By Sandshoe

Readers who might have missed Episode 1 – November last year – may wish to catch it here Castle Episode 1

The Busker scrawked at the top of lungs sounding fit to burst. His head gyrated as if paranoia advanced to a physical affliction and his legs thrust rigidly forward in heavy worker’s boots one after the next as if he stilt walked the concrete drive, yet without grace. His thin shoulders hunched forward and his eyes slitted from side to (Suse always said about his eyes, psychopathic) side.

The incline to the squat known as The Castle is a driveway between neighbouring houses with neat white verandahs that now breathe only a sense of rectitude over the top of the silent, emptied bungalow of boarded-up doors and windows on the headland at the bottom of the hill. Suse lived at the Castle with her partner Black from a time before it was a neglected squalor of rotting and hard rubbish thrown from the verandah until on each of 3 of its sides on a ridge that sloped steeply away from one the rubbish mounted the height of the verandah’s edge. Her eyelids drooping shut mean for now we will be patient and sit quiet until Suse rouses again. She will take up description of her commitment to her profession and its conduct as if she had not slumbered. Suse, her white face thin and lightly freckled, framed with wispy hair, sits for now frozen in apparent sleep beside her coffee steaming on the surface of the adzed wooden table.

Black had come home from a nightclub jaunt in the early hours of that infamous Sunday morning, tossed fuel over the contents of the pit that all the hard rubbish from around the contours of the house had been thrown into and a lit match. The Australian woman, her head leaning back against the window overlooking the black of night on the gully, was sitting chatting with Mix’s Mum on the bed that was couch by day and for late night a traipse of visitors who left their impressions on its meagre arrangement of cushions. Her feet met with the floor of rough hewn squares of slate and their deep crevices between that had never been filled or sealed and she was running. Black, doubled over in a cloud of silk pillow case puffs of black smoke, staggered and bobbed, seemingly for a moment to mock and taunt her awe but it became evident with uncontrollable laughter like intermittent howls of grief across the silhouette of a breaking dawn. Where the surface of the pit had been a giant and surreal square of broken broom handles, tin cans and a washing machine protruding above the flat table top of recently bulldozered soil, the smoke billowed in an intersperse of flickering flames shooting skywards as Black staggered in erratic circles. Morning glory vine tendrils had become visible in the dawn light curling across the door of the raised garden shed out of which The Spider stepped in a crumpled frock of white guipure lace.  His face creased with an expression of puzzled anxiety.

The Australian woman breathed deep. She addressed Black to try to determine if his gait was shock or if he was on fire and he straightened. As soon as he  looked in her direction he doubled over. She wondered he was intoxicated, perhaps on nothing but laughter.

The yard filled with late night stragglers and confused early risers as dawn filled the previous anonymity of night with light, but Spider dominated at the top of the steps of the shed, the guipure sticking incongruously out beneath a knotted overlay of pink tulle. His legs threatened comprehension these were a man’s legs and not a human spidoid’s, so thin they might break, cloaked in stockings carefully sculpted into intricate patterns by dotting lit cigarette butts their entire length. The rumble of aftershock backdropping the backyard’s precipice to its valley floor like a theatrical curtain was broken by a lone siren, joined by another and another. An outburst of exclamation swelled and died as a crowd gathered. A young man from a property on the upper slope remarked as if to air on the depth of the valley of dense vegetation and its extent so close to the heart of a city.

The mouths of some neighbours hung open. The assortment of individuals in plain, striped and floral pyjamas with bath gowns and some hastily overthrown street coats grouped at a remove from where the woman from Australia was standing. These observers stood shoulder to shoulder and their shoulders hunched forward to project themselves to better see without entanglement. Black had looked up and seen them. He had doubled forward again with his arms crossed before his lower rib cage and his stomach as if wounded. The tableau of people was his catalyst. Sirens become louder ceased with inevitable surety. The firemen grouped as they ran past and stopped, other than one who reconnoitered the burning pit and Black. It was patent Black could not cease from laughter.

Suse stirs. The cold fire place behind her has metamorphosed in a quietude of contemplative sketching, into a row of stylised flames. “Then I knew,” she mumbles, “that Black Egg would never allow the dog to suffer.” Her companions are used to the long silences and mumbling broken by fitful sleep.