I will be Maeve.
I will be working in a place called Gumbo’s Café when I first meet
Moondance. He will set my heart
pounding. I will watch as he builds an
empire and wages a business war against his enemy Vinegar Vera. And my heart will speak to me everyday. This is how it will be.
- - - -
I will be twenty-two years old when he walks through the door. Old enough to know there’s no hope that somebody ordinary can be with a Blue Person. But young enough to hope anyway.
He won’t be tall for a Blue, just seven-foot, but he’ll be wide like an ocean, and his pale blue skin will be clear as a summer sky. He will be, like all of his people, completely hairless. I’ll enjoy that thought. And Moondance will know how to wear a suit.
I will serve him coffee, knowing that I am flushing bright red. But he won’t comment, being too discreet for that. Instead he will sit in the back corner, sipping from his mug and casting a steady, deliberate gaze around Gumbo’s. When he takes out a leather-bound notebook and starts writing in it, the small elegant pen he uses will move fluidly in his thick fingers, and I’ll know he has lovely handwriting. When his coffee is low he’ll take up the solitary white rose from the small blue glass vase on his table, and hold it to his button nose. I’ll walk over with a refill, trying to keep my flushing under control.
“You won’t smell much over this coffee”, I’ll comment carefully.
“I haven’t got a sense of smell,” he will say. And then we’ll be talking. We’ll share little tidbits of our stories. Moondance will have a way of encouraging people to talk intimately with him, even when they have only just met him. But there will be a part of his mind that is cool and calculating, filing away information, and noting anything that might be of use later. But I won’t resent him for it. That will just be Moondance’s way.
I’ll tell him about how I plagued Gumbo for nine years before he gave me a job at the café. I’ll tell him that the café is the heart of Cylinder City; that I have known that, better than anybody else, ever since I was eight years old. I’ll tell him that I am a quiet person, and that I like to watch people. I’ll tell him I have everything in the world that I want. Within fifteen minutes he’ll have had all the most important parts of my story. Well, nearly all.
In return I’ll find out that he lost his sense of smell when he was fourteen. Wrestling with his brother Rigel one day, they slid down a grassy bank that overhangs a stretch of his favourite childhood beach. He managed to land headfirst on the only rock within a hundred yards. Upon recovering consciousness he knew something was missing. Half a day passed by before he realised he couldn’t smell anything. Rigel was unsympathetic. He joked that he had taken Moondance’s sense of smell, and that he would sell it back to him if he made a suitable offer.
I will instinctively believe this odd story, because of something in Moondance’s eyes. He will tell me that the scent he misses the most is sand. “The tang of sand when you first step onto a beach”, he’ll say. It will suddenly seem a very sad thing to me, to never smell again.
He will rent a basement apartment in the Cylinder Tower. He’ll tell me he is turning it into a minimalist retreat from the confusion of the world. A cool white cube where he can stop and be. He’ll say he has some business ideas he wants to ‘explore’ here in the city, and he’ll smile, almost shyly, as he says that one-day he’ll be moving his beautiful basement up to the penthouse. My eyes will be shining by now. I’ll have surrendered already.
Gumbo’s Café will be a magic place. Large and busy, and full of cosy little corners, it will be the only place that I ever know about where anybody and everybody belongs. The old dears will laugh over their Welsh cakes at the surfers, and the surfers will laugh at the townies and the business suits, and the Lord Mayor will sit back to back with Insane Girl and her band: Algolagnia. Gumbo’s wife, Jane, will put it down to a spell she bought from a gypsy when the café first opened. She’ll call it a “universal armistice spell”. It will seem to have worked.
Moondance will ask Gumbo to sell the café to him, step one of his business plan. Gumbo will run a hand through his mop of black hair, to clear it out of his eyes – it will flop right back down, as usual – and he’ll laugh. Moondance will write a figure on a piece of paper and slide it across the table. I’ll see Gumbo’s face flicker as he actually wavers for a heartbeat. Then he’ll pull himself together and smile and push the piece of paper back.
“I have everything in the world that I want Mr Moondance”, he’ll say. I’ll know that he means it, because that will be the real reason of the café’s success: Gumbo’s contentment. Nothing to do with spells at all. But the figure that Moondance writes will have made that piece of paper very heavy. Gumbo won’t even have been able to pick it up.
The gypsy will turn up one day, telling Jane that Gumbo had better get rid of the café pronto, and it won’t seem obvious at all. Not at the time. Well gypsy’s are like the wind aren’t they? Not even Moondance could own one, could he? But afterwards we’ll all know. He had found out that Gumbo’s weakness was Jane, and Jane’s weakness was superstition.
Gumbo will gain a substantial amount of money in the sale. But a part of his heart will turn to stone too. Moondance won’t change anything about the café, not even the name, and so the first stone of his empire will have been laid. His nightclub, The Eclipse, will follow three years later. He’ll take Balast on as a bouncer and a bodyguard, the only other Blue Person in Cylinder City. In fact, he’ll hire Balast before he’s even bought the club. Like everything Moondance does, it will be a shrewd move. They will both be so charismatic you see. It’s difficult for huge, hulking creatures not to be – though some certainly manage it - but walking about like that, together, their presence will be amplified somehow. They’ll become greater than the sum of their parts. When Moondance takes up a negotiating posture at some business meeting in the back room of Gumbo’s, and Balast stands behind him, it will be like Moondance is casting a huge blue shadow, one that reveals his true size and power. I will see them walking down New Market Street one Saturday afternoon, amidst the throngs of eager shoppers, and I’ll get the feeling I am watching a great ice burg, a single ice burg that has two great blue peaks, drifting silently and purposefully though a sea of brittle lifeboats. Moondance’s business plan will roll on. Pubs, clubs, restaurants, surf shacks and surf shops, a caravan park, a roller blading park, recreation halls; one by one they will be absorbed into his legend. Some will do it with an almost palpable sigh of relief. Somebody strong has come to take up our burdens.
I’ll watch, my heartbeat jumping. From Gumbo’s Café I’ll have a privileged ringside view. I’ll see the way Moondance looks at things. I’ll see him working things out. I’ll almost be able to read his mind. A cold, blue, gentlemanly ice burg; sallying forth from his beautiful minimalist capsule, to own, to control; to order the chaos. I’ll see that he is trying to be the master of his own heartbeat. He’ll want his temperature to lie obediently below a certain level, making a cold, still lake of his soul. If he has his way, he will release all that is visceral. He’ll aspire to a pure clarity that will render him invisible. Untouchable.
And who will not surrender? There will be a few. Vinegar Vera and Annie, underestimated by all, they will be the most obvious. When their defences against Moondance’s proposals turn into outright counter attacks he will prudently back down; try to leave them alone, with their seedy pub and over-sized bingo hall. But a bee will be in Vera’s bonnet now. She will be nothing more than an uncouth and deranged psycho-bully to my eyes, certainly no match for the power, precision and panache of my Moondance. But their business war will escalate so quickly, that it will be over almost before I’ve realised it really is a war. Within five years of Moondance approaching Vera with one on those heavy pieces of paper, the kind he had showed Gumbo, she’ll have a burgeoning little empire of her own. The whole of Cylinder City will be waiting expectantly for her to fall flat on her face, to overreach herself, but even though each of her acquisitions will clearly be beyond her, and doomed to failure, she will thrive. Her malevolent smile will begin to haunt my dreams.
Somebody else who will never surrender to Moondance will be Balast of course. Balast has been bought, it will be said. But that won’t be true. He will be as unruleable as Moondance himself, and if anything, even more inscrutable. Now and again I will hear Balast say ‘no’ to one of Moondance’s instructions. He will place a reassuring hand gently on his boss’s arm as he defies him. That touch, and the measured tone of his voice, will tell Moondance that he is straying over the edge of some boundary. Moondance will invariably rethink his strategy, his conscience having spoken. I think that Balast will actually have some of that crystal purity, which Moondance craves. And Moondance will want to be close to it.
“You’re flustered”, Balast will tell him, when Vinegar Vera tops his bid for The Tiger, a large surf shack at the north end of Cylinder Bay. That is all it will take to pull Moondance up short. He’ll shake his head, as if to clear it, and he’ll laugh.
“I am flustered”, he’ll say. “How silly of me.”
They’ll be so understated. I’ll love that.
- - - -
Inevitably, of course, the day will come when Vera walks into Gumbo’s Café with a heavy piece of paper of her own. I will be forty-eight years old by now. I’ll have been married and widowed. I’ll have two grown up children – well I’m not going to become a nun just because I love the unobtainable Mr Moondance.
Balast will be out of town for the weekend, visiting his mother. My heart will have been hurting all morning, but I’ll put that down to it being the same time of year that my Mitch died. When Vera steps through the door my heart will lurch so badly I’ll think I’m having an attack. I’ll see Annie standing outside on the street, loitering, not coming in. Then I’ll know something is desperately wrong. Vera will face Moondance across a table, one in sight of the window, and she’ll order three coffees and a tea. She will give one of the coffees to Moondance, but she won’t explain who the remaining two drinks are for. Then she will give him her piece of paper. He will crumple it with a low chuckle, not even looking at it.
“Go home Vera” he’ll say, almost affectionately. “I’m too old for your games.” He won’t know that my heart is hurting so much. Vera will smile back at him, and she’ll almost seem human herself, just for a moment. Then she’ll gesture to Annie. I’ll watch, my heart in my mouth, as Annie moves to the door, closely followed by a huge dark shadow.
It will have to stoop and turn sideways to get through the door. His blue skin will be unusually dark, but the shape of his jaw will tell me he is Moondance’s brother. I will suddenly want to die.
“Rigel”, Moondance will say under his breath, then he will just sit there, frozen, refusing to talk. He will stare into his brother’s eyes with a gaze that should pierce his skull. But Rigel will note this with relish, and begin to describe his part in Vinegar Vera’s business activities. He’ll speak with a disconcerting mixture of charm and venom. He will radiate a barely suppressed, feverish, passion. I’ll know that his mind is not right. Then I’ll begin to understand Moondance’s obsession with order and coolness and purity. He will be terrified of his brother, and the things they have in common.
Rigel will unfold his story. Not only will he be in control of Moondance’s competition now, through Vera and Annie, but he will be a silent partner in certain companies that are directly supplying Moondance’s own concerns. Everything will be in place, after years of planning and preparation, to destroy Moondance in a day. While Moondance casts about for new suppliers, a process that Rigel is ready and able to hinder in-definitely, Rigel’s own companies will fill the yawning gap created by the stalling of Moondance’s machine. If his calculations are correct, and of course they will be, Moondance’s empire is toppled already.
Moondance still won’t have moved or spoken.
Next Vera will pipe up that she has arranged a little surprise too. As this meeting is taking place a little gang of her’s is breaking into The Eclipse to burn it down.
“It should be happening right now”, she’ll explain.
Moondance will leave immediately. I’ll shout after him to stop, to wait for Balast to come back, but he won’t be able to let The Eclipse burn. As the door slams behind him, Rigel will crow with delight.
“Vera my dear, you’re priceless”, he’ll laugh. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to cover up for you and your little arson.” He’ll down his tea in one smooth movement and hand the cup to me. “You’re Maeve aren’t you?” he’ll say, turning those sickening eyes on me. “Don’t worry you’ve still got a job.” And he’ll saunter out as if he doesn’t have a care in the world.
I will start to cry now. Vera will sigh and walk over to me. Taking the cup that had held Rigel’s tea she will walk around to my side of the counter. She will look at me briefly, but she won’t speak. Instead she will put the cup in the dishwasher and turn it on.
“See you around Maeve”, she’ll say. Then she will leave. Later that evening, at the best of Moondance’s restaurants, Rigel will topple over his lobsters, dead. A heart attack.
Meanwhile I will close up the café and wait for Moondance to come back. Eventually he will return, his head split open like a watermelon, weaving as he walks, and nodding involuntarily at thin air. The Eclipse will still be standing. There was never any intention from Vera to burn it down. It was a direct ambush against Moondance. Vera will have turned out to have more marbles than anybody could have thought.
“Sit down here while I call an ambulance”, I’ll order him, but he’ll take hold of my arm and look at me drunkenly, as if from a far away place. When he speaks his speech will be slurred and unusual.
“The coffee smells good”, he will say. I’ll look at him blankly for a moment, nonplussed, before I realise that his sense of smell has returned. I won’t be able to speak because my heart is hurting too much. What have they done to him? But I will master myself and tell him again to sit down.
“Take me to the beach Maeve”, he’ll say. One side of his face won’t be working anymore. I’ll start to cry again.
“Later darlin’. Let’s get you to the hospital first.”
“No. No time. Take me to the beach.”
I’ll have loved him for a long time by now. What choice will I have?
In later days I will watch Moondance and Balast, as they walk down New Market Street, or sit in the back corner of Gumbo’s on a rainy afternoon. Now it will be Balast who wears the suit and writes in a leather-bound notebook, while Moondance shadows him, working as his bodyguard. I will wonder if things might have turned out differently, if I’d taken him to the hospital. Would his wits have returned to their former keenness? Well it will be too late by then to dwell on such things. And now, his scarred brain seeing things differently, he will have acquired some of that elusive simplicity of mind that he had so yearned for all those years. Now it will be he who gently says “no” to his boss from time to time, keeping Balast from losing himself in business.
This is how it will be.
The sun is setting on the horizon now, swollen and blurred, when he can’t sit up any longer. I let him rest his bloody head in my lap, and I soothe him, accompanied by the lulling sound of the waves. He breathes in the tang of the sand and sighs, and my heart hurts. The breeze coming in off the Irish Sea fails to cool his skin and I feel honoured to be there, smelling it with him.
------ The End -----
© Ian Moore 1998
