The Love Feast.
Ned McCann.
Adam shivered beneath his too thin T-shirt. He moved into a patch of early morning sun angling across the lawn and listened while Mrs Cosgrave swaddled herself deeper into her down quilted morning gown and told him what she wanted doing to the pergola.
"Scrape all the flaky stuff off and give it three coats," she said. "Think you can manage that?"
Adam calculated the floor area to be about three times the size of his cubicle at the Hotel Bella Vista. "It’ll take a while," he said.
"Three days," Mrs Cosgrave decreed.
"Gotta be scraped, filled and then painted."
"Four days."
Adam looked the pergola over again. "Closer to five," he said.
Mrs Cosgrave narrowed her eyes. "I don’t pay for no meal breaks."
Adam looked steadily at her. "I stop at 12 for a bite, same’s a horse," he said. "Don’t expect a body to pay me for time not worked."
"Twenty five for an eight hour day," Mrs Cosgrave said. "Fair?"
Adam knew it wasn’t. But 25, multiplied by 5, if he did a moonlight from Bella Vista, was enough to get him out of this mean, little town and back to the city. "A deal," he said and held out his hand.
Mrs Cosgrave looked at Adam’s hand. "Don’t suppose you’ve any brushes in your sugar bag?"
Adam shook his head. "No," he said and wiped his hand on his jeans.
"There’s some in the shed." She pointed. "They’re by the paint. Brunswick green. And mind you wash them out when you finish."
She turned from him, pulled her morning gown around her and waddled back to the house- squat, white and domed like a sepulchre- windows curtained like blind patched eyes.
Adam called after her.
"Yes?"
He was dying for a smoke. "Don’t suppose you could see your way to give me a bit of a sub?" And a beer when he finished work wouldn’t go wrong either.
"You suppose correctly. I subbed the boy who came to fix the fence and look at it."
Adam looked where she pointed. A picket fence sagged on rotted posts into the Lantana. Stacked neatly beside it were piles of new lumber.
"Any good at carpentry?"
"Done a bit," Adam lied.
"See how you go with the painting. I pay when the job’s done."

The sun was high now and, although filtered through the pergola, hot. Adam peeled off his T-shirt. He wiped the sweat from his chest and armpits and turned at the grinding squeak of the garage door.
The Mercedes glided up the drive. It stopped at the pergola and the driver’s window slid down. "I have to go into town," Mrs Cosgrove looked at the paint flakes littering the ground. "You will, I hope, rake that up before you go," she said.
Adam dug his scraper into a paint blister.
"And, please, put your shirt back on. The neighbours, anyone, could see you."
Before he could reply, the window slid up and she drove away.
Adam looked down at his concave belly. Some flakes of paint clung to the wisps of red blond hair curling from the waistband of his jeans.
"What neighbours?" The house was two miles from town. At the end of a long, winding drive surrounded by Ghost Gums and Oleander. "And so what, anyway?"
*
Adam sat on a bench running around the inside of the pergola. He pulled off his boots and wrinkled his nose as he removed his heavy work socks. Standing up, he wriggled out of his jeans, clutched his penis and waggled it at the drive where Mrs Cosgrave’s exhaust hung still and blue. Turning around, he did the same in the direction of the house and stopped when he noticed the slightest flicker of a lace curtain at an upstairs window. A breeze, he thought, blowing through the house could have caused the flicker-could have. Adam reached into his bag. He pulled out a pair of work shorts and thongs. "Bugger you, Mrs Cosgrave," he growled and put them on.
*
When Adam reckoned it to be noon, he put down his scraper, reached into his bag. He took from the bag two slices of toast smeared with vegemite and an apple from the Bella Vista breakfast table. Before he knew, he had eaten and barely remembered the taste. Now he was thirsty with nothing to drink.
There was a water tap beside the garage door. Adam could see the sparkle of its drips in the sun. As he went to it he caught again the merest flicker of movement from the lace curtain and the shape of someone behind it. Bugger, there was someone in the house.
Bending to the tap he regretted his little performance. Whoever was spying on him would probably report him to old Cosgrave when she returned. Bang would go his 125 and he would probably find himself up on an indecent exposure as well: unless the face behind the window had a sense of humour.
Adam looked up the window and gave a cheery wave. His hopes lifted as a hand waved back, and lifted even further as the window was raised.
The most beautiful girl ever leaned out and smiled a beckoning to him as he imagined a princess would to a prince from a high turret. Adam blushed, embarrassed at what she must have seen earlier. Yet her smile showed no censure, her frank look no malice. Instead, her blue eyes shone with the glint of mischief and a hint of something Adam couldn’t even hope for.
Her sudden laughter tinkled her name at his asking."Tomorrow?" Adam said.
"No, no." The blond vision laughed again. And at the sound of it Adam felt as if his soul had risen to lodge somewhere in the back of his throat. "Not tomorrow, Tamara. You Australians have such cloth ears."
Adam rolled the name around his tongue until he had become as familiar with it as his own.
"Adam," the angel repeated when he had given his name. "The first man. How is your rib, Adam?" And laughed again as he looked down at his side in confusion.
"Do you take tea, Adam?"
Adam, throat so dry he could not speak, nodded.
"I’m just putting on the kettle. Would you like a cuppa?"
Adam managed to swallow and said he would. He glanced at the driveway, asked about Mrs Cosgrave.
"Oh, she’s having her hair done. Won’t be back for hours," Tamara assured him. "Come up."
"OK," Adam said. "But how do I get in?"
Tamara’s face clouded. "Oh, of course," she said. "Mrs Cosgrave will have locked all the doors."
"Bummer. Let down your hair, then."
Tamara’s face brightened again. "But there’s a ladder in the garage, I think."
There was and Tamara looked down as Adam placed his feet on either side of it and watched it extend until it reached her windowsill.
Tamara’s room looked and smelled as if freshly whitewashed with talcum powder. Adam took off his thongs; placed them on the sill and felt his feet sink into the softest of sheepskin.
The walls were lined with shelves. On the shelves was toys- broken toys. A headless Barbie and an armless Ken sat side by side with a monocular Teddy and a Golly whose striped trouser legs dangled empty: interspersed with those decoupage boxes where little girls like to keep their mementos and secrets. In the corner, a large bed covered in a bright patchwork quilt. Above the bed an ivory Jesus torn from his cross wept ruby droplets from his wounds. Flanking Jesus, martyred saints in gilded frames clenched hands in prayer and offered up their pain to God.
Tamara stood before a painter’s easel. Behind her, on a marble-topped table, a kettle steamed on a spirit stove. She smiled a smile sunny as a field of waving buttercups. Adam’s heart leapt at the sight of her. "You n’artist? He nodded to the easel.
"Given the chance, everyone’s an artist, Adam."
"I can’t even draw a straight line."
"But you do a pretty artistic jig." And she laughed again.
"Ah, no." He covered his face and peeped at her through his fingers. "You did see me."
"Well, you did point," and broke into peals of laughter so infectious Adam could not help but join in.
"Whatcha paintin’?" Adam made to look.
But before he could see, she threw a paint rag over the canvas and held her hand against him. "I don’t like anyone looking at a work in progress," she said.
Adam could have kicked himself. But he had never met a temperamental artist before- an artist even- or a girl like Tamara who apologised for only having one mug. But they could share and would condensed milk be OK?
Adam assured her that however she made it would be OK with him. And watched as she filled a silver infusing ball with tea, poured the boiling water on to it and watched her watching him back as she plunged it again and again into the mug.
"This is how they make tea in India," Tamara said as Adam sipped on the sweet brew. " Do you like it?"
"It’s different." Adam shot her his gap toothed Huckleberry grin. "I like it."
Tamara took the mug from him and Adam watched lost in love at her throat flickering as she sipped.
"Who is that?" He pointed to a multi-armed statuette wearing a necklace of skulls and dancing in a wall niche smoke blackened by incense.
Tamara looked to where he pointed. "That’s Shiva," she said. "The great mother. The giver of life." She walked over to the niche, struck a match, and lit a fresh stick of incense. "And the great destroyer."
She put the spent match in a bowl of grey ash. Pursing her lips, she blew the flame from the stick and as she glided back to him arabesques of smoke followed her and filled the room with sweet fragrance.
She held out her hand for the mug of tea. And as she did Adam heard a clink and when he looked down at her foot he saw the chain attached to a bracelet on her ankle. And his eyes followed the chain; whose other end was attached to a hasp riveted to the bed.
Adam slammed his mug down on the table. "Who the fuck did this?"
Tamara lowered her eyes. "Mrs Cosgrave," she whispered.
"And who the fuck does Mrs Cosgrave think she is?"
"My keeper. And please don’t swear." She looked over at the ivory Jesus bleeding on the wall. "He doesn’t like it."
"Oh doesn’t he?" Adam strode to the window, climbed out, slid down the ladder, went to the garage, rummaged the tool bench until he found a hacksaw and climbed back with it to Tamara’s room.
"Oh, don’t," she cried as he began to saw at the chain. "Mrs Cosgrave will be so upset."
Adam ignored her and continued sawing until the severed links lay between their feet.
"We may have cloth ears," he said. "But we are free. And there’s no way-no way- we’ll allow anyone to be chained like a dog."
Adam heaved the chain from the window. And, when he had, Tamara threw her arms around him, hugged him to her.
He felt her nails rake his back, slip under the waist band of his shorts to clutch his shivering buns: heard the tired, old fabric rip and stepped out of them as they fell around his ankles.
Tamara slithered a tongue into his ear. "My hero," she breathed.
Free, hard and strong, Adam’s nostrils filled with the smells of incense and Yardley’s English lavender.
"I will not come, I will not come. I will not come yet," he murmured as he slid beneath the needlepoints of Tamara’s breasts to the softness of sheepskin.
*
Mrs Cosgrave smiled to herself in the mirror, wiped a smear of lipstick from her teeth and patted her bubble cut as she purred up the drive. Passing the pergola, she noted the discarded tools flakes of green paint skuttering in the breeze and looked at her watch. "Eight hour day my arse," she said.
When she saw the ladder at the window, she gunned the car in a spray of gravel to the front door. Throwing the door open, she rushed up the stairs, slashed back the bolt on Tamara’s door.
Tamara, kneeling beside her bed saying the rosary, looked up and smiled her buttercup smile.
Mrs Cosgrave blinked at the stained walls-the bloody gobbets of flesh littering the floor.
"Not again, Tamara," she sighed. "He’d hardly begun the pergola, never even looked at the fence."
Ends.
©Ned McCann. 2004.