Mr. Flood's Last Resort(45)
CHAPTER 17
There is no customary welcome dance from Renata today, which can only mean one thing. As I pass by her kitchen window I hear two voices: a high-pitched jabbing and an exhausted monotone. I ring the doorbell.
There’s a temporary lull, then the skittering of feet along the plastic mat in the hall. Lillian answers the door, head down, showing two inches of gray roots. She doesn’t want me to see her cry.
I bend down to take off my shoes while she composes herself.
“I am not coming back,” she announces, red-faced and defiant, her eyes blurred with tears of frustration and industrial oven cleaner. “This is the last time.” She points down the hallway with a shaking finger. “That thing in there, it’s inhuman. It wears me out.”
She stands wiping her hands absentmindedly on a pillowcase with her blouse on inside out. Then she puts the pillowcase in one of the laundry bags she has lined up in the hallway and puts on her jacket.
“One day, God forgive me, I will kill it in its sleep. I will poison it like a rat in a dress.”
She picks up the bags and leaves without a backwards glance.
*
RENATA IS sitting at the kitchen table. Her lipstick has worn off and one of her eyebrows is smudged. She has a coat on over her kimono. I wonder if she attempted to storm off again, or just locked herself in the bathroom like she usually does. In an argument an agoraphobic is always at a disadvantage.
“I will change the locks and keep her out.” She pulls at the edges of her headscarf. “I will never let her in again.”
“You always say that.”
“She wanted to throw away my magic costumes.”
“Why would she want to do that?”
“She says there’s damp in the dressing room and she can’t bring her builder round with my hooker’s outfits on display.” She shakes her head. “All it needs is a little paint maybe.”
I follow Renata into a room that’s half bordello and half boudoir, with a rococo dressing table, beaded lamps, and three bow-fronted deco wardrobes. Renata pushes a heap of clothes off a plush sofa and we sit down and survey the havoc.
Fishnets and leotards, furs and corsets, bras and feather boas are strewn across the floor or bundled into rubbish bags. Renata’s working wardrobe, the costumes she wore when she toured with Bernie Sparks, the fast-burning, early-dimming light of her life.
“God, your waist,” I say, picking up a costume in mermaid green. Fronds of net bustle from the backside.
Renata laughs. “And that bust, look at it.”
The costume is engineered to provide a lethal chest. I turn it around on its hanger. Ghost bosoms fill it still, straining voluptuously at the seams.
There is a faint smell of show business: sweat and panstick, singed hair and stage dust, and stale, stale dreams. I hold up a ringmaster’s outfit: black satin tails and a bustier. A sequinned bow tie dangles from a buttonhole.
“I wore that the night Bernie died onstage in Weston-super-Mare,” says Renata.
I look up at her, aghast. “Bernie died onstage? You never told me that.”
“We were going up for an Asrah levitation.”
“Christ, is that what killed him?”
Renata laughs and shakes her head. “No, it’s an old trick. The magician hypnotizes his assistant and she lies down, all in a dream. Then he covers her with a cloth and she floats up, up, up. When he pulls off the cloth—she’s vanished!”
“It sounds complicated.”
“Chicken wire and a sideboard on wheels.”
“You did well to earn a living from that.”
“Only just.” She frowns. “We were halfway through the act that night when Bernie collapsed.”
“Jesus, that’s terrible.”
She nods sagely. “The audience didn’t see a thing. He fell down and as quick as a flash I bundled him up and stuffed him into the sideboard.” She points. “Top drawer of the dressing table, darling.”
I find the framed photograph she’s after and I sit back down next to her. We study it. Renata, barely twenty, a wisp of a waist, stands in a corset with her hands on her hips. She is wearing an ironic smile and a top hat at a raffish angle. Stage right is a small man with the slippery air of a pickpocket about him. He has one eye narrowed and is reaching inside his jacket.
She touches the photograph. “If you look closely you can see his Cuban heels.” She smiles. “People were shorter then because of the rationing.” She glances towards the mantelpiece. “You should feel the weight of Bernie’s urn. It’s pitiful.”
I have no intention of manhandling the earthly remains of Bernie Sparks. “What happened next?” I ask.
“I finished the act, got a round of applause, and pushed my darling off the stage.”
“Heavens.”
We sit in silence for a while.
“You still miss him, don’t you?”
She nods. “He was difficult, as all creative artists are. But he always stood by me, whether I was a boy or a girl.”
“And you never came unstuck, living as a woman, I mean? Those were less forgiving times, surely?”
“You’d be surprised.” She thinks for a while. “I was very good at it, but everyone fears being read. Being found out. Everyone has their secrets.”