Lambs of God by Marele Day

Author:Marele Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 1998-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

It popped out. The thing that had broken loose in Margarita had now found its way to the surface. She lay in the Great Silence, the Knitting Madonna on her chest, so stiff and straight on her narrow bed that it might have been a coffin. Her eyes were riveted to the ceiling. In between the bones of timber, cobwebs and other things she saw the chandelier, its pendants set hard and bright as tears.

Beauty did not go to the Beast’s house, the Beast came and fetched her. ‘Beauty, my Beauty,’ he said. He played his tongue out so his cherry-red lips became moist and shiny, touched his moustache as he looked at her, running his fingers over it, curling it up at the ends like a suggestive smile. He had a name, a tawny name, but she had willed it out of her consciousness.

‘Beauty, my Beauty.’ The house was brown in her memory, with an upstairs and downstairs. The third step creaked and the corridor at the top was lit by gas lamps converted to electricity. Brass fittings on the walls with delicate glass hats. The garden had nothing in it except a few hard bushes. The house was in the country on its own, about an hour’s drive in the horse and buggy from the trainstation. There were two or three cars in the trainstation town but a horse and buggy were better suited to the country roads.

‘It will be an adventure for you,’ promised her father with a pasty smile. ‘A trip to the country. Imagine that. You can make up some lunch and take it with you.’

Standing in the kitchen of her father’s house in her best white dress with the blue sash, preparing thick slices of bread with pickled onion and ham.

‘No need,’ said the man with the black moustache. ‘We can stop at a tavern on the way and have a hot dinner. Grilled kidneys, a nice stew. What do you say?’

The two men looked at her expectantly. She noticed her father’s shirt fraying at the cuffs and a few grey hairs around his knuckles. He wore the same air of bravado he wore when trying to bluff at cards.

‘Will you come too, Father?’

‘Oh no no no no no no no,’ he said. ‘I have my affairs to attend to.’

He had not attended to his affairs in months. When he did venture out he would be gone for hours, all night sometimes and in the early morning she would hear him come in, hear him knock things over, crash. On those nights she would stay very still and quiet.

The visits of the men to the house became more and more frequent. She would put out the ashtrays, serve them wine, sit in the kitchen and listen as the room filled with their smoky conversation and leery jokes. The man with the black moustache and cherry-red lips would often be there. When they played cards his jacket would be off and his sleeves held up by gold armbands that rippled like metal snakes.

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