Bridge 2

‘Patrick.’

‘Yes.’

‘I asked if you wanted any more of this bacon, because if you do, I’d hurry up about it, your sister’s going to have the pattern off her plate if she carries on the rate she’s going. You hear me, Mab?’ Maggie Cotton pulled at the sides of her gaping robe, through which her magnificent belly bulged.

Maggie was the butcher’s daughter and, as Mr Cotton was fond of saying, you could feed families with a couple of slices from Maggie’s rump. She was big boned, a fatty, a lard arse, a pig, a beached whale, elephantine, doughy, steady on her feet, a tanker, she’d jump in and the water would jump out. Maggie, in short, was massive; she was also beautiful and we loved every towering inch of her.

We were sitting in the bunker-like back kitchen of father’s studio. We always ate well when big Maggie came to feed us. She was the first girl that my father convinced to model for him. Maggie was having a break whilst father worked on the drapes that surrounded her pose. Night had already pasted itself against the window where Old Miracle’s dusty Alexander roses knocked their gaudy heads as if pleading admittance.

Maggie gathered her robe around her once again and sat down next to us at the table, plucking a piece of rind from Mab’s plate and popping it into her mouth.

‘Eat up Patrick and then it’s up to bed for you both. I’ve made up your cots on the top floor, so they’ll be no need to be tramping across town. Your Dad’s got that look in his eye that tells me I’m in for a long night.’ She gave a theatrical shudder then pinched up her toes on the lino and set her legs shaking.

‘Getting the judders out of you,’ Mab muttered, before Maggie could tell us.

Maggie’s knees thundered against the underside of the table top and set it trembling. Mab and I rescued our water glasses and started transferring plates to the sink.

‘That’s it, you two. Get all that flotsam and jetsam cleared away and we might even have time for a little fortune telling before bed.’ Maggie grinned at us, her cheeks quivering, her robe thrown aside again and a pair of incongruously small pale pink nipples winking into view, as her legs bounced beneath her.

Maggie always kept her Tarots by her; she claimed her readings came from a distant gypsy heritage. But the cards she used were hardly a family heirloom: they came from a cellophane wrapped box, printed with sanitised mystic symbols. She’d bought them from the hippy shop that had opened next to the new built Catholic Church on the other side of the bridge, the cardboard (despite its plastic covering, which Maggie preserved as a glistering pocket to slide her treasure in and out of) still held the whiff of patchouli.

‘You shouldn’t have bought those for yourself, you know?’ Mab told Maggie.

We were tucked up in our attic room, under the eaves of the studio. I scuffed my heels against the stiff fabric of father’s old camp bed and twisted so that it would rock, boat-like, beneath me. A steady tick tick as the uneven struts struck the floorboards. Mab was sunk into the voluptuous clutches of the fold-out brown chair, which was really little more than a collection of sofa cushions, sewn clumsily together. There was not even a breath of breeze in the room, but Maggie was busy piling our sweaty bodies with extra blankets, which we would kick off as soon as she left the room.

‘It’s bad luck,’ Mab muttered.

‘Now what, Mabel Farrington, could be bad luck about me buying myself a nice little present? Bought with my own good money too.’

Maggie had pulled on a thin summer dress before she escorted us upstairs and she stood with hands on her hips, the fabric straining across her chest, her heavy flesh pouching where she’d missed a button.

‘It’s bad luck,’ Mab repeated, stubbornly, struggling to find purchase for a supporting elbow amongst her soft bedding. ‘Someone’s meant to buy them for you, or you should steal them. Otherwise they won’t work for you.’

‘Maggie Cotton is no thief,’ Maggie sparked, ‘and if you think any different then you won’t be wanting anything to do with her or her cards, now will you?’

The disagreement was quickly forgotten as Maggie drew the Tarot kit from the pocket of her dress and started to slip the cards in and out of each other. I always felt that this was the part that she enjoyed best, handling those glossy oversized cards, peeling them off into cut after cut. This was the magic for me, Maggie Cotton, the giant gypsy queen, with her fast moving fingers and her quiet pride in their agility.

We could hear father moving about the studio below us. His short cat-like cough and the plumed fragrance of burning tobacco drifted up through the floorboards as he lit another of his hand-rolled cigarettes: vanilla tobacco in liquorice papers. A veritable sweetshop reduced to stubs and ash as he covered his canvases.

‘Now cut the cards with your left hand and find your card,’ Maggie sat down on the end of my camp bed, crushing my toes comfortably under her bulk and propelling my head up towards the overstretching beams.

Mab leant over obediently and plucked at the deck. I watched her sharp little face peeping out between the dark brackets of dark fringe and spongy cushioned bedding.

‘No cheating now, Miss,’ Maggie warned, slapping at Mab’s fingers.

I knew what Mab was searching for; she had a passion for The Fool and wasn’t going to be cajoled into chance, that might after all, leave her with another card. I knew the print well, The Fool’s moonlike face gazed wistfully towards a decorative border, where bolts of gold paint were twisted into the assumption of a sun. But it wasn’t this that interested Mab, neither that nor the bright harlequin costume that The Fool wore, nor the Dick Whittington-style handkerchief that tied mysterious contents to the pole thrust over The Fool’s shoulder. It was the little mongrel dog that appeared in the bottom right-hand corner, his jaws agape, seeming ready to nip at the heels of his master and frighten him off the cliff-edge that threatened his feet. Mab thought this was funny.

In the end, when Mab threatened to turn the edges of the cards, Maggie impatiently fanned the deck face-up and my sister was able to pick her card.

‘You used your left hand at least,’ Maggie conceded. ‘Now let’s see…’

She took up the little booklet that accompanied the pack, opening it with great care so as not to crack the spine, and read briefly the qualities that Mab’s choice endowed her with. Then it was my turn: I broke the pack carefully, aiming for the exact centre and turned up The Lovers.
Mab snapped out a laugh. ‘Oh Patty. It’s a life of sweet love for you.’

‘Now Mab, don’t tease the poor boy. You know these cards aren’t nearly so simple as that, there must be some meaning…’

Maggie flicked quickly through the pages of her book searching for her place. I was embarrassed, but wasn’t entirely sure why. The pair of figures on the card both sported courtly dress and would not meet my eye, so absorbed were they by each others. The man had long hair; almost as long as the woman’s. Their faces were so alike, that they could have been transferred one from the other. A naked cherub hung from the branches of the trees that twined around them and aimed its dart at their linked hands as if to cut them in two.

‘Here we go: A successful decision is to be made…previous conflicts will be resolved…follow your heart and leap towards your goal. There we are Patrick, that all sounds good now, doesn’t it?’

‘Oh reverse it,’ Mab yawned. ‘They’re always much more interesting when you reverse them.’

Maggie tucked us in one last time and, as a customary treat, we were allowed to slip our chosen cards inside a book and put them under our pillow for the night. We always forgot to return them to Maggie the next morning, but they had disappeared by the following day. Maggie must have crept up and retrieved them while we slept.

I didn’t think that Mab had ever given much thought to the reading that came with The Fool, all that talk of new paths in life, new beginnings and great adventures, but what did I know? Maybe even then, tucked down in her temporary bed, Mab was planning her great escape. And there I lay next to her.

Stand and watch them for a while with me, the two sleeping babes. Their hair already damp from the heat of the room, their blankets and sheets pushed down to the bottom of their beds. Four pink naked feet, hardly worn, shown up by the light that flittered up through the ill-fitting floor boards. Brother and sister side by side, with The Fool and The Lovers sleeping under their pillows.