It sounded dirty and a little absurd in his clipped, English voice. He waited for me to complain and seemed disappointed when I didn’t. I knew what he’d be looking for: the chance to point out that I’d never complained before, when he’d called me that in other, more private circumstances. Instead I just smiled and wished there was an olive in the glass to chew on. My body went a little soft at the joints. He raised his glass in a half-hearted toast.
Jenny – The sky here looks weird without the towers.
Missing you.
I had finally got around to mailing one of the postcards. The stamp was an image of the Statue of Liberty; the other option at the post office had been an American flag. Reaching to drop it into the mailbox on the corner, I stopped, disturbed. I looked down at the card, the short note, my writing. It was suddenly unfamiliar, the handwriting of someone else. What was I giving away, I wondered, seeing the marks and strokes and lines that would mean a whole range of things to Richard Evans the graphologist, things I couldn’t see in my own writing.
There was someone waiting behind me with her own things to post, a woman wearing a brown fur coat and big sunglasses. I glanced over. She made small sighs and noises of irritation and shifted her weight from one foot to another on kitten heels. In one hand, raised to her waist, she held a miniature dog, a chihuahua with big, wet eyes. It tilted its little head to the side and bared a set of tiny teeth at me.
I stepped aside, let the woman post her several letters.
When she was done, I pushed my card through the slot. It didn’t make a sound falling in.
There was a message on the notepad next to the phone when I got back to the apartment.
Julia: Peter pls call
Friday pm
Peter and I hadn’t spoken since I’d been in New York. Before I left he had started his residency at a hospital out in Sydney’s western suburbs, the same place he had been working as an intern. I called. His phone rang and then went to an answering machine. I left a brief message. Was there a birthday that I had forgotten? No – his birthday was in May, a week before my own. I tried calling my aunt. The phone rang out.
I tried again the next day, calling Jenny first this time. Again there was no answer. The phone rang almost as soon as I had set it down, and it was Peter. His voice was tired. The news was bad.
‘It’s Jenny. She’s had a stroke. A serious one. We think she’s going to be OK but recovery could take some time. It took a while to find your number.’
I stared at the clock on the wall and absorbed its details. The two hands, one longer than the other – by how much, I wondered. Two centimetres? How many centimetres in an inch again? Little black lines around the edges marked the seconds, and the numerals were all bold, finished off with just a little curlicue. This is shock, I thought, the idea floating. This absorption in the details.
My hand felt numb against the plastic of the phone. How many seconds had gone by? The thin little ticking third hand didn’t help me decide.
‘I’ll come back as soon as I can,’ I told him. Peter’s voice was so familiar, and my own now sounded so strange.
‘I think she’d like to see you.’
‘She’s awake?’ I asked.
The distance between us sounded like the backwash of a wave. Seconds passed, although my eyes were having trouble now focusing on the thin black lines of the clock. Peter’s voice brought me back from deep underwater.
‘So when will you be able to get here?’
‘I don’t know. Soon. The time difference. I don’t know how long it will take. I’ll get a ticket as soon as I can.’ My brain started to wrap around the logistics of airlines, times, travel.
I watched the dirty-looking sunset finish. When the door buzzed later it was dark and the room was lit by just one lamp. A second later the buzzer sounded again, a long ring. I rose to answer it.
Jones’s voice crackled through the box. I pressed the button to open the downstairs door and went to open the latch. He was there quickly and inside. He almost lifted me from the ground, arms squeezing out the breath, and then he stepped back. He looked at me strangely.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘What is it with you?’ he countered. ‘You’re pale.’ He touched my arms. ‘You’re freezing.’ He began to pull off his jacket.
I told him. ‘My aunt had a stroke.’
‘Your aunt?’
‘We were close. We live – I lived with her in Sydney.’
He became suddenly solicitous and kind and ushered me inside and through to the couch with a steady arm, opened wine and poured me a drink. ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked. I shook my head. He went into the kitchen and used the phone. ‘Food’s on the way,’ he said as he came back in.
‘Now,’ he said, looking at me as though he were about to explain a complicated concept. ‘You don’t have a seat booked already, do you?’
I shook my head again.
‘Alright,’ he said, and turned on the television. I stared at it. He changed the channels until a black-and-white film appeared. He went to use the phone. When he came back a little while later he handed me a sheet of notepaper with an address written on it and some sets of numbers. ‘You can pick up the ticket from there in the morning.’
I looked at the notepaper.
‘It isn’t far,’ he said.
I was confused, thinking for a moment that he meant Sydney. ‘Oh, you mean this place,’ I said eventually. The address belonged to a travel agent. It was a shopfront a few blocks away, always filled with students. The numbers on the paper were dates and times and flight numbers but I read them without real understanding.
Food arrived at the door then and I ate the noodle soup straight from the plastic container. Jones cleared the table when we were done and came back. The television was still on, a different movie that looked the same as the one before.
‘There was a flight tomorrow or not till next week. So you’re leaving tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Now come to bed.’
I was half-afraid that he would try to take me out of the semi-present state I was hovering in, but he seemed to understand that oblivion was what I was looking for. And when had it been any different really, ever, I wondered, as a long breath left me, and the question dissolved. He was rough and deliberate. I wondered what a concussion felt like. I slept.
The light came through the doors at a strange angle the next morning. It was too early. The knowledge of Jenny’s stroke was perfectly present in my mind when I woke; there was no moment of not remembering, no sense of it coming back slowly. It was just there.
Jones’s jacket rested on the armchair at the other side of the room, flung across so that the crooked arms suggested a fallen person. This was odd. I imagined that he had forgotten it when he left in the night. The buzzer rang. I pulled on a shirt and went to the hall, pressed the button, croaked out hello.
‘It’s me,’ a voice replied.
‘Jones?’
Nothing. I buzzed him in.
He walked in with coffee and doughnuts in his hand, six in a flimsy cardboard box. I pulled it open and took it out of his hands and chose one with chocolate icing. It seemed to be made of chocolate cake.
‘You eat utter crap,’ I told him with my mouth full.
He grinned and made his way into the apartment. ‘You’re welcome. Good morning.’
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ I asked.
He didn’t reply, stood in the bedroom facing the French doors, pushing his hair back, drinking coffee. I sat on the bed and chewed my doughnut. He watched me eating, undoing the buttons of his shirt.
‘This is good,’ I said.
‘I thought you said it was crap.’
‘No, good. Thanks.’
‘Hmm.’
Jones’s and Matt’s voices drifted in from the living room when I came out of the shower a while later. I dressed and went in there. Matt was gazing at Jones with eyes full of adoration and dragged his gaze away to look at me.
‘Did
Jones tell you?’ I asked.
‘Tell me what?’ Matt glanced back at him quickly.
‘My aunt’s had a stroke. In Sydney. I’m leaving today.’
‘Oh, god,’ he said, and put his arms around me. ‘I’ll help you pack. And we can talk about when you’re coming back. Don’t think about staying there.’
I looked at Jones, but couldn’t catch his eye.
‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget the ticket. Your flight’s this afternoon.’
The note with all the details was still there on the coffee table. He pushed it in my direction with his finger. He and Matt exchanged a look and a nod that seemed to convey something about making sure I made it to the airport in one piece.
I walked Jones to the door and he held me close for a short moment, and put his hand in my wet hair and squeezed so that it almost hurt.
*
My suitcase didn’t take long to pack. When it was done I went downstairs and knocked on Mrs Bee’s door. She opened it and let me in. Her hand was warm on my arm and she looked at my face, my eyes. ‘Sit down,’ she said.
She filled the kettle and set it on the stove. The sounds were a reminder of Jenny, and I felt myself lose steadiness inside.
Mrs Bee brought the tea out on the usual wooden tray, which rattled as it came to rest on the low table. She poured the tea into two cups. It smelled delicate and earthy, and I imagined a flower on its stem freshly pulled out of the ground, dirt clinging to the threadlike roots. Black leaves floated down through the liquid.
‘Men carrying doughnuts and coffee can be a portent of many things,’ she said with a smile. ‘I don’t know what it signifies in this case but you look as though you’ve had a shock.’
‘My aunt’s had a stroke. In Sydney.’ I put my hand to my hair, smoothed it down.
Mrs Bee nodded slowly, listening.
I sipped my tea, waiting for her to say something. I saw my arrival in the city and my imminent departure, bracketed by the loss of one person and now, almost, another. The feeling of Ingrid’s loss was refreshed by this new brush with grief, and I knew that it would deepen and change now.
‘So you were right, at my last visit,’ I said. ‘The search is coming to an end.’ She’d made this prediction, unusually specific, while inspecting the dregs of my tea a few days before.
Mrs Bee smiled gently. ‘All searches end one way or another. Yours was bound to end one day. But you can return to it, if you feel as though it’s not finished here.’
She reached for my cup, now almost empty. I turned it, the gesture now automatic. The liquid drained out as I rested it upside down on its saucer. She looked into it casually, and tilted it so that the inside of the cup was visible to me. The leaves made a rough circle, broken in one place. I looked again and saw an hourglass, or a cloud. I closed my eyes and saw a brown, clear river, old leaves and branches resting at the bottom.
I opened my eyes. ‘Did you see it?’ I asked her.
Mrs Bee placed the cup back in the saucer.
‘The last time I was here – did you see it?’
‘No,’ she said, meeting my eyes. ‘But think about it. What would I do with knowledge like that, even if I had it?’
She leaned back against the sofa, tiredness in her face, a new expression.
Part Three
21.
The plane was still sitting on the runway when I took out my book, knowing I wouldn’t start reading it yet but wanting to have something in my hands, some words ready to distract me when the take-off began. Removing the book required some subsequent rearrangement of the things inside my bag; bags within bags within bags; things I looked at now and couldn’t imagine needing. At least ten pens. Why were all these receipts in here? I took out a Valium pill and swallowed it, struggled to do the zip back up and fitted the bag under the seat. The seat next to me was still empty. In the aisle seat was a middle-aged man in a suit. He had taken off his tie as soon as he sat down and squashed it cruelly into the mesh pocket in the seat in front. Wrinkles were beginning to form around the bottom of his jacket. Neither of us ventured to put anything on the seat between us. I thought about it and decided to wait.
The book rested squarish and large on my lap, a mystery novel with a jacket dominated by raised silver lettering. An envelope packet of photographs had got stuck inside the cover while it was in my bag, and I took it into my hands. I had borrowed Matt’s camera, a lightweight Nikon, a few times in the past weeks, and had the snapshots developed. The cover of the envelope, provided by the photo shop, showed a generic Alpine scene with snowy peaks and improbably shaded sky.
The plane’s wheels started to move slowly, slowly, crawling out along the runway. I removed the photographs and studied them: the first one was a snap of that picture on Fleur’s wall, with Ingrid’s back and Fleur’s young, made-up face. Ingrid seemed very solid in this image, and alive. Something in it made me think of my aunt; I remembered her standing at the stove as the kettle boiled, her back to me, steam on the windows and the lamplight soft as I sat at the table waiting for tea to be made. There was a longing for home in this memory, and I wondered if there would be any return to that kind of moment, her standing there like that, both of us waiting. I moved the photograph to the back of the pack.
The next one was the picture of Ingrid I had taken from Fleur’s drawer, stowed in here with my own pictures. It looked as though it had been taken on the Brooklyn Promenade, a wide walkway in Brooklyn Heights that ran for a mile along the East River, lined with playgrounds and mansions looking over to the southern end of Manhattan. The city was a blur behind her across the water. Her hair had come loose in strands and blew around her head, a blonde corona. One hand was raised to shade her face or keep the hair away, obscuring one of her eyes. She smiled her Mona Lisa smile, no teeth showing, lips soft. I moved to the next photograph, and the plane moved a little faster. I concentrated on the photographs – of SoHo, of the apartment, the birdcage on the roof, rooftops beyond it, the skyline, the sky – and came back around to the Promenade.
This time I saw something different. It was as though the angle of the photographer had shifted. Perhaps my change of perspective came from viewing these dozen other pictures, many of them skylines, but the photograph seemed to show the city beyond Ingrid’s figure in a new way. Where was she standing? The wheels moved faster, and the feeling in the pit of my stomach grew more troubling as they gained in speed. But now the feeling was attached equally to the photograph. I tried to imagine myself there again on the Promenade, the wide pavement, the people walking and laughing, sitting on the benches, the generous trees overhanging and laying their spotted shade on the grey path, the roar of the expressway below, a monster beneath. The way the island looked from there, from the start of the walk – here the pretty old skyscraper, there the stepped pyramid roof of that other building, the bridge swinging down all the way over there. But where was she standing? I strained to remember the place and where she could be. Behind her head the sky was palest grey or blue. But it was empty, I realised with growing wonder. Above the stepped skyline of downtown the fingers of the towers did not reach into the air. The towers were not there. Where was she standing? When was she there?
She continued to smile, and it had never seemed so mocking, or mysterious, or aggravating. The photograph was smaller than the other ones by half an inch around the edges. I had always imagined that Fleur had taken the picture but now I wondered. The plane hurtled along the runway, walls shuddering. I suppressed an urge to shout, Stop! Let me off. I wanted to run through the airport and all the way back to the SoHo loft and ask Fleur about the photograph – when was it taken? Who took it? What does it show?
I looked down and saw that I had unfastened my seatbelt, ready to rise. I couldn’t, of course, I told myself. It would wait, for a phone call. I fastened the buckle again. The man in the aisle seat slept, his head tilting to an awkward angle as the plane lifted off and left the ground.
The turbulence began as we ap
proached the clouds. The city, the water, all the shrinking freeways and buildings and little islands disappeared slowly below. I looked from the square window back down to the photograph. The contours of the city behind Ingrid seemed fuzzier somehow now, and the angle even less clear, as the drug entered my bloodstream.
A few rows ahead a small child’s scream cut the mechanical buzz of the aircraft, a thin, reedy note right on pitch. After a long minute it dropped away to sobbing, responding to a mother’s voice almost inaudible above the other noise. I heard the child crying and had a second of displacement where I wondered fearfully if it might be my own voice. The crying continued. Was it a boy, a girl? Through the Valium haze the shudders of the plane felt like rocking by a huge, unseen hand.
My brother Peter met me at Sydney airport in his nice black car.
‘Where am I taking you?’ he asked.
‘To the house. Mosman.’ It didn’t feel right to call it home somehow.
By the time we were halfway there we were fighting traffic.
‘How’s Leonora?’ I asked.
Peter had been having a secret affair with one of the other doctors at the hospital, a woman in a senior position, for months. The secrecy was something to do with their relationship at work; it had never quite made sense the one or two times when he had tried to explain it to me. Jenny disapproved in a silent, resigned kind of way.
Peter shrugged and made a show of focusing hard on the road.
He walked up to the front door with me, and I went to my room while he wandered back out to the verandah. The house felt empty as a tomb, and I thought again of the chambers in the Pyramids and the curse tablets that Ingrid had been working with. Tiny, rolled-up pieces of metal, some of them stuck under a corpse’s tongue. What would it have taken to have found them – prying open the old bones?
The air in my room was cool and still. I dropped my bag and went through to the studio. It was filled with the direct light that Jenny liked to work with. Canvases sat stacked against the wall. One was standing up on an easel towards the back of the room. The blue of it was immense, swathes of colour swept through with white strokes. Clouds; the foam on waves. The bright whiteness of sunlight through a window in a strip against the floor.
The Legacy Page 27