And she knew his face—
Her husband.
And she knew his name—
Andrew.
And she knew the thing he would do for her—
“Make me a child.”
“Spin it for me, grandfather,” Eileen whispered.
“Oh—” said the man and even though it was one mouth there were still two voices to it, running up unevenly against each other so the words collided like rocks in an avalanche. “She remembers after all.”
And he bent closer to her, so close that the bristles on his chin stood out. His two hands—hands that hung so low to the ground the knuckles dragged across the floorboards when he walked—chucked her underneath the chin as they had when she’d been a little girl.
Those hands touched her hair. They smoothed it down until it was soft and pretty beneath their fingers.
All that hair.
“I remember,” said Eileen, and she remembered, of course, she remembered but this memory was not a gift: she knew why her mother had forgotten, she knew why her mother had let the memories seep out of her like water from a cracked cup because memory was a terrible thing, truth was a terrible thing but there was a gift with it, yes, there was always a gift with it—
“Did you leave because of me?” her mother had asked.
But that was the wrong question, wasn’t it?
“Did I leave you to them, mother? Did I leave you to the darkness? Did I leave you knowing they would come in the darkness? When you were alone?”
She had.
She had always known what those two long beds had meant, the two coffins, one for Rees and one for Jacob, one for Eirlys and one for Johanna. One from every generation. The first apple of the womb. One to go and one to stay. One to go, the other to pay and pay and pay. She had not wanted it for her daughters. No. When she had grown round and pregnant as an apple with the twin children inside of her, when Tamsyn had come for her—an old woman with her back stooped like a crook, because there was no one left, no one left for the grandfathers—Tamsyn had told her to come back to Ship House, and she had said no. And Tamsyn had taken the little one anyway, but that had not been enough, not enough for the grandfathers. . . .
Because the child must be given. That was the bargain. That was the price.
But in return, there might be blessings. There might be gifts.
“Once we spun straw. The king would have killed his wife, would have cracked her head like a hazelnut on the hearth, but we spun and we spun and we spun. But it was not straw that we spun for her. Straw would never turn to gold. Gold for gold, that is what we told her, and she cut her tresses for us. She gave up a piece of herself to keep her husband happy. What shall we spin for you, darling? What shall we spin for you, oh granddaughter come-home-to-us?” There was glee in those two rolling, robin’s-egg eyes, in the grit of the teeth clicking together as her grandfather grinned at her. And his fingers were in her hair and this time they were pulling at it, plucking at it like straw. Eileen cried out, but still the hair came away in a thick tangle.
“Why does it have to be like this?” Eileen asked, clutching her fists together.
And her grandfather drew close to her, and although Eileen shied away, she couldn’t. Not in that tiny hallway. The walls pressed her toward him, and she spun her head furious from side to side, but he took her chin between his thick, dirty fingers. She looked. She looked because she had to. He was as ugly as a mussel shell, his skin hanging slack off his cheeks in filthy crenellations. A stunted thing. A tiny little monster.
But not all monster. There was something in those rolling, robin’s-egg eyes, something slick and gleaming and Eileen knew if she touched it her fingers would come back salty and wet.
The grandfather was crying.
“Because someone will always pay in blood, sweet granddaughter. The ground is thick with it, the air is rank with it, and we have grown with it, we grandfathers, the spinners and menders, the death-singers, the charnel-houses. And we are old, and we are tired, and we are broken, but still they call for us to take the bodies away . . . bobbejaan climbs the mountain. Poor bobbejaan. Always climbing.”
“To torment the poor farmers,” Eileen whispered.
And then: “Go,” she tried to tell him. “Please.” And her throat felt engorged and thick with a pity she did not want but she could not be afraid of him any longer, this sad, clinging thing, this misshapen lump of clay.
“You have paid in blood already, granddaughter. Let me spin for you.” And it seemed almost as if he were pleading with her.
And she could not resist. The bargain had been made. The price had been paid.
And in return all she wanted was one small thing.
“Yes,” she said. “Spin for me,” she said.
And her grandfather began to spin, and the sweet smell of her hair was all around her.
In the morning, Eileen woke to the smell of bacon sizzling in the air. Sunlight was streaming through the window, falling slantwise on the two narrow beds in the little bedroom. The heat of it had not yet set in, and a cool breeze trickled in off the mountain.
Eileen got up carefully and stripped off her clothes. She had fallen asleep in them. They were damp and sticky, and she was glad to be rid of them.
She showered quickly. Let the water run over her in thin, happy rivulets as she massaged the shampoo into her hair.
Her shorn hair. The stubble felt soft as down against her fingers. She had thought it might be sharp and prickly, but it wasn’t. When she towelled herself off, it stuck up at odd angles in the mirror. She ran her hand through the damp fluff of it and felt oddly satisfied.
When Eileen finally made her way to the kitchen, her feet moving silently over the woven rugs and the polished wooden floorboards, it was to see her mother in the kitchen leaning over a pan of smoking bacon fat, dipping in two thick pieces of bread to fry up.
“Goeie more,” her mother called out as she turned the bread in the pan carefully.
“Ja,” said Eileen and the Afrikaans came easily back to her. “Goeie more, moeder.”
They took breakfast together on the little table in the backyard, and though the garden was a ragged, unkempt thing, it was still sweet-smelling. Table Mountain gleamed a dull green-grey in the distance, and the clouds folded themselves over the long flat top like a draping cloth. In the distance, a cable car slowly trundled its way to the top, floating over the canyons and sharp rocks beneath it.
Her mother was clear-eyed today; she was like a properly made bed, everything folded just so, with the corners tucked away.
“Mother,” Eileen said. “We need to talk.”
“I know, darling,” her mother said.
They were silent for the space of three breaths as the cable car docked at the top of the mountain. It would be filled with happy children, girls and boys lathered in sunscreen, ready to scrape their knees while their parents tried to usher them away from the edge.
“I’ve decided to stay in the house,” Eileen’s mother said at last.
“Mum,” Eileen began, but mother silenced her with a wave of her hand.
“I know you worry for me, love. But this is my house. I need to stay here. I can’t leave.”
“Of course you can, mum. I want you to come back with me. Please?”
“Hush up, Eileen.”
“I want you to meet Emma. I want her to know her grandmother—”
“—listen to me,” her mother said with a wave of her gnarled hand. “To meet my granddaughter would be a wonderful thing. Perhaps the sweetest thing of all. The only thing left to me. . . .”
“But?”
“But.”
“You won’t.”
“No, child. I have lived in the shadow of Table Mountain all my life. That is not a small thing. It is different for you, I know it is. You found a way out of this place, and perhaps that is how it should be
, perhaps it is better that way, but this is my home. I have shed tears in this house. I have found love in this house. The sum of my life is in this place, and I . . . I cannot let it go so very easily. It cannot let me go.”
“Doesn’t it frighten you? This place?”
Her mother smiled a sad sweet smile, a smile her daughter had never seen her smile before. “Of course, it does, love. A home is a frightening thing. An anchor. A place of resting. A place of waiting. A sign, perhaps, that you will never move any further than you have come at that very moment . . . but. I love this place. Let me to set it to rest.”
The air was still and quiet. In the distance there was the sound of a bird—or a child—whooping gleefully.
“They will not come for me,” her mother whispered, and Eileen looked at her sharply. “They will not come in the darkness again.”
“How do you know?”
And her mother smiled a grim, tight-lipped smile.
“There are some things I know, lovey. Blood whispers to blood.”
And Eileen gathered up her mother in her arms, and her bones were thin and delicate underneath the pale cotton dress, but her back was unbent, it had uncurled itself like a spring sapling loosed from the weight of winter. They sat together for a time. Listening to the sounds of the morning, the birds and the cries of the children, as the sun dappled the garden.
“You will have to go,” her mother said.
“I can stay awhile,” Eileen said.
“It is best done quickly. I’ve arranged for the taxi. It will be here soon.”
“What if I don’t want to go?” Eileen asked.
“Ha,” her mother laughed. “Oh, child. Your Granny Tamsyn always said I was the weak one of her children, but I have some of her steel in me yet. You think you can deny me this? I am an old woman, maybe, but not a weak one. You have a husband. You have a child. Go.”
And Eileen wanted to say something to that, but she didn’t. She felt a kind of relief fall over her like putting on a sweater to keep away the chill. When they were finished, she carried their dishes to the sink, and she filled the basin with water.
“Leave it be, love,” her mother said. “Do not linger.”
Eileen packed quickly, and when the taxi came to her she was ready. When Eileen kissed her mother lightly upon her dry, powdery cheek, she breathed in the smell of vinegar.
And she did not look. She did not look.
The taxi carried her down the side of the mountain, and sometimes Eileen slept, and sometimes she let her gaze drift outside the window to the shantytowns and their long lines of coloured cloth floating in the breeze. She did not recognize the faces there. She felt something of the place falling away from her. It had been home once. But no longer. No longer.
She had left her mother in the kitchen, scrubbing away at the dishes, singing softly to herself. She wanted to remember her mother like that. Clear-eyed. Present. Wholly herself. It was a kind of gift.
And in return she had taught her eyes not to see—
the crank of the dial on the stove
And she had taught her ears not to hear—
the slow hiss of the gas, and perhaps the striking of the match
She had let her feet follow the floorboards—even as they whispered, “Fare thee well, child,” even as they whispered, “Let her go, daughter”—past the threshold and away.
“If you look far enough in one direction,” he said, “you can see the beginning of everything.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF
SCIENCE FICTION
i. Cosmology
Carole at Fifteen
Her relationships never made it through the Big Bang.
“Is it the penis?” Ted asked.
It wasn’t the penis.
“You’ve probably heard things about my penis. Did Anita tell you? She’s such a. Bitch. Sorry. I don’t mean that. I know you’re friends.”
“We’re not friends, Ted. Not since seventh grade. No one told me anything about your penis.”
“It’s just. Listen, Carole. It’s not true. What Anita’s been saying. Just because my dad’s Chinese. I don’t have a microdick, okay?”
Around them there was utter darkness. It was as if they were floating in space. Not space, exactly. Pre-space. The space before there was space. The emptiness before matter and time and love and microdicks exploded into the universe 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago. Before the primeval atom. Before the primeval penis. Utter blackness. And silence.
Silence except for the snuffling sound that might have been Ted crying. Silence except for the tinny orchestral music playing over the speaker.
She didn’t even know what a microdick was.
Carole wanted to look at Ted. She wanted to see if he was crying. She wanted, maybe, to take his hand and reassure him that it wasn’t anything Anita said. Anita could be a bitch. Didn’t she know that? Didn’t she know how much of a bitch Anita could be when she wanted to?
And Ted probably didn’t have a micropenis.
Probably.
Carole didn’t want to find out. Ted was nice. He was a nice boy. But even nice boys always wanted to move. All she wanted was to remain motionless. At a fixed point. The world was beginning to accelerate around her. She hadn’t even wanted to kiss him. Not really. She just thought she should. She just thought, “That’s what you do, right?” So she’d kissed him.
And now this. Utter blackness. And in a moment, the primeval atom ripping into a billion, billion bits and ushering in the universe as she knew it.
“Sorry, Ted,” Carole said. “It’s not Anita. I think I just don’t like you enough, you know?”
He hiccoughed. “Yeah. I know.”
“So we’re okay?”
“I guess.”
“Shall we go then?”
“I guess.”
Carole started to walk. She didn’t wait to see if Ted would follow her. There were little green dotted lights on the ground marking the pathway out. There was a large sign—very elegantly done—counting out the years as she walked. The formation of stars. The formation of the solar system. Life on earth.
There was an emergency exit sign.
“I’m going to go, Ted, okay? You just finish up here by yourself.”
“You’re really leaving then?”
Now Carole could see his face. Just a little. It was red and blotchy. It might have just been the light from the emergency exit sign.
He was sixteen. He wasn’t sixteen in a cute way. He was sixteen in a sort of greasy, pimply, not fully formed way. The red light from the emergency exit sign made the pimples on his face stand up and wave hello.
Carole was sure, then. This was the right thing to do. Even though Anita would talk. Even though Anita would say she was some kind of ice princess or something. Ted’s mouth had a twisted look to it. She waited for his last words.
“I knew this would happen,” Ted said. He clenched his hands into futile little fists. “I knew this would happen. Anita told me. She told me if I let you take me here . . . she said it was always here. You always break up with them right here. Right in this very spot.”
“I—” Carole began, but then she stopped. She hated Anita. She wanted to say something nasty about Anita, but what was there to say? “I’m sorry, Ted.” She paused. “You were a good kisser.”
“I was?” he asked hopefully.
He wasn’t.
“Sure,” Carole said. “Goodbye, Ted.”
And then she took the emergency exit.
Just as she had before, every other time. Just like Anita said, Anita the bitch, Anita who never kept her mouth shut about anything.
And she abandoned Ted. She abandoned his spotted face and his twisted lips. She abandoned all of it to the fortunes of the cruel, ever-expanding universe.
ii. Synchronicity
Carole at Thirty-Four
She didn’t know when it was that Nicholas changed.
Maybe it was at the crash site when the doctor—measuring pupil dilation, asking the date, his name—had declared the head injury near catastrophic.
The car had come out of nowhere, he said. The road had been perfectly clear, he said.
Or maybe it came after, during the slow recovery time when he called her Cocoa as he had during the early days in college, both of them new to the city, their first time living alone, or as he tottered out of the hospital eight days after the crash, refusing the wheelchair and insisting he drive home. She could see the way his hands shook. He couldn’t put the key in the ignition until she did it with him, her hands over his.
At first they didn’t talk. She let her glances land like butterflies on his face, startling away before he could catch them. Then it was the questions after.
“Do you remember what speed you were going?”
“No.”
“Do you remember if the other driver stopped to see if you were okay?”
“No.
“Do you remember how we first met?”
Shamefaced. “No.”
Carole would lie in bed beside him. She craved the presence of some other Nicholas, the one she had fallen in love with. The loneliness was somehow made deeper by his presence beside her. His body scant inches from hers, his fingers brushing a nipple by accident before he curled into a comma away from her.
Afterward he would insist on driving although Carole had a license too. They had taken their test in different cities on the same day—November 15th—the birthday they shared by chance.
That birthday had become a secret sign between them over the years.
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
To which the answer was both as clear and as complicated as the way they had aged perfectly alongside one another. Graduated together. Turned thirty together. It was its own form of time travel, this steady march into the future.
Gifts for the One Who Comes After Page 20