A Wicked Old Woman by Ravinder Randhawa

Author:Ravinder Randhawa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

MEA CULPA TOO, FAUST

Stick-leg-shuffle-leg-shuffle. Stick-leg-shuffle-leg-shuffle.

Damn Caroline! She’d tried to call Caroline. Sid had answered. Said Caroline was away with Rachel. Sid sounded grumpy. She didn’t ask him why. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t care.

Blast Caroline’s letter! She’d discovered it lying wrinkled and grimy at the bottom of her bag. Caroline had said it was urgent. True or False? She’d decided to deliver it – back to Caroline. No Caroline. Stumped! She’d have to get rid of it. She’d have to go.

Stick scraping, forgotten on the pavement, eyes unseeing, mind a jigsaw of scattered pieces: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley.’ It was wrong. She never could remember quotations right. Her Manderley wasn’t the Manderley of the nameless heroine: it was Keats’ nightingale flinging its soul-song into the frozen caves, emerging into the horror light of Faust and his agony. Faust, who bartered his soul for the beads and trinkets of hell’s duplicity, becoming a territorial conquest in the colonialist war between the White God and the White Devil.

No wonder they overran the planet with their marauding armies and marauding merchants. Christians had direct examples from above, the orders transmitted at every Sunday worship, assimilated through generations of congregations.

Mea Culpa too, Faust – I fell for the beads and trinkets too. Should have remembered they’ve had heavenly examples to teach them the ways of bartering with the natives.

She didn’t go in, but loitered outside, hoping to catch someone going in to whom she could pass on Caroline’s unveiled attempt to bring her back into contact with the fold. The one unbridgeable divide between them in all the shared years of childhood and adulthood. Caroline was now an integral cell in the body of the party, believing in it, working for it and defending it. She had never been able to reconcile herself to Kulwant’s exit. If Kulwant was turning her back on the party, where did that leave her? Both had avoided talking about it. Kulwant never wanting to and Caroline never daring, scared of bringing the rupture into their personal lives, deepening the ripple effect of the fracas. They were both stained by it and a single word could have been spark on dry tinder.

The house had been repainted. Window sills, pipes and door gleaming a bright red. Geoff must have done it, he’d been talking about it for the last seven years. The front garden too had been tidied up: emptied of the debris of years of pamphleting, placard making, thousands of soggy dog-ends from the impromptu meetings on the doorstep, or the quiet smoking of someone slipping away for a cigarette-break. There were times when Kulwant had wished she smoked too and had the excuse of addiction to slip out for a respite from the intensity or banality inside; as it was, too many eyes would follow, too many minds wondering what she was up to. Was there a secret cabal having a secret meeting outside? Much the safer course to risk tedium than incur their suspicions.

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