Anticipation

by Tanya Moir

  The builders kept as much of the old wood as they could, but my grande dame’s joints are now pinned with straight new pine, her skirting cloned, her polished kauri boards transplanted from Remuera. She still looks her age. Her walls could, as Maggie might say, tell many stories. Happily, though, she has the sense to keep them to herself.

  It was when we opened up the verandahs, ripped out the dormitories, that the house began to shine. The glint of the harbour in her big sash windows again, the soft skitter of cloud and wave lighting dusty dados and mildewed ceilings (just as it is playing, right now, on my crisp paintwork, grey-white and silky beige, a perfect, newly opened mushroom). The offence of aluminium joinery and plywood partitions consigned, piece by piece, to a skip beside the boatshed, awaiting the tide.

  As everything on the island must. Last week, for instance, I knew, before Sally arrived, exactly how long she would stay. My guests must adhere to the harbour’s timetable. Leave me, at the appointed hour, to my mangroves and herons, the sweep of sea and mud. My quiet grey house. The returning creep of my pale arachnid ghosts.

  But of course, when the jetty is finished, all that will change.

  This morning, when the builders came up for coffee, I expressed my fears.

  ‘Ah,’ said sapper Jake. He’d put his T-shirt back on to come into the house, but I could still see a tattooed band below each sleeve, blue braces holding up his biceps. ‘You want one of those new invisible jetties. They’re all the rage.’

  I smiled. ‘But could I afford one?’

  ‘Yeah! They’re easy to build, eh. No extra charge. We’ll have it done for you tomorrow.’

  Through the afternoon, the visible jetty progresses less quickly. Not that Jake and Pete aren’t working hard — but they’ll have to knock off soon. The September sun is already heading west, making for the Waitakeres and, beyond them, open water. Sharpening the day as it goes, honing light and crushing shadows. While in another hemisphere, those same rays, worn and waterlogged, are clambering up Wimbledon Hill, over Tooting Broadway, the Lüneberg Heath, revolving into a soft-edged autumn morning.

  Except, of course, that it’s we who are moving, time and tide, cold-shouldering our way in and out of darkness. What comes around will go around.

  I watch my jetty grow and think about William Biggs.

  I wish I could remember my days with him. What did we do? What did he say? What pacific fairy tales did he whisper, whisky-breathed, into my ear?

  As it is, I have only Maggie’s word for it that such a time occurred at all.

  And yet I think I hear an echo of him in my thick-watered silences, just as his pattern replicates in the soft centres of my bones.

  Here we are, in a room in 1969, alone with the scent of disuse and the sun shining pink through the curtains. What does William see when he looks at me? A soft-skulled seed. Germ cells slippery with proclivity, reddening with need. And yet he feeds me.

  Someone’s got to do it.

  Brave Will. He never lets tasks slide. Every day, he rises with the first bell of his alarm, performs a thorough gentleman’s toilette, arrives at the printing presses coolly and on time. It’s no wonder he can’t sleep. He’s kept up his guard so long his spine has fused. My osseous grandfather, a rock in unmaternal Harding seas.

  Of course, he tells me nothing. Perhaps, as we doze side by side on the candlewick, I inhale the dust of his dreams. Or perhaps it was already there, in the nucleus of my first cell. A frosting on my chromosomes, waiting to be raised.

  Catching us on the bed like this, guilty Sarah predicts my doom. She should know by now to save her breath. Accidents can’t scare William Biggs. He’s a fan of disempowerment.

  William leaves for his shift at five. Roger comes by at six, picks up me and my nappy bucket, and heads home for a busy evening. No after-hours prospecting for him now. His figures are down. I hate to think what they’re saying at the office.

  After an hour alone with Sarah, I’m usually feeling fractious. Like my grandfather, I don’t sleep well at night. Perhaps it’s the milky smell of Maggie, a taunting blur, a presence guessed at but out of reach.

  In time, pharmacology prevails, and I’m reunited with my mother. She takes me to the park. We sit silent beside the duck pond, watching. From their sanctuary in the centre, the half-grown mallards come and go. Maggie stares at the water. Other mothers throw bread.

  Of course I can’t really see anything yet, especially not from this pram. The light on the water, at best. Maggie’s face, and the grey summer sky. Still, I like to think it’s here I catch my first glimpse of an island.

  The importance of going out at least once a day has been impressed upon Maggie. We walk, diligent, down Bradbury Street in the middle of every morning, hot or cold, squinting into sun or wind or stinging drizzle.

  When it’s really raining, we go to the library. Up the stone stairs there are puppet shows and stories. Downstairs there is quiet.

  We sit at a big wooden table with books other people have taken down and neglected to return. Occasionally Maggie looks through them. Mostly, as in the park, she seems to do nothing, but I could swear, here and there, there’s a kind of a hum, something rattling around, like a modem searching for connection.

  Finding Family, she reads one day, sticking out between a guide to the British Isles and one on making jam. A Beginner’s Guide to Discovering Your Roots.

  In retrospect, I blame myself. I could scream now, but I don’t. I just focus on her face, its sharp lines vanishing behind the shiny orange cover. She gives me her finger to hold. It appears a harmless enough game.

  FOUR

  Islands, you might say, are in my blood — if my great-grandmother-many-times-removed had only stayed on hers, kept her chromosomes to herself, she might have saved us all a lot of trouble.

  True, the shallows of the Waitemata, sheltered among mangroves and hills and the unconfronting histories of strangers, are about as far away as you can get from a windswept slavers’ port in the middle of the North Atlantic. But they don’t look so very different, Marialuisa’s old volcano and mine, and the principle of all islands is the same. They have limits. There’s only so far you can go.

  Of course, I do leave. Sometimes things have to be done. And despite my best efforts to prove otherwise, Gillian still believes our sales team’s success depends on a glimpse of my face every once in a while. But each time, I’m forced to think twice — re-evaluate potential gratification and risk — before I decide to cross the water.

  It’s not that I’m frightened. Oddly, the sea doesn’t bother me much. Not this subtropical sea, anyway, which is, for the most part, warm and thick and flat. On hot days, I’m happy to dabble my toes. Even wade up to my knees, when I need to — if I have to launch the dinghy on a mid-tide. And for some reason, I’m quite at ease in a boat, skimming along on top of it all, knifing straight across the surface.

  It’s just that, having thought twice, I usually find I prefer to stay where I am. I don’t have to watch out for anything, here. To look over my shoulder. The undergrowth hides only small terrors, huhu beetles and wetas and tree spiders, scurrying brown geckos and skinks. Nothing I need to worry about. Or for. Those days are gone. My phone will not ring in the small hours of the night, and, even if the tide is right, there can be no doorbell to dread. I’m nobody’s next of kin.

  And yet I woke up this morning with a sense of calamity, the snaking coat-tails of some unremembered dream.

  I pulled the curtains back on a sky lightening around soft rain, the sea greying, the lights of the traffic on the causeway. Bleary lovers and shift-workers and red-eye fliers, the early, the late and the desperate. An ambulance, slow and silent. A popular hour for dying.

  It’s too late to go back to sleep, too early to go downstairs. I sit and watch the day spread over the water. It offers a good view, my turret window, of whatever’s coming. Two hundred and seventy degrees, at least, of sea. I settle back in my chair, tuck my feet up. Wait.

  A beau
tiful thing, this chair. Leather, French, not quite antique — sourced by Andy from some Parisian club, buffed and distressed by the passage of time and newspaper ink, of gabardine and brandy. I run my fingers over the arms. It might rub off on me, this old skin. This foreign DNA might stick. A camouflage of hide and hair, the stains of somebody else’s dead. If I sit very still, I might be overlooked. You never know.

  Across the water, the morning gathers.

  It still seems strange to me, this city seeping up from the dark. Its ardent jungle growth. Its little wild-haired hills and bright white motorways. The calmness of its water. It isn’t home. That’s what I love about it.

  How many years has it been since I came north? Nine, ten? Long enough to have stopped counting. My for sale signs are all over town. And yet palm trees, a curving yellow beach, the gentle lap of waves are still exotic. It remains an odd place to find myself, like waking up in a stranger’s bed. The shiver of a sin now licensed to be compounded.

  (Not that I do that any more. Wake up in strangers’ beds. These days I just take a room at Quadro, where I’m guaranteed clean sheets and a decent shower. Not to mention a good excuse to be out before nine o’clock.)

  But there’s something about this morning, something quiet and thin-skinned. There’s a rare chill in the air, a ghost of the south to raise my arm-hair. A bare-hilled, open-ocean cold. It reminds me of old times. Tulip beds. The walk into the wide grey flooding calm the day that Maggie died.

  No. I don’t want to think about her now. Or William, either.

  Now, before the day is quite here, before some Atlantic gale sweeps in to blow the spiders out of the trees, while I still can, I want to think about my father.

  Will you think me too cruel if I cut straight to his death? If I lay it down in black and white as his defining moment? Maggie had it set in stone long ago, a succinct summation rising from the grass of the Greenpoint Cemetery. Roger John Galbraith, 29 June 1945 – 17 August 1976. No doubt in the space of that dash — lost now under yellow lichen — he was all manner of things. Rotary Club treasurer. Salesman of the month. Loving husband. Father.

  (I imagine sheep graze around his plot. Their big flat teeth cropping the concrete edge, their warm busy breath misting the stone. But perhaps this isn’t true.)

  For the first seven years of my life my father must be solid and real. He must do things I can’t remember. Then, on a bright winter day in ’76, he stops being there, and my mother doesn’t seem to notice.

  It’s the job that kills him, of course. One cold call too many. That August morning, speeding on an empty road through the stubborn southern dark, Roger hits three things in close succession: black ice, white rails, the Mataura River. All the swimming lessons in the world are no use inside a ’72 Kingswood. He drowns about seven-thirty.

  Maggie tells me little of this. On the day of the funeral, I read the police report in Mrs Cousins’ paper. Page five. She’s left it open on our table. It calls my father ‘dead man’. Mrs Cousins looks a bit guilty when she comes back to find me reading it, and makes me eat another piece of rocky road.

  We’re alone, Mrs Cousins and I. The house is silent and cold and might belong to strangers. I’m not familiar with tombs, so I think of the library. I sit and read Five on a Treasure Island quietly. Outside it’s grey. Inside, there’s the tight little tick of the clock on the range, like a spring unwinding.

  Maggie comes home just after two. She’s wearing black nylons and muddy high heels and she smells of hair spray. She sits neatly on the edge of her chair, knees together, ankles crossed, just so, in front of the three-bar heater. My mother at twenty-nine, as poised as an acrobat on the high trapeze. Everything she will be contained inside her.

  ‘It was a good service,’ my grandfather says to a spot on the wall.

  ‘Oh, it was,’ agrees my nanny, startled from her gin.

  Is that all they have to offer, these veterans of loss? There’s a tear in Sarah Harding’s eye. Is it for my father?

  The clock ticks a bit more. Mrs Cousins goes home, and the lounge gets slowly darker. William switches the lights on and puts a match to the fire. He and Sarah go home too.

  ‘Well,’ says Maggie, at five o’clock. She gets up and puts one of our many casseroles on to heat, and we watch Gilligan’s Island.

  In the morning, everything is normal. There’s only one coffee mug in the sink, but there’s nothing unusual about that, and for the next few weeks my father could be away on an extended sales trip. His big stripy hankies still turn up in the wash. By the time the last odd sock disappears and it’s clear that Roger’s not coming home, I’ve forgotten to expect him.

  The grass begins to grow again. Mr Cousins and Mr Booth take turns to mow our lawn on Sundays.

  I have no sense of loss. It’s more of a misplacement. If it weren’t for those two column-inches in the Southland Times, I might think my father had just neglected to come back. For years, I can see him lost on a gravel road somewhere, bemused, the boot full of Britannicas, the needle hitting empty — indeed, in my twenties, I’ll send away for a copy of his death certificate, just to be sure.

  Meanwhile, dead or not, Roger John Galbraith continues to provide. We have a better set of encyclopaedias than my school, and a vacuum cleaner that looks like a robot. Not to mention the Diamond Plan — cover that keeps on saying ‘I love you’ long after you’re gone. Maggie receives lump sums of love every quarter until the day she dies. But there, I’m getting ahead of myself again.

  Back in ’76, my mother no longer has to work. Maggie could stay home if she wanted to. She doesn’t. But she’s always back by four.

  It would be wrong to suggest our life doesn’t change at all. The house is always neat now. We have spaghetti on toast instead of a roast on Sundays. And with the Holden gone, we have a new car, a two-tone Cortina, in which Maggie picks me up from school every second Thursday.

  There are no more swimming lessons. Instead, we drive north, to a big brown room, dim-lit and warm, to glossy tropical leaves and the gentle lap of orange carpet. We wait. My mother’s name is called. I read a magazine about ponies. We drive home again, across the bridge, high above the hungry river. White-knuckled, not looking down.

  Ah, good times. The summer sun in our eyes. The promise of fish fingers. The luxury of irrational fears, the high odds against the accidental. But they’re not going to last, and we must move on, because already the search has begun.

  While, on the other side of Queens Park, restless William Biggs makes plans for a change of climate, drifting Maggie, all at sea, is looking for a mooring. A line to grasp, a link, something rooted deep in solid ground.

  She has an idea of cousins. A brood of the like-blooded. Some for her and some for me.

  William is a blank, a wall, an only son. A child of the Great War who never met his father. But Sarah, when pushed, looks through old photographs, identifies — perhaps correctly, who’s to say? — Maggie’s aunts Betty and May, two prettyish black and white blurs behind Uncle Eddie’s shoulders, under the old pear tree.

  ‘What happened to them?’ foolhardy Maggie asks.

  ‘They’re dead,’ says Sarah. She seems surprised that we don’t know this. She looks at the photograph again. ‘All of us gone now, except for me.’

  Maggie looks vexed — at her inconveniently dead aunts, or being left out of her mother’s us, it’s hard to say. Shaky Sarah’s glass drips onto the page, and she staggers off to get a cloth. She’s in quite a state — even for her — given it’s only lunchtime.

  I lever myself up the back of the couch to look over Maggie’s shoulder. There’s another photograph of Betty — or is it May? — in a modest wedding dress. She has shoulder-length hair set in careful Rita Hayworth waves and she looks a lot like my mother.

  ‘I don’t remember them,’ calls Maggie.

  Sarah stares at her from the doorway, as if trying to think why she should. ‘Betty and John were posted to Germany,’ she remembers at last. ‘They would have l
eft before you were born.’

  ‘Did they have children?’

  ‘No. Betty was ill. She passed away very young.’

  The Oreti Reporter’s finest barely pauses for breath. ‘What about Aunt May?’ she asks, trying out the title.

  ‘She was only thirty.’ Sarah sits back down. For a moment, her eyes clear. ‘Your age,’ she adds coldly.

  ‘Who, Betty?’

  ‘No! You were asking about May.’

  ‘May died young as well?’ This time my mother looks worried. ‘Was she sick too?’

  Sarah stares into the swirl of her new gin. ‘It was a terrible thing,’ she says, very quietly. ‘Terrible. There was a fire. The whole house went up, took her and all three children.’

  Maggie glances quickly at me. I’m pleased — she hasn’t forgotten I’m here after all. I smile brightly to show I’m not listening, and pretend to play with my paper dolls.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  There is a long and slurping pause. ‘Her husband left her,’ Sarah says. ‘James, he was. Ran off with an Aussie nurse. He was an army captain. Been right through the war.’

  Maggie shakes her head at this non sequitur. God help her mother in twenty years if she’s like this before she’s sixty.

  ‘It was all over the papers,’ adds Sarah, confusingly. ‘It was the death of my poor mother. Her nerves were shot. It’s no wonder she had her accident, after all she’d been through.’

  This is too much. Please, I think, don’t ask.

  ‘What accident?’

  Again, Sarah looks surprised. ‘With the gas. Don’t you remember? She forgot to turn the oven off. Mrs Blunt found her next to the kitchen table.’ She shakes her head. ‘Poor old Mum. She’d have been listening to The Archers.’