Cosmo Cosmolino (5 page)

This was one of the few taxi rides of Raymond's life and he was worried that the driver, an Asian in a clean white shirt, would think he was a bludger or up himself for taking a cab at all instead of public transport, and also that he might think he had something
to do with this puffy, purple-faced moll who tore in cigarette smoke with all her back teeth showing and kept letting out panting noises and wiping under her sunglasses with the bottom of her dress. She had a flagon of sherry in a plastic bag between her feet and every few minutes she bent over, tipped it sideways and took a swallow. Raymond sat with his hands clasped between his tightly clenched thighs, and kept his eyes on the shiny headrest in front of his face.

The place, when at last the taxi swerved off the freeway and followed the signs to its gates, looked more like a golf course than a cemetery. It was vast, bare and trim. At the end of its curved black road they came to a garden, and in it, a building. Ursula shoved him out, pushing the wrapped flagon into his hands, and he stood there sweating while she paid the driver and the taxi drove away. At the mouth of the chapel some people in a group turned towards them and stared. Raymond thought they were looking at him, but it was Ursula they were watching out for, they were waiting for Ursula to arrive. They must be her friends from before; they were old hippies with grey curls or beards, and the women had hair that was long and stiff, or else cut short like boys', showing their wrinkled eyes and foreheads. One of the men was tall and bony, like a skeleton, with a shaved head and rotten teeth; his hands were tattooed. Ursula kept a tight grip on Raymond's elbow. To the people staring it might have seemed that she was using
his arm for support but in fact he was her prisoner, she was yanking him along beside her in a shuffle, in at the chapel door, through a cluster of whispering girls with massed hair and black bodies, and right up the aisle to the empty seats in the front row.

Yellow light fell from long windows at the sides. More people, not many, were waiting in the seats, and someone was playing one of those organs that quiver automatically. Ursula was different now. She was trying to act normal. Raymond heard her put on a voice and say to the woman on her other side, ‘What a lot of people have turned up!' The woman tried to put her arm round Ursula's waist, but Ursula went stiff, and the woman, with an offended look, took her arm away and moved across the aisle to a seat further back. Raymond sneaked the flagon under the seat and pushed it out of sight with his foot. As he straightened up someone tapped him sharply on the shoulder. He jerked round. A woman in the seat behind leaned forward and spoke to him in a furtive way.

‘What? What?' he said in confusion.

‘I said, you were Kimmy's boyfriend, weren't you?' said the woman. She slid her eyes over his face, ears, hair, neck.

‘No, no,' he jabbered. ‘Not me, no, it wasn't me. Friend of the family, I'm a friend. Of the family.'

His head was shaking itself like a puppet's. He turned his back on her and hunched his shoulders up
round his ears. In the front row there was no protection. He could not fold or bend his legs enough; his feet were enlarged, gross, dirty.

The music stopped and a man in a suit stepped uncertainly up to the front and stood against some curtains, facing the people. Raymond did not know whether they were supposed to stand or sit. He glanced behind him for a clue. A couple of the girls were scrambling to their feet, one bloke dropped on to his knees, but most of the people stayed seated with stiff, embarrassed faces. The man out the front said nothing, gave no orders. He did not appear to be in charge: no one was in charge. Raymond realised that nobody here knew how this thing was meant to be done, that nobody here was going to stand up and say the words that would save them.

Then he heard, in the uncomfortable hush, a squeaking and a gliding, the sound of small wheels. Ursula's nails sank into his arm. The curtains at the front were nosed apart and into the empty space where the weak man in the suit was waiting rolled, on a metal trolley, the wooden box with Kim inside it.

Ursula stood up, dragging him with her. Her fingers bit into his inner elbow; and now out of her mouth horrible sounds began, ugly and ridiculous, the noises that bad singers make when they work up to a solo: woh, woh, woh, she went, blank and gaping, gobbling for breath. An old woman darted across and seized
her shoulders with both hands but Ursula flung up one arm and knocked her away. In the same movement she struck off her own sunglasses which dangled from one ear and hung half across her mouth, revealing two swollen bruises: her eyes. Out of these sore slits poured a gaze that hit the end of the coffin and bored right in. Ursula at that moment could see through wood.

She turned on Raymond with a crazy mouth. He fought to break away but, like the shrilling of the bird outside the window, Ursula's howling, this horror, exploded and stuffed the universe, paralysed him, swallowed him whole.

Then the bald skeleton with tattooed hands stepped right through the commotion in his heavy boots and put both arms round Ursula from behind.

‘Let go,' he said, right in her ear, working at her hands, rubbing at them, getting his thumbs under their grip. ‘Urs, it's me, Phil. Come on, Urs. It won't help the little girl now. Lay off the poor bastard, Ursula. Come on, let him go.'

He unhooked her claws and Raymond stumbled back. A rush of murmuring women with handkerchiefs and skirts flowed into the space where he had been, but in the second before they engulfed her he saw her one last time, with her back against the bald man's chest, rearing, her arms pinned up by his grip on her two wrists: her face was a demon's muzzle, sucking in air before its final plunge into the chasm.

* * *

Raymond got to his feet in the corner where he had been flung. The air in the ugly chapel settled; the coffin hummed behind him. He could not look at it, but he felt it vibrating in the yellow air, rippling out waves that pressed against his back and propelled him down the aisle towards the door. Ankle-deep in crushed garlands he crossed the porch and stopped on the step of the building, swaying and hanging on to the sides of the archway. He slid his head out into the garden. The last of the cars was pulling away. He heard the sponge and pop of its tyres on the bitumen, saw the blurred hair-masses of the girls packed into the back seat, smelled the exhaust that shot out of its low muffler. It swung round the curve in the road, and was gone.

He let his knees buckle, and sat down hard on the step. He was empty. There was nothing left inside him at all. He crouched there on the chapel's lip, rolling up his shirt sleeve to inspect the site of his bruises. If he could work out where he was, if he could find his way to the gate, he was free to get out of here, to drag himself away.

So when the heavy boots came crunching towards him across the carpark, although the skin of his skull tightened and a thousand hairs grew stiff, he did not raise his head. Maybe it was the gardener. Maybe it was the first person arriving for the next funeral. He kept very still. He made himself narrow. He waited, with shoulders clenched, for the boots to pass.

They halted in front of him. In his stupor and weakness, Raymond fixed his eyes on them. Never in his life had he really examined or considered the meaning of what anyone wore on their feet. The boots were very worn. They were black, and old. They met the ground with leisurely authority, and yet their Cuban heels gave them a lightness, a fanciful quality that was poised, vain, almost feminine. The man whose boots they were, from whose footwear Raymond was trying to read his fate, breathed steadily in and out. He was in no hurry. Still Raymond did not raise his eyes.

At last the grating voice began. ‘So you were the one, were you,' it said. ‘You were the one who was fucking her.'

Raymond made blinkers round his face with his cupped hands and kept his eyes on the boots. ‘No, mate,' he said. ‘Not me.' He hardly recognised the sound of himself. ‘Oh, I knew her, sure. Sure thing. I knew Kim. Everyone knew Kim. She was a nice girl. But I only came today because Ursula, because her mother wanted me to.'

The boots shifted, emitting a faint leathery squeak. ‘Bit old for her, weren't you?'

A whiff of cigarette smoke dropped to Raymond's level and spiked the lining of his nose. ‘Listen, mate,' he said, cupping his eyes, keeping his eyes down, ‘you've got the wrong bloke. It wasn't me. I don't know who she—'

‘Anyway,' said the man, moving his weight on to his left foot. ‘She's dead now. No point worrying who was up who. Is there.'

‘This is right,' said Raymond. ‘Nothing can help her now.'

Over in the garden beyond the carpark a bird uttered three notes of a mounting song, and fell silent.

A butt landed with force on the black ground beside the boots. It lay on its side, saliva-stained, twisted, still burning; Raymond could not resist, at last, the urge to reach out one foot and perform the little circular dance of crushing it. Still he did not look up.

‘There is one thing, though,' said the low, harsh voice above him. ‘There's one more thing that has to be done. For the girl.'

‘I have to go, actually,' said Raymond. He drew in his feet and placed his hands on the step as if to stand. This movement raised his gaze to the knees of the man's black jeans: the cloth was beaten, necessary, seldom washed, carelessly pulled on: as flexible as skin. ‘I think I'll get on home,' said Raymond. ‘I have to find my brother.'

‘Hang on,' said the voice, patiently, firmly. ‘You can't leave yet. I want to show you something.'

The boots took two steps back, then another two, then two more. The garden, until now blotted out by the hugeness of the boots, the legs, the voice, spread suddenly into Raymond's frame of vision. This he did
not want. He did not want movement, noise, softness; he wanted a permanent berth inside his grey casing.

He raised his chin to argue.

Where one man had been standing, there now were two. Raymond sat in his crouched posture, head back, on the threshold of the chapel. His lips parted to speak, but he could not properly see the two men's faces, for the afternoon sun hung exactly behind their two heads which were leaning together ear to ear, calmly regarding him, calmly waiting for his next burst of excuses; and these died in his mouth at the sight of the corona of light whose centre was their pair of skulls, one furred with yellow hair, one shaven bald as ivory.

The two men stepped apart.

‘I know who you are,' said Raymond to the bald man. Again his own voice rang oddly to him, as if his thoughts were forming on his tongue and not in his brain. ‘Are you her father?'

‘Hardly,' said the bald man, and laughed. ‘Don't be a dickhead
all
your life.'

The men looked at each other, swung their heads to take in the moving garden, then fixed their eyes again on Raymond. They're crims, thought Raymond. They've been in the nick. The one with hair was dressed in ironed grey trousers and a maroon blazer with gold on the pocket. He must have a job at a racecourse or out the front of a tourist hotel. He wore boots as well but cheap brown ones, hard-looking, though polished.
He glanced at his watch. His hands too were tattooed, with bitten nails.

‘Come on, Phil,' he said to the bald man. ‘The next mob will be on my back at four.'

The bald man, catching Raymond's eye, clicked his tongue and jerked his head sideways. ‘Hop up, pal,' he said. ‘We want to show you something.'

Raymond got to his feet warily, brushing the seat of his pants.

‘Tsk,' said the man in the blazer, to himself. ‘People don't care
what
they wear to a funeral these days.' He took a toothpick out of his blazer pocket, jammed it between his back teeth, and clomped away along a narrow path that skirted the chapel's outer wall. The bald man pushed Raymond lightly between the shoulder blades, and himself trod close behind. A freckled man in a towelling hat passed them and went tramping away across an enormous lawn, wheeling a barrow and whistling with raised eyebrows and cheerful trills. All three men greeted each other in an old-fashioned way, with grimaces and clicks.

Raymond's legs were still hollow and shaky; but as the men marched him Indian-style along the pathway, not speaking, moving forward with apparent purpose, he began to relax. Maybe this wouldn't be too bad. These men, like uncles, had taken him in hand. He turned to glance at the bald one, who winked at him and nodded. It was a public place, after all. What could
go wrong? Maybe he could drop his guard and walk like this between them, single file. It was not so dangerous. He could slide from one thing to the next, and the next; nothing much would be expected of him, the rest of the day would roll by as even the longest of days do, and by the end of it he would have got a lift somewhere, would have walked somewhere, would find himself somewhere, under somebody's roof, maybe with people, maybe on his own; yes, all this he could handle. The worst was over. He turned again to the bald man, and almost smiled at him.

The man in the blazer veered off the path and plunged into the dense strip of hedge that separated it from the building's side. Between two bouncing bushes of blue flowers he rustled his way, spitting out his toothpick, and with key outstretched unlocked a little wooden door marked
Private
.
He held the springy green branches apart for them with turning thrusts of his shoulders; they joined him, pinned against the wall by whippy shrubbery; he went ahead, and one by one they stooped and stepped through the little door, on to a narrow staircase that led them into the underworld.

The shock of it.

Raymond propped on the stair with one leg in mid-air. Above him the door slammed. The bald man coming close on his heels down the ladder would have cannoned into him, but took the strain with his thighs, and Raymond felt, instead of the weight of a heavy
body landing against him, merely a dexterous, light brushing. He lurched down the last step.