 
HEADS UP

An anthology of short stories

Published

by

The Royalties

who are

Libby Hathorn

The Day TV Came

Louise Katz

The Little Demon

Bem Le Hunte

The Final Christmas

Sue Woolfe

A Conversation in the Desert

Smashwords Edition 1

Copyright 2011 The Royalties

The Royalties is a writers' collective founded by Sue Woolfe, Bem Le Hunte, Libby Hathorn and Louise Katz, a group of much-published Australian women novelists who decided to come together to create precedent for innovative new publishing models that will benefit all Australian writers in an international marketplace.

We are not particularly tech-savvy, but we all feel the urgency to participate in rapidly changing publishing structures. With current technology there is a real opportunity for writer-centric models to replace traditional legacy publishing models and promote a true renaissance in literature.

With publishers nervous and bookstores closing, it's become clear to all of us that this is the time for writers to ride the times, take the risk and claim greater rights to their words. And who, we ask, would take control in these formative moments of opportunity, if not the writers themselves?

We are all actively involved in experimenting with our literary work and the way that it is produced, distributed and marketed, and we'd like to share this experiment with other writers. If you're a writer you can join us in this experiment, share in our experience and reach out to a wider community of national and international readers.
THE DAY TV CAME

by Libby Hathorn

'There's a new market started in the RSL Hall of a Thursday,' Frannie's mother called as she threw the spoils of her afternoon's shopping onto the large table. 'And looks like I've got a job on Mrs Rosenthall's stall. Thursday mornings.'

'Good,' Frannie had said, drawn towards the sound of parcels being unwrapped in the dining room.

This smallish room, with its bow-fronted sideboard, mock Jacobean table, and three matching pictures of pale English country gardens, was called the dining room even though one end of it was actually the kitchen or kitchenette, as Laura insisted they call it.

One wall of the dining room seemed entirely taken up with the bulk of the cream round-shouldered refrigerator that had only recently replaced the neater wooden ice chest. The other side had twin windows with cream venetian blinds that looked out over a clipped lawn and a piecemeal straggly garden of staked dahlias and intermittent hydrangea bushes bordering a grey paling fence that hemmed the lot in. Frannie stared out of it and thought about the wildness of her grandmother's garden and vista in Megalong Valley on the farm. In her mind's eyes she always saw the rambling roses and long grass that ran down to the bickering creek all lined with heavy waving blackberry canes then up to the honey coloured cliff faces beyond that one day she planned to scale.

'See what I got. Only spent a couple of pounds too.' Laura spread things out. There was a big damask tablecloth with matching serviettes and three linen tea towels.

'They're all for you, 'she said in a pleased voice, 'for your trousseau'.

'What do I want those for, Mum? You know I don't have a trousseau for God's sake. And I'm not getting married. Never. Never. Never. You know that.'

'Give them to Raelene or Janine Thingo for their shower teas.' Frannie stared at the unwelcome gifts and then at her mother. 'They don't have Bermuda shorts there do they, Mum? Cynthia has a tartan pair and they're –'

'I'll put these in the cupboard with the other things, Francis. I thought you'd say thank you at least.'

'Thank you at least Mum. You shouldn't of. But I didn't ask you now did I? Not for house things.'

Laura snatched up the goods from the Thursday market at the RSL Hall.

'Shouldn't _have_ \- you should know that with all your education...'

Frannie knew her mother got some small satisfaction in correcting her or her younger brother Darren when she could and she said nothing.

'Set the table nicely, Fran. We've got a visitor tonight.' Laura was on her way to the linen cupboard now half way down the hall.

'Not Ray. He's not coming tonight, is he Mum?'

'He's coming to look at the room. And if he likes it and if you kids are quiet enough, he'll move in on the weekend.'

'He's a dope,' she called at her mother's disappearing back.

'Well, he's nice enough.'

'And it means Darren'll be moving into my room I suppose.'

'No, Darren can move in with me if Ray takes the back room. I hope to God he takes that room Francis. It'll be a big help.'

'A few lousy pounds a week and having to put up with a dope like Ray.'

'Well you get out and earn a few lousy pounds a week, my girl.'

'I would, if you'd let me leave school,' she called out. It was easier to say all this with her mother out of the room.

'You know I won't get my Leaving, Mum. I just scraped by the Inter. I haven't got a hope. I'll get out and earn a few lousy pounds, just give me the chance'.

'Miss Preston told me you're a very intelligent girl, Frannie – Miss Preston said you could pass no trouble – a girl with your IQ.'

Frannie sank down onto one of the stiff plastic covers that had replaced the worn tapestry on the dining room chairs only a few months ago She hated words like intelligent and IQ more particularly now since their neighbour, Mrs Dale, had had both her kids tested. She'd told everyone in the street, in that way of hers, that her kids were in the _superior range_ with their IQ's. Raelene and Michael Dale for God's sake!

'They're going to start a big supermarket up the junction, Mum,' Frannie jumped up and wrested a fresh tablecloth from the over-stuffed sideboard drawer. 'You know, where the ice works used to be. A supermarket right in the middle of Maroubra Junction, Mum! You know like they have in America – really big.'

'Mmm.'

'I want a job there. I _can_ add up you know. You don't even need your Inter, let alone your Leaving I reckon I could get a job no trouble. Desley Slater told me her Dad's leaving Coles 'cause he's going to be running the place. And he said they're looking for girls.'

Her mother came back into the room. Her face look tired, worried. 'I want you to get that Leaving Certificate, Frannie. I want you to have that piece of paper. You know why. So don't go on about it anymore.'

Frannie threw the knives and forks down untidily on the fresh seersucker cloth. Mum had had to leave school at fourteen years of age. She'd never had the opportunity to learn. She'd never got a decent job. She had to go and clean houses just to keep the family together. Her and Darren. She didn't want Frannie working like she'd had to. 'You just get that certificate and get a nice job – a teacher or a nurse. Something nice. You're clever enough if you really try. Not cleaning toilets and things like me, all of your life, Frannie.'

'What's for tea then?' Frannie asked her mother.

'I'm doing crumbed lamb cutlets.'

'Two each I hope or he'll think we're mingy or something.'

'Two for Ray,' Laura told her daughter.

Ray moved his things in on the weekend. Boxes and boxes of books. He was a clerk somewhere. He liked reading. He had his own radio with a record player attached. He was a quiet man. They only saw him at tea time and sometimes even then he went out. Laura cooked really nice meals for Ray, and Frannie noticed she put on make-up at teatime too. She talked brightly and she didn't go mad on them half as much.

'Maybe Ray can help you with your maths homework,' Laura said after Frannie's report came in and she'd failed again in algebra.

'It'd be a pleasure,' Ray said in that shy way of his. And so once a week she sat with Ray and he'd shown her lots of things about algebra she'd never understood and explained cos and tan and all that stuff she never listened to in class. And when she passed at the half yearly exam Mum bought Ray a few bottles of beer just to say thank you.

Things didn't seem to change too much with Ray being in the house. That was until they got TV. It was actually Ray got them a television set – well, half of a television set.

'Nearly everyone's got TV now,' Frannie had complained as often as she dared to her mother, 'We'll be the last in the street.' Whenever Frannie and Darren accompanied Laura on shopping expeditions to Maroubra Junction they would stand outside Eric Anderson's, heads rotating in slow half circles like the open mouthed clowns at the Royal Easter Show, watching three lots of flickering black and white TV pictures for as long as they could. In fact it was almost impossible to budge Darren once he was into a show. But Laura was adamant.

'I'd get a fully automatic washing machine before I got TV,' she told them, 'you'll just have to be content to watch TV up at Cynthia's or over at Pete's for the time being. I don't want to hear any more about it.'

And then just a few months after Ray had come to live with them, there'd been _his_ suggestion about TV.

'I can get a new TV just about cost. So maybe, if you thought it was a good idea Laura, we could go halves,' Frannie heard Ray say one night in that apologetic way of his, 'that's of course if you're interested.'

'An HMV in a very nice cabinet too, doors with a brass trim and brass handles. A good looking piece of furniture.'

'I suppose it'd be educational for the kids,' she was surprised to hear her mother say just like that.

'Oh, lots of programs are educational for sure, on TV', he'd said, 'You know I reckon it'd go well in that corner of the lounge room, that is if you're sure you want it in the first place.'

That was when Frannie wanted to fly out from her bedroom and say, 'Oh no it wouldn't – you're not deciding where things go in our place. The cheek of you, boarder! We don't want half a TV with you telling Darren and me what we could watch. Oh no, we bloody well don't.' But she heard her mother agreeing again.

'Under the window there? Yes – yes it'd fit quite nicely there, Ray, now that you mention it. Of course, I'd have to move that nest of tables over here somewhere.'

'You'd have to be a bit careful about the weather too – you know the wood. Wouldn't want the rain coming in on it.' Frannie hated the way they both laughed as if in perfect agreement when it was common knowledge that Laura left windows and doors carelessly open to the weather all over the house.

But she couldn't help feeling the excitement of it all the day the TV arrived. Lex, a friend of Ray's brought it in the back of his Ute. Frannie was watching through the flyscreen from the bay window of her mother's room and saw, over the bulbous heads of blue hydrangea blooms, the truck swinging around the corner into Kyogle Street. Ray was sitting up on the tailgate, his arm over the top of the burly box that was dressed in canvas and lashed with ropes. When they pulled up outside where half a dozen kids were waiting, Darren let out a yell that opened doors and windows all along the street and drew Frannie outside too.

'It's here! It's here! Our TV's heeere!' Darren's shrill voice rang out and Frannie felt the thrill of it all right. As if the Amusu or the Vocalist theatres up at the junction were about to move right inside their house. Pictures of their own and every night!

She sauntered down the side path not wanting to appear too child-like about it. She watched as Ray untied the ropes one after the other with deliberate movements.

'God he's a bloody slowcoach!' she thought wanting to jump up there and wrench the wrapping off and reveal the HMV TV that was half Ray's and half theirs. She'd ask him which half when they got it inside.

When it was sitting on the grass, stripped and shining, all the kids clapped and some of the women who'd gathered to watch, too. She noticed when Ray smiled like that he looked a bit like a kid himself.

'Do you realise...' Laura announced dramatically when the two men followed by Mrs Dale and several kids had heaved it up the path and down the hallway, setting it under the window where the nest of tables had been, 'that we're about to let the world into our lounge room...'

Darren's young friends had lined up on the carpet waiting but Laura was standing right in front of the tightly closed doors of the large new shiny piece of furniture, admiring it.

Darren's best friend Pete spoke loudly to the group assembled in the room, 'I like The World of Disney, Mickey Mouse Club and Father Knows Best', he challenged, 'in that order.'

'Sounds like the American world to me,' Ray commented.

'I suppose you're right, Ray,' Mum agreed, smiling at him. 'We're letting the American world right into...'

'Turn it on, turn it on,' Darren shouted 'C'mon Mum!'

Ray glanced at Laura and she smiled and nodded graciously. 'The plug's just there, Ray,' she told him. She stepped aside after she pulled open the polished doors of the new television revealing the large curve of screen, that magic surface smooth and sleek, an empty dark grey that would have a life of its own any second – and leap into theirs.

There was a moment, just a moment, when all talk and movement stopped in the room. It was when Ray drove the plug home into the socket on the skirting board half hidden by the drape of the heavily ruched honey-coloured curtains. It was as if the chartreuse green room itself took a deep breath and waited. He swung in a single movement from down there at the socket straight back up to the large gleaming dial button of the HMV TV, everyone watching, no one speaking.

He twirled the dial maddeningly slowly bringing the huge remorseless eye (a 21 inch screen it's got and I'm advised you really need it that big) to life. Music splayed out into the room and Frannie glanced round watching the faces spattered with the strange bluish flickering light trapped in their small lounge room. Then there were whoops and yells and Darren's high cackling laughter as he rolled around the floor in delight.

'TV!' he chanted, 'Teeee Veeee'.

'No need to get excited, Daz. It's only the test pattern, silly,'

'It's our test pattern but,' Darren said.

'You change it, Laura. Come on, come over here and change the station,' Ray said putting out his arm towards her.

'Channel,' another knowledgeable voice informed.

But Laura was afraid of the glittery over- large dial that controlled the moving pictures at a touch.

'No, I'm fine,' she told him, staying back against the wall with Mrs Dale. 'Go on, you get the thing going, Ray.'

Again Ray's hand on the dial, bump, bump, bump around the glittery clock face thing with its overlarge numbers 1 to 10. And then a new shivery image assumed form.

There were water pipes in the background, huge water pipes that ran off downhill and somewhere further off the vague twinkling of movement, a distant river. And there was a man very close up, a man who was very short of hair. He had a microphone in his hand and one foot rested nonchalantly on a rock whilst he talked about the water pipes.

'Over twenty thousand migrants have worked on this part of the hydro electric scheme to date. And the area where I stand right now is to be the next major stage of development...'

'Yeah,' Darren applauded smiling at his companions, 'it's on.'

After ten minutes there was a ripple of movement in that room. The camera had moved to a close up of one of the pipes now but the man's grey voice was going relentlessly on...

One by one the kids in the room began slipping away, 'It's better this arvo,' they apologised to Darren, 'they don't have much news stuff then.' And even Ray's friend Lex said well, he better get going now it was all set up and good luck with the new TV.

Frannie sat in the shabby single armchair,' You can see it OK from this angle,' she told her mother, 'quite clear, even sitting sideways.

'You'll have to get TV plates with sections on them, like we have. In plastic. You'll be having dinner on your knee every night, you know,' Mrs Dale told Laura after a minute or more of the pipes and authoritative tones.

'Turn it down Darren, so's we can hear each other,' Laura told him.

'TV dinner plates,' Mrs Dale repeated.

'I suppose,' Mum said uncertain.

'This chap could probably get them cheap, you know Laura,' Ray was smiling at her from where he sat on his haunches by the TV.

'Good, good,' Frannie was amazed to hear her mother say.

'But you said one thing we'd never ever do, Mum – you said one thing we'd never ever do – was eat our dinner in front of TV. You said it was barbaric. I remember you using the word. Barbaric, not to sit around a table and talk over dinner like human beings and...'

''Oh now Frannie, p 'raps sometimes we'll sit in here for tea. Odd occasions...if Ray can get the plates from that chap.' She smiled across the room at him.

'It's a nice piece of furniture, ' Mrs Dale cut in, regretting her own pale veneered TV with its modern splayed brass cupped legs, which had, after all, been the first TV in Kyogle Street.

''I'd like Alf to come and see your HMV this evening – I really would,' she went on.

'Yes, it's a lovely thing.' Laura went across the room and stood beside Ray to needlessly polish the surface.

'I wonder should I put something here, on top, something from the china cabinet. The ballerina or maybe this?' She picked up the heavy clawed ashtray that sat on the mantel piece above the gas fire forgetting the flickering screen.

'Not that Mum, it's so damned _ugly!'_ Frannie objected at once. Venetian glass was new in Maroubra and Frannie loathed the heavy gaudy highly coloured pieces that had made their way into the two or three gift shops at the junction and thence to several lounge rooms in Kyogle Street including theirs. Ugly contorted protrusions, vivid blue or red. Laura had said by way of explanation to her disapproving daughter, hiding it on the dusty mantel, 'It's a gift, Fran – and if your Auntie Dulcie visits – well, it'll be nice for her to see it here. Don't carry on about it. I don't really like it either...'

Now, Laura placed the big red ashtray carefully in the centre of the polished wood where the daylight blazed on it.

Mrs Dale had fixed her eye on it approvingly. 'The red of it goes so nicely with the dark wood of the cabinet, don't you think? And the gold handles.' Laura wasn't sure. 'What do you think Ray?'

'Oh, don't ask me, I've no idea about these things,' he said.

'Course not,' Frannie thought, 'you're not going to stick your neck out, are you?'

'I think the glass looks too much there Mum with all that light on it. It's ugly, that's what!'

'Hardly ugly young lady, the price someone must've paid for it!' their neighbour said.

Laura hesitated, reached her hand out towards the bulbous glass piece and then stopped. She walked back across the room and stood studying it

'Doesn't look too bad there, I s'pose. Not too bad'

There was a silence in the room.

'Not too bad,' Ray said going to stand beside Laura as if to contemplate the new placement more carefully

'Nice,' Mrs Dale said appreciatively.

When Mrs Dale left, Frannie noticed that her mother sat down next to Ray on the settee – something she'd never done before. Right beside him on the settee that was directly opposite the big new 21 inch screen.

They all stared silently at the moving screen. Outside Frannie could hear the whoops and yells of Darren's friends. He had not been able to resist the lure of the games on the sunny grass verges. But later he would not be able to resist the lure of the new acquisition and would develop the skills of sitting quite, quite still.

Laura made a cup of tea for the three of them which she brought in on a tray that she put on one of the small tables close to Ray – and a plate of overlapping Saos arranged with untidy chunks of Kraft cheese.

'Help yourself, love,' she told Frannie.

'It's okay, Mum.'

'So this is TV,' Frannie was thoughtful in her chair as the earnest balding man seemed to chomp at the microphone. The river continued to run tantalizingly somewhere too far away behind him whilst above his earnest face, the large red-clawed ashtray glittered in the sunlight.

First published as part of an exhibition on television by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia

**Background to the story** _The Day TV Came_

_The Day TV Came_ was written as part of a novel about life in the Sydney suburb circ 1950's. Although the novel was not completed because of other writing commitments ( I was working on the text of the picture book _Way Home (Random House)_ and the novel _Feral Kid Hodder Headline)_ , there were early chapters that were complete in themselves. Some of these later became the basis for short stories. The chapter about television besetting the closed world of the Australian suburbs was one such discrete chapter. When the Museum of Contemporary Art, fairly new in Sydney at the time, was calling for stories about television, I figured that the story of a family actually receiving a television into their living rooms and indeed into their lives, would fit the bill. And it did.

It was exciting for us to have a large museum in a beautiful sandstone building by the harbour, dedicated to contemporary art in Sydney at last, and I was thrilled when I saw their call for stories. In fact, The Museum of Contemporary Art was opened in 1991, the building at Circular Quay gifted by the NSW government. _The Day TV Came_ was forthwith published by the MCA in special edition of a magazine to celebrate their newly mounted exhibition on the life of television in Australia.

As many writers do, I then put the story aside for later publication as part of a book of short stories, never dreaming it would be part of another way of publishing and of accessing reading. It is interesting to me, given the revolution that is upon us as writers and publishers, and thinking about the impact of e-books, to choose this story of the impact of day of the television as my contribution to this co-operative of writers publishing our first e-book together.

Biography

Libby Hathorn is an award- winning author of more than 50 books for children and young adults as well as poetry for all ages. Her works have been translated into several languages and published in the US and the UK and India. Her latest novel which was highly commended in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, 2010, is _Fire Song_ (ABC Books) and latest poetry collection is _The ABC Book of Australian Poetry_ (ABC Books, 2010). She is currently working on a novel set partly in contemporary Australia and partly at the Somme in World War 1; and a book of short stories entitled _Several Pleasures._ Her first e-book _Ghostly Ghastly_ (2010 ) is now on Amazon and only available in this way, along with her book titles with ABC Books, _Fire Song_ and _Letters to a Princess_.

.www.libbyhathorn.com

www.libby-hathorn.blogspot.com

THE LITTLE DEMON

by Louise Katz

Now, this world is very wide, and so is the next one, and the one after that. I cannot vouch for more, or even if there are more than three, for three are as many as I have seen. It is quite often the case that inhabitants of one domain may have heard rumours of the existence of life in other worlds, but it is only on very special occasions that direct contact between species occurs. But it does happen. In fact, it was only quite recently that it happened to a human and a demon.

Demons, and angels too, live in the air, in great mansions of cumulus, and prefer to remain invisible to their neighbours. (Bats, who are very sensitive beasts, are aware of them, but being blind, have never actually seen them. This doesn't bother bats, for they have never seen anything else either.) Demons may occasionally manifest themselves for short periods of time, but they cannot effect lasting changes in their world or any other. In any case, it would be extremely unusual for a demon to attempt an act of creation, for creative impulses are born as much of flesh as they are of mind, and demons have no flesh, no material substance of their own.

Once upon a time there was a demon lord who lived in one of the larger, better appointed castles in the air. He was long since widowed, so his countenance was grim, but he was wise and clever and occasionally good. Like all demon folk, he was not troubled too much by virtue. Fate and his beloved wife had blessed him with six children, all of whom were geniuses in their own particular ways. His first daughter, Discretia, knew how to disguise dangerous truths with the most convincing lies, while her twin, Indiscretia, could cause quite a stir by simply speaking the truth. Nick was the most talented thief, and Bushel contented himself with merely hiding things, from pins and pen caps to agendas and motives, while young Beatrice would help folk to find things that were lost from hope and trust and luck to that excellent recipe for hot and sour hail soup. Then there was Merrili, whose spirit was so light, so joyous, that he was almost impossible to control. He brought embarrassment as well as joy to this demon family, and never seemed to understand that there are always consequences to every action.

It was the occasion of Merrili's three hundredth birthday. He was the last spawned, the baby of the family and the most beloved of all, for not only was he extremely lovely to look at, but he possessed the sweetest humour, the sharpest wit. To be in Merrili's presence was to be happy. Three hundred is the age at which demons reach their prime. (For benefit of humans reading this, three hundred demon years would correspond to about thirty in mortal terms.) In preparation, the demons had shifted some continental plates in order to clear a space for dancing, organised a monsoon or two to water the garden, and detonated a few volcanic eruptions, for no party is complete without fireworks. Merrili and all his siblings and friends had a rollicking time.

But now, as was the custom on three hundredths, the time had come for the special coming-of-age experience itself: Merrili was to descend from the air to visit the mortal world where humans live. Three hundredths were one of the very few occasions that demons were allowed, for reasons of protocol, to materialise for the purpose of hobnobbing face to face with humans. Merrili felt some trepidation on this momentous occasion, but it was not in his nature to show it. Instead he cracked a joke or two to make his excited and anxious siblings smile.

As the escort party of demon lord and progeny made its way towards the rim of the world, Discretia took Merrili aside. "Little brother, I do want you to enjoy your visit over there, but a word of caution. Keep close watch over your heart, your mind, your money, because men are a shiftier bunch of shysters than even our darling Nick!"

"Why is that, do you think, sweet sister mine?"

But Indiscretia interrupted, as was her wont. "One theory is that all their troubles are caused by that soul thing they have. Sneaky beast, soul, hides itself somewhere in the conjunction between spirit and flesh. Humans are part flesh, you know. We demons are safe since we don't have any flesh, and therefore no conjunction, but nave seen soul in action! And it's mean, baby brother, it's viral! Kills 'em in the end, always. But in the living meantime, it fills those mortal minds with such an array of conflicting fears and doubts and yearnings, all born of dreadful desire, that they are probably the messiest conundrum in the cosmos. So take care, little Merrikins, okay?"

By now the demons had reached the fringe of cloud that marks the beginning and the end of their world.

"And don't forget, Merrili, you must return at the very first sign of dawn, lest you lose yourself in the light of day," cautioned Bushel.

"I won't forget," replied Merrili, who by now was quivering on his hooves in anticipation of the adventure before him.

And so, Beatrice banged out a few devil's tritones on the portable perplexichord while their father, the demon lord, slammed together his most powerful pair of syllables: _HA BOOM!_ And without further ceremony Merrili was on his way.

On the worst day of her life Delia walked into Purgatory. Ahmed's Dick and the Boiling Witches were playing. It was very dark in there, and very loud, which was exactly what she needed. Dark to hide in, noise to kill her thoughts. She ordered a double vodka from dear old Mother Russia, and drank it down quickly before going into the laundry to put on her costume and make up her face. The laundry, with its comfortable smell of washing and its pleasantly domestic sound of whirring machines, always made her feel calmer. After dressing, she sat on a straw laundry-basket and waited for her cue.

Soon she heard the Witches winding down, and her band winding up. After a couple of warbles, a whine and a howl came Ahmed's drum roll. She scuttled backstage; a moment later Princess Delia shimmied through the curtain, resplendent in bangles and frills and a few gauzy bits which covered most of her, except for her dainty toes, her slender arms and a glimpse of her little round tummy.

It was at this moment that Merrili, fresh from the ether, materialised at the bar. Fortunately all eyes were fixed on Princess Delia's garnet navel-ring so nobody noticed his eccentric mode of arrival. He staggered a bit at first, being unaccustomed to the weight of a body. "Whew, he muttered to himself as he slipped onto a bar stool, "this gravity deal they have here is really heavy!" He ordered a bloody mary and turned to watch the floor show.

Princess Delia stood in the centre of the large stage, then slowly turned until her slender back was towards the audience. She raised one arm in a languid salute to the band, and a guitar murmured softly to itself. She moved her body almost imperceptibly - a tiny dip of the shoulders was all at first, exposing her nape. Those few downy centimetres of woman-skin at the opening of the stylised garments implied everything else that was hidden. Hidden, but known to be there, bound up in a fabricated abstraction of gauzy folds, a disciplined container for sex.

She stamped her foot and fantasies of Eastern concubines dropped away in a snow of remembered peonies. The volume of the music increased. She strutted like a flamenco dancer, inviting everyone to take her in. She began to move her arms, her hips. She danced and her dance was unselfconscious and unadulterated, despite and because of the pornographic stares of the audience: _I am the procurers' confection_ , sang her lissom arms, her hips, heir lips, carelessly._ _Look, but don't touch_ Her dance was style; it described what she was in purest terms, and she didn't care, for her dance was an animal's dance. The soul that animates doesn't trouble itself with the impression it makes. She danced her dance that was banal and cruel and coarse and magnificent.

Oh, by all things diabolic and all things angelic, thought Merrili, how lovely she is! How completely miraculous! Nothing had prepared him for the sight of a human abandoning itself to sensation. Merrili was suddenly certain that every delight he had ever experienced was a frivolous, shallow thing in comparison to this human animal version of joy. He was thrilled and shocked to the very core of his ethereal being.

Princess Delia's eastern, western, flamenco-belly dance ended abruptly. It seemed that someone had flicked the off- switch on the light which had energised her. Merrili, for whom love and laughter was as natural as breathing is to a human being, felt his tender heart ache for the suddenly melancholy Princess.

She let herself down from the stage and moved back across the floor to the bar. The barman placed a complimentary vodka before her. She drank it down like medicine. Of course she noticed Merrili sitting nearby, for he was now as visible as the bottles on the shelf and the drinkers at their booths. She thought, Now, that is a seriously made-up person in intriguing fancy dress.

She could not gauge his gender, or whether he was ugly or beautiful, young or old, for humans cannot judge demons at all. Still, she found this odd aura of ambivalence rather compelling, a factor to distract a girl from her sad thoughts. And diversion was what she craved through dance, through drink, through lovemaking, through novelty. What else was there? She noticed that he had the longest nails, and that the nails were a very deep, dense matte black. The skin was absolutely white. The effect, she assumed, was heightened by Purgatory's lighting.

Then the apparition spoke: "You are so beautiful," he said, politely inclining his horns.

Delia, startled, shifted her stool back a few centimetres.

But the weirdo in fancy dress was determined to persist. "You are lovelier than an armoury of lightning rods. Your beauty is more radiant than all the fires of Vesuvius."

By her astonished expression, Merrili gathered that perhaps these were not the sort of words she was accustomed to hearing. He tried again. "Have one on me."

Delia was bemused, but she felt no threat. In fact, she had begun to notice a slight easing of her heart that even the dancing had been unable to induce. The relief was lovely. She even smiled.

"Thank you," she said, graciously offering Merrili a scintillating twinkle of her violet eye, and a glimpse of sweet little pearly teeth. She shook back her long, black hair and raised her tumbler. "Cheers!"

Merrili smiled and took a sip of his own drink.

"So," she said, "you are a demon, then, I suppose?"_

"I am."

"Horns and tail and all. Very traditional. I like that."

"Thank you. My name is Merrili."

"Row, row, row your - boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. You are a very cute and funny demon. Are you particularly wicked?"

"Wicked? What is that?" Merrili was rather taken aback. "I am merely a genius. I inspire the mind."

" _Do_ you? Oh, excellent. I could do with a little inspiration, to tell you the truth. Buy me another drink will you, Merrili- genius?"

And so Merrili and Princess Delia sat and talked through the night. She confided in him the reason for her unhappiness. She said she was almost at the end of her tether, and that men, in her estimation, were on the whole the most terribly unscrupulous bastards. Merrili agreed, having heard the same from his sister, Indiscretia, only that morning. And Delia told him of her lover, Bruno, who had left her that day to return to Brazil. Merrili had never heard of Brazil, but assumed it must be some other place in the animal world. So he told her of his life in the sky, which brought a smile to her lips. He described the occasional shifts he did with the angels, helping them carry messages between the dead and the living. This story made her flesh creep deliciously. And when, with a playful twinkle, he told her a tale or two of demonic trickstering, his favourite pastime, she laughed out loud. How charming he was! What a delightful sense of the absurd! Her eyes, which had been so grave, were now alive with lovely sparkling lights. Merrili did not mind being laughed at, not at all. For now he existed only to make her happy.

However, too soon, far too soon for Merrili, the sun began to rise. Thin-fingered dawn had already begun to insinuate herself through the shuttered windows of Purgatory. He had to excuse himself.

"But don't forget to come and see me again, little demon!"

"I will be back," he replied, taking care to leave by way of the door before reversing his father's syllables, clashing them together, and evaporating on the deserted pavement.

*

Back in the overarching heavens, Merrili found that he could think of nothing but beautiful Princess Delia. He took to spending an inordinate amount of time in the Observatory, which is the place from which demons who have come of age keep an eye on humans bumbling around in the world. So Merrili became an obsessive human-watcher, or more specifically, Delia-watcher. Delia's routines became his own. He watched her wake in the morning; he watched her eat her breakfast. He sent her his love, impregnated with special demon-joy, so that for the first time in a long while she savoured the bitterness of the coffee contrasting with the sweetness of the honey on her toast. He watched her lock up the big double doors to the warehouse where she lived, and clatter down the iron staircase to catch the bus that would carry her to her day job. He watched her at work, where she spent the day staring into a lighted box with little written characters moving across its screen. He sent more Merrili-lightness to her, so that her colleagues noticed her change of heart. Perhaps she is in love, they whispered to each other in the tea room.

She almost always went to the cinema on Tuesday nights. She had a standing date with friends. Merrili came to know her favourite performers and movie themes. After the movie the group would walk to a nearby bar or a cafe, where they would eat a light supper and enjoy a few drinks. He quite liked her friends, but worried that she drank so much. He also attended her yoga classes twice a week. He did not like her instructor, who seemed overly familiar when adjusting the limbs of his students to conform with the traditional yogic postures.

On Saturday mornings her warehouse became a dance studio. He loved to watch these classes. Whether awkward or proficient, Delia treated all of her students with respect; she was a kind, patient and devoted teacher. And the students themselves were also a wonder to behold. The disciplined way they learned to contend with that gravity deal filled him with admiration. Fate had loaded the dice against them, yet there they were, nobly aspiring to freedom from physical constraint. So brave, they were, to work against these devastating odds inflicted upon them by nature.

And he never missed her performances at Purgatory. It was there that she was most truly alive. The music energised her, touched her somewhere in her strange, human, being. Her dancing never failed to thrill the little demon. He also felt a strange desire to partake of whatever this animating force was that she experienced through dance. He longed to feel what she was feeling. He wanted more than her proximity. He wanted to _be__ her.

Each fortnight she engaged in a ritual which utterly mystified him. She would get into her little car and drive to a place he came to understand was called 'Airport'. She would park the car then go to sit in a plastic seat on the observation deck. Once there she would remain staring out of the huge plate-glass windows for an hour, or sometimes two, as the incoming and outgoing flights came and went, came and went. There seemed to be absolutely no point to the exercise, yet she performed it regularly, and each time, without fail, it would make her cry. Merrili was both saddened and perplexed.

One day, about six months after his first encounter with the Princess, he saw her set off on one of her airport excursions. On this particular day, for some reason, he felt unaccountably uncomfortable once she was inside the car-park. Perhaps it had been the sight of her, so small and vulnerable, driving right in under the great sign 'Terminal' which alerted him. (Demon thinking is surprisingly intuitive compared to that of most other immaterial life forms.) So he decided to expand his vision a little beyond the immediate vicinity of the object of his desire, for to be forewarned is to be forearmed. He checked out the broad concourses where people wandered to the tinkle-plink of electronic versions of Rolling Stones songs; he looked in on the waiting rooms and the bars, so unlike Purgatory, all faux-wood panelling and laminex for easy cleaning. He observed the sad and solitary patrons in the formica cafes moodily unpeeling their sandwiches from the plastic packaging. He watched the customs offices and runways and loading docks. Nothing was out of order, he was deciding, when a great roar rose up from the observation deck where his beloved was seated.

The roar was followed by a blinding light, and then all was a chaos of smoke and flame. At first Merrili thought, Oh, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. Princess Delia will be carried up to me on one of these delicious eddies of fire! But then he remembered that humans cannot bear the flames so beloved of the demon folk, that their mortal flesh dissolves in its embrace. And so Merrili, with a fine disregard for every demon rule that was ever written, leapt through a hole in the ether and plunged towards the earth.

His princess was lying, quite unconscious, amongst the debris created by the bomb blast. Of course nobody could discern a demon amongst the licking flames and boiling clouds of smoke, for these are the basic elements of which demons themselves are composed. Merrili lifted Delia in his arms and carried her away from the site of the disaster, to the other side of the airport and the safety of one of the great, cool aeroplane hangars. He laid her gently on a tarpaulin, and then looked around for somewhere to hide while he waited. At the back of the hangar was a small kitchen for the ground staff, complete with cooker, fridge, a calendar with a picture of a pretty woman called 'September', and a poster in red and black featuring an image of someone who could have been a member of Merrili's immediate family. He carefully arranged his elements in such a way that his formal aspects blended into this advertisement for _Mephisto_ , and composed himself to wait until someone came to find her.

Very soon a group of young men entered the hangar. A particularly handsome man with dark curly hair and pilot's insignia on his shirt ran forward to where the princess was lying. As he leaned over her, she opened her eyes and uttered a sob of joy.

"Bruno! What are you doing here? What am I doing here? Christ, have I died? Are you dead too? What ..."

"Hush, love," replied Bruno with great tenderness. "We are both very much alive. And you are very lucky."

Merrili did not mind that this Bruno received his princess's innocent gratitude. He was simply glad that she was safe. He stayed until the ambulance arrived to carry Delia away.

And so his love lived but without him. Merrili was now in some kind of hell. He spent even more time in the Observatory. He sent loving thoughts to Delia to hasten her recovery. He chatted encouragingly to her pot plants so that her apartment would be full of pretty blooms when she returned from the hospital. He watched over her each and every day.

He also began to broaden his understanding of the workings of the mortals' realm. Much of what he learnt frightened him, for humans, he found, were full of terrifying passions. But how marvellous this lust for life could be. When Merrili looked into those disorderly but fascinating minds, and watched the interplay of feeling and thought which occurred unconsciously but with such dramatic effect, he was quite envious. And he saw great wonders too, both natural and manufactured.

Now, at this point, you must remember that for a creature without materiality, such as a demon, the creation of things of substance is as mysterious and strange as demonic propensities would be to a mortal. The native inventiveness that is the hallmark of human creativity stunned him. Things – _objects_ \- amazed him, whether useful or decorative. Their metal tools and plastic artifacts, their formidable cathedrals of stone, their glittering cities of glass, the beautiful forms they carved from rock or painted on screens of canvas - all of this filled him with awe.

Merrili began to wonder how this was all possible? Why do they do it? How do they come to _think_ of doing it in the first place? It was beyond the reach of the cleverest kinds of demonry. He began to think of himself and his people as shallow tricksters, lacking depth, lacking lustre, and was filled with envy for these strange, living, breathing, _constructive_ beings. He asked himself, What is the stuff that fills them up and fuels this mysterious energy they have? What is it that makes them dance? Is it something to do with that thing that exists within the conjunction of matter and spirit that Indiscretia told him of? Is it soul? Is _this_ what soul brings? He even dared think that it might well be preferable to be human rather than demon, and soon this idea became a conviction.

In the meantime his siblings began to worry about him, for no longer was he the laughing, jesting baby brother they adored, but a disconsolate mooning thing. Eventually, Indiscretia could bear it no longer. "What ails you, Merrili?" she asked.

Now, the little demon badly needed a confidant, for he was a demon with an innate leaning towards open-hearted communication. So he told Indiscretia of his fascination with human beings in general, and his love for Princess Delia in particular.

"But, brother, you can't!" she exclaimed, horrified (which is just what Merrili had expected, and he cursed himself for a fool).

"But they are so vigorous and daring and very_ _very__ clever," he protested. "And their creations are so grand, and they last for years and years and years! Truly, they are a miraculous race!"

" _Pah_!" replied Indiscrepa. "Waste of energy. It all comes to dust in the end."

"Dust? Why? It seems to me that if they are not consumed by flames or suffocated by smoke, they must surely live forever!"

"Nonsense, they go out, just as we do up here in the sky. Only they call it 'dying'. And their lifetime is a fraction of ours. Demons live to be a thousand years old, whereas humans cark it after seventy of so. The whole human deal is awful, ridiculous even. I mean, it's like being born then having to fit everything into about five minutes before _zap_ _and _kaput_!" She clicked her fingers to illustrate the brevity of human life.

"Oh!" Merrili was aghast. "But that is horrible!" And privately he thought that perhaps it was the provisional nature of their life that compelled them to such feats of creativity.

"There are compensations," Indiscretia was saying, indiscreetly. "When we expire, it is the same as when a candle is snuffed out - there is a small_ _pfft__ and that's it \- we are no more. But the soul endures. Although after death there is no more living flesh, soul enters into the things of the world - a blade of grass, say; or a grain of salt, or into a bright ripple of light on water -and so life continues. That is how mortality works."

Merrili's face grew sad as he wondered why, by all things sacred and profane, demon-folk had not been granted immortal souls. It was terribly unfair. A freak of nature.

"How can I procure a soul for myself?"

"Merrili. It is as good as impossible. You must be loved by a human."

"But that is what I desire!"

"Baby brother," Indiscretia said in that slightly patronising tone that Merrili had always found annoying. "Human love is not so easily won. And the quality of the love you need must exceed that of father, mother, country, even of life itself! We're talking truest, deepest, most unselfish love. And believe me, for I've been watching them in action for longer than you, this kind of human love is hard to win. They want it, they need it, but they fuck it up every time! The human heart is fickle, a frail and unreliable thing. Where we mate for life, they are terribly promiscuous.

"In fact, you know what, Merrikins? When I think about it, it is humans who are the true tricksters, not us! They trick themselves. Always telling themselves, This is the one, this is the one for me. But it never is. We demons have a much happier time of it than people do. The world of matter is terribly disorderly. You would not like it, you would never understand it - how could you? Even material life forms themselves find their lives incomprehensible. Leave well enough alone, baby brother mine, and put all these thoughts from your mind. Accept what you are and be joyful!"

But Merrili could neither accept nor be joyful.

And so, he resolved to seek advice from the shaman who was known as Wherewithal the Wise, yet whom others called The Fool; ancient child and infant sage, embodiment of contradictions, Wherewithal would tell him what was to be done. Wherewithal would know how to go about winning a soul and the love of a human princess.

The shaman lived deep within The Wastes, a terrible place that existed in a part of the universe that was not of the air like the palaces of the demon folk; neither was it substantial like the world of matter where the humans lived. It was fluid place, where ectoplasmic ghouls and spectres, ghosts and wraiths moaned and clanked and wrung their knobbly hands in mourning. To find the shaman, Merrili made his way through the Sucking Bogs, where dreadful things grabbed at him with poisonous tentacles, trying to drag him into their foetid depths. On he went, braving the Briny Wakes of Loathe, the Tracts of Tumour, the Palls of Pox ... and on and on until, at last, he passed through the Gates of Gore and into the safe haven of Wherewithal.

The room was queasily illuminated by the livid glow from the dead men's cheeks with which the walls were padded. Merrili tried not to mind the decor too much, for he understood that as well as providing light, the resilient cheeks also protected the shaman's frail old body whenever he threw a visionary fit.

After he had grown accustomed to the sickly atmosphere, Merrili detected the shape of Wherewithal hanging from a filthy, tattered web in the corner, reading a magazine.

"Oh, goody!" called the shaman. "What a treat! A visitor! Greetings, little demon." He laid aside his journal and beckoned Merrili with outstretched pincers.

"Come closer, for although I possess the wisdom of ages, I am also rotten with years, and my eyes are not what they ought to be." Wherewithal grunted painfully as he shifted his numerous limbs, all arthritically twisted into a range of interesting shapes. "Ah me. I am old and wise ... and ill, bitter and cynical. Unlike your youthful demon self. You will never suffer pain, never want for any joy, never yearn over something that is beyond ..."

"Oh, but I_ _do_ , Shaman," and Merrili's eyes filled with tears.

This drew Wherewithal up short. A creature of the air crying like a mortal? How strange. The youngest, sweetest, one-time happiest demon had engaged his interest. Six of his eyes boggled and the seventh stared in silent appraisal of this extraordinary example of demonkind.

"What has possessed you, you anomaly you, that you should be overcome by emotion?"

"I have seen the realm of humans. And I would be part of it."_

Wherewithal cackled sarcastically. "Oh yeah?" He grinned, exposing his one remaining fang. "You desire mortality? You desire a _soul_ , by golly?"

"Yes. For I have witnessed the wonders of manifest creation. And I ... I have ..."

"You have _what_?"

"I have fallen in love."

"With a_ _mortal_? Hee hee! Now that's a _good_ _one! The best one in millennia, for my money!"

"Oh, Wherewithal. I want to hold her. I want to feel her living skin. I want to feel her warm human breath. I want to_ _be_ _her."

The shaman chuckled, a dry, papery crackle, like the sound a snake makes when shedding its skin. "And what would you do in order to love her, to be her love, to be _her_?"

"I would do anything."

"Well, well, well. Actually, there might be some little thing I can do for you." The shaman gangled down from his cobweb and feebled over to his work table. He rummaged around for a while amongst the phials and bottles.

"Now _where_ is it ... Here? Nope. There? Nah um, oh, there? Nope. Ah, _phut_ poopers ..." Finally he found what he was looking for. From within a pouch of finest phoenix skin he withdrew a small vial of dark glass. "Oh, yeah, baby, this is the stuff," he murbled in glee, holding the heavy, not quite opaque bottle up against the lairy glow of the most bruised of the wall-cheeks.

"Wh... what is that stuff, Wherewithal?"

"Mmm? Little demon, take heed. If you were to drink the contents of this bottle, your bright scales would fall away. _Poh_! like so. Your lovely little horns would shrink back into your skull. Your tail would vanish. And each time you were to take a step on your new, human feet, the place where your hooves once were would pain you. You would feel knives driving into your soles. This is what it takes for a demon to become a mortal."

"Give it to me. Give me the potion!" Merrili's eyes were fever-bright as he held out a shaking hand.

"There is no going back, you know, dearie. Once you have drunk this lot, which contains precious drops of my own rather nasty but very valuable blood, you can never return to your family."

"If I can be with her, I will not want to come back."

"And if your princess chooses to love another, then you will die. By the end of the day that she gives herself in matrimony to another man you will be breathing your last. Do you get it, baby boy?" Wherewithal smacked away Merrili's grasping little claw. " _Listen_ to me, dammit! If she chooses to love another, you will not attain an immortal soul like other humans. You are risking love and life a very long life!"

"I will take the chance. I must."

"Very well." But still the shaman held onto the bottle. Four of his eyes glinted craftily, two had a rather pathetically desperate cast and the other one held the little demon's gaze with chilling focus. He hissed through his mandibles:

"There is a fee, you know."

"Ask it. I will pay."

"Ooh, so decisive! Gee willikers, I'm impressed. Well. What I want is your most engaging personal attribute, my sweet. I want a touch of that demonic verve of yours, which is born of your delightful humour. A bit of life and laughter in my miserable retirement, by gum! Give me a little of that old trickster-joy gear, Merrili!"

"But," protested the little demon, "how will she love me if I lack charm?"

The shaman smiled a crooked smile. "You have charm to spare, and levity also. If you give me what I ask, doubtless you will feel a little heavier of spirit, but them's the breaks, fella. And, in time, she may come to love you for your devotion, for your patience, for the mystery of yourself." And in a harder voice he added: "Take it or leave it."

"I will give you what you ask, Shaman. It is yours."

"Then come closer, sweetling, that I may breathe in the essence of your power. Come, place your lovely lips upon my own ..."

Soon Merrili was making his way back through the Gates of Gore, the Palls of Pox, the Tracts of Tumour, into the Briny Wakes of Loathe, and out by way of the Sucking Bogs. His spirit was heavy, for not only had he sacrificed his native lightness of spirit, but he might never again see his beloved family. For the first time, Merrili knew what it was to feel depressed. Yet there was hope in his heart, for soon he would be with the Princess Delia. He told himself that she would come to love him in return, and he would gain that brilliant, evanescent thing, a human soul.

*

Archie Typhus and the Jungians were playing in Purgatory. Merrili disguised his arrival in a puff of smoke. He sat at the bar and ordered a bloody mary. He drank it down quickly, then retired to the men's room so that he could drink the shaman's potion in privacy. But the men's room was full of men. He left and went in search of a place where he could be alone. In the basement he found a little room full of bags of dirty white uniforms and linen, and machines that whirred and hummed beneath dripping pipes. The room was small, uncomfortably warm, but private. He sat upon an inverted basket of straw and quickly drank down the contents of the bottle. It stung his throat and made his eyes water, for it was very harsh. But as the bitter liquor coursed through his veins, the pain he felt was exquisite, for he knew that it was his means to true love and an immortal soul. His scales dropped away, his tail and horns vanished, his delicate, pointed hooves were replaced by those awkward plates of flesh that humans call feet. Merrili blacked out.

When he came to, the first thing he saw was the face of his beloved princess. She was squatting by his side, holding his two hands in her own and rubbing them vigorously. He watched gratefully as she fetched a glass of water from the sink and brought it to him, inviting him to drink.

"You don't smell pissed,' she said. "Neither do you look like a junkie. Besides, you haven't got the gear for it. But what on earth are you doing here in the laundry?"

Merrili had no idea what she was talking about, and while he was still racking his brains for a reasonable answer, she continued, "Did someone attack you? Were you mugged?"

"Mugged?" he answered, but Delia did not hear the question mark in his voice.

"Oh, you poor bugger. Did they take everything? Looks like it. Oh dear. Well, you obviously can't stay here. Look, I'll call you a cab. Where do you live?"

But Merrili had no home, so he could only look sadly at his feet, which he noticed were naked, as was the rest of him, except for a sheet that the dear princess must have wrapped around his body while he was still unconscious.

She helped him to his feet, for he was still rather shaky. He took a step ... and as Wherewithal had warned, the pain was terrible. He cried out against it and, as he did, vowed never to show such weakness again.

"God, kiddo! Naked and unconscious in the laundry, and what have they done to your feet? I can hardly turn you out onto the street alone." She paused thoughtfully, drawing her brows together. "You'll just have to come home with me. But just don't go getting any ideas, okay?"

*

And so it came to pass that Merrili the ex-demon was installed in Delia's warehouse. In the morning she asked him a lot more questions, fundamental things like address, age, occupation Merrili supposed it must be simple enough stuff but he could not answer. Delia decided that he was suffering from a condition she called amnesia, brought on by the shock of the attack. As this seemed to do as an explanation, Merrili left it at that. In his confusion during her interrogation, he even mispronounced his own name, so that from that time on, to Delia he was "Mel". There was little magic in that syllable, Merrili felt, but it would do.

Delia helped him to find work. On week nights he washed dishes in Purgatory's kitchen, and on Saturdays he helped behind the bar at happy hour. This was a great trial for him, for to be on his feet all evening was excruciating. But he hid his pain. He smiled and laughed with the customers. Everybody took to Merrili, for although he no longer possessed demonic levels of charm, he still had more than enough left over to make him a very socially adept human. As well as this, he was incredibly lovely to look at, by mortal standards. His dark lashes framed eyes that in some lights were a lively warm lustrous golden brown, and in others, amber, like a cat's. His lips were ruddy and plump and curved like Cupid's. His cheekbones were high and prominent, lending a certain dignified austerity to a face that otherwise might have been just a little too pretty. He was tall, but light and wiry with beautifully contoured muscles that were the envy of all the men who met him, and caused the women to want to touch him. All women except Delia herself.

Yes, they all fancied funny, handsome, mysterious Mel, Delia's amnesiac foundling - even those who already had men of their own. Merrili remembered the words of his sister. The human heart is a frail and unreliable thing.

They shared the housework, the shopping and the cooking, and after a month or so the new household of two was well established. Delia and Merrili became inseparable friends. It was only sometimes, at night, after he had done his shift at Purgatory and Delia had done her dance, that he became sad.

She would be curled up on the sofa with a book. He would sit as near to her as he could without causing her alarm, pretending to watch a late-night movie. He might reach out and hold her hand for a moment, and she would smile up at him. And he would ask the unaskable with his eyes, and she would reply with her own: You are my dear, beautiful, irreplaceable friend. How lucky I am to have found you. And then, perhaps if they had shared a glass of the sweet wine she liked to drink before going to bed, she might confide in him how badly she missed her lover, Bruno, whose home was on the other side of the world.

What kind of creatures are these, wondered Merrili, who would let mere geography stand in the way of what they thought of as true love? Still, aloud he sympathised, while inwardly cursing the Brazilian bastard to hell.

She told him how Bruno had found her and saved her that time at the airport, when there had been a terrorist bomb explosion. She had not even known Bruno was there that day. Then suddenly, there he was, a vision of splendour, brave Bruno rushing into that holocaust of fire and smoke. She would certainly have died, she told Merrili, had he not come. Merrili had to nod sadly, and agree, that yes, Bruno was certainly the best and bravest of men.

And since then, she told him, she and beautiful Bruno had re-established communication. They wrote each other funny letters - she showed Merrili one or two. He did not understand Bruno's humour. They often phoned each other and were in regular email contact. He was sweet and good, and she need only be patient. "One day," he had said to her, "we will work out a way to be together." And poor Merrili had to say, "Oh, how wonderful."

Delia took Merrili to parties and picnics and concerts and restaurants. He was sure that with time and patience she would come to see that he could be so much more than just a friend; that he was meant to be her lover, her warm, sweet, human lover who had sacrificed his home and the family he adored on the altar of his desire for her, and his desire to be like her, human and ensouled. A candidate for eternity.

Merrili knew that his hopes were not in vain. He knew that her love for Bruno was an illusory thing. He, Merrili, the ethereal being who had transformed himself from air and light to warmth and substance for her sake; he, Merrili, was the one who was meant for her. Did she not laugh and joke and play when she was with him? He knew that he made her happy. And whenever she spoke of Bruno, though her eyes were bright, her voice was full of anxiety. Yes, Merrili was convinced that it all just a matter of time.

And perhaps he was right. The problem was, he did not have that time. For one morning, when they were on their way out to meet up with a party of Delia's friends, another one of those envelopes with a Brazilian postmark was slipped through the letterbox. Delia snatched it up greedily and read it there and then, once to herself, then aloud to Merrili so that he could share in her joy.

The following week Bruno arrived. He moved into Delia's warehouse, into her room. He had taken a break from his work, and he had decided to spend it with his "little honeyeater". How this and other endearments tore at Merrili's heart! And now, instead of the two of them, there were three. That is, on good days, for much of the time, particularly in the evenings, Delia and Bruno would go out alone. Merrili would hear them returning after midnight, sometimes laughing, sometimes murmuring phrases he could not catch. At these times both voices were soft and very tender. They would retire to Delia's alcove at the other end of the warehouse, and Merrili would pull the blankets up over his ears to drown out the sound of their lovemaking.

A week later Bruno was gone, but Delia did not mind this too much. She had her assurance. She had her airline ticket. She had only to organise her affairs in her home town, which would take no more than a month, and then she would join Bruno in Brazil.

"You see," she explained to Merrili, her eyes glowing with excitement, "we have it all worked out! And guess what ? I want you to be my best man. Oh, I know women don't have best men, but for you we can surely make an exception. Bruno won't mind; he is the most kind and generous of men!"

Merrili agreed, yes, Bruno was kind and generous. "Oh, Mellie Mel Melon! Don't look so put out, you mustn't worry for me! Some marriages _do_ work, you know. I've already looked over the pre-nuptial agreement - he's worked everything out in advance."

Her eyes were shining like those of a religious convert. Merrili had seen such people handing out books on the street. He had talked to them on more than one occasion, strange and fascinating creatures they had seemed. They all professed an absolute confidence in their convictions, but Merrili knew that behind this vigorous proselytising dwelt fear and uncertainty, else why would such people - and his Delia was one of them now - have to protest so much? He feared for her, indeed he did.

"In any case," she was saying, "we _will_ have to make it legal, otherwise how would I get a work permit in Brazil? Mel - you must come too! You will, won't you? Say yes!" Merrili said yes.

"Oh, Mellie! This is so completely and utterly flawlessly excellent I think I might explode!"

That evening, after they had eaten, Merrili was feeling sad and hopeless. He went to bed early but he could not sleep. Instead he listened to her moving about the warehouse, going through her papers, her clothes, sorting out the useful from the useless in preparation for her big trip. After a while he heard her pour herself a glass of sticky wine, and go to the telephone. Soon she was talking to one of her friends.

"... So you think I'm silly to leave everything to join this man in a foreign place."

There was a slight quaver in her voice._"... Well, a_ _few_ misgivings maybe, but nothing that means ..."

"Oh look, I know, I know. Sure it worries me, I know it's hard enough for relationships to work out even under the easiest circumstances, and Bruno and I will have the usual problems, plus the language, cultural differences ... Oh, plenty ... Oh, god ..."

Merrili was frightened for her, but at the same time hope rose in his heart. But then she said, "What? Oh, yeah ..." Merrili could hear a little smile in her voice now. "... Oh, Mel - he'd be perfect. But I don't feel that way about him, simple as that. I mean, what can you do about that chemistry thing?"

A short while later he lost track of the conversation, for his heart was shrinking and shrinking. Soon there was nothing left but a cold, cavernous emptiness. How could so small a being as himself contain so much absence, he wondered, an aching nothingness wider than the Earth, broader than the sky where he had once lived in that castle of cumulus, with his father, his sisters, his brothers ...?

By the time he was capable of hearing again, Delia was saying, "You're right. I'm an idiot. It is perfectly obvious, isn't it? I've got no choice anyway. I love him. It's quite simple. Anyway, what's to stop us spending six months of the year in Brazil, and the other half of the year here? It'll work out, I know it will. I don't mind compromising, and Bruno is a man capable of great sacrifice!"

If only I could tell you what sacrifice meant, thought Merrili, you sweet, ignorant human. You irresponsible child. You foolish darling of my heart. And as he said this to himself, he felt that heart of his coming apart at the seams. If I still had my demon charm, you would not see this Bruno for my radiance. He would be a pallid thing, as bright as a heap of dead ash, as scintillating as wood. But there is nothing to be done. You have always seen me as a pretty friend, someone to play with while you waited for the real thing. While you waited for Bruno.

After Delia had gone to bed, Merrili rose from the twisted sheets. He went out the fire escape and climbed up to the roof. "And all that she said to her friend on the phone is right," he said aloud. "I am not the man Bruno is. I am not a man at all, and now I never can be. I will never have her love, and soon, very soon, I will die. And when I die it will be as though I never existed, for I have not earned myself a soul."

A cloud passed over the face of the moon, a great cloud whose edges glowed like molten steel. And obscured from mortal eyes from within this gloomy camouflage, he could just make out the stricken faces of his brothers and sisters: Bushel and Nick, Beatrice, Discretia and Indiscretia. They gazed down upon him in appalled sadness. "Oh, Merrili," they sighed together. "What you have done cannot be undone, and we are so very sad and so sorry. Oh, baby brother, there is no help for you at all ..." And their tears bathed the city in warm rain, and their grief was heard in the wind, and then they were gone, leaving Merrili to weep alone on the roof above the great city in the dark night.

On the departure date, Merrili and Delia took a taxi to the airport. She did not notice his melancholy, for she could only look ahead. The sad boy who sat next to her on the flight to South America was part of the present, and the present was simply something to be endured while her heart looked forward in joyful anticipation of her glorious future.

As far as Merrili could tell, the city they came to was a city like the one they had just left. It was bigger, and louder, and there were certainly more people, but it was just another town. Merrili wondered what it was that had so captivated him about the mortal world and the works of humankind, for nothing moved him now.

The band played beneath a magnificent canopy of red and gold and blue. There were dancers too, people of different colours wearing golden tunics and silver sandals, their hair set about with brilliant little birds and every kind of jewel. But none were so lovely as the dancing girl, Princess Delia, on the night he had first fallen in love with her, or on this day, the day of her wedding. Her mass of black hair was arranged in two cones, like a mediaeval lady. She was wearing a high-waisted dress of creamy lace, with long, close-fitting sleeves. She carried a bouquet of violets that matched her eyes, whose edges she had outlined in deep, dark blue. How those eyes of hers sparkled when she gazed into Bruno's face. Merrili now understood how futile his quest had been, for never, not once, had her face glowed with such happiness when she had looked upon him.

The priest mouthed the words that would symbolically join this couple together forever. Delia and Bruno signed the contract. Merrili knew that his life was over.

He left the wedding party and walked away into the darkening city. He gazed up into the blank, moonless night, then down to where, far below, the human traffic played and loved and hated and hoped and played some more. Soon, too soon, they would be consumed by the very passions that gave them life.

"Merrili, Merrili, look up! We are here!" Merrili looked up into the sky. The clouds parted and there, once more, were the faces of his brothers and sisters. "We have been to see Wherewithal," they called, "and he has given us the means by which to return to you your demon being!"

At first Merrili's spirits rose, but then he remembered from bitter experience that Wherewithal would not give anything away for free. "And what must I give in payment for this second lease on life?"

Her life for yours, Merrili!" cried Nick. "Here!"

From the sky there fell a little key. "This is the key to the bridal suite. You will need it," said Nick. "And also, this ..."

Merrili noticed a faint glow before him, a glow which gained in brightness as he watched. The light formed itself into the shape of a little knife. And now Beatrice's sweet voice rang out above the others: "Take this blade, Merrili!" And when he hesitated, they cried out in one voice: " _Please_! Take it!"

Merrili snatched the knife from the air. He felt its cool weight in his palm.

Then Beatrice was speaking again: "Before first light plunge it into the breast of she who has caused you and us all this grief! Her blood will fall upon you, and you will become again what you were. Her dying breath will waft over you and carry you back to us. You will be Merrili the trickster again, our little brother, our joy!"

"Her life is no great thing, Merrili," said Indiscretia, "for, after all, mortal existence is brief, no matter what. And then her soul will endure for all eternity. But for you, one life is all there is! Think on it, and you will see that you must do as we say!"

Mortal existence is brief, repeated Merrili to himself, as the great cloud rolled away, leaving him alone with the moon, the key and the dagger.

After a long time he made his way to the place where his princess and her groom were sleeping. He pressed his ear to the door, but there were no voices, there was no sound at all. He inserted the key in the lock and turned it very gently. He entered the room, and there, amongst disordered sheets and blankets, lay Delia and her husband. Her head lay on his shoulder, and strands of her fine, black hair made a delicate filigree pattern over his chest. Merrili reached over her to touch, ever so softly, a strand of this precious soft hair. "Already dead," he whispered under his breath. "Even as you live, your skin, your nails, your hair, all are dying on your body. You look so sweet and fresh, but already you are in a state of mortal decay."

Merrili's mind and body felt completely numb except for a single centre of sensation - the pain in his heart. The knife was light in his hand. He raised it above Delia's soft, unconscious body.

Bruno murmured softly in his sleep and curved his arm around her shoulder. His hand cradled one small, pink-tipped breast. A pale blue vein pulsed at her temple, full of miraculous life-giving animal blood. Blood to sustain her fragile mortal heart. "Sweet, fickle, human heart, _my_ heart ..."

Merrili dropped the knife to the carpet, but stayed a moment longer to listen to the peaceful sound of their breath rising and falling together. Then he crept away and out into the grey dawn, which was already softening the black edges of the night. He knew that soon he would be gazing upon the last sunrise he would ever see. And as he thought this thought he felt the first deathly breath of dawn upon his brow. The touch was gentle. It did not hurt him at all. He felt his body as a fragile mass of loosely woven fibres which were softly, but very surely, unravelling. Softly and surely Merrili's flesh and the bones of his body were dissolving.

His brothers and sisters felt a light go out in their world when Merrili died, and the heavens became dark and the rain that was their tears fell upon the earth. When Merrili died, the shaman felt the flame that had invested him with new vigour flicker and depart. His husk of a body hung in its tattered web as it had done before, and he cursed the stubbornness of the little demon, he cursed the waste. But when Merrili died, the energy that was his being did not dissolve into nothingness. It had go somewhere. Merrili was no longer a thing of flesh in human form, nor was he the entity of spirit-matter that he had been. He was something in between the two, something for which there is no name. Yet this nameless, weightless thing, this almost-nothing, was something, for nothing that ever existed in any world can ever truly cease to be.

Somewhere in a large Brazilian town the day dawned clear and bright upon an empty, rain-wet street. The source of brightness that had once been Merrili attached itself to a beam of light that, after a little time, penetrated the drawn curtains of the room where Delia and Bruno slept. The lovers lay within a cocoon of warmth and light.When Merrili died, Delia and Bruno awoke to a transformed world where there was no more uncertainty, no more anxiety about the future. When Delia looked into her lover's face, she knew that any fear, any last nagging residue of doubt had vanished.

At last, as a being lighter than light itself, Merrili had found his way into his princess's heart. At last Merrili _was_ his own love. And he stayed there, at the centre of her mortal being, investing every day of the life she lived with her husband with the purest joy, the most constant love that it is possible for an unreliable human heart to feel.

First published by HarperCollins Publishers

**Background to the story** _The Little Demon_

_The Little Demon_ is a homage to Hans Christian Andersen, a writer I loved as a child. Also I wanted to do a version of his _The Little Mermaid_ because certain others had refused the fundamentally tragic nature of the story, possibly out of fear of upsetting or frightening young readers. While I don't hold with gratuitously distressing children, softening the blow of the mermaid's fate I feel does undermine the spirit of the tale.

Having said that, I should point out that in any case, unlike the original, _The Little Demon_ is not written for children. It is just a fantastical story based in consensual, contemporary reality, for adults with a penchant for romantic tragedy.

Louise Katz has written novels, short stories and articles, and is the recipient of two Aurealis Awards for speculative fiction. Louise works at the University of Sydney as a writing teacher and is currently working on a fourth novel.
The Final Christmas

by Bem Le Hunte

August 14, 1947

" _Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge...At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom..._

" _The appointed day has come – the day appointed by destiny – and India stands forth again, after long slumber and struggle – awake, vital, free and independent. The past clings on to us still in some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so often taken. Yet the turning-point is past, and history begins anew for us, the history which we shall live and act and others will write about..."_

Even though Tulsi Devi had turned the wireless down to no more than a light crackle, the words spoken by the nation's new ruler amplified in that room with the sheer nobility and passion of their message. Tears landed on her sari as she tried to picture Pandit Nehru speaking to the Indian Constituent Assembly, giving hope to the millions who sat outside under an August moon and looked up to see freedom in the stars beyond.

For a moment there was no fighting. Everything in the past was history, and everything in the future was a new land, awaiting its first pioneers. The bloodshed had been forgotten. The only thing worth remembering now were the heroes who had brought the country to this moment in time. Independence.

It felt like a moment cleaved from time. The British had finally gone. Yet there was nobody there with her to share this elation. Her seven-year-old daughter was fast asleep, because she had no stamina to stay awake until midnight, and her husband was asleep early, because he had no interest. For him midnight was simply the clock ticking over with the slow certainty that the country would soon be overrun by power-hungry politicians of its own making. As the nation experienced the exhilaration of freedom, Tulsi Devi remembered that she was the wife of a Colonel who had served in the British army, and as such could not lay claim to any of India's newfound pride.

She thought for a moment if the Colonel's ominous predictions could be fulfilled. What would their lives be like after the British? What would the next day be like and the day after that?

December 1946

Tulsi Devi had been meaning to say goodbye to Lily, the governess from her childhood, for many weeks. Photographs kept appearing in _The Statesman_ showing the British packing up and boarding boats and trains. One week there was a photograph of an Englishwoman being carried onto a boat in a palanquin. The next week there was a photograph in _The Statesman_ of a servant touching his English master's feet goodbye. Was it already too late to say goodbye to Lily and Roy? The longer she left her visit to their house, the more concerned she became that she would be met with its new inhabitants.

Finally, when Tulsi Devi and the Colonel did go to say goodbye, Lily's house was in boxes and her mind was already in England. Seeing this, the Colonel said:

"Where do you intend to spend Christmas this year, if I may ask?"

Where had he even imagined such a question? It had arrived like a bullet from a renegade soldier, catching Tulsi Devi off guard, because she knew him well enough to know what would follow.

"We have no plans this Christmas. It's a bit difficult, because we're all packed up to leave."

"Well then we would be most happy to be your hosts on Christmas Day if you will allow us the honour," he continued.

Lily agreed, seemingly delighted. "But please do not go to any trouble," she insisted, without fully knowing the troubles that erupted in the wake of her words."Christmas?" Tulsi Devi had said later to her husband, waving her arms around, pointing to the ornaments and paintings that had never once seen a Christmas celebrated in the Sundernagar house. "Christmas?" she repeated, as a question that could never have any answers. "What all are we going to give them for Christmas? What to celebrate? What are we going to cook?"

"Turkey," the Colonel answered confidently. "The English like to eat turkey for Christmas. Or sometimes goose, or sometimes swan."

"And where, if you please, are we going to find these birds? And who is going to cook them? Dhruv has never cooked meat in his life?"

"Then I will cook it," came the Colonel's reply. "And if I cook it, I will insist that we all eat it."

"I will not touch it," Tulsi Devi replied, for the first time in her life refusing one of her husband's military-style orders.

"And you will insult your guests? You will feed them food that you would not eat yourself. For God's sake woman, you will show some damned respect, if not for me, then for this Lily person."

Christmas Day came closer and the Colonel visited the Officer's Mess to try and order turkey. There was none to be found there, and so he started making inquiries through his contacts in Himachal Pradesh. Surely there was a turkey lurking somewhere, waiting for a high price before it lay its head down on the chopping block? Surely some peasant had been producing these damned creatures for the British to consume every year? He asked everyone, except, of course, Lily and Roy. Let them just come along on the day and see how he summoned the spirit of Christmas just like they did at the British Club.

The celebration of Christmas required a lot more than just a turkey. The next problem was the cutting of a Christmas tree. He would have gone north with an axe himself, except that the country was plagued with riots and civil unrest. "Wait and see," he told Tulsi Devi, "after they've gone there'll be nobody to control the rascals. They'll give Jinnah his Pakistan and we'll fear for our lives every time we step out of the house."

With the land in turmoil there was nothing for it but to pay a handsome bribe – on this occasion to a bearer at the Officer's Mess. "Take two days off work," he told the man. "Bring me a tree with spikes down from the hills. And while you're there, do one thing for me. Try and buy a turkey from some farmer."

The singing of Christmas carols was another problem. Nobody knew any, not even the Colonel.

"Didn't they teach you Christmas carols in the army?" Tulsi Devi asked.

"Do you think that the army was some kind of party?" he replied. "Who cares about singing? It's not a child's gathering. Let them sing some for us if they must."

Their daughter, Rohini, was the only person who expressed an interest in learning carols. "Papa, I will arrange a choir," she told the Colonel. "We'll have a party and all of us will learn a carol to sing to the English people."

So a party was organised and five seven-year-olds were taught to sing _Silent Night,_ by a colleague of the Colonel's who had served in a military band. "It's just like the story of Krishna," he told the children, whose mouths opened wide when they sang those unfamiliar words. "Just pretend you're singing the baby Krishna to sleep."

In spite of the difficulties, the Colonel was determined to make that Christmas his own personal farewell to the country he had served, as if the British had been his guests, and his alone, over the past two hundred years.

After plans for this farewell were in place, the Colonel decided that he would just have to relax, wait, and see how everything turned out. _It's just a party_ , he kept reminding himself. _They have been guests of Tulsi Devi's family for so long, they must know how we people are._ When Tulsi Devi offered help, the Colonel refused, saying: "I will manage everything. Your job is to enjoy Christmas."

Come Christmas Day, Roy, Lily and their daughter Juliet arrived punctually at noon. They had Christmas presents for everyone. Rohini was given a baby doll that drank from a bottle and wet her nappies – a doll that was so coveted it had to spend many nights away from home, wetting its nappies in strange beds all over Delhi. Next, Tulsi Devi was given a huge box of household ornaments that Lily and Roy had decided to leave in India, and the Colonel was given a small flame tree.

"I wanted to give you something that'll stay alive and remind you of us for many years to come," Roy said.

"There are so many things the British have given us to remember them by," said the Colonel, shaking hands with Roy. "Your gift is most kind and we will give it pride of place." All the time he was wondering how he could have overseen this exchange of gifts. He felt stupid and humbled by his lack of generosity and started to think about what they might be able to produce at the last moment as a Christmas present from their side. Unable to imagine anything suitably worthy, he decided upon a simple distraction tactic. "Have you seen our Christmas tree?" he asked.

"That's the most enterprising Christmas tree I've ever seen," came Roy's reply.

"What does enterprising mean?" Rohini asked.

"It means 'very pretty', Tulsi Devi quickly whispered. Even she knew that it wasn't a real Christmas tree – more like some dying branches hacked from a fallen Himalayan pine. She'd heard her husband shout abuse at the man at the gate who delivered that tree and the turkey the previous day.

Christmas lunch was served by Dhruv and another two chefs from the British Club who had been hired for the occasion.

"What an incredible spread of food!" Lily remarked. "Absolutely grand effort," Roy added, and the two families tucked into the food whilst the servants watched, hungry for the Indian food they had cooked separately for themselves.

Tulsi Devi and Rohini discreetly took small pieces of the turkey and placed them under some roast potatoes on their plates. The Colonel braved the bird and took an extra large portion to compensate. As they tucked into the English food, Roy said, "we're going to miss India. Really. It's been such a privilege to work here."

"But aren't you excited to be going home?" Tulsi Devi asked.

"It's not my home yet," their young daughter Juliet said. "I've never been to England."

"She's in for a shock," added Lily. "There'll be no maidservants over there to clean up, no cooks, no nothing. Juliet will have to learn some independence."

"We're all going to have to learn about independence," the Colonel added sagely. "And we're going to have to learn that it comes at a price."

There was an uncomfortable silence before the Colonel continued. "If they divide India and give Jinnah his Pakistan there will be bloodshed like this country has never seen before."

"They won't divide India," Tulsi Devi interrupted, mostly through politeness to their guests. Yet she knew as well as the Colonel that it was only a question of time before some doddery English hand drew a line that would separate India from herself: create Pakistan and create huge upheaval in the process.

"It's going to happen," Roy spoke, quietly. "It's been decided. But God only knows where the division will be."

There was a knock at the door to break the awkwardness of their political discussions. Dhruv left the table and came back with a group of five giggling girls.

"The children are going to sing _Silent Night_ , announced the Colonel, back in his festive spirit as the commander of events. "Come _betis_ , sing for us."

Silence.

"Come along now. Sing it for the nice people."

"They're shy," Juliet said.

"This is why it's called _Silent Night_ , I guess," Roy laughed.

"You must sing now children, come on."

Lily started them off, Rohini joined in, and then all the children started singing self-consciously about heavenly peace and the night that a holy infant was born, not in India, not in England, but in some place that none of the children had heard of.

March 1947

" _It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East. A new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed..._

" _We think of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come. They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we shall be sharers in their good or ill fortune alike..._

" _To the nations and peoples of the world we send greetings and pledge ourselves to cooperate with them in furthering peace, freedom and democracy. And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and bind ourselves afresh to her service. JAI HIND!_

The Colonel turned the radio off. "Can't they stop replaying that speech of his? Nothing has improved since this Independence business. As peace-loving citizens we should beg the English to return and restore some order to this place."

Tulsi Devi continued eating her paranthas at the breakfast table. "It will settle down. It has to. How long can people carry on killing each other? Muslims against Hindus. Everybody against everybody else."

"As long as people are leaving their homes and losing the people they love they will retaliate."

Tulsi Devi couldn't eat with her husband brewing up for an argument, and so she picked up the paper and pretended to read. Her eyes were tired from being woken too early by the morning _call to prayer_ that floated out from behind the walls of the Old Fort where Muslims were temporarily being given refuge and protection. The wailing submission to divine forces had been so heart-piercing, so haunting, that she couldn't help but pity the Muslims who survived beyond those walls, refugees in their own city.

Her tired eyes rested on _The Statesman_ headlines. More killings, more unrest, more fear, more hatred. The Colonel, not wanting to discard his argument, stood behind her and looked over her shoulder, pointing to the pages of the newspaper. "See what I mean? This fighting is relentless."

"It's the fault of your beloved British," Tulsi Devi responded with unusual pluck. "This business of a divided India was their idea. It was their good-bye present to us."

"And what good-bye present did we give in return?" asked the Colonel, and both of them, without saying a thing, remembered Christmas Day and their inability to reciprocate the generosity of Lily and Roy.

"Look here," Tulsi Devi said, pointing to a picture in the paper. An Englishman was standing next to a gangplank in Bombay with a coolie holding a peacock, its legs tied together for the journey. "This was a goodbye gift from a distinguished Indian to his English colleague."

The Colonel looked at the picture closely and once more he thought about Christmas Day. He thought about the bearer who arrived the evening before with a bird of around the same proportions, diligently plucked so that it resembled a turkey in every way except for a few electric blue feathers on its neck.

Who knows what Lily and Roy would have thought if they'd known what they'd been offered to eat for their final Christmas in India? What would they have said or done? _One good thing about Independence_ , the Colonel thought, _is that nobody will ever have to find out._

The Final Christmas was first published by HarperCollins Publishers

**Background to the story** _The Final Christmas_

I wrote _The Final Christmas_ as a literary accompaniment to a novel I published in 2000, _The Seduction of Silence_ , a story of five generations of an Indian family. A spiritual and emotional journey that traversed 100 years, three continents, this life and the next, _The Seduction of Silence_ flourished with untold stories that couldn't fit between the jacket sleeves produced by HarperCollins and Penguin, my publishers. The abundance of excess narrative somehow demanded recording. _The Final Christmas_ is just one of the stories that evolved out of my novel: it tells of how the British finally left India, having stayed as uninvited guests for over 200 years.

In _The Seduction of Silence_ every character had a complex relationship with the British, and so in _The Final Christmas_ , each of them translates Nehru's triumphant 'Freedom at Midnight' speech to fit their individual ideologies. I hope you enjoy this short story, and if you do, I'd love to hear what you think of this and _The Seduction of Silence,_ should you be willing to share your response at www.bemlehunte.com. Happy reading and thank you so much for sharing these stories with me!

**Praise for** _The Seduction of Silence_

" _The Seduction of Silence_ is a work of persuasive imagination, of such scope, power and narrative charm that it does make you wonder, as with Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry and others, whether all good modern writing has an essential connection with the Indian sub-continent."

Thomas Keneally, Booker Prize winning author of _Schindler's List_

"A splendidly conceived saga weaving the history of an entire culture into the portrait of one family: vivid, compelling, utterly fascinating."

Kirkus Review, US.

"Passion, grief and glory infuse this novel, which is at once wholly original and yet squarely in the tradition of the great family sagas. In prose as vivid and arresting as a marigold, Le Hunte gives us five generations of seekers. Her account of what they find and what they lose is irresistible. I couldn't put it down."

Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of _March_

"This intricate tale moves across continents and time as it maps the reaches of the soul. Is Le Hunte an Anglo-Indian Allende? Or even a female Rushdie? You decide in a very worthwhile read."

Helen Elliott, Vogue.

To buy a copy of _The Seduction of Silence_ please visit www.bemlehunte.com.

Biography

Bem Le Hunte is Indian by birthright, British by descent and Australian by choice. She is the author of several short stories and three novels. _The Seduction of Silence_ and _There, Where the Pepper Grows_ have been published internationally to critical acclaim by HarperCollins and Penguin, and _Father of all Stories_ (publication pending) forms part of a recent doctoral submission at the University of Sydney. It should soon be the inaugural e-published novel of The Royalties.
Conversation in the Desert

by Sue Woolfe

She only knew the desert in her country from postcards she'd send overseas to friends, when she wanted to seem interesting and exotic.

This is my country, she'd write.

As she belonged to the desert, as if she knew what belonging meant.

She was a child of migrants who'd settled here at various stages over a century, sheltering from who knows what deeds done against them. They'd been too traumatized to tell. But she'd only lived in the Europeanised, Americanised cities on the coastal rim, crammed with new settlers. She longed to be with people who deeply belong here, and had forever, so that something of what they are might help her belong more. Might help her come home.

One day the longing was too great to bear. It happened that she had a childhood friend who'd become a nurse for a tribe in the desert, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest town. In her twice a year e mails, Pat would apologise for being so seldom in touch; she was just too busy. Once she explained that she'd given up on her family and they'd given up on her, she survived on Timtam biscuits from the bush store and wore the same clothes all week.

Frances told her friend she was coming to look after her.

What language do they speak there? she wrote.

Some weeks later a tape arrived in the mail, with no accompanying letter, just a note scribbled on the back of a torn envelope saying that the language on the tape wasn't quite the right language because it hadn't been written down yet, but this was more or less the same. Frances listened to the tape every night, surprised that in a desert where surely everything was just sand hill after sand hill, the people had evolved such a complicated way to speak. But she wasn't daunted. Then she took three months off work, bought a second hand land rover and drove for ten days. She was like a woman possessed.

She knew she'd reached the desert when the ground turned from black to the colour of sunsets, blushes, apricots. She left the tarred roads behind, often stopping to consult a map, often lost. There was never any one to ask. Behind her, dust rose like smoke. She camped at nights, lighting fires and heating cans of food. At first she was frightened of the heat, axe-murderers, dingoes, snakes, spiders, anything. She'd never been a brave woman, but she was in love with her mission. In early light the dust was mauve, the mulga trees were olive, the mountains were emerald green. By mid-morning the ground was red, the mountains Prussian blue. As she drove, yellow light moulded mountain ranges into hundreds of smaller hills, sometimes with gold outcrops that in another country from a distance she'd glimpse and think, Aha! A castle! But here there were no castles, no buildings, no sign that humans existed. Or were there? The thought crossed her mind that the people she was soon to talk to might be able to see such signs. Once she stopped for a break at a dried-up clay pan, with thousands, probably millions of small, almost perfectly formed hexagonal clay clumps like pieces of a giant board game. She'd pick one up and beneath it would be another, and another, all the same shape. She crouched alone in a space so vast and still that even a breeze seemed a dramatic act. After a while, she was ready to believe, like Pythagoras, that the purity of line of a geometric shape represents something fundamental and as yet unknown about the universe. Above her hung a low intense cloud, itself like a phantom mountain. She drove on, but when she looked in her rear mirror, she saw that the dust behind her was now rising like uncertainty.

Another night it rained, sweeping adamant rain that brought leaks to her tent. The next day was sunny and still again as if nothing had happened, but in a matter of hours, it seemed, there were William Shakespeare type neck ruffs of green lacy weeds around the roots of gaunt tree trunks so twisted with light, they seemed as graceful as ballet dancers and without weight. Only the heat seemed to hold them down. By early evening of that day she'd travelled beyond the mountain range and was in country so flat with trees so low that when she turned on her heel that night, she saw the entire circle of the horizon spinning by. She didn't put up her tent but lay under the dome of stars, watching the trajectory of the Southern Cross move directly above her toes, then above her stomach, above her chest, above her head. Until dawn, the black sky was spangled all the way down to the ground, all around her.

People who live here must be wonderful as the night, she thought. She would soon talk to them.

After many wrong turnings, she found a notice announcing the community, and then a windmill, and now her heart was hammering with excitement. She found herself in a village that looked like any ordinary village, though the ground was the colour of tomatoes. She passed naked black children laughing and shouting at a burst water main, their teeth startlingly white, and there was Pat at her gate, her once black hair now grey, her once slender body now chubby, her face like the face Frances remembered, but her wide toothy smile now disappeared into bulging cheeks and many chins.

Look at you, Pat said, for Frances was city slim and elegant, though her glossy skin was dusted with red. Their friendship used to be edged with competitiveness. There was a touch of envy in Pat's voice now, Frances noted with a small puff of satisfaction.

After they'd hugged and taken the bags inside the house and had a cup of tea, Pat said she was just about to drive around doing the evening delivery of tablets to people who might otherwise forget to take them.

Isn't this after hours? Frances said.

Pat laughed at the notion, and Frances saw that her old friend was full of an energy that seemed to bounce off her olive skin. Even her graying hair curled energetically.

You can come but don't get out of the car, said Pat.

Why ever not? Frances was eager to be introduced, eager to begin talking.

It's uncouth. Evening is family time. And don't look at them. That's uncouth too.

Looking is uncouth?

Just glance up, and look down again. That's their way.

They drove around the tomato streets, Frances sitting in the car trying not to look but peeking. The people were so dark-skinned that in the evening light they seemed like shadows or burnt tree trunks. They didn't live in their houses but around them, sitting in groups on gaudy blankets in the dust, women cooking over a small fire, men in other circles gambling, children sometimes playing with each other, sometimes sitting quietly with the women. There were large flat boards on flour drums she first took to be tables and looked around for chairs, but then she realized that the boards were probably beds. So the people slept under the stars as she had, she thought. Television sets were flashing colours and mumbling English in some yards, but they seemed like guests everyone ignored.

Are people talking about me? Frances couldn't resist asking as they drove to the next house.

They notice everything, Pat said. They seem to read people's bodies.

That thrilled Frances. Surely they'd see how eager she was to talk with them.

She was ready to forgive the grubbiness of it all, the walls of the houses stained with greasy hand marks, the cars rusting and dismantled in yards, the litter of papers and plastic bottles blown against fences and trees. After all, she told herself to calm her nerves, they'd been nomads and probably never had to think about cleaning up, just moving on to the next camp and leaving animal bones and seeds and chaff to the wind.

But when Pat drove down a street of partially demolished houses with the walls ripped off and only rusty framework left standing for years, Frances struggled with disappointment.

Someone should clean this place up, she said as they drove to the next house.

She felt Pat stiffen beside her.

Not you, of course, Frances added.

Pat grabbed a new batch of pills and slammed the door behind her, her back protesting. Frances, chastened, listened to the way she spoke simple English to the people, with only a few words of their language. Sometimes she gently touched the forearms of the women, and often she held their babies. When she returned from her next delivery she had softened, Frances saw.

When a relative dies here, his house can't be lived in because of his cranky spirit. It must be destroyed and the family must move on, said Pat, offering her this information in a conciliatory way.

She drove to the next patient.

I know the mess is awful but the whites here who run the services do nothing. The headmaster, for instance, says this is the most degraded people on earth, Pat said.

Why don't they sack him? asked Frances.

These are a gentle people, said Pat. Not like a neighboring tribe. These people put up with a lot. They don't do things white people's way. And they're pre-occupied with family, huge families, all needy, all hungry. Rubbish is the last of their concerns.

She swung into another street and laughed fondly.

Though an old man yesterday complained that his yard was messy. He said he'd have to move house. I thought he meant the way his yard was littered with rubbish. But he didn't. They still track here. See how they're all bare-footed? He meant there were too many footprints. He couldn't tell who'd been in his place.

When she came back from her next delivery she said:

You can't stay if you're going to criticise. You've got to look below the surface.

That's why I came, said Frances.

What are your plans? Pat asked as they headed back to her house. Besides being my servant, she added with satisfaction.

I'm going to have real conversations, said Frances.

For a difficult, frowning month, Frances kept house for Pat, shopping at the only store (she winced at the extortionate prices), beginning a vegetable garden because the store didn't sell vegetables, and re-learning the language at the house of another white person, a Lutheran missionary, an earnest, patient man who spent long hours every day questioning people about exact meanings while he made them cups of black sugary tea. Frances had studied Italian and Greek at school and she'd learned her tape assiduously but the local language turned out to be very different. She wouldn't let herself be deterred. This language was more demanding with many cases and an entire page in the missionary's half-finished, often handwritten dictionary of the ways to say "we"(she counted thirty ways). She discovered that much of the time when she wanted to say that someone did something, she had to split the verb open like a New York bagel and fill it with a number of other words chosen from scores of possibilities that showed at what point the speaker was in a journey- and then she must finish the sentence. So, the missionary said proudly, for he'd spent several years working this out, there were sixty nine ways of splitting the word to hit.

You split it to say you're hitting while you're going down a hill, hitting while you're going up a hill, hitting while you're walking away from the hearer, hitting while you're heading towards the hearer...

His voice trailed on and on as if they were both dreaming.

What if you're not traveling? Frances asked, hoping for an easy way out. This new linguistic complication might put off conversation for weeks. After all, there are lots of things you'd do when you were stationery – like cooking! she told him.

Even if you're sitting at a fire and talking about the kangaroo you caught, said the missionary in triumph, you have to split the verb.

To her it seemed like the way Latin might've ended up if the Romans had been nomads.

After another month she visited Pat at the clinic and sat in the waiting room to try a conversation. A beautiful young mother with her breast bared for her baby smiled at her.

What's your country? the young mother asked in English.

I usually live in Sydney, Frances said in her new language and lurched to a stop.

You've got a beautiful country, Frances said after a while in the language.

The woman fell silent, looked away.

Frances tried again.

Your baby is beautiful too, she said in the language.

The woman smiled again, caressed the baby's back, but still averted her glance.

Over dinner Frances tried to keep irritation out of her voice.

I was trying to make small talk, she said.

They don't do small talk, Pat said. They say, those white people, always talking.

That's alright, Frances said. Really, I'm not interested in small talk. I want deep, meaningful conversation. Big talk.

Pat smiled at the intensity of her friend. She'd always been like this, even as a child, insisting on her own way, refusing to play with other girls if they didn't play what she wanted. She'd refused sometimes to play with Pat.

What's important to them is being together, said Pat. Silent company. Marlpa, I've heard it called by another tribe.

She saw how Frances' lips shut in a determined line.

One morning at the end of the second month Pat ran up from the clinic to tell her that some people wanted to go for a drive for bush oranges which were in season. Frances was in the middle of watering the vegetable garden; she was enchanted with the willingness of the green sturdy leaves to shoot straight out of the red dirt.

Almost as if they want to feed us, she told Pat. She'd never grown anything before. Perhaps she could teach the people and turn them from a nomadic culture to an agricultural culture. It might be good for them and at least inspire them modify those terrible verbs.

Now, said Pat because Frances hadn't turned off the hose. They're ready to go now.

Won't tomorrow do? asked Frances. It's going to be very hot soon. I was thinking of putting up some shade cloth for the spinach.

They don't plan ahead here, said Pat patiently. She was used to her friend.

They want to do it now. Not tomorrow.

They have cars, Frances said. Why would they want me to take them?

There's no money for fuel, Pat said, still patient.

How far? Frances asked.

Down the road, Pat said. Do you want to get to know them, or not?

Pat filled Frances' car with people- a slender old man with a bare chest and a black plastic leg, his two wives, one much younger than the other, and his two sisters. One sister sat in the front and smiled and then looked away. Frances did the same. She cast around for something to say but all the words in her mouth seemed like small talk and dried up like leaves in the sun. No one spoke, so she put off her meaningful conversation for a while and drove. It had rained recently and the churned red road with recent wheel tracks looked like a child's finger painting. When they came to a fork in the road, she turned to her companion. She had learned that the language didn't have left or right, just north, south, east and west and she wasn't exactly sure which way she was facing. But her companion didn't speak, she just indicated the road with a graceful, economical gesture, her hand stretched out ahead with the fingers clamped together and slanting to the right. Frances drove for another hour.

Stop, one of the wives at last called in English from the back.

Frances stopped. Her companion was gazing out at the mulga. In the back, everyone else gazed in the same direction. It's just undifferentiated trees, Frances thought impatiently.

What are we looking at? she managed to ask in their language.

No one answered her.

Rubbish, someone said in English.

Rubbish? repeated Frances.

These bush oranges rubbish, her companion said in English.

It came to France suddenly.

They're not ripe? Frances asked in their language.

Her companion didn't answer, but gestured onwards.

Frances drove. It was like city people going out for dinner to some distant restaurant because it's had good reviews, she told herself. After another eighty kilometers, one of the wives called again.

Stop.

Frances again saw only undifferentiated mulga, but her companion indicated with her hand that Frances should start the car again.

Slow, said the woman in English.

They pulled up underneath two trees that Frances hadn't noticed. She looked up. Green bulbous fruit hung high up like Christmas decorations.

Everyone clambered out. Frances, wanting to impress with her helpfulness, climbed up on the Landrover roof and threw the fruit down to waiting hands. This seemed popular. When there was no more to pick, she stood shyly amongst the seated group until one of the sisters patted the dusty ground. Frances sat then, trying to cross her legs like them though it hurt, and ate and told herself not to worry about how she'd wash the red dust out of her trousers. She was glad they weren't her best cream ones. The oranges were not like anything she'd ever tasted. They were layered in flavour. At the first bite they tasted like mango and then as she neared the seed, like marzipan without sugar, with an aftertaste of kerosene.

Suck the seed, said her companion in English, breaking a long silence. Frances obeyed. The seed was almost bitter but she pretended to like it. Perhaps it was doing her good. She even threw the seeds down on the ground like they did, stifling her impulse to bury them so they'd grow for the future. She reminded herself that this was a language without a future tense that extended more than a few days. Besides, burying the seeds might make it look as if she was trying to do magic. She'd learned a little about their beliefs. She didn't want to do anything uncouth. Everything must aid her towards having a conversation.

Beautiful food, she said in their language when she could bear the silence no more.

Everyone laughed, and looked away.

So she put off conversation for later in the drive.

She was expecting to re-trace their route but when they came to another fork in the road, her companion silently indicated another way. Frances hesitated, then did as she was told.

Stop, a sister called after a while.

Everyone climbed out except the old man who had fallen asleep, and they bent over bushes at the side of the road, gathering handfuls of long fronds.

What is it? Frances asked in language.

Bush medicine, said her companion in English.

Frances wanted to help, so she found identical bushes on the other side of the road and gathered a big bouquet of fronds. Soon the back of the car was littered. Frances lay her own bunch proudly on the dashboard for everyone to see. It might bring on a conversation.

What's this for? her companion asked in English about Frances' fronds.

Your bush medicine, said Frances, surprised.

Her companion reached over to the back, picked out from the pile one of the fronds and held it up to compare it to Frances's fronds. The leaves were different.

No bush medicine, said her companion.

Frances laughed, and the woman smiled gently.

They drove again in silence.

Stop, someone called again.

Everyone clambered out except for the old man, who had taken off his black plastic leg and laid it across the back seat.

Frances again could see only mulga but the group was pulling at the trees and filling plastic bags with elongated green fruit.

Bush pears, said one of the wives in English to Frances who stood watching.

Soon the women ranged out of sight, coming back every now and then with plastic bags bulging with green pears which they emptied into buckets. Frances didn't want to walk away from the car. The heat of the sun was beating on her head like a drum. She'd forgotten her sunhat. She shaded her eyes and circled a few trees because she wanted to show she was interested, but she could only find two pears. When one of the wives returned, bringing another bulging bag to the car and depositing it inside, careful not to disturb the old man or his leg, she touched Frances' arm and walked some distance off. She lay down on the ground, patting it, indicating that Frances should come over and lie beside her. But Frances didn't want to rest.

Come, the woman called in English. Frances walked over reluctantly, half obeying the woman, half dazed by the sun. The woman patted the ground more emphatically. Frances sat down nearby, thinking that this wasn't the right moment for conversation. She wouldn't be able to split her verbs accurately, not in this heat. The woman banged the ground so hard, dust rose around her ample body. Frances didn't like to sit so close. She hesitated, then thought better of it and wriggled over. But the woman still wasn't satisfied. She insisted with her hand that Frances lie beside her rather than sit.

My mother taught me when she was growing me up, said the woman in English.

This seemed to promise the conversation at last, at least about childhoods, so Frances lay down. Only then did the woman raise her arm and point. Then Frances understood. From that angle, with the breath of the woman on her face, she could see pear vines as they twined from one branch to another high up in the tree against the blue, searing, endless sky.

From out of her pocket the woman fished a crumpled plastic bag and handed it to Frances.

Get some, she said.

The car by now smelled sweetly of plants but Frances barely noticed. She turned on the ignition key in a trance. Again she expected to retrace their route but again the woman beside her indicated another way. They drove cross-country far from the road, over spiky blonde spinifex and deep water course ditches, beyond an outcrop of orange rocks and then, suddenly in front of them, smiling at the sky, gleamed a narrow stretch of water. The women burst out of the hot car and waded in, fully clothed. They submerged themselves and then beckoned to Frances, who'd paused at the edge of the waterhole, just wetting her feet.

You too, said one of the wives in English.

She followed them in until she was waist-deep. The water was about the same temperature as the air, not cold as it would be on the coast but she didn't mind. It was red with mud, but when she moved back to the shallows, her wet body discovered a breeze and almost sang in pleasure.

Beautiful, she said.

Everyone laughed and looked away.

She sank into the warm water then and let its soupy depths take the weight of her tired body. It was like yielding to a lover. It enfolded her. She turned luxuriously on her back and gazed at the torrent of blue sky and floated for a while in wonder. She turned again and buried her face in the warm wetness and almost slept. When finally she stood up, small animals brushed softly against her feet and legs but she didn't care. The water and the women would look after her. For one of the first times in her life, she felt no fear. Afterwards she saw that the red mud had stained her clothes, but she didn't care.

She drove back into the community when the moon was so high it had drowned the stars. She took the women and the old man to their house. They disappeared into the darkness carrying their fruit and medicine fronds without saying goodnight or thanking her, but by now she knew that was their way. Greetings and thanks are small talk.

Pat had cooked dinner for once. It was waiting on the table, covered with a freshly washed tea towel. Frances slumped in her chair. She couldn't find the energy to speak, but she lifted her fork and toyed with the food to please her friend.

You've had a good time, her friend observed.

The conversation I came for, said Frances.

For more information about Sue Woolfe please go to http://www.suewoolfe.com.au

