The Knife Sharpener (36)

36.

Oscar navigated the long driveway of Holdingstock Manor in his Kia Sportage. It was lit by intermittent ornamental fire pits, which cast the fairy houses in crude shadows. He couldn’t see any of the little buggers, though. They were probably out hunting for bin scraps. It was for the best. Oscar couldn’t stand fairies. They were a nuisance. Chittering, sparkly things, likely to play havoc with TV aerials and cables. And their mating habits! He remembered when he’d only been a kid. They used to wake him at all hours. He would hear them outside his family home in Ashburton, rollicking and spewing glitter dust all over his window, grunting and growling louder than he thought possible from such little things. Oscar would see them outside his window, playing elaborate courtship games on brush tail possums. Freely fornicating on his ledge. Tiny faces in rapturous contortions. Tied up with stolen elastic bands.

            Oscar had known a few of his school peers thought this was quite erotic when it happened on their windowsills. More than a few had had their sexual awakening from watching these displays. Stories of discovering masturbation told amongst the boys. Sure, Oscar had given it a try. Jerked at himself furiously. Concentrating on the fairies as they glammed around near his window. Naked humanoid shapes, bent over, plugged up, gagged, playing elaborate games with eucalyptus oil. Tried to get a hormonal kick out of the pleasure in their faces and their unholy squawks. Regaled all the boys, ‘three times last night, fellas.’ Fist bumps. Challenges. But Oscar never got it. He left the freaks to the freaks and watched good, stable, respectable porn when he felt appropriately mature. Developed his paper tissue and lubricant ritual.

            When Oscar met his wife, Margaret, he only had to replace the tissue. They maintained his silently heavy breathing, two-minute practice at least once a week to keep the body taut, trim, and empty of distractions. Purified for the events to come.

            He had been delighted when the Ministry had started culling the fairies. Rumours had started that they planned eventual eradication. Purify the city of the pests. They’d already systematically, and much to the relief of Oscar’s fear of attack from above, removed that fearsome irritant, the drop bear. First, shooting them off street signs, porch roofs, playground equipment, then moving into the wild, and lighting trees on fire where they were found to have homed. Melbourne was a safer, cleaner place without their random droppings.

            The light was on above the front door. Oscar pulled up his car and exited. He moved in quick hurried steps to the entry. Trying to get in from what had become a hard and cold night. Within, Oscar heard choral singing. A tremulous, record sound echoing and scratching. One of the richest people in Melbourne and Carmel still didn’t have a proper sound system. He could have fixed her up with something top of the line, quickly and with great value for every dollar. Thoughtfully, he prepared his pitch and reached for the doorbell.

            He needn’t have. The door swung open. Carmel Holdingstock stood there in an extravagant baby blue ball gown. Make up smashed across her face in broad aggressive strokes. All rouge and eyeliner, lipstick and foundation. An overwhelming sweet perfume.

            ‘Evening,’ said Oscar.

            ‘Monsieur de Valle! Here you stand and thus lend credence to the clamoured hullabaloo that has speckled our evening as if it were poorly flecked paint on a papyrus canvas. It has clearly drawn you to me, for if things were as they were meant to be, nothing would,’ said Carmel, reaching across the precipice of her doorway to kiss the air near Oscar’s cheek. ‘I have heard strange tidings from the mouths of minions. Tell me of their honesty.’

            ‘Unfortunately, yes. Things have not gone as planned,’ said Oscar. He never knew how to address Carmel. Madam? Mam? Miss? Carmel? He wanted to get it right, so avoided it as much as possible.

            ‘Was the knife sharpener lacking in the requisite fortitude? I did take his measure as was your request and found him thoroughly virile. Indeed, strapping in the spectacle of his peasantry’s toil,’ she said. ‘I must admit my attraction to a silent lothario in a stained tunic, curdled with poverty’s scent lines. He had my tummy bugs aflutter.’ Carmel made a strange flickering motion with her hands.

            ‘We didn’t have the chance to see. The knife was stolen by some girl. He took off with the thief in his van,’ said Oscar. ‘At this point, we suspect collusion.’

            ‘Oh, you do not possibly utter these words! That mine gentleman of magic mitts – steel stained and cowhide tough – is some capering, burglaring Loki come to spoil your institution? Aghast, Monsiuer de Valle. Aghast.’

            ‘I do, though,’ said Oscar. ‘Um, utter those words.’

            Carmel rested her face in her hands. Raised herself back to Oscar. Sighed. ‘It would not take a phenologist to uncover their subtext.’

            ‘I – I guess not, no.’

            ‘My heat for the man spiked my senses. Wrapped a cloth around my head as though I were some prophet blind to everything but lust. I knew there was a magician’s aura about him.’

            She gestured Oscar into the mansion. Closed the door behind him. Nearby, a butler waited at the bottom of a grand marble staircase. It was fire warm and incense smoky. Hint of broiled chicken and peas.

            ‘Would you care to partake of my late evening repast? Sliced with knives given such delicious treatment by the perfidious knife sharpener who has crossed you and, now, I, both. I prepared quite enough for a battalion and had planned to eat as one with porcine genes in anticipation of your work with the Church. But, alas, the cataclysmic cut has been delayed, and I am burdened with excesses of poulet my humble paunch cannot possibly imbibe.’

            Oscar shook his head.

            ‘As you will,’ said Carmel. A long moan flowed down the hall into the entrance foyer. ‘The restless spirits,’ she said, looking to the noise.

            ‘I have someone tracking them,’ said Oscar. ‘She seems capable judging from her, um, posts.’

            Carmel still peered away from him. ‘I had hoped to grant them silence. See their remnants extinguished,’ she said. ‘In this place, Monsieur de Valle, I ache for the amiable chatter of man. Instead, I am granted the legacy of Holdingstock guilt and purgatory. We built the metropolis which has become mine unforgiving sepulchre.’

            ‘We will have your family’s knife back soon,’ said Oscar.

            Another throaty whine and a chained rattle.

            ‘Then we can do it … start it again,’ he said. ‘Cut open the st –’

            ‘Of course, each decision bears its burden through ages. In her haste for the aureate mineral in the forsaken east, my mother never considered the toll on perfecting fate’s tool for her own – our family’s ends. A Waste she left and a class of proletariat all but extinct.’

            Oscar shuffled a little. ‘The Church won’t quit. Must not quit. We deserve to show the world who we are.’

Carmel summoned the butler over with a limp wristed flick. ‘Americo,’ she said. ‘Would you fetch that over eager little Kerboros who fronts the Militia?’

‘Xavier, ma’am,’ said the butler. ‘Immediately.’ He left.

            ‘You will still require the services of the sharpener,’ said Carmel.

            ‘There will be more.’

            ‘None like him. Not with his Care,’ said Carmel. ‘To utter truthfulness, his blasted treachery and likely history – it brings tingles to my loin’s soul.’ She breathed from her stomach. ‘Rebellion against the strictures of my mother, now, as night grinds existence to inevitable conclusion … to be young, almost, amidst a hint of sand and salt water parching memories in half built carparks and communities gated, Monsieur de Valle. It is to wrench the sundial in shade and lose all time.’

            Oscar thought about his cavalier dead or alive message. ‘We will,’ he said.

            ‘Now, to feast,’ said Carmel. ‘You must advance the knowledge of the whippersnapper I have summoned. Give him faces to hunt my mother’s precious knife.’