Cooee

by Vivienne Kelly

  I can’t remember, now, who rang whom. We always do make peace, though.

  But she’s wrong. I’m not a cold person.

  The business of the rhymes is interesting. Sophie was herself not much older than Liam when she made up that rhyme. With a little help, I admit: still, it was her impetus.

  The children in our family have always done this: made up rhymes. Zoë and I used to hurl them at each other as abuse. Dizzy Izzy, in a tizzy! Doughy Zoë, gone to Moe! Stinky Minky! Mainly pretty meaningless, I suppose, but they were a game we played — in many different versions, in many different places — on and off right through our childhood. I’m not saying they were great poetry, or even minor poetry, but it can’t have done our verbal skills any harm.

  I still remember how stunned I was when Dominic, aged three (am I exaggerating?), cocked his head at me over his messy breakfast toast and chortled: ‘Funny honey, gone all runny!’ It was as if he knew he was participating in an old family tradition. And there was no way he could have known about it.

  I’d never done it with Kate: she was a stolid and unimaginative child and had no interest in wordplay. I rang Zoë to tell her about Dominic and his honey, and we dissolved together in a rare sisterly exhibition of tears and laughter.

  I still, sometimes, find myself haunted by doggerel. The words slide sideways into my mind and shift themselves into pulse and cadence and won’t go away.

  I’m not a cold person.

  Sophie’s interests are expanding. The other day she said: ‘You used to be an architect, didn’t, you, Gandie?’

  ‘Used to be?’ I say, meaning to make a joke of it but perhaps letting it come out more sharply than it should. ‘What is this “used to be”? Are you putting your old Gandie on the scrapheap already?’

  ‘Well, but I mean you used to do it all the time, didn’t you? Not just a couple of days a week.’

  ‘Yes, honey.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? A girl has to do something.’

  ‘Yes, but I mean why did you choose to do that? Why did you decide to be an architect?’

  ‘I thought I’d like it, I suppose.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yes. Very much.’

  ‘Then why? What did you like so much about it?’

  She is persistent, Sophie, in this new phase of hers: I am learning this. She will not be shrugged off. I try to explain it to her. It’s all ancient history: it’s hard to bring it back. It had something to do with the constructing of new things, the excitement of generation, the buzz of creativity. Something, too (let’s be honest), to do with sheer randomness, a friend’s father, an architect himself, suggesting it to me only half seriously. I might never have thought of it for myself, but his suggestion somehow took root and prospered.

  And the drawing, the discipline of it, the precision. I had always wanted to be an artist. I try to describe it to her, this urge to produce wonderful oil paintings, watercolours, even sculptures, to see things nobody else could see, to show that you could see things nobody else could see. I didn’t have the talent. It always seemed to me that I had the first part of it: I could see. But I couldn’t translate the seeing.

  As an architect, however, I could learn to draw: I could do the technical side of things. I might not be able to paint glorious portraits or landscapes, but I could learn perspective, and precision. I could draw little, round shrubs, symmetrical obedient shapes, tiny detail penned in with meticulous care.

  Even now, I don’t use computers much for my sketches. I can do, of course, if I have to. But I choose not to, most of the time; I choose to draw. And I always try to do a watercolour for each project. I love doing the watercolours.

  ‘That’s one of yours, on the wall, isn’t it?’

  It is.

  ‘That was your house, wasn’t it, Gandie? You built it, didn’t you?’

  ‘I designed it, honey, and I lived in it.’

  ‘With Max?’

  ‘Yes, with Max.’

  ‘What was the house called? It had a funny name, didn’t it?’

  ‘Rain. It was called Rain.’

  ‘Why did you call it that?’

  ‘I can’t remember now.’

  Sophie goes over and inspects the sketch. It’s still there, framed, on the wall. God knows I never want to see Rain again as long as I live, but I can’t bear to throw out my painting of it, when it had no history. It was so new, so fresh, it hadn’t even been built, didn’t exist except in my plans and my dreams and my mind’s eye. It shimmered for me then.

  ‘It’s pretty,’ she says, thoughtfully, as if she isn’t quite sure. ‘There’s people in it, Gandie. Look, there’s these two people, holding hands, looking at the house, over at the side. Are they you and Max?’

  ‘No,’ I lie. ‘They’re just two people. I always put people in my sketches. It makes it more fun.’

  ‘This one looks like you. Look, she’s short and thin, and she’s got dark curly hair.’

  I baulk, but silently, at ‘short and thin’: I had petite and lissom in mind.

  ‘It’s a coincidence, honey.’

  ‘The man’s tall. Was Max tall?’

  ‘I suppose so. But those aren’t us; they’re not Max and me.’

  ‘Who are they then?’

  She doesn’t believe me, of course. I’m not sure myself why I’m lying.

  She examines the picture minutely, running her finger over it. It’ll leave a mark on the glass, but I don’t say anything. She’s thinking.

  ‘You always have funny names for things, Gandie. A house called Rain. A dog called Borrow.’

  ‘Well, you know about Borrow.’

  ‘I know. You used to share him with Mum. You used to borrow him, and she’d borrow him back.’

  The dog raises his grizzled old Labrador head and looks at us. He knows he’s being discussed.

  ‘And it was Max who gave him to you? To you and Mum?’

  Dear Christ, the child is relentless!

  ‘Yes, honey, it was Max.’

  She thinks, and then flashes one of her blinding smiles at me. ‘Gandie wears the cloak of Zorro, in a house called Rain with a dog named Borrow.’

  I smile. It’s an effort, but I do smile. But she’s not focusing on me: she’s working on another little flash of creativity. It comes and she smiles again. ‘Lives in a house, for nothing it lacks, with a dog called Borrow and a man called Max.’

  For the rest of the day, into the evening, into bed, the knocking rhythms pursue me, but they’re not Sophie’s rhymes. They’re my rhymes. I don’t know where they come from but I know they’re mine. Doleful and thudding, like a muffled hammer, they hum in my head: Lived and loved in pain and sorrow, in a house named Rain with a dog named Borrow. Lived and loved, pain and sorrow, house named Rain, dog named Borrow.

  Perhaps I am going mad.

  But madness takes its time, evidently, to sneak up on one. I know this from the past. There are the dark times, the times of spiralling down inside the vast slow cyclone, its walls black and unyielding, slipping, slipping all the time, knowing you’re slipping, not able to do anything about it. I’ve got a bit of slipping still to do, I think, before I reach the stage of irretrievable lunacy.

  The endless questioning about the past didn’t stop there.

  Kate swore to me that she wasn’t encouraging it. ‘She’s twelve,’ Kate kept saying, placidly. ‘She’s growing up. She’s taking an interest in all these sorts of things. If you try to shut her up she’ll just think you’re keeping things from her, Mum.’

  Well, aren’t I?

  The next assault concerns not my wedding but Kate’s.

  ‘Well, honey,’ I say. ‘You should ask your mum about that. She’s got a whole album: you must have seen it.’


  Sophie knows this, but it turns out that what she’s after isn’t the formal statement, the embossed frontispiece, the endorsed public announcement.

  ‘I like your photos of Mum’s wedding better, Gandie. They’re not so stiff and posed. Everyone looks happier in them.’

  There’s an irony. The photos in my album were taken by Max, who loved taking photos and had a gift for it. He was good at so many things. This was in pre-digital days, of course; and Max’s camera (like everything else Max owned) was absolute top quality, state of the art. I can’t remember what it was — German, I think. Leica? Whatever. All sorts of special lenses, but he never made a fuss of it: he would sneak up on you and take it before you realised, and then he’d grin at you, and maybe wink, and move on to his next victim.

  The photographs Max took at Kate’s wedding were terrific: I remember when they came back from the developers and I leant over his shoulder as he sorted through them. He was pleased with them; Kate and I were delighted. Sophie has good taste, as always. They have a quickness and vibrancy — and, sometimes, a wit — quite lacking in the official version, in which Kate and Gavin, both self-conscious and gauche anyway, look even more so as the professional carefully poses them, tries to make them appear happy, as they stare at their feet or glance wild-eyed at each other, as if to say: My God, what have I done? Which, to be fair, is not what either of them was thinking. At least, I don’t believe so.

  So we get out the album and flip through. At least, since Max took most of them, I am spared having to look at him — for the most part. There are a few of him. There’s one I took, of him with his arm around Kate, who is looking up at him adoringly. There are a couple of him and me together, me in the fine silky little number I bought specially for the occasion, mother of the bride, floaty soft pink and dark sepia, high strappy heels; Max divinely handsome in his monkey suit. Most men these days have to go and hire a dinner suit for these occasions: Steve certainly did. Max owned his own, beautifully cut. I can’t remember now who took these of us together, who grasped Max’s camera and lined us both up through the delicate hairline sights. We look awfully happy.

  Sophie lingers on them.

  ‘It’s a pretty dress,’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It looks soft as.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Have you still got it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was twelve years ago, darling.’

  She draws a breath and I can see she is working up to something.

  ‘Do you miss Max a lot, Gandie?’

  ‘Yes, honey. Of course I miss him.’

  ‘When will he come back, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know that he will.’

  ‘Did you ever report him?’

  ‘Report him?’ I repeat, confused. What would I have reported him for, I am wondering.

  ‘As a missing person.’

  ‘Oh. No. No, I never did that.’

  ‘But he was missing, wasn’t he? Is missing.’

  ‘I suppose so. In a way.’

  ‘You don’t mind me asking?’

  Why can’t I just say: Sophie, Sophie darling, don’t talk to me about Max. I do mind, I can’t bear it, for Christ’s sake stop it.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Sophie looks at the photo again, traces around the edge of it with her slender, honey-brown finger. Sophie’s like me: fine-boned, olive-skinned; she’s got a tan all year round. She doesn’t appreciate it yet, but she will, when she finds what a saving it is on pantyhose.

  ‘He must come back one day,’ she says. ‘He must come back to you, Gandie.’

  To my appalled horror I feel tears rising to my eyes. I turn the page and see a spread of Kate and Gavin fooling around with the cake, Gavin brandishing the knife in mock threat.

  Sophie giggles. ‘Dad’s such a clown.’

  Well, that’s certainly true.

  When the children were small I would go in from time to time, in the evenings, to check on them — as all parents do, I suppose. Kate would always be asleep, curled up, rosy and boringly angelic. Dominic was frequently awake, ramrod-straight in the bed, his wide eyes glinting darkly.

  ‘Why aren’t you asleep, honey?’ I’d sit down on the side of the bed. Sometimes, if I dared (as I’ve said, Dominic never liked being touched), I would run my hands through his thick dark hair.

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Are you trying?’

  ‘The more you try, the less it happens.’

  That’s true. Insomniac from way back, I know this.

  ‘Have you been playing word games?’ I know this is one of the things he does, when he can’t sleep.

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘Are you worried about anything?’

  ‘No.’

  Eventually I would give up and leave, patting him in what was meant to be a consoling, maternal way. I’d peek in later, on my way to bed. Sometimes, even then, he’d be awake.

  I never knew what he was thinking, though. Not then; not now. I talked to Zoë about it; I asked her advice. This was a rare step, for me: the trouble with asking advice from Zoë was that she gave it. Then she followed it up, to see if you’d done what she’d told you. It wasn’t worth the trouble, asking Zoë what she thought about anything: you knew you would be liable to her swift persecutions, her rampant assaults.

  But I suppose I must have approached her when I was feeling yielding or unconfident, forgetting that the aura of sisterhood was more attractive than the actual experience. Anyway, she was a teacher: she was supposed to understand child psychology. I remember she raised her eyebrows at me.

  ‘You worry about things, don’t you, Minky?’

  ‘Some things.’

  ‘Some things, yes: that’s what I mean.’

  ‘Of course I do. Everybody worries about some things.’

  ‘Well. Children worry, too.’

  ‘He’s three, Zoë.’

  ‘The world is a worrying place, when you’re three.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Use your brains.’

  Well, that was Zoë all over. Use your brains, little sister. Don’t get me to work it out for you.

  It’s always been edgy, my relationship with Zoë. I don’t know that I would call it dysfunctional, entirely. I don’t know enough about what sisterly relationships are usually like to be able to make that judgement. I am five years younger than Zoë, and she’s never let me forget it. I think when I was born she regarded me as a little-sister present, straight from the stork to her, my parents incidental to the transaction.

  My character, my clothes, my moral development, my diet: Zoë studied them all earnestly, and never fell short of her duty when she felt good advice was required. Her shadow, murky and persistent and I suppose well meaning, leans over my childhood: wherever I was, whatever I did, Zoë was there to help things along. There were good parts to this, of course: when I started school, for instance, it was comfortable to know Zoë was around to give Chinese burns to anyone who teased me; Zoë was there to look after me if I was ill, if I fell over in the playground, if I forgot my lunch.

  It was less comfortable, as we grew up, to find Zoë had read my diary (she gave me marks for it), vetoed potential boyfriends (when they rang, she told them I wasn’t home), and insisted on monitoring the sorts of bras I bought. Whenever I complained she always said she did it for my own good, because she loved me.

  She said the same thing, many years later, when I complained about her girlhood interventions. She did them because she loved me. I didn’t disbelieve her. That was precisely the trouble with Zoë: she did things because she loved you. They were awful things, but she did love you, loved you according to her lights and with a total absence of imagination.

  It would have been
far easier to cope with her if she had acted out of malice. Contrary to what many people think, it isn’t malice or evil that causes most of the world’s problems: it’s stupidity — it’s people thinking they know best and not seeing how disastrously wrong they are.

  As I’ve said, we used to make up rhymes when were young, but Zoë’s frequently had an admonitory flavour. I’ve never used rhyming as a means of instruction or inculcation with Sophie: it’s a matter of having fun, of having a giggle and encouraging her to play games with language. It’s a skill she already has and it’ll never do her any harm. Kate is perpetually astounded by it and shakes her head. ‘She’s so clever,’ she says to me, in wonderment. ‘Just like Dominic. He could always do that, too, couldn’t he?’

  Once, when Sophie and I were doing some cooking together, she chanted this to me:

  Great chefs are contumacious,

  Disputatious and pugnacious

  In kitchens that are spacious

  They make soups that are audacious,

  And salads all herbaceous.

  Their desserts are ostentatious

  And their pancakes farinaceous.

  ‘Did she truly make it up on her own?’ Kate asked later.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You didn’t help with any of it? Even the farinaceous bit?’

  ‘It started with the farinaceous bit. She discovered that it was a word that had to do with flour, and she just took it from there.’

  ‘Amazing,’ murmured Kate. ‘Amazing.’

  One of the things Sophie has achieved by the very fact of her existence is to inject a little normality into her extended family. Split as we are by old histories, replete with enmities matured like ripened cheese, we gather at family occasions with an inbuilt propensity to eyeball each other across the room as if battlelines were about to be declared.

  Sophie overcomes these divisions; she traverses the sharp and jagged crevices in our family landscape; she presents to us an image of ourselves as harmonious and ordinary. A regular family, a commonplace and unremarkable group of related people who don’t bicker and simmer, who don’t harbour fetid suspicions or implacable hostilities about each other. It isn’t a bit true, of course: we’re so lost in our dysfunction, so crabbed and twisted by it, that we’ll never emerge from it. It’s like an indelible dye: it’s imbued the fibre and substance of our relationships with its telltale stain.