Homing

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Amelia was absorbed. Marion retreated to sit cross-legged in front of the fire, watching her aunt sort through the pieces that lay heaped on the table and in the woven bowls at her feet.

  A few moments later, Marion heard footsteps behind her and felt firm fingers on the crown of her head. She twisted around to smile up at her other aunt.

  “Hello, Auntie B.”

  Aunt Belle took a hairbrush down from the mantelpiece and started to untangle Marion’s damp hair, teasing out the knots. “Such beautiful hair,” she said.

  Belle was the second-oldest sister. She was less physically toughened than Amelia, softer around the middle. Her face was rounded, her upper arms fleshy and a little sagging. But the two women had the same clear brown eyes, the same air of vigour and resourcefulness. Belle was also dressed in a practical uniform of sandals, loose shirt and slacks, her silvering hair cut into a pageboy bob – the result of Amelia’s more painstaking handiwork with the scissors. Belle did not share her sister’s fascination with smashed china. New pots were her thing. She enjoyed the company of the women in the village, where she ran a craft workshop: local women brought their clay pots to be fired in her kiln, and she arranged for the wares to be transported to town and sold to tourists.

  There had been three sisters, all raised in this wooden house, all buxom and bright-haired. Amelia had helped their father, a GP, in his practice until his death, then later had volunteered at a veterinary clinic. Belle had been a social worker in the town before getting involved in the craft project. Neither of them had ever lived more than an hour’s drive from the beach.

  Of three sisters, only two now remained. Marion’s mother had been the youngest and prettiest, a brilliant child, but not strong. Despite her vital appearance, Celia had been secretly fragile.

  When Celia was only nineteen, Amelia and Belle had started to lose her. So careless. While they were busy on their energetic projects, their younger sister had floated away to the city. There she’d studied drama, sung cabaret, had love affairs, produced a child before she was twenty-three. She’d return to the beach house every now and then – always sparkling, always bringing too many gifts. But the soft sea mists had dimmed Celia’s shine. When her mood darkened, she would leave at once, which meant she never stayed for long. Over the years, she visited her sisters less and less.

  And in the city, with its late nights and loud days, its electric light and shadow, Celia had started to separate. Her highs had become towering, her lows abysmal, until there’d been little left in between. Gradually she’d got lost in the troughs and ridges, the heavy waves of her illness – an illness that had probably always been in her, but that her sisters had not recognised until Celia was far, far out on a dark sea.

  And Marion was with her, most of the time. When Celia was feeling good, the days were bright: she’d take her daughter shopping. She loved pretty things – ornaments, bric-a-brac. Often, these breakables were the things her hand fell to first when the mood shifted. She liked to throw things. Celia’s frenzies of destruction were operatic, terrifying. Marion – aged six, seven, nine – rode them out. She would hide behind the couch or under the bed, barely breathing, waiting for the fit to pass. This was repeated many times, with accelerating rage, until, by the end, almost everything fragile in the house had been destroyed.

  When things were quiet again, Marion would bring her mother tea and aspirin in bed.

  Celia tried. She sent the little girl back to the aunts when she could. Marion spent school holidays and long weekends in the house by the sea; also the two occasions when Celia was hospitalised. Each time, she felt a guilty buoyancy in being away from her mother, released from her duty of watchfulness. Later on, the beach house was where she went for her boarding-school holidays, and where she lived for her first year out of school. By then, guilt was part of the complex taste of the place, like the salt in the air.

  Marion had been with her aunts when the news came. It was when she was eleven. Although the details were never discussed with her, she knew that her mother’s death had been no accident. Celia had been just strong enough to make her own exit.

  She was aware of how much she physically resembled Celia; how she too could fly into moods and rages and transports of exuberance, fits of tears or laughter. And she knew how her turbulence provoked her kind aunts, how it summoned anxiety into their eyes. They were vigilant, watching for cracks; for the signs they’d missed in Celia. And so Marion tried to be placid and cheerful, to gentle their suspicions. She hated it when they went still and watchful around her. It made her restless; made her miss her own life back home. In Cape Town she worked as a vet’s assistant, just like her Aunt Amelia. She missed the incurious gaze of the animals.

  “Why do you want to go back to the city, sweetheart? The sea air is good for you. Look at the colour in your cheeks,” said Belle. A quick glance from Amelia, over the mauve rims.

  Marion sat still, keeping her head motionless as the brush tugged at her hair, suppressing the impulse to leap to her feet and shake out her hair with a shout, to kick and jump about. As a child she’d hated having her hair done, hated the enforced stillness every morning as Celia hacked at the knots with a comb, the tugs painfully communicating her mother’s own frustration.

  “Leave the child, Belle, for heaven’s sake. She’ll go if she goes and she’ll stay if she stays.”

  “What’s in the city? Greed and grief, that’s what. Greed and grief.”

  Belle had worked out the knots now. The brush made a few last passes through the damp hair, and then Marion could feel her aunt nimbly separating three handfuls, the weight lifting away from her nape as the strands were braided together and secured. The tight sensation at the base of the plait was pleasurable. She was calmed, like a groomed horse.

  And sitting here by the fire, watching the rain beating at the milkwoods outside the window, one mad gull spinning high up in the turbulent air, Marion did indeed feel safe – in the warmth of her aunts’ affection, in this house that her grandfather had built for his daughters. She wanted to be in here with them, not out in the storm. Perhaps it might be possible to stay for good this time.

  Behind her, Amelia sighed with satisfaction. “Voilà!”

  Marion turned to see her positioning a piece on the framework of the phantom vase. It floated there, bellying out the lost curve.

  “Well done, Auntie A! You got a fit.” Marion stood and went to her, reaching out to touch the vase.

  “Careful,” said Amelia, and Marion smiled. After storm and wreck and tidal grinding, now to treat it like crystal. But she was careful.

  “You’ll never find all the pieces, surely?”

  “Of course not. That’s not the point. This isn’t a jigsaw. But we can make it more whole than it was.”

  “You and your old pots!” Belle snorted, pinching hair out of the brush. “Spoils of empire, that’s what they are. Flotsam of greed and conquest!”

  Amelia directed a private smile at her floating vase and pressed the abutting pieces more snugly together. “But still, very pretty,” she murmured.

  “Rubbish. Why don’t you collect the local pottery, Amelia? Now that’s beautiful. And useful.”

  “Stop fighting, you two,” said Marion. It was an old argument, and the aunts were enjoying themselves. In this house, nobody raised their voices in earnest – not any more.

  “Oh, don’t go back to the city, darling child,” Belle sighed, laying a hand on Marion’s smoothed hair. Marion knew that she was thinking of storms and disaster, greed and grief. But her aunt sounded resigned, as one is resigned to history.

  That night, Marion dreamt again the dream of her mother: her young and beautiful mother, burning, throwing again and again a clear glass vase against the wall of the bedroom. Marion woke with the shattering all around her. It took a moment or two for her ears to clear, her heart to still; to hear only the quiet of the night, with its distant hushing of waves.

  In the dream it was always that one particu
lar vase, turning and turning through the air, while around her mother’s tall, ecstatic figure the room was filled with sparkling splinters and a constant grinding sound of breakage that never seemed to slacken or to cease.

  One ordinary evening two weeks before, Marion had taken each of twelve good dinner plates – plain white china, which she had desired and saved up for and bought precisely because of their blank purity, the only complete set of crockery she’d ever owned – and thrown them, one by one, at the wall of her flat. For no real reason. A bad day in a bad week. A fight at work, a phone call from an old boyfriend. Not really reasons at all. It had frightened her, had made her feel that she was standing on the edge of a cliff, hurling her possessions into the void. In a way she was still standing there, waiting for the sound of them hitting the bottom.

  It was this incident that had brought her back to her aunts, to the peace of this old house, as consternation had often done in the past. Although never before had she done something so startling, so alarmingly futile.

  None of this could she tell the aunts. To tell them would be to confirm all their fears; it would force them to make some terrible gesture of recognition. But although she’d said nothing, still they seemed to sense that danger had touched her, that she’d fled to them from some pursuing shadow. This visit, the aunts had been particularly solicitous, watchful, kind.

  But in her heart, Marion knew it had not been real. Yes, her wrist had flicked and the plates had spun from her hand, hair whipping across her cheeks and colour flushing the skin. But even as she’d acted out her mother’s mad ballet – performed so many times, long ago in another small apartment, when Celia was not much older than Marion was now – she hadn’t truly believed. She had never felt the weight of true madness under her arousal.

  And afterwards, standing there with her bare feet, nicked and a little bloody, in the heap of shattered porcelain, she’d known that it had been an experiment. Drawing blood from the perfect skin inherited from her mother, cutting it to find what was inside. She had not entered the fury, had not been lifted away. And with the small wash of relief she’d felt at the ordinariness of her emotions – embarrassment, fright – there’d been a tickle of something else: maybe shame.

  And so she must continue. She must allow Auntie B to brush out her hair as she had once brushed Celia’s; she must go down to the sea and collect for Auntie A the pieces of broken plates and bowls. She must be serene, and persuade them that Celia’s heart had found in her own generous breast a peaceful resting place.

  In the morning, when she was packing the car, Amelia and Belle came out to say goodbye. Amelia was carrying a large cardboard box.

  “If you have to go, take a little something with you,” said Belle.

  It would be a clay pot from the village. Belle often gave her presents from the workshop; Marion’s flat was full of them.

  Driving back along the dirt road, she passed through the village and saw the women walking in twos and threes between the rondavels and the pink-plastered hexagonal houses, carrying paraffin tins and plastic drums on their heads. Not porcelain or clay, but functional. They made pottery for tourists, but for fetching their water, they used what worked best.

  Back home in the city, Marion opened the cardboard box and found not a clay pot but Amelia’s partially reassembled vase. It was carefully bound up in thin sheets of foam rubber and sticky-tape. She took it gently out of its wrappings and placed it on the dresser.

  “Auntie A, it’s beautiful,” she said on the telephone.

  “It’s just an old broken thing,” said Amelia, sounding pleased. “Of course half of it’s still down at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “But what if you find more pieces to fit?”

  “Then you’ll have to come and get them, won’t you?”

  After the phone call, Marion stood before the vase on the dresser for a long time. She had positioned it not centrally, but to one side. Next to it, invisible, was another, vanished vessel: the clear glass vase that used to stand on this same dresser when she was a little girl.

  She touched the sides of the vase, the smooth patches of porcelain, the rough absences where the chicken wire showed through. And she was calmed by the feel of it. These broken pieces would not hurt her: spoils of empire, casualties of storm and wreckage, softened and blunted by time. Lovers on a bridge, a willow tree. And broken as it already was, she in turn could do the vase no further harm. Running her finger over the smoothed-off edges, she poked her fingertips into the gaps, feeling the parts that would always be missing, and the parts that were whole again.

  Falling

  Victor selects a square of glass and touches it with his palms. He’s very high up: from where he stands, he can see the whole long flank of the mountain and, on the other side, the Cape Town suburbs fanning out to the sea. At his feet is a stained concrete surface never meant to be seen, and before him rises a shining dome, three times his height. It reflects the soft pink sunrise and his own lean figure. His face is severe, deeply lined for a man still in his thirties, and determined. Only Victor himself can see something daunted in the eyes.

  He blinks it away and shifts to the side, so that he’s looking instead at one of the rising steel beams. The beams support the dome, converging like the ribs of an umbrella. From street level, they seem as delicate as lines of latitude and longitude on a model globe, but up close, each is as broad as a big man’s hand. The glass they support is thick and greenish, a cloudy mirror. Where it’s bolted into grooves in the beams, there’s a gap between glass and steel, wide enough to admit fingers.

  Victor finds the grooves, grips and leans back so that the weight hangs from his shoulders, and braces his feet against the glass. Up he goes now, climbing the curve, hand over hand.

  Near the top, where the gradient eases out to almost horizontal, he picks a pane and lays himself flat, belly and chest against the glass. Below, the mall is waking, busying. At 9 a.m. the interior lights snap on, muted through the tinted pane. And then the glass becomes porous, revealing its depths.

  Here, now. This is the place.

  At this moment, Victor is calm. He shifts his gaze in increments from near to far. First, he concentrates on the surface of the glass. The reflection of his own eyes. This is not hard: all it requires is a kind of squint. Then, when he’s ready, he takes a breath and cautiously extends his focus. Pushes it through the glass and into the space beyond.

  The dome floats above the open atrium of the shopping centre. Down there are mezzanine floors with ornate railings, escalators, elevators. Victor concentrates on these forms. It’s easier than contemplating the drop itself, the body lengths of space. Deliberately he moves his gaze from feature to solid feature, eyes gripping one detail at a time, down, down, all the way down through three storeys of light and movement to the tiled floor at the very bottom.

  The first time he tried this, he failed. He’d touched the glass with his forehead and recoiled after just one glimpse. He had not yet learnt the trick of the incremental gaze. The next time, it was easier. Now he finds he is able to lie still and contemplate his fear. Because the fear is still there, of course.

  The thing is, he can picture it so easily. The consequences. The sequence of events. It would all happen quite quietly. First just a snap, like the snap of fingers, and a small crack would jag across the pane directly under the weight of his body. A broken corner would drop cleanly from its frame, leaving a triangle punched out of the reflections. The breeze would assume a different pitch. From far below, faint cries would float. Small faces would look up, then scatter out of frame. And then, after a ceremonial pause, a creaking would start up, and a soft, percussive popping as glass and metal shifted, trying to adjust to a balance of forces fatally skewed … tap … tap tap … tap … A chain reaction, working its way through to the edges, each failure in the structure triggering the next until tiny cracks infested the dome.

  And then the collapse; and a million fragments debouching into the waiting vault,
losing their brilliance all at once, like a swarm of bees dropping from sunlight into shadow.

  Leaving only a skeleton, a drawing, the concept of a dome. Through which it would be possible – easy – to plummet like a stone.

  He closes his eyes. His heartbeat shakes the glass. It is a pond, and he a weightless insect dimpling its surface. The membrane holds. His breathing slows. He opens his eyes.

  No sounds from below penetrate the glass, but there’s already much activity down there. Foreshortened bodies of shoppers cross the distant floor, eyes fixed on their own paths through the arcades or on the gilded arrangements in the shop windows. If they were to glance up, they’d see him easily, framed. But nobody looks.

  Directly below him are the two elevators, uneven pistons moving in their shafts, their loops of cable bellying out as they rise and tightening as they fall. On the ground floor there’s a fountain: he can see the sequins of coins tossed into the shallow pool for luck. Escalators flank the space, one up and one down, and in between and around move the people. Only Victor, suspended over three deep mall storeys, is still. Watching the complex flow, he can see it all as a model, an animated diagram. It calms him.

  But of course this is only the shallows. He must dive deeper.

  Victor fears falling, but that is quite ordinary. Common, even. Below that fear, attached to it like an anchor at the end of a weed-slimed chain, is another, heavier dread. And that one is specific and unique, his very own.

  He closes his eyes again and takes a breath, a man about to go deep. To touch the wreck.

  He was ten years old, with a red hard hat which he had to hold to stop it slipping over his eyes. The foreman greeted Victor’s father with nods, and smiled at the architect’s son. Someone rapped knuckles on his helmet, and the hollow knock so pleased him that he kept tapping and scraping his fingernails against the plastic to make that loud, private sound.