24.

'Can I be of a.s.sistance?' Wally said.

He put his freckled hands on the edge of the car door and Roxanna considered them thoughtfully: the stranger's wide pink nails hooked over her wound-down window.

She turned off the ignition, leaving the car stuck where it was, its wheels askew, poking out into the entrance lane. 'Got a light?' she asked. This time yesterday she had been a married woman.

Wally's lighter was silver, with a windshield. When it flamed it was red and smoky, and Roxanna fresh from her own adventures with kerosene held back her fringe to stop it getting burnt.

'It's the Happy Hour,' he said when she had exhaled. He just said it as a fact. As if it were the Happy Hour and therefore dot dot dot.

Until this moment Roxanna's only plan had been to check into the motel, eat on room service, and leave without paying. Now she looked at this man and considered him. She had done worse things in the old days, but the truth was yuk she no longer had the stomach for the life.

'Could you tell me what day the local zine comes out?' she said, and hid from his insistent eyes in her handkerchief, blowing her nose wetly, unattractively, deliberately. She found her dark gla.s.ses in her bag and put them on. 'I need to put an avvert in.'

'What are you selling?' he said. He had a high forehead like a clown, and sad grey freckled eyes.

'Pigeons,' she said, very level.

'What sort of pigeons?' Wally said. 'I got a young fellah might be interested.'

'Racing pigeons,' she said.

'Start him off with a couple of street-p.e.c.k.e.rs.'

'These aren't street-p.e.c.k.e.rs,' she said. 'They're racing pigeons. They have pedigrees.' pedigrees.'

'I had a grandpa who raced pigeons,' the punter said. 'He won a lot of races, but he never had any pedigrees. I had a dog dog once.' He smiled: he had wide pale lips. 'Now that fellow had a pedigree.' once.' He smiled: he had wide pale lips. 'Now that fellow had a pedigree.'

'So are you interested or what?' She took the keys out of the ignition. She wiped her hands with her handkerchief. 'I've got other people interested.'

'I could be persuaded.' persuaded.'

'What do you think I'm talking about, mister?' she said.

He opened the door for her and stepped back politely so she could get out of the car. 'Not doves,' he said, and grinned.

'They're expensive,' she said, lowering her eyes as she locked the door. 'That's all I meant. It isn't like an impulse buy.'

As she walked back to the caravan, she sensed Wally Paccione's freckled hand, imagined it half an inch away from her pleated red skirt, as insistent as thrip, a fruit fly hovering, but when she looked over her shoulder she saw he was not even looking at her, but back towards the chalky green motel doors.

When she opened the van for him the smell came flooding out.

'Sorry,' she said.

That smell used to drive Reade crazy. He always asked her every morning before he drove away please clean the loft. When she was under the impression that pigeons made BIG MONEY she had cleaned brooms, scrubbing brushes, disinfectant. She had been a fanatic in the cause. She laid out brown-eyed peas, ground millet, butcher's seed. She checked each hen once every day eyes, throat etc. But when she saw what Reade's idea of BIG MONEY was, she gave up on the pigeons.

If she had bought a gun and pushed him into a bank, Reade would have thought she was a genius. But when she wrote away for books, he laughed and farted and spilt his drink back in his gla.s.s.

'Your lips move,' he said. 'Your f.u.c.king lips move, Roxanna.'

She let him laugh. It made him look so pitiful.

She sat in the kitchen in her dressing gown, toast crumbs embedded in her elbows. She read about things that bewildered him: the production of tin soldiers in nineteenth-century Europe, for instance. His lip curled, but his eyes looked frightened. He could not imagine the pay-off. He was not meant to. She read slowly with a wooden ruler held under each line.

He came home with beer on his breath and s.n.a.t.c.hed the ruler away. She knew he was hanging round with that Voorstandish widow up at the cashier's office. He did not look beautiful any more. His s.e.xy red lips had got all twisted and his eyes were bulging, like someone with a thyroid condition. He was her husband, but she looked at him from far, far away one more bozo going to hit it big with greyhounds, pigeons, possum furs.

Rich people did not mess with things that s.h.i.t or made you ill. Only poor people did that. Reade already had bronchitis, fancier's lung, all that bloom which came off the birds, white clouds of it, every time they settled.

The weird thing was that when he split, he abandoned the pigeons too. Now they were her only a.s.set.

'Can I hold one?' the punter asked her at the Melcarth Motor Inn.

She folded her arms across her chest and watched him as he lifted out the cage and opened it without being shown the tricky latch. He took the bird hands up and down its chest, down around its neck, like a fancier.

What she could not know was that the only two truly happy years of Wally's childhood had been spent with his maternal grandfather who was exactly that character that Roxanna now despised the working-cla.s.s man with a pa.s.sion for pigeons, a man making twenty-five cent bets, upgrading his stock, crossing street-p.e.c.k.e.r with street-p.e.c.k.e.r, dreaming of the big bets, the famous birds.

She watched him running his nicotine-stained finger down the back of the bird's head and thought he was just like Reade looking at ties in an expensive shop. She was deep within herself. She did not hear the five members of the Feu Follet cross the yard and stand behind her. What she was thinking was: she was back at square one if he did not buy these birds, she was going to have to have s.e.xual intercourse for money.

Then she heard the sc.r.a.pe of shoe behind her. The hair on her neck stood on end. She spun around and saw tattoos, face scars, ripped shirts and sweaters, a bald-headed man with bright blue eyes staring at her t.i.ts. Sweat pooled in the tight creases of her hands.

There was a woman with an accent like a Sirkus star. She was striking, pale-faced, copper-haired, holding a blond-haired child who was hiding himself under a patchwork shawl.

'We all wanted to see the clean bus, Wally.'

'Here, Tristan,' Wally said to the fair-haired boy. 'Hold this.'

A pair of surprisingly large hands emerged from the tatty shawl, and as the child took the bird she saw his face, my face.

Jesus f.u.c.king Christ Almighty.

It was hard to look, hard to not look my triangular head, my dense blond hair, my frightening lipless mouth, my small regular white teeth, my striated marble eyes terrible, beautiful flecked with gold, like jewellery.

'Feel its heart,' the punter said. 'You can feel its heart beating in your hand.'

Everything was happening for Roxanna in slo-mo. She saw Tristan Smith hold her pigeon with his normal hands.

'You feel that?' Wally said. 'That's its heart.'

The boy cupped his hand around her pigeon's breast.

He said, 'Air ... atter.'

'OK, you're an actor,' the punter said. 'I never said you wasn't.'

'Ah ... don ... h.e.l.let ... ehh.'

That's right. You don't collect anything yet,' the punter said. 'I'm not saying you're not an actor. I'm asking you, would you like to breed pigeons, race them? Feel its heart, feel it on your face.'

'Ah ... don't ... h.e.l.let ... ehh.'

'You don't collect their eggs. You let the yolk stay inside, then you get birds out of them.'

The boy held the bird so tight Roxanna feared he was going to choke it.

'You like the pigeon?' the woman asked. 'Would you like that?'

The boy's eyes were big, swimming, alive, all those fine gold stripes flashing in the artificial light. His legs were twisted, wasted, pipe cleaners inside his striped pyjamas. He nodded.

'Is this OK?' the punter asked the beautiful woman.

The woman turned to the boy. She smiled and stroked his soft white neck. 'Is this instead of climbing trees?' she asked him.

When the punter turned back to Roxanna his face was blazing red. His eyes had changed. They had been all sleepy and slitted but now they were bright, p.r.i.c.kly, absolutely awake.

'How much?' he said.

Roxanna did not know what it was, but she saw something was happening.

'I don't sell them individually,' she said.

'All of them,' the punter said, his colour still high.

He held the bird's beak open and looked inside checking the cleft.

'That's Apple Pie,' she said. 'He's famous.'

'How much is all I'm asking.'

She thought 300. She thought 5000. 'You couldn't afford it,' she said.

'Wally,' said the beautiful woman, swinging Tristan Smith on to her other hip, 'where would we keep pigeons in Chemin Rouge?'

'Chemin Rouge?' Roxanna asked. (There was an antique toy exhibition in Chemin Rouge next week!) 'Are you going back to Chemin Rouge?'

'We get the right price, we're going to buy it,' the punter told the boy. 'We're going to have pigeons.' To the woman he said, 'Is this OK?'

They're educational,' Roxanna said. 'Maths, genetics, dot dot dot.'

The punter could not hear her. He was looking straight into Tristan Smith's wild unnatural eyes. He was like a man proposing marriage still, intense, a coiled spring.

'A thousand,' Roxanna said.

The minute she said it, she knew it was too much. She saw his Adam's apple move. He grinned at her, a little foolishly.

'Oh, for heaven's sake,' said the beautiful woman.

'I'd set you up,' Roxanna said to Wally. 'You know what I mean?'

That was how s.e.x got mixed up with it again. She hadn't needed to say this. It was habit, insecurity.

'You know what I mean?' she said. 'For a thousand, I'd be prepared to come down to Chemin Rouge and set you up, get everything in nice working order.'

'We're actors,' the woman said. 'We haven't got that kind of money.'

'Three hundred,' Wally said.

In the end Wally paid 650 dollars and my mother was aghast, bewildered. 'Was this about what I think it was about?' she asked Bill Millefleur.

25.

The last day of the tour found our party camped at Fiddler's Creek, waiting for the next day's car ferry to Chemin Rouge. Bill had spent the late morning in sleep, or pretended sleep, and now he lay in the back seat of the bus, reading and rereading the first page of Dead Souls Dead Souls, wishing nothing more than for the time to pa.s.s, the sultry day to go, for tomorrow to come so he could catch his flight back home to Saarlim City.

My maman, however, had other plans for the last day.

She appeared at the window by his head, tapping, beckoning.

'What?'

When she saw his face through the dusty window the great ridged scar from mouth to chin, the anxious eyes Felicity knew something was up, but she did not know how serious it was.

Bill held up his book.

She shook her head and beckoned.

When he appeared at the bus door, he looked strangely shy, and she took him by his hand and led him past the dusty horse float, through the hash-sweet campsite, along a rather melancholy avenue lined with dead black mimosa trees and shoulder-high blackberries whose leaves were now grey from dust.

'What is this?' he said.

'You'll see,' she teased him.

Around the bend Bill saw his best linen suit, clean and pressed, shrouded in plastic, hanging from a low mimosa just off the track. He felt a dull kind of dread.

'Some fancy joint?' he asked. 'Out here?'

'Sssh.' My mother made her eyes go big, fluttered her lashes, began to undo the b.u.t.tons of her khaki shorts.

'Some joint with cha-cha?' Bill whispered, rolled his eyes.