by Octavia Cade
Rosemary didn’t want to look but felt she had to. It never did to look away from unpleasant things—they didn’t go away, and the only person you cheated was yourself.
Sitting between her splayed out heels, and wanting the drawing, really wanting it, and having her name drawn out of the hat, Rosemary was surprised by luck for the first and only time. Afterwards, she wasn’t surprised at all—she had wanted the dragon more than anyone else, so of course it had flown to her. Rosemary believed she was lucky, luckier than the classmates who saw their tiny selves folded and rolled and taken away on the dragon they had also wanted—but not enough. “You are lucky,” they said to her, in sulky-envious tones, and Rosemary had smiled because it was true. The dragon was proof. She was lucky, now and forever, and the sweet dry smell of the rolled-up wax—it smudged off on her fingers if she wasn’t careful, streaking them green like old bronze—was the smell of the rightness of the world, where everyone got what they wanted best.
It hung over her in the dark, wax slick under her fingers, and Rosemary’s back itched with the feel of little legs, of round faces with orange smiles with twigs for hair. They looked down at her from their place atop the dragon, and she resented their presence; resented their polluting the clean ridgeline of the dragon’s back. She would have liked to cut them off, but their legs were part of the dragon and even if she had snipped off their owners—her classmates—from the picture on her wall the legs would remain.
The cat stayed put, which suggested what it caught wasn’t tasty enough to bother preserving. Pressed against the foot of the house was a skink, made short and squat by the loss of its tail. Rosemary liked skinks, liked most reptiles but snakes. Reptiles reminded her of dragons and freedom and luck, but the snakes on their ribbed, socked feet were too earthbound to be endearing. She could not picture wings on them, like she could with the skink, frozen on tiny, needled feet.
She picked it up—a smell of wax, the warm, slick crumbling scent of sunshine on its skin—and saw it bite her. Rosemary didn’t really feel the bite, but with the shock of it she dropped the skink back to the ground, where it lay still. Again she picked it up and again it bit; despite herself Rosemary dropped it again, flat onto its back with a quick flat thud like a falling crayon. Her fingers were waxy, a residual sheen.
Blood bloomed on her finger, and the cat slunk away, disinterested. It didn’t seem eager to eat any more of the skink, but Rosemary had lost sympathy and would have let it anyway.
Looking back, Rosemary realized she could have colored over the lines, but at the time she didn’t think of it. Her child self would not have wanted to try, frustrated by her inability to stay within the lines, clumsy hands that were short and fat like badger’s mitts as yet incapable of fine motor control. Control . . . Rosemary could not control her hands and did not want to control the dragon. It was the color it was, a scratched and mottled green, and it was not Rosemary’s place to darken its skin, to skin the scales from its eyes and make it red ravaged and hungry, to snatch the riders from its back and gorge them down in lumps, to be free of its harness and still pinned to her wall. At night Rosemary lay with the dragon above her and knew it to be real. This did not frighten her. She supposed it would have to eat but it wouldn’t eat her. Why would it? They were the same.
Yet she could never understand why it wouldn’t eat the crude outlines weighing it towards the earth, with round orange smiles and hair like twigs and hands like claws spearing into its spine. Rosemary would have eaten them, and felt relief at the eating. The memory still scratched at her. She would have liked to keep the dragon, keep the moment of luck and the conviction it brought her, and yet to forget the ghosts of the children who came with it. They had kept the reality from perfection; there was no reason why they should remain in the memory as well.
In her memory Rosemary unchained them from the dragon, left the scale-crests of its spine clean and mountainous along the ridges of her memory, let them fall from its back and spiral grinning into oblivion.
Halfway down the drive, and already late, she dropped her bag and turned back. Half disgust, half pity. The skink was scaled and in the sunshine its skin was edged and distinct. Rosemary admired the clear outlines, admired that it would bite her, try to hurt her to live, to snap and cling and draw blood from something so gargantuan, something that outclassed it so completely. It wanted to live, and she wanted it to live.
For the third time she lifted it, and the skink bit her again. Had she not seen the jaws clamp, Rosemary would not have known she was bitten. (Perhaps her dragon did not know he was ridden, so small the people clinging, remora-like, to his back.) She let it cling, its warm body malleable against the heat of her fingers, the scent of its skin musty and sweet against hers.
In the garden, in a safe place, she had to peel it off her finger; slice it off her body as she had sliced her classmates from the dragon. It left blood behind it, a sweet tiny smear, and wouldn’t dart into the crayon green shade—froze with its mouth open, dared her to pick it up again.
She felt nothing but relief in doing so, the relief of removing an unsightly stain from the picture in her mind of the world as it should be, as it should have been. Someone else could find them and pick them up, some simple-minded simpering person who would recognize something of themselves in a skinned and spinning set of paper dolls, thin-legged (one-legged) and holding hands—recognize themselves and find value in the nostalgia.
Rosemary had never played with paper dolls. She found them obnoxious as child and adult, a sickly pastel shadow that couldn’t touch the grim, sharp lines of scales that marched across her memory, and stood like doors and windows. Rosemary couldn’t remember the face of the dragon, or the claws, or the tail—though she could just about remember the last because of the spiral of scales, the subtle curves reflecting vertebrae. It was the scales that mattered to her, the scales and the luck. Once the annoying dolls were gone, she was free to see the dragon in its entirety, and free to slice it down into the pieces that mattered most, to vivisect its waxy coat and wrench legs like bird bones from an undemanding carcass. These she discarded, having skinned them with her teeth and tasting greasy, the unmemorable flesh. Neutral flesh, like chicken. These she scattered in the sunlight and forgot. Dragons left chunks of gristle and cracked bone after eating, and Rosemary abandoned her own fragments. They were not worth remembering, and she left them for scavengers.
She had got what she wanted best.
Lucky skink. Lucky Rosemary.
The coin was iron, and weighed down the front of her dress where the pockets were, peaked the fabric out ahead of her. It felt heavier than Rosemary knew it to be, dragging her earthward. She carried it herself, along with the rest of her purchases. She didn’t want to trust them to the porters, no matter how well paid—the ground was so jagged and treacherous, the air so confining and misty, that she didn’t want to chance an accident. At least if she fell, the coins would remain with her and not tumble down the slopes attached to someone else. With her luck they’d never find them again.
Early morning frost had made the ground slippery, and the rhythmic thump of coins against her breastbone was a counterpoint to her unsteady feet. The wind was heavy over the hills, and the footing uneven. It made Rosemary nervous, and she crept close to the hillside, clutching at tussock strands as she went. Wind whipped the strands against her so she could barely see the path. The tussocks left wet stripes on her hands and a smell that she wanted to wipe off her fingers, but her clothes were permeated with it, a warm slick impermeable layer that left her feeling trapped and sticky.
Rosemary kept her upper arms clenched to her sides, reached with her lower and stepped close to the ground, crabwise. She did not trust the wind, and the heights of the hills made her dizzy.
She was glad to have people with her.
Kaikoura
A thick piece of kelp, dried black and smelling of the sea. It was rigid in Rosemary’s fingers, and she remembered the slick, spongy surface of the
coin when she had cut it from the kelp; how the sharp knife had flashed white in sunlight, and how the house had smelled of brine for days after she had dried it in the oven. Dried a series of such coins—she kept a selection of blanks in reserve, and coins redolent of the ocean were common in the archipelago. Some she had used, mostly in small change, but she had experimented with others, soaked them before drying in different solutions, altering the final smell of the coin into ocean overlaid with lupin or lilac or pohutukawa.
This kelp disk had been infused with rosemary oil, a pun that had amused her when she had made it—she’d not been much older than a child and subtlety was then beyond her. She would not make such a coin now. To do so would appear gauche, a form of bragging, and of claim—a selfish fragrance that would cling to the coin through its trading. Not that this coin would be often bartered—kelp had an interesting scent, but even dried it was more fragile than wood or stone or metal, and too much rough handling would see it destroyed.
The memory it contained was too valuable for that.
The biologist breathed in the coin, without touching it, and his eyebrow rose in surprise. Rosemary blushed at the sight, resisted the urge to excuse herself. A master craftsman might have a signature for his coins, to signify their added value, but while Rosemary was more than competent that would have been claiming more than her skill entitled her to.
“It’s very old,” said the biologist, examining the kelp. “But newly imprinted?”
“I made the blank when I was young,” said Rosemary. “I kept it to remind myself what not to do. I didn’t think I’d ever use it. But what you want . . . that memory was also from my childhood. They seemed to fit together. Two little fragments.”
“You don’t feel young anymore?” said the biologist. “I don’t blame you. Neither do I.”
“I have some excuse,” said Rosemary. “But you can’t be that much older than my daughter.”
“It’s not age that weighs me down,” said the biologist. He unloosed a long cord of leather from around his forearm, uncovering a small flat disk pressed against the soft inner flesh of his wrist. “A family tradition, you might call it. I got it from my father, and he from his. I keep it on me, always. You might be interested in trying it while I check yours over.”
Pale and yellow, the coin was made of old bone, smooth and oiled by close and constant contact with human skin. It smelled of incense, funereal, as if the bone had been smoked, and the scent was stronger than she expected. Looking closely, Rosemary could see tiny grains on the surface, and realized that the biologist continued to polish the bone with the incense, re-infusing the scent and strengthening the association with the memory.
The coin contained an empty ocean, a lifetime of search. The last of the dusky dolphins—once so prominent about the Hikurangi trench, had died when Rosemary was a child, in a marine park far from open water. From the memory, Rosemary could see her own hands, larger than normal, with square knuckles and a dusting of thin hair across the back. They looked very much like the hands of the biologist, but older and hardened with wind and salt, and they crossed and re-crossed the ocean, looking for any trace of survivors before the bitter, baleful acceptance of their extinction.
Rosemary shivered, taking her fingers off the coin. No wonder the young man was so unhappy—to feel this grief, this anger (and not even his own, but his grandfather’s) as a constant presence would be enough to sour anyone—let alone someone who worked in a room of old ghosts, walls lined with skulls and stuffings and the detritus of the dead.
“Why do you do it?” she asked him. Certainly, while some people would rid themselves of their grief, even if only to bury the coins in the back garden, many more held on to it as part of the human condition. Rosemary did so herself. One could not experience pleasure without pain to contrast it with, and sometimes the cost of excision was greater than that suffered by keeping the experience in the first place. Even so, accepting pain was different from deliberately keeping it alive, different from passing it down through the generations to spoil the lives of descendants.
“To remind me of what I am,” said the biologist. “And what I am is a collector, just like you. But unlike you, I collect specific memories for a specific purpose.” He smiled, a little wistfully, and the expression did not seem to fit his face. “You were happy,” he said, caressing the kelp that she had given him. “You were excited. Not many got to see the last one, to swim with it, but I suppose wealth buys many privileges.”
“The water was too cold for you. You squealed when you got splashed, and your mother had to convince you to go in, had to remind you that it wasn’t a shark. You’d sneaked a shark coin from the library some weeks beforehand, given yourself nightmares, and when you were floating in the water, looking down as the dusky swam beneath you, you could almost believe it was a shark. You knew it wasn’t, but your legs curled up under you anyway.”
“It swam close enough for you to touch.” The biologist’s voice wavered. “It must have been nice.”
“I expect it was,” said Rosemary, neutral. She did not remember it now.
The biologist shot her a resentful glance, and his jaw hardened, settled again into the stony expression she had first seen on him. “It is sufficient,” he said, brusquely. “I’ll take it.”
“I’m surprised,” said Rosemary. She was trading for the last coin, her favorite, the ice coin with its cool marble surface and slick scent. It was worth far more than she was paying for it. Animals died every day, but the icebergs did not.
The biologist’s mouth twisted. “As I said, I have very specific tastes.” He gestured at the wall behind him, set with shelves and lined with what Rosemary estimated as nearly a hundred coin cases. “All the dusky dolphin memories I’ve been able to get my hands on. Not many people can make any more now—you’re one of the last. I’ve been tracking them all my life. Like you, I was trained in collecting.”
“It’s very impressive,” said Rosemary, truthfully. “What are you going to do when you’ve got them all? Open a museum?”
“No,” said the biologist. “I’m going to burn them. All of them. Make a great pile on the beach, dig a kiln in the sand to melt down the metals. We killed those dolphins,” he continued, seeing Rosemary’s horrified expression. “Every last one. We don’t deserve to remember them.”
“Do you think the extra loss will stop it happening again?” said Rosemary, appalled.
“No,” said the biologist grimly. “I don’t.”
“So you’re just doing it to punish, to make people suffer? Even the children, even the ones who were never responsible, who will never see what you’re planning to destroy?”
“Why the hell not?” said the biologist. “There has to be consequences. For once it’s just going to be us who pays them.”
He twisted the leather cord, rebound the bone coin to his wrist, flat against the pulse point.
Rosemary didn’t want to remind him, didn’t want to risk his temper before the marble coin had been handed over—
(artists in the Waikato, smashing their work with hammers, clay fragments and shredded canvas and marble chips)
—didn’t want to risk losing the ice that was in so many ways like a dolphin, but she had to know.
“What you’re doing doesn’t make sense,” she said. “The ice coin . . . those bergs are gone now, and we are as responsible for the change in climate as we were for the destruction of the dolphins. Yet you’ll give the ice coin to me, ensure its survival. Why can’t you do the same for the dolphins?”
The biologist held up his hand, turned it so she could see the braided wrist. “I haven’t been living with bergs,” he said. “I don’t love them the same way. It doesn’t matter so much to me if people remember them.
“Besides,” he added, “what are you going to do with it? Lock it up in your collection with all the rest? It might as well be dead.”
“I won’t be keeping it,” said Rosemary, stung. Dead, indeed. Her library preserved
, for future generations. It did not bury, did not entomb or destroy. “I need it to trade for something else.”
“Something you like better?” said the biologist.
“No,” said Rosemary. “Not better.”
“Who will it go to, then?” said the biologist.
“Someone who’ll just look at it,” said Rosemary. “Someone who won’t appreciate it. He sold it once. He’ll likely do it again.”
“To another collector, then,” said the biologist. “Another library like yours, or one like mine.”
“Not like yours,” said Rosemary. “Not ever like yours.”
The wharf was empty. Rosemary was hours too early for the ferry, but the biologist hadn’t offered her tea and she would not have accepted if he had. His office felt as empty as his ocean, and the skulls leered at her from the walls, their eye sockets accusing and empty.
The heat was giving her a headache. She sat on the edge of the wharf, took off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water. It was warm as blood and very green, very clear. Her toes shone pale beneath the surface. She tucked her hands beneath her skirts, knowing that they were her own again and yet afraid to look lest the knuckles were suddenly larger, the hands suddenly hairier, the reddened, weather-worn fingers closing into empty fists.
Rosemary could not fathom it. To destroy all that experience—to do it deliberately, knowing the loss to society, to knowledge . . . it was beyond her. She found it offensive, viscerally so. His plans for his library made her want to vomit.
Surely he could not be serious.
She rather suspected that he was.
The loss would be so permanent. Trading in memories meant personal loss—the loss of private experience. Yet those memories would still be available to the wider public. They would sift through the population, never really dying, spreading ideas and emotions and empathy.