Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  But here they are at home in the spring sunshine, and Clare has walked past them up the hill thinking how good it is to be away from the office and the stale mustard carpet and the 2 p.m. tutorial group. How good to flip so suddenly from autumnal decline to edgy spring and to join the cheerful crush of escapees like herself gathered in the foyer.

  Anna’s paper is at 11 a.m., part of a day-long session devoted to politics and twentieth-century muralism. Not the dead hour, but a respectable, now-sit-up-and-take-this-seriously hour. Anna has drawn a large crowd. Clare finds a seat towards the back. The little podium is spotlit at the front. There are two empty chairs, a lectern, a screen lowered for the presentation. Two men step into the light.

  One stands at the lectern and announces, a little too emphatically so that the plosives pop at the microphone, that, as many of you will be aware, Dr Anna Leov passed away one week ago today, and her paper, ‘Radical realism: the New Deal democratisation of culture, art “for the people” and abstraction in the murals of Maxine Albro’ will be read in her memory by her colleague, Dr David Bensemann.

  Dr Bensemann is grey haired and earnestly bifocal in the big, loose, tweedy fashion of certain American academics. Of his session Clare hears not a word. She hears a kind of noise as a succession of images flash onto the screen. There is one she recognises immediately: two women wearing long dresses to gather sheafs of flowers in an asymmetric landscape. The final image is a photograph of Anna in her big dark glasses, laughing at the camera.

  When the image fades at last and everyone has filed out of the auditorium, Clare approaches Dr Bensemann. He is packing his notes into a briefcase.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘Do you mind if I ask what happened? What happened to Anna?’

  He looks up at her over the rim of his spectacles. A round moon face, clean white hands tidying everything away. ‘A street accident,’ he says. ‘Knocked over by a car while she was on study leave in London. Were you a friend of hers?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Clare. ‘I met her last year in San Francisco. She took me to the Coit Tower.’

  Dr Bensemann clicks his bag shut. ‘Ah yes,’ he says. ‘The illustration of hope. Anna was always big on hope.’ His eyes behind the thick lenses fill suddenly with tears. ‘She had multiple sclerosis, you know. Not many people knew that.’

  He pushes a flop of thinning hair from his forehead. His hand bears a wedding band that punches a tight crease in plump white flesh. Clare has a sudden momentary glimpse of the old friendship, the collegial connection with the person in the office down the corridor, the relationship that has evolved over many years from the moment when he arrived fresh from college, vague and dreamy, and she arrived soon after in her high heels, edgy as some exotic bird, a parakeet among the brown sparrow people. The way initial suspicion would shift to familiarity over years of meetings and consultations, till she knew all about his wife and kids and their difficulties at school or their holidays at the lake, and he knew, when many didn’t, that she had multiple sclerosis.

  And there might perhaps have been a point, back when they were both in their thirties and his marriage was stale and her latest lover had moved out, when they considered an affair, and maybe they decided against it because it would have been wrong. It would have destroyed his kids. It would have caused deep hurt to Mrs Bensemann. Or maybe they did sleep together once or twice, at just such a conference as this, then said no more, because it made everything too awkward, too complicated. But a certain warmth remained, that lasting affection for which the Russians have a word that cooler English lacks. Razbliuto. The residual tenderness one feels for a former lover. And now here he is, bereft. And all he can do is read her paper on Maxine Albro at a conference in Cork. And Clare can say nothing that will make anything better, because she hardly knew Anna. Just a single afternoon, a walk to a tower, some painted walls. She can offer nothing whatever by way of comfort.

  ‘H-okay,’ says Dr Bensemann, taking out a programme and making some business of scanning it closely, though his hand is shaking. ‘So … that’s the deal … Life’s short … Anna’s gone … That’s the deal … Room 202 …’ He trails away. He disappears into the crowd as if he were looking for someone.

  But Clare turns the other way. She pushes past the crowd at the coffee stand. She slides through the groups of art historians gathered about the orientation table and the book stall. She shoves open the big glass doors. And then she is striding away from the conference, back down Washington Street toward the city.

  She is heading for the hotel. And the tourist information centre. And a car-hire firm.

  Clare Lacey has decided it is time to act.

  Life’s short.

  That’s the deal.

  Seven

  So here I am, alone in the dark, thinking about walls. I’ve been thinking about limestone and how humans are drawn to its smooth white surface, following the thread of instinct through the twists and tangles of the psyche in the curved white cavern of the skull. I’ve been thinking about bones.

  It’s inevitable, I suppose, given the circumstances.

  I’ve been thinking about my own bones and how they took shape as I floated in the dark watery sack of my mother’s womb. I’ve been thinking about that tiny embryonic disc, that dab of yellow yolk, the minute bloody stalk, the pinpoint of my heart commencing its rapid tattoo.

  I’ve been thinking about the disc that was me folding in on itself to form a pocket, a tiny cup whose hole became my bum. I’ve been thinking about myself taking shape bum first, like the good little deuterostome I am, unlike the vast majority of creatures for whom the pocket in the nucleus becomes a more genteel mouth.

  There I was, taking shape bum first to the deep rhythmic dub-dub of my mother’s heart and the roar of her crimson blood. There I was, absorbing gas and nutrients through the thin permeable barrier of the trophoblast, the tissue that was all that separated me from her, even then. I think of my bones taking shape, the tiny perfect crystals of calcium salts like a little cloud drifting to form cartilage, then the fragile struts that arched and fused to solid white. My bones. Femur and tibia, fibula and clavicle, the Latin names like music, like a litany of flowers.

  Bones that are like limestone. We may have ingested the minerals found in basalt or schist by exactly the same process of foetal transference that contributed calcium to our developing skeletons, but the connection is less evident. Touch limestone and it feels instantly and deeply familiar. It is white, like our bone. It has a granular texture, like our bone. It is porous so that even deep underground it breathes, permitting cool air through pores that are like the pores in our bone. That unwavering temperature, fifty degrees Fahrenheit, that steady-air moisture of ninety-six to ninety-seven degrees beloved by the producers of cheese and mushrooms and wine and all those things that thrive on calm and dependability.

  I have been thinking about these things, and about the day, a year after our father left to buy his cigarettes and never returned, when Ozzie Moses knocked at our door. It was a Saturday afternoon. Phemie had moved in to help take care of us. She had taken up her old job at the nursing home, working the night shifts so she could be there with a Marmite piece and a cup of weak milky tea when we got home from school. When Ozzie turned up, she was cleaning windows, teetering on the shaky ladder and reaching for the awkward corners with a fistful of scrumpled pages from the Oamaru Mail because there was nothing like newspaper to give glass a good sheen. They could keep their expensive Windolenes and what-have-you when all that was required for a good clean window was printers’ ink and elbow grease.

  Mum was sewing my First Communion dress. The dining table was a frothy rustling heap of white organza. She was onto a tricky part, pinning in a puffed sleeve, her forehead furrowed in concentration.

  ‘Can you get that, Clare?’ she said from behind teeth clenched on a row of dangerous shiny pins.

  I ran to the door.

  Would we like, said Ozzie, very polite, very formal, in a strangely clean w
hite shirt and pressed trousers, to go for a drive? To celebrate our mother’s birthday?

  We didn’t know it was her birthday. After our father’s departure, adults no longer celebrated birthdays. We children had an iced Madeira with Happy Birthday in curly pink, and a bowl of cheerios with tomato sauce, and sensible presents like new school shoes, but there was not a lot of money for celebration. Christmas was a tree cut surreptitiously from the row of pines behind the golf course and carried home, smelling richly of resin and summer, to stand wonkily in the coal scuttle, draped with a festive frill of crêpe-paper chains folded red over blue, green over yellow. The chains were kept in a drawer on the sideboard, along with the popup cardboard Nativity. Easter was a single marshmallow egg by our pillow to eat after breakfast. The rest was nonsense: gimmicks to persuade a lot of fools to spend a lot of money on things nobody needed or wanted.

  How else could it be when a woman is left with three children to raise and no assistance from the man who was referred to in our house as simply ‘your father’? That errant man who had fled without a word and whom our mother made no attempt to pursue.

  ‘Ach, let him go,’ said Phemie, when our mother broke down in tears one night soon after he’d gone, as we all sat at the table over a strange tea of dreary grey mince and sodden potato and Brussels sprouts the colour of lavatory lino. ‘He’s not worth the bother. Let him go and good riddance, I say. We’ve coped before and we’ll do it again. We’ll manage just fine on our own, won’t we, kiddies?’

  We puddled our mash with our forks and watched the grey water flood in. That was the night the drawing of the farmhouse and the little girl leading the donkey vanished from above the dining table, and the swans flew in to take their place, creamy white among pastel-green willow.

  Let him go. Kath Lacey would not care. She would hold her head high and refuse all hints of pity or commiseration. One afternoon Mrs Powell sent over a box of her daughter’s discarded clothes. Jennifer was curly-pretty and spoiled, our mother said, as only children always were, and Mrs Powell was making a rod for her own back. Jennifer was older than us, and always dressed with exquisite care in enviable combinations of angora bolero cardigans over frilled white shirts and skirts with stiff petticoats and white ankle socks and shoes of glossy patent leather. Clothes that had been sent by her auntie in America who had married a GI and gone to live in Florida. Jennifer’s curls were held in place with butterfly ribbons and an array of glittery clasps. And there she was, standing on the step, bearing a cardboard box and saying her mother said to tell us we could keep what we wanted and do whatever we liked with the rest. She handed over the box and bounced off between the pansies in tight jeans and pure white sneakers, like a girl in a picture book, like someone who drank delicious drinks called cherry sodas and had a brother called Chuck.

  Maddie and I tore open the box. A blue and white gingham dress with a full skirt and a little white collar with a red bow, some tee shirts, two with horse’s heads on the front, a pleated tartan skirt and red velvet jacket, a pair of Levi jeans with turn-up cuffs and studs on the pockets. By the time our mother came home from work we were fully outfitted and admiring our beautiful new selves in the hall mirror.

  ‘Look! Look!’ I said, twirling in blue gingham so the skirt spun full circle. ‘Look what Jennifer gave us!’

  Maddie strutted in her jeans, her new pony tee shirt, her hair in a raggy ponytail.

  Our mother made us take it all off. She folded each lovely thing back into the box and marched next door, white with anger, to return the clothes, which were kindly meant, she was sure, but quite unnecessary. She was perfectly capable of making whatever clothes we required. (A tartan skirt with pleats that never quite lay flat, and for my next birthday a pallid gingham frock with a collar that buckled and had no scarlet ribbon at its neck.)

  ‘Quite right,’ said Phemie. ‘We may be without a man about the house, but we are not yet objects of charity.’

  We were not a family given to celebration, so we had no idea it was our mother’s birthday. Yet here was Ozzie asking if we would all like to go out for a picnic, a birthday treat. He had everything prepared. She had nothing to do but agree. We were amazed.

  Phemie said she’d just get on with her windows, thanks very much, but the rest of you go if you want. So here we were, climbing into Ozzie’s truck which he had specially cleaned for the occasion. The seats had been cleared of their debris and covered with a tartan rug, the paintwork had been washed and polished. The truck was a muted army green, a fact no one had had any inkling of, for it was permanently coated in thick white layers of quarry dust. But here it was, looking brisk and military once more, and our mother in her best coat was being handed up into the passenger seat and taking Brian on her lap because he could never be trusted out of her sight. And Maddie and I clambered onto the tray where Ozzie had made us a seat out of an old sofa which he had anchored firmly to the cab with a bit of rope.

  ‘Here you go, girls,’ he said. ‘You make yourselves comfy.’ And he gave us a couple of eiderdowns to wrap about our legs, and handed us a bag of chippies each. Salt and vinegar. And off we went on our mother’s birthday treat.

  Ozzie was free. His mother had died: old Mrs Moses, brittle and twisted as a bent stick so that people had talked to the top of her head with its skimpy web of grey hair. He no longer had to hold the cup for her to drink her tea nor lift her out to the veranda on a Saturday afternoon to enjoy the sunshine. He could take as long as he liked to take us wherever we wanted.

  There is no way of moving through a landscape that is quite so wonderful as to drive along facing backwards on an old army truck, watching the world unfurl behind you in a series of unanticipated surprises, the wind whipping at your hair. You are warm and snug on a soft sofa and wrapped up in a faded paisley eiderdown that smells of duck feathers and mothballs. And you have a whole bag of chippies that you do not have to share with your sister, measuring exactly one for you and one for me and one for you … You swing round corners, falling sideways into one another, then straighten up again, and you ride looking down on everyone else, waving at the cars that come up behind at the intersections as you roar through town. And then you are gathering speed as the truck hits its powerful stride and you are heading out into the country, the north country where you never go, past farm houses and paddocks filled with lambs bleating, for your mother’s birthday is in October and everything is bursting into fresh leaf and the hawthorn hedges along the road are all frilly white blossom.

  Ozzie took us first to the river so we could stand on the bridge and look down at the water surging brilliant blue streaked with milky white around shingle islands glossy with yellow broom. The air smelled of damp clay and flowers and the clean open air. And he told us that this was the water that made our lights go and our oven and our fridge. That beautiful surging blue.

  And then we went to a place where there was another marvel: a big rock on the side of the road with a special metal sign on the front that Ozzie said marked the 45th parallel. The place where we were standing was exactly halfway between the Equator and the South Pole. An invisible line rose up out of the sea at our backs and then unravelled over the shingly river plain away to the distant mountains. The whole world was held in a web of threads of longitude and latitude like a basketball in a string bag. So we stood with our feet on either side of the invisible line while Brian had a pee behind the big rock, and then Ozzie said in a special American voice, ‘Okay, kids, let’s hit the road! Wagons ho!’ So we climbed back on board and headed off up the valley toward the hazy rim of mountains.

  The truck rumbled along the base of an ancient river terrace of low flat-topped hills, and the air smelled of diesel and gum trees and pine trees and sheep poo. White gravel roads led away from our road at sharp diagonals, cutting off over the flats toward the green rim of spring willow that bordered that beautiful surging blue water that made our fridge go. We passed through tiny settlements with a pub, a memorial hall, a church with a frilly
tower and, finally, just as we had eaten the last of our chippies, licking our fingers to take up the salt from the bottom of the packet, the truck slowed. We were pulling in beside a fence with a sign on it. We were stopping. Ozzie got out of the cab.

  ‘Okay, kids,’ he said. ‘This is it.’

  We had reached the picnic place. We unwrapped ourselves from our eiderdowns and climbed off the tray. We were parked at the foot of a huge white cliff, all fretted and pitted with holes and cracks where swallows and sparrows and pigeons flitted about, nesting in holes in the warm stone. The sound of their chirruping and cooing was calm after the roar of the truck engine. Our hair was a wild tangle, a tight mop you could scarcely drag your fingers through.

  There was a picnic table next to a big round rock that looked exactly like a giant hen seated on its nest. Ozzie took an apple box from the back of the truck. He flapped a checked cloth over the table, and Mum said, ‘Oh, lovely! A proper table cloth!’ She liked things like that: serviettes in rings, a cruet set, tomato sauce in the gravy jug and not the bottle, please and thank you and may I leave the table and being ladylike. Then he set up the thermette and made a pot of tea while Mum unpacked raspberry fizz for us and corned beef sandwiches with yellow pickle, and a cake tin with a chocolate cake — a cake that even at eight I could tell had been bought at the Four Square, but for once our mother did not comment on how dry a bought cake was and how you could never beat homemade, but had two slices because Ozzie had arranged a forest of candles in the store-made icing and we all sang Happy Birthday while she blushed and blew out the immense conflagration in a single puff. She said the cake was absolutely delicious.