, Journals,
vol. xv.
*
The role of the little blonde ingénue who recites the ‘Great Works’ in the Saarlim Sirkus has always been known as ‘Irma’ in Efica. Why it should be Irma here and Heidi there, no one can tell me.
[TS]
24
‘Can I be of assistance?’ Wally said.
He put his freckled hands on the edge of the car door and Roxanna considered them thoughtfully: the stranger’s wide pink nails hooked over her wound-down window.
She turned off the ignition, leaving the car stuck where it was, its wheels askew, poking out into the entrance lane. ‘Got a light?’ she asked. This time yesterday she had been a married woman.
Wally’s lighter was silver, with a windshield. When it flamed it was red and smoky, and Roxanna — fresh from her own adventures with kerosene — held back her fringe to stop it getting burnt.
‘It’s the Happy Hour,’ he said when she had exhaled. He just said it as a fact. As if it were the Happy Hour and therefore dot dot dot.
Until this moment Roxanna’s only plan had been to check into the motel, eat on room service, and leave without paying. Now she looked at this man and considered him. She had done worse things in the old days, but the truth was — yuk — she no longer had the stomach for the life.
‘Could you tell me what day the local zine comes out?’ she said, and hid from his insistent eyes in her handkerchief, blowing her nose wetly, unattractively, deliberately. She found her dark glasses in her bag and put them on. ‘I need to put an avvert in.’
‘What are you selling?’ he said. He had a high forehead like a clown, and sad grey freckled eyes.
‘Pigeons,’ she said, very level.
‘What sort of pigeons?’ Wally said. ‘I got a young fellah might be interested.’
‘Racing pigeons,’ she said.
‘Start him off with a couple of street-peckers.’
‘These aren’t street-peckers,’ she said. ‘They’re racing pigeons. They have pedigrees.’
‘I had a grandpa who raced pigeons,’ the punter said. ‘He won a lot of races, but he never had any pedigrees. I had a dog once.’ He smiled: he had wide pale lips. ‘Now that fellow had a pedigree.’
‘So are you interested or what?’ She took the keys out of the ignition. She wiped her hands with her handkerchief. ‘I’ve got other people interested.’
‘I could be persuaded.’
‘What do you think I’m talking about, mister?’ she said.
He opened the door for her and stepped back politely so she could get out of the car. ‘Not doves,’ he said, and grinned.
‘They’re expensive,’ she said, lowering her eyes as she locked the door. ‘That’s all I meant. It isn’t like an impulse buy.’
As she walked back to the caravan, she sensed Wally Paccione’s freckled hand, imagined it half an inch away from her pleated red skirt, as insistent as thrip, a fruit fly hovering, but when she looked over her shoulder she saw he was not even looking at her, but back towards the chalky green motel doors.
When she opened the van for him the smell came flooding out.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
That smell used to drive Reade crazy. He always asked her — every morning before he drove away — please clean the loft. When she was under the impression that pigeons made BIG MONEY she had cleaned — brooms, scrubbing brushes, disinfectant. She had been a fanatic in the cause. She laid out brown-eyed peas, ground millet, butcher’s seed. She checked each hen once every day — eyes, throat etc. But when she saw what Reade’s idea of BIG MONEY was, she gave up on the pigeons.
If she had bought a gun and pushed him into a bank, Reade would have thought she was a genius. But when she wrote away for books, he laughed and farted and spilt his drink back in his glass.
‘Your lips move,’ he said. ‘Your fucking lips move, Roxanna.’
She let him laugh. It made him look so pitiful.
She sat in the kitchen in her dressing gown, toast crumbs embedded in her elbows. She read about things that bewildered him: the production of tin soldiers in nineteenth-century Europe, for instance. His lip curled, but his eyes looked frightened. He could not imagine the pay-off. He was not meant to. She read slowly with a wooden ruler held under each line.
He came home with beer on his breath and snatched the ruler away. She knew he was hanging round with that Voorstandish widow up at the cashier’s office. He did not look beautiful any more. His sexy red lips had got all twisted and his eyes were bulging, like someone with a thyroid condition. He was her husband, but she looked at him from far, far away — one more bozo going to hit it big with greyhounds, pigeons, possum furs.
Rich people did not mess with things that shit or made you ill. Only poor people did that. Reade already had bronchitis, fancier’s lung, all that bloom which came off the birds, white clouds of it, every time they settled.
The weird thing was that when he split, he abandoned the pigeons too. Now they were her only asset.
‘Can I hold one?’ the punter asked her at the Melcarth Motor Inn.
She folded her arms across her chest and watched him as he lifted out the cage and opened it without being shown the tricky latch. He took the bird — hands up and down its chest, down around its neck, like a fancier.
What she could not know was that the only two truly happy years of Wally’s childhood had been spent with his maternal grandfather who was exactly that character that Roxanna now despised — the working-class man with a passion for pigeons, a man making twenty-five cent bets, upgrading his stock, crossing street-pecker with street-pecker, dreaming of the big bets, the famous birds.
She watched him running his nicotine-stained finger down the back of the bird’s head and thought he was just like Reade looking at ties in an expensive shop. She was deep within herself. She did not hear the five members of the Feu Follet cross the yard and stand behind her. What she was thinking was: she was back at square one — if he did not buy these birds, she was going to have to have sexual intercourse for money.
Then she heard the scrape of shoe behind her. The hair on her neck stood on end. She spun around and saw tattoos, face scars, ripped shirts and sweaters, a bald-headed man with bright blue eyes staring at her tits. Sweat pooled in the tight creases of her hands.
There was a woman with an accent like a Sirkus star. She was striking, pale-faced, copper-haired, holding a blond-haired child who was hiding himself under a patchwork shawl.
‘We all wanted to see the clean bus, Wally.’
‘Here, Tristan,’ Wally said to the fair-haired boy. ‘Hold this.’
A pair of surprisingly large hands emerged from the tatty shawl, and as the child took the bird she saw his face, my face.
Jesus fucking Christ Almighty.
It was hard to look, hard to not look — my triangular head, my dense blond hair, my frightening lipless mouth, my small regular white teeth, my striated marble eyes — terrible, beautiful — flecked with gold, like jewellery.
‘Feel its heart,’ the punter said. ‘You can feel its heart beating in your hand.’
Everything was happening for Roxanna in slo-mo. She saw Tristan Smith hold her pigeon with his normal hands.
‘You feel that?’ Wally said. ‘That’s its heart.’