Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [34]
“Sweetie,” she moaned, hanging her arms around him like a necklace of white gold, “I thought you had left me for good.”
“You did get my pneu, didn’t you?”
“Oh! Very late! Oh my, that’s for me?” she asked, pinching the mirror from Brentford’s hands. Before he could react, she had wiped it clean with a swift brush of her gown. “It’s so nice. Thank you, honey. Smack, smack.”
Brentford sighed, then scowled, but what could he do now?
“You were nice with the Eskimos? You didn’t offer your future wife to them, did you?” she asked, while looking for a spot to hang the mirror.
“Oh, darn, I knew I had forgotten something,” smirked Brentford, sitting on the bed. “Hope you’re not mad at me.”
“I am so mad at you, my dear. I wished you had been here with me this afternoon. I was at the Ringnes Skating Rink with the band, didn’t I tell you that, for the Clicquot Club Caucus.”
Brentford was trying to undo his tie, easier said than done with fingers numb from the cold. He was in Sybil-listening mode, letting himself be pleasantly lulled. Even when she was close to him, she had that kind of from-the-bathing-room voice: it flew from her body, and fluttered all around, so that she and her words never seemed to be in the same place at the same time.
“I had to do a demonstration for the new Ice-cycle,” she said, as she unhooked a small drawing from the wall to put the mirror in its place. “You know what they are, don’t you? The front wheel is replaced by a little skate. I wished you had seen me. It was so much fun.”
“What a shame,” said Brentford, who regarded all these social and promotional events with what could pass as condescension. The recent occasion on which she and the Cub-Clubbers had entertained Bipolar Bears in garbage-rehab cages to celebrate the release of their cover of “You should a-hear Olaf laugh,” he had found, to say the truth, a tad ridiculous.
“Here. It looks fine, doesn’t it? And oh, I saw the strangest thing today when I came back. A girl just fainted in front of the Greenhouse. She must have been waiting for God knows what. A man passed in front of her, maybe he brushed against her, and whoosh, down she went. They had to call an ambulance to fetch her.”
Brentford almost told Sybil of the ambulances he had seen in front of the Toadstool, but Sybil was now looking at him with a movie actress’s expression of deep concern. He was used to these mood swings, and braced himself for what was to come.
“And then, there’s some bad news” she said, with the pout of a spoiled child, which was, Brentford had to admit against his better judgement, more irresistible than exasperating. “Did you read the newspaper?”
“I did not have time,” sighed Brentford.
Sybil took a folded copy of the New Venice News, John Blank’s paper (“Ice-breaking the news since 1927 AB”) from the bedside table and handed it to Brentford.
“Look who’s back,” she said.
Brentford took the paper and read:
MS. LAKE, BACK, PROMISES UPHEAVAL BY JOHN LINKO
The Nethergate Psychomotive Transaerian Terminal, under yesternight skies.
Where has she been, what has she done? It was supposed to be a homecoming. It turned into a theophany. Psychomotive coloured steam had not finished hissing when the shrill of the crowd took over. Cutting her way through the panting pink and green puffs, Ms. Sandy Lake appeared to us simple mortals as an omen.
Do we have to recall to the neo-New who she is? Listen to the venerable stairs of Grönland Gardens, prick up your ears in the glasshouses in Glass Town, keep silent in New Boree Crescent, and you will know. New Venice is still humming with everlasting echoes of her heady “Yesterday’s Skies.