Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  And when we had finished, Ozzie filled the thermette for a second cup and Mum, all pink and smiley with her treat, actually accepted one of Ozzie’s cigarettes. She lit it like an expert with a deft flick of the match, and inhaled deeply. We looked on in astonishment. We had never seen her smoke before. Not once. But now here she was, looking suddenly foreign, like someone else’s mother, leaning her head back as if she had done this many times, half closing her eyes and releasing a jet of smoke through narrowed lips. She was really good at it.

  We hung about, watching. Now that the cake was eaten, we didn’t know quite what else to do. At birthday parties, this was usually the time for the terrors of Chip chop chip chop the last one’s DEAD and the lumbering pants-wetting mayhem of Blind Man’s Buff, but adult parties were probably differently managed.

  Ozzie looked up from where he was kneeling on the dry brown grass. ‘Why don’t you kids go and look at the pictures?’ he said.

  ‘What pictures?’ we said.

  And Ozzie said, ‘Over there, past the sign.’ He was snapping little twigs to feed the flame in the column of the thermette. ‘And why don’t you take Brian with you. He’s going to burn himself otherwise.’

  Brian was being a pain as usual, wanting to poke twigs into the fire too. So we took one sticky hand each, and led him away up a narrow track worn down between prickly boxthorn and broom bursting into yellow flower and smelling of honey and toasted coconut. The track led to the foot of the white cliff where there was a big cage of netting wire protecting an overhang.

  We peered through the wire. The overhang breathed a soft warm air, and the chatter of nesting birds was deafening. The netting stretched for forty metres or so along its base, where the rock curved inward to form a low shelter. There was nothing there.

  ‘What’s this for?’ said Brian, rattling the wire to make it squeak, squeak, squeak, and Maddie said it was a cage for keeping annoying little brothers in. We peered through the rattling wire. Something had been put away out of our reach. Something precious, perhaps, like afghans and coconut squares in a tin on a high shelf. Or something dangerous, like the fire at home behind its wire guard. Or a bull, all heavy menace, behind a wire fence. Creamy rock, streaked with sooty black.

  And suddenly I saw that one of the sooty marks was a fish. Yes. Definitely a fish, just like the fish that marked off all the Fridays on the Columban calendar above our dining table. There was its head and there was its forked tail and there was the fin on its back. And over there the lines formed a boat: a slender little boat. I could see the curve of its hull.

  ‘Look! Look!’ I said, but Maddie and Brian had noticed a sheep’s skeleton among some broom bushes at the foot of the cliff, the bones all perfectly dried and picked clean, and they went off to collect the knuckle bones and the jaw which had all its teeth for playing Dental Clinics when we got home. Ordinarily I would have joined them, for that arch of white ribs, the intricate chain of the spine, each bone shaped to lock to its neighbour, the smooth curve of the skull and the big round sockets through which the animal had once looked at this green world. How entrancing it was that all this lay beneath its woolly skin as it lay beneath our own skin, so that you could press your own chest and feel a row of ribs, smaller but exactly the same! How amazing was this structured concealed place!

  But today I preferred the stone. I left my brother and sister to collect their treasures, and wandered along the fence on my own, watching marks emerge from stone: that long red wavy line that might have been a snake and the row of little figures that looked like frogs, or maybe people dancing with their arms in the air and their legs flexed. It was like one of those magic painting books we sometimes got for Christmas where there was nothing inside except blank white pages speckled with tiny dots. But when you dabbed at the page with a wet brush the dots faded up into puppies and clowns and princesses in shades of brown and pink and blue and green. I peered through the netting, waiting for the pictures to come out of the stone.

  That’s still the part that entrances me.

  The emergence of art from a wall of white stone.

  You walk across a ploughed field in early spring, puddled water cracking in the ruts, and come upon a rift. The paddock ends abruptly at a cliff edge invisible until you are almost upon it. The land drops to a steep-sided, narrow valley, a kind of nave between white crags either side of marshy ground that, come summer, will be golden with hooded monkey musk or starred with the tiny white flowers of cress. There’s a way down to the valley floor through a broken arch in the stone, some scrambling over fallen rock, and then you are there: an Israelite between the frozen breakers, a tiny pilgrim between the white walls of a roofless cathedral. The stone mutes the sound of cars passing along a nearby road and a tractor droning up and down a field, preparing the earth for sowing. The stone forms a kind of enclosure that is curiously comforting, like being held as a child in big arms. It has been pitted and carved by raindrops, and at its foot it offers shelter to a few sheep, perhaps, some bails of fencing wire, a rusted horse-drawn harrow, the gig discarded back in 1924 when the family bought the Ford, the Ford itself smashed and gutted. And it could be sacrilege, it could be vandalism, this rough and ready rural pragmatism. Or it could be poignant: an installation expressive of human transience.

  And somewhere behind the rubbish and the red smear of raddle left by sheltering sheep, somewhere among the stains of lichen and mineral seepage, there is art. Deliberate marks like the ones I first saw when Ozzie Moses took us on our picnic. Marks drawn in pigments made of the fat that dripped from the carcass of a plump bird, slow-roasted over a fire, and resin that oozed from a tree trunk to heal a wound just as blood oozes from human skin, and soot from the ashes of matai which burns to a fine black powder, or kokowai, the red ochre that was carried here for just this purpose in a little woven pouch from the places where it had been laid down as a thread of crimson ash woven into the rock of basalt country.

  You walk between crags as in a processional, cabbage trees on either side rattling their strappy green leaves as banners, broadleaf and bush lawyer making a grab for solid rock in the crevices. You walk to a place where the stone has been shaped by weather to a deep overhang. You look up at its ceiling and see a massive multi-headed creature emerge from the rock to stretch its tendril limbs over you. You stand beneath it like some ancient Egyptian on his bier beneath the lean and elegant arch of the goddess of death, Nut’s body spanning the whole wide fruitful earth. You stand beneath it like a swimmer in deep water looking up at the tangle of bull kelp drifting on tidal surge. You stand beneath it like some restless sleeper looking up at the spine of the house from your place among all the other snuffling, snoring sleepers who are being carried like you safely through the dark in her warm wooden womb.

  Art emerges from white stone. A flock of long-necked moa stand about like a flock of chickens on some sunny distant morning, a bird bears smaller birds upon its outstretched wings as grebes carry their chicks through turbulent waters, small human figures raise their arms and flex their legs, some with the bulb of a head between their shoulders, some with no head, some with a beaked profile.

  You peer at white walls through the netting fences of assumption and preconception, trapped by time as surely as those nineteenth-century gentlemen who saw in these same images the work of Phoenician traders or Buddhist missionaries, or all the proof required to report to the Society of Biblical Archaeology back in London that the islands of New Zealand were indeed the Isles of the Sea mentioned in Ezekiel.

  Theory and belief cluster at the wire: the marks denote a sacred place where women came to give birth to children destined for great things. They were designed as illustrations to some fireside story. They left a practical directory to food sites – so many hours walking from here to the next campsite where there is a plentiful supply of birds, or so many days to a lake with big fish; they are star maps, the imagery of cosmos, instruction for the young, induction to knowledge; the blank within the body of the lit
tle dancing figures represents the soul, or the sensation of hunger or loneliness, or is evidence of artistic convention, linking these figures with similar figures in Hawaii or Easter Island …

  Theory and belief peer through the trophoblast, the thin membrane of time that separates them from the artist who stood where they now stand, on the same reef that lies beneath their feet. They watch art rising like fish through stone.

  As I did that day Ozzie Moses took us up the valley for our mother’s birthday picnic. There was the smell of dry sheep poo and the sound of Maddie and Brian squabbling over a molar, and when I leaned back and looked up, the cliff loomed overhead as if it were a massive wave, a wave like the one in the picture in our Children’s Bible that was held back by Moses till all the Israelites had crossed on dry land, then came crashing down. Maddie could never look at that picture because all Pharaoh’s charioteers were driving horses.

  ‘What happened to the horses?’ she said. ‘Did God kill all the horses?’ Mum had to skip that page, just as she had to skip Noah on account of the animals who didn’t make it onto the ark. There they were in the picture, the unlucky ones, horses and cows and sheep, standing about on the hills eating grass while Noah shepherded the lucky few on board and the grey clouds gathered ominously overhead. The image reduced Maddie to such a pitch of hysterical weeping that Mum generally omitted the Old Testament entirely, except for the infant Samuel kneeling in his nightie, and moved directly to the baby Jesus, the ox and ass who were always safe and warm in their stalls with plenty of feed. But we had caught a glimpse of God’s injustice. We had seen the horses and the cows, and we knew that they would drown. We had seen that great wave and knew that it would come crashing down as soon as Moses’ arm got tired and he lowered the rod.

  I looked up at that cliff that afternoon and it was full and white like that wave, and when I leaned back, swinging on the wire enclosure to track a hawk circling on a brilliant blue sky, a cloud poured out overhead. And then it was as if the cliff itself was melting and rolling down or as if I were falling backward. As if solid earth was shifting under my feet. And I would have screamed, except that at that very moment Maddie tried to take the jaw for herself, finders keepers, and Brian began to yell and ran off down the track to tell Mum, and we had to run after him of course, and of course he fell over and scraped both his knees, which made him howl even louder. So we all burst yelling and protesting from the broom bushes, and there was Mum standing by the picnic table, and though they broke apart the minute we arrived, we had time enough to see that Ozzie Moses had had his arms around her.

  They were standing very still, close together, while the thermette boiled away behind them, sending up a plume of steam and bubbling over onto the grass. They were standing very still, as if this didn’t matter.

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Mum, turning a bright silly face toward us, another face we had never seen before. ‘Come here, Brian. What’s wrong? Have you been in the wars again?’ And she made a great fuss of kissing his knees better, though it was just a scrape and scarcely worth bothering about. A twitchy little wind had got up, eddying about at the foot of the cliff and picking up our empty chippie packets so that they flapped and flew like flustered birds. Mum kissed Brian’s knees, holding him too close, closer than she usually did, so that he wriggled and fought to be released.

  It was time to go.

  She turned to packing everything back in the apple box, humming ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’, which was what she did when she was happy, and folding the sandwich wrappers into the cake tin for another time, as if she expected that there would indeed be a next time. Ozzie dashed the water from the thermette over the ashes in the embers of the fire, and everything they did had a flare to it, as if they were giddy, like kids at the end of a party.

  ‘What are those pictures?’ I said as the ashes sizzled.

  Ozzie stamped out a smouldering twig with a lightfooted exuberance that was really more than was strictly required. ‘The old fellas made them,’ he said. ‘They used to come up here from the coast. They camped here.’

  ‘But why did they draw them?’ said Maddie.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Ozzie. ‘Must have liked drawing, I suppose.’

  ‘So why did they draw frogs?’ I said, and Ozzie said he didn’t think they were frogs, they were people, and Mum said to stop bothering Mr Moses when he was trying to get organised.

  ‘It’s all over there on the sign,’ she said. ‘You can go and read about it for yourselves.’ And she smiled over our heads at Ozzie, a smile we weren’t supposed to see. We were left out of that smile completely.

  So we went and read the sign and it said that Early Maori had ornamented the walls of this shelter five hundred years ago. They had passed this way, the sign said, on their way to the coast to collect greenstone (‘pounamu’), a ‘highly valued commodity’.

  So that explained it.

  We climbed back onto the sofa for the trip into town. The twitchy breeze made it cold, despite the eiderdowns. I turned round at one point and looked through the little rectangular window into the cab where Mum and Brian and Ozzie looked warm and snug. Brian was curled on Mum’s knee, sucking his thumb, and Mum was talking away to Ozzie, and he was laughing and turning to look at her though he was driving and the truck could easily have gone off the road. He was driving with only one hand on the wheel, and when I looked more closely I could see that she had her hand resting on the metal bit between the seats, the warm part I had sat on when we went to fetch the limestone for Dad’s wall. And Ozzie had his big hand resting over hers. I watched their hands lying together till he had to lift his away to change gear by the meatworks at Pukeuri where the air smelled sour and fatty like cat food. I was feeling a bit sick anyway, because of all the chippies.

  As dusk fell we arrived home. We jumped off the truck and followed Ozzie as he carried Brian up the path because he was too heavy for Mum to manage on her own, though she managed perfectly well every night when Brian fell asleep on the sofa and had to be carried to bed. But she let Ozzie carry him inside and tuck him tenderly under his eiderdown, while we watched this man walking about in our house. And then we stood in the front hall while Mum said, ‘What a lovely afternoon we’ve had, haven’t we, girls? Say thank you to Mr Moses for our lovely afternoon!’

  Maddie said, ‘Thanks, Ozzie. I liked the chippies!’ and jumped up into his arms to give him a big hug, and Ozzie laughed and swung her round and said that was good because there were plenty more where they came from. Which was exactly what Maddie was hoping for.

  I couldn’t look up. Not at my mother’s silly bright face. Not at Ozzie’s big moon face, smiling and happy.

  ‘Clare?’ said Mum. ‘Where’s your manners? Say thank you to Mr Moses.’

  But I wouldn’t. I kept my head down and looked at the worn patch on the Feltex.

  My mother’s hand gripped my upper arm. ‘Clare!’ said Mum. ‘Say thank you!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ozzie. ‘She’s probably tired.’

  ‘But I want her to say thank you,’ said Mum. ‘After you’ve gone to so much trouble.’ The grip tightened so that my fingers began to tingle.

  There was a pause. They waited. I looked at the worn patch. You could see a little web of brown netting under the pink.

  ‘Well,’ said Mum, ‘I want to say thank you. I can’t think of an afternoon I’ve enjoyed more. It has been the best birthday I can remember.’

  And Ozzie said it was just the start.

  Then he said, ‘Well, cheerio, Kathleen. Happy birthday.’

  No one ever called her Kathleen. She was always Kath to our father, our proper father, the one who had disappeared. I kept my head down and looked at the Feltex and heard the little pop of a kiss landing on skin somewhere in the space above me. Ozzie had kissed our mother, in our front hall. Then the door clicked shut.

  Mum’s grip became a vice. She lifted me by that one arm. She shook me. ‘How dare you be so rude!’ she said, fury making her voice thi
ck and curdled. ‘How dare you embarrass me like that in front of Mr Moses!’ She knelt down and forced my chin up so that I had to meet her eyes. Her face was bright pink. Her eyes looked very blue, a kind of icy blue like the top of the milk on a frosty morning. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’

  The yelling had drawn Phemie from the kitchen.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said, and Mum said I was being a little madam and embarrassing her by being rude to Mr Moses, and I was to stay here in the hall and not have any tea till I had apologised, first to her and then tomorrow I was going straight round to Mr Moses and apologising to him too.

  Brian had started crying, woken by the shouting, so she slammed the hall door and went to fetch him and I was left alone with Phemie. I looked at the Feltex and stuffed the crying back down into my throat in a wadding so thick I could not make a sound.

  Silence.

  ‘So,’ said Phemie. ‘What was all that about?’ Her big square hand stroked my head. ‘Clare?’ she said. ‘What happened?’

  Silence. I could feel my mouth getting ready to cry.

  She knelt beside me. ‘Why were you rude to Mr Moses?’ she said.

  The words came through the wadding like small fists breaking something down.

  ‘Mr Moses stinks,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Phemie.

  ‘He wouldn’t let me get my knickers from the hedge,’ I said. It was the only thing I could think of that explained my anger.

  Phemie went very still.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Clare? What are you talking about?’

  ‘That time when he took me in the truck,’ I said. ‘He gave me lollies but he wouldn’t let me get my knickers.’

  And suddenly I was crying, loud heaving crying from the bottom of my stomach, for Dad who had gone away and Mum with her bitter mouth banging saucepans in the kitchen and Brian who was always in the wars these days, and most of all because I knew for sure, for absolutely certain, that God and Gentle Jesus and the Blessed Virgin were all a lie, like Santa Claus — a made-up story the grown-ups told us for their own reasons — because I’d been testing. I had prayed every night for a whole year, asking them to make my father come back, and he hadn’t. He had left us without a word. He had made not a single phone call. He had sent no letters. And that was all the proof I needed.