Gewgaw
© Stephen Cain
1194 words
The sky above the block of flats is full of the northerly and the voices are streaks of coloured starlight amid the flecks of rain and traffic noises of a wintry Wellington evening.
I make myself a cup of microwave tea. It smells like fresh sweat.
The view out my bedsit window twitches uncomfortably. The temperamental lighting reveals a collection of shoeboxes stacked untidily and painted in assorted shades of cheese, low-cost storage for rejects like myself. On a steep slope above the shoeboxes there is a belt of trees from above which shine the unwinking lights of the well-wired. You would probably think the houses above the trees perfectly ordinary if you saw them from the street, but they look like the mansions of the elect from here. The voices are transparent paramecia appearing and disappearing in wet air.
"I want you to work for me!" The voice is young, female, and paranormally imperious.
"Work?" I query. Perhaps there really is something worthwhile to do?
"Walk," she says.
As usual, her ceaseless speaking seemed only intended to plague me with vague ambiguities. I was on the verge of responding with my usual, "If you've got nothing to say then please say it!", when it occurred to me that a walk might not be that dreadful an idea.
The air of supernatural promise with which the outing had begun was growing thin, however, as I padded cold and damp past the old museum — the new Design School — on my way back home. What had I been thinking could possibly happen? The unknown. An adventure. Very likely! A small amount of exercise had been the best that had been achieved. Bored and unreasonably disappointed, I decided to take a turn through the museum grounds. I did not know whether or not people were allowed in there at night, but the lure of walking on forbidden ground trailing luminous childhood memories of forbidden fruit, green and inedible but delicious for all that, was too hard to resist. But the old museum seemed as drained of Nazi grandeur as the grounds were moon-washed of colour, and the new Tomb of the Unknown Warrior seemed just as empty of heroic dust. As I wandered down the narrow roadway between the trees back towards Buckle St I caught sight of something flashing in the moonlight. I bent and picked it up. A bauble, a gewgaw, a triangular fragment of loose fabric threaded with gilded polyhedrons, with two larger gilded spherical pendants attached to one side, and bearing a golden fleuron of seven leaves with a single pearl at the centre — all made of plastic, something even one of the design-school students had decided on second thoughts was just too garish a fashion adjunct.
"Oh thank you — I'll put it with Zen, the lost sacrament of the ancients, the secret name of God, the philosopher's stone, and all those other fairy gifts whose value cannot be calculated in money shall I?" I muttered under my breath, throwing the piece of sparkly trash down under a tree beside the roadway feeling more certain than ever that falling asleep would be this particular evening's stellar highlight.
"Hello, Steve," a strained-but-cheery voice rang out — a real one; I can tell — as I left the museum grounds. I looked up into the smiling face of an ex-neighbour. She used to drink far too much and fight violently with her boyfriend. I sometimes used to think he got the worst of it. More recently she had been hanging out with the other homeless alcoholics down on Cuba St. She still said hello whenever she saw me though. She had not yet become completely unattractive, if you did not count the teeth in her broad smile too carefully, or witless. Her face was framed by the passenger's window of a taxi entering the museum grounds.
"Hi," I mumbled. I couldn't quite remember her name. I can never remember people's names. It wasn't until I got some distance along the road that I started to wonder what she was doing in a taxi and, what was more puzzling, a taxi entering the old museum grounds at night. I doubted there was anywhere to sleep in there. I would have hazarded a guess that her interest in higher education was low, and I was fairly certain that there would be no classes at that time of night anyway. Irrationally, you will doubtless think, I began to put this together with my voice's seeming insistence that I go out for a walk this evening, with the vague suggestion that there was something important for me to do. I thought about the life that Jay-Jay — her name came back to me — must now be leading, the single-minded focus on money for drink and drugs that must arise whenever unmodified consciousness threatened to return. It suddenly struck me that she had been sitting in the front passenger's seat of the taxi. Had anyone been sitting in the back? I had not noticed. I do not have a photographic memory. I do have a photographic imagination though. I saw the taxi-driver bleeding darkly in the grey moonlight. I did not really want to go back and check. It was just one of those moral imperatives. I have tried to break myself of this neurotic habit of always doing the right thing, not always with great success.
I moved as quickly and stealthily as I could. Speed was important, but given what I was imagining, the consequences of being seen could have been a bit nasty and of no help to anyone. I made it to the top of the slope in front of the museum and from behind a low wall I was able to see the taxi parked — no lights, no visible signs of life — to the left of the old museum's facade of heavy rectangular columns. I kept low. It was dark beneath the trees, but I expected Jay-Jay's young eyes would be considerably sharper than my middle-aged ones. I was in a quandary. The taxi driver might be slumped and bleeding in his vehicle, but his assailants could still be in the immediate vicinity. My dilemma did not last long however. I heard the taxi-door slam and somebody began walking down the narrow roadway between the trees towards Buckle St. It must have been Jay-Jay. The taxi moved off almost immediately, heading out of the grounds by another route. I was quite pleased to be spared having to deal with a bloody assault victim and, realising clearly for the first time what must have been happening, more concerned than ever about being seen.
She must have been staying at the night shelter just around the corner from the old museum. She would have to pass my glittering gewgaw on the way out of the grounds. I wondered whether she would pick it up, its tawdry glamour being of a kind often associated with her current profession. She didn't, so I keep it with Zen, the lost sacrament of the ancients, the secret name of God, the philosopher's stone, and all those other fairy gifts whose value cannot be calculated in money.