Dust rested in the air and on the blades of Fin’s scissors. The faded places on the wall where her peasant dresses had hung. She cut squares from a roll of chalky plaster bandage and for a time all Darcy heard were the subtle sounds of their instruments.
We could never have been everything to each other, said Fin. She dunked plaster in a plastic bowl of water on the ironing table. But you being here, I feel kind of broken in two, she said.
That’s how I’ve always felt, said Darcy. Since I was a kid. The parts in him that lived in their separate compartments: sex, love and affection, trust. In Aurelio he’d sensed them just barely coalescing. He reached for her fine-toothed pick and tucked foil into the crevices of his building, making the lard look gilded, his fingers tipped with bronze. He looked over at Fin with nothing to lose. When I was nine, there was a Mormon missionary, he said, down in the gully.
Fin didn’t look up at him.
He laid me out in the grass on my shirt and rubbed himself off on me. I felt like it was my fault. I followed him down the drive in the car.
The gully where you took me? she asked. She cautiously layered plaster on two toilet rolls taped end to end, moulding the swoop of the obelisk. She focused thoughtfully on her work. Do you think that’s why you’re like you are?
Darcy uncupped a new mould. I recreate it, he said, the intensity, the adrenaline rush, public places. He knew it needn’t define him. But it had.
She took her blade and cut the edge of a section of silver foil. Did anyone know?
My mother guessed, he said, but she was too drunk to know what to do except taunt me.
Fin turned on her hairdryer, melted the foil on the blood-veined lard, gilding it with heat. Then she stopped. You don’t think that made you gay?
Darcy shook his head. I’ve never wanted to be with a woman, he said, other than you.
She turned the hairdryer back on. The way the heated foil hugged the lard had the dulled effect of pewter. He could read her mind: what sort of family is this? Again she flipped the dryer off. I’m sorry, she said.
For what? asked Darcy.
The other night, she said, and back then.
You couldn’t help back then, he said. He thought of their American mothers, Fin on the drive in Mount Eliza, just left there, the same drive Darcy rolled down in the Austin and where that had taken him.
I’m sorry I disappeared, she said.
Darcy nodded to himself and looked at her make-up, the colour in her transparent brows, the line carefully traced around her lips. The prospect of being alone here lay about him like a prison, the way she’d brought him here. He reached for some of her wet plaster bandage, aware of the subtle shake in his fingers, laid the plaster to soften the edge of her man-made lake, to firm up where her building met the butcher’s grass. She placed her implements on the trestle and folded a sheet of bronze-leaf foil then went into the bathroom.
Darcy watched her cigarette burning low in a saucer. The dog walked over and licked from a bucket of lard, and Darcy closed his eyes to the sounds of her getting ready, the running of the tap, the click of her make-up case, her mirror check. He fashioned a small wax dog and perched it on the nose cone of the obelisk, and painting it red he found himself crying. The whippet watched him from the sheepskin. Fugitive and guardian.
Fin appeared in her skinny jeans and a snug-fitting cardigan, her hair a new brunette like a Russian Sloane Ranger; all she needed was a string of pearls. Are you sure you don’t want to come with me? she asked. She pressed her lips and spread her gloss evenly.
Darcy knew she was going to Jobik. I’ll wait here, he said, for Aurelio. He looked at the half-finished sculptures, some mottled cream, others bronzed or silver. I’ll finish this. He spoke uncertainly, not quite avoiding the break in his voice.
If things go wrong, she told him quietly, there’s a restaurant called the Jaguaroff. It’s in a lane off Solyanka, behind the church; it’s listed in Fodor’s but please don’t write it down. She blew him a kiss as if she’d be back in a minute, leaving in her plain leather coat without so much as a haversack or handbag. He didn’t dare look at the door.
Darcy found himself left with wax and lard caked on his hands, strangely still, her paintbrush in his fingers. The dog regarded him carefully, trustful. Everything fell suddenly silent as if a temporary deafness had come over him. He listened through the walls for sounds in the snow from the wallowing darkness. Instead of freedom, he felt a frantic dread of being alone.
Ulitsa Kazakov
Early Saturday morning
Friday night
Darcy dreamed he was in California, driving too fast on a winding road, birds thumping on the windscreen, blue jays, blood and feathers, eucalyptus and orange groves, a cottage in the distance. A sea of round lilies that turned out to be melons. He dreamed Aunt Merran waved a long-leafed vegetable over a fence, calling out but not to Darcy, to a blind ram with its bedraggled head twisted up. Aunt Merran’s hair a dirty grey, long and loose. Darcy sketched her with his left hand, shaky and childlike, as the ram ran around in suspicious circles, sniffing up at the air. Eyes sunken deep in a woollen face, eyes that came at Darcy. If I left he’d die, Aunt Merran shouted, a farmer’s tan and weathered face; she walked away with undulating hips. A cumquat tree looked like a large umbrella floating above the fence. But Fin was your daughter, said Darcy. The veranda sofas sprung and uncomfortable and the drumming of rain on the corrugated tin. You’ll look after her, Merran said and Darcy drove away fast on a road through a jungle lined with emaciated men in rags, shaved heads and bleeding tattoos. He jolted awake in a sweat, his heart in his teeth at the squawk of the keys in the shifting locks. He leapt up from the couch where he’d been lying, the whippet held close for protection, watched a gloved hand slip inside the front door, reaching for the light, a hand that remembered the switch by feel.
Aurelio? he whispered.
Svetlana, she said. She stood in the entry hall, buried in the collar of a coat dusted with snow, a pistol extending from her glove. She pointed it at him with a thin-lipped smile and Darcy’s breath went loud and quick inside his head. Where’s Aurelio? he asked. The words faint, struggling from him as he gripped the whippet’s fine coat, its skin taut in his fingers. Its collar.
You must let this dog go, said Svetlana. Her fringe was plastered wet against her forehead, no colourful scarf or sunglasses now. She produced a bone-shaped biscuit from her pocket. Boyar, she said, then something in Russian, the treat in one hand, pistol in the other, the name Darcy’d last heard from the son-in-law’s lips, had him holding tight to the quivering dog, its heartbeat pulsing fast in Darcy’s palms, its white-rimmed eyes looking back for permission.
Svetlana jolted the pistol, impatient. I shoot you right here and not one will be come to see you, not one. And Darcy believed her but still he held the dog hostage. Is Aurelio in trouble? he asked.
Svetlana squinted. We are all in trouble, she said. All of us. You were the honeytrap, but you gave us no honey. She moved a step forward, brandishing the treat and weapon, trying not to scare off the now cowering dog. Don’t be hero, she said.
I need my passport, said Darcy.
You need more than passport, she said. Give this dog.