by Tracy Farr
‘Love, you’re wet!’
‘There’s soup on the stove if you want it.’
‘Let me hang your jacket up –’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘And bread. Here –’
‘Yeah, okay. Thanks.’
Kurt sits at the table, lets Iris put soup and bread in front of him, lets her rest her hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, without shrugging her off. The noise of the kitchen wraps around him, warm but somehow annoying, like a wool jumper with a scratchy label. He’s aware of the notebook in the pocket of his jacket; the weight of it. He closes his eyes against the chatter in the kitchen. He can see the panels he drew at the bay. The boy, the dog, the dark shape in the water; the rain, the disappearing, the panic; the lifted chin, the eyes turning away, the dog’s turning tail.
Luce creaks through the door, lets it bang behind her. Kurt is sitting, eating; they all are, around the table. Iris half gets up, asks her all the food questions. No, she doesn’t want soup. Yes, she’s sure she doesn’t want soup. Yes, she’s fine. No, she’s not hungry. Yes, she had a big breakfast. Yes (again), she’s fine. She stands just inside the back door, her hands in the pocket of her hoody, one clutched around the stone, one around the phone.
In the old lounge chair on the other side of the table, Kristin sits nested in cushions on a crocheted rug, the baby on her (of course, as always). Kristin lifts the baby, flips her in her arms like handballing a footy, or rolling a ball of dough. She presses the baby against her skin. The baby bumps at her, like a blind puppy.
Luce shudders, rolls her eyes. The whole room smells of baby. She goes to the stove and stands with her hands out towards it, an excuse to turn her back on Kristin and the baby, on all of them.
‘Hi, darl. Where are you? Have you left yet?’
Iris talks too loudly into the phone. It statics in the gaps, the response audible but unintelligible, so there’s only one side of the conversation.
‘Yeah, I know, we pretty much drove into it. It was amazing! It poured all night. It’s eased a bit now, but not for long –’
‘Is that Mart? Tell her Evie’s coming tonight. She emailed me.’
‘Paul says Evie’s coming tonight. I know! Did you –’
Luce gets a bowl from the cupboard, lifts the lid off the soup on the stove, clatters it.
‘Tell her Evie’s bringing the new man.’
‘Did you hear that? He said she’s bringing the man-child.’
Luce slops soup into the bowl, clashes the lid back on the pot. She rummages in the cutlery drawer until she finds a spoon she likes. She takes her time. She tings the spoon against the rim of the bowl as she takes each mouthful of soup.
‘Alright, well don’t leave too late. The roads’ll be slippery.’
‘Take it slow, sis!’
‘Did you hear that? Okay. Drive carefully. See you soon.’
Iris moves the phone from the side of her face, holds it in front of her at armslength, peers at it, does a thing with her mouth, taps the screen, pushes the button, puts the phone on the table.
‘That was Marti.’
Luce looks up, catches Kurt’s eye. She puts her tongue in behind her bottom lip, puffs it out fat and dumb, widens her eyes, wobbles her head. Kurt cracks a smile. Luce smiles back, but she keeps her head facing down to her soup, so no one else can see.
Stitch the Diamonds
Stitch a hand of cards to mark the baby’s Diamond clan. Stitch the first two cards for Jacko and Alba (he’s Jack o’ Diamonds, she’s the Queen). Stitch Auntie Marti as a Joker (Joker’s wild, for any card); stitch her blonde-haired, blue-eyed, laughing; make her laugh a red-stitched smile. That makes Paul another Joker; make him Marti’s twin, her pair. Edge his face with rust-red beard, and stitch it salt-and-pepper grey. Stitch Kristin as another Queen (of hearts, of course), and complete the hand: full house.
Rock paper scissors
They’re all around the house, now, all of them. Each of them’s busy, focused now on packing: there’s newspaper and scissors, packing tape and boxes, bubble wrap and bin bags. They unpack shelves and cupboards, and then – like building a drystone wall, or playing Tetris, judging space and place, rotating each piece to position it perfectly – remake them as careful layers in boxes as they go.
Iris watches Luce, on the other side of the room. Luce has stopped packing books into boxes and sits, reading, one hand on the book in front of her, the other poised above the page, moving between the page and her face, hovering, where it needs to be. Only her hand – this hand – moves. The rest of her – the core of her, and her legs, her shoulders – is still. There’s a stillness and measure to Luce, solid as rock, marble-smooth. A beautiful measure, timeless and forever.
Luce sits on the floor, her back against the sofa, her feet on the low table, a book propped against her knees, on her thighs. Iris has given everyone jobs. Iris has given her boxes to fill.
‘Just pack everything. We don’t have time to sort things. The movers are coming on Tuesday. Make sure you label the boxes.’
The empty, flattened boxes that Iris brought down in the back of her car are piled in the hallway, with rolls of that old-lady-undies-brown tape. Luce has filled one box already, written on the top of it OLD BOOKS, in big letters; then, slightly smaller, PACKED BY; then, biggest of all, LUCY FLINT. She took longer to write the label than she did to pack the box.
She looks up, across the room, at Iris and Kurt at the table, wrapping, packing. They look busy. Kurt stands and tapes a box closed. There’s the skritch sound of the tape, high-pitched, like ripping your eardrums apart. She closes her eyes until the noise stops.
She’s onto the bottom shelf of the bookcase now, halfway through her second box. The book she has just opened has a cover of thick brown card, dark with time, almost chocolate in colour. It smells of dust, the smell of secondhand bookstores. Iris told her that that smell is the smell of a fungus, that lives on paper. Luce opens the book – the cover opens out into her, hits her in the chest, before she folds it carefully over to her left – and, on the first page is a photograph, and three spaces where photographs must have been, but are no longer. There are mounts to show the corners of the missing photographs, and writing below where they would have sat. She turns the pages, more interested in the gaps than the photographs that remain in place.
Iris is wrapping glasses and china in newspaper, nesting them in boxes. Kurt stacks a taped box to one side, then sits back down, across the table from Iris. He’s been helping her pack, but he’s been sidetracked; first by the words on the newspaper (he sat, quietly, reading for some time), and then by the actions of wrapping, of cutting: paper, scissors, reminding him of rock.
‘It’s universal. There’s some version of it in most cultures. Different names, of course. Different objects. But it’s fundamentally the same. Always three things. Three’s just one of those numbers. There’s something about primes, but three in particular.’
He talks with his hands. He leans in, animated, to make a point to her, then leans back, flings his head sideways. His hair arcs back, uncovers his face.
‘It’s circular, never-ending, that’s the beauty of it. No one thing wins over every other thing. Any choice you make might win, or it might lose. There’s the potential to win with each choice, each move, but there’s also the potential, each move, to lose.’
He makes a fist with his left hand, pumps it up and down three times, then opens his hand out flat, palm down, thumb tucked in tight at the side.
‘Even paper can win. Paper wraps rock.’
He forms a fist with his right hand, folds his left hand around it, brings both hands in under his chin.
Iris forms her first two fingers into a V, and scissors them at Kurt’s wrapping hand.
‘Chop-chop. Scissors cut paper.’
Kurt’s right hand, rock-fist, nudges Iris’s scissorhand.
‘Rock blunts scissors.’
Iris wraps her other hand around Kurt�
��s.
‘And paper wraps rock, again.’
Kurt leaves his hand there, big in Iris’s smaller hand but nonetheless enveloped, for a moment, before withdrawing it, placing both hands, one on top of the other, flat on the table in front of him. Iris had leaned forward to reach Kurt’s hands; she leans back now, leans back into the chair. She wants to hold him, but instead she gives him space.
She remembers: a long flight home, Kurt sitting between Iris (in the window seat) and Paul (the aisle), Kurt with a Lego alien robot that he took apart and put back together, reconfiguring it, over and over.
‘More stable,’ he’ d said to himself, planting the three limbs on the tray table, jiggling the tray table up and down, back and forth, making a little quake.
Angry eyes peered over the seat in front of him.
‘Sorry,’ Iris said to the angry eyes, and put her hand on Kurt’s hand.
‘Don’t rock it, sweetie. It’s annoying the people in front.’
‘Stableman! Rock. And. Ro-o-o-ll!!’
Kurt rocked the plastic figure back and forth, making rumbling noises. Iris could hear the angry-eyes-woman hissing.
‘Can Stableman do paper scissors rock?’
‘Don’t be silly. He hasn’t got hands. He’s got tools. Impendages.’
‘Ap-pendages’
‘Ar-pendages. He’s got ar-pendages.’
Kurt formed his left hand into a closed fist, pumped it up and down three times, bobbing the plastic man in unison. On the third bounce, his left fist opened to a two-fingered V, fingers snapping scissorlike at the plastic figure’s head.
‘Stableman beats scissors!’
He crashed the figurine onto his hand, ‘Ah! Argh! Take that, scissorhand!’ then, predictably, ‘Ow.’
Iris reached over and took his hand in between her hands, rubbed it, then lifted it to her mouth and kissed it.
‘Mu-u-um.’
He’ d wriggled his hand away from hers. She let it go, patted it as he rested it on the table. She grabbed Stableman from Kurt, planted a kiss on his head. Kurt rubbed the plastic helmeted head on his t-shirt, erasing her kiss.
She remembers when he was a tiny boy, a teenage boy, and everything in between. He will remain her tiny boy. Even now, when he towers over her. He has towered over her since he was thirteen. She still thinks of him as tiny, and soft. A tiny boy holding onto her hand.
She will always see the little boy in him, not the man. This is what she struggles against. And this is what she struggles never to lose. Never lose that tiny boy, for only she remembers him. He is hers forever, that tiny boy. She cherishes him, and holds tight his hand. She feeds him and comforts him, stills his racing mind with her finger, tracing a circle on his forehead. She stills his fears, his overreaction to what he imagines might happen. His is an active mind; is and ever has been. She formed it. She was there when his imagination formed; she created the environment in which it grew. She is to blame (or thank).
She can still hear him, his boy’s voice, him as a child. She kept his answering machine message on the phone long after anyone ever left a message, long after it was needed. His not-yet-broken voice, that she could phone, and speak to.
Twenty-one years has gone in a flash. Imagine another twenty-one, and another. She has lived for nearly three twenty-ones. She remembers life before Kurt. He cannot imagine life without her. They have co-existed for all of his life. There can be no memory where experience has not lived. Only inference. Imagination.
The rain starts up again, hard on the roof, percussing the heart of the house. Each of them looks up at the noise, makes an O with their mouth at the ceiling.
The thing with feathers
‘I found this in the bedroom, on the bookshelf, when we got here. It’s so slim, it was between some other books, you know, kind of hidden? I’ve been reading it. It’s all about maps and land and love, somehow. He’s a poet from the sixties, seventies. I looked him up this morning, on my phone. He was maybe a little famous, back then, but a little mysterious. He published as Zigi, this one name only, and everyone thought he was ripping off Bowie. Or maybe he was Bowie. But it turned out he was this German-Israeli guy, and Zigi was just a nickname he went by, short for Zigmund.’
Iris and Kristin are sitting at the table in the kitchen. Paul and Kurt have gone to get beer and wine for the party; Luce is in her room. Iris pours more tea from the pot, takes another piece of shortbread from the tin. Kristin drinks from an enormous glass of water, and eats carrot sticks that she has cut and assembled on a plate in front of her. The baby sleeps on Kristin, in the green fabric sling looped across her front. All Iris can see of the baby is a thin crescent of head, silky hair dark against the soft, padded curve of the sling. Kristin rests her hand on the book on the table in front of her as she speaks. She is intense, staring; but Kristin is often intense, staring, and Iris barely notices it any more, in the same way that she barely notices the overlay of Kristin’s faint accent, her oddly placed words, as she speaks.
‘The poems are good. They’re beautiful, simple. He was – it turns out – a scientist. A geologist. The centre of his book of poems is a haiku cycle based around this idea of fault. But it turns out to be a literal fault, a geological one, that he worked on as a young student, as a geologist. So, like this: “The most common shape / of the fault trace is an arc / concave to the north”. This is one of the haiku, but it’s about the geological fault, you know, that he actually worked on. He made a map of it. He “mapped it”.’ Kristin wiggles her fingers in the air. ‘This is what you call it? When these poems were first published, when this book came out, the fact that he was a scientist, that wasn’t known. That only happened quite recently. I think maybe he’s been rediscovered, you know? According to the internet, anyway. I just really like the poems, though, the science–art thing. And the German–English thing is interesting.’
‘Did he write them in German?’
‘I dunno. I think in English. But maybe that’s why I like them, because they’re not written in his first language. There’s a click, you know, a something, a missingness in the language. It’s maybe something about the distance between the German and the English, the distance between science and poetry. Lots of distance, of displacement. And yet so many connections. It somehow works. There’s something about displacement that makes good poetry, I think.’
Kristin picks up the book, hands it to Iris. It is slim, so slim, in the way that only poetry books are. Slimmer than a notebook. Underneath the book’s title – The Hope Fault – the cover shows a map, in black and white, overprinted in pale orange. Lines and marks. She turns the book over. At bottom right is a tiny, blurry photograph, black and white, of a young man with dark hair, thick 1960s glasses of a type that is fashionable again now. His finger is raised to his mouth in a pose that’s coquettish. Iris peers in at the small, grainy photograph, trying to see the detail, but the image becomes more unclear, resolves into dots, so she can hardly make sense of it.
She flicks through the book, closes it, turns it over so the front cover faces upwards, holds it towards Kristin, who waves it away.
‘Oh, I’m done with it. You should read it. You’ll like it.’ Kristin leans in close to her, puts her finger on the cover of the book. ‘So. Our thinking is so fucked – you know, we’ve become so desperate – that last night we were even talking about this.’ She points, jabs her finger again at the book, at its title. ‘For a name. For the baby. Hope.’
‘Mmm. Hope’s nice. A nice name.’
‘Oh Iris, come on. Hope. Hope Diamond.’
‘Oh.’ Iris splutters, nearly spits out her tea. ‘Oh, no.’
‘I know. Can you imagine? It’s like a porn name. Or a Bond girl. But we didn’t even notice until we’ d almost decided, you know, almost talked ourselves into it.’
‘Oh, I would’ve told you. Or someone would’ve. It’s too bad, Hope’s a nice name. Old-fashioned, in that good way. Like Faith. Or Charity.’
‘Yeah. Well, the
thing is, it made us decide to decide.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, we thought while we’re here – all of us, here in the house – we should do it. Name her. What better time, you know?’
‘But you haven’t decided on the name?’
‘We haven’t. Not quite.’ She sips her water, rearranges the carrot sticks on her plate. ‘But we need to, anyway. You know, they give you only three months, and you must do it. Register. So we will. This weekend. Paul and I talked about it last night, for ages, after Paul came to bed. We want to have a naming party. Sort of a ceremony. On Monday, before we close the house up. What do you think? Is that okay?’
‘God, of course!’
‘Just simple, just all of us, family, you know? Maybe outside, if the rain ever stops.’
‘I’ll make a cake. Pat it and prick it and mark it with B.’
‘Bee?’
‘It’s a nursery rhyme. On top of the cake. B for Baby.’
‘Ah, Baby. Not for much longer.’ Kristin’s hand drifts to the baby’s head, rests there lightly. She dips forward and kisses the baby’s forehead, almost as if she doesn’t realise she’s doing it.
They’ve all called Kristin and Paul’s baby Baby for so many months that Iris has come to think of this as her name. But Baby needs her own name. Names are important, Iris thinks. Long ago, a name was a magical offering. Spinning straw into gold, guessing the names of sprites and goblins and otherworlders, that’s a thing of the past, of myth. The world doesn’t work that way any more. And yet, a thing – a person – isn’t quite itself if it’s nameless, or un-named, or wrong-named.
‘Oh.’ Kristin has her hand inside the sling, checks the whimpering baby. ‘You’re wet. Come on, little Hope Diamond.’