Leather Wings (15 page)

There. Is it the right one? What did he do with his mother’s key, must have left it somewhere in the flat? Never mind he won’t need that key again.

“It’s a key.”

“I want you to unlock the door.”

“Yes? Shall I get the doctor? Or Mrs Wallace?”

“No! I don’t want the doctor! I’ve got my own things in my briefcase. You know my case?”

“Mmm.”

“Fetch it. Please. Then I want you to go —” Fly away ladybird. This house is on fire. “I want you to go round the corner — to the shop. Any shop. Tell them your name, and Esther’s name.”

“And your name. I’ll bring the amberlance.”

“No! Not my name! You’ll get me … in trouble. Don’t bring anyone. Just tell them… your name. Just that. I can’t look after you. I’m sorry.”

She frowns. “What have you done? Is it the money? I found the money, on the sofa.”

Wallace groans and puts a hand up over his mouth.

“Are you going to sick up?”

“Please! Take the key!”

Jania holds the key, which is on a piece of perspex with a fern leaf trapped in it. She whisks it thoughtfully from side to side. “I stole something once. Not money. Money’s awful, they could put you in prison for money. It’s all right I won’t tell. I’ll get your ointment bag.”

“Yes. Please. Then go. I want to see you unlock the door — it’s a bit … stiff.”

“Don’t you like me now?”

“Yes! Of course I — I do like you, of course. A lot. But you need —”

“It’s all right,” Jania says, putting the key down on the floor. “You’ve forgotten — Daddy’s coming. I’ll wait for Daddy. I’ll look after you. I might be a nurse when I grow up.”

A tear, a real tear seems to be moving slowly on Wallace’s greasy cheek. It pops off his cheek like a tiny balloon and
another one has inflated out of his other eye on to the other cheek. Jania leans in and pats his bristly face with a mixture of curiosity and concern. He is growing a beard. Pat pat, she goes.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m tired. I just feel tired. It’s all right.”

“Hmm. Well, I’m not going. You can go to sleep if you’re tired. I’m going to wait here with you until they come. Night night.”

E
STHER WAKES TO
find Rex kneeing her rhythmically in the back. It is not quite morning; the swirling patterns on the bedroom curtains are not properly defined by daylight and yet there is enough morning in the room to show the time on the digital clock. Five fourteen. There he goes again, putting his knee viciously into her flesh.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know. Waking you up.”

“I know that. But why?”

He buries his unshaven chin in her shoulder and bites her, not too hard but hard enough, in her neck.

“What is this?”

“Just reminding you, that’s all.”

“Reminding me of what?”

“Me. You have a husband here in bed with you. Old Rex, remember?”

“We have been introduced,” Esther says. She begins to sit up in bed, yawning, but he bats her down again with the back of his wrist. “Ouch!”

“I’m so angry. I want to kill you! Okay?”

She looks at him, askance. “No, it’s not okay. Actually.”

“Oh, I’m not going to do it. I just want you to know how I feel.”

“Rex.” She reaches out her hand and tries to touch him in the old way. “I think I do know. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“You’re not sorry, don’t give me that bullshit. You wish you hadn’t told me — why
did
you tell me? Did it make you feel better, was that it?”

“It was over. I wanted it over.”

They lie for a moment thinking about this on their backs, twin effigies on a tomb.

After a while Rex says hopefully, “Is that true?”

“Yes, of course it is.”

“Prove it.” He rolls towards her, presenting his flesh as if for a new experimental surgical technique. Operate on me. He
is asking to be transplanted from middle age and adulterous wives. Then he drops his head back in her neck and begins to sob, heaving. She strokes him, she is starting to remember who he is, the old tenderness. How could she have done this to Rex, reduced him to this quaking bag of misery, this heart-rending, heart-rent Steven Spielberg creature sobbing as if he will expire and become an airless toy? She has done this. Could she undo it?

Then the phone goes. Something has happened at last. The body of the old lady, Wallace’s “dotty” mother, has been discovered by an evening milk vendor who noticed her front door swinging open. There are no suspicious circumstances, she is simply dead of hypothermia and/or influenza. However, a routine check of the premises has produced some interesting evidence.

“We think Mr Wells might have been here, recently. Also we’ve discovered there’s another property, a flat that belonged the Mr Wells senior …”

“So? So why haven’t you got him?” She flexes her bare toes in the carpet pile and bites one finger; she can feel her heart turning over, racing like an engine.

“We’re going in this morning. You can’t rush these things. We’ll consult with the psychologist and work out the best way to approach him. We don’t want him to feel threatened; he could panic. It only takes one slip.”

“What do you mean?” A slip of the tongue? A slip of the knife? Supposing the Rawleigh’s man has a death wish? Then she hears herself sounding business-like, bossy, herself again. “I’ll get on a plane. Where do I come to?”

“We’ve been trying to locate Mr Barton, he isn’t answering his phone. You don’t —?”

“I’ll contact him.” She can’t wait to ring off and make her arrangements to fly north. “Do you actually know that Jania’s with — with Mr Wells?”

“No. We don’t. I’m sorry. But we have to assume she is.”

Rex is standing in his mauve bare feet rounding his eyes at her. “Well?”

“They think they’ve found them — him anyway. He’s not down South at all. I have to ring the airport; I’m going up there.”

“To Auckland?” He narrows his eyes at her.

“You heard. Yes. That’s where he is — they’re fairly sure. He’s been at his mother’s place — they found her dead — no, don’t worry he didn’t do it. But they know where he is, or think they do, and they’re … What are you looking at me like that for?” She has thrown her nightgown off and is wrenching a skirt from its wardrobe hanger.

“Don’t you want me to come?”

“Do you want to? Rex, I don’t think you should travel.”

“I thought you’d say that.”

“Anyway, Martin will want to — we can’t all go.”

“So I sit here and wait for the phone to ring, is that it?”

But she isn’t listening to him. “I haven’t rung the airport. I’ll do that now.”

When she has finished telephoning she draws back the bedroom curtains and notices the woman at forty-four has a synthetic silver-needled Christmas tree glittering in the window and a holly wreath on the door knocker. The same fading wreath goes up year after year. Esther had planned to take Jania to choose a fir branch from those on sale at the local hall, a real “tree”, nothing synthetic. Perhaps it will still happen — although the best branches will have been picked over and only the straggly crooked stuff left. Home for Christmas — she dares to be hopeful. But what sort of Christmas?

Martin is still not answering his phone. What are he and his Kelly lover up to? With the phone unplugged? Or? At last she leaves a message with the receptionist who says gently, “Yes, we have that message already actually. I’ve slipped a note under the door.”

She has booked one seat on the plane. Martin will have to make his own arrangements. Just time now for a slice of toast.

Rex is sitting at the kitchen table looking apprehensive. “Wish me luck,” she says, gulping instant coffee, then feels foolish. They all need luck, not Esther alone, this isn’t her solo ordeal. “Martin might call. And I’ll ring as soon as I know anything. All right? Sit by the telephone.”

“I intend to.” He looks her over, appraising what she is wearing, how she looks, as if he might not see her again. “You won’t phone him, will you?”

“Who?”

“Donald’s in Auckland, isn’t he?”

“Oh —
what?
” She is appalled. “I’m going for Jania, not for a dirty weekend! Jesus Christ!”

“You don’t have to swear. I’m sorry, I just thought of it.”

“Idiot.” She kisses him in his thin wiry hair and her lips tingle. “Take it easy, Rex. Trust me.” Because she means it, because this time it is true it sounds to her unconvincing. She has lied with more conviction in the past. She was a good liar. Now she will have to practise telling the truth.

On the plane she sits suspended in threshing currents of air, suspended in disbelief; is this really her life? Is she really flying to confront a madman who has her granddaughter at knifepoint — her grandchild who is anyway sentenced to death by a sneaky modern retrovirus? This can’t be true, if it’s true her fellow passengers might have equally outrageous secrets. On previous journeys she has studied her fellow travellers to divine their romantic secrets and possibilities, fantasising exotic origins and Mills and Boon passions. It hadn’t occurred to her to imagine real and horrid lives for them. Today she stares at them wonderingly, leaving her airline snack box unbroached. The awful thing is that at the back of her rampant fear, her concern for Jania, there is a place where she is nearly enjoying herself. A horrid excitement nibbles in her abdomen while she waits for the performance to begin.

J
ANIA HAS MADE
tea in the chunky teapot, which was the first dwelling of her toy city. The teapot is a thatched English cottage, crazed with cracks, but cosy. She proffers the chipped spout to Wallace where he is wilted on the floor. He needs watering.

“No, you drink out of here — out of the spout. I saw it when I was in the hospital. There was this old lady. Well, you don’t have to be old.”

“What is it?”

“Tea. It’s a teapot,” she tells him kindly.

He tries to shake his head.

Jania looks disappointed. “It isn’t hot. Just drink a bit, go on.”

He sucks and splutters, spits out tea leaves. “It’s not hot!”

“I said it wasn’t. I’m not allowed matches.” She sighs suddenly. “I expect you miss your wife, don’t you?”

“She’s sick,” Wallace reminds her, coughing, and congratulates himself for remembering the lie correctly, even in his tortured state. Though it probably doesn’t matter now. He coughs on the last of the tea leaves.

“Don’t worry, when Daddy comes we’ll take you home with us to Granny’s — to Esther’s. Granny likes you.”

“I don’t think so.” The words grate out of him, chopped into hard heavy little bullets.

“What? Yes she does!”

“I don’t think she’ll take me home.”

“She will. She will! We’ve got a spare room.” She considers. “Well, I suppose I can sleep in with Daddy, I used to, on a cot.”

“Oh, Jania …”

He does sound tired. He sounds — she recognises the way he sounds from another time in her life. After the accident. When people kept talking to her over and over, explaining things in funny flat voices, sorry voices, trying to touch her when it made her feel sick to be handled.

“Little pixie …”

“Who’s a pixie?” The word has cheered her up.

“You are.” He groans. “I’ve messed everything up.”

She thinks he is looking at her doll city. “No you haven’t. I can build it all again, it’s easy.”

When she returns later, descending the ladder one stair at a time above his head — he can’t turn his head, but he hears her — she is clanking the frying pan against the steps.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a bedpan.” And she giggles. “Well, you must need to have a wee.”

He feels himself blushing like a girl. In such a way his mother had made a habit of embarrassing him as a child.
Wallace, have you been to the bathroom?
That outsize cartoon whisper inflating on the air in front of his schoolmates. But this is different, and unfortunately Jania has got it right. He’s even wet himself a bit but not too badly.

“I don’t need — that. Bring me … there’s a plastic bottle. Upstairs. Sink. Under the sink.”

“A bottle!”

“Yes — oh — don’t forget the lid. The lid.”

She thinks it’s a tremendous joke, chuckling. But she abandons the frying pan obediently and goes back upstairs. He can hear her moving about, banging the cupboard doors; the discomfort in his bladder is keeping him alert.

When she reappears equipped with bottle and, yes, a lid, he orders her, “Now go away.”

“Why? I’m a nurse.”

“Go away!” He nearly shouts. It hurts him to shout at her. Pain. She looks as if it hurts her too, she is peeved.

“Oh, all right. I’ll go in the back room.” She glowers.

“Good girl.”

He hates his body.

His briefcase is lying open beside his hand, displaying tubes and jars and flat shiny tins. He had loved his wares, his “products”, so cleverly slotted in, so glinty and exciting like a jeweller’s window. His lists, a familiar recitation, incantatory, he knows them by heart. Black pepper, cinnamon, ginger,
nutmeg. Cough Control, Lanolin Rub, Camphor Balm. The Rawleigh’s man is a member of a club, a secret order, he orders secrets, he delivers blessings. The opened case blinks at him now, the goods are a bit jumbled, Jania has been in it; a promising array, a jumbled array of promises. They had promised him a future that was lies, lies, all of it lies. Wallace’s lies? What about Wallace’s lies? Nothing wrong with the advertised product, his product, he feels a loyalty. But not one item to help him now, to get him out of this.

Anti-pain Oil. An essential oil? Perhaps if instead of rubbing it on his joints he drank it, put it in the cottage teapot and sucked? Or Ready Relief, a nice old established product that one, he used to enjoy the sound of that; he has spent all his life looking for ready relief. Door to door. Looking. He was the salesman, the Rawleigh’s man, toting the goods, and yet in a way he had seemed to be the customer instead, lifting knockers, rapping knuckles, pleading — what can you offer me? Not what can I do for you, but what can you do for me? What do you have? What do you have for me? In your warm kitchen? Something for me?