Pongo #78 THE END

Andaw

Even as we patched up the cut on her head and brought her round with stinging dabs of antiseptic, even as we bandaged the cut, which fell just shy of stitches, Insa and me knew we were wasting our time. Sure enough, Cadderine died a month or two later, partway through a last-ditch course of chemotherapy.

Through some anomaly of the system, or a basic human error, Marley’s still paid my fees for a short while. I put most of last month’s wage towards the funeral. Eventually the auditors spotted the mistake, and I thanked the sky for my slavish saving over the years.

Insa has thrown herself more than ever into her work, shorthand scribbling late into the night, flyering for Sweeper Rights, clicking by green light, trying to find a loophole to allow me to give Maren’s body - hopefully rotting - back the junk I wore for it, compiling forests of evidence to present a case against the Big Three,. She never feels like there’s quite enough. Wants to get it right first time. Hit the headlines for the right reasons. She knows the kind of lawyers they can afford to hire, and exactly how flexible scruples can be under bribery. In her words: “give them enough shingshing and they’d dance the Beldiste in a polka dot thong before the judge if it meant they’d win.” I only ever see her face in profile, her lips mumming “thanks” as I hand her the odd coffee.

All this means I see her less and less, but I know some day soon she’ll emerge from that dim den she’s built, carrying a red-taped bundle lit from beneath, and then all this will come out, and then maybe, blinded by the light difference for a moment, she’ll love me.

My own tumour, about which I eventually confessed to Insa, who said she sort of knew and apologised for not having talked about it, is under fire. I'm going the old-fashioned route, my hairless scalp the perfect trim to my badly stuffed body.
I still keep the mask.

This morning a letter arrived. A new, extremely high-profile client is looking for a sweeper to begin immediately. The money’s obscene – enough to gild the City. Enough to take on the world.

Insa

It’s as if there’s a tremendous fear of letting her down. I keep telling myself she’s dead, but it seems like now more than ever, just blowing across her grave could stir her.

I’m not blind. I’ve seen Andaw glancing at me, and sometimes, though I hate to acknowledge it, I have to wonder if I’m doing all this simply to make him bearable to look at. I also wonder if he sees in me a flesh and blood version of my sister – less willowed and wildly striking, more plausible, tangible. Then I wonder whether he was in love with Gilligan after all, and even what that means. Then I go back to work.

Pila

Nobody came. Eventually I checked out of the hospital, and began to walk again. The breeze on my face grazed off the dead porcelain still remaining. I look more hideous than ever, and it’s bliss.

The other day, I visited to the main city cemetery. Many of my old friends were buried there, from the child stars to the mouthy suaves of my final films, and I fancied some company. The mountain of flowers obscuring Maren Gilligan’s lavish grave, looked faded as I passed. Peonies curled at the edges clung to creped tulips for comfort.

As I stared at the surfboard stone Fan Tremil had requested on a whimsy in the summer of wipeouts, I saw a gaunt woman standing by a small plot. She stared silently at the marker like someone unknotting a riddle, and her tears were constant like the leaking of a dam.

Soon a second woman, younger and extremely pretty, joined her. They did not acknowledge each other at first, maintaining a gap like a wall between their feet, the maximum possible while in joint audience with the grave.
Ex-wives of a bigamist, I thought. Or else that one’s the mistress.

Indeed, the second woman stood like an elm for fully five minutes, watching the other weep, before suddenly firing out a sob and crumpling to the grass. The spell was broken, as the first woman, still red-eyed, knelt down and whispered something, then raised her fellow mourner by the hand.

The first woman, as plain as she was, suddenly struck me as familiar. The kind of recognition when you see an old friend’s mother, and trace this nose, that almond eye, laying them over that blank where your friend's face used to be. You see their future and it frightens and fascinates you.
Stood, the distance was attempted again, but now they faced each other, made their introductions.
I heard the younger woman say “You just know that if he could see us now, crying our eyes out, he'd have total wood.”

And the older woman smiled.

Now they were talking, and I, suddenly rude for looking, walked back through the surfboards and withered dahlias, out of the gates, pulling them ajar behind me.

Miffy

Three days after the last of the last of my food ran out, I heard a knock at the door. It wasn't the crack of a bailiff knock, but I considered hiding nonetheless, in case they would try to take away whatever I had left. The phone line had been cut off, as had most of my comforts.

I didn't hide. They'd get in eventually and I needed so badly to ask for help, my little cracked voice undernourished in itself. My mid-life legs felt like they were eighty plus and mutinied as I tried to stump to the door. The knock rang out again, and I thought “Take it all”. Faces bounded before me: Danver, Fembs, Marty, weathergirls, crooks.

My hand twisted the latch as the world fell down. As I fainted, I heard a voice exclaiming “Blimey Mif! Shit, girl, let's get you some air.”

When I had come round, Fembs had wrapped me in blankets and was spoon-feeding me soup. He smiled weakly.

“Don't get used to this. I was worried, is all.”
My muscles twitched in response.

“Shit, Mif,” he repeated. “What's happened to you babe?”

“New haircut,” I managed, and he smiled for a moment.

“Listen, I'm sorry darling. I'm so sorry I haven't -”

“I don't blame you. It's not pretty.”

“Now listen,” he became stern, emptying pea and mint into my throat. “You're fucking beautiful, Mif. You always have been.”

“Put a sock in it, Fetz. You wouldn't hire a film with this on the cover, whatever it promised.”

“I would if you got really dirty.” The old spark flicks on in his eye. “I mean rrrreally dirty.”

“Prick.” I think I grinned, opening up for another mouthful.

The spoon dipped, collected, deposited three more times.

Fetz stayed with me, buying me hot cheese rolls, grilling chicken, saving the water from boiled broccolli for gravy, salvaging every last vitamin possible to build me up. He paid to revive my heating, my water. He treated me like a prize fighter, and at night like a cat, head on his lap.

And I got better.

I tried to tell him everything that had happened, but it sounded tinny. At night I dreamed of being small again in my miniature frock, of dodging in and out of a bracken of giant legs, only to come out just over the edge of a precipice, kicking air for a second before plummeting.

One morning, a week or so in, Fetz jumped on my bed and wagged two pieces of card in my face, grinning. Before I had a chance to read the letters on them, he snatched them away and ordered me to get my coat. A half-arsed protest later, I was buttoned up and on the bus with him. It struck me that now nobody would mistake us for father and daughter again. We whizzed past children throwing handfuls of precious ice-cream at each other. Past the cemetary again.

Once off the bus, he blindfolded me, then led me up to the zoo gates. I smelled straw. When he took off the wrap, I laughed.

“Why?”

“You once told me you'd never been to one of these. Well as someone who had great fun annoying a hell of a lot of animals as a kid, I thought it was about time you got to experience it.”

“But I'm not a kid,” the words were barbed.
He stood in front of me, tucked my ticket into the top pocket of my shirt and cupped my chin. I hadn't realised how small he was for a man.

“You are today.”

And he skipped, I shit you not, through the gates, flashing his ticket at the surprised attendant.

So I skipped too, enjoying the spring and tense of my legs as I flashed the card and passed through.

Oh God, the colours. Fucking hell. Flamingos, salamanders, tarantulas, toucans. We ran, hand in hand, me and my manager, from case to cage to hutch to aviary, mouths dry from gawping. It was like sneaking inside an exotic documentary. The sinews of the tigers, the whiparound of the dolphin, inches from us, moving. Moving! Then, panting as Fetz gambolled off to look at the tamarins, I saw them and stopped.

“Bornean Orangutan. Pongo Pygmaeus,” read the sign. A hairy shape perched in a branch scratched its back with a gangly arm. The face looked like a babyish pout flanked by grey padding. The eyes were the blackest thing – two warm little inkdrops that looked inside you.

Under a blue Conservation Status heading on the sign, I read “Orangutan mothers are often killed to gain access to their young, who are sold as pets. Metika, our newest arrival, is part of a program sponsored by City Zoo to boost the orangutan population, which also provides funding to help save babies from illegal poachers.” And with that, the female scratched her back again to reveal a tiny, firm shape with even blacker, more urgent eyes clinging to her fur as if it were all that mattered.

Metika stared, amazed by it all, before the ginger rug of her mother's arm was swept across once more.

“I need a fag.” Fetz had come back, clutching a schedule of feeding times. “What's up Mif?”

“Fuck you, I'm fine.” I scrubbed my eyes with my sleeve, then let him gently take my arm and lead me away.

“You know they're outsourcing,” he said quietly, as we walked.

“Who?”

“It's in the paper. They're outsourcing. Cambodia, Kenya. Subscriptions will crash.”

I said nothing.

“They're talking a hundreth of the price. Maybe less.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Want me to tell them to go fuck themselves?” He holds out twenty glossy flyers, all addressed to me.

“That's your job, Fetz,” I grinned, and he tore one in half.

We were clawed then, ripping at the cluster like Christmas paper, scattering shiny confetti into the air.

“You're the best, Mif,” he said, and for once I think he meant it. “We'll find something else, eh?”

Out in the zoo, children screamed at snakes, laughed at penguins, fell in love with otters and wowwwed at giraffes. Their high voices became squawks and mews, twisting into one another, mixing, and the bars were butter. In my mind, the animals burst out in a soup of colour and texture, trampling me and everyone, their paws and talons pressing like forkmarks in shortbread. A glance back however, and they were docile again, some wanking half-heartedly in their own ways.

“Yep,” I said. “Something else.”