Madame Bovary's Haberdashery Read online

  ‘Last year some woman picked me up in the street when I fell over.’

  ‘I need some woman to cook for me.’

  Why not ‘a woman’?

  Is it like ‘some cake’, ‘some sugar’, ‘some butter?’ A collective noun? ‘Some woman’ is an amorphous mass of uncountable, replaceable and identical items, (grains of sugar etc). You draw on this supply at will.

  So a ‘good woman’ is like a ‘good cake’, belonging to this bigger group with similar functions. Some perform these functions better than others, and are therefore good, not in any moral way, but in the way any other serviceable item can be so termed.

  Must go,

  Linguistic Love,

  CC.

  Dear O,

  Have succumbed. Scrubbed his false teeth again. Contrary to advertorial claims, Steradent does not miraculously make all the sludge disappear in three minutes of soaking. Especially if you do not take them out of your mouth for three or four days, which he doesn’t.

  Have I told you he holds me directly responsible for the weather?

  Every morning before he gets out of bed, he snarls an enquiry about the state of the heavens – far beyond anyone’s predictions, especially in Melbourne as you know. He sighs deeply as if mortally and personally affronted if I fail to come up with a good prognosis. Should I lie? After all, he never goes outside.

  I know I’m boring but please answer my emails, just a note at least to tell me all is forgiven,

  Your best friend,

  CC

  Dear O,

  He’s waking me in the middle of the night to get me to pass him his medicine, which I always place within reach on his bedside table. Maybe there are initial polite calls from the room, but I certainly don’t hear any.

  The first thing I hear is thump thump on the wall with his walking stick, escalating the summons, beating on the wall in a constant, ever louder rhythm. Surprising strength for a man who apparently can’t lift a finger.

  Yours anyway,

  CC

  Dear O,

  Odd happenings. A few days ago, I’d just come home from shopping for his particular whim for lunch. I saw him scurrying with surprising agility from the sunny kitchen back to the armchair, where he assumed the apparently deeply sleeping position in which I’d last left him.

  Since then I’ve been observing him slyly, as the best way to ascertain his degree of illness. For example, just before his last ‘bad spell’, I saw him scraping out the bottom of his pea and ham soup bowl with the last of the toast crusts which I had absent-mindedly left on his plate after cutting off.

  I am worried about you. Let me know you are OK.

  Love

  CC

  Dear O,

  How’s this for dialogue?

  ‘What would you like for dinner?’

  ‘What is there?’

  At first I would reel off all the delights I could whip up for him, but all the food he likes makes me nauseous. The only thing that settles my stomach is chocolate-covered ginger (have I told you how much weight I’m putting on though?) He favours things from The Fresh Food People like a fillet of fish sealed in a plastic bag with its own plentiful (forget the quality, feel the width) white sauce, variously titled cheese, onion garlic etc though they all look the same (can’t say how they taste!). I follow the directions and thrust this plastic ‘pouch’ into a pot of boiling water into which I add the three minute frozen ‘fresh’ vegetables at the end, then remove the pouch with kitchen tongs, lay it on his plate and cut it open with scissors. A pale reminder of a fisherwoman laying a fish on a plate and gutting it. The sauce oozes thickly out like innards.

  On the plate, with the three colour vegies, it makes a frighteningly convincing simulacrum of a gourmet steamed fillet of fish in rich cream sauce with julienned vegetables straight from the garden.

  Anyway, in answer to the question, ‘What is there?’ I started petering out earlier and earlier each time as I became more familiar with his narrow tastes.

  But I’ve learnt now to retaliate with, ‘Well you tell me what you feel like.’

  This is much more satisfactory to me, much less to him.

  Apparently he finds eating from a tray a great treat. He can always call out to me if he requires a little more tea or if he decides, as if it is a great treat for me, that he thinks he may, after all, try a little more jam tart, or another of the various combinations of red jam, white flour and sugar that he favours.

  And then there is his attention to his hair, about which he is surprisingly particular. He has his hair brushed forward and then combed back into place …

  Feeling the heat of a blush, Cicely stopped reading.

  What a whinger she was. How mean about Uncle Bill.

  She wished she could have a sip of Assam. No, it would have to be a smoky Souchong if she was to recover from realising what a boring friend she was. Why hadn’t she asked what was really on her mind? Odette’s sudden loathing for her, her disappearance with the unstable, knife-obsessed Zac?

  She was almost glad that her emails had gone unopened.

  Deleting as she went, she scrolled down to the last one, dated a few weeks ago, the heading a lonesome cry:

  WHERE ARE YOU? ???????????CONTACT ME!!!!!!!

  Out of morbid self-abasement, she almost clicked it open. How pathetically low had she gone?

  She clicked on the Sent Folder instead. But Odette had kept no copies of her own emails.

  She then clicked on Drafts and bingo, found just one, dated months ago. Addressed to herself. Reading mail addressed to oneself was certainly not a crime, so …

  Dear CC,

  I thought it all finished as you got near forty, but with internet dating, things just speed up. I go through a whole relationship in a week, from start-up perfection to fight at the end. Even in a day it can all happen!

  I think of the men in sets. A set of five or six men makes up one dream relationship.

  And when I meet them, I meet them in sets too, all on the one day. I arrange café dates an hour apart, keeping notes so that I don’t get them mixed up.

  Out of a set of five or six there will usually be one hot enough to call back, then a whole evening of dinner and wine, before I decide his fate.

  When I get bored with one set, I put them away like broken toys and start up a new game, compose a single come-hither email and hit Reply All.

  Feels like fishing when I return to the screen the next day to see what I have caught …

  Had some maniac got angry at her cavalier attitude?

  Toys?

  Had a lunatic traced her to this apartment?

  Fish?

  After all, it was the only one occupied on the entire floor. Odette would have been a sitting duck.

  Night was falling.

  She really was extending this ‘trip to the supermarket’ to its limit. What if Uncle Bill died while she was away, as he had warned her so many times that he might? In spite of herself, she felt the same pity for him that she had dreaded receiving from others.

  However, she needed just a few minutes more …

  I always use my toweroflove ID and address. Check it out at toweroflove.com. I’m ‘honeylicks’. Have a look at my photo. The password is ‘more’ You should try it. You would … But I’ve just realised what you would do. I can’t send you this email because you will just use my life again, like Zac said, like in your novel …

  Her heart beating fast, and feeling as if she was watching herself from above, Cicely’s fingers tried to log into toweroflove. com.

  And failed.

  The site no longer existed.

  How could she find honeylicks?

  Something else

  Trying not to think about the hospital appointment the following day, Cicely was swirling Uncle Bill’s plastic bag of bream fillet around in the boiling water so that it would not stick.

  Restlessly, ideas for the film-script were similarly swirling in her head. Graphic fugue scenarios starrin
g Odette. Kidnapped. Or worse. And now, as well as Zac to consider as the villain, it could be one of Odette’s many anonymous internet lovers. Though she tried to tell herself that it was still possible that one day she would walk into Golden Tower and find Odette, unharmed, it seemed more and more unlikely as each day passed.

  For Odette had the habit of taking on the lifestyle of whoever was her current boyfriend. Zac had only been the latest in a line of weird lovers. The worst one had been Bandit. Odette’s Bandit personality had taken over their share house, ages ago, when Odette had been an arty nineteen, Cicely already twenty-two.

  Cicely shuddered even now to think of Bandit – his smell of dope, his dyed black hair clogging up the bathroom basin, the music playing all night. Zac had been right to accuse her of using this and other Odette mishaps in Last Chance, but hadn’t she also used her own dreams of travel, not to mention Miss Ball’s life? In the same way that Odette transformed clay into something unrecognisable, surely the characters in Last Chance were no longer Odette, no longer Miss Ball?

  She turned on the radio to distract herself, but the mournful classical mix of harp and flute only intensified her sense of hopelessness, until, as if from behind the music, she seemed to hear a haunting whisper. If only she could make out that mental ripple.

  The melody ended. Grabbing at the steaming plastic with tongs, she slapped it down roughly onto the cutting board and sliced it open with her blunt kitchen scissors. The violence of this daily procedure, reminding her of post-mortem scenes on TV, drove her to ring the police later that night.

  ‘Have you been personally threatened in any way by this fellow, madam?’

  The distracted officer on duty was not showing much interest in the case.

  ‘No? Little we can do about that sort of stuff madam, until something else happens …’

  But that was her fear.

  That unnamed something else.

  Couldn’t he see that? But he considered the knife-throwing to be a hobby, and she had to admit that, yes, even if the dark stain turned out to be blood, it was minor and to be expected in that particular circus act. Much like darts. Not a crime.

  And a thirty-something woman, especially an artistic one may, after all, choose to leave her place of residence without telling anyone, he reminded her. He took the time-pressed view that Odette would turn up just as unexpectedly as she had disappeared. The outback, drugs, a new lover. After all, she had cancelled her mail, hadn’t she?

  By the time she had slowly replaced the phone, having failed to put into words her deepest anxiety, the radio music had segued into the news, and she heard out loud that word which she had dared not utter on the phone.

  Murder.

  It entered her kitchen now with an undeniable force of its own. She repeated it in a whisper, then more loudly.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ called Uncle Bill irritably.

  She hurriedly arranged his fish with accompanying strained baby potatoes and peas on the plate, took it in to him, comfortable in her chintz chair by the TV, and left him to hoe in.

  She gathered clothes and started up the washing machine, putting in detergent, separating darks and lights, trying to get rid of the word now pounding in her brain.

  If she contacted the sensible policeman again, he would tell her that it was just her overactive imagination. An understandable concern about a friend. Loneliness too, the police might smirk at each other after he had hung up.

  Murder.

  She went back into the kitchen and turned off the radio, but the word would not fade away. Uncle Bill was calling out to her from the other room, and she was almost glad.

  She took his tea and jam-fancy biscuits in to him, and returning to the kitchen sink with his scraped plate, she sat down and poured her own Souchong.

  It was a moment of stillness in the house that she did not want to disturb. Mr Mistoffelees was sleeping on the window sill, her chin resting on the planter of basil. Cicely listened to the purring while she sipped her tea. She took from her wool basket the old-fashioned crocheted cardigan which she was unravelling so that she could re-use the soft wool. Pure wool was expensive these days, and she always recycled old knitwear like this, badly designed but with quality wool, to create soft, loose jumpers and shawls. The soothing repetition of the unravelling, the rewinding, grounded her.

  Soon enough, she would have to collect all the forms and papers she needed for the hospital in the morning, then ring to book a taxi. She had to be in by 7.00 am for the procedure at 12.00. Back home by five or six. A little ‘discomfort’, as the doctors called it, could be expected and she had already bought the prescribed eye drops and a supply of the strongest over the counter painkillers.

  As for Uncle Bill, if he couldn’t cope for a day with her less than full attention, there was always the threat of Martha.

  Though Cicely was by now used to her cheery greeting at the letterbox, or while picking up her newspaper from the dried out lawn, Martha had still not got her foot back inside the door.

  The best laid plans

  The patients in battered slippers and old dressing gowns, as if they were in their own lounge room, stared blankly at the huge, over-loud TV.

  The bored nurse inserted Cicely’s eyedrops every half-hour for three hours.

  As she sat on the hard plastic chair in a corridor, the drops started to anaesthetise her eyes, and her brain. She heard a humming under all this busy noise, and felt she was becoming part of a giant, beneficent beehive, efficient and sterile. She kept thinking of how she would always miss the eye of the needle when she tried to thread it these days. It was so frustrating … but soon, she would be able to thread needles precisely again …

  With Cicely drugged to the eyeballs, the operation itself had indeed been painless. She remembered most of it, but there were definitely blanks. She recalled being told that she would be given injections around her eyes, but that she would not remember them. She remembered lying on the trolley, listening to her own unquiet breathing echoing from under the oxygen mask. Immobilised, she was mesmerised by hovering, alien-like figures who joked with each other as they removed unspeakable things from her eyes … tampering with parts of her self. Inserting foreign objects in her eyes with red-handled daggers and long tweezers like curling extended fingernails …

  She wondered if alien abduction stories were actually constructed from people’s memories of these local anaesthetic operations.

  Imaginary friend

  When Cicely woke up, she was reclining on clouds.

  Her eyes were still bandaged.

  Someone was setting a tray carefully on the bed and the aroma of savoury toast was wafting towards her. Was it Welsh rarebit? She hadn’t had that since …

  ‘Odette? Is that you?’

  With an effort, she remembered how, in excruciating pain, she had collapsed into the arms of the woman waiting at her front door – an angel from heaven who had helped her inside, put her to bed and plied her with painkillers.

  ‘It’s only me love. Sit up and eat,’ ordered Martha. ‘It’s ten at night and you haven’t eaten all day.’

  Coming down to earth with a cushioned landing, Cicely felt blindly for the delicious squares and munched gratefully. So tangy …

  Martha was explaining the eye drops which she would need for the next morning, when the eye pads were to come off. She tried to concentrate.

  ‘Two hourly intervals, and the painkillers, here, on the bedside table, all you need. And your Thermos for the night, just the way you said …’

  Had she said? When? She wondered how many painkillers she had taken, for she felt pleasantly enveloped in cottonwool.

  ‘Tea to your liking?’ asked Martha, sitting heavily on the end of her bed, and Cicely nodded, wanting to cry with gratitude.

  As she sipped it, holding the cup carefully with two hands, for everything was difficult with the eye pads, she heard Uncle Bill calling out to her.

  ‘You better yet girl? Can I have …?’


  But she had a renewed surge of empathy for Uncle Bill. It was so nice, after all, to have someone to care for you, when you were weak. And it was Martha now who would go to him.

  Cicely felt the woman’s weight disappear from the end of the bed.

  ‘Thanks so much Martha …’

  ‘Oh, I’ll settle him right. You shouldn’t get a peep out of him,’ she added, complicitly.

  And indeed Cicely could hear that her uncle’s ‘bah’ had already softened, becoming more like the bleating of a dependent, contented, enquiring lamb.

  Though Martha did seem happy to help her, Cicely remembered that she had always kept to herself before Uncle Bill had moved in. Her reward, if virtue itself was not enough, was to have at last penetrated the fortress that up until now, Uncle Bill had constructed around himself. With the genuine excuse of helping poor Cicely, for after all, he could not be expected to do it, had she planned to wear him down, starting from that moment when, standing in wait for her outside her door, she had helped Cicely out of the taxi, and pushed past him into the house? To get him used to her coming and going as she pleased?

  That first night, tangling her sheets in sweaty dreams, Cicely was unravelling the over-tight sleeve of an orange jumper, and replacing it at breakneck speed with a loose picot border of burnt orange mohair. It was for Dr Singh. She might even finish it, if there were not too many thumps from behind her eyes, thumps on the wall that night, thumps of knives grazing Odette’s perfect skin, her shrieks changing from erotically charged to panicked as she thumped under the locked lid of the golden casket of the disappearing lady …

  Dream knitting needles were bursting painfully out of Cicely’s eyes.

  They clacked wildly, their hypnotic rhythm louder and louder, until suddenly, there was Miss Ball, sitting on an armchair floating in space, knitting a red heart with oversized needles, smiling down at Cicely.

  So far away, with the stars twinkling around her, but Cicely’s eyesight, in her dream, was extraordinarily precise. How delightful to make out the detail of the lace edge on her collar, her pearl necklace, her black, lace-up ankle boots.