Part 6
Rae's father had been at medical school with Sheila's father, so it was a.s.sumed that the two girls would get along. At school Sheila had been an aggressive hockey player, often getting called out for having her stick raised too high. She was at her best at school camps, making bivouacs and jumping into cold rivers with her clothes on. In cla.s.s she fought with her teachers, struggled against their facts and their requirements, and their sheer stupidity. Her burning anger with the world gave her a kind of power. Many of the girls felt it and avoided her.
Not long after Sheila started school, Rae's parents invited Sheila and her father to lunch. Sheila had been patently bored. When the adult talk turned from fire alarms to stomach cancer, the girls asked to be excused. They went outside, following the path into the orchard. The quince leaves hung motionless in the warm autumn air, and walnuts in their twisted black cloaks lay ready to be picked up off the ground before the rats that lived in the hedge could get at them.
One of Rae's ch.o.r.es was to gather up the cooking apples and put them in a basket in the corner of the kitchen. On Friday nights, Rae's mother would sit behind the scales, slicing the apples with a firm hand. Rae had not collected apples for days and a strong wind had scattered them on the ground. Sheila picked up an apple and threw it against the garage wall. The apple hit the bricks with a satisfying thunk, split in two and dropped off, leaving behind a few fragments. She picked up another and another, smashing the apples against the brick wall with fierce joy. Sheila is happy, thought Rae. Sheila is having a good time at my house. She felt proud to be pleasing Sheila when no one else could, so she stood and watched while Sheila went about gathering all the apples from the orchard and even pulling some off the trees and throwing them against the wall.
On Sunday afternoon Rae's mother was raking leaves for a bonfire. The smoke lay curled about the trees.
"Will you look at what those boys have done to my apples? It's a crying shame. All my apples." She pointed at the bruised and smashed fruit lying under the garage wall, the brown fragments clinging to the bricks.
"That's terrible," said Rae. She went inside to learn her French verbs. For a while after the apple incident, Rae avoided Sheila in the school corridor.
Rae sat in the chair on the porch and looked out at the grey lines of the sea. On Monday she would make her lame excuses to Sheila, and their friendship and everything else would be broken. All she could think of was the sadness in her mother's voice as she looked at the smashed apples. And in the same voice she could hear her mother asking, where is love in all this? Except that her mother had never said anything of the sort.
That afternoon she found her father in a sombre mood.
"It was my fault Rae. I killed her," he said.
"Dad, you had a stroke. There was nothing you could do."
Rae's mother had died shortly after her arrival at the hospital. It was a blessing, everyone had said so.
"Dad, I'm thinking of going away for a break. Just a fortnight. Will you be all right without me? My friend Sheila says she will look in on you. You remember Sheila's father Rex Haworth from medical school?"
"Fine physician."
Rae had no idea whether Sheila would agree to it.
"So where are you going off to Rae?"
"Mum's cigarettes arrived the other day, and I thought I might go to France." She tried to make it sound as casual as going to the beach.
"That's a long way from here. What do you want in France dear?"
"I want to tell that French woman about mother."
"Who?"
"You know, the cigarette friend, the flatmate from the Sorbonne."
"Well you're not going to find her, dear," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because it wasn't a woman."
"It wasn't a woman?"
"No. I think you'll find it was a chap." With difficulty Rae's father turned his head and looked out the window.
"Oh," said Rae.
She turned and looked with him out at the wet rhododendrons. Raindrops were making their way down the pane, separating and colliding and separating again. So change was possible, even after death. Deep inside Rae a great bird lifted off and the land below fell away. She was high above the white caps and there was no sound but the wind.
"Will you be all right Dad?"
"Yes. No. I don't know. You go on. I'll still be here."
"Dad, are you sure?"
"I suppose so. Does this Sheila friend of yours make scones?"
"I'll ask Dad, I'll ask."
Neptune's Necklace.
THE TRACK TO THE salt marsh was crowded with lupins poised to shed their seeds with a twisted cracking of each blackened pod. Once on the sand, Hattie let Sh.e.l.ley off his leash and set out towards the channel at the harbour entrance. Sh.e.l.ley ran ahead, tongue out, weaving in and out of the tide lines as he sniffed the morning news. There had been a storm in the night. Papery sea lettuce and the green nubbled beads of Neptune's necklace lay slung about the flats in greater quant.i.ties than usual. More rain would come around eleven o'clock, and more again in the afternoon. Around five it might clear up. It was always this way.
When Hattie reached the end of the flats, she turned to walk parallel with the channel towards the sea. There she sensed the usual clutch of child-sized shades running before her along the beach, shouting at each other to come and look at a dead mollymawk where it had washed up against a piece of driftwood. Obediently she also stopped to look at the tide-rinsed bird, noting the sand already banked up against the sharp curve of its useless beak. Hattie felt the presence of the long-dead children every morning, and every morning she had to stop and wait until the children's cries faded and her heart rate slowed. She turned towards the sea, and, frowning, concentrated on a couple of dis...o...b..bulated sea slugs lolling like t.u.r.ds in the tide. Further along, bouquets of sea tulips lay tossed up among the confetti of sh.e.l.ls. She pa.s.sed them by; she had painted the fleshy heads sagging on their goose necks often enough.
Nearby, in the depths of the channel grew an entire field of sea tulips, endlessly flowering and feeding in the sea currents. Funny things, sea tulips. They start off as animals and end up as plants. Hattie often imagined the pattern that the stems and heads might make en ma.s.se, waving in the depths of the channel. She had a weakness for pattern and she knew it; wherever three or more objects appeared together, well, that created significance, even if it was accidental. Sometimes she would deny herself pattern; deny the repet.i.tions that created rhythm and the links that made narrative. She would try to paint the object as itself alone and not seen in relation to any other thing, except her own eyes. Other times she fell off the wagon entirely and silk-screened whole rolls of wallpaper just to get the patterns out of her system. Some days she did nothing but sip her cognac by the fire.
Hattie. Her real name was Heliotrope. Her mother had been an artist's model back when there were only two models in the whole city of Dunedin and all decent New Zealanders considered modelling to be tantamount to prost.i.tution. Heliotrope. What a name for a child. It was preposterous, redolent of ragged satin undergarments strewn over an ancient odorous carpet. Hattie, on the other hand, was not a bad name for an artist, and Hattie had decided to be an artist at the age of six.
Now Hattie was seventy-three. She had yet to fall upon getting out of bed, and she had no children to worry about her. She had a good dog, a good stick, a seldom used lock on the door, and no external display of rot, barring the wrinkles and the rough patches. She had already decided to move into town once she could no longer make her morning walk, but she could not really see herself studying a hand of bridge in an overheated lounge decorated with the flesh-coloured spears of gladioli in vases.
The ghostly children scattered and disappeared. Ahead Hattie caught sight of the last three in a chain of linked dredge buckets, long since beached after the end of their useful life hauling silt out of the shipping channel. Occasionally, after a good storm, a section of the buckets would surface in bas-relief against the pale sand, hefty and mottled like the bellies of chained ogres or the vertebrae of long buried dinosaurs. Hattie loved the dredge buckets, mainly because she never knew when they would appear. For months she had wanted to paint a dredge bucket triptych. Now she stepped up to take a closer look at the s.p.a.ckled line of the sand around the edges of the hulks where they lay submerged in the sand.
She patted her pockets and cursed. No sketchbook. Irritated, she walked around the buckets, memorizing for later.
When she got back to the house Hattie quickly drew what she could remember of the dredge buckets. The most difficult thing was catching their weight in relation to the sand, which at one moment could lie waterlogged and banked up, and at another could blow away. By the time she had finished, the mid-morning clouds had rolled in from the sea and the rain had begun.
While she drank her coffee she looked out the window and considered the childish shades. Once a day she permitted herself to think about them, no more. Even once a day was too much, by some people's standards. The shades were girls, all of them, and one of the shades was Hattie's daughter, running ahead, the first to tumble shrieking and splashing into the waves. The other girls shouted for her to wait, while they scrambled over the dunes behind her. Far behind, two mothers ambled along the beach, towels slung about their necks, linked tennis shoes dangling from their wrists, slowed down with baskets of iced buns and fruit, spare sunhats, seaweed strands and sh.e.l.ls. Hattie remembered that the mothers had been discussing varieties of cooking apple.
She poked at the fire. The grate was small and it never gave off a great deal of heat, but the colour always warmed her, as did the bronze velvet curtain that screened off her bedroom. Absently she looked out the window. At the time, she really had been very good friends with the mother of the other two girls. They had congratulated themselves on sharing the same values. Neither of them had any time for husbands or fathers. Painting, baking bread, sprouting mung beans in jars on windowsills, knitting chunky jumpers, and being ready to swoop in like hungry petrels to scoop their children out of difficulty; this was what was important. In the end, they turned out to have nothing in common at all.
The rain had settled in for the afternoon, slanting along in front of the headland, striating the reddish rock and the green slopes on top with grey. Without seeing them she knew that the houses in the settlement looked like wet boulders lying close to the land.
Sh.e.l.ley was barking. A couple, a boy and a girl, students perhaps, were coming down the driveway. They were hurrying, holding a large rust-coloured jumper over their heads for shelter.
Hattie saw them pa.s.s the side of the house, heard the squelching of their sandshoes on the gravel. She held still while she waited for the knock at the door and wondered whether she would answer it. She moved into the kitchen and took a quick glance out the window at them. Young and lithe as eels, the couple stood on the step laughing in the wet air that was no discomfort, since they were together. The girl's dark hair stuck to her cheeks in licks and inverted question marks. The straps of a purple bra plainly showed around the edges of her robin's egg blue tank top. She wore a necklace of seaweed. Hattie decided to open the door for the sake of the necklace, if not for the colour of the shirt.
The girl spoke first.
"Sorry to bother you," she said, "but we were wondering if we could use your phone? We forgot ours. The mini won't start."
Hattie had owned a mini herself once. She still remembered with pleasure the cresting waves of mechanical sound between the gear changes and the flashing of the speckled tarmac in the road pa.s.sing by through the holes in the floor.
"Of course. Do come in out of the rain." She held the door open for them. They wiped their sandy shoes on the mat and came into the galley kitchen, glancing around at the low slanted ceiling, taking in the cracked enamelled sink and the leaking tap. There was sand on the backs of their necks from where they had been lying in the sea gra.s.s before it began to rain.
The boy dropped the wet jumper on the floor by the door.
"I'll just leave these here." The girl had picked up a bunch of sea tulips attached to a mussel sh.e.l.l. She placed them on top of the wet jumper where the sandy heads lolled back like pale chunks of meat.
"This way to the telephone," said Hattie.
The students followed her up into the sitting room where the long windows on either side of the fireplace let in strips of light and a view of cabbage trees threshing the grey sky. The couple stood with their backs to the fire, rubbing their hands together and casting surrept.i.tious glances around the room and into the studio beyond.
"It was only an eight-hundred-dollar car," the girl said, "I hope they don't have to tow us back into town. We were chased by a seal," she said happily.
"That would be Victor the sea lion. He does get territorial," said Hattie. She showed the boy where the phone was. He dialled and spoke. His voice sounded impatient as well as apologetic. She could see that he was a good boy, even if he did not take particular care over the jumper that his mother had knitted for him.
"We'll be late for dinner," he said, turning to look at the girl.
"With his mother," said the girl, blushing. "Are you an artist? It's so wonderful to be in the house of a real artist. I'm studying art history. I have to do an essay on someone contemporary and maybe I could come back one day and talk to you about your work, and your influences?" The words came hurrying out, ending in a raised squeak.
"I'm usually working at this time of day," said Hattie. "I don't have any influences. But feel free to look around."
The girl blushed again. She stepped up into the studio where Hattie saw her taking in the shelf of maquettes, the notebooks recording the heights of the tides, the sh.e.l.ls and the sea gla.s.s, the bones and the buoys, the driftwood and the comparative logs tracking the heights of the tides and the patterns of the seasons, all in the attempt to make sense of the anomaly that had overtaken the rhythm one summer afternoon.
"I'll make tea," she said.
She was annoyed to find her hands shaking as she filled the kettle. It b.u.mped awkwardly against the tap as she filled it. The girl came back in. She seemed tall in the galley kitchen.
"I'm sorry if we have disturbed you. Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked.
"You can find the cups if you like," said Hattie. "I like your necklace," she added, trying to make up for not having any influences. Tied to a piece of twine, the fresh fan of nubbled sea beads lay at the girl's neck like a damp hand. "You did a good job of tying it together. My daughter always used fishing tackle to attach the ones she made me, but they do tend to come apart after they dry up."
"Thank you," said the girl, laughing. "Kevin made it for me. We are in love," she added shyly. "Gosh, I don't know what made me say that. Is that your daughter?" She pointed at a discoloured snapshot of a little girl waving a large piece of seaweed.
Hattie nodded.
"She was one of three," Hattie began, and she saw the girls smacking the water with the flat of their hands to make it spray up at each other, heard them shrieking. Over the years she had painted these children in so many different ways, descending among the sea tulips as water babies, naked except for fins, or bedecked in bra.s.sy oval leaves like weedy sea dragons. She had painted them as adolescent albatrosses that have left the cliffs, never to return to land. She had painted them as the girl guides they were, gifted at tying knots and at making cups of tea, but unable to solve the puzzle of the currents.
The sound of the rain on the tin roof slowed to a series of dull raps. The young man hurried in.
"They'll be coming soon. We should wait by the car," he said. The girl nodded.
She put down her barely sipped tea.
"She was one of three girls," Hattie finished. They were not listening. We are in love, the girl had said. Why not, for once, leave it at that?
Hattie stood watching them go. At the end of the driveway they stopped and glanced back at the house. She ought to have turned away by now. But she could not take her eyes off the girl, the same age as her granddaughter might have been, and the boy, who might have been her boyfriend, and the jumper, which she might have knitted for him. To that girl, I am nothing but a tissue of influences, she thought. She took off her gla.s.ses. The rusty jumper and the eggsh.e.l.l blue tank top stood out against the dusty darkness of the macrocarpa hedge and the strip of gra.s.s beside the road. I will paint them, she thought, as a tartan rug for picnics, and lying under it, a sea lion.
Hattie collected the cups and turned the tap onto the dishes in the sink. The afternoon had cleared up nicely. Soon the students would be back in town, the sand rinsed off their feet. Perhaps the girl would say, we were chased by a seal, and the boy would correct her, it was a sea lion, and then mother would say, when I was young a rogue current pulled three girls out to sea there and they all drowned; it's a pity you were late, the ca.s.serole has all dried out; and the boy would reply, taste's fine to me, mum. Then the young ones would look at each other, already in a hurry to get back to their flat, to the sagging line of washing, to the bed propped up on beer crates.
Hattie was in the middle of lacing her boots when an earthquake shook the windowpanes. Annoyed, she moved to stand in the doorway while she listened to the sea gla.s.s and the bones rattle on the shelves. Go for higher ground, the civil defence page in the back of the phone book said. Don't go down to the sea to watch. Hattie never paid any attention. Tsunami or not she would go down to sketch the dredge buckets before the light faded. Let any old tsunami take her; just let it roll her into the underwater fields. Wasn't the better part of her there already?
Scottish Annie.
ON SAt.u.r.dAYS AT FIVE Archie McLean visits the retirement home to take requests at the piano. Each week the seniors try to trip him. "Robins and Roses," they'll say, naming some old tune that they used to dance to on the wind-up. They can't catch Archie out. Archie knows them all and he sings in that old-fashioned radio way, leaning back on the piano stool, nodding to the ladies. At the end, he opens the piano lid right up and plays an extra fast b.u.mblebee song. I'm usually out in the garden when Archie gets back after the tea and scones, and then he leans over the hedge to tell me about it.
"Well Ruby," says Archie, "I think we wowed them today." It always makes me laugh. You would think he was a whole orchestra the way he talks. Archie is a nice young man. Genteel, my mother would have said. We play Scrabble on Wednesday nights. He's been my neighbour for nearly fifteen years now. Back in March, he celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and I made an eggless chocolate cake, because Archie doesn't believe in exploiting the hens. He served me a slice and said, "so when's your birthday, Ruby?"
"Get away with you," I said, "a lady doesn't admit to her age until she's in for a telegram from the Queen. All I'm saying is I'm not old enough to be your mother. Have some more cake."
Last week, when he had finished toting up the score for the word umbilical, Archie told me that he has to move, because his landlord wants to sell the house. I was very sorry to hear that. Archie has been a great friend to me.
After mother died, three years ago next February, Archie got me started volunteering at the retirement home. He said it was better than hiding in the potting shed. At the time, I said that I wasn't hiding and that I'd think about it. Now I take the seniors out on wee trips in the car. Archie is the piano man and I am the driving jukebox. They tell me where they want to go, and I take them, within four hours and within reason. Often they like to go back to where they were born, or where they've had picnics in the past. One afternoon I drove ninety-year-old w.i.l.l.y Callaghan to Oamaru. We idled outside a renovated villa on Vine Street while Mr. Callaghan wept for the loss of the corrugated iron sheets on the roof and the front room where he had been born. I said that a nice conservatory full of tomatoes was nothing to cry about. Still, I let him have a good old weep, and then we went for an ice cream and came home. It takes me a year to get through all the seniors, so some of the older ones don't come more than once.
When I arrived up at the home last week, Mrs. Webster was waiting for me in the foyer, all wrapped up warm for her outing. She always wears mohair cardies that her niece from up Ranfurly way knits for her. The light catches in the hairs.
"You're glowing, Mrs. Webster," I said, and she was pleased. Mohair keeps your chest warm, but it's not cheap, and it gets stringy. Better to mix it with a bit of wool.
"Anyway," I said, "where are we off to today?" Mrs. Webster wanted to go to the nursery at Blueskin Bay, to buy a miniature rose for her bedroom. She had a coupon from the paper. They do love coupons. So off we went, out through Pine Hill and over the motorway to the nursery. She got a wee apricot rose to match her curtains. I almost got one too, but then I thought it was silly to get over-excited about plants that don't survive the winter.
Mrs. Webster was sitting in the car looking at the rose bush on her lap. Then she looked at me quite shyly.
"Do you think we could take the road along the coast, through Seacliff?" she asked.
"Of course we can, Mrs. Webster," I said. "My wish is your command." So away we went, winding along above the sea, past the rabbit holes in the yellow clay banks and the twisted macrocarpa trees along the fence lines.
"Seacliff always makes me sad," I said, just to make conversation. It's the kind of thing that people say when they drive through Seacliff. The paddocks there fall so steeply towards the sea that it's hard to tell how a sheep might hold on in the wind, let alone a farmer on a bike. And you think you might hear some ghost from the asylum wailing away in the breeze. It was a grand old place, the asylum at Seacliff, majestic and crenellated. They had proper lunatics in those days.
"Just here, Ruby dear, drive me up here," said Mrs. Webster, "up towards the asylum, to those trees at the top of the road." We stopped by a gate where there was nothing to see, just an old car with no headlights, buried in the bushes, and a pile of bricks to show where a house once stood.
"I was born here," said Mrs. Webster. "The back door faced the asylum, and the verandah ran all around the house. And up the hill under the eucalyptus trees there were pa.s.sion fruit vines with purple flowers, all fringed with blue. Every year Mum would take us up to look at the flowers, and she would say, See kids, even in Seacliff. And we would say, even in Seacliff what, Mum? And she always replied, even in Seacliff we can be on a tropical island. She had a lovely laugh, our Mum."
"Shall we walk up and have a look Mrs. Webster?" I said. "Would you like that?" I helped her out of the car and into her coat, found her stick, took her arm. The wind was fierce. Together we took granny steps up the paddock towards the gum trees at the top.
"My mother was known as Scottish Annie," said Mrs. Webster. "She had that kind of bone-china skin that reddens in the southerly wind. She used to stand on the porch shading her eyes with her hand, looking out at the sea, while she sent my sister Milly to get the washing in, quicksticks, before the rain comes. It was a deal of work to keep the five of us washed and mended I can tell you. She did the washing on a Sat.u.r.day, which was considered quite unusual, but that way the boys could help. Johnnie stirred the copper with a big stick. Our Mum didn't do things quite like other people."
Mrs. Webster was looking way out across the ocean. I could tell that she had a story to tell so I let her run. So many of the older ones only have fragments left, but that afternoon Mrs. Webster could still put her hand on the whole thing.
"Our Dad was killed by a coal dray coming down Stafford Street," said Mrs Webster. "Dad rolled right out of the pub and into the road and then the dray came clattering down the hill, and that was that. You might think that the coal merchant would have had the decency to send a load out to the widow, but he didn't.
"Mum let out the paddocks to Mr. Currie to run his cows on. The cows used to come up and look at us through the window. Then our Mum got a job serving hot dinner up at the asylum, but that still wasn't enough, so we got a lodger. His name was Mr. Reginald Hooper. Mr. Hooper was a clean-cut medical resident, neat as a pin, with round spectacles that he polished with a handkerchief that came out of his pocket, and such nice clean nails. He must have wondered what had happened to him, coming into our house with five kids roaring about. But he never said anything and he was as polite as you please, and out of the house early and not back until teatime. We had our tea first, and then Mum would give the lodger his stew and tell us to go away and let the man have his dinner in peace, because he worked in the madhouse all day and he didn't have to live in one too. We called him Mr. Hooper, but Johnnie sometimes called him Dr. Whooping Cough. We thought that was terribly funny.
"Mr. Hooper did his best to be handy about the house, even though Mum would never have asked him to lift a finger. A couple of the big eucalyptus trees up the back had been cut down and when Mr. Hooper came home in the evening he would chop his heart out with his sleeves rolled up and his dark hair flopping about. The first woodpile he made came down in the night. How we laughed. Mr. Hooper bit his lip and went out in the dark to stack it again. He liked to bring in a load and put it by the stove ready to use, and our Mum didn't have the heart to tell him that it would take six months to get the wood half-dry enough for burning.
"Mr. Hooper was nice to us kids too, and he didn't have to be. He brought in gum nuts and put them in a box for the baby to shake. And once, when he saw us watching him put his boots on, he turned his sock into a snake that spoke in a funny voice, and another time he did a shadow show on the wall with his hands-you know, the dove, the old woman, the Turk-all those shapes he could do.
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