MISERY LOVES company almost as much as oil slicks love a picturesque coastline to move in on with sticky persistence.
The Fan Weaver Widows Society were in a flap when rumours were rife one of their number had come up lucky on the Pulse Ball and her expected presence at Easygoing Evening for a foursome turned into a scandalous absence.
'She'll spend it all, you mark my bitter and twisted words,' Deirdre Snapper said, her crimson-speckled mouth wrinkled in a tight little flower of jealousy as she toyed with the cards before her. She kept throwing sets of three upon the baize with enraged neglect. Her skill at loading hands with unseen stealth was awry and the two others present schooled themselves secretly in her techniques during her absentmindedness.
'We could call Joosteen to make a set, a three, a four I mean,' Parget Moos stuttered as she noted a finger flick that was decisive as another threesome materialised among the shuffling cards. This made Deirdre pause in her actions and glance down at red bony fingers as if they were traitors. She gathered the cards up, her splotchy crimson mouth stretched in a brittle smile and she produced two doubles in the blink of an eye. Her mind was back on the game.
'Three pins please,' she said to the lady on her right, who squinted defiance.
'Ain't a game without a fourth. Besides I wagered naught,' Alice Clout spat back. 'Will wager something though. She'll marry that hatter on Feltup Corner. Mad on him she is. You mark my bitter and twisted words.'
'Anyone notice where we are?' Parget said brightly.
The others looked around.
'Mellow parlour, bit of lilac in the trimmings. Lacy window fluff and dimpled cushions on every surface. View of copper roof stains, half-dead pines and that awful Karolean's still unincinerated oddments pile in her backyard north corner where them cats like to meet and fight every half moon,' Deirdre said carefully, seeking a greater meaning to the casual question. Then she slammed a four setter on the table and stood. 'We're in her bloody parlour! Her parlour! While she's off Pulse Balling across the Face of the World.'
'Shall we nick stuff and leave a note?' Parget suggested with a chortle, palming a paperweight so her actions matched her words.
'Wot? Dimpled cushions and them there diamond crusted tea cosies she's always flaunting? Don't make me laugh,' Alice Clout laughed, her actions conflicting with her words.
As another paperweight tumbled into Parget Moos's left cardigan pocket so that it sagged with guilt everyone paused to absorb what had just been said and then there was a sudden rush to the kitchen where a certain lockless cabinet held pride of place between a glass-fronted vase cupboard and a bowl storage tower made of shiny metal string with interstices that boggled the mind as well as the hard-pressed housemaid during dusting sessions.
'Ma'am's due in any minute,' this worthy said, waving a locator tab as she strained upon the lead of a rather fierce-looking dog with a large head balanced on a small but muscular body. It was a dark animal, except the teeth which were very white and quite visible. The growl it emitted made one of the bowls trapped in a slightly wrong slot in the stringy crockery tower slip down, bounce upon a worktop and roll drunkenly into a nearby sink where it clattered out of sight.
'Soopsie!' Deirdre Snapper said with a pleasant puff of energy, the kind given off by an activated landmine where none had been expected. 'We were just wondering where your mistress had gotten to. Us Fan Weaver Widows are eager to get started on the game, you know, in the parlour, as we do every week round about this time.' She glanced at the wall clock to reassure her senses all this was actually real and almost chipped a tooth when she gritted them with dismay to find it was.
'Found these, um, tumbled about,' Parget added, letting a couple of paperweights roll out of a dry and slightly trembling hand onto the worktop where they eventually joined the bowl in the sink with their own distinctive clatter notes.
Soopsie the maid turned her calm gaze to Alice Clout who glared back.
'Wot?' she said with a sniff. 'Only here for the diamonds.' Then she made a gesture as if remembering something of a sudden. A quick squirm and a tiny ceramic frog with glittery eyes appeared as if from thin air to hop onto the worktop next the sink. It made no attempt to join the others, merely stared in the direction they had gone with facet-eyed placidity.
Everyone looked at everyone else with a kind of nervous smiley expression, except Shredder who showed no signs of nerves until he suddenly howled.
'Ma'am's here,' the maid said solemnly and dragged the baying dog off into the back kitchen where a robust hook secured the creature to a length of anchor chain salvaged quite possibly from a large passenger vessel run aground off Pleasant Isle. The dog continued to howl dismally as the widows resumed their seats with sympathetic gloom.
'She'll crow,' Alice insisted.
'She'll glow,' Parget admitted.
'She'll know we've been bitching, you mark my bitter and twisted words,' Deirdre added with greater elaboration and brutal honesty, of which she was fond.
When Flossie Much entered, lilac hair in tight curls fresh on that morning and a dainty handbag swinging from a flexed wrist, for the maid had divested her of everything else at the door, she most certainly did not glow. Instead, she took a look at each of her widow friends in turn and then satisfied all eyes were upon her, burst into tears.
'There, there,' Parget sympathised, giving the others a puzzled look as she patted a thin shoulder with automatic reassurance.
'Sit,' Alice simply said, pulling up a chair to the card table. 'And tell us all about how it went so terribly wrong,' for clearly something had. Pulse Ball winners did not react like that.
'Yes,' Deirdre inserted her own carefully sharpened tongue. 'That hatter wasn't good enough for you, not after Reggie, short and balding though he was even in his prime.'
'Huh?' Flossie twitched between sniffs and a pink hankie.
Reggie Much had been if she remembered correctly, a skillful fan weaver in spite of other shortcomings. The fact he along with so many others, was quite incapable of handling sharp spinning fan blades with the dexterity necessary to survive in the tough and demanding arts and crafts movement so typical of Cherryball Flats and its catering to the making of authentic native work for tourists, was beside the point. All the ladies present had lost loved ones, and won generous compensation before safety regulators shut the business down. What was so tragic here was she, Flossie Much, comfortably pensioned widow of a departed fan weaver killed in action, had lost her Pulse Ball token and could not claim the prize she knew was hers. And she had somehow to explain this to her co-widows without being laughed at.
'I,' she began with monosyllabic drama, 'was attacked.'
'No,' someone spluttered. The dog howled at a distance and Flossie Much added her sobs to its doleful sound. She was inspired.
'Yes,' she said, 'by a dog, a fierce brute so unlike my kind little Shredder who mourns with me at the end of his chain. It took my Pulse Ball token from my grasp with a fierce snap of its jaws and was gone down some dusty lane somewhere, probably towards some gang of combers just waiting for it,' and she sniffed, for the worst was now over. The truth, for what it was worth, was out.
'No,' Alice Clout spat. 'Did you get its code?' She had a note pad out.
'Code?'
'All them mongrels got codes, don't you know. If it don't eat the token it ken be traced. Was it a green and blue lozenge, or pink and orange stripey circle, or-'
'It was dark. And there were teeth and smells and things.'
'What junction?'
'Sorry?'
'Them mongrels is territorial. Big fights else. Narrow it down a bit.' Alice stood poised like a coiled spring, notepad at the ready.
'Don't remember,' Flossie said flatly.
'Haw, that's a double double. You owe me three pins missus Clout,' Deirdre Snapper declared with a shout.
'Tea, anyone?' Parget said, holding a pot that sparkled impossibly. Her cardigan looked neatly balanced again as she gave her hostess another sympathetic look. 'We might then begin our evening's game and move on from this tragic loss,' and she coughed briefly, making to blame it on the tea fumes.
Thus the Fan Weaver Widows gathered their collective misery together and fed upon it through the evening and into the night so the darkness hid Karolean's oddment pile though not the cat noises that marked its location.
The dog Shredder howled a lot too until it was time to settle him to bed. Soopsie the maid knew a lot about dogs. She liked them or so Flossie said. It was not like her to neglect poor Shredder though, nor the dishes, or a few other little duties she tended to perform before setting the alarms for the night. In fact it was not like her to be absent at all.
'She'll turn up in some swish resort up the coast eventually,' Deirdre suggested with a gloomy farewell peck on her friend's cheek. 'You mark my bitter and twisted words.'
'I guess so,' Flossie accepted.
That was the other thing about misery. It could lie itself down like a dog when it knew it was beaten.