Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner Read Free Book Online

some curtains, facing the people. Raymond did not know whether they were supposed to stand or sit. He glanced behind him for a clue. A couple of the girls were scrambling to their feet, one bloke dropped on to his knees, but most of the people stayed seated with stiff, embarrassed faces. The man out the front said nothing, gave no orders. He did not appear to be in charge: no one was in charge. Raymond realised that nobody here knew how this thing was meant to be done, that nobody here was going to stand up and say the words that would save them.
    Then he heard, in the uncomfortable hush, a squeaking and a gliding, the sound of small wheels. Ursula’s nails sank into his arm. The curtains at the front were nosed apart and into the empty space where the weak man in the suit was waiting rolled, on a metal trolley, the wooden box with Kim inside it.
    Ursula stood up, dragging him with her. Her fingers bit into his inner elbow; and now out of her mouth horrible sounds began, ugly and ridiculous, the noises that bad singers make when they work up to a solo: woh, woh, woh, she went, blank and gaping, gobbling for breath. An old woman darted across and seizedher shoulders with both hands but Ursula flung up one arm and knocked her away. In the same movement she struck off her own sunglasses which dangled from one ear and hung half across her mouth, revealing two swollen bruises: her eyes. Out of these sore slits poured a gaze that hit the end of the coffin and bored right in. Ursula at that moment could see through wood.
    She turned on Raymond with a crazy mouth. He fought to break away but, like the shrilling of the bird outside the window, Ursula’s howling, this horror, exploded and stuffed the universe, paralysed him, swallowed him whole.
    Then the bald skeleton with tattooed hands stepped right through the commotion in his heavy boots and put both arms round Ursula from behind.
    â€˜Let go,’ he said, right in her ear, working at her hands, rubbing at them, getting his thumbs under their grip. ‘Urs, it’s me, Phil. Come on, Urs. It won’t help the little girl now. Lay off the poor bastard, Ursula. Come on, let him go.’
    He unhooked her claws and Raymond stumbled back. A rush of murmuring women with handkerchiefs and skirts flowed into the space where he had been, but in the second before they engulfed her he saw her one last time, with her back against the bald man’s chest, rearing, her arms pinned up by his grip on her two wrists: her face was a demon’s muzzle, sucking in air before its final plunge into the chasm.
    * * *
    Raymond got to his feet in the corner where he had been flung. The air in the ugly chapel settled; the coffin hummed behind him. He could not look at it, but he felt it vibrating in the yellow air, rippling out waves that pressed against his back and propelled him down the aisle towards the door. Ankle-deep in crushed garlands he crossed the porch and stopped on the step of the building, swaying and hanging on to the sides of the archway. He slid his head out into the garden. The last of the cars was pulling away. He heard the sponge and pop of its tyres on the bitumen, saw the blurred hair-masses of the girls packed into the back seat, smelled the exhaust that shot out of its low muffler. It swung round the curve in the road, and was gone.
    He let his knees buckle, and sat down hard on the step. He was empty. There was nothing left inside him at all. He crouched there on the chapel’s lip, rolling up his shirt sleeve to inspect the site of his bruises. If he could work out where he was, if he could find his way to the gate, he was free to get out of here, to drag himself away.
    So when the heavy boots came crunching towards him across the carpark, although the skin of his skull tightened and a thousand hairs grew stiff, he did not raise his head. Maybe it was the gardener. Maybe it was the first person arriving for the next funeral. He kept very still. He made