Madame Bovary's Haberdashery Read online

  Desire, it seemed, had returned.

  ‘I’ve been kicked out …’

  The Black and Gold Initiation had taken place, behind a black curtain threaded with gold, which billowed under the ceiling fans in the hot summer night.

  Partly she had earned this initiation because she had been working well as an unpaid secretary. Partly she had earned it because reports on her spiritual receptivity from her guru-assigned sexual partners had been favourable. After Bliss, there had been Dressing Gown, among others. But most importantly, with her starvation rations, her periods had ceased.

  The guru was to personally administer the ultimate Receptivity Test, reserved for female followers. If she passed, she would have the honour of working on more confidential correspondence in his office, and even of travelling to one of his other centres in San Fran or Sweden, with food and rent thrown in.

  I saw it all clearly as she recounted it …

  Behind the black curtain, waiting to be admitted, Patchouli trembled. Would she pass?

  Would she be presented with the locket of the guru tonight? In spite of her achievements, nothing was assured.

  Patchouli incense – in her honour – wafted from behind the curtain, and a gamelan tinkled.

  Initiated males had explained to her that, because of the different auras and spiritual vibrations of the yoni, this initiation was of a different nature to full male initiation. But Patchouli was feeling proud and expectant – given her gender, this was the pinnacle. And complete control of the cycles of the universe would still be hers.

  When the gamelan rose to a crescendo, male initiates took her white robe from her, and, naked except for tinkling bells around her wrists and ankles, the neck bare to receive the locket, she passed through the split black and gold curtain and approached the guru.

  He was sitting on his red velvet dais, surrounded by incense and flowers which almost disguised the smell of beer. To his left was a golden bowl full of jasmine water.

  He was cross-legged, but leaning to the right, towards a smaller golden dais with no cushion. Resting on this dais was his right forearm and hand, palm upward. His thumb and middle finger were not joined as in the circular gesture of universal compassion. Rather they were erect, pointing sharply to the ceiling.

  Her previous tantric sex partners had prepared her for this initiation, but she had never actually fully rehearsed it with any of them. This was forbidden. The Guru had the honour of presenting this cosmic experience to the female initiates. To him alone was relegated this droit de seigneur.

  And so it happened.

  Patchouli, trying to remain as graceful, receptive and feminine as possible, lowered her naked body onto the golden dais and into the lotus position. That is, locking onto the guru’s rigid digits, trying not to flinch as they fitted painfully into her two oiled orifices.

  His panting breath hot on her cheek, his probing finger and thumb ascertained her level.

  After the required full minute, during which she managed to sustain her rigid lotus position, he extracted his fingers rather sharply. She cried out, in spite of her training. He plunged his hand immediately into the cleansing bowl of jasmine water.

  Then he stared in horror, unable to believe what his eyes were telling him.

  The jasmine water in the bowl was slowly turning blood red.

  Some cycles, it seems, even a guru can’t control.

  Red in claw

  The turning point in his life.

  Stroking his Flaubertian moustache, Zac paused to savour the moment.

  At the top of the steps outside the terrace house which was Claw Publishing, in the heat of the concrete street, he smelt success.

  The publisher’s letter of acceptance was in his hand.

  His life’s work, five years of gruelling, handwritten work, was to be published. A scholarly work, not like Cicely’s women’s novel. In his moment of glory, he could even feel magnanimous towards her plagiarism. After all, her novel was forgotten already.

  His fame had already spread. After this appointment, he was on his way to Inner Savage, to arrange a keynote address on the real message of Madame Bovary, conveyed in his extensive footnotes. After that, no doubt, there would be the talkshows, the press, paparazzi. He would need a secretary …

  He stepped boldly into the cool foyer, loudly announced his name and soon he was shown into the holy of holies, the publisher’s office.

  It was smaller than he had expected.

  Darker.

  The publisher was a woman encased in tight black with a plunging neckline. He tried not to look.

  A female editor fussed satisfyingly around him, and soon he was sitting with a coffee in a comfortable chair, listening to nice things being said about his work.

  ‘We love your translation …’

  ‘We love your interesting theoretical footnotes …’

  When the publisher turned on the desk lamp, with her red-tipped fingers, it glared into his eyes, and the room became modern and metal. The light shone cruelly on his manuscript, prostrate before her on the desk.

  The editor, it turned out, was French, and thought it natural to speak to Zac, the latest translator of Flaubert, in that language. He gaped at her Gallic fluency. She was puzzled that he did not return her enquiry about his method.

  The problem was, well, that Zac had, in fact, blended together the best points of all recent translations, and was proud of it. However, the reason he had done this was that, apart from a quite extensive vocabulary relating to the female body, Zac did not speak more than schoolboy French.

  This seemed to shock the two women. So, in English, he proceeded to outline his method of work. How he had collected all the known translations of Madame Bovary.

  ‘And then, like, melded them.’

  ‘Like, melded them?’

  Two pairs of doubtful eyes were on him.

  ‘You have never read Flaubert in the original?’

  ‘Well no. But you admit it’s a good translation, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes but …’

  ‘So what does it matter if I don’t speak French?’

  They looked at each other, then at Zac, and shook their heads.

  ‘Zac, you are a translator who only speaks English, you don’t see …?’

  ‘Never satisfied,’ he muttered bitterly to himself, slouching down the steps of Claw Publishing with the manuscript heavy in his arms.

  Inner Savage would have found his address, on the real message of Madame Bovary, revolutionary and brilliant, and elected him to the committee.

  But he was now bereft of his dreams. His trembling fingers clenched and unclenched the jewel-handled dagger in his pocket. Each step he took placed him further and further away from his future of staggering literary glory, and so he slowed his pace to consider this nightmare. How could this have happened?

  How could it be that Cicely had been published and not he?

  But of course …

  In a flash of insight that made him stop and let out an involuntary groan that caused people to glance his way, he suddenly understood that it was she who must be responsible for this otherwise inexplicable state of affairs.

  These black-clad women inside Claw office, with their devilish cleavages and blood-red nails were certainly part of it. But only a part.

  For one woman in particular had sucked his psychic energy. A vampire of literature, who had somehow lured him to the bed he had thought to share only with Odette, with one evil goal.

  What other explanation existed for her sudden seduction, and then abrupt rejection of him? He recalled how she had stolen his mind as they made love. How, for the first time ever, he had lost the rhythm that enabled him to keep conscious control … she had emptied his mind.

  Now he saw why she slept alone. Her task, to suck his psychic energy, to feed it into her own novel, had been accomplished.

  Her mission to destroy him had been achieved.

  She was a succubus.

  And, next,
she would turn her psychic powers to annihilating Odette, just to punish him even further for his genius. To escape her malign power, they would have to move out as soon as possible … but where to?

  He recalled that he had the duplicate key to his great-aunt’s apartment. No one would know if he moved in, and anyway, it would be officially his soon enough. He chuckled darkly. Taking Odette from Cicely would destroy her, for it was clear that Cicely was in love with Odette. They were codependent. It was unhealthy. He would rescue Odette before it was too late.

  Looking around, disoriented, he saw that night was falling and commuters were hurrying, heads down, to their homes. Homes with one woman only. As it should be.

  Where in hell was he?

  He found he was standing outside a brightly lit shop, with figurines of angels in the window. He noticed a glittering silver chain on which was suspended a carved silver dagger. He was drawn to it, and knew he must go inside and buy it for Odette as a token of his gratitude for her love.

  On the counter was a thick illustrated Book of Curses & Hypnotic States.

  He flicked through it.

  Effective retaliation would require research in this field.

  Target woman

  Odette was lying naked on the kitchen floor.

  Cicely had just returned from the library and now, dropping her library bag full of cassettes with a clatter, she screamed.

  Zac was bent over Odette, wielding one of his frightening red-handled daggers, cutting around her, ripping through the black cotton sheet on which she lay.

  Her legs were spread wide and, into the V they formed, Cicely watched the dagger progressing threateningly towards the soft groove of her crotch.

  But Odette’s face was radiant with adrenaline as she turned to Cicely.

  ‘I’m his target woman …’

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said roughly.

  Even Odette couldn’t soften the demonic cloud in which he now dwelt. Instead, she meekly obeyed, eyeing him adoringly. What had happened to Odette? Her spark?

  It was as if he had hypnotised her.

  The house had become a hellhole.

  He and Odette had been drunk ever since he had returned from the publisher a few days ago. Cicely had thought getting published would have made him happy, but he seemed to no longer be able to bear the sight of her. And he had clearly enlisted Odette in his new loathing. For, all of a sudden, Odette now claimed to feel badly done by in Last Chance.

  Why, after two years?

  Why now?

  Zac must have egged her on.

  It was as if Cicely’s life had been suddenly cursed.

  The sight of Odette’s submission to him, coupled with the S&M tension in the room, made Cicely blush, avert her gaze. Bending down, she tried to concentrate on retrieving the cassettes, noticing yet another empty bottle of Baileys on the table.

  She noticed also that the Velcro on her library bag had snagged a brand new key, complete with address sticker, that must have been on the table. Cicely slipped it surreptitiously into the bag along with the cassettes.

  Zac had spoken of his plans, of the new flat in Docklands where he and Odette were going to live, telling her that they wanted a complete break from her. She would not be invited to visit.

  So Cicely would steal this key from him, as he was stealing Odette from her.

  Though now playing with aplomb the role of the offended subject of her novel, with much melodramatic rolling of the eyes, pressing of the temple as if Cicely’s very voice gave her a headache, Odette nevertheless allowed Cicely to help her pack up, once Zac had gone to Inner Savage again.

  Cicely saw that he had collapsed the Japanese screen, cleared away all his Flaubert books and, instead, on his desk now, in pride of place, was his velvet lined display box of jewel-handled daggers. She winced.

  He had nailed corkboard to the wall by the four-poster bed. Pinned to it was the black sheet silhouette of Odette that Cicely had found him cutting out in the kitchen that afternoon.

  ‘It’s to practise his knife-throwing. Before he actually uses me …’

  Cicely caught at a detail to stop her imagination running wild with images of knives grazing Odette’s inner thighs.

  ‘Er … isn’t it upside down?’

  Odette flipped nimbly into a handstand to demonstrate.

  ‘That’s, like, the act. It’s for the Inner Savage cabaret. He, like, throws the daggers up and down my bare legs. Hot, eh?’

  Perhaps on stage, she would finally get all the attention she craved.

  Late into the night, the last one that the three would spend together, Cicely listened to hysterical drunken laughter and the regular soft thud of daggers against their bedroom wall.

  PART

  Two

  Idle hands

  Cicely, left alone in a rented house which she could no longer afford, had settled for a little flat in a rundown art deco block. Surrounded by parched lawn, battered cabbage trees and one apparently indestructible greengage plum tree, the block was to be demolished in exactly one year, so it was unbelievably cheap. And it was right opposite Miss Ball’s Haberdashery.

  Just when Cicely would no longer need to buy any more wool for her crochet and knitting.

  That first night, there was an electrical storm lighting up the sky. She hurriedly covered the windows with improvised curtains, for she was afraid to look out into the black starry depths.

  For as well as knives and spiders, Cicely was afraid of lightning. It made her think about the immense void around the rapidly spinning ball on which, in half dreams, she saw herself trying to maintain her balance. She was glad that electric cities blocked out the stars, so that people were able to go about their nightly business with never a thought about these cold, remote witnesses to their compulsions, their private rituals.

  She was also afraid of staying alone at night unless she could light a fire. So this first night in her new flat, she set about arranging newspapers and a few dusty briquettes into a reluctant glow in the deco-tiled hearth. Mr Mistoffelees, though sulky and unsettled by the move, padded out of hiding to join her on the ancient chintz chair. Comforted once again by the shabby furniture which came into its own now that Zac’s modern additions were gone, the new tenant and her cat half closed their eyes, gazing at the strengthening flames.

  As a child, Cicely had been allowed to sit next to her father, before he had gone away, in this same chintz chair. They had toasted their bare feet by the fire that her mother had lit for him each winter sunset. No fidgeting, for fear of being banished from the rare and silent comfort of being near him.

  It was then that she had learned to knit.

  Now, she picked up some orange wool, warm from the fire, as if it was a living thing. She held it to her face a moment, before grasping the needles. She needed to test herself to see if she could knit with her eyes completely closed. Only a few rows before she dropped a stitch of the complex entrelac pattern. Exasperated, she opened her eyes and let the knitting fall away. Her empty fingers twitched. Most of all, Cicely feared having idle hands.

  The cat started winding herself around her ankles. She bent to pick her up, glad to feel the warmth of a pliant body.

  Almost midnight.

  Across the road, behind the counter in Miss Ball’s Haberdashery, the owner’s ancient fingers moved relentlessly back and forth, in and out of the loops, finishing off the fine lace picot edging of yet another lawn handkerchief.

  She put it down, admired it a moment, then picked up her next job. Her picot or triple or quadruple trebles, her puffs, her popcorns and her shell stitches pulled her hand round and round, digging in and out like a mother bird compulsively feeding her young.

  Miss Ball had accepted Cicely’s first cardigan a few years ago because she had wanted to encourage her, one of her few younger customers. Still, she had lamented the fence post needles, the twelve-ply wool. And the rather free construction – for Cicely never used a pattern – and wild colours were not to Miss
Ball’s refined taste.

  But that cardigan had sold the next day.

  Somewhat perplexed, Miss Ball had since taken them regularly from Cicely, and secretly wondered why her own, ever growing pile of finely crocheted doilies and collars still languished in the display window.

  It was now midnight.

  Cicely would understand why Miss Ball’s hands were afraid to be idle.

  Sitting by the fire across the road, her hands fidgeting in her lap, Cicely’s mind was now free to turn back to Odette, to see again Zac’s glittering knives flying perilously close to her bare skin. One slip and …

  The waking nightmare would not go.

  She would never see Odette again.

  She had last spoken to Odette the day that she had moved with Zac to his great-aunt’s apartment.

  ‘Why him?’ Cicely had dared to ask.

  Odette had shrugged, twisting the silver dagger on the chain around her neck, next to a shiny new brass key and tag, the same as the one Cicely had hidden in her library bag.

  ‘I’ve never lived with a guy before. Like, alone.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘I’m, like, thirty-five.’

  ‘I’m thirty-eight.’

  The theatrical sigh, pressing her fist to her temple as if in despair.

  ‘Exactly. And I don’t want to end up alone like you, shagging your pillow at night.’

  Cicely blushed. It was true that she slept hugging a Dutch Wife, a two-metre pillow that she liked to wrap her legs around. But the words were sharply masculine, coming from Odette. There was a new tone to her voice. It was flatter, almost a monotone.

  ‘We’re codependent …’

  Zac’s words, Cicely was sure.

  ‘And we don’t want to end up in another of your bitchy little novels, do we?’

  In the end, Odette had reluctantly given Cicely her new phone number, on condition that she did not tell Zac.