SATURDAY LUNCHTIME Celia is in the boiler room in the cellar, hanging up a double load of laundry. A pale wedge of light is falling through the pivot window above the washing machine, down a shaft at the side of the house. The window is propped open a fraction and the gauzy spiderwebs outside ripple in the draught. When Celia was little, a fat toad speckled the colour of dead leaves used to sun itself at the bottom of that shaft, with a smaller skinnier creature on its back, like a hump. A baby toad cushioned from the hard pebbly ground, she’d thought.
‘That’s the female lugging about the male,’ her mother said, adding after a short pause, ‘Just like us humans.’
She’d been baffled. Her father was gone by that time, but she remembered him as a big man. Much too big, surely, to have ever been carried by her mother. And Walter weighed almost forty kilos.
The boiler is sputtering, then growling. Celia feels suddenly hungry. The air has grown so sluggish she picks up the next piece of laundry, a lime-green pillow case, in near slow motion.
She’d spent most of the morning doing her weekend shopping. The town centre had seemed infested with the torn remains of firecrackers, bangers, caps, confetti, streamers, coloured straw and feathers. Crushed and dirty, they clung to the soles of her boots. Encased in iced-over puddles, they glittered at her coldly in the winter sunlight. They even latched on to the hem of her coat, godknows from where.
Having bought some vegetables at the market on the chestnut-tree promenade – no sign of the harlequin, she was glad to see – she’d stepped on to the zebra crossing between the Sämanns brunnen, the seed-sower’s fountain, and the castle with its farmhouse structure of half-timbering and shingle. That’s when the bright-red Anders-Wil shuttle came shuddering round the corner, honking harshly, down its track along the middle of the street. A boy leant out from a window like a jack-in-the-box and aimed at her with a silver toy pistol. The shot made her jump.
‘Stupid kid,’ she shouted before she could stop herself, and he fired a whole volley.
Once the last carriage had trundled by and she was safely on the pavement opposite, Celia scurried up the way instead of down past the central post office towards Station Square. Up along the castle park with its scarlet benches and evergreen plants to the arcaded entrance of the Town Hall, where she knew the large barred window on her right belonged to the offices of the police, ‘your friend and helper’. But after a while she’d felt recovered enough to laugh it off: all that boy had given her was a fright for fun. Perhaps the Carnival bunting flittering in the wind between the solid Bürgerhäuser of the Old Town had cleared her mind.
Now, stooping for a fluffy striped towel, it occurs to Celia that quite possibly this was what Granite Mask had intended – fear and fun in equal measure. The greater the fear, the greater the fun. The fun always feeding on the fear. Her fear. Maybe if people didn’t show any fear, the fun would stop. Or would the threats only get worse? Celia slaps the towel into shape with the flat of her hand, then reaches down into the laundry basket for another piece.
‘Oh hi, how’re you doing?’ Said in a low drawling voice behind her.
Celia’s heart clenches … and unclenches almost instantly. It’s Carmen from upstairs, pushing aside a wet bedsheet and smiling her gap-toothed smile.
‘Thanks, I’m fine – getting there, at any rate.’ Celia plucks at the clumped-up mass of her new fluorescent-red nightdress and presses her lips together in a grin-and-bear-it grimace.
For a moment they gaze at each other. Celia notes how worn out Carmen looks – violet shadows under the eyes, her usually vibrant complexion slack and dingy. Small wonder, of course, with her working half the night at the Bluebeard Club, then having fun at home. Yes, FUN.
She herself could never be a waitress, certainly not in a place like the Bluebeard, full of schmaltzy music and girls on the stage, run off her feet by a clientele of drunks and clumsy bum-grabbers.
Carmen breaks the silence, ‘Good idea to get the painters in. A bit of redecorating can make such a difference. And Dominic’s great.’
‘Dominic?’
‘Lehmann’s assistant. He is a regular at the Bluebeard.’
Celia pictures the man with his hooded eyes wide open, like a lizard’s, in a clean baseball cap, drinking with his friends and smacking his lips at the dancers every so often.
‘Much more approachable than his boss,’ Carmen continues. ‘Quite vain that one, so they say, and something of a softie.’
‘Well, I hadn’t noticed,’ Celia replies, untruthfully.
‘Guess I’d better shut up or I’ll be passing on trade secrets next.’ Carmen giggles and Celia glimpses her new tongue stud. ‘I’m off this weekend, thank God. Carnival’s such a hassle. The punters consider it a free-for-all, if you know what I mean.’
Celia nods yes. Doesn’t she just!
‘Well, if there’s anything Rolf and I can do for you …’ The silver-studded tongue has settled in the gap between the front teeth, full of promise.
Thanking her, Celia can’t help recalling the bedroom noises from upstairs. Can’t help playing them back to herself. The memory has made her fingers dig into the red nightdress. Hastily she shakes out the cotton material and, on an impulse, lifts it up for Carmen to see:
‘How would you like this for a night in?’ she asks with a laugh. ‘I got it half-price.’ She watches her neighbour read the sprawling yellow letters on the front: Babies? – No Thanks! Made in China, it says on the label inside, but Carmen doesn’t bother to check. Her face has changed from an expression of pity (for a woman who has recently lost her mother) to a flush of bewilderment and back to pity again (only now it’s for a woman who doesn’t seem to want to be a mother, which is another thing altogether).
‘Very nice,’ she mumbles without much enthusiasm, shrugging at the three-quarter sleeves, the slits up the sides and the low neckline. ‘Let’s hope it’ll keep you, uhh, warm.’ She waves goodbye, in a sudden hurry. ‘Got to go. Catch the shops before the afternoon rush.’
She departs in the direction of her lock-up section and seconds later Celia hears a key, then the clank of empty glass jars, bottles and tins being thrust into bags for recycling.
Rolf and Carmen are good neighbours really; she ought to be ashamed of herself. They invited her up to their flat on several occasions. Even sent a flower arrangement for the funeral – white lilies, beautifully tied with a black velvet bow.
Of the two, Rolf is probably Celia’s favourite: late twenties, sturdy, with shiny quick-glancing eyes and a toothbrush moustache. He works as an engineer at the large sugar factory that crouches like a grey monster on the western outskirts of Anders, stuffing itself with wagonloads of sugar beets and disgorging black sludge and stink. In his spare time Rolf is a biker. On good days he’ll service his Harley in the backyard, surrounded by tools, spare parts, oil-smeared cloths, cans and sprays, and a gaggle of children from the neighbourhood – while Celia stands watching covertly from behind her kitchen balcony door.
‘Want me to see to your smart little Golf?’ Rolf had offered when she moved back into the house. Since then he’s done quite a few repair jobs, replacing a broken wing mirror, the fan belt and a windscreen wiper, even crawled underneath to fit a new exhaust pipe. He’s a handy man, and very nice.
Several drops of water have plish-plashed to the floor, but Celia keeps staring at the red nightdress spread-eagled in front of her. It feels like she has put herself on the line.