Stone Mattress: Nine Tales Read online

“Maybe some old boyfriend?” says the Klingon.

  “Oh, no,” says Constance. “More like a politician. Milzreth is very political. But I did put one of my old boyfriends into Alphinland. He’s in there right now. Only you can’t see him.”

  “Go on, tell us,” says the Borg Queen, smiling fit to kill.

  Constance turns coy. “It’s a secret,” she says. She looks behind her, fearfully, as if she suspects there’s a spy. “I can’t tell you where he is. I wouldn’t want to disturb, you know. The balance. That would be very dangerous for us all!”

  Is this getting out of hand? Is she, perhaps, a little crazy? The Borg Queen must think so because she’s cutting this off right now. “It’s been such a privilege, such an honour, thank you so much!” she says. “Boys and girls, a big hand for C. W. Starr!” There’s applause. Constance looks bewildered. The Klingon takes her arm.

  His golden Constance. She’s gone astray. She’s lost. Lost and wandering.

  Blackout.

  “Wasn’t that great? She’s so amazing,” says Naveena. “So, I thought maybe you could give me some idea … I mean, she practically said she put you in Alphinland, and it would be really a big thing for me – for my work – if I could figure out which character. I’ve narrowed it down to six, I’ve made a list with their different features and their special powers and their symbols and coats of arms. I think you must be the Thomas the Rhymer character because he’s the only poet in the series. Though maybe he’s more of a prophet – he has the second sight as his special power.”

  “Thomas the what?” says Gavin coldly.

  “The Rhymer,” says Naveena, faltering. “He’s in a ballad, it’s well known. You can find it in Childe. The one that was stolen away by the queen of Fairyland, and rode through red blood to the knee, and wasn’t seen on earth for seven years, and then when he came back he was called True Thomas because he could foretell the future. Only that isn’t his name in the series, of course: he’s Kluvosz of the Crystal Eye.”

  “Do I look like someone with a crystal eye?” says Gavin, straightfaced. He’s going to make her sweat.

  “No, but …”

  “Definitely not me,” says Gavin. “Kluvosz of the Crystal Eye is Al Purdy.” This is the most delectable lie he can think of. Big Al with his poems about carpentry and working in a dried blood factory, being stolen away by the queen of Fairyland! If only Naveena will put that into her thesis he will be forever grateful to her. She’ll work the dried blood into it, she’ll make it all fit. He keeps his mouth still: he must not laugh.

  “How do you know it’s Al Purdy?” says Reynolds suspiciously. “Gavvy’s a liar, you do realize that,” she says to Naveena. “He falsifies his own biography. He thinks it’s funny.”

  Gavin bypasses her. “Constance told me herself. How else?” he says. “She often discussed her characters with me.”

  “But Kluvosz of the Crystal Eye didn’t come into the series until Book Three,” says Naveena. “The Wraith Returns. That was way after … I mean, there aren’t any documents, and you didn’t know Constance any more by then.”

  “We used to meet secretly,” he says. “For years and years. In nightclub washrooms. It was a fatal attraction. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”

  “You never told me about that,” says Reynolds.

  “Baby,” he says. “There’s so much I never told you.” She doesn’t believe a word of this, but she can’t prove he’s fabricating.

  “That would change everything,” says Naveena. “I’d have to rewrite … I’d have to rethink my central premise. This is so … so crucial! But if you aren’t Kluvosz, who are you?”

  “Who, indeed?” he says. “I often wonder. Maybe I’m not in Alphinland at all. Maybe Constance blotted me out.”

  “She told me you were in it,” says Naveena. “In an email, just a month ago.”

  “She’s going scatty,” says Reynolds. “You can tell from that video, and it was shot even before her husband died. She’s mixed everything up, she probably can’t even. …”

  Naveena bypasses Reynolds, leans forward, widening her eyes at Gavin, dropping her voice to an intimate almost-whisper. “She said you were hidden. Like a treasure, isn’t that romantic? Like those pictures where you have to find the faces in the trees – that’s how she put it.” She wants to jig and amble, she wants to lisp, she wants to suck the last slurp of essence out of his almostvoided cranium. Avaunt, wanton!

  “Sorry,” he says. “I can’t help you. I’ve never read any of that crap.” False: he has read it. Much of it. It’s only confirmed his opinion. Not only was Constance a bad poet, back when she was trying to be one, but she’s a terrible prose writer as well. Alphinland: the title says it all. Aphidland would be even more accurate.

  “Excuse me?” says Naveena. “I don’t think that’s a very respectful way of … that’s an elitist …”

  “Can’t you find a better use for your time than trying to decipher that turgid puddle of frog spawn?” he says. “A fine specimen of womanhood like you going to waste, your cute butt withering on the vine. Getting any?”

  “Excuse me?” says Naveena, again. It’s evidently her fail-safe: the plea that she be excused.

  “Any scratch for your itch. Any humpety-hump. Any sex,” says Gavin. Reynolds digs him in the ribs with her elbow, hard, but he ignores her. “There must be some jolly thriving wooer who’s putting it to you. Much better a good healthy fuck for a beautiful girl like you than wasting your eyesight footnoting that drivel. Don’t tell me you’re a virgin! That would be preposterous!”

  “Gavin!” says Reynolds. “You can’t talk to women like that any more! It isn’t …”

  “I’m not sure my private life is your concern,” says Naveena stiffly. Her lower lip is quivering, so maybe he’s hit it right. But he won’t let her off.

  “You have no scruples about delving into mine,” he says. “My private life! Reading my journal, rummaging in my papers, sniffing around my … my exgirlfriend. It’s indecent! Constance is my private life. Private! I don’t suppose you ever thought about that!”

  “Gavin, you sold those papers,” says Reynolds. “So now it’s public.”

  “Bullshit!” says Gavin. “You sold them, you double-crossing bitch!”

  Naveena closes up her red tablet, not without dignity. “I think I should go,” she says to Reynolds.

  “I’m so sorry,” says Reynolds. “He gets like that sometimes,” and the two of them are up, up and away, ooing and oodling and so-sorrying their way down the hall. The front door shuts. Reynolds must be walking the girl to the taxi stand in front of the Holiday Inn a couple of blocks away. They’ll be talking about him, no doubt. Him and his tetchy outbursts. Maybe Reynolds will be trying to repair the damage. Or maybe not.

  It will be a frigid evening. Bets are that Reynolds boils him an egg and then plasters on a glitter face and goes dancing.

  He let himself get angry; he shouldn’t do that. It’s bad for the cardiovascular. He needs to think about something else. His poem, the poem he’s writing. Not in the so-called study, he can’t write in there. He shuffles into the kitchen, retrieves his notebook from the drawer in the telephone table where he likes to keep it, locates a pencil, then makes his way out the garden door and down the three tiled steps to the patio and carefully across it. The patio is tiled too and can be slippery around the pool. He achieves the deck chair he’s been aiming for, lowers himself down.

  The fallen leaves revolve in the eddy; maybe Maria will come in silently in her denim shorts with her skimmer and skim them out.

  Maria skims the dying leaves.

  Are they souls? Is one of them my soul?

  Is she the Angel of Death, with her dark hair,

  with her darkness, come to gather me in?

  Faded wandering soul, eddying in this cold pool,

  So long the accomplice of that fool, my body,

  Where will you land? On what bare shore?

  Will you be nothing
but a dead leaf? Or …

  No. Too much like Whitman. And Maria’s just a nice, ordinary high school girl making a few extra bucks, dime a dozen, nothing special. Hardly a nymphet, hardly the beckoning sapsucker from “Death in Venice.” How about “Death in Miami?” Sounds like a TV cop drama. Dead ends, dead ends.

  Still, he likes the idea of Maria as the Angel of Death. He’s about due for one of those. He’d rather see an angel at his dying moment than nothing at all.

  He closes his eyes.

  Now he’s back in the park, with Richard the Third. He’s had two paper cupfuls out of the martini thermos, he needs to pee. But it’s the middle of a scene: Richard, in leather gear and carrying an outsized whip, is accosting Lady Anne, who’s escorting the bier of her murdered husband. Lady Anne has been costumed in an SM fetishist outfit; while performing their venomous duet they take turns setting their boots on each other’s necks. It’s preposterous, but when you come to think of it, it all fits. He skewers her husbuddy, she spits at him, he offers to let her stab him, and so forth. Shakespeare is so kinky. Was ever woman in this fashion won? Check the box for Yes.

  “I’m off to take a leak,” he says to Rey when Richard has finished bragging about his conquest of Lady Anne.

  “It’s back there by the hot dog stand,” says Reynolds. “Shhh!”

  “Real men don’t piss in porta-potties,” he says. “Real men piss in the bushes.”

  “I’d better come with you,” Reynolds whispers. “You’ll get lost.”

  “Leave me alone,” he says.

  “At least take the flashlight.”

  But he declined the flashlight as well. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. He ambles off into the darkness, fumbles with his zipper. He can hardly see a thing. At least he’s missed his feet: no warm socks this time. Relieved, he zips and turns, ready to navigate back. But where is he? Branches brush his face: he’s lost track of the direction. Worse: the foliage may be filled with thugs, waiting to mug such a witless target. Shit! How to summon Reynolds? He refuses to wail for help. He must not panic.

  A hand seizes his arm, and he wakes with a start. His heart’s pounding, he’s breathing quickly. Calm down, he tells himself. It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem.

  The hand must have belonged to Reynolds. She must have followed him into the shrubbery, with the flashlight. He can’t remember, but that’s how it has to have been, because otherwise he wouldn’t be here in this deck chair, would he? He would never have made it back.

  How long was he asleep? It’s twilight. Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower. Just a song at twilight. What a Victorian word; nobody says twilight anymore. Still to us at twilight comes Love’s sweet something or other.

  Time for a drink.

  “Reynolds,” he calls. No answer. She’s abandoned him. Serves him right. He didn’t behave very well this afternoon. But it was enjoyable, not behaving well. You can’t talk that way. Sod that, who says he can’t? He’s retired, he can’t be fired. He chuckles to himself.

  He levers himself out of the deck chair, points himself towards the steps up to the house. Slippery on the tiles, and it’s so dim out here in the yard. Crepuscular, he thinks: it sounds like a crayfish. A spiky, hard-shelled word, with pincers.

  Here are the steps. Lift the right foot. He misses, cascades, impacts, abrades.

  Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?

  “Oh my God!” says Reynolds when she finds him. “Gavvy! I can’t leave you alone for a minute! Now look what you’ve done!” She bursts into tears.

  She’s managed to drag him onto the deck chair and prop him in place with the two pillows; she’s wiped off some of the blood and stuck a wet dishtowel onto his head. Now she’s on the phone trying to locate an ambulance. “You can’t put me on hold!” she’s saying. “He’s had a stroke, or else … This is supposed to be an emergency service! Oh fuck!”

  Gavin lies between the pillows, with something neither cold nor hot trickling down his face. It isn’t twilight after all because the sun’s just setting, a glorious pinkish red. The palm fronds are waving gently; the circulation pump is throbbing, or is that his pulse? Now the field darkens, and Constance is hovering in the middle of it; the old, withered Constance with the masklike makeup job, the pale, wrinkled face he saw on the screen. She looks at him with bewilderment.

  “Mr. Potato Head?” she says.

  But he pays no attention to that, because he’s moving through the air towards her, very quickly. She doesn’t get any nearer: she must be flying away from him at the same speed. Faster, he urges himself, and then he closes the gap and zooms right up close, then in through the black pupil of her blue, bewildered eye. Space opens up around him, so bright, and there is his Constance, young again and welcoming, the way she used to be. She smiles happily and opens her arms to him, and he enfolds her.

  “You got here,” she says. “At last. You’re awake.”

  DARK LADY

  • • • • • • • • •

  Every morning at breakfast, Jorrie reads the obituaries in all three of the papers. Some of the writeups make her laugh, but to the best of Tin’s knowledge none of them has ever made her cry. She’s not much of a sniveller, Jorrie.

  She marks the noteworthy dead people with an X – two Xs if she plans to attend the funeral or the memorial service – and hands the papers across the table to Tin. She gets the real paper papers, delivered right to their townhouse doorstep, because according to her they skimp on the obituaries in the digital versions.

  “Here’s another,” she’ll say. “ ‘Deeply missed by all who knew her,’ I think not! I worked with her on the Splendida campaign. She was a sick bitch.” Or else: “‘Peacefully, at home, of natural causes.’ I doubt that very much! I bet it was an overdose.” Or: “Finally! Creepy Fingers! He groped me at a company dinner in the ’80s with his wife sitting right beside him. He was such a lush they won’t even have to embalm him.”

  Tin himself would never go to the funeral of someone he dislikes, unless it’s to comfort some needy survivor. The early days of AIDS were hellish; it was like the Black Death: walltowall funerals, widespread numbness and glazed disbelief, survivors’ guilt, a run on the handkerchiefs. But for Jorrie, loathing is an incentive. She wants to tap dance on the graves, figuratively speaking; neither of them is up to the actual dancing any more, though he at least was an agile rock ’n’ roller in high school.

  Jorrie wasn’t agile, as such; more like enthusiastic. She was rangy, she was coltish, she flung herself around, and her hair slipped out of restraint. But the gang thought it was neat when the two of them took the floor together, on account of their being twins, and he could make Jorrie look like a better dancer than she was: it was his calling from childhood to defend her when possible from her own impetuousness. Also, dancing with her gave him a short respite from whatever belle of the ball he was supposed to be going out with. He had his pick, he played the field. Best that way.

  Astonishing to him how popular he’d been with the teenaged lovelies; but not surprising, when he comes to think of it. He’d had a sympathetic manner, and he’d listened to their plaints, and had not tried to disrobe them violently in parked cars, though he’d done the mandatory spate of postdance necking so they wouldn’t think they had halitosis. When extra favours were offered, including the unhooking of the pointytitted wired bra and the peeling off of the adhesive pantygirdle, he would considerately decline.

  “You’d hate yourself in the morning,” he’d counsel them. And they would have hated themselves, and cried on the telephone, and begged him not to tell; and also they would have feared pregnancy, as kids did in those days before the pill. Or they might even have hoped for it, with a view to trapping him in an early marriage – him, Martin the Magnificent! What a catch!

  Nor did he ever tell boastful fibs about them, as lesser, pimplier youths were in the habit of doing. When the subject of his prev
ious night’s adventures would come up in the chilly, nofrilly, nakedwillie boys’ locker room, he would smile enigmatically, and the others would grin and nudge one another and wallop him on the arm in a brotherly fashion. It helped that he was tall and nimble, and a star at track and field. The high jump was his specialty.

  What a rascal.

  What a gent.

  Jorrie doesn’t want to tap dance on the graves alone because she doesn’t want to do anything alone. If she keeps at it she can nag Tin into attending these doleful bunfests with her, even though he says he has no desire to be bored out of his cranium by a crowd of fauxgloomy old farts gumming the crustless sandwiches and congratulating themselves on still being alive. He finds Jorrie’s interest in such terminal rites of passage excessive and even morbid, and has told her so.

  “I’m only being respectful,” she says, at which Tin snorts. It’s a joke: neither of them has ever made respectfulness a priority except for outward show.

  “You just want to gloat,” he replies; and Jorrie snorts in her turn because this is so accurate.

  “Do you think we’re brittle?” she’s been known to ask him. Terrific sense of humour is one thing, but brittle is another.

  “Of course we’re brittle,” he has answered. “We were born brittle! But seek the bright side: you can’t have much taste unless you’re brittle.” He doesn’t add that Jorrie fails to have much taste anyway; less, as time goes on.

  “Maybe we could have been brilliant psychopathic murderers,” she said once, perhaps a decade ago, when they were barely in their sixties. “We could have committed the perfect crime by killing a total stranger at random. Pushed them off a train.”

  “Never too late,” Tin replied. “It’s certainly on my bucket list. But I’m waiting till we get cancer. If we’ve got to go, we’ll go in style; take a few with us. Deburden the planet. More toast?”

  “Don’t you dare get cancer without me!”

  “I won’t. Cross my heart and spit. Unless it’s prostate cancer.”