Read Online Stray Love by Kyo Maclear - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kyo Maclear
Tags: Adult
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stepping over her. “Just let me know when you’re done.”
I sit at the kitchen table and watch her while I drink my coffee and wonder if this sophisticated New York act of hers is covering some hidden damage. I’ve seen it before: a child playing urbane companion to her single mother, young girls behaving like mini-women.
Another minute passes and she’s still lying there.
“Don’t do that, Iris,” I say finally with a shiver.
“What?” she says. Her eyes open.
“Don’t play dead.”
“Oh, come on, Marcel,” she says, making a space. “Just try it.”
I hesitate for a moment. I look up at the ceiling, where I notice the paint is cracked and peeling. Then I make my way onto the floor and lie down.
O VER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS , Pippa made every effort to include me, lavishing me with spontaneous hugs, asking for my opinion. She seemed eager to have me around. She took me to a shop called Mary Quant’s Bazaar and her favourite salon on the Edgware Road and asked my advice while she tried on clothes or had her hair done. But sometimes Oliver insisted that they go out alone for dinner or to the cinema, so he could have Pippa to himself. On such nights, Pippa called up her friend Martha to come keep watch.
Martha Harling (whom we called “Mata Hari”) had a smallplace on nearby Clonmel Road in Parsons Green. She lived with her mother, Mrs. Harling, a vigorous white-haired widow in her early eighties. Mrs. Harling had been a successful stage actress in her birth country, Austria, and still wore thick pancake makeup and spoke in a quavering theatre voice. Once a week, she baked delicious loaves of raisin bread for her favourite neighbours, who lionized her for her efforts, thus fulfilling what Pippa called Mrs. Harling’s “fame needs.” Otherwise, Mrs. Harling sat in her doily-festooned parlour watching
Candid Camera
on the telly.
Her daughter, Martha, had quit hairdressing and was now officially “in between jobs.” We called her Mata Hari because of her preference for bangles and wispy scarves and her dyed jet black hair. I liked to imagine that she was an exotic dancer or a spy.
Sometimes she would spend the whole evening in our flat without removing her coat, claiming she was losing heat, and I could almost visualize it being siphoned off her. Sometimes she brought her white cat with her. It was a long-haired Persian and she would carry it as if she were holding a Salvador Dali clock to her chest. Often she carried books. Some of them had strange titles, such as
Magical Mandalas
and
Virility & Vitality,
and were crammed with clippings and notes on torn paper.
Mata Hari was just one of the many rootless people who entered and exited and re-entered the flats on New King’s Road. There were a lot of visitors in those days, a lot of artist types in black ponchos, cast-off tuxedos, and moulting fur hats. Oliver complained that Pippa had a weakness for “the poor, the transient and the unstable.”
Some of her visitors spoke English with strange accents and apologized for their poor pronunciation. Most of them had littleexperience with children and treated me as if I were a small grown-up. One man sat at Pippa’s coffee table and rewired a clock so that the hour, minute and second hands would tick backwards: anti-clockwise. Another artist was creating an all-white chess board with all-white pieces. (She told me that she wanted to see how long opponents could conduct a match with uncertain sides. How does one advance when the adversary is identical to oneself?) Oliver thought it was all idiocy. Pippa offered her misfit friends the respect normally bestowed upon prophets and great statesmen, and Oliver hated that. He hated the idea that people were living by rules of their own invention.
Pippa’s lack of convention was growing more alarming by the day. She seemed incapable of staying indoors for very long. Trading her favourite high-heels for flat-soled loafers, she would set off from her flat and
I sit at the kitchen table and watch her while I drink my coffee and wonder if this sophisticated New York act of hers is covering some hidden damage. I’ve seen it before: a child playing urbane companion to her single mother, young girls behaving like mini-women.
Another minute passes and she’s still lying there.
“Don’t do that, Iris,” I say finally with a shiver.
“What?” she says. Her eyes open.
“Don’t play dead.”
“Oh, come on, Marcel,” she says, making a space. “Just try it.”
I hesitate for a moment. I look up at the ceiling, where I notice the paint is cracked and peeling. Then I make my way onto the floor and lie down.
O VER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS , Pippa made every effort to include me, lavishing me with spontaneous hugs, asking for my opinion. She seemed eager to have me around. She took me to a shop called Mary Quant’s Bazaar and her favourite salon on the Edgware Road and asked my advice while she tried on clothes or had her hair done. But sometimes Oliver insisted that they go out alone for dinner or to the cinema, so he could have Pippa to himself. On such nights, Pippa called up her friend Martha to come keep watch.
Martha Harling (whom we called “Mata Hari”) had a smallplace on nearby Clonmel Road in Parsons Green. She lived with her mother, Mrs. Harling, a vigorous white-haired widow in her early eighties. Mrs. Harling had been a successful stage actress in her birth country, Austria, and still wore thick pancake makeup and spoke in a quavering theatre voice. Once a week, she baked delicious loaves of raisin bread for her favourite neighbours, who lionized her for her efforts, thus fulfilling what Pippa called Mrs. Harling’s “fame needs.” Otherwise, Mrs. Harling sat in her doily-festooned parlour watching
Candid Camera
on the telly.
Her daughter, Martha, had quit hairdressing and was now officially “in between jobs.” We called her Mata Hari because of her preference for bangles and wispy scarves and her dyed jet black hair. I liked to imagine that she was an exotic dancer or a spy.
Sometimes she would spend the whole evening in our flat without removing her coat, claiming she was losing heat, and I could almost visualize it being siphoned off her. Sometimes she brought her white cat with her. It was a long-haired Persian and she would carry it as if she were holding a Salvador Dali clock to her chest. Often she carried books. Some of them had strange titles, such as
Magical Mandalas
and
Virility & Vitality,
and were crammed with clippings and notes on torn paper.
Mata Hari was just one of the many rootless people who entered and exited and re-entered the flats on New King’s Road. There were a lot of visitors in those days, a lot of artist types in black ponchos, cast-off tuxedos, and moulting fur hats. Oliver complained that Pippa had a weakness for “the poor, the transient and the unstable.”
Some of her visitors spoke English with strange accents and apologized for their poor pronunciation. Most of them had littleexperience with children and treated me as if I were a small grown-up. One man sat at Pippa’s coffee table and rewired a clock so that the hour, minute and second hands would tick backwards: anti-clockwise. Another artist was creating an all-white chess board with all-white pieces. (She told me that she wanted to see how long opponents could conduct a match with uncertain sides. How does one advance when the adversary is identical to oneself?) Oliver thought it was all idiocy. Pippa offered her misfit friends the respect normally bestowed upon prophets and great statesmen, and Oliver hated that. He hated the idea that people were living by rules of their own invention.
Pippa’s lack of convention was growing more alarming by the day. She seemed incapable of staying indoors for very long. Trading her favourite high-heels for flat-soled loafers, she would set off from her flat and
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