Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  A little town with a movie theatre and an Opera House with dusty velvet and the Copper Kettle Tea Rooms for lamingtons and mutton pies and Aspros’ Fish Shop with its trays of glass-eyed moki and flounder laid out dead behind a window rippling with falling water. A little town with churches and schools and twin war memorials either end of the main street: a soldier in his pointy hat recalling the Boer War at one end, and another in puttees and tin helmet farewelling a little bronze boy at the other, lest we all forgot the world wars, First and Second.

  A little town that was not truly a city, though it had once had ambitions. Back when there was a glimmer of gold in the creeks of the hinterland and wheat grew prodigiously on virgin soil and miraculous technology made it possible for sheep from colonial paddocks to feature as the Sunday roast on the dinner tables of Manchester and London, the town had high hopes. Mr Shrimski built a drapery store among the wood and corrugate shanties on the muddy track that was to become the main street, using white stone quarried from a nearby hillside. Mr Jones built from the same stone a pub which might have flown fully formed direct from Cardiff to land with a thump among the toitoi and flax, with its etched glass, a bar shiny as a pair of new boots and convenient stables for customers’ horses out the back. Mr Meek built a flour mill by the creek. And all the other businessmen and exporters and bankers and the Harbour Board and the Council and the church vestries followed suit, wanting that aura of dependability and permanence that limestone conveys.

  And the architects began to dance, though they were heavy men with whiskers and top hats. They were light on their feet with this stone that was so soft, so pliable when first quarried but that hardened on exposure to air and did not crumble. They composed banks as extravagant temples to colonial finance with capitals of austere Doric or bouquets of acanthus as if the stone itself had given up on its regular stolidity and ran with sap. They designed houses for the colonial gentry in Gothic or Georgian or a bit of both. And churches in their national dress: St Patrick’s with a bosomy Latinate dome, St Luke’s with a demure English village spire, and an assortment of determinedly dowdy little nonconformist chapels. They built schools mimicking Eton with mullioned windows and Virginia creeper and harbourside warehouses with carved architraves resembling twisted rope. In neat rectangular bites the quarrymen ate into the hillside, drawing forth the stone like teeth from a jaw, working in pairs with heavy cross-shears. Block after block they took, till the town had taken on a sturdy stone-built air. It began to presume itself a rival for San Francisco, Sydney, Shanghai.

  And then the gold ran out, the sheep carcasses could be shipped more efficiently from other ports that were better sheltered, and the town shrivelled. Down by the harbour, the warehouses emptied. The bank in the Florentine manner became a roller-skating rink, the hotels closed their doors when the town voted for abstinence in 1905 and no spirituous liquor was permitted to leave its rings on a polished bar. The steamship offices became empty caverns of damp white stone. The town shrank within its ambitions like a child in its father’s overcoat, like those other lost places you pass through at 70kph on the way to somewhere more significant, with their Victoria Streets and Albert Streets signposted beside a single morose pub and a few rackety houses behind barricades of wrecked cars. Places where only the old maps with their optimistic mention of universities and seaside promenades suggest what the planners had in mind.

  That’s where I was born. On a reef made up of the remains of billions of tiny creatures with whom I shared a common ancestry, that concestor whom Dawkins calls our ‘300-million-greats-grandparent’ who joined the great pilgrimage of life at a juncture roughly 590 million years ago. There I was, wriggling into life on the bony residue of my distant relations, child of the White Stone City with its big empty buildings of bleached oolite.

  Our house was not built of stone. It was wooden. A small pre-war bungalow on the South Hill, across the road from the cemetery. We played there with the other children from our street, amid the couch and hawthorn tangle that had grown over the graves. There was a new cemetery a block away, a lawn cemetery that could be kept tidy in an afternoon by one man on his mower. The newly dead lay there in rows of neat rectangular slabs of black or pink Takaka marble, shiny as a Formica benchtop, with Sacred to the Memory written in silver and an engraved rosebud for decoration. We preferred the mess and tangle of the long dead, who dreamed greater things and lay beneath limestone elaborately carved with urns and drapery and broken columns bearing their solemn metaphor of perfection thwarted in its prime, and angels with wings spread who stepped out into thin bright air.

  On the cracked slabs beneath their insouciant feet the children of the neighbourhood made their huts. A kind of squatter village existed down there, out of adult reach among the dry grass and overgrown white powder-puff roses. The old graves were fenced with rusted iron fleur-de-lis, and each had a proper gate centre-front, as if the grave itself were a quarter-acre section and this the correct way to enter. Sometimes hidden among the weeds were arrangements of white plaster flowers exactly like the bright posies our mothers picked for the vase on the sideboard, except that these were white. White as bone. Like the flowers in some fairytale garden laid under a wintry curse, transformed from living breathing things of scented blue and red and yellow to brittle dead white. If touched carelessly, they shattered to a thousand pieces. Once, I took one home, hoping to add the exquisite white flower to my collection of treasures: the stone that looked exactly like a chocolate, the stamps from San Marino that were triangular instead of square, the Olympic badges from the Kornies packet, the fossilised pipi found in a cliff face at the beach, the postcard of a Haflinger pony eating an apple that a Swedish penfriend sent during a brief penfriendship — for what was there to say after we had written down the names of our family and our school and our favourite hobbies?

  My mother stopped me at the kitchen door.

  ‘Where did you get that old thing?’ she said, pointing to my white stone lily. ‘Don’t you go bringing that into the house.’

  She liked flowers, but not dead white ones. Not this flower that was a bit like an arum lily which, with its funeral taint, its waxy white furl about the poisonous golden spike, was reserved for church and could not be brought inside.

  ‘You put that back where you found it,’ she said.

  So I carried it back across the road and placed it carefully among the others in the plaster bouquet on the broken slab, careful not to look down through the crack as I did so, for there just might be someone looking back: a dead eye, an empty socket, a body preparing to rise up as everyone would rise eventually. All those bones rising from below the ground like a great rattling reef into the sunlight.

  Rising into the blue sky above the White Stone City.

  Four

  Michael Lacey.

  There must be millions of them. Google the name and the screen comes up with 1,370,000 entries. There’s a novelist, a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at some mid-western college, a professional poker player, one who is listed somewhat ominously as a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI. There’s a Michael Lacey listed as assistant coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. There are Michael Lacey attorneys, Michael Lacey surgeons, Michael Lacey managing directors. And several who are just plain dead. You are invited to add your condolences to the site, tossing virtual poppies onto the virtual coffin lid.

  Thousands upon thousands of Michael Laceys, all leading their parallel lives.

  Too many to check, though Clare has scanned the list and sent emails to a few likely candidates, knowing as she did so that her introduction sounded lame and suspiciously like the beginning of one of those pleas from some con in Russia or Nigeria, hitting up the world at random for a handout from the global street corner that is the internet.

  ‘Hullo. My name is Clare Lacey and I am trying to find …’

  Sometimes she has received a reply. Apologetic or brisk, but always with the same message. Not known at this address.

 
She persists, however, late at night, when her rational self should have gone to bed had it not been subverted by the hopeful child who lurks just below the breastbone, wanting to stay up and play unsupervised. That same child who always checks out the telephone directories in strange cities.

  Lacey M. F.

  Alone at night, safely unobserved, she sits crosslegged on some hotel bed and reaches for the phone. The remains of a room-service concoction are drying to a crust on the desk alongside the TV remote and the writing folder with its notepaper monogrammed with the hotel chain’s logo. Notepaper and envelopes. As if people still sat at desks and composed notes on linen paper to post to their friends and colleagues. As if this hotel room belonged to some golden age of international travel, with alligator-skin luggage and deferential porters tipping their hats as the fortunate traveller steps forth from the taxi after journeying first class on the Cunard Line or the transcontinental express. Notepaper. Cocktails. Dinner at eight. Cognac and a little discrete cocaine for afters, snuffed up from a bevelled mirror with a hundred-dollar bill.

  Clare sits on the standard-issue hotel bed with its standard-issue quilted coverlet and its 400-thread or 500-thread sheeting, dialling numbers and wondering with one part of her brain when they started counting the threads in the sheets. One year no one notices the thread count, the next they do. One year the soap everywhere is a round white tablet scented with magnolias, the next it’s a transparent rectangle composed of virgin olive oil. She sits, idly considering the sheeting or the soap, phone in hand, a few bleary hours away from the campus conference room at 9 a.m. sharp the next morning and yet another distinguished offering from some learned colleague on the subject of the visual politics of psychoanalysis in a post-traumatic world, or Fuseli and the rhetoric of the sublime.

  Hazy with jetlag, she sits listening to the burr of ringing in an unknown room. Or maybe an apartment. Or maybe a doss house. Or maybe a cosy senior citizen’s unit in a rural rest home. A room she cannot visualise, but which is the current address of Lacey, Michael, Lacey, M. F. Such a stupid quest, the kind of thing to be indulged in only in the absolute privacy of a neutral room on the third or fifth or fourteenth floor of a determinedly neutral building. A room that could be anywhere at all and so is nowhere whatsoever. She sits, waiting for that click of connection.

  It has been a long time, and he will be old now, nudging ninety, frail and wavery, but surely she will recognise his voice. She cannot remember it precisely. It exists in her mind as a kind of musical intonation, a manner of speaking that she recognised in childhood as different from the rhythm and style of other people’s speech. She remembers some phrases: ‘There’s my girl!’ as he picked her up to sit on his knee. Or ‘I’m pulling your leg,’ when he told her some marvellous thing and she believed him. Or words he used that were his alone. Like saying he was putting the kettle down, whereas Mum and Auntie Phemie said they were putting the jug on. Or calling Mr Powell next door a sanctimonious louser.

  But remembering the exact cadence is difficult. The memory is muddled with other sensations: the rasp of an unshaven chin, the blended scents of sweat and an old tweed coat and tobacco, the piratical fascination of a gold filling when he opened his mouth wide to laugh. Trying to remember his voice amongst all these other distractions is like trying to remember a bird’s song. You can never whistle it exactly, the complex call of a bellbird or a thrush. But you recognise it the minute you hear it. You know immediately which bird is the singer. She might not be able now to recall his voice exactly, but she would know it again in an instant.

  The phone clicks as it is lifted from the cradle.

  ‘Hiya,’ says Lacey, M. of #3, 1498 Robson Street, Vancouver, over doof doof doof from a background stereo. Too young by at least three-quarters of a century. Or ‘Good evening!’ from Lacey, Michael, 33 Holton Road, Dulwich. Too fruity, too theatrical, too English. Or ‘You’ve reached Mike, Trish, Lou and Charlie. Leave a message after the beep.’ And that’s not him either, young and optimistic, with a wife and children happily assembled in Atholl Close, Brisbane.

  So she hangs up, and he vanishes all over again and she is left feeling unbearably small, in her Marilyn Sainty jacket and her Italian boots, reduced by fleeting hope to a seven-year-old in winceyette pyjamas with a smudged pattern of pink rosebuds, lying in a darkened room listening to the silence that settles over the house once their mother has double-locked the front door and checked twice to make sure, and switched off the hall light and there is the creak of springs as she settles to sleep alone in the big double bed. Seated in Room 204 of some anonymous Plaza, Clare has felt the old impulse to pray. To launch into the Hail Mary then the blessings for all those she loves in a rapid roll call, then the heartfelt admission of sins committed that day, not forgetting a single one because if she can only remember them all — the lies, the failings, the wicked thoughts — she might be able to persuade God or the Blessed Virgin to make everything well again. HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththeeblessed …

  She has sat there with her laptop on the desk and her presentation ready to go, knowing as she had known at seven years old that she could never be good enough.

  She may have been named for a saint but the name was no more than skin deep. That was as far as her saintliness went. At seven her sins were infant things: being mean to Maddie who had lost Mr Bun the Baker and ruined the whole set so they couldn’t play properly ever again, and not helping Mum with the washing up, and hitting Brian because he had scribbled pictures on her school book. But seated on the hotel bed with the phone buzzing in her hand, she knows her sins have grown too. Far from being the kind of person who would wash lepers’ feet and drink the water, choking on the odd toe in the process, she now sins on a regular basis. Her life is made up of small daily acts of cowardice and omission. She tells fibs, for instance, because for some reason she finds it less difficult to lie than to say the truth. She lies for no reason, or for reasons so trivial they scarcely warrant the effort of invention.

  When, for example, Elizabeth who has the office next to hers asks her to dinner at the weekend, she lies. The thought of sitting with Elizabeth and Roderick and their friends chatting about departmental politics for hours makes her shrivel with boredom. She could not say that exactly, for truth has its limits, but she could say, ‘I won’t be able to, I’m afraid. Not this weekend. But thank you.’

  No.

  Instead of saying that, she accepts the invitation. She says thank you, that’d be great, with all the appearance of delight, of keen anticipation. She even says could she bring anything? Some chocolates for dessert? No, no, says Elizabeth, just your lovely self! And they both go into their offices, Clare delivering a cheery wave and a ‘See you on Saturday!’ while knowing as she says it that she has no intention whatever of sitting at Elizabeth’s table eating Chicken Cacciatore, but will ring on the day around 10 a.m. and pretend to have flu. She will actually go to the trouble of playacting on the phone, pitching her voice low and husky, almost persuading herself that she does indeed have some advanced streptococcal infection which requires bed rest and hot lemon.

  And she hangs up astonished. Why tell such a stupid, over-elaborate lie? One that she would have to remember now, because next week she would hear, inevitably, that little tap at her office door and there will be Elizabeth looking concerned in that irritating way of hers, mother to the entire world, asking how she is. (For poor Clare was such a mess, in need of a bit of TLC now that she was on her own.) And Clare would have to remember to pretend she’d been sick at the weekend and not stripping the kitchen wallpaper in preparation for a new paint job. Or worse, she would have to spend all Sunday with the knowledge that Elizabeth was capable of turning up at her house unannounced, bearing a book about some man or woman who has abandoned regular work for the joys of restoring a farmhouse in Tuscany, or the Dordogne, or anywhere really with warm weather, quaint locals and cheap wine. Something to read, and a plastic container filled with chicken soup.

  ‘
Zuppa di pollo!’ she would say, pronouncing each word as if it were an aria and not just plain old chicken soup with a layer of yellow fat on top and some soggy distended rice at the bottom. When she spoke Italian, she always became grandly theatrical. She would stride into the kitchen, glossy with good intention. ‘You just recline on that sofa while I warm up my witch’s brew!’ Which would leave Clare no alternative but to recline, playacting for another hour till Elizabeth had to dash off to pick up her kids from soccer. Stupid lies, trivial deceits.

  How ridiculous she is in her avoidance of truth.

  And then there are the other failings: flippancy, occasional lust, a failure to love wholeheartedly, a deep-seated inability to trust or forgive. If they count as sins, she sins on a regular basis.

  So, seated on the coverlet with the phone buzzing away like a dead fly on a windowsill, she knows prayer is of little point, just as she had known it at seven. There could be no way she had chalked up enough points to receive her reward.

  ‘Is this Michael Lacey?’ she has said to strange voices in Vancouver, Melbourne, London. ‘Michael Francis Lacey?’ The voice in reply is wary, the use of the full name hinting at legal action, some abandoned child with access to adoption papers perhaps. Some creditor come back to haunt. Or maybe it’s just the nightly irritant of the telemarketer seeking answers to those perennial questions: are you satisfied with your bank? Would you like a faster broadband connection?

  ‘Michael Lacey?’ she asks. ‘Who lived in New Zealand between 1955 and 1963?’