Part 5
"Ever."
But Penelope had nothing to say. She was terribly afraid that she would do it again. They were in the middle of nowhere. All around the island the ocean glittered and beckoned. She sought out his hand and held it in the dark chirruping night.
Through the Gates.
AT FIRST SIGHT, there was nothing special about St. James's Church. A stubby square tower sat up like thumb at one end, and at the other, a broad curve of windows overlooked a gully full of tree ferns. Inside, the couple lay collapsed beside the altar like tramps, their heads propped up on the stucco wall, straining to catch a glimpse out the window at some marvel in the sky. Eventually the woman sat up and rubbed the back of her head.
"I give up Gord, it's no use. You can't see the glacier from in here any more. Maybe twenty years ago. I told you we'd have to drive up close in the car." Rita used the corner of the altar to pull herself up off the floor. She pulled down her jersey, puffed up her hair out of habit.
"Maybe if I get down a bit lower," said Gordon.
"You can't go lower Gord, you're on the floor. It's no good. Here, take my hand and let's be going."
Really it wasn't their habit to drop into churches in this way, but since Amanda had phoned from Canada with the news, Rita had taken to going into churches of all kinds. Private G.o.ds, public G.o.ds, ancient G.o.ds, invented G.o.ds; she called on them all to spare her daughter. Gord, on the other hand, kept his spiritual side tucked away out of sight, like his bald spot, which he hid under a flat brown cap, with a few grey curls licking out the back of it. Pressed, he would call himself a bet hedger in the G.o.d department. Still, he always tagged along when Rita went into churches.
Actually Rita and Gord were lucky that the church was open at all. A good fifty years had pa.s.sed since the church had been built, with its view of the Franz Josef glacier out the front windows, designed to prompt prayer among the tree ferns and praise for the high and icy work of the Almighty. Now it was 1986 and the volume of tourists in the area was already increasing along with the number of fish-and-chip dinners served at The BellBird's Table, the theft of car radios and motel visiting books, and even the bra.s.s candlesticks from the very church that they had been lying down in.
Gordon was disappointed that he could not see the glacier. A great uncle had brought him to this church once before as a young lad. He remembered the twisted fingers of the uncle, gently pushing him to kneel down and crane his neck to see its great gritty tongue. He'd always liked the idea of the inevitable flow of ice that crushed mountains as it moved. Since Amanda's phone call, the glacier seemed to have taken up residence inside his skull, sc.r.a.ping along like a great cold headache. He wondered whether the man existed who would be patient enough to lie down and be run over by a glacier. It would be a slow death. A decade would be long enough, surely. After that the glacier would bear you along towards the sea, with a creaking, crackling pebble-strewn slowness; a good and natural way to go.
Throughout their West Coast road trip, Gord was continuously reminded of standard six and Mr. Watson in front of the blackboard, rapping with a ruler at the words Plato's cave. Something about light and shadow flickering on the wall, but you had to go outside the cave for the real thing. Once, when Amanda had been seven and leaping about in the shallows at Waikouaiti beach, the slanting green fronds of the aurora australis had processed in stately fashion over the clouds above her. Gord had thought to himself, shadows and archetypes; gifts from beyond, but he had explained it to Amanda in terms of charged particles because even then he could not remember enough about the cave.
Rita stepped into a shaft of light, holding a brochure that she had pulled out of a rack beside the church door. She had left her gla.s.ses in the car and now she held the brochure at arm's length.
"The brochure says that Hinehukatere was climbing in the mountains with her boyfriend Tawe, and he fell, and she wept," she said.
"And her tears made the glacier?" Gord came up beside her. "That's a lot of crying."
"Hinehukatere is called the Avalanche Girl," said Rita. "Do you think Amanda has a boyfriend?"
Gordon shrugged and turned the corners of his mouth down.
"Is that how you catch it?" he asked.
The break away had been planned well before the phone call, and Amanda had insisted that she felt fine, and that it would be weeks before she knew the results of the next set of tests. In any case, Rita said that she couldn't possibly wait by the phone that long so they set out inland from Christchurch, as arranged, and pa.s.sed across the great divide to the wild West Coast. When they got to the coastal highway they turned left and headed south, and that was where Gordon began seeing what he thought of as archetypal forms, because the rainfall made everything so much bigger there. First they drove past a great matai tree beside the road, huge and towering with a trunk as s.p.a.cious as a spare room. Gord could only see twenty feet up into the tree before the thicket of branches blocked his view, but even then he could see the flax and ferns and moss that sprouted along its branches. He thought of the great upsuck of sap and the endless supporting of life among the branches for a thousand years. He took off his cap and rubbed his head. Feeble, that's what humans are, he thought, feeble by comparison.
From the beginning, Amanda had been a bright child, filled with a kind of light that manifested itself as an intense curiosity. She crouched in the back garden over a rock that she had just overturned, peeling off the slugs and watching the colonists underneath scatter into the dense growth of the pale gra.s.sroots. After her undergraduate degree, she went to study micro-organisms in Ontario, working on an MSc that stretched into a long PhD and on into a postdoc. As long as she could get funding, she could go on lifting up rocks and observing what was underneath them, at least that's how Rita thought of it. Gord and Rita had visited Amanda at Rook University once, but they had been so cold in the tiny apartment where the ice feathered the windows like expensive crystal. Outside the snow creaked underfoot and the wind bit into their faces with a nastiness that surprised them. Not once did they find a real cup of tea. The waitress insisted on giving them a gla.s.s of hot water with the teabag still in its packet on the plate underneath. Explaining made no difference. North America was not for them.
Gord drove for a while and Rita looked out the window, watching the sky and the glacier and the tree ferns and the crashing surf. She was surprised that her eyes were wide enough apart to take in the view, but there it was, the whole water cycle from the beginning to the end and back around again, all framed by the windscreen.
Rita had behind her a lifetime of putting spare change in the social money box labelled good deeds, pouring out tea for elderly folk, standing on street corners in a cold spring breeze to sell poppies for the Returned Services a.s.sociation, but when she came to think about death, she could only sense a kind of tumbling inside a great cosmic washing machine full of atoms and liquids being poured in and drained out. The amount of energy in the world is constant. That much she recalled from science at St. Ethelred's School where lab-coated Miss Scott performed dangerous acts with minute amounts of sodium that in the off-hours lurked under oil on the storeroom shelf, curious as an artichoke heart or an embryo. Miss Scott made manifest the possibility of a bright twinkling light under the right circ.u.mstances and a certain diminishment of the material world as a result. With the self, as opposed to Miss Scott's twitchy experiments on Wednesdays at 11, one never knew when.
The next morning Gord and Rita walked around the edge of Lake Matheson. They went early, as the guide book suggested, along a lakeside boardwalk covered in chicken wire. Eventually they came onto a small railed jetty that gave them a view, the view of the mountain. Before them Mt. Cook/Aor-aki, with a spike and a rip in the sound of its name, slashed up through the blue canvas of the air. How many years had Rita looked at the same image on the back of her bridge cards? Here it was, in the flesh, in the stone. And without the implacable force of the peak ripping into the sky, there could be no famous image on the backs of playing cards, no comfort in bridge, no quiet discussions among women.
The peak's reflection rippled as a duck tracked a vee across the surface of the water. Rita did not know if there was a cure for whatever Amanda had. She did not know if you could only catch the disease in North America or if you could catch it in New Zealand too. She thought about the Avalanche Girl, and the torrent of frozen tears running from the sky to the sea. A cold river of grief was to coming to sweep her and all her life before it.
She sat down with a thump on the jetty. Gord came up and stood over her, rolling up his jersey into a lumpy pillow.
"You all right? You're looking pale. You might want this. It's damp."
"If anything ever happens to me Gord, you'll find me here."
"Nothing's going to happen, Rita. We'll manage. Do you need a tissue?"
"No thanks, dear. I just came over a bit wobbly that's all." She stood up, leaving an imprint on the dewy boards, taking the arm he offered and leaning into his body.
"Come on, let's go back to the car, love," said Gord. "I think there's still some tea in the thermos."
They idled down the coast through the afternoon. The sun heated up the inside of the car. Just beyond Whataroa a sign invited them to visit a colony of white herons. Gord slowed the car before the turnoff.
"Shall we?"
Rita shook her head. All those big white birds flying up from the trees and settling again. She had seen them in a doc.u.mentary, with their feathers spread out like finger bones in the sun.
"I don't think I can, Gord. I feel like it's all speaking. We must go home, in case there's news."
"I know, Rita," he said.
"You do, you really do?" Rita frowned.
"We must try, you know, Rita," he said. "The problem is that we don't know very much about it. There must be a pamphlet."
"I just feel so helpless." Rita shook her head again.
"Cheese sandwich at the Haast cafe?"
"Yes. Then home."
The Land Below THE LAST TWO PARTIES of the day saw no adult albatrosses at all, so it was up to Rae to make sure that the visitors did not go away disappointed. She tried to create the missing birds, making huge gestures with her arms in front of the audiovisual display, dramatising facts about the dangers posed by drift-net fishing, and the sly thieving nature of stoats, but nothing compared with a glimpse of a white wing sweeping around the headland where the Otago harbour meets the South Pacific. You couldn't conjure it: it was, or it was not. Well, at least the tourists got plenty of pictures of the two fat chicks on the windy hillside, wisps of down fluttering at the back of their necks.
Just after five o'clock she hung up her vest and took her handbag out of her locker.
"Well that's it then. I'll see you on Monday, Sheila."
Sheila looked up from the statistics on her screen.
"You okay, Rae?"
"Yes, thanks, just a bit tired I suppose."
Rae brushed the back of her hand across her eyes. She was glad that Sheila had come to work at the albatross colony. A constant kind of friendship had grown up between them, based on having been at school together. To know someone at thirteen is really to know them. She remembered the greeting they had shared on Sheila's first day, as if it had not been thirty years, but just a long summer holiday since they had seen each other. Rae walked across the car park and down to the railing at the cliff's edge. A gull in red stockings ran before her, skirting the puddles full of pink sky. Below her the cliff fell away in a cascade of fleshy ice plant starred with orange flowers. When she looked back she saw Sheila waving as if she had something to tell her. Rae walked back up to the building.
"Rae, I was wondering if you'd like to go to Sandfly Bay tomorrow afternoon, to watch the penguins come in?"
"I thought you usually worked on Sat.u.r.days?" Rae searched her pockets for her car keys.
"Not this Sat.u.r.day. Interested?"
"What time?"
"About three?"
"Sounds good."
The two women hugged. Rae could not remember how they had fallen into this hugging. It had started as a New Year thing, but each time they held on a fraction longer. It was only a matter of time before they would look each other in the eye afterwards and one of them would push away a loose strand of hair from the other's face.
As Rae swung in and out of the bays along the harbour road back to Dunedin, the sun crept up the hills behind the city. The street lights had come on by the time she turned into the driveway of the villa on the crown of the hill. She locked the car. The air was sharp on the lungs and hazy with smoke from the wood fires down in the valley.
On the floor inside the front door lay a familiar packet addressed to her mother, postmarked from France. Rae picked it up and threw it onto the kitchen table without looking at it. She knew what it contained: Gauloises, the annual reminder of the year that her mother had spent at the Sorbonne before marriage claimed her.
Rae took down her mother's ap.r.o.n from the hook beside the stove, found matches and relit the pilot light. In the days when everyone was switching to electric ovens, her mother had insisted that gas gave better heat. I'll make Dad some scones, she thought, thinking of her mother's floured hands turning and tossing the dough as if she were slapping laundry on a rock, then throwing the trays into the oven through a crack in the door as if a volcano might billow out into the room. There was nothing her father liked better than scones and raspberry jam. Making jam had been one of the last things her mother had done before they left to spend New Year's Day with the Leamings. Just after a quick stop for tea at Catcher's Hotel, while the Leamings waited to greet them with leftover Christmas pudding and honey-glazed ham, Rae's father lost feeling in his left side and slumped forward over the wheel. The car veered across the road into a power pole.
It was always surprising how few pots of jam came out of a batch. All that washing and picking through, taking out the mouldy and the squashed, and they boil away to nothing. Rae found a jar at the back of the cupboard and tapped on it. The cellophane seal was concave and tight as a skin.
While the scones cooked she turned over the package on the table, looking at the French stamps. Rae knew so little about her mother's life before her marriage, especially the mythical year when she studied at the Sorbonne, boiling eggs in a kettle and sleeping in a hat, scarf and black mittens. Each year the French flatmate, who must now be heading for seventy, sent a packet of Gauloises to New Zealand. The cigarettes would arrive squashed, battered and stale, yet without fail Rae's mother would retreat to the bottom of the garden where she would smoke one or two each afternoon for a week. Rae and her father raked the leaves into piles around the unseeing woman wreathed in smoke.
Rae went about the house picking up bits and pieces that might help her father to pa.s.s another moment in the nursing home where the floor polisher hummed night and day in the corridor. She found a newspaper cutting about the retiring dean of the medical school, and an article about a giant squid found floating on the surface of the sea.
The physiotherapist was in the room when Rae arrived, putting away the mirror that she had been using to encourage Rae's father's left side to move. While Rae watched, her father succeeded in twitching his thumb a fraction.
Rae's father was a retired medical man. He enjoyed his golf, and he enjoyed sitting in front of the television diagnosing the weather lady's goitre problem. There were no mysteries for Rae's father. The body was a machine, a bundle of processes, and like a car, it could be fixed. Rae's mother, on the other hand, had been a machine that could not be fixed. I'm sorry Ms. Small, there is nothing we can do. Nothing we can do. There's always something you can do. There were always scones to make, shirts to iron.
Dr. Small chewed laboriously at a scone, p.r.o.nouncing it delicious. There were crumbs and a coffee stain on his jumper. They talked about the coming election, about snow in the forecast.
"If only I could get out of this darned chair," he said. "You will look after the house after I'm gone, won't you? Don't let them change anything."
"Oh Dad, you mustn't talk like that."
"Well I'm not going to last forever, but your mother wouldn't like it if they changed things around." Rae thought of the mottled red carpet and the gas heater with the plastic logs and the revolving bulb that flickered inside them. There was everything to change. It was a young couple's renovating dream.
"Don't worry," she said.
"Forget what I said about staying in the house, Rae. Sell it. You have your own life to live."
An old hot vein of frustration opened up in Rae. She took a deep breath.
"It's alright Dad. Don't worry," she said.
On Sat.u.r.day afternoon Rae and Sheila met in a farmer's field high up above the Pacific. A sharp wind blew the macrocarpa trees further into their ancient stunted shapes. Signs pointed visitors over the paddock towards the giant sand hill at the entrance to the beach, warning them not to bother the lambs. Rae took off her boots and rolled up her jeans. The two women picked their way down the sand hill, eyes narrowed against the wind, both remembering their thirteen-year-old selves on a school outing, launching themselves off the top of the hill with whoops and bounds. The sand hill seemed smaller now, trodden down. At the bottom the wind-blown sand stung their ankles and hissed in the tussock. The beach was empty, except for a sandy piece of driftwood that developed flippers and a pointed nose, and lumbered off into the dunes. Sand had banked up against the sea side of the bird hide and they both had to work to get the door open.
"My feet are so cold, I think I'm going to die!" Rae pulled her socks out of her pocket and used them to rub at her heels. "I don't know why I took my boots off in the first place," she said.
"Old reflex, I suppose," said Sheila. She opened the shutters, letting in a thin sliver of sh.o.r.eline and the winter sky. "I haven't been here for years."
"Me neither," said Rae.
Rae sat on a bench in front of the window, and Sheila turned and lifted each of Rae's feet in turn. She brushed the sand off matter-of-factly as if it were not Rae's foot at all, but a piece of driftwood that she had picked up to take home.
"Better?" asked Sheila.
"Yes, thanks," said Rae.
A penguin paddled in the waves just offsh.o.r.e, craning its neck to see whether the coast was clear. Soon another joined it, and soon there were three. When they felt safe they reared up off their chests like little toys and waddled towards the shelter of the flax bushes, inching their way up the hillside on their private tracks. The women sat side by side on the narrow bench, no longer touching, not Rae, not Sheila at all, just two women who had driven out to watch the penguins come in.
I wonder how long I can carry on not being me? Rae thought. This isn't me. Or perhaps it is me, but not a me that I know yet. I must see if Dad's nails need clipping. She tucked the thought away, the same way her mother used to come in from the garden tucking stray wisps of hair behind her ears.
Rae could feel Sheila's palm warm against her ear, silencing the sea, leaving only the sound of her blood.
"You should look after yourself, you're looking a bit thin," said Sheila. Rae was silent. "You okay Rae?"
"I don't know about this," said Rae.
"What's there to know?" asked Sheila.
What was there to know? Only the agapanthus and the empty clothesline.
"Rae, come and stay with me for a while. Let me look after you for a bit. No, that's not what I mean. Come and live with me Rae, we'd be good together."
It was as easy as that. We'd be good together.
"Thanks, Sheila." Rae looked at Sheila's small, perfect earlobe, unable to look her in the eye. "I'll think about it, I really will."
"Do," said Sheila, placing a hand on each of Rae's shoulders. "Promise me you will." She kissed her on the cheek.
They left the bird hide and walked back towards the car. They pa.s.sed only one family coming the other way, two adults and a child who ran in and out of the sea, oblivious to the cold waves.
"You don't have to go home, Rae. Come to my place."
"Thanks, I know I don't, but I always go up to see Dad about this time."
"I'll see you on Monday then?"
"Yes, I'm in from 11 until 4."
The numbers defined the s.p.a.ce between them. Of course Rae would see Sheila. There was work to do. If a life together were to be arranged, it would be thought out with the practicality of grown women, of egg sandwiches and a thermos of hot water, of teabags in a separate container. It could wait until Monday. They got into their cars. It was a relief not to be buffeted by the wind any more. Rae drove home past the spiked silhouette of a cabbage tree against golden sky, and a lone sheep, watching.
Rae went up the path to her parents' house, past the hydrangeas with their wet mottled leaves. I don't know how to proceed at all from here, she thought, and I should. I am a middle-aged woman.
It was getting late. She picked up the package from the kitchen table. The postmark said Toulouse. She found scissors and carefully slit the brown paper apart. Inside was a packet of cigarettes, unsealed and then resealed. She pulled the cigarettes out. There was no note, but on each cigarette a single French word was printed: plain, domestic words that ordered and reordered, told a different tale each time. Monday, coffee, bed, chair, cheese, blanket, Wednesday, bread, Burgundy, Thursday, gra.s.s, cemetery. One cigarette had initials on it, her mother's maiden name, K.M. Rae thought of her mother smoking random dreams at the bottom of the garden. Over time the famous year in France had fragmented into single words, brittle as shreds of old tobacco. She looked at a cigarette that said L.F. de R. for a long time before she put it in her pocket.
It was getting late. Rae ran a bath and got into it before the enamel had finished warming up. She lay there until the water was nearly cold, occasionally flapping her hands over the surface of the water. She thought of Sheila in her waxed jacket doing battle against the wind, the wind lifting her curling hair away from her forehead, her profile dark and intent.
Women do it all the time, pack up, leave, move in with their pastoral care officers, their nutritionists, physiotherapists, local health-food co-op owners; women who touch their skins and minister to their bodies and minds. Daily, thousands of women arrive with squashy bags full of sweatshirts at the front door of a place that isn't yet home. There was nothing to it. But how could she do that, if she did not really know what she felt? Why was it so hard to feel anything at all?
She dried herself and dressed and went out to find a few things in the garden to take up to her father. Rae's mother had loved flowers, but not in an ordered way. The garden was filled with ma.s.ses of nodding aguilegia seeded in clumps. The dried sticks of the flower heads stood above the scarred and dying leaves. Rae clipped some late heartsease and looked at their inquiring faces, wondering what her mother would have said about her father being in a home, and what she would have said about Sheila.
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