Himself(9)
They almost reach the foot of the staircase when a voice rolls out into the hallway and along the faded carpet. It’s the sort of voice honed to turn corners, vault walls and open door handles.
‘Is that someone with you there, Shauna?’
‘No, Mrs Cauley.’
Shauna puts a hand on Mahony’s arm to stop him walking forward but he’s already held by the speaker’s spell. It hardly matters what the voice says; Mahony would stop and listen to it anyway.
‘Am I actually a fecking idiot?’
‘No, Mrs Cauley.’
‘Bring them in here then.’
‘There’s no one here.’
‘If I have to get the leg out of this bed . . .’
‘All right, I’ll bring him in.’ Shauna turns to Mahony. ‘Come in and say hello to her or I’ll have no peace.’
Mahony follows Shauna through a heavy door wedged open with an umbrella stand full of walking sticks. Inside is a corridor constructed from complicated strata of books, magazines, periodicals and papers. Some of the stacks are waist height but others reach up to well over ten feet high. Shauna stops to pick up a drift of pamphlets. She stuffs them into the cracks between piles.
‘This was a beautiful room until she made it her lair.’ Shauna points up at the thick cobwebs that trapeze the spaces between the books.
The smell is so strong that Mahony can taste it; a thick damp prowls into his nose and mouth, settles on the back of his tongue and starts to paw his throat closed. It is the smell of a million mould-blossomed pages, of a thousand decaying bindings, of a universe of dead words.
‘She calls it her literary labyrinth,’ says Shauna, kicking an avalanche of play scripts out of the way. ‘I call it a bloody hazard.’
They emerge into a clearing. A bed, ringed by a low wall of books, is set before curtainless French doors. The night sky is captured in its topmost panes.
The bed is carved from dark wood and is horribly ornate. At the head of it stands a dead man holding his hat against his chest. The dead man looks up at Mahony with his eyes low-lidded and full. Mahony sees the famished hollow of his cheeks and the sad drape of his moustache. The dead man lifts his eyebrows imperceptibly then his gaze sinks down again to rest on the floor.
A reading lamp throws a web of light over the occupant of the bed: a very old bald woman who is reaching for a wig slung over the bedpost. Constellations of age spots pattern the waxy scalp.
‘Wait until I am seemly, Visitor. I am preparing a respectable facade.’
She straightens the wig with some difficulty and a voice emanates from under it, mock sonorous. ‘Come.’
Mahony draws closer and is staggered that such a body can hold such a voice. Clad in a silk kimono, with her legs half-covered by blankets, the formidable Mrs Cauley is no bigger than a child. Her chest is startlingly concave in contrast to her distended belly. This rounded abdomen, together with her long, very thin arms, gives her the appearance of a benign geriatric spider.
‘Now there’s a face,’ Mrs Cauley whistles. ‘Sit down here, handsome.’
She gives Mahony an unsettling smile, revealing a set of teeth like a row of bombed houses. ‘You’re a fine-looking individual.’
Shauna pushes a pile of crumbling music scores from a footstool and hands it to Mahony. ‘He’s only staying a few days but.’
‘He’ll stay longer than that, sweetheart. Go and put on a teacake, lightly tanned with a knob of butter.’
‘You’ve not long had your tea.’
‘And I the overpaying guest here? Get on, a bit of exercise for those fat legs of yours.’
Shauna tuts and disappears into the maze.
Mrs Cauley edges upright in the bed. ‘Good. Now we can talk. You can’t trust her, the slinkeen. That girl would steal the eyes out of your head. I’ve had many personal effects gone missing since I came here. Emerald-set jewellery and bank notes and suchlike. There was a fox stole with glass eyes, which was very fetching. That went.’
‘Why don’t you go elsewhere?’
Mrs Cauley scratches her scalp, moving her wig to a new rakish angle. ‘I like the forest around me, and all the things that live in it, badgers and owls and fecking squirrels running about. That one pushes me out onto the veranda and I languish there all day listening to the trees sing. Hold my hand; I want to feel some male warmth.’
Mahony takes her hand and holds it gently. He can feel her knotted bones through her fragile skin. ‘What do your trees sing about?’
‘All the lowlifes who inhabit the village.’
‘So you know the villagers well?’
‘Through the trees I do. I hear all the tales of illicit affairs and nasty actions. And what the trees don’t know Bridget Doosey fills in with her slanderings. God, without her this place would be even more of a morgue. She’s forensic, that one. Doosey could take this village apart and tell you what killed it in the time it takes you to break a girl’s heart.’
Mahony frowns.
Mrs Cauley grins. ‘Shauna hates having Doosey in the house; she says we’re a bad influence on each other. That girl chews the ears off me with her relentless bloody nagging.’ Mrs Cauley shoots him a mutinous glance. ‘As soon as she patters off down to town I get Doosey in for a bit of hell-raising.’ She leans forward and speaks low. ‘We have a signal. I hoist my harvest festivals out of the window and Doosey stands on the quay with her binoculars.’