Still that silence. I knew she was there. I could hear the breakfast show faintly in the background: that jaunty little jingle that accompanies the Briscoes ads.
I had my eyes closed tight. The questions jammed in my throat.
‘Phemie, just say yes or no. I’ll never tell anyone, promise. Was my father someone else?’
Silence. Just the sound of someone breathing far away.
‘Was Ozzie Moses my father?’ I said. My voice cracked on the word.
A pause. A quiet click. The phone went dead.
Twelve
So here is Clare driving through the dark, the car’s headlights snagging on hedges and signposts luminous with alternative destinations to the one she has chosen. She follows the narrow beam through an unknown landscape and sometimes it feels as if it she is not moving at all. She remains motionless while the earth flows around and beneath her like some dark stream and she skims along on its surface.
Her mind seethes. Fact and memory are in turmoil. Her life has been framed by delusion. Loves and loyalties must be realigned. Conversations half remembered take on other meanings. Her entire life has not been the one she had thought she was living at all: it has had a completely different beginning and a more complex middle section. The only thing that remains unaffected is the same uncertain ending. The lives of others are even less comprehensible. She can only guess at their moments of pleasure, their moments of pain.
She has to try to reframe it all. She desperately wants it to make sense. Above all, she wants her own role in it all to become clear. She wants to recall everything as accurately as she can manage, and to present this narrative to the audience of shadows who stand about, as they always do, silent witness to every human life.
She dawdles down through the dark, a soft breathing human thing contained within the thin shell of a rental Toyota. She has time to think. Her plane does not leave Cork until the morning, but she does not want the fuss of a city, a hotel room, the brief disinterested scrutiny of strangers. She prefers to remain in the solitude of her car where she is free to address the dark and that company of shadows: the living and the dead to whom we make our most intimate confession. She finds herself reaching for the word, and it comes bearing a memory so physically painful it makes her gasp, of cold white flagstones on bony knees, the smooth beads of contrition ticking through her fingers like minutes passing. She sits in a car in her grown-up clothes remembering the crumpled softness of pink winceyette and the nightly pleading: that things might be different, that prayers might be answered simply and immediately, not knowing that answers can arrive years later and in a format no one can possibly anticipate.
She drives down the narrow roads of Ireland, thinking about the past and how it is carried within us and cannot be ignored, no matter how much we might wish it otherwise. She thinks about stone bones and that tiny gene passing from Mrs Moses to lodge undetected in the body of her big soft son before he in his turn passed it on like a birthday parcel to his only daughter: to Clare, the child he fathered with the beautiful Kathleen Mulcahy, former Lady-in-waiting to the Coronation Carnival Queen.
How might this have occurred? How did they meet? At the Annandale pub one winter afternoon after a muddy game, he with his mates out from town to celebrate a win over Athletic, she filling jugs behind the bar? Or was it later, when she had moved into town to live with her protective older sister? A neighbourhood affair, furtive by necessity for was he not married still to the woman who subsequently ran off with the Bon Brush man? But by the time he was free, Kathleen herself had married, to an Irishman, a traveller who turned up one day and painted robins in snow on the window of the Copper Kettle. Timing is everything.
And then the Irishman also left and for a split second there was a hint of possibility. The way was left open for happiness: for love and a family and picnics up the river valley every birthday. That happiness glimpsed through a bleary rear window before tangled loyalties and tangled love twisted and ruined everything.
The past is hard to contemplate. The future is uncertain, and the present is no more than a narrow beam of light that Clare follows through sleeping villages where her passing forms part of someone else’s restless dreaming, the reflection of car lights gleaming for a second on someone else’s mirror, then fading away in the dark. She drives past farms where dogs lift their heads to bark then settle back in their musky kennels. The car lights set little fires in the eyes of sheep and horses in roadside fields. They flare scarlet as if the creatures burned from within, then are snuffed out. She passes through little towns where the shutters are down and the mannequins in the shop windows wait stiffly in their frilly dresses, presuming on summer. She passes as unobserved, as unreal as one of them. She might as well be non-existent. She might as well already be numbered with the dead.
She drives slowly, while within the white cave of her skull shreds of fact, particles of memory, swirl and sift down in the crevices of consciousness where they settle and take on new forms. Those particles from which we make the little boxes within which we lead our lives, emerging to eat and mate, hopeful always of some kind of second chance: that rot and putrefaction might be succeeded by another existence better than the one we’ve managed so far. All of us in the little boxes of our own creation that are linked to the structure of all the other little boxes of the lives that have preceded us, all those antecedents whose remains form the reef that is the ground on which we stand. On which we breathe, where our tiny hearts beat and our brains try to make sense of it all. Where we exist within the sway and tide of a near-perfect reversible reaction in which dissolution and precipitation achieve approximate equilibrium: darkness with light, love with pain, faith with disillusion, beauty with despair.
Some time very late —it is almost morning — she finds herself broaching the crest of a hill. Away in the distance she can see the glitter of lights that is Cork city, but it’s too soon yet to retrieve her everyday rational self: return the rental car, check in at the airport, set out on the long journey home. She turns off the main road and follows a minor way a few hundred metres up through some pines to a place where there is room to pull over. She gets out of the car.
The wind up here is chill, blowing through holes in the dark, so she finds her coat and huddles down in the lee of a wall, looking out over the country spread below while away to the east the sky smudges to grey.
She sits and thinks about two girls on a pony and a snow-white village sketched on a shop window. She thinks about a young man lying at his ease in some brilliant infinity of blue. She thinks about stone bones, and a woman in a high tower and a man entombed in ice. She thinks about herself standing in the vast entrance to a cave in France, surveying a ridiculous visitor centre designed by an architect determined to turn his back on the dark immensity that lies within the hillside for some childish fantasy of dragons, and how frail art seemed at that point. She had looked up at the curve of stone and thought: Why do we ignore this?
We note the human handprints, loving their delicacy and strangeness, but we pay no attention to the surface on which they have been drawn. That white stone so pure it glitters in torchlight. That surface made up of billions upon billions of tiny extraordinary lives. That stone that prompts the human mind to see strange creatures in the random mouldings of rain and wind. That stone that prefigures the cathedral with its gargoyles and arches, and the way we pass from the outer to the inner world through such tiny doors, discovering the cave within or its imitation worked in stone, its floor a plateau on which the light through stained windows leaves watery pools of indigo blue, its vault distant and dim and ornamented with grotesques, half prelate/half pig, or men blessed with the wings of swans.
Clare sits out of the wind watching the dawn well up in the east and seep over the land while somewhere in the air about her white stones flip and tumble to earth becoming in that instant of contact, living breathing beings whose voices she can hear as clearly as if they stood at her shoulder. How unexpected life is, th
ey murmur. How brief. How inconsequential. How ridiculous it is to try to detect form and pattern in the welter of incident and sensation that is existence. How poignant, though, that we try. How silly we are and how appalling and how astonishing and how beautiful: tiny sentient beings moving feverishly about the surface of the earth, slung on our frameworks of white bone.
A bird begins to sing, a single piping note dropping into the silence like the angelus. And then it is joined by another and another, till the whole place is absorbed in making something ecstatic from the bare facts of sex and territoriality.
Clare feels cold suddenly, chilled right through to her bones. Her legs are stiff and her feet are numb. She gets up awkwardly, stumbling on uneven ground. But when she reaches out, her hand touches stone. Damp and grainy, the wall stands at her back, offering its shelter from the worst of the night wind and preventing her from falling. Its stone holds her steady till she can stand upright and make her way back to the car.
And some hours later here she is at Heathrow placing her bag in the overhead locker. She slides into her seat: a window seat so she can look out as the plane climbs up over Europe and watch it turn into a pristine place of forested hills and snow-topped mountains through which wind the rivers that are named for the old goddesses — Rhine and Danube and Volga — legendary and beautiful from 30,000 feet, shorn of their clutter of rusted cargo boats and effluents and chemical spills and millennia of quarrelsome human history. A landscape through which people and all the other beautiful animals — bears and bison and shaggy-maned little ponies — roam unhindered by frontiers and the residues of past unkindness, a place where memory is short.
She settles into her seat, buckling herself into the twenty-first century, tired after her long night. She flew away this morning from Ireland in the same company of commuters with whom she arrived: all early-morning vigour and dash now, with their Blackberries and little pull-on cases and polished shoes. Ready to take the day head-on. And now she sits in her window seat at Heathrow, waiting till everyone is aboard.
She has a sudden longing for home: that dream of primeval beaches scattered with driftwood, and dark forests, and plains burned to a tawny hide in late summer. That dream she knows to be corrupted by reality: the beach is already threatened with subdivision and the trees with clear-felling, and the tawny plains are bordered by the dry beds of intricate vanished rivers. And everyone is arguing because we’ve all woken up and found ourselves together in this small boat, this tippy waka, out here in the middle of a vast ocean, and we’re all trying to paddle toward perfection but we don’t know how to get there, so we squabble and fight. And sometimes we say things out of love or mistaken loyalty that cause pain and loss for other people, though we didn’t mean to do it. We are all just trying for happiness.
She sits in her cramped seat, twenty-seven hours away from home, watching the passengers board. The hours line up ahead of her like fences to be jumped. Twelve hours to Singapore, that strange sleepwalking city of eat and sleep. She’ll stand as she has stood before, watching the armies of workers emerge from the underground to the squeak of the escalator and the pit-pat of their shoes across the flagstones into the high glass towers. And after a few hours she’ll climb onto another plane and head out across the wide sky to that archipelago she was born on, that funny little semicolon where all the big continental statements finally stutter to silence.
A teenage boy takes the seat in front of her, a lad in a Ronaldo tee shirt and spiky tinted hair that bristles above the headrest like the crest of a startled tropical bird. A mother with a small child sits across the aisle, the mother humping a bag stuffed with necessity and distraction, the child bright-eyed, delighted by the tray table, the seatbelt, the faces of strangers, the new world. A beautiful child — a child, Clare hopes with all her heart, like the child who lies furled within Eva’s womb, preparing to squeeze through the narrow entry into the world. The only grandchild of Michael Lacey. All that hope and possibility contained in one tiny body that has its whole life yet to live.
She looks up and there is a man coming toward her down the aisle. He is checking the numbers above the seats. The same rumpled greying hair, the same woollen jacket. Several kilos of newsprint clasped in his hand: it looks like the morning’s Guardian. A leather laptop case slung from one shoulder. He pauses by her seat. Consults his ticket. Looks down at the empty seat next to hers.
‘66B,’ he says. ‘Good.’ He glances down at Clare as he says it. Nice eyes. Crinkled at the corners, but not too crinkled.
He slips the laptop from his shoulder, looking slightly puzzled. Then suddenly his face clears.
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Weren’t you on the flight last week coming over?’
Clare smiles. Far too much smile, really, for such slight recognition, but she cannot stop her lips stretching.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You were sitting in front of me. The Ancestor’s Tale.’
‘What?’ he says.
‘Richard Dawkins,’ Clare says. ‘You were reading The Ancestor’s Tale.’
He smiles. ‘So I was,’ he says, reaching up to shove the laptop among the cabin bags and duty-free shopping. ‘Great book.’
‘The marine worm,’ Clare says. ‘Isn’t that the best bit?’
She thinks her mouth will never stop smiling.
‘Flipping over onto its back,’ says the nice man. ‘Amazing, eh?’ And he slides into the seat next to hers.
66B beside passenger C. Lacey in 66A.
Which might turn out to be the most satisfactory seating arrangement any airline booking system could ever possibly devise.
About the Author
Fiona Farrell is one of New Zealand’s leading writers, publishing work across a variety of genres.
Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the 1992 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. The Hopeful Traveller (2001) and the widely read Book Book (2004) were shortlisted in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Both these novels, along with Mr Allbones’ Ferrets (2007), were also nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her short fiction has appeared in the company of Hanif Kureishi and Alice Munro in Heinemann UK’s annual Best Short Stories (1990 and 1994, ed. Gordon and Hughes). She has published three collections of poetry, and her work appears in major anthologies including The Oxford Book of New Zealand Poetry and Bloodaxe’s best-selling Being Alive. She has also received the Bruce Mason Award for Playwrights.
She is a frequent guest at festivals in New Zealand, and has also appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Vancouver International Writers Festival. She has held residencies in France (the 1995 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton) and Ireland (the 2006 Rathcoola Residency).
Fiona Farrell has received numerous awards, most notably the 2007 New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction.
Copyright
The assistance of Creative New Zealand is gratefully acknowledged by the author.
A VINTAGE BOOK published by Random House New Zealand
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand
First published 2009
© 2009 Fiona Farrell
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN 978 1 86979 169 8
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Cover illustration: Getty Images
Cover design: Matthew Trbuhovic
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