by Mary Swan
At first she climbed straight back up the stairs, but now she walks through each small room, her eyes taking in clues from the lives going on without her. Ben’s damp trousers are draped over a chair and that means he was home very late the night before, walking through the sudden sleety rain that clattered on the roof over Clare’s head. He used to use the same attic space for his tinkering, his inventions. Drawings in coloured ink tacked up all over the walls. Until once when Kez helped him do something with glass and two wires; there was a loud bang, a singed smell growing stronger as the rest of them ran up the narrow stairs. Ben and Kez were sitting on the floor where they’d landed, laughing so hard. “Are we dead?” Kez said. “Are we dead?” Laughing with a sooty streak on her cheek, a thin trail of blood near her eye.
Their mother didn’t laugh. She tore all the drawings off the wall, leaving tiny white flags that still flutter, stood with her arms folded while Ben packed everything away. He was already working at the Telegraph Office and had asked for the use of a basement storeroom; that’s where he would have been until late. Barely noticing the slush that soaked his pant legs as he made his way home, his head filled with diagrams, with arrows and letters and possibilities.
There are more signs in the kitchen; the sugar tin empty and three cakes cooling on wire racks mean that Nan is a little sad about something. And Kez must be having trouble sleeping again, the good silver teapot gleaming on the kitchen table, beside a puddled, blackened cloth. It’s as if they’ve all left messages for her, or not messages, exactly, but things set out to tempt her. A plate and fork beside those cooling cakes, a magazine open to an article about sundials, a clipping on the table about distant stars. The intention making her think of that black and white dog Ben tried to tame, years ago, and how patiently he worked at it. Leaving scraps of food in the yard, luring it closer and closer to the back steps, any sudden noise or movement making it bound away. An angry bite on his hand, kept wrapped and hidden, from trying to pat its head too soon. Remembering that, she snaps her teeth together twice, a startling sound.
In truth she is ready to let herself be coaxed. Sometimes now she can see her breath in the attic room, reminding her what it’s like in deep winter, the need to fall asleep before the last bit of warmth leaves the cloth-wrapped bricks at her feet. She’d claimed the space when Ben’s things were gone, said it was too crowded in bed with her sisters, said that now that she was at the high school she needed a quiet place to do her lessons. She’d forgotten that, how she suffered the cold but wouldn’t complain. Wrapped in blankets, making notes with the pen in her thick, gloved fingers. Her mother holding Clare’s face in her hands, giving it a little shake and saying, “My stubborn girl, where do you get it from.”
So one evening she comes down to supper, and then every one after that. She doesn’t have much to say at first, but the others talk about the usual things, pass her the salt and fill her glass, and no one behaves as if her presence is a thing to be noticed. And maybe it isn’t, but she knows how all of them, especially Nan, are good at playing a part. That time their neighbour came banging and shouting, Nan just smiled her sweet smile and told him that he was mistaken. That Charlie had been home with her all day and couldn’t have broken the window; it must have been a completely different boy he saw, running away.
After the meal Clare helps with the washing-up, sits for a time with the day-old newspaper her sisters have carried home, climbs the stairs like she used to, after saying good night. She remembers, as she slides toward sleep, how that scruffy dog came to know Ben, sat up with its ears perked when he opened the back door. Let him scratch behind those ears and even let himself be brushed with Nan’s good hairbrush, until she found out. But one day they heard a terrible whining and found the dog lying, splayed, at the base of the step, trickles of green bile from its mouth. Poison taken from someone’s hand, that’s what their mother thought. Better for him if he’d stayed fierce and wild, not been fooled into thinking that one kind hand meant that all were, but Clare knows that’s only one way of looking at it.
No one has said, but she knows her small salary is missed. The price of everything is going up and they feel the pinch; they always have. There’s talk around the table of taking a lodger; it’s been a luxury really, the way they’ve kept their parents’ room as it was. The quilt on the bed, the watch and the brush on the dressing table, the silver hatpin. The white curtains they wash every spring and fall, a clean scent rising with them when the window is open.
Charlie pushes away his empty plate and says that he has a key that will unlock gold and jewels enough for all of them. “Of course we’ll have to light out for the West,” he says, and then it’s a joke, Kez saying that first they’ll have to learn to ride horses. She rummages through the jumble in the dresser drawer, pulling out bits of twine, and Charlie knots them together, fashions a loop. They take turns twirling it, trying to throw it over the high stool and then over each other’s heads, until Ben’s glasses go flying, a crack in one lens that gives him a desperate look. “I’m just joking,” Charlie says, when he meets Clare’s eye, and she hopes he means it.
There are still days when she’s too tired to leave her bed, times she’s swept under, no way to know if for minutes or hours, except for the slanting light. But mostly she comes downstairs when she knows the others have gone out; there’s nothing to fear in the familiar rooms, though she keeps her eyes away from the world that seems to breathe and press at the tall windows. So different from those in her own room, the small squares of sky in different shades, with wisps or crumples of cloud.
She’s been coaxed this far, but she knows it will go no farther. Shakes her head when Kez asks her to come along to the shop, when Ben says why doesn’t she walk with him to his office, or Charlie buys tickets to that new play. Things she once would have done without a thought. She knows she must be the same person, but it feels as if she’s peeled away from that life, from the girl with the clear path to follow. She tries to remember what it felt like to be that girl, but it’s difficult.
What comes into her head instead is a leaf-tossed day, a wind that roared and howled like something from the frozen North except that it was warm, that wind, though just as fierce. She remembers walking down a street with her parents, holding on to their hands. All kinds of things flapping and tumbling past them, newspapers and twigs with green leaves still attached. A battered black hat, pieces of flimsy fruit crates, even a small child rolling over and over, though when she thinks of that now she’s sure it couldn’t have happened. Maybe a joke someone made, or a dream she had, but she can see the child, trailing a grey blanket, buffeted right past them and away down the street. She has no idea where they were going, or why it was just the three of them. No idea how long it lasted, but she remembers how her body felt, how solid. Her parents bent forward, her father’s eyes half closed against the grit and her mother’s skirt fluttering out behind, while she herself was quite steady, held firm to the ground by their warm hands.
January
Nan says she’s looking better every day, “More like your old self.” The others agree, and must think they’re helping by talking about the future, about the note Principal Thomas has sent. As if this time is just a short side line that will soon link up with the main track again. Clare knows it’s not like that, but she hasn’t said, trying first to have a plan, some other way to earn money and add her share. The difficulty is that her sewing skills are basic, nothing anyone would pay her for, and she has no talent for music or drawing, can’t think of any kind of lessons she could give in the safety of the house. What’s left is to find work in a shop, or an office of some kind, and the thought is terrifying. But she remembers that skittish stray dog, not his sad end but the way he conquered his fear, a little bit more each day. Tells herself that she can do it like that, no reason, no good reason why not. And she tries so hard to feel her parents’ anchoring hands when she stands by the tall front windows, making herself look out to all that’s there.
She gives the door a hard push and black birds rise, screaming, from the bare trees. They wheel through the enormous sky and she feels herself whirling with them, scattered to a thousand dark, beating wings. Every bit of her blasted and separate, like the pieces of the watch in Charlie’s book, and nothing at all at the core. She doesn’t remember the stairs, but she hears her own hard breathing when she burrows under the covers of her bed, curling as small, as tight as she can. Wishing she was still in that muffled white Eskimo world, still that little girl under her father’s long table, his voice singing beyond the folds of black. “Little pitchers, little pitchers,” he said when her mother came in with a cross voice, a jumble of wool in her hands. When her mother said, “Look at this mess, have you seen her?” Said, “That child, I love her like she was my own, but honestly …”
It’s never really been a secret. Another thing she just knows, knowledge that seeped in from things overheard, from questions asked. Usually she didn’t think about it at all but there were times when the questions of who she really was flared and she tried to work it out for herself, knowing no one would give her a proper answer. When she was small her father said the fairies brought her, and once Kez told her that they’d picked her out from a bin in a shop, carried her home along with a sack of flour. The most her mother ever said was that it was a thing to talk about when Clare was older. There were times she imagined she was a stolen princess, every squeaking cart wheel the sound of a gilded coach. Her real, royal family, come to sweep her away, the imagining followed always by a complicated shame.
As she grew older Clare asked more cunning questions, thought about the most likely answers. Ben and Charlie were too young, but not Ross, whose leaving then became banishment or flight. Or maybe she belonged to one of her so-called sisters; when she was thinking that way she followed them from room to room, stared hard at their hands, holding a duster or resting flat on the kitchen table, looking for similarities. When they were pulling on their stockings she tried to see if one had a curled-over baby toe like her own, but they both did, so that told her nothing. From time to time the question of who she really was would squat in her mind and it would matter, but then the season would change, or examinations would be just ahead, and it would disappear. Though she realizes now that it’s been like a splinter that’s driven in deep. You get used to picking things up, to moving a certain way, until a careless touch makes you feel it.
It’s cold in the attic room, but her breath has warmed the space where Clare burrows, and her damaged heart is calmer. She thinks of the way the word morning floated up in her mind, all those months ago. A simple, familiar word, but once it appeared there was no going back to the timeless place she’d been. She thinks of secrets that aren’t really secrets, of things that can be glimpsed but not seen. A drawing that can be two things at once, a kind of magic that can’t be pinned down.
And she thinks about time, another simple word, used so easily and often. Yet a word you could spend your whole life thinking about, without reaching the end of the mysteries it contains. Clare thinks of her mother’s cross words sliding free, like the way a solution to a problem can suddenly appear when you’re thinking of other things. But she knows the remembering is not an explanation, knows that she hasn’t arrived anywhere. The words are just another knot on the long string of memories that plays through her mind. Like Ben with the twitching dog’s head in his lap, like her father bathing Peachey’s poor bruised feet. Like the first time she heard Kez crying in the dark.
“Think of what you know,” her teacher used to say. “Start from there,” but maybe that’s not the best way. For centuries the astronomers she read about in the small green book watched the strange tracks of the planets, and tried to make sense of their movements around the Earth. Looped, uneven paths that sometimes went forward, sometimes turned back on themselves, ever more complicated and mysterious. Until Copernicus came along, and emptied his mind of all assumptions. Thought about those paths and imagined himself standing, not on Earth, but on the fiery Sun. The planets’ tracks now simple and constant, and Earth not the centre at all but just one of them, moving forever on its own, solitary course.
She wonders then if she’s been like those ancient astronomers, building everything on false assumptions. Wonders if she’s really some stranger’s child, not brought by the fairies but left somewhere, found somewhere. If her mother had lived until she thought Clare was old enough, is that what she would have told her? That she was a stray, taken in and cared for like Aunt Peach, but with even less reason. A kind of charity that had nothing to do, not really, with love or belonging. If so, she owes a simpler kind of debt. If that’s how it was, then nothing is certain, and even her mother’s ghostly presence might be nothing more than a wish.
There are voices downstairs, loud groans and laughter as Kez and Nan set their heavy bags on the scrubbed kitchen table. Clare thinks of how shakily she stood, at first, how easily her legs move now, and she’s suddenly sure she can make a small, closed place for herself, thinks maybe that’s all she’s ever wanted. Those beating black wings still whir softly, but an idea begins to glimmer and grow. She’s already memorized the diagrams and she can teach herself everything else in Charlie’s book, send for the other titles that are listed in the back. Kez and Nan can tack up notices in the neighbourhood, put a small sign in the window. Watches are always losing time, clocks seizing up; it won’t be a regular wage, but she’ll be able to contribute, no need to force herself into the terrible world. She’ll find her missing books, put them back on the shelf, and there’ll be time to read and think, and it can be enough, she tells herself, why not? A quiet little life like that.
Clare swings her feet to the floor and smooths her hair; in a moment she’ll go down and tell them her plan. There will be a pause, while Kez and Nan exchange a look, but then they’ll get caught up in it, they’ll see that it’s the only solution. And she knows there are things she could ask them now, knows that they might actually tell her; perhaps that’s what holds her back. Questions and answers that can’t be unsaid, half secrets maybe kept out of nothing more than kindness.
August
Clare wakes with the answer clear in her mind; sometimes it happens like that. Or sometimes when she’s emptying a bucket out the back, or smoothing a newspaper to read. When she opens the door to her workroom off the kitchen, sunlight is falling on the table and she sees that she’s right, knows exactly what to do. One part of the escape wheel is just slightly out of true, an easy thing to remedy, and then she can move on to the mantel clock that apparently loses so much time that it’s been used as a paperweight for years.
At first she worked with the books propped open, Charlie’s and the more detailed one she sent for. She copied out some of the diagrams, making them larger, and practised with her father’s watch, taking it apart again and again, until her fingers knew what to do by themselves. Then she hung it on a nail above her work table, where she can always hear it ticking. Kez and Nan still think she should use the front parlour; they fret about her eyesight, but she tells them that the morning light is fine in Aunt Peach’s old room, that she needs a small, bare space she can keep free from dust.
&n
bsp; It’s mostly watches she works on, a few small clocks. She’s found that it’s usually just a matter of taking them apart and cleaning the jewels, the pivots and escapements. Carefully oiling with the proper-sized wire at each stage of the reassembly. She has a few tools, nippers and burnishers and oilers, and a small collection of springs and other pieces. If she needs to replace a cracked or missing face, Charlie finds one for her, buys it on tick, he says. Each job a little puzzle to solve, a series of small satisfactions. When she senses that the work will be beyond her ability, she simply names a ridiculous price; so far no one has persisted.
The room is cool in the afternoons, when the sun slips to the other side of the house. She doesn’t miss the shady pathways in the park, the breeze that ruffles the water of the lake, when you wade through. And she wonders sometimes if Aunt Peach found the same comfort in the voices that drift in from the street, the sounds of children running wild in the laneway. The constant chatter in the kitchen that becomes a kind of underlying music, beyond the closed door. Word has been spreading slowly and she has enough work to fill several days each week, enough money to set a little aside for the books she wants to send for. Time passes easily inside the house, and she’s only a little sad to think that maybe she hasn’t peeled away from anything, maybe this is the life she was always meant to have.
December
It’s probably Charlie’s idea. Clare’s not even sure how it happened; one moment she was thinking of the clock on her work table, the pieces laid out, clean and lightly oiled, waiting for the morning light, and then she was outside in the cold dark. Kez and Nan linking each arm, Charlie in front of her and Ben behind; like a prisoner, she thinks, but it doesn’t really feel like that. In order to move ahead their steps have to be perfectly in time, and somehow that happens easily. Her niggles of unease have no time to grow when they’re walking this quickly, and she feels something clean washing through her with the cold air.