If Clara

by Martha Baillie

  Clara

  Does friendship exist between Daisy and me? I think she likes Us. But this can’t be, since she sees only Me, not Us. She can’t know about Us, can’t and mustn’t. What if Daisy is one of Them? Until this afternoon, she likely liked my likeness. But it fell from its frame. Julia and Daisy must never meet. My sister would not tolerate Daisy’s interest in Me, she could not allow Me a friendship outside her control. If Daisy were to learn about Us and to tell Julia about Us, Julia would send the Emotionals to drown Us in a Sea of Histrionics. They have plans for Our body. Which of Us does Daisy see and hear? I try to speak as Clara, as Me, to always be Clara when We are with Daisy. The trouble is Our amnesia. WE MUST NOT REMEMBER: of sealing wax and kings. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ asked Julia, and we had to stop, because Julia is one of them and they are too numerous. We could not stick our fingers up all their noses at once. They carry their buckets of shit with them. Beatrix brought butter tarts. We’d rowed out into the middle of the lake, when she stood and bared her bum. We didn’t mind drowning. The practice of drowning is approved of and often put to use for retrieving information that has been swallowed whole and is wholly indigestible, though believed by some to be holy. A fine must be paid if death occurs before the missing pieces are recovered. The size of the fine depends on the fireman’s mood. A recent manual, government-approved, recommends tying a cat to the top of the informant’s head. As the water rises, the cat will claw the unfortunate’s ears. Clawing of the ears stimulates speech, if the day is not overly humid. Birdsong encourages collusion. To discourage partisans from hiding in the foliage of public parks, all birds are to be shot if seen wearing feathers. Julia has been sent to spy on me. I used to think she was one of Us, but she is one of Them. Blow the bag up. Not the woman, the paper bag. I only meant the paper bag.

  Julia

  The grave has been dug – a hole in the dirt, artificial grass unrolled along its lip. A mound of loose soil waits off to one side. Long and deep the hole is, its dense walls alive with roots and insects. Into this space she will be lowered. Elsa Burns. I did not know her. I am here to support Maurice, who is having a hard time freeing himself of the idea that he killed her, Maurice who has not yet arrived. I’ve come early because I’m anxious. This is the correct grave, I hope. To calm myself, I think I’ll climb that path over there, the one leading to the summit of the grassy knoll, and sit under that oak tree at the very top.

  Still no sign of Maurice, for whose sake I am waiting for this funeral, which refuses to get underway. Seen from up here, from this summit, the hole in the ground looks much smaller but just as raw, as new and intrusive as when I was standing down there. The hole invites. It begs completion. Aha, here comes the hearse and a cortege of several cars. Still no Maurice. From a dark limousine two women are extricating themselves. Elsa Burns’s daughters? The short blond one is wearing a red coat. She must be Fiona. Maurice has mentioned repeatedly a red coat. Here comes another car, small and white. It’s advancing slowly, with as much dignity as such a tiny vehicle is capable of. It’s come to a halt. Ah, Maurice! He’s emerging from the passenger side, and from behind the wheel long-legged Bruce is sliding out with inexplicable ease. On his feet are his two-tone shoes, of course, recently polished, by the gleaming look of them. Bruce and Maurice, at last. They are glancing about, getting their bearings. Now they’re walking over to the woman in the red coat. It’s time for me to join them. A taxi has pulled up. I’ll stroll discreetly down the hillside. Wait! Clara? Oh, my God, it’s Clara. I can’t go down there. Clara, attending a funeral? Already the taxi is driving off. There’s a woman with a cane. She and Clara are stepping off the road and into the grass. Who is that woman with my sister? They are hanging back, Clara and her friend with the cane. Clara has a friend? Why has she brought Clara here? Oh, God, I am dense. Fiona Burns. Fiona of the red coat must be Clara’s psychiatrist. How many times have I asked Alice for the name of Clara’s psychiatrist? As if Alice could remember. But she might have. It could have surfaced at any moment. Where are Maurice and Bruce? Oh, there they are, way over there next to Dr. Fiona Burns and her sister and the other mourners. They’ve assembled at the edge of the grave. The moment has come for me to join Maurice, this is when I ought to be slipping my arm through his. I promised to be there. Soon the preacher will speak, and possibly Bruce also. I’ll hear nothing from this stupid hilltop. But I can’t go down. Clara, startled, taken off guard, might behave who knows how? Clara has made a friend! What a great flapping of wings! Three crows have just landed in the branches above me. Strikingly at ease they are, in their permanent funeral attire. One of them is returning my stare. What a chorus of cawing. What’s going on below? If only I had a pair of binoculars. Clara is turning her head. Her gaze is gliding up the hill and now she’s seen me. Oh, Christ, she’s running off between the trees, away, away. The woman with the cane – how long can she balance there, left on her own, swaying uncertainly? Should I go to her, or run after Clara? Grab Maurice by the arm and ask his advice? I am running. Catch her, catch her, catch her if I can. Each breath slicing between my ribs, the grass flattening beneath my feet, down the slope I go, hurtling along the level now, until the next small rise, and she’s keeping ahead of me. No. She’s stopped. She’s turned. She’s staring at me and shouting. Her words are arriving meaningless. My fear has carved a trench, a delay that comprehension must leap across. Meaning has leapt and arrived: ‘Stay back. Stay back. Don’t come near me.’ If I sit down on the grass right now, she’ll understand, she’ll know that I know that she does not want me to pursue her. But my legs refuse. She is yelling, eyes searching for an exit. She’s off again, has slipped between two bushes, is going out through the cemetery gates and down Mount Pleasant Road, running, running, searching for an escape from me, an exit.

  Maurice

  You? Charging full tilt across the hillside? This is not, absolutely not, what we agreed upon. Elsa Burns in a box being lowered into the ground, and your arm slipped through mine – that was the plan, Julia my dear. What in God’s name? First you fail to appear, then you spring into existence as motion blur in the corner of my eye. If you’d not been moving so fast, I’d have missed you. There I stood, feeling full of shame, and pissed off at you. It was your idea that you come. You offered your moral support. ‘I’ll be at the burial, I want to be there for you.’ When Bruce and I arrived, no sign of you. Fiona and her sister we spotted immediately. Bruce stepped forward and announced that he’d like to read a small passage from the Bhagavad Gita, to which Fiona, more quiet than usual, nodded her head in consent. Then the minister approached and requested a word with both daughters. I turned my back to give them privacy and to survey the surrounding area, hoping to see you arrive on foot or step out of a car. Instead, who arrives? Clara, your sister! You must have seen her, from up on your hill, seen her climb out of the taxi, and with her Daisy Harding, Bruce’s other-side-of-the-wall neighbour. I stood there, feeling the wind against my skin, thinking what a terrible day it would be for flying, and wondering if I’d ever want to go up in the ultralight again, and trying to figure out why on earth Daisy Harding was with your sister, and what were they both doing here, and why hadn’t you told me that your sister was coming, or didn’t you know, and where the hell were you, when the minister began his speech, and my thoughts changed track, and our little throng, from which those two stood apart, tightened around the grave, and we all bowed our heads in concentration. I could no longer see Fiona’s downturned face, nor her sister’s. I killed their mother. You insist that I didn’t, but I did. Beside me stood Bruce, nervously fingering the paper in his pocket. I’d watched him copying from one holy book after another, before settling on the lines of Hindu wisdom now concealed in his pocket. Soon, soon, he’d pull out the paper, open his mouth, and say aloud his frightened farewell to Elsa of the pale green sweater and brown slacks, ‘dead from shock and delight,’ or so her daughter claims. ‘My mother died in a state of wonder,’ insists Dr. Burns, mender of min
ds, doctor made small by death, doctor weeping. A sudden, raucous cawing yanked our attention, and there you were, observing us from your hilltop. Immediately Clara broke free. She shot past us, feet pounding on the path. The minister turned his head and watched her go. All heads were turning. Down the slope and straight for us you charged, Julia dear. But you were not descending to apologize or to explain. You swerved east, in pursuit of Clara, extending your stride, hair flying, and there I was, running also, calling out, shouting not your name but Clara’s. ‘Clara, stop. It’s all right, Clara, it’s all right.’ I don’t know why her name, not yours. She most certainly couldn’t hear me. It was your name I should have been calling. ‘Julia, stop. It’s all right, Julia, it’s all right.’

  Daisy

  The entire fiasco was stupid and avoidable. It was me who encouraged Clara, who offered to go with her. This broken leg has taught me nothing. The day was far too windy for anything to go as expected, clouds sweeping across the sky, trees bending. I leaned on my cane and thought about the wild audacity of humans, our determination to stand upright on two legs. My thoughts made me laugh. ‘What’s so funny?’ asked Clara, suspicious as always. ‘Standing. The absurdity of being vertical,’ I answered. Clara grinned. Her happiness gave me pleasure. A gust of wind high above us shifted the clouds and the sky became bright and I looked all around me. I saw grass and trees, and Bruce and Maurice, my two neighbours. The wind had deposited them beside a birch tree, at the edge of the grave of Clara’s psychiatrist’s mother. Why had I not put two and two together earlier? ‘I know that man with the fancy shoes,’ I whispered to Clara, ‘and the man beside him, they live on the other side of my living room wall. The one with the shoes is Bruce Mammadov, an Australian; the other is Maurice, whose last name I don’t know. You may have seen them when you were coming or going from my front porch?’ Clara shook her head. She continued shaking her head, and her hands began searching the air for an answer until she succeeded in pointing her finger at Maurice. ‘My sister, he’s her best friend.’ Her entire being was now visibly trembling in fury and fear. ‘I should never have fucking come here.’ She dug her heel into the ground. ‘Dr. Burns can’t want me here. Why would she want to have one of her patients turn up at her mother’s burial? What a stupid idea. I’m an idiot. I get Maurice as my prize for being so stupid. I have to leave. I’m sorry. I thought I could do this but I can’t. This is my fault. I wanted to know how Dr. Burns would behave, confronted by her mother’s grave. I wanted to see her fall apart. Now I get to pay for sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. If Maurice walks over here, I’ll have to leave, I’ll have to abandon you, I’m sorry, but I won’t have any choice.’

  I advised Clara to wait and catch her breath. I suggested that her presence, possibly, might comfort Dr. Burns, might send a message of validation in a moment of loss. I proposed that our mutual decision to attend the burial of Elsa Burns was neither stupid nor inappropriate, while in my ears all I could hear was the whistling of wind, then Clara, staring at the ground, started a tuneless humming under her breath. She wrapped her arms around her middle, then lifted her head and looked me in the eye. ‘You’re right. I do care about Dr. Burns. A lot. I care about her a lot.’ Tears were sliding down Clara’s cheeks and along the edge of her nose. They went slipping into her mouth. She covered her face. I fished in my pocket for a Kleenex. Scraps of eulogy sailed over to us, clusters of words carried on the wind. Handfuls of soil were being dropped into a deep, rectangular hole, dirt raining down on the coffin of Elsa Burns. From high in a tree, several crows called out in solidarity. Clara turned her attention to the crows. On the crest of the hill stood a woman. As if shot from a gun, Clara took off. Within seconds the woman on the hill started running, racing down, racing Clara toward some finish line visible to no one but the two of them.

  Maurice

  We caught up with Julia. She was sitting on the ground, alone.

  ‘Gone?’ I asked, and Julia nodded. We placed ourselves, Bruce and I, on either side of her, like two hapless sentinels. The groaning of ancient trees urged patience. ‘I’m an idiot,’ she announced. Just then, Daisy Harding came lurching toward us, her gait uneven, her cane preventing her from toppling. She perched her weary self on a tombstone a few feet away.

  ‘Julia Hodgkins, Daisy Harding. Daisy, Julia,’ I offered. It was all I felt capable of.

  ‘Where’s Clara?’ asked Daisy.

  We could pursue Clara or not. She was out there, running through the city, demons far worse than us howling inside her. Soberly, we debated. We arrived at the following plan: Daisy would ride with Bruce in his car to the Leslie Street Spit, and there the two of them would search a tiny portion of the shore of Lake Ontario. The Leslie Street Spit was Daisy’s idea. Farther north, a streetcar would carry Julia and me along St. Clair Avenue to the stop closest to Clara’s apartment, where we’d get off. Should Clara fail to respond when we knocked on her door, Julia would use her emergency key to let us in, and from the front hall we’d call out Clara’s name. Further failure to answer on Clara’s part would justify our entering further, to verify if she was indeed not home or perhaps unconscious and in need of immediate assistance. By cellphone, the two search parties would communicate their findings to each other.

  Bruce and I ran, we ran back the way we’d come, along the weaving path between wind-flailed trees, back to Elsa’s grave, to get Bruce’s car, I gasping for breath, determined to keep abreast of my long-legged darling.

  Daisy

  Here is where Kamar drowned herself. The Spit. A finger built from discarded concrete, shattered toilet bowls, old crockery, and broken sewage pipes. A rubble digit, overgrown in patches, colonized by willows and aspen, grasses, asters, and bulrushes. It pokes into the lake and the frigid water slaps at it.

  My cane and unwilling leg slowed us down. At first we saw no sign of Clara.

  Maurice

  Words painted on the walls, crude caricatures of the heads of animals, of the heads of birds, alongside faceless children of various sizes. And there were dolls hanging by their feet, strips of paper uncurling from their abdomens. It surpassed what I’d expected in horror, sadness, and artistry. Julia had warned me, but nothing could have prepared me for the grief I felt. Words typed on these gut streamers, words I did not bend close enough to read. Inscribed in red strokes of paint above the unusable fireplace: Say not what you see. In a thicker black scrawl descending the living room wall: Those who tell shall be blinded. Do not swallow. Beware the emotional deluge. I am the other eye.

  In flowing blue cursive on the wall outside the bathroom: Of sealing wax and kings. In her bedroom, on the inside of her closet door: If Clara. In the bathroom stood the unused bathtub, its once-long-ago-white surface licked by thick tongues of paint, and above the tub, from the ceiling hung a black fishnet stocking, stuffed full of dead light bulbs.

  Clara everywhere but nowhere, we locked her door behind us.

  Daisy

  Mismatched houses line up in pairs. The brilliant green garbage truck grinds and compresses its cargo of refuse as it glides up the street. How is it that this truck’s appearance and the sounds it produces, the turning of its rubber wheels, the gnashing of its metal teeth, and the rumble of its engine, combine to convince me of its reality? For Clara the houses outside my window are a hoax, a facade thrown together to trick her. The entire street, visual and audible, has been devised by an organization devoted to the torture of children and defective adults. A defective adult may be one who trusts too easily or one incapable of trust. She cannot say when she first became aware that such a plot exists. Her childhood she can rarely reach inside of, and when she does she retrieves little. Were her cocooned past to hatch, the monster of pain released would be of giant proportions, or so she fears. Into the jaws of her past she would disappear forever. This much she has explained to me.

  I poured us each more tea. I rubbed my sore leg. She saw my hand moving back and forth and asked if I was in pain.

  ‘No,�
�� I assured her. ‘An aching stiffness, that’s all. It feels wooden, and the tips of the metal screws trouble me when I touch them through my skin. But it’s recovering. It’s functioning.’

  I did not tell her: I know who put them there, those screws; I remember being wheeled into the operating room and staring up at an arrangement of lights that resembled the underbelly of a UFO or the eye of a giant fly, and I remember feeling grateful that many lights were to shine down on my flesh as the surgeon cut my leg open, and I recall that I had no doubts as to why he was about to insert metal plates inside my shattered limb, and I know that I gave my consent. Might another surgeon have performed the operation better? This doubt I do toy with. When my leg hurts, I imagine a more pleasing outcome, and I attribute varying degrees of incompetence to my surgeon. However, the hospital’s excellent reputation suggests that I was not placed in poor hands, and most importantly, my leg’s steady progress indicates that the surgery was well-executed. I banish my fears, or rather I juggle them. A cataloguing of my worries occurs most often when I’m lying in bed and confronted by night’s borderless expanse or the demanding arrival of daylight. A rapid, desperate sorting of my terrors may occur on a public bus also, or while I’m seated on this sofa and pretending to read.

  As I turned these thoughts over, trying to decide if knowing of my vulnerabilities would be of use or detrimental to Clara, I watched her drink her tea in great gulps and set down her cup. She lifted the pot to pour herself more, making a visible effort not to allow the tremor in her hand to cause any liquid to spill onto the table.

  ‘Cruelty, justifiably provoked by my own despicability,’ she said, ‘it allows the world to remain a potentially desirable place to live, though not for me, as I am despicable.’ Her fingers smoothed the cloth of her skirt where it spread over her knees. ‘If, however, I am the innocent victim of monstrous misuse,’ she continued, ‘then I am not despicable, but the world becomes an even greater palace of horrors, of human viciousness set loose. I take either path, depending on the hour or the day, and either way I find myself impaled upon an event or a series of repeated events that I cannot remember. Last week, on the Leslie Street Spit, when you and your neighbour found me, I wasn’t going to drown myself, not unless Julia had come looking for me. I wanted to be near water. I also needed to be as far from Julia as I could get. I wanted waves. It was windy enough. The sound of waves is a good place to hide.’