The Moors Last Sigh

escaped, having been offered a deal by the court after negotiations with the tax authorities, much to his daughter’s fury. He paid a large fine cheerfully, testified for the prosecution against his old ally, was granted immunity from prosecution in return, and, some months later, bought the beautiful K. K. Chambers for a song from the jailed politico’s crumbling property company. And there was one further defeat for Mynah; for although she had successfully proved the existence of the invisible buildings, she failed to establish the reality of the invisible people who built them. They continued to be classified as phantoms, to move through the city like wraiths, except that these were the wraiths that kept the city going, building its houses, hauling its goods, cleaning up its droppings, and then simply and terribly dying, each in their turn, unseen, as their spectral blood poured out of their ghostly mouths in the middle of the bitch-city’s all-too-real, uncaring streets.
    When Ina holed up at the Altamount sisters’ nursing home to await Jimmy Cash’s return, Philomina surprised us all by paying her sister a visit. There was a Dory Previn song that you heard a lot back then – we sometimes got to things a little late – in which she accused her lover of being prepared to die for total strangers, though he would not live with her … Well, we thought much the same of our Philomina. Which was why her concern for poor Ina was so unexpected.
    Why did we do it? I think because we understood that something had broken, that this was Ina’s last throw of the dice. I think because we had always known that although Minnie was smaller and Mynah was younger it was Ina who was the most fragile, that she had never really been all there ever since her parents chopped her name in half, and that what with her nymphomania and all she had been cracking up for years. So she was drowning, she was clutching at straws as she had always clutched at men, and cheesy Jimmy was the last straw on offer.
    Mynah offered to collect Jamshed Cashondeliveri from the airport, reasoning that, what with his new life as a law student and all, he might find it easiest to open up to her. He arrived looking very scared and very young, and to put him at his ease she began prattling, as she drove into town, about her own work, her ‘struggle against the phallocracy’ – about the case of the invisible world, and also her women’s group’s efforts to fight the Emergency in the courts. She spoke of the climate of fear pervading much of the country and the importance of the struggle for democratic and human rights. ‘Indira Gandhi’, she said, ‘has lost the right to call herself a woman. She has grown an invisible dick.’ Because she was so absorbed in her own concerns and so convinced of their justness she failed to notice that Jimmy was becoming more tense by the minute. He was no intellectual – law school was proving a great struggle – and, even more importantly, he had not a single drop of political radicalism in his blood. So it was that Mynah was the first of us to put a spoke in Ina’s wheel. When she told him that she and her colleagues expected to be arrested any day now he thought seriously about jumping from the car and heading straight back to the airport before he became guilty by association with so tainted an in-law.
    ‘Ina is dying to see you,’ Mynah said at the end of her monologue, and then reddened at her choice of metaphor. ‘I mean, no, she’s not,’ she corrected herself, hotly, making matters worse. A silence opened. ‘Oh, hell, here we are, anyway,’ she added a while later. ‘Now you can see for yourself.’
    Minnie met them at the door of the Maria Gratiaplena nursing home, looking more like Audrey Hepburn than ever, and all the way to the room where Ina waited like a miserable balloon she spoke of hellfire and damnation and till-death-us-do-part in a seraphic voice as sharp as breaking glass. Jimmy tried to tell her that he and Ina had not signed the full, holy, brimstone-and-treacle type of contract, having opted instead for the fifty-dollar Midnight Special country-style civil nuptial ’n’ hoedown in a Reno quickie ‘Wed-Inn’ parlour, that they had been married to the music of Hank Williams Sr rather than hymns ancient or modern, standing not before an altar but beside a ‘Hitching Post’; that there had been no priest officiating, but a man in a ten-gallon hat with a pair of pearl-handled