All the Voices Cry

by Alice Petersen

  Charles was smaller than she remembered. He stood up as she approached.

  “There you are,” he said, as if she were a sock that he had mislaid under the bed. “May I inquire just what you thought you were doing, taking off like that?”

  “I’m sorry. I needed to be by myself.”

  “I see,” said Charles. There was a tight look about his mouth.

  Penelope saw her husband’s face framed by the great Pacific Ocean that glistened and stretched to the moon. They were trapped on this island, with no hope of swimming away. A truce had to be reached before they could travel on together.

  “I’m glad you’re still here,” she said. “I thought you might have gone to find a glimmering girl.”

  “I am not in the mood for funny phrases,” said Charles. “I have been waiting for you for three hours. Can you imagine how that makes me feel? Obviously not. Now. Shall we catch our plane before it’s too late?”

  They stayed far apart as they walked up the hill. In the taxi, Charles leaned back and pretended to sleep.

  “Please don’t do that again, Penny,” he said, his eyes still shut.

  Penelope was silent.

  “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 gods, public Gods, ancient gods, invented gods; 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 God 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 passed 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 brass 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, scraping 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 glasses 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 passed 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 spacious 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 grassroots. 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 glass 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 Association, but when she ca
me 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 circumstances 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 documentary, 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 café?”

  “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 Saturdays?” Rae searched her pockets for her car keys.

  “Not this Saturday. 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 apron 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 pass 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, pronouncing 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.