterwards. And the pan was wrecked.’

  She pauses, fiddling with her crucifix, obviously hoping for a reply. Celia hazards a rather mechanical, ‘Yes, that’s to be expected,’ without turning her head. She isn’t really referring to anything specific. Unless she has the blackened dried-out pasta in mind. She is staring at a dichroic pink-and-red tourmaline, holding it up to the light till her eyes begin to hurt.

  ‘Sometimes, though, death brings relief too.’

  The voice sounds disembodied, far away, and carries on of its own accord:

  ‘Imagine you yourself are that pot. Simmering away. Steaming. Never allowed of
f the heat. Things getting scorched inside. Then pouf! goes the switch. And you find you’re half-cracked by now. All in a tingle. Cooling down very, very slowly. At long last.’

  Only when the voice stops does Celia realise it’s her own.

  In the silence that follows, the air around them seems to quiver as if it, too, was cooling down, until the Comtesse erupts in a sharp series of hisses, spurting hot milk.

  Drawn by the noise, Eric is making his Way through from the inner office, with Lapis dashing past him, tail going like a windmill in a gale.

  Eric doesn’t walk, Celia reflects, he waddles. His expensively cut trousers balloon about his belly, then flap deceptively over his old man’s stick legs. An eternal bachelor who’s got nothing better to do than read up on stones and more stones, with the odd Fémina chocolate melting on his tongue. Or sit glued to one of his microscopes, ogling at the cleavage of some gemstone or the drillhole of a pearl. Poor sad man. If it wasn’t for Lapis, he’d probably have fossilised ages ago, right there in his king-size swivel chair. Just like ‘Eric the Opalised Pliosaur’ from Australia, dead for the last hundred million years at least, whose skeleton picture she’s got pinned up above her desk.

  At the moment, however, Eric the man is very much alive and brandishing a recent edition of the Journal of Gemmology.

  ‘You should have a look at these abstracts, ladies,’ he says. ‘Very entertaining, very. Some of it old hat of course, but still. Ever heard of cat’s-eye rutilated quartz? Or the Sweet Home Mine in Colorado? The ancient supercontinent of Gondwana-land? Well, it’s all in here.’ He taps his reading glasses on the cover of the journal and chuckles, ‘Here for the taking.’

  Celia nods and smiles, thinking, ladies, mygod!

  Lapis, meanwhile, has leapt on to his favourite leather seat by the window and stands grinning his tongue off, trembling with excitement at the biscuits to come.

  Quarter past four and Celia can’t wait any longer. She must catch Alex before he leaves. They have to talk. Work something out. She’d like to do it again with him, soon, preferably on the bed for warmth and bounce. Or, even better, in the bath … Not that she intends to stir up trouble for him on the home front. She considers their affair more a kind of interim arrangement. For a split second the man in the fluorescent orange shirt flashes through her mind, Paolo he said his name was. Perhaps she could ask Angelina to suss his friend, and get the phone number off him. The mere idea makes her go weak at the knees.

  Earlier than usual she steps off the bus at the pink housing estate, thanks to Eric’s gratitude at having her back and partly to his – pardonable – misconception that she was really asking for time off to grieve in the privacy of her own four walls, at length and at her leisure. It’s freezing cold and Celia half-runs, half-slips along the ice-and-confetti-flecked pavement. She can hear Dr Caveng’s pills rattle about the envelope in her coat pocket. Behind Bänninger’s plate-glass window Deli-Doris is see-sawing at a chunk of cheese with a big square blade.

  Alex – she simply must see him.

  No sign of the van round the back, but the lights are on in the flat, thankgod. There are dark silhouettes on the walls where the shutters used to be. She breaks with her ritual of smelling the winter jasmine by the gatepost, whips open her letter box, grabs the paper, two letters and a postcard. Her breath comes quick and jagged now as she hurries towards the house, and Alex.

  The assistant has just finished locking up when she throws open the street door. He grins down at her, reinserts the key and says, ‘Hello and goodbye. Boss left at noon, with the rest of the shutters. Felt ill he said.’ He ushers her in, tipping his baseball cap like a second-rate hotel porter. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ is all Celia manages to croak as she pushes past him into the freshly crimson-papered mouth of the corridor. So that’s that. ILL, for chrissake! Trying to avoid her, more like. For an instant she is tempted to dial the Lehmanns’ home number. Instead she pours herself a large vodka, squeezes a blood orange into it because she hates tomato juice, and begins to sip. The coward.

  The postcard is from Nita and shows a female snowboarder in mid-jump, with the sun star-splintered behind her head in a kitschy gentian-blue sky. ‘Dear Cel,’ it says. ‘In case you fancy a change and some bracing Alpine air after all you’ve been through, you’re very welcome up here at Albula. Hope you’re okay. Love and kisses.’

  If things continue the way they’re going, she might very well take Nita up on this. Celia props the card against the vase with the black tulips.

  The heftier of the two letters, a recycled grey envelope with the imprint of the town council’s logo, contains the cantonal and federal vote proposals for the first quarter; maybe she will vote, maybe she won’t. Celia drops it on the pile of correspondence yet to be dealt with, on the worktop above the rubbish bin. The other letter looks nice and private. The address rather scrawly, the postmark illegible. A message now from the black-tulip man? Or from Alex?

  Dream on, she ridicules herself as she unfolds the Opium-scented thick cream-coloured paper. A small photocopy flutters to the floor, speckled black and white, and full of whorls, with a shape like a newt outlined in red. Jasmin writing to say, hey, it was great talking to you on Saturday and she’s got a little secret to reveal: she’s PREGNANT! Thirteen weeks into her term so it’s safe to announce to the world (at least as safe as can be). Tests and scans fine so far. Lovely ultrasound picture (enlargement enclosed), a bit grainy, though quite recognisably a thumbsucking little girl, beautiful – no? Name under wraps of course – have a guess! Birthday date all set: 15 August (Caesarean after that ordeal with Igor Junior). Baptism fixed for the second Sunday in October. Please keep that day free and your fingers crossed!

  Christ, so well ordered; Celia drains her vodka in one long gulp, then giggles until she gets the hiccups and, still hiccupping, prepares herself another, no orange juice this time but a thimbleful of tonic, for maximum effect.

  She won’t be in the mood for reading tonight, she can tell, and dear old Eric’s Christmas present, Gemstone-Smuggling in the Twentieth Century, will have to remain shelved beside the jar of colourful Pasta Festa fatto a mano from Angelina and the New Zealand wine-making kit. A quick glance at the paper, a blast of MTV while she’s having a bite to eat, that’s as far as she can plan right now. Alex, damnhim!

  The phone starts ringing and the echo swoops along the corridor, brrr … brrr … brrr, penetrating doorways and rooms with a crimson insistence that angers and frightens her. She huddles up so tight to the old-fashioned kitchen radiator she can feel the heat from its metal ribs scoring her back. Brrr … brrr …

  Once the flat has fallen silent again, she detaches herself and her singed cashmere sweater almost proudly, as if she’s won a reprieve. Jasmin’s letter lying open on the table reminds her of Dr Caveng’s pills and, having fetched the envelope from her coat, she shakes two on to her palm, washes them down with vodka. Pop one and stop one, she can’t help thinking, with more giggles. Then, glass in hand, she wanders over into her bedroom. Takes off her skirt and sweater for the hell of it, and switches on the nephrite lamp. She might as well inspect her gemstone collection.

  Over an hour later she wakes up, her nose buried in the velour of the inlay tray. Her forehead is throbbing, the skin puckered from the beads of rock crystal and the Australian boulder-opal cabochon (its shifting ripples of colour are the closest she’ll ever get to a Klimt original). There’s a faint tickly dustiness in her nostrils, strangely familiar …

  That’s when the memory ambushes her: a blazing summer’s day with the promise of cool lake water and smooth hot shingle, the dim shuttered lounge, carpet-musty – and terror. That old upside-down feeling coming back to haunt her, with a vengeance.

  the top of her head searing hot, grazing the floor –

  sweat and tears on her face and the blood pumping and pounding within –

  SMACK HER! –

  her mother’s hands on her ankles like leg-i
rons –

  the room juddering around her –

  no air –

  watery shadows slashed by sunlight –

  my fault –

  her grandmother’s feet tiny, out of reach –

  then her gnarled fingers, much too close –

  and, cloying and choking everything else, the hard unswallowable soreness in her throat –

  The memory still makes her flinch. After a pause she wipes some specks of dust off the sardonyx, the first gemstone she’d ever bought herself, banded a delicate red, brown and white. Next to it, the ruby sits in its corner compartment with what appears like a smug glow.

  As she leans forward to have a closer look, some flyaway strands of her hair frizzle out and cling to the small tourmaline figurine stowed at the back of the inlay tray. Celia laughs out loud – the stone has become electrically charged through the heat and pressure of her head. It’s carved in the shape of a woman. A naked woman with voluptuous curves, her minuscule nipples erect.

  Then Celia suddenly becomes serious. Yes, she realises, with a shiver that flits all over her body, yes, she is no longer a child. No longer that little girl at the mercy of her mother’s grip, and her grandmother’s excuses. YES!

  18

  THURSDAY COMES. Celia is lying in wait for Alex by the kitchen balcony door when the van pulls up below. That’s how desperate she is. Split right down the middle; pain on one side, longing on the other. She’d been skimming over yesterday’s paper to distract herself, but the reports and pictures of ferocious avalanches in the mountains – the worst in decades – don’t help: homes and trees razed to the ground like so many doll’s houses and papier-mâché woods, covered under masses of bilious-looking snow; people buried alive, freezing and suffocating slowly to death. Outside it’s snowing again, flakes upon dirt-yellow flakes falling straight as bead curtains through the fading glow of the streetlamps. And Alex hasn’t come.