Rainbow's End (24 page)

He also wondered why the garden tools, given the state of the bit of earth that lay between front door and public pavement. The other residents of Catchcoach Street might conceivably refer to similar patches as “my bit of garden.” But the Crippses' looked in a state of turmoil, clumps of weedy earth churned up, mounds of dirt beside gravelike holes, as if making way for whatever had died inside—dog, cat, gran.

It looked like that, yes. But Melrose was quite sure the overturned earth was not waiting to receive any Audenesque honored guest. No, these dugouts would serve no utilitarian purpose. No poet would be buried here, no beloved pet. The Crippses did not waste their time on fine feeling, nor were they even pragmatic. That old child's saying “A hole is to dig” found its ultimate expression in the Crippses. No, feelings were a waste. There was always too much to
do.
Like torturing one another or driving the neighbors round the twist.

Or, if it was truly a lucky day, a
stranger.

Seeing this one crossing the street towards them, the kiddies suspended all activity in an eyeblink and watched the Stranger with a voraciousness that all of the coyotes in New Mexico were eyeing Richard Jury with about now.

He drew abreast of them, smiled and asked pleasantly, “Mum home?” The point being that—unless Mum or Dad came to the door—there wasn't a hope in hell of crossing the Cripps threshold until this lot gave its permission. “Or Dad?” added Melrose, removing one of the small bags of candy from his pocket. He took out a fizzy bear and made himself chew it although it tasted like liquid sugar.

Twelve eyes—no, ten, for the sixth seemed to be too stupid to remove its blindfold and just stood with its mouth open—followed the progress of hand to mouth. The toddler had draped its sticky self around Melrose's leg to yank and yell.

The oldest of the bunch, a boy of perhaps ten or eleven, took over. Pretending to disdain the fizzy bears, he glared at Melrose. “So 'oo wants ter know?” and to the toddler he yelled, “Put a sock in it, Spanky!” and gave the child a right wallop across its rear, thereby ensuring an increase of volume.

“I do,” returned Melrose, calmly taking out another bag, this one of lemon sherbets. He sucked on one and watched a couple of the kiddies
lick their lips. Number six was still waddling around with its blindfold, arms thrashing. “I'm a friend,” he added.

“Oh,
yeah
? Mebbe she be home, mebbe not.”

“That fairly covers it, doesn't it?” Melrose took out a third bag and peered into its contents. Smartees. Ugh. He shoved two in his mouth and chewed slowly. The middle girl (of perhaps six) was jumping up and down, clutching herself as if the very sight of Smartees gave her a sexual thrill. She danced backwards toward the door, calling out, “I'll get 'er, I'll get—”

“
Shaddup
!” yelled the biggest boy, running to grab her back and making her fall in one of the freshly dug holes. Briefly, she cried and then gave it up to come back to where the action and the sweets were. Furious with Melrose for possibly making him lose control of the consortium, he stood hands on hips and repeated, “Mebbe so, mebbe not.”

“Make up your mind; I haven't all day.” Out came the bag of Rainbow Crystals, to audible “ooohs” and “aaahs.” The toddler unleeched its dirty hands and turned its runny-nosed, runny-eyed face up to Melrose and flailed its small hands towards the white screw of sweets. Melrose pinched up the colored sugar and popped it in his mouth. Four bags were now in evidence.

The blindfolded one had blundered around and was now running into the toddler. The older one yanked him back and told the “stupid, bleedin' li'l prick” to take off the bloody blindfold. The little girl who had been dumped in the dirt gave her brother a whack with a trowel.

Melrose drew out bag number five, buried his nose in it, then fingered out a Devon toffee that looked hard as a rock. Be damned if he'd eat that. He returned it to the bag.

The child, now minus blindfold, made a swipe at the bag, missed, and started to urinate very near Melrose's shoe.

“See, see!” yelled one of the girls. “Look what ya made Petey do!” The girl who had yelled this and the one who'd scrambled from the hole joined hands and swung each other round and round, singing

Piddlin' Pete, Piddlin' Pete

Give him somethin' sweet to eat

whereupon they collapsed in giggles.

When the last bag came out—the sour bats—they all went berserk, even the ringleader, at the realization there were
six
bags and
six
of them. They shouted, they screamed, they lunged for the bags which Melrose was holding beyond their reach. He had an uncomfortable moment recalling a shuddery scene in a Tennessee Williams play in which some poor devil is set upon by a bunch of horrid urchins. Well, he thought, he probably deserved it for so blatantly taunting Crippses.

Then, at the height of the game, the front door flew open, and White Ellie herself appeared, Dear Old Mum, in flowered overall. “You lot get in 'ere—” Then she saw Melrose. “Well, I'll
be
!” And she kept repeating this as she waded through the dirt, debris, toys, and mangled tools to where Melrose stood so that she could pick each of her kiddies off him as if she were dead-heading roses. “Now you get in t'yer tea!”

“Just a moment,” said Melrose, stopping them to bestow on each a white screw of sweets.

They grabbed, they yelled, they laughed, danced, they tore away to their tea, snatching at whoever's white bag was not fixed firmly in his or her hand.

 • • • 

DESPITE THE CUT-OFF SCREAMS
, breaking crockery, and the voice of White Ellie layering all the other sounds like a big thunderclap, Melrose was relaxing serenely in the parlor, congratulating himself on the use he had made of the sweets. He thought himself especially clever, since he hadn't purchased them with the Crippses in mind. Whatever in the world had made him buy six bags? God was in his Heaven, clearly. So now he felt rather pumped up, some of the old confidence come back, the bit that had drained out of him upon discovering Sergeant Wiggins might be smarter than he himself was. No, Wiggins had never outwitted the Cripps kiddies.
He
had outwitted them. The point was that it was all but impossible to outwit the Crippses, they being totally witless. And then in the midst of all of this self-congratulation he pursed his mouth and frowned. Was this, though, something a rational man could take pride in? Had he, perhaps, well,
lowered
his expectations of himself . . . ?

As he waited for White Ellie to reappear with his cup of tea, he went back to smoking, to blowing smooth little smoke rings in air. Here was certainly a place where one didn't have to wonder if smoking was permissible since it was obvious, glancing round the parlor,
that everything else on God's green earth was. Big-armed chairs and sofas abounded, jammed in as if the parlor were a secondhand shop like Ada Crisp's; stuffed in and piled up with old pillows and mountains of laundry waiting to be sorted by an act of God. Above the cold fireplace hung the head of a bobcat (probably brought down by some of the kiddies) that could have stood a bit of touching up by the local taxidermist. Table lamps rested on the floor, shades splayed as if to spotlight the carpet's faded cabbage roses like nocturnal lights in a garden. In one corner sat a dish of water which Melrose found puzzling. Leaning forward, he saw that wires seemed to be running into it. He shrugged and sat back to survey the wallpaper. This paper was fresh (well, Cripps-fresh), for he recalled the old wallpaper having a different pattern. But it was still familiar to him, as he knew it was the same as the wallpaper in the kitchen. So they must have found a few old rolls and redecorated. It was covered with those big, horrible-looking flowers (the name of which escaped him), the sort that had wide petals open around drooping stamens that closely resembled phalluses. The resemblance here had been marvelously enriched by the crayon-wielding kiddies. The similarity now was even more striking and quite a little conversation piece, he imagined, when guests came to call. Still, it fit the general graffiti-like theme, for doors and sills had been inked and Crayola-ed with various obscenities. He wondered if the two buckets stationed beneath damp spots on the ceiling were really for catching drips or for Piddlin' Pete. Both, probably.

White Ellie's voice preceded her. She chugged into the parlor with two mugs of tea, a small plate of iced biscuits, and one of her long-winded anecdotes, already in progress.

“. . . an' there be Rasputin, chuckin' the bleedin' furniture straight out the upstairs window, an' that wouldn't a been so bad except—'ere.” She handed Melrose his tea. “I sugared it fer ya.”

(Melrose murmured his thanks and turned the lipstick smudge on the rim outwards.)

She dropped into a deep dark armchair, redistributing a pile of laundry and resettling a balloon of dust. Her cigarette danced as she talked and seemed magically to cling to the corner of her mouth. “Except 'e's got this 'ere bonfire like going, and there goes me mum's antique petit point chair right on top of it. So I yells at 'im, ‘Rasputin, ya bloody fool, the fire brigade'll be 'ere any minute—' ”

Melrose waited smilingly and patiently for her to conclude her saga of Rasputin's Guy Fawkes adventure. White Ellie had a way of beginning her tales in the middle, with her interlocutor being totally in the dark about who the characters were or what their relationship to her was. She would have been a match for Homer, except that White Ellie would never manage to make the ends meet, as Homer had.

“. . . shed, that's wot! Rasputin decides it'd be a right laugh to burn t'shed out back and then 'ere comes t'Old Bill round
and
the Social—that's Missus Esposito lives down the street, an' don't
she
ever stick 'er long nose in. I says, ‘Wot's the Social doin' chasin' t' fire brigade?' ”

Her buzzsaw voice
brrr
ed away, rising to a screech or lowering to a whine as Melrose drifted in and out of a gentle fuguelike state, broken first by the volcanic eruption of kiddies out of the kitchen and up the stairs; second, by a commotion beyond the parlor window, which was partially open, even in February. He turned to look out and saw two people standing more or less in the middle of the street, obviously arguing, ignoring a Morris Mini trying to maneuver round them. The man was small, stooped, with a terrific overbite and a chin that disappeared into his neck; the woman was sharp-faced and shrew-voiced.

White Ellie hove herself from her chair, walked to the window, and yelled at this couple to “shaddup, I got company,” which invited a few hurled insults and did nothing to make them stop. She slammed down the window. “It's the Liar and Fuckin' Freddie. Make me sick, they do. Fight fight fight an' right outside me window. Where was I, then? Oh, yeah, well, Rasputin—”

Melrose looked over the plate of biscuits she had set beside him, selecting the one with the smallest amount of pinky icing. They were quite revolting looking, but appeared to be clean enough, and he wanted to be as good a guest as she was a hostess. As he bit into the chewy biscuit, his attention was diverted by the appearance of a very small mouse that had taken up a station by the dish of water on the floor. Definitely giving it the once-over. Well, he simply had to know. He interrupted the tale of Guy Fawkes revelries (the fire brigade, the entire police station) to point out the mouse to White Ellie.

She leaned way forward to twist her head to see. “Oh, that's Ashley's mousetrap. That there's Narcissus.” Then she returned to Rasputin.

Mousetrap? Narcissus? Perhaps they really were in the land of the Lotus-Eaters. “Just a minute. How could a dish of water trap a mouse?”

“Well, it don't, do it? It's one of Ashley's inventions. Now, them electric wires in the water is to electrocute any mouse that takes a drink. The only one even comes for a deco is Narcissus there. Friend of ours, Gabe Merchant, named him that.” When she grinned, a touch of gold winked in the light.

Ah! A wedge, a crack in the door—the mention of Gabe provided a smooth transition to the matter at hand. Not (he reminded himself) that one needed to use cunning with White Ellie. He watched as once again she wrestled her huge girth out of the chair and waddled to a shelf from which she plucked up a square of paper or cardboard. This she handed to Melrose. “See? Gabe painted 'is portrait.”

Melrose couldn't help but smile at the little drawing, later water-colored in, of a mouse by a water dish. It was extremely fetching and whimsical and put him in mind of Beatrix Potter. Two bright little eyes appeared to be asking, “Would you fall for this lot?” At the bottom the artist had penned in the name “Narcissus.”

“Cause 'e always be lookin' at hisself, Gabe said.”

Gabe, Melrose was pleased to discover, was imaginative.

“So I leave a bit of biscuit out fer that there mouse, but don't tell Ashley. 'E'd be ever so disappointed.” She lit another cigarette and waved out the match. “Was a dead mouse out in t' kitchen I brought in and put by the dish. Died from natural causes, it did, but Ashley didn't know that. Oh, he was ever so pleased. ‘Elephant,' 'e says, ‘Elephant, there's genius up 'ere,' an' taps 'is 'ead. A genius Ashley ain't.”

Melrose smiled, then laughed. He handed back the drawing, saying, “This painter, Gabriel Merchant? That his name?” White Ellie nodded. “He was in the Tate with a friend of his—”

“Bea Slocum, right.”

“They were both in the Tate when a woman named Frances Hamilton died.”

White Ellie let out a hoot and slapped her thigh. “Weren't they ever? Well, there Bea sat and this lady falls on 'er. I never.”

Melrose marvelled that it did not occur to her to question his visit, or to question his question. In White Ellie's world, it was all part of one giant tapestry, the warp and the woof, Rasputin and the Tate, the mouse and Melrose, the garden on fire and sudden death. White Ellie's approach to life was almost metaphysical.