BUT THE AFTERNOON doesn’t turn out too bad. At Bänninger’s Celia buys herself some Valentine treats: a small Tipo di Milano salami, a jar of white asparagus, extra thick, and a bagful of sinfully expensive purple grapes.
Just as she is leaving, Deli-Doris, the plump young assistant, offers her a free massage. ‘All over,’ she adds, her brown eyes touchingly sincere, ‘if you want. It’s very relaxing. Soothing.’ She pauses, smiles until her dimples show, then asks with the eagerness of a child, ‘Would you like to try? I’m pretty good by now. Ready for the diploma course in spring, they said at the evening class.’
Nonplussed, Celia stares at Deli-Doris’s hands which are resting on the counter like two soft floury rolls. She laughs quietly to herself and, before the girl knows what’s happening, lays her own hands on top, saying, ‘That’s really, really kind of you. Some time, maybe.’
‘I only thought, seeing that your mother – I mean, ah, I’m sorry.’ Deli-Doris has blushed pimento-red and Celia, more than a little taken aback, saves the situation: So, were Doris and her friends going to be in the Carnival Parade tomorrow then? What, up on the Valentine Float? That should be fun. Be nice if it snowed some more overnight, wouldn’t it?
At that point the shop’s glass doors slide open and in walk two of her mother’s former beauty clients. They start homing in at once, their overrouged cheeks puffed out expectantly, their richly mascaraed eyelashes (‘fly’s legs’, her mother would have said, cruelly apt) flapping rather than fluttering. There is no doubt in Celia’s mind as to what they are after: a detailed account of The End, down to the very last burst capillary.
‘Have fun,’ she says towards Deli-Doris and makes her escape, her hand lifted in a hurried gesture of farewell. God, she’s glad to get out of the place. Out and home. Away from inquisition and the iniquity of kindness.
As she crosses the side street to her house, Celia pictures the half-hour ahead: an instant cappuccino sprinkled with real chocolate flakes, a palmful of grapes and some loud music from the CD still in the player, ‘Love You Live’ by the Stones. Having seen them at the gigantic rock festival on Anders Common the previous summer, she’d become a belated Jagger groupie – too old now, and perhaps never quite young enough.
A second cappuccino and a double dose of ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ – then Celia finally buckles down to the cleaning. But before she has vaccumed more than a third of the lounge, suctioning decade-old dirt and slivers of fresh lining paper from between the floorboards, her jeans and the camisole top begin to stick to her skin. That’s what gives her the idea. After all it’s hot enough; the central heating is going full blast. She strips quickly, with the same urgency and excitement she used to feel during the sun-drenched summers of her childhood with Lily when they’d change into their bikinis behind a tree by the Thur or in one of the sweaty cubicles at the open-air swimming pool. She drops her clothes on to the dustsheeted furniture, then reaches for the extension tube of the vacuum cleaner, looking over to the window for a moment. Snow clouds have gathered into the murk of an early dusk – no one will notice anything different about her in the curtainless unshuttered twilight.
The ceiling casts a purple glow over her naked skin, like a spell, and the tulip figures in the cornice seem to bend their heads in her direction, quizzically, watching her every move. Her breasts swing and slap recklessly, squashing up against her arms and belly, deliciously warm. And every time she stands astride the body of the machine, the hose springs spiralling up between her legs, alive and willing. Suddenly, doing the housework is no longer a chore she’s subjected to. It’s an act of anarchy. Rebellion even. How, her mother would have disapproved! She always wore an overall for cleaning jobs, and horrible yellow rubber gloves to protect her hands.
Afterwards, on the phone to Jasmin, her Zurich friend, they giggle like mad and when Celia remarks, in a flippant undertone, that she is still naked, Jasmin sighs with envy and vows to try it out herself as soon as she’s alone at home. ‘Or perhaps not alone. Might give my man a bit of a surprise in his study while he’s preparing some lecture or marking papers or – hey, Cel, how about that? – video-conferencing!’
Celia stares down at her thighs sprawled out over the seat of the upholstered chair. They’re nice thighs, soft without being flabby; smooth and unworn. Unwanted, she thinks, in a rush of bitterness.
The Carmen-story rather amuses Jasmin, who doesn’t take Celia’s anti-kid stance too seriously one way or the other. ‘Live and let live, right, Cel?’ is all she advises.
Celia knows better than to bring up the topic of Walter; it would fall on deaf ears as usual. Jasmin refuses to be involved in unpleasantnesses. At the funeral reception she’d actually said, ‘Lucky your brother hasn’t put in an appearance.’ Celia had been too upset and exhausted to be annoyed, and now it doesn’t seem worth the trouble. Jasmin has difficulty dealing with conflict, all the therapy in the world hasn’t sorted that. Conceived after years of doctoring, she’d been fought over the instant her umbilical cord was cut. Years ago, at a full moon Walpurgisnacht Party on Lake Zurich as they were sitting round a bonfire with other women, burning photos of deceitful lovers and, in Jasmin’s and Celia’s case, so-called loved ones, Jasmin had drunkenly announced:
‘You want to hear about me and my parents – well, here goes. If I smiled at Mother, I’d have to smile at Father. If I kissed Father, I’d have to kiss Mother. And so on. I even had to shout and scream at both of them. If I failed, they’d blame each other. Punched each other – often until they were bruised. I felt like the prize in a boxing match nobody could ever win.’
Celia for her part had kept her mouth carefully shut.
She tunes back in to what Jasmin’s been saying about a new client at the private clinic where she works as a physiotherapist. ‘Old goat. Had to remind him the massage parlour was one block down.’
Celia’s laughter makes her breasts quiver. She is getting a little cool now that the surge of frenetic energy has drained away. Her nipples have stiffened, their aureoles the colour of dark wine. Her arm brushes against them as if by chance and the touch conjures up images of herself in the bath, playing with the shower nozzle set at turbo speed. She pushes the pictures from her mind, for the present at least.
Should she maybe tell Jasmin about the masked stranger from the night before? Instead, she ends up asking after Igor Junior, a bright and lively child with the wheat-blond hair and broad Slavic features of his father.
Before they hang up, almost as an afterthought, Jasmin inquires how she’s coping and Celia says, ‘Okay. Ready to treat myself to your seaweed bath – as the climax of my cleaning coup!’
And now, relaxed after a quick tease-and-release thanks to the invention of adjustable shower nozzles, Celia is having her bath.
Three candles are wax-glued to the tub’s enamel rim at her feet. The first one’s a creamy white. The middle one is red. And the biggest, on the left, a deep black-pit black. With the main light off and the shadows trembling on the walls, the windowless bathroom resembles a cave, damp and slightly draughty because of the extractor fan near the ceiling. Celia herself is immersed up to her chin, wrapped in a thick layer of Shiver of Sensuality Seaweed from the waist down.
Jasmin had given her a big trial pack for Christmas. ‘Our latest hit,’ she’d written on the box with a green felt-tip pen, ‘freeze-dried and loves to expand. ENJOY!!!’ And, in a small PS: ‘Igor Junior’s just had his first “shivers”. His comment: “Great. Almost like mucking about in the playground.” – What more do you want!’
Celia moves her legs a little; the loosened rubbery fronds around her body wobble. She smiles, reminded of Deli-Doris: a well-meaning girl if perhaps a bit too trusting for her own good. Celia flips over on to her right and the seaweed floats off her hip like a badly tucked-in blanket. Shadows chase themselves around the walls and ceiling, past the washbasin, mirror-fronted cabinet, toilet, radiator, door, chest of drawers, towel rack, bath, extractor fan. Zigzagging ghosts.
For several minutes she lies motionless, gazing at the wavering candle flames reflected in the water. Some of the wax has dribbled down the rim of the bathtub, tentacle-like.
She’d come across the red and the white candles in the store room the other night – the night of the suede shoes – while rooting around in the old cupboards and cabinets for the teak furniture spray. They were stockpiled in small cartons behind dozens of dried-up woodfiller tubes, re-touching crayons, tins of furniture wax and bottles of polish. ‘Explorers’ Essentials’ it said underneath some uninspired drawings of grottos. Her mother mustn’t have had the heart to use them. But Celia has. After her phone call with Jasmin she’d retrieved the store-room key from the top of the coat rack, then in, seize a carton of red and white candles each, and out again – as if the place was haunted. She’d felt like the little girl she’d once been, darting in and out of their cellar lock-up with its deep dark shelves hidden by curtains, to fetch a jar of her mother’s irresistible fruit preserves for herself and Lily.
For the black candle, though, Celia had trudged all over Anders. She’d tried the Co-op, Denner and Migros, Blumenliebe by the Old Town Steps, a craft centre close to Eric’s that only sold blocks of unformed wax, and even a couple of artsy pharmacies – until, reluctantly, she’d stopped in front of Boutique Exotique, the letters painted topsy-turvy across the shop window. Under her grandfather’s ownership the name Alfred’s Antiques had arched in gold relief above the entrance. She hadn’t been back inside since then.
Pulling the lengths of seaweed tight over her belly, Celia slips on to her buttocks. She’d hesitated in the door, in the midst of an oriental tinkle, and asked towards the counter did they have candles at all? Black ones? The air was thick with incense. How Grandfather would have hated this – for a moment she could almost see him shuffling around the shop, peering with tired distaste at the wind chimes, the mobiles of brass Indian elephants, wooden birds, shiny metal stars and crescent moons, at the lampshades smothered in strings of coloured glass beads like cheap Egyptian headdresses.
The assistant was friendly enough. Tall and lanky, with luminescent green hair and glittering studs in his eyebrows, he unfolded himself from behind the counter. Had one look at her jeans, poncho-style coat and rainbow silk scarf, and said:
‘Black candles, no problem. They’re over here. I’d recommend Black Magic. Burns for hours and smells of you-know-what, even makes you feel kind of giddy. Great stuff.’ He cocked his head, eyebrows sparkling like exclamation marks, and grinned down into her face.
Instead, Celia had pointed to a sign on the top shelf: ‘Black Sugar Loaf – guaranteed hygienic and odourless.’
By the time she’d twigged what the shrink-wrapped stumpy veined candle was really meant for, the man was already rolling it up in lurid green tissue paper colour-co-ordinated with his hair.
This candle is for Walter.
Walter, who will always be five years older than her. Walter with his curls, their grandmother’s chiselled lips, and the sexy cleft in his chin.
Walter, who while still in primary was allowed to accompany their father on his caving expeditions – shrugging noncommittally when asked about them, like a conspirator. Every other weekend they went off, the car boot a medley of overalls, boots, gloves, helmets, rucksacks, torches, carbide lamps, foodstuffs. Off to explore the secret treasures of dwarfs and gnomes, Celia thought. Off to ‘creep and crawl and prowl in the dirt’, her mother said.
Dear brother Walter, the ‘man of the house’, who made her gifts of desiccated beetles and spiders and the bleached bones of mice. Who netted trout at Uncle’s for killing on their kitchen balcony, sprinkling the concrete floor with silvery scales. Who left home at sixteen to train as a chef at the Schlosshotel.
Walter, who lumbered after Lily like a lovesick dancing bear, then claimed her: the bear transformed into a trim young soldier in charge of one of those wall-shaking tanks, seducing her on his blue sleeping bag up in the tree house. Who later took her away for good. Took her away so far she couldn’t come running back even if she’d wanted to.
Walter, who now blames her, Celia, for their mother’s last will and testament.
Celia feels an icy current on her forehead. Is it her imagination or has the hum of the extractor fan got louder? Almost grinding? The candles flicker. Was that the door of her flat opening – and closing? But she locked it, she remembers. Double-locked it, in fact, to be on the safe side. Something she’d never bothered to do before … DAMN THAT MASK!
Then she yells it out at the top of her voice: ‘DAMN THAT MASK! DAMN THAT MASK! DAMN THAT MASK!’ to rally herself back into a Frauenpower mood. She hates Carnival. Hates the way its sweaty drunkenness has seeped into her life, leaving her adrift, and vulnerable. DAMN THAT STUPIDSTUPID MASK!
She calms herself by focusing on the white candle.
This one is for her father.
White like a blank page.
Like stalactites and stalagmites.
She doesn’t have many memories of her father, she was too young, barely at kindergarten, when he disappeared. Mostly they are associated with smells, tastes. The butter on her breakfast croissant tainted by raw onion because he’d yet again flouted the house rules, forgetting to wipe his knife as he prepared himself a midnight sandwich.
Or the clear sharpness of white wine from his mouth, smudged with smoke scrolls. Like the time he was telling her a new picture-book story – some adventure of Schellenursli’s, the boy goatherd from the Alps – while she was perched on his knees, his twisted cigarillo curling smoke round them like the thread of a silkworm. On the page in front of her a nanny goat is stamping its feet, sneering at the herbs and flowers in Schellenursli’s pasture. There is silver paint on the goat’s hooves and bell, its brows are pencil thin, the eyes rimmed bluey black and bristling with lashes.
Her father had begun to cough. Doubled over, he spluttered smoke, and she was nearly bounced off his knees. Then she saw he wasn’t coughing; he was trying hard to hide his laughter from her, rocking her up and down playfully, up and down, to make her squeal. That’s when her mother had stormed in saying, couldn’t they keep the noise down, honestly, Peter, you know I’m doing a manicure next door, and he’d snapped the book shut so fast one of Celia’s fingers got trapped between the pages.
Once her father was gone, of course, and the dining room redecorated as the Beauty Room, Celia had realised he must have disliked her mother’s occupation. She’d felt obscurely pleased, and had loved and missed him all the more – despite his preference for Walter when it came to treasure hunting in caves.
She slides down deeper into the bath now, trawling her arms and seaweed legs through the water to seek out the last pockets of heat. The three flames flare up as one. For an instant they throw a shadow against the door – a figure with an hourglass waist and shoulder-length hair, unmistakably real.
Yes, the third candle is in memory of her mother.
Red: for those final weeks when the thin blood refused to be stemmed and came dripping slowly, steadily, staining paper tissues, pillowslips, sheets and the fronts of her nightdresses.
Red: for the seething fleshliness she’d always kept under wraps – apart from the night of the Maskenball and that Sunday afternoon in August, the afternoon of the skin belt.
And red for the pain she inflicted, even on mere things.
The small roll of glass wool had been lying in a skip, only Celia didn’t know it was glass wool then – she couldn’t have been nine yet. Such a nice fleecy rug it would make for Charlie’s kennel, she’d thought, grabbing hold of it. By the time she got home her hand had felt like a pin cushion, and flexing it was torture.
The kitchen door down the corridor was open and she could see her mother, hair over her face, standing at the table. She was stoning cherries. Cherries from Margaret’s garden. Her white rubber gloves were stained crimson, her arms spattered beyond the elbows. Spurts of juice were trickling down the fat smile of the ladle-licking chef on her plastic apron, puddling into the sheets of newspaper at her feet. Two large woven baskets were placed on chairs, heaped with fruit from which her mother had already removed the stalks and the odd leaf. With the sunlight trembling over them, the cherries looked strangely animate, fresh and pouting as babies’ mouths. The gadget her mother used for the stoning had lost its silvery colour; it was oozing blood and shreds of flesh like a witch’s cauldron. The smaller of its two spouts was spitting teeth into a bowl with gravelly shrieks.
Celia couldn’t bear to see or hear any more and turned away, crying out as a spasm of pain gripped her hand.
Her mother’s hair flew up. ‘What on earth –?’
‘I wanted it to be a rug. To keep Charlie warm. But now I can’t even move my fingers.’
Her mother didn’t fuss, she never did. Just glanced from her to the glass wool on the floor, then crossed over to the sink, took off her gloves and apron and washed the splotches off her skin. There didn’t seem to be a trace of blame in her words when she said, ‘Why not leave Charlie alone, Celia? I’m sure Frau Gehrig is perfectly capable of making him comfortable. He’s old and arthritic, you know that. The poor thing’ll die one day soon, rags or no rugs. There’s nothing you can do about it.’
While her mother went to get the tweezers from the Beauty Room, Celia wept a little, thinking of Charlie in his bare kennel and how he’d begun to snuffle around the backyard all stiff-legged, dribbling pee on the ground, and how she couldn’t help him, ever. Then she was told to sit down next to the balcony door. In the summer sun her palm and half-clenched fingers appeared to be studded with the glitter of pain.
‘Don’t, mum, please! Let me do it myself, it’s less –’
‘Keep still now, they’re almost out.’
‘NOOO! Aow!’
‘Silly Cel, don’t be such a baby.’
‘You’re hurting me! MUM!!’
‘Almost there, just a –’
‘AAAOOOOWWWWWW!!!’
At that moment Walter came in from school. He dumped his leather satchel beside a kitchen chair and surveyed the scene. ‘Little sis in trouble again?’ he asked. Lifting the glass wool between thumb and forefinger, he dropped it into the bin. Then suddenly yowled, his face contorted.
‘Walter?’ Their mother sprang up from where she’d been kneeling, ‘All done, Celia – go and wash your hands,’ and, tweezers flashing, rushed towards him.
‘Only joking, Gabrielle,’ he replied, coolly. ‘Just checking you’d do the same for me. So, what’s to eat?’
‘Mon dieu! You are wicked!’ Laughing, she had opened the fridge and produced some juicy cuts of Buurehamme. Afterwards she carried on with the stoning.
They had cherry tart that evening. The kitchen was filled with a sugary lacerated smell and the last few rays of the sinking sun seemed to bleed all over its cupboards and walls. Celia, her hand salved and bandaged for the night, ate slowly, trying to ignore the looks of complicity and amusement between Walter and her mother, their banter and broken conversation in French peppered with phrases like ‘tu sais’ and ‘si tu veux’ and ‘mon chéri’. Trying to ignore the bloodied lumps of cherries on her plate, limp and sullied. Concentrating instead on the yielding sweetness in her mouth.
The bathwater is freezing and Celia shudders involuntarily. She has been chewing on air and there’s a bitter taste on her tongue. Her eyes ache from having stared at the red. candle so long.
Red.
Like anger and cruelty.
Like misunderstandings that grow and fester. And erupt.
Blood red.
Then her right leg tears free of the seaweed, out of the bath: NO! and splashes back in. NO, DAMMIT! SHE DOESN’T NEED THOSE MEMORIES! She couldn’t care less where the water goes just now. She’ll mop it up later. The candles gutter. They hiss at each other. Wax slops over, runs down into mingled roots and shoots, red, black and white. A few drops have fallen into the tub, tiny free-floating islands jostled by waves and seaweed.
Only the black candle survives – due to being bigger, perhaps.