David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

He passed the doors of St Nicholas the Weaver, its tent-roofed belltower and golden cupolas shining against the lacklustre sky. A city where churches were being converted to museums of atheism. A cardboard box flew up and scraped along the wall, tore off around the corner. Those still in the street had their hands in their pockets as they leaned into the squall. A siren interrupted, sharp as the wail of a wounded dog, then it was as quiet as a curfew except for the slush of the cars.

In the alley at the back of Aurelio’s dress shop a sapling bent as though trying to hold onto its long lost leaves and a brindle cat leapt between square metal rubbish bins, its fur blown flat. Darcy couldn’t see much through the half-painted window, just the mirror where he’d examined himself as he first pulled on Aurelio’s coat. Scraps of material and a bodice on the work table, but no sign of life. Darcy banged loudly and shouted zdrastvuytye, the syllables butchered, all of them engulfed. He stood back in case someone appeared in the window above, Aurelio’s mother perhaps, the friend of Castro, but there was just a filmy curtain bunched at one side. He shouted Aurelio and suddenly wondered if that was really his name.

A stocky man appeared in the mouth of the alley and, without being sure who it was or if he’d even been noticed, Darcy found himself running. He hurtled down a barely lit side street, narrow compared with the broad boulevards, past two stone lions atop a gatehouse, buildings with low gargoyles, an old part of the city. When he stopped for breath he kept walking on an empty lane with shopfronts. A washing machine in the window of one and a stack of folded blankets topped with a bouquet of plastic sunflowers. It wasn’t as cold away from the river.

He sheltered in the doorway of a store with stuffed birds in its window, dead hawks and falcons, a display so dusty it could have been there since the time of the tsars. A horse’s neck and head was mounted beside them. It was carved from a tree trunk, cut straight across its shoulders, part of it covered in bark. Then Darcy realised it was real, not a carving, but so old the horse’s hair had fallen out and the leather was peeling. Its ewe-neck bowed upwards as if it stared at the moon, reaching for something, its Roman nose high and a wildness in its marbled eyes. He saw himself in the photo, even though he’d strained up with clenched eyes; with Fin they’d been wide open, reaching for something else.

In a cul-de-sac behind him he heard a dull thumping, a boy juggling bowling pins in the dark, three at a time. Some trick of the faded light or a dream, the image he conjured to paint was appearing in real life. The young boy on his own, a bicycle leaned against a tree and a patterned handkerchief tied on his head. The boy’s ragged canvas pants and his fervent concentration on the rhythm of the pins had Darcy entranced. A secret response to the General Secretary’s passing. Everyone lying in wait. The boy tumbled the pins much higher, then dropped one and slapped himself on the thigh, more self-aware than if he were alone.

Darcy looked up into the blank apartments, imagined inhabitants standing in darkness behind the shutterless windows or kneeling on beds they used as divans in the daytime, pillows laid along the walls, watching. If it was a subtle celebration of Andropov dying, for Darcy it was something else. If he’d believed in a god he’d have thought it a sign. But of what? Hope or innocence, or both of them lost?

Darcy wanted to dig for his pad and sketch the lines of the juggler but he just watched, intoxicated by the boy’s gypsy flair, his circus pants, the bandana. His evocation of purity. Then the boy began swinging pins from ropes wound on his wrists and curled through his hands, and he spun them in opposite circles, flipping them fast and then faster, surrounding his body as he swayed. Whizzing like propellers extended from his arms.

Darcy had thought that everyone here looked lonely, that he could almost smell their disappointment, but the boy seemed different, reaching and dipping, possessed by a passion. Darcy used to imagine teaching horses to dance on a rumbling wooden floor so their steel shoes made a tapping sound that blended with flamenco music. He’d wanted to paint the Lipizzaners doing airs above the ground. But he’d become lost along the way. He searched up into the new-fallen afternoon dark like the horse did beside him, as if there’d be a moon through the low-ceilinged clouds. He was close to the age the Mormon had been when he appeared at the door on Baden Powell Drive, and the thought made Darcy feel strange.

The boy seemed to sense Darcy staring and abruptly he caught all his pins and packed them into his drawstring bag. Darcy held up his gloved hand to say he was sorry, he meant no harm. As the boy got on his bike and scraped down the street, he glanced back at Darcy in the doorway then blended into the dark and cobblestones. The juggling pins in his bag bumping gently on his back.

The quad lay in shadows, dew on the grass, they appeared with the Ming Wing behind them like a juggernaut. Darcy kicked the fortyfour gallon barrel that rumbled with books, keeping it straight, a drum accompaniment as it rolled over cement behind Fin as she shouted her spiel about witch-hunts. The Malleus Maleficarum, she yelled to Asian kids who roamed the campus at night, haunting the libraries, gathering now, intrigued yet ill at ease with their own books under their arms, evening lecturers turning their heads, on their way home. Fin dressed up as a punk medieval witch, purple boots that came up over her knees, her leather mini-skirt and a cape with an embroidered Harley-Davidson. She looked more like Robin Hood’s dominatrix.

The Hammer of Witches, she said, that’s what it means. Darcy held up her placard that read WE ARE NOT THE EVILDOERS. He felt like a magician’s assistant, but he’d promised to support her. He dropped the sign on the ground because he couldn’t do everything, poured the fake copies of the witch-hunt book from the barrel all over the moist evening grass. Copies of anything by William F. Buckley Jr stolen from the library, now pasted with Malleus Maleficarum covers.

Darcy glanced up at the random assemblage of student faces, some of them wincing, trying to understand. Fin pointing at men accusingly: A hundred thousand women killed, she shouted, her numbers that always felt plucked from the air.

Accused of infanticide and cannibalism just for refusing to weep in the inquisitorial courts.

She doused the insides of the now upright barrel with kerosene and threw in a match, started burning the books. Her face painted black with white lips, her eyes now lit by the flames with a ghoulish effect. A female teacher in a plaid skirt shouted, Hey, offended by books on fire.

It’s an instruction manual, Fin yelled back. For the killing of women. Like you. Idiot women like you.

The woman walked off towards the Student Union and Fin stared at Darcy accusingly. He faded behind her into the shadows but, undaunted, she continued with tirades about female circumcision, Islamic women, Nigeria, Egypt, Sudan, infibulation, subjugation.

Elly elly etdoo , Darcy warned her as a security guard emerged through the glass doors of the Union and Fin stopped mid-sentence, abandoned her props, and they ran through the dark between buildings to the car park on Wellington Road, with their smiling getaway faces. This was the fun he’d been robbed of, he thought. Then he realised that Fin was in costume, quite unrecognisable, while he’d been there as himself.

That went well, she said, laughing, as they leapt into Darcy’s mother’s Corvair and sped out towards Dandenong Road. She reached for her stash in the glove box to roll them a joint. You call that art!