The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  Lizzie was very capable of creating surprise: new interests would develop quickly, and be pursued with zeal; her opinions were unpredictable. Her mind, thought Bernát’s father, lacked cohesion; her thoughts had no ‘weight’, he said. For Bernát, Lizzie in her late forties was as stimulating and entertaining a companion as any of his student friends. And then, on the brink of fifty, she produced her greatest surprise.

  At a wine appreciation class, Lizzie came to know a man called Barry Tillotson, six years her junior, whose business involved the renovation and highly profitable resale of vintage sports cars. Barry was freshly divorced from a ‘madwoman’ who had become convinced that her irresistible husband was sleeping with a different trollop every week. Whenever he came back from a trip, she interrogated him for hours; she insisted on unpacking his bags, looking for evidence. She would turn up at his office without warning, to catch him in flagrante; she was in the habit of intercepting the postman, to check the mail that was coming in. After the divorce, she took to parking outside his flat at night, watching the windows; the campaign of harassment was ended by Lizzie, who confronted her in the street at 3am and ended up in the passenger seat, counselling the poor woman until dawn.

  Barry’s business was successful. He drove a pristine Maserati 3500 GT, a gorgeous and powerful vehicle of infuriating fragility; Barry possessed the skills to heal the machine whenever it developed an ailment. He was an accomplished cook, and never bought a bottle of wine that had any English words on the label. Before long, Barry Tillotson had seduced Mrs Vidal, or vice versa, to the surprise of the entire Kalmár family. Barry was not a catch, in their eyes: the physique was no better than average for a middle-aged Englishman, and the face lacked all distinction. More to the point, Lizzie Vidal was a reader, whereas Barry was not; Lizzie enjoyed serious music, whereas Barry, by Lizzie’s admission, did not; Lizzie liked to visit galleries and museums, which was not at all Barry’s idea of fun. The meeting of Bernát and Barry was much as Bernát had suspected it would be; the conversation was turgid, and soon expired. Some time afterwards, Lizzie said to him: ‘You don’t get it, do you? Myself and Barry. You’re at a loss.’ Bernát had to admit that this was the case. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘to tell you the truth, I’ve had enough of living on my own. I’m fed up. Week in, week out, round and round – school photos, graduation photos, wedding photos, school photos, graduation photos.’ They were in her garden; looking at the engagement ring on her finger, she began to smile. ‘And the thing is,’ she said, leaning closer, though they could not be overheard, ‘he is tremendously good at sexual intercourse.’

  ‘Tremendously good,’ Naomi repeats, as though the words had a relishable flavour.

  ‘And this was the old lady at the concert?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘So everything worked out fine in the end.’

  ‘Not quite,’ says Naomi. The relationship between Bernát and Lizzie had weakened after the marriage to Barry, she tells her; it weakened to such an extent that when he went back to the Midlands to see his parents, he didn’t always visit Lizzie; whenever he did call on her, though, she seemed happy, Bernát told Naomi. Lizzie’s second marriage lasted more than six times longer than the first, and the distance that had grown between herself and Bernát in that quarter century could not be closed after Barry died. But though it was not possible to restore the intimacy that Lizzie and Bernát had once enjoyed, they did, with no great effort, succeed in becoming companionable again. Many times Bernát drove up to Birmingham solely to talk to her; after a year or thereabouts, she came to London, and they went to an opera together; her expeditions to London became quite regular. The last time she came down, she surprised him again: she announced that she was going to Australia to live out her last years in the Gold Coast town where her brother and his wife were living. Her brother, a Ten Pound Pom, had emigrated in the Fifties and had gone on to set up a boatbuilding business, which had made him so much money that he’d been able to build a huge house for himself and his wife and four sons, overlooking the ocean. A few years after Christopher’s death, Lizzie had flown to Brisbane to spend a fortnight with her successful brother and his beautiful wife and their four irrepressible boys; she’d found the place unbearably dull, Bernát reminded her; there had been nothing to do except stare at the sea. Staring at the sea was what she wanted to do now, she answered; and the idea of being warm, all the time, was powerfully enticing. She would take a book to the beach and lie in a rock pool all day, she said. ‘But she never got to do it,’ Naomi tells her sister, and her eyes begin to water, as if the loss were hers.

  She presses the heel of a hand into one eye and then the other, and smiles at her foolishness. ‘Tired,’ she explains. ‘More tomorrow. One more instalment should be enough. Maybe two,’ she says, then she hugs her sister too tightly.

  IV

  18.

  The air is fresh and moist and still, and a bright mist lies over the houses and the Paddock. The leaves of the trees and bushes around the Paddock are a pallid monochrome. It is almost silent; attention is required to distinguish the sound of the traffic in the centre of town. Kate looks at her watch; it is almost eight thirty and she has been sitting here, at the end of the terrace, for more than half an hour now. Minute by minute the haze is lifting from the summit of the castle; she watches the stone walls coming into focus. Behind her, cutlery jangles in the drawer: Naomi has come downstairs. For a few minutes more, Kate stays on the terrace. She wanders to the end of the lawn and looks back at the house. The kitchen lights are on, all of them, and Naomi is standing below one of the spotlights, holding a pot of honey; she raises the pot above her eyes and swivels it slowly, examining it as if it were something marvellous.

  In Kate’s mind, a scene begins to coalesce: a village; she is sauntering with Naomi; a street of plane trees; green light under the leaves, and a fountain; they pass a bottle of water back and forth without a word. A rack of honey jars stands at the door of a shop. Inside, on the counter, in a track of sunlight, stands an unlabelled flask, lidless; the honey that half fills the flask has the colour of mahogany. With a small wooden spatula, Naomi takes a scoop and dribbles it onto her tongue; she closes her eyes; the taste seems to require concentration. Delicately, as if placing a thermometer, Naomi puts the spatula into her sister’s mouth; her forefinger brushes Kate’s lower lip. The honey burns like a spice; there is a smokiness in it, like the air of the scorched hillside above the village. ‘Strange,’ says Naomi; her hair, struck by the sun, is a thicket of golden filaments; there is not a sound in the shop. Remembering, Kate experiences the faintest taste-echo, an instant of elusive smoky warmth.

  She steps into the kitchen.

  ‘Good morning,’ says Naomi; she seems cheerful.

  ‘Coffee?’ Kate asks.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you’ Naomi answers. She watches her sister at the machine; for half a minute neither of them speaks. ‘Having book thoughts?’ she asks.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Something else then.’

  ‘Not really thoughts.’

  ‘Tell,’ Naomi commands.

  ‘Just remembering something.’

  ‘Tell.’

  ‘The honey shop in France.’

  ‘The obese cat,’ Naomi responds.

  Kate remembers no cat.

  ‘There was a vast cat, on the opposite side of the road,’ states Naomi. ‘Grey. Shaggy. Yellow eyes. Horrible.’

  Naomi’s memory of that afternoon turns out to be more replete than Kate’s. The waiter at the café under the plane trees had taken a shine to their mother, apparently; some one-sided flirtation had gone on when he brought the change; Naomi mimics the waiter’s smarmy smile as he put the dish of coins on the table. Their father, says Naomi, was unamused, and reduced the tip in retribution. In a side street they had seen a man working on the engine of an ancient Citroën; he had been singing something operatic quietly to himself, and his voice was rather good. She recalls much else besides. There is no
doubt, for Kate, that Naomi’s recollection is exact.

  ‘And when was the waterfall?’ asks Kate. ‘Before or after the honey shop?’

  ‘After,’ says Naomi, instantly. She has cut her toast into tiny strips; she dips them one by one in the honey and takes them between her teeth, as if it were imperative that the bread should not touch her lips.

  ‘That was a terrific holiday,’ says Kate; Naomi nods, inserting another tiny slice. ‘I often think about it,’ says Kate; this is not true.

  ‘Why?’ asks Naomi.

  ‘Because it was terrific.’

  ‘It was,’ Naomi agrees, but no residue of pleasure is audible in her voice. She takes a sip of her juice, then another little slice. ‘But a very long time ago.’

  ‘Not a very long time.’

  ‘Thirty years, more than,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Christ,’ sighs Kate. ‘Doesn’t feel like it.’

  ‘It does to me.’

  ‘But you remember it so well. Better than I do.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I’m getting it wrong.’

  ‘You’re not. When you remind me, I remember.’

  ‘When I remind you, you think you remember,’ Naomi corrects her. ‘If you’re relying on your brain alone, you can’t know I’m right. And I can’t know I’m right. I might be convinced I’m right, but I can’t be certain, without evidence. It may feel right, but that’s not the same thing.’

  ‘I can see the man fixing his car,’ says Kate.

  ‘Really? You can see him?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Kate, shutting her eyes to see more clearly.

  ‘OK. What colour is his shirt?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is he wearing jeans?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I can see the car with the bonnet up, and the man working on it.’

  ‘You imagine him. You don’t see him. He’s not there to see.’

  ‘I do see him,’ answers Kate, looking at her sister. ‘Just not as well as you.’

  ‘I’m not seeing him. I don’t know what colour his shirt is. I don’t even know what colour the car is. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There you are,’ says Naomi. ‘It’s a mess. For all we know, some of the things I think were in that village were somewhere else entirely. I’m not observing the man and his car – I’m making him up. I can’t observe him, because there’s nothing outside of my brain to observe. The man with the car does not exist – he’s a creation of our heads. It’s not like an excavation – you’re not digging up a picture. You create the picture when you look at it.’

  ‘No, we’re not making him up. He did exist. We know he existed because he appears in my head and he appears in yours. He’s real. I might not see him like I’m seeing you, but I see him.’

  ‘Fine,’ says Naomi, to insert a pause. Meshing her hands on the tabletop, she leans forward; she looks at her hands and breathes deeply, as if deciding how to reformulate the facts in sentences that will be easy to comprehend. ‘When you think of the honey shop, of us in the honey shop, as kids, do you think you’re experiencing it again, as it was?’

  ‘It’s as if I’m there, for a moment, yes.’

  ‘You become the girl in the honey shop?’

  ‘For a second or two.’

  ‘You’re looking through her eyes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Naomi regards her sister as if she were talking to someone likeable who is insisting that she has seen angels. ‘But of course you’re not there,’ she says, ‘because that place has gone. You’re here.’

  ‘I’m there and here at the same time,’ says Kate. ‘Put it another way: the girl is part of me. And young Naomi is part of you.’

  ‘But she’s not,’ says Naomi. ‘The kid who saw the cat in the street has gone. We go by the same name. And that’s about as far as it goes.’

  ‘That’s not true, Naomi,’ states Kate. ‘You’ve changed. I’ve changed. Everyone does. But the girl is still here. Here is the only place she can be. Who else would she be if she weren’t you?’

  ‘Herself.’

  ‘Which is inseparable from yourself.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘You’re saying she has no connection with you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You remember what young Naomi saw, what she felt, what she thought.’

  ‘I think I do, sometimes.’

  ‘Because you’re the same person. Your eyes are the same as hers.’

  ‘I’ve inherited her equipment and some of the things she learned, that’s true,’ Naomi concedes.

  ‘It’s more than that,’ says Kate. ‘You’re a continuation.’

  ‘I can see continuities,’ Naomi concedes; her smile suggests that she might be playing a game and is pleased that she has been able to take it this far.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But maybe that’s just hindsight,’ suggests Naomi. ‘We’ve arrived here,’ Naomi goes on, ‘and we can go back through the years and find a path that leads to where we are. We find a pattern in what we remember. Or perhaps we draw a pattern over it. But if you were somewhere else today, if you’d become a zoologist, a doctor, a meteorologist, a pilot, anything, you could look back and find incidents in which your destiny was evident for those with eyes to see.’

  But it was odd, to say the least, Kate responds, to think about one’s younger self as if she were another person. She could not imagine her life as some sort of relay race, with Kate Number Fifteen handing over to Kate Number Sixteen, who handed over to Kate Number Seventeen and so on. For how long did each Kate hold the baton? Was she to think of Kate in June of last year as someone distinct from Kate in July? Separating her life into episodes, each with its distinct Kate, was like trying to cut up a river, she tells her sister.

  Naomi looks out at the garden; her lips form a shape as if touching the mouthpiece of an invisible trumpet; this was once a mannerism of hers, an endearing one. Still facing the garden, Naomi resumes: ‘We don’t think. To say that we think is to get it the wrong way round. Thoughts happen inside our brains, and they make us think that we made them happen. But we are not in charge; the thoughts are in charge. Everything comes afterwards. An idea happens, an emotion happens, a chemical reaction that feels like something, and then a reason is found for it, a justification. The brain makes everything seem to fit. It makes us up.’ She gives her sister a long and penetrative look, a look that is stern yet sympathetic; it says that their situation is worse than naive Kate believes, but not hopeless. ‘When I’ve been mad,’ she says, ‘I—’

  ‘Don’t use that word. Please.’

  Naomi returns her sister’s gaze, but as if the interruption had been nothing but a noise from outside. She continues: ‘When I’ve been mad, the voices in my head were saying things I would not say. They were invaders. The voices had invaded me. That’s how I saw it. My mind had been hijacked. But this was a misunderstanding. I came to understand what had really been happening. The voices were the same substance as what I’d thought of as my thoughts, but in a different form. Like water and steam and ice. The same substance, but different forms. Do you see?’

  ‘I understand water all right,’ says Kate. ‘But—’

  ‘I hadn’t been invaded – there was no I to invade. The invaders were what I was, as much as my regular thoughts had been. What I came to understand—’

  ‘Exactly. What you had come to understand.’

  ‘What had become clear,’ Naomi revises, ‘was that I was the product of the chemicals, of the reactions. I was the weather of this particular brain. I understood this, and I accepted it,’ she says, placidly, as if talking of a religious conversion that had occurred many years ago. She takes Kate’s hand, and raises it for a kiss. ‘You think this is all terrible, don’t you?’ she says.

  ‘No,’ Kate answers, retaining her sister’s hand. ‘I don’t think it’s terrible. I think it’s not right.’

  ‘You think you have a wee woman
inside your skull, pulling the levers? The Katie-essence? Mission control?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘A soul?’

  ‘The weather can’t think about itself, Naomi.’

  Her sister smiles; this objection is the obvious one, the smile tells her, and is easily refuted. ‘The stuff out there can’t think about itself,’ says Naomi, pointing towards the garden. ‘I grant you that. But the sky is simple stuff. Just water vapour and a few gases. In here,’ – she raps a knuckle on her brow, with force – ‘it’s much more complicated. Billions and billions and billions of cells, fizzing away, day and night. So many chemicals and circuits. It’s a universe in there,’ she says, mock-boasting, and she laughs.

  ‘Perhaps I’m out of my depth,’ Kate suggests; Naomi does not contradict her. ‘All I know,’ Kate goes on, ‘is that there is a person called Naomi, a person who thinks and talks and makes decisions, a person who is unique and herself, and always has been. It’s not a vat of chemicals I’m talking to right now.’

  ‘Oh, but it is,’ Naomi replies, sorrowfully; the sorrow is for her innocent sister. She puts her glass on the plate; the toast has not been finished; she has eaten almost nothing.

  ‘And Bernát?’ says Kate. ‘He’s just a bag of chemicals that has achieved some sort of reaction with the bag of chemicals we call Naomi?’

  Naomi stands up and kisses her sister on the top of her head. She carries the plate to the bin, then puts it into the dishwasher, in the wrong place. ‘You get some work done,’ she says, ‘then I’ll go to see Mum.’

  ‘What are you going to do this morning?’

  ‘Homework.’

  ‘Homework?’

  ‘Past tense, conditional mood,’ says Naomi, with a teasing smile as she leaves.