freakishly fat? Is that what you wrote?
—Are you reading over my shoulder, I said, turning from my page.—Why are you so close to me.
—You mutter aloud when you write, The Lamb said. She flicked her magnificent hair.—It’s a sign of lower intelligence.
She picked herself up from her squat and began flouncing off. —I couldn’t care less what’s in your stupid report anyway.
The other nurse was quite small and with skin like a raisin.
This other nurse swaddled Kiki B in a robe of fuchsia silk, sprayed with flowers and characters of an eastern persuasion. This other nurse took a wide-toothed comb of bone from a breast pocket of misleading size and with the word BATTERSEA stitched above in neat blue script and began tugging at Kiki B’s hair. This other nurse after making a certain amount of headway through the tangle though not quite a lot of headway replaced the wide-toothed bone comb whence it came and took from the same and increasingly magically proportioned breast pocket a large silk flower and clipped it behind Kiki B’s left ear, pulling some of the hair back with it.
—There, said this small pruney nurse, looking critically at Kiki B. —There’s something.
Kiki B beamed in the manner of children and idiots the world over and pulled from the pocket of her freshly acquired robe a folded piece of paper. She handed it to me.
It was taken from me swiftly. So swiftly that my arm remained awkwardly outstretched for some moments after, fingers pinched around a paper-sized bit of air.
Binelli tucked the scrap into his own breast pocket, which was of the usual size and had no resplendent stitching above.
I moved my arm in as casual a manner as I could manage back to my side, where it hung a touch awkwardly. I made quick shaking movements to exercise the oddness out of it. Limbs should always be made comfortable.
The corner of the paper covered where some stitching would go, if Binelli had had some stitching above his breast pocket.
I thought we should perhaps look into some stitching.
It really was quite distinguished.
Only what would ours say.
It would take some looking into.
—Would you care for some shrimps, said Tiki Ty, quite out of the blue.
—We should be going, the raisiny nurse told him,—but thank you nonetheless.
—Is there. The large nurse looked at the ground shyly.—Is there any way. What I mean to say is, might it be possible—
—Of course, said Tiki Ty jovially.—I’ll bag some up for your return trip. I have spill-proof containers for the dipping.
—Bless you, said the nurse.—You are good and you are great.
—And I shall have you on my plate! said Kiki B, beaming a benevolent smile after Tiki Ty’s departing backside.
—Is that any way to talk, said the raisin.
—It’s one way, said Kiki B in a sulky manner, and then no one spoke until Tiki Ty returned to the room with an enormous vat of shrimps and a spill-proof container filled with dipping.
I worried.
I worried I must admit something awful about our remaining supply of shrimps and dipping. I felt a sudden and blistering annoyance toward not only the huge nurse but for the huge in general, who take far more shrimps than their due.
And seating on the trains. And white linen. And freshwater pearls. Et cetera.
The nurse became almost glazed of eye and aspect.—Bless you. O bless you, Tiki Ty.
The threesome made to take their leave.
Kiki B firmly in tow, the shrimpmonger and the raisin made to heave on and all through the window whence they came. Unfortunately for the future of popular music, not located in the bathroom. Kiki B cast a beatific smile over those of us remaining. It was an exit smile, an Exit, the gracious and munificent queen of a country or pageant sweeping out on the arms of her keepers.
—Wait, Binelli said. He gestured toward the bare feet of Kiki B with something akin to horror.
The feet were certainly scratched and of the bluish hue sometimes favored by vampires or victims of frostbite.
They were certainly filthy.
Kiki B smiled and the nurses made impatient noises.
—Doesn’t she have shoes, Binelli said, strangling a little bit.
—It’s lucky she got the robe. The shrimpmonger spoke with disdain dripping from that cavernous mouth as so very surely the honey and the crumbs and the pie fillings did with regularity.
The shrimpmonger had certainly undergone a bit of a personality adjustment now that the shrimps had been claimed.
—Well she can’t go on without shoes. Binelli had something now akin to hysteria about his eyes.
15
Binelli, it might be useful to mention at this point in the report, once had a sister. This was a sister who in her short time on this earth approached nothing so much as sainthood. She is certainly a saint now, at least, very much dead and gone as she is. This sister had the unlikely red hair of the devil, but red hair that—as Binelli is quick to point out when the subject arises, which it sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t, sometimes doesn’t for long stretches of time and then arises several times over the course of a day in rapid succession, and then perhaps might not arise for a month or two or six, even, and then arises and arises until we all wish this sister from high atop the grandest golden throne in whatever afterworld had admitted her would smite her brother in some way that would include but not be limited to the removal or crippling of his larynx, or thorax, or other crucial component of the general mouth-to-sternum region of his person where the apparati responsible for his talking are housed—so far surpassed my own red hair in terms of gloss, shine, hue, cascadability, volume, manageability, tossability, length, amplitude, and texture, that one would not even, if one were to see the two of our heads of hair side by side, refer to them both as red. Not even refer to them both as hair.
I cannot tell you what they would refer to the one not referred to as hair as. That will remain a question for the ages.
Ultimately, to get the snow shoveled at least in the general direction of the point for this is not after all a traipse through a meandering wood nor a lark through a bubbling brook but a report, in fact, digressions notwithstanding, Binelli and this sister made shoes. I am absolutely one hundred percent positive that behind this fact is an even longer story of a daddy on the dole or a mother in her cups, some manner of neglect and nursemaids and a kindly old manservant who let them polish the household ones-and-twos, a chore to which they against all odds took a shine and began noticing all the little ways upon which they might improve said shoes et cetera ad nauseum. Whatever the sordid story behind it, Binelli and this sister made shoes. They sketched designs for shoes and gathered the materials for shoes and procured the equipment one might need to put shoes together and even pressed their own leather labels into the soles of these shoes: RUSTY BINELLI. Now was Rusty a childish Binelli-issued nickname for his redheaded sister, or was it a reference to the scavenged nail that poked one or the other young cordwainer in the big toe and began a period of infectious infirmary that would lead to the necessity of finding a crafty activity to fill the long hours of bedridden days, an activity of which the children failed to tire, though strength returned; no by god, they never tired of this, the smell of leather, the meticulous stitching, the shodding of the people, the heady glamour, the creative juices stirring within pent-up loins, loins that hungered for the tickle of a stray red wisp tossed carelessly past a hollowed cheek—well, it is all conjecture and as such not for this report to contemplate. Shoes were made, many shoes. All women’s, only one pair of each style, and without exception every single one a clownish,