Chapter Six
“It’s not a telescope.”
“How would you know?”
His stepmother took her number six cosmetic bag from the right-hand drawer and plonked its gingham rump on the dressing table. “What makes you think it is?”
“It looks like a telescope,” said Nathaniel.
“Appearances can be deceptive. Didn’t your father ever tell you that?”
“Not directly.”
“Well, your mother certainly did. In her inimitable way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Picture of propriety by all accounts. Anyway, let’s not divert - it’s your adventure we’re discussing. How’s the head now?”
“Still awful.”
“Take another day. Bring me some paper and I’ll write an absence note.”
“No, I’ll be alright in the morning. And even if I’m not – I’m going in. I need to see if Nudge shows up. What do you mean – it’s not a telescope?”
His stepmother began to vigorously backcomb her platinum hair.
“Did you look through it?”
“No.”
“I have.” His stepmother’s hair, formerly very Ingrid Bergman, was already piling towards Dusty Springfield. She’d stretched, braised and glued it this way for over a year now, even though she was a half a generation too old to be on trend.
His head felt like a gatepost. “You’ve been in 13A?”
“It’s where I met your father.”
“When?”
“Now you’re asking.”
“I am,” said Nathaniel. He struggled with a cognisance still befogged by whatever he’d been plied with the previous night. Now his brain had been spliced open by the latest cleaver of revelation wielded by the woman who had usurped his mother and flattered his father. All his college friends knew his parents’ marriage had been prised apart by a woman who was too young be Nathaniel’s mother, or to be dismissed as undesirable.
“You know, if you were really there, you can’t remember when it was.”
“Yes, I can,” he said. I was there last night.”
“And you came home in a wheelbarrow with your little treasure chest on your breast.” His stepmother’s hair was now a honeybee palace of sugared straw. She applied the fifth crop-spray of aerosol adhesive, then gripped the multi-bruised pad from her compact and set about the re-sedimentation of her soft rock face. "Remember?"
"Yes."
“So you weren’t really there.” She punched her cheekbones and a fairy cloud of powdered camouflage curled vortices around her fingers.
Nathaniel considered. “That’s – partially – true. I can’t remember hours of it. It was as if time and me were on parallel tracks. Crazy journey to nowhere via everywhere. Parking that – back to the box. What do I put in it?”
“Everyone has secrets”
“I don’t.”
“I’m sure you do.” Pumice talc pillowed from the impacts with the pores of his stepmother’s cheeks.
“Not that secret. Not secret enough to tell anyone.”
“You don’t tell anyone. That’s the whole point. You lock it in the box and keep the key.” She leaned towards him while fumbling for her snuffbox of mascara. “It was in my Dolce Vita period.”
“What was?”
“When I met your father. Five years ago.”
“You married him five years ago.”
“Three actually.” She snapped open the snuffbox, removed the surgical comb and leaned in to seduce her reflection. “Just seems like five.”
“Have you got a box?”
“From Telescopic Titus?”
“Yeah.”
“Nope.”
“Thank god for that.”
“He’s got it.”
“What?”
“In his bureaux. With all the others. I’ve got the key.” Without looking she reached in the open drawer and selected make-up bag number one; the black one with red, green and yellow birds of paradise patterned on it. “In here.”
“What did you lock in it?”
“Your father’s reputation.” She put the bag back and set to work on the whips of her other eye.
“That’s horrible.”
“But true.” She enjoyed the reflection of the angst on her stepson’s face. “Relax – I didn’t put that in the box. Can’t tell you what I did though, can I? But now you know where they key is.”
This was just too provocative, but that was the way his stepmother always was. She was outrageous, exasperating, flirtatious, self-indulgent and intoxicating. He thought that was why his father was attracted to her; in fact, he knew it was. Her eyes now looked like over-keen clams, their claws so eager to bite that they had curled themselves into rearward-facing feather scythes and hence their prey would surely see only safety in their embrace. She selected a lipstick, screwed up the warhead, pouted like a salmon, and smeared her mouthparts salmon-paste pink.
“I’ve done stuff,” he said. “But only what everyone does. Some of it is - ultra-cringe stuff, but it’s not that secret. Not lock-away secret.”
“You will,” she said. “Unless you get lucky.”
“Get lucky?”
“There’s no such thing as good,” she said. “Just people who get lucky.”
His mind told him that if he were sober, he might understand what she meant. He wasn’t, and didn’t. She started to put her cosmetics away. “I hope you get unlucky. Life’s much more fun that way.”
He thought about Deborah. She was unlucky enough to live at the most stimulating house in his street. “I didn’t get lucky at 13A,” he said.
“Neither did I,” she said, pushing her chair back. “When I met your father there.” She stood and her shift fell straight from her shoulders to her thighs, not clinging but strongly hinting.
He stared at his stepmother, half fascinated, fully engrossed. After what might have been half a minute, or half a generation, he discovered that she was staring back at him via the dressing table mirror. “What are you thinking?” she asked, her voice so plain it was transparent.
He was both shaken and reinforced. “I was thinking how it’s fortunate we don’t live across the road from Telescopic Titus.”
She shifted her weight from bare foot, to bare foot. It was something that was always there to remind him of Sandy Shaw. “It wouldn’t matter. Take it from me, while Titus might well be telescopic, the apparatus on his tripod gives a very different perspective.”
“How do you mean?”
“Have a look. When you go back.” She stopped applying crushed beetles to her eyelashes. “You are going back?”
He nodded. “I need to take my box.”
To be continued
13A Bohemia Way is a scribbling exercise. The next instalment is not compiled until the previous one has been made public. There can be no revisions of earlier chapters, and there is no plan as to how the story might unfold.
It all began in January with Mother Eartha
uneasywords 