The Ruby Slippers (3 page)

For Barell a bone
.

Michael peers across at Rosa, who bows her head, permitting no more communication. He turns away wearily, but then swings round again, unable to resist the words he has said so many times before: ‘For God’s sake, Aunt Rosa, take a bath, then we wouldn’t have this performance.’

Even as he says it, he sees his words are wasted. She gives away nothing, not a thing – or was that just the glimmer of a smile? Michael blinks in defeat. Inside the store he sees his daughter standing protectively at the shoulder of his granddaughter, and his wife next to her, that same old stern look on her face. He feels as if he has somehow failed them all; as if he could have said something; as if he could have done anything at all.

He steals a glance at Rosa before turning back for the warmth of the store, taking his time, of course, to thoroughly wipe his feet at the door.

■ ♦ ■

And that is why the three youths are hanging there outside the record store: to be in place to witness, again, the cheesy old comedy show play out between the stinking old woman, the uptight grocer man and the wide-eyed shop boy. To them, it’s a performance every bit as entertaining as the razzle-dazzle of the St Patrick’s Day Parade.

The smallest of them, Floyd, is by nature likeable and easy-going. The huge one, Dale, is clumsy and strong but harmless, though not bright. It is only the third guy, Harrison, who is remotely mean and dangerous; but the worst of them stands for them all. If Harrison draws long and lethal on a cigarette, and spits in that terrible way that he does, they’re a bunch of no-goods. If he curses out loud, they’re a fearsome gang; and if Harrison by chance meets the gaze of a passer-by and is too proud to turn away and conceal the hurting years that have made him what he is, then that stranger is going to conclude that this is a hateful bunch of guys. A loner by habit, Harrison prefers to walk alone, especially by night, seeking he knows not what and finding whatever he finds. But there is still enough generosity of spirit in him to be able to enjoy hanging out with the guys, laughing about stuff and taking some interest in what’s going down.

The moment Rosa’s sad figure has retreated away, it begins: the worn-out old argument that has happened as often as Old Rosa has come along this street and they have been there – which is just about every other day. They cannot resist, each taking his habitual position.

Floyd, who likes stories because they contain surprises, is quick to revive the legend that is the source of their differences: ‘She rich, I telling you. My old man tell me this, since I was so high.’

Harrison, who hates stories because experience has shown him that life holds no surprises, is fierce to deny it: ‘Don’t give me no shit!’

Big Dale, as usual, is content to listen, nodding his head, eyes growing wide on the meat of the quarrel as the guys battle to outdo each other with their own versions of the living truth.

‘She rich! That apartment she live in, man it stinks and it’s all shit an’ everything, just like you would imagine it, but she got big bucks in there too.’

‘So who seen it, Bro? Show me the man who seen it?’ At this, even Big Dale can’t resist chiming in, ‘I heard that. I heard that, too. I heard she got the money in the mattress.’ Which makes Harrison spit with contempt: ‘So, like she tell every nigger this? Like I say, show me the man; tell me the name of the person who seen it, cause it sure as shit ain’t so.’ Floyd, though, sticks with his side of the story: ‘There’s people been in there, like nurses and social workers an’ stuff. They say that once upon a time she been some kind of aristocrat an’ stuff. She got a whole lotta money, that for sure.’

But it’s Harrison who wins the day with a perfect one-liner: ‘An’ I got a crocka gold up my black ass!’ The others crack up at this. Impressed by his unaccustomed turn of phrase, they concede the last word to him, and he heads off down the road, feeling pretty cool about himself.

■ ♦ ■

The hospital is just around the next corner on Fifth and still his inner fury is not spent. But James knows when it comes to it that he will bow his head as a nurse dispenses here and a doctor deliberates there, and that he will speak with a small, holy voice as men do at
times like this
, and that he will put on the meek, sneaky role he has been allotted to play. For it is a sad fact that no one has told Paolo that he is going to die, nor has Paolo ever come close to asking. So if, by chance, he has not yet slipped into the cold embrace of a coma, James has prepared himself to talk to his dying lover about small, sweet things that have passed in the hours since his last visit. How the rain came down like hushed cymbals in the night. How he forgot altogether to eat and never noticed the passing of time. How the marmalade cat from downstairs crept into the apartment and curled up on Paolo’s vacant side of the bed. With each ephemeral phrase James knows that he will surrender Paolo to the great emptiness, and with each hollow utterance, something of the keen edge of his own humanity will be blunted.

In his savage preoccupation, James does not take in the weather, which, as it happens, is cold but sunny. Nearing the Park, he’s oblivious to the people hurrying past him so eagerly: the mother with her unruly brood; the old couple sharing a thrilling squeeze of hands; the ramrod man wearing medals. And all of them sporting faces made vacant for anticipated pleasures. James simply is not prepared, then, when a fat, brassy blast of music bounces along the Park railings, shaking him from his private stone. And then he sees it.

‘My God, the Parade!’

There it is, flouncing up the Avenue towards him. A teeming sea of banners and badges, of chests puffed like sails to fill tunic and tabard, of batons leaping like Masai competing for the sky.

Fine things are sometimes best encountered obliquely, when our senses are trained elsewhere: a beautiful woman glimpsed across a crowded carriage; a heavenly aroma beckoning from a rusty grate. Delights stumbled across can sometimes entice us from the hermit-cell of the mind. And so, all in a moment, James is alive with the knowledge that he is at the heart of a delicious thing. He stands in the bristling fuzz of people lining the sidewalk and gawps like a child. He catches the infection of smiles and laughs, as row upon row of heads go by, like coloured beads spilling from a box. Then he moves along with the thing, marries his own step to the serpentine train of humanity; marches with the drums and rides high with the pipes as they waft silkily along the bright avenue. What a wonder that a human spirit can, in the span of a sigh, soar from the darkest pit to the most rarefied peak.

Nor has James abandoned reality. In a few moments he will turn away from the Parade and continue his sober journey. But now he will be able to go into Paolo and – if he is not already gone – tell him that on the way to the hospital today he witnessed a fine, lovely thing. Indeed, he is duty-bound to take the glory of it with him. Maybe it will bring a smile to Paolo’s harrowed face, or perhaps he will be in that place where words and gestures cannot reach. But either way, James is certain it will mean something, it will mean something.

M
ARCINKUS
the grocer goes out front to loosen up and straighten out and swallow a coffee. The day has been so-so but bitty; it’s great to have Jenny’s help and to see little Sylvie, but when she and Benjy get together it’s like being in a kindergarten. Then there’s the question of Old Aunt Rosa. These frequent showdowns are unsettling because, if the truth be known, they make him feel guilty, and something in him still longs to hear her speak, to recapture a trace of the affection that had once existed between them. As her nearest relative, it had fallen on him to come to the rescue when she’d started to become strange all those years ago. At one time, he and Grace had given much to keep her on her feet and try to coax her back to the heady, happy life she’d once led. There had been kindnesses and high hopes, but each time she had relapsed until finally she had ended up like this – lonely and insane, pretty much. He knows that she has a bona fide condition. Syllogomania it is called: people who cannot throw things away, who hoard everything, their garbage even, and end up living in their own filth. He takes consolation in the fact that she has a recognized syndrome, but it never quite eases those guilty pangs.

Michael has seen people grow old. He has watched them struggling with seized joints, and slowing brains and memories blanching with the years. He has made a personal study of the phenomenon, doing his best to countenance the fact that he and Grace will surely go the same way. But what really gets to him about Old Rosa is how at eighty-seven years of age she is still able to keep on going with her stubborn rebellion. It must take a hell of an effort to remain so apart from the life of the city and yet to continue to walk abroad in it, repeating the tiresome routines it takes simply to continue to stay alive. It must take every atom of concentration, every last distilled drop of her willpower just to go out and buy bread in the morning, each step painful and empty of joy. How amazing, then, that she can at the same time keep the avenues of her senses so strictly closed off to the world. How exactly does she wake up each day, her mind moulded into the same negative cast? How do the molecules or electrical messengers, or whatever they are, in her brain stay fixed so doggedly around such cussed ideas? Why does she not simply fade away or disintegrate mentally, as so many of them do?

On top of all that there’s the matter of the boy Harrison. Once he had been their shop boy, just like Benjy, coming in after school and at weekends. They had hoped the job would take him from hard-working kid to boy made good. But he had blown it, crazily, once, twice, three times over, taking things from the shelves, denying it even when they found the items in his pockets. Had he himself not bent over backwards to keep him on long after others told him to make the best of a bad thing and let the boy go? It hurts Michael to recall how Harrison had accused them of picking on him when all they ever wanted was for the boy to make a go of things. It was him, so pig-headed and twisted in his thinking, going out of his way to be anything but good, that had forced their hand. And in the end, what with Grace having gotten so weighed down with anxiety that she became ill, the kid had left him no choice.

He peers across at the record-store entrance. The youths are no longer there. He counts back through the years, surprising himself: more than three since they let Harrison go. Three years – my God, the boy is a man now, pretty much, and still hanging around on corners, making nothing of himself. Michael slings back his head, drains the cup and goes back inside. The neat little Filipino maid woman is waiting patiently at the cold-meat counter. A polite, respectful person to serve. That’s something nice in the day at least.

■ ♦ ■

The smallest room in the house contains the biggest and ugliest of truths. Just to haul his dead weight from the wheelchair onto the toilet seat and back again has become an ordeal that leaves Malachi McBride holed-through. And in between, there are the pitiful fumblings and spillings that slay him with the knowledge that he is failing by the day. He has grown fearful of this place. With its anaemic tiles and ghostly mirrors, the bathroom is as heartless as any church confessional. At every angle, he sees his alienation captured and cast back, dead-eyed in the glass. And his other senses play their part in the same unnerving conspiracy. Fragrances belonging to soaps and lotions bring to McBride’s mind the sacraments, with incense in ghostly trails, turning his thoughts to mortality and, of course, to God: God the voyeur, the sadist; the mocking, sniggering bastard God! If he were a child he would cry and his mother would come and smooth away his tears. But there is no mother to come running, and this is a man who will not cry even in secret. He thinks instead about the true worth of the fortune he has amassed. What he wouldn’t give just to be able to stand square at the toilet and piss into it, a man again. But no, he will not cry, he will not open himself to pity, and he would punish anyone foolish enough to offer it. The world must pay.

Rinsing his hands at the washbasin, McBride hears the click of the latch out in the hallway. The nursemaid, Inez, has returned. Not even stopping to dry off, he spins the chair, flicks the lever and lunges the machine at the door, the kick plate slamming against a gash of wood in the paintwork that testifies to past injuries. The door flies open, and there he catches her, dramatized in shadows, wide-eyed like the heroine – or is it the victim? – in a silent movie. He knows that she will have stopped off at St Joe’s on the way home to light candles and pray for everything under the sun. He is certain of it; he can all but smell the ghastly place on her, and it inspires him with words to shake her from her cosy Catholic notions: ‘The day is fast approaching, my little rosebud,’ he declares, giving a jolly little tilt of the head and oozing a terrible kind of delight, ‘when you are going to have to wipe my sorry ass for me.’

A hair’s breadth ahead of him, Inez hangs her coat on the door, turns smartly away and carries her groceries into the kitchen, prompting him to pump up the volume: ‘When it’s easier to slit your wrist than take a shit, you just have to start thinking!’ Inez opens the refrigerator door and buries herself in domestic intricacies. Cheerily, she clucks away to herself: ‘Now did I or did I not already buy tomatoes?’

McBride heads for the kitchen, even so, noticing in a glance through the living-room picture window how the Park seems ethereal in the spring sunshine. But it does not stop his onslaught as he rolls into her space: ‘Do you pray for me, Inez? When you’re down on your knees in the church, do you pray for me with all your soul?’

With a theatrical sigh and a shake of the head, Inez withdraws the salad tray from the refrigerator and places the tomatoes side by side with the newly bought ones. ‘But there is much less than I thought of the lettuce,’ she clucks, suitably irritated. From the corner of her eye, she can see that McBride has crammed himself into every inch of the door frame and will have the last word. She gives up on matters salad-related and turns, wearily, to face him: well then, let him say his worst. Naturally, he does: