“Please, Mrs. Tefler, can’t we just stop this?”
“You,” Maggie says, “are nothing but a slut, and the sooner you are outa here, the better.”
And so, as the sun sinks slowly into the saltchuck, we bid farewell to Maggie Tefler, friend of fallen womanhood.
Fan Brady’s house in North Vancouver is at the top of a steeply sloped street, Begonia Road. Looking out the front window of Morag’s apartment, you can see the harbour, and beyond that, the tall city, looking cleaner and more stately from this distance than it really is. Looking out from the back balcony, you can see the pine and tamarack marching up the mountainsides. The entire top floor of the two-storey house belongs to Morag. She sleeps in the livingroom where the couch makes up into a bed, and gives the bedroom to Pique. At first, Morag is nervous thinking of the child alone in there–what if the cot blankets slip and she smothers? This is, of course, ridiculous. Pique at four months is active and strong as an eel, a born little scrapper. There is no way that kid would ever lie there passively and let some feeble blanket suffocate her. Her voice, also, has if anything grown in power. Hence another anxiety. Pique may not smother, but will she yell and disturb Fan, who will then order Morag out? Fan, however, works nights, sleeps days and is only in evidence in the late afternoon. Pique, luckily, does most of her lung exercise in the evenings.
Fan Brady does, as Julie said, take some getting used to. It is impossible to tell her age, but she is probably close to thirty. She is tiny, bird-boned, but well-endowed withal, and she cares tenderly for her body, constantly smearing perfumed and pastel-tinted creams and ointments on various parts of herself, whoever happens to be present. False modesty is one thing Fan
hasn’t got. She wears her flaming auburn hair in an odd assortment of ringlets, frizz and spitcurls like a calendar girl from the Mary Pickford era, and yet on Fan this coiffure doesn’t look old-fashioned. Her face isn’t beautiful–it isn’t even pretty. In fact, facially, she rather resembles a monkey. She is well aware of this, and doesn’t give a damn. When she has applied her false eyelashes, green eyeshadow, orange lipstick, and multitudinous other bits of makeup, she looks weird. But from a distance, possibly, and under coloured lights, there would be a certain circus sequinned splendour about her.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she says, that first day. “You get settled in okay? Want a beer?”
“Thanks.”
Fan twirls across to the fridge, her apricot nylon housecoat frothing around her. She is devoid of makeup at the moment, and her face is drawn tight and hollowed by whatever it is she has lived through, but she moves with speed and lightness.
“Now, let’s get this straight, sweetheart,” she says. “I don’t give a fuck what you do here, just so long as you don’t do too much tramping around when I’m asleep. I gotta get my sleep or I’m dead. Not that I’m that easily wakened, once I get to sleep, the amount of Seconal I take. I wish I could sleep without them, but I can’t. You’d think in all this time I’d of gotten used to sleeping days, but no.”
Fan Brady is, in her own terminology, a danseuse, and she works at a nightclub called, with more publicity than accuracy, The Figleaf.
“Don’t get me wrong, sweetheart. I am not yer common-or-garden stripper. Not by a long shot. I am a dansoose. How about that, eh? Makes it sound good. The Figleaf is just another clipjoint, actually, but in a slightly classy way, legal
and not too crude. Spicy but genteel, is the management’s slogan, ha ha. Well, never mind, I can laugh, but I tell you, sweetheart, my work is an Art. It is definitely an Art. I am a pro, I will tell you that. Not like some of these kids, all bump and grind–they think if you’ve got a decent pair of tits, you don’t need to learn nothing. I am definitely not like that. I work at it. I exercise daily. I practise. I go on the Swedish milk diet coupla days each month–can’t afford a spare tire around my belly. It’s my work and I take it serious. Not that all them slobby salesmen appreciate it. I don’t do it for them, the cheap bastards. It’s my pride. That’s what it is.”
Morag is fascinated. Does fiction prophesy life? Is she looking at Lilac Stonehouse from
Spear of Innocence
? Fan Brady, though, hasn’t got Lilac’s naïveté. Fan is tough in the spirit, wiry and wary in the soul. She is not really like Lilac at all, of course. She is almost the opposite. And yet, looking at Fan now is almost like looking at some distorted and older but still recognizable mirror-image of Lilac. There is a sense in which Fan
has
that same terrifying innocence, expressed in different ways.
“That Julie,” Fan says. “I’m really fond of her, and I’ll miss her, but she was soft in the head, if you ask me.”
“How do you mean, Fan?”
“She actually felt bad, leaving Buckle, you know that? Save your tears, sweetheart, I kept on telling her. Don’t waste them on that crumb. But oh no. She can’t stand the guy, but still she feels bad about it. Can you beat it?”
“It doesn’t sound so strange to me,” Morag says.
“Like fun it doesn’t. That guy is a bastard through and through. An asshole. And she feels sorry for him! She should of fed him arsenic years ago.”
“Well, it’s not that simple, I guess.”
“Yer damn right it’s simple,” Fan says. “It’s plain as daylight.”
There is obviously going to be one area which Morag and Fan will not be able to discuss. Something, of course, has made Fan this way. How much is foisted upon a person and how much is self-chosen to mesh gearlike with what is already there? How far back does anything start?
“You want to see Pique?” Morag asks, anxious to avoid argument right now.
“What? Oh, your kid?”
“Yes. She’s asleep upstairs.”
“Yeh, sure, I guess so. I don’t go much on kids, to tell you the truth. I’m not what you’d call the maternal type. I had to look after a whole bunch of young brothers and sisters when I was a kid, and it kind of put me off. How many abortions you think I’ve had, Morag?”
“My God, I don’t know. How many?”
“Five.” Fan says coolly. “Five.”
“That’s–awful. That must have been terrible for you.”
“I never batted an eyelid,” Fan says.
But why had she got pregnant all those times? As a clueless sixteen-year-old, perhaps. But after that, what compulsion? Morag does not bring up this question, nor will she, ever.
Pique, sleeping, is as near perfection as it would be possible to get. Faintly smiling, small pinkbrown hands closed but not tightly, the fingers unfolding one by one, like petals.
“Very nice,” Fan says stiltedly. “I suppose you’re not getting a nickel out of her dad?”
“I never asked him. It was–it wasn’t like that. He knows about her. It’s all right.”
“You should have your head examined, Morag, that’s all
I can say. If I was you, I would put the screws on him, but good. It might not get you anywhere. He’d try to weasel out, I’d bet. But at least you could try.”
“Look, Fan–just don’t tell me what to do for my own good, eh? Not ever. Okay?”
Fan looks up, surprised.
“Hey, take it easy, sweetheart. I only meant–”
“I know. But don’t. That’s the one thing I can’t take.”
“Okay, okay. I get the message. C’mon down and have another beer. I wanna ask your advice.”
“
My
advice?” This is certainly a quick change.
Fan laughs, a high trilling like a nervous song sparrow.
“Sure. Wait till I show you.”
“Show me what?”
“You’ll see.”
Back downstairs, Fan begins shaving her legs while talking.
“Well, I’m changing my act, see? I figger it’s time I got a speciality. I’m not getting any younger. I’ll be thirty-four next month, although I never admit to more than twenty-five.”
Thirty-four. Ye gods. And what of the future? What of the future for a writer, if it comes to that? But at least Morag isn’t dependent upon her shape, which in the course of years can only get worse, in one way or another.
“So what’re you going to do, Fan?”
“I’m gonna become a snake dancer.”
“A
what
?”
“You heard me. I’m practising right now. I just got it the other day. I met this guy who knew a guy who had an African python for sale, so I bought it.”
“Fan,” Morag says, in a deadly quiet voice, “
where is it?
”
“In the basement.”
“The basement!” Morag yells. “For christ’s sake, you’re a madwoman! What if it gets loose?”
Pique, strangled not by the coverlets on her cot, but by a python.
A python.
Slithering coils of slippery and probably slimy steel.
“It won’t,” Fan says, enjoying this. “I give it a quarter-tranquillizer from time to time. The guy I bought it from says it’s mostly in a comose state.”
“In a what state? Oh, you mean comatose.”
“Pretty handy with the big words, aren’t you?” Fan says irritably, her drama momentarily dimmed.
“Sorry. But hell, Fan, you can’t keep a python in the house. It’s–well, it could be lethal.”
“It’s harmless as a kitten. They don’t have no poison, you know, pythons.”
“No, they just curl around your windpipe and choke you to death. I warn you–if that thing comes near Pique, I’ll kill you with my bare hands. I mean it.”
What to do? Move out instantly? To where?
“Worry not, sweetheart,” Fan says placatingly, observing that Morag really does mean it. “C’mon–I went and had a look at your pet, so now you come and have a look at mine.”
Pet. Child. Oh jesus, deep waters, deep waters. What has Morag got herself into?
The python, looking dead, and less large than Morag has imagined, lies asleep in a cage in the basement. The cage has a handle on top, for easy transportation to the club. It is covered with fine wire mesh, Morag is somewhat reassured to notice. The snake is gaudily patterned in brown and cream, and is really quite beautiful, if you like that sort of thing.
“I call it Tiny,” Fan says.
This lady is nutty as crunchy peanut butter. And yet, against all reason, Morag is beginning to like her. Tiny, yet. Merciful heavens, what a choice of name. All the same, Morag vows to keep the upstairs door bolted and locked at all times.
Over another beer, Fan elaborates.
“I gotta get me another name, see, Morag? Something kind of oriental-sounding, know what I mean? So I thought, seeing as how you’re a writer, you might dream one up for me. Princess something-or-other, I thought.”
“Holy God, Fan, that’s some request. I’m not an advertising copywriter.”
“For you, it’ll be easy,” Fan says confidently.
Morag thinks for a while.
“What about Sapphire?”
“No. I don’t think so. Not enough zing.”
“Hm. Well. Let’s see. Zarathustra?”
“Too fancy. Nobody could say it.”
Morag thinks again. Then inspiration strikes.
“Eureka–I think I’ve got it!”
“That’s it!” Fan cries, swivelling her hips gleefully on the way to the fridge.
“Huh?” Morag says, momentarily uncomprehending.
“What you just said.”
“Eureka? That’s just–it’s an expression. I think it means ‘I’ve found it,’ or something like that. From this ancient Greek philosopher, who–well, never mind. I was going to suggest–”
“Never mind what you were going to suggest. That’s my new name. Princess Eureka. Print it down nice and big so I can see how it’ll look on the billing.”
So Morag prints.
PRINCESS EUREKA
S
NAKE
D
ANCER
O
RIENTAL
D
ANSEUSE
Dances With Real Live Python!
Thrilling!
Exotic!
“Gee, that’s great,” Fan says. “Thanks a million, Morag.”
“Any time. No charge. I’ll be your advertising consultant.”
“Times are sure looking up,” Fan remarks. “You’re not really scared of Tiny, are you?”
“I wouldn’t touch that creature with a ten-foot pole,” Morag says fervently.
“I’m not ascared of snakes,” Fan says modestly. “I got used to them as a kid. I grew up in the Okanagan. My old man had a little fruit ranch, there. He was a worthless hunk of humanity, if ever there was one. My mum and us kids ran the place. We had a lotta snakes around–great big bull snakes, and garter snakes and all kinds. Only dangerous sort was the rattlers. We used to take our two German shepherd dogs along when we went up to the orchards. They were like devils whenever they seen a rattler. They never got bit, ever. Snakes are okay if you know how to handle them. It’s very simple with rattlers. You just kill ’em.”
“Oh, very simple. Better you than me.”
“But Tiny, there, he’s friendly. I bet you think a snake feels slimy, eh?”
“Yeh.”
“Well, they don’t. They’re smooth and dry, sort of dusty-feeling. You’ll see.”
“That’ll be the day.”
Later, upstairs, Morag thinks about Fan Brady. Lilac Stonehouse begins to look like pretty pale stuff in comparison. Could you get a Fan Brady down on paper? Only an approximation. Even the name of the club, for heaven’s sake. “The Figleaf” is much better than “Crowe’s Cave.”
And you think Fan Brady’s crazy?
Memorybank Movie: Travelling On
Snapshot:
Pique, age one, sits on the front steps of the house on Begonia Road. Her sturdy legs are stretched to their small length in front of her, and her feet are encased in new white shoes, high around her ankles so she will learn to walk steadily. She wears a yellow dress, very short, patterned with butterflies green and mauve and blue. Her straight black hair is still not very long and is brushed carefully for the picture. Her round face is unsmiling but not unhappy. Her large dark eyes look openly and with trust at the person behind the camera, namely her mother.
Pique’s first birthday is over, and she is asleep. Morag and Fan are having a beer on Morag’s balcony. In the garden below, the forsythia is in yellow flower, and the leaves are beginning to come out on the big dogwood tree. The evening air is faintly bright and warm, and there is a smell of salt, the breeze now blowing from the sea. In the distance the white gulls glide, riding the wind.
“You oughta get out more,” Fan says disapprovingly. “You go on devoting the whole of your entire life to that kid,
and I’m here to tell you what’ll happen, sweetheart. She’ll grow up and leave without a backward glance.”