by Lucy Atkins
I picture the whales with their loved ones tight around them, synchronized, protecting one another even as they sleep. ‘I just feel,’ I say, ‘very alone.’
‘Oh Kali,’ she shrugs. ‘You are alone.’
I look at her. She chops on, nonchalantly. ‘You’ve lost your mother and possibly your husband,’ she says. Then she turns her head, and her bleached-out eyes settle on my face. ‘That’s why you need to stay here for a bit longer. That’s why you came.’
‘Oh, no.’ I look down at the mess of onions. ‘Honestly, Susannah, I couldn’t stay any longer here – I mean, we really do have to go first thing tomorrow, to get back to Vancouver. I’ve imposed on your hospitality quite enough.’
‘No, you haven’t.’ She touches the tip of her knife against her glistening index finger. ‘And anyway. You shouldn’t be dragging a young child around like this. You owe it to that baby to stay here at least one more night. You’re here for a reason. You need to accept that. And you need to learn to accept help, Kali. Especially in your condition.’
I look at her. I have no idea what she’s talking about.
She takes the board with my onions and garlic, and tips them into the frying pan.
She picks up a spatula. ‘Does your husband know about the baby?’
‘What baby?’ I look at her and she looks at me. ‘You mean Finn?’
‘No. The one inside you.’
I let out a wild laugh. ‘What? You think I’m pregnant? God no. No. I’m not pregnant.’ I glance, involuntarily, at my belly. We both do. I stop laughing. ‘Why … why on earth would you say that?’
‘You just seem pregnant to me.’
‘Good God. Why? Because I threw up?’
‘That, and I don’t know – you just seem pregnant, Kali, that’s all. I’ve been around pregnant women plenty of times. I’ve been one myself in fact. You can’t touch your wine and you’re very tired; you’re kind of out of it, not noticing things. You threw up. But it’s more than that, of course. From the moment you walked through my door you just seemed pregnant. You feel pregnant. Your aura feels pregnant.’
‘My aura feels pregnant? Well, I’m definitely not.’ I consider introducing Susannah to the four years it took me to conceive Finn, the diagnosis of unexplained infertility, the eventual mind-blowing success – and the fact that Doug and I have only had sex about four times in the past six months. But of course, I would never go there with her, never in a million years. ‘Well, whatever my aura is telling you has been lost in translation because I am categorically not pregnant,’ I say. ‘I’m jet-lagged and … discombobulated.’
‘Discombobulated?’ She laughs and shakes her head. ‘OK.’
She cooks the onions for a bit, then adds the tomatoes to the pan and some chopped herbs, then mixes in tiny foetal clams, stirring until it all thickens to a deep red sauce, with caramel-coloured oils on the surface, and flecks of herbs and the globular shellfish bobbing about. The salty, garlicky smell is overpowering.
I turn away and reach for the plates. My hands feel jittery. The plates are thick, handmade, with a pale-blue glaze and a blue whale design in the centre. I lower them very carefully from the cupboard. They are heavy.
‘So.’ She takes one and lifts overcooked spaghetti on to it. ‘We’re agreed then. Tomorrow, you rest and I take the baby away for the day.’
‘Oh no. Really! I couldn’t let you do that, no – no. Honestly.’
‘Kali,’ she snaps. ‘I am offering to help you.’
‘Yes, I know you are. And that’s very kind. But Finn would miss me. He hardly knows you, after all, and all this is strange for him – you said that yourself. And, he’s hard work sometimes too. No, really. I wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘You must.’
‘No, really, Susannah. That’s so kind of you, but I couldn’t lie here while you entertain Finn all day, it’d feel totally wrong.’
She spoons the sauce onto the spaghetti.
‘And I’m not that bad, honestly,’ I continue. ‘I think I threw up because it’s all been pretty intense lately – with Doug, and my mother’s death, and jet lag and then hearing all that stuff about my mother’s life up here – stuff I had no idea about. I mean, what sort of mother has this past and doesn’t mention it – keeps it from her daughers for decades? It was a bit much to cope with.’ I take the plate. ‘I’m just, you know, slightly overwhelmed. I probably need to process all this. I’m just not myself right now, I’m really not myself at all.’
‘Who are you then?’
‘What?’
She smiles, and for a moment, I almost like her.
We sit down and pick up our forks. She grates Parmesan onto her pasta and hands the greasy block to me. We eat for a few moments in silence. The food tastes strongly of the sea: it is gloopy and salty. The clams slide over my tongue. I feel like one of her dogs, great lumps forcing themselves down my throat. I rest my fork on the plate.
‘What was your husband like?’ I say. ‘Were you together for a very long time? How did you meet?’
‘Which question would you like me to answer first?’
‘Sorry.’ I smile. ‘How did you meet?’
‘Well, I was forty and I’d been single for a very long time, many years in fact. I didn’t want anyone in my life and I’d decided to be on my own for ever, but then my biological clock kicked in – wham! I didn’t see that one coming. I guess the universe was telling me to have a baby. I’d started the gallery by then, I had my life in a good place and my creative work was flowing. But the urge for a baby was … powerful.’
‘And did you meet through your gallery?’
‘No, actually. He was a writer – biographies that nobody reads. I was in Vancouver and happened to be in a bookstore where he was talking.’ She reaches over and fills up her glass again. She leans back on the chair, hooking one arm over the backrest, raising her glass with the other. ‘I told him I was on the Pill.’
‘Oh.’
‘Ah. You’re one of those?’
‘One of whats?’
‘A love-at-first-sighter.’ She smiles, not very kindly, just with her mouth. ‘Let me guess. You want roses on Valentine’s Day. You believe – or maybe believed – that your husband was “the one”, your destiny?’
She’s right, of course. I do. Did. Not the roses, but I did believe Doug was the only one for me – I never doubted that I wanted to stay with him for my whole life, not even in our most stressful moments. In fact, I realize, I still do.
When we met, introduced over dinner by the only people I knew in Oxford, he offered to show me round the city. I’d been single for a long time – I felt safer that way. All my friends were getting married and I was thinking about working for a year or so at the new job, then maybe going to India at last. I thought I would be alone for ever.
It was the last Sunday in March and we met in Christ Church meadow. It was so cold, but the daffodils were out – egg-yolk yellow splashed down the riverbank. I was wearing a green woollen hat and no gloves, and Doug had on his big overcoat and the navy-blue wool sweater that is, right now, in Susannah’s spare room.
It seemed astonishing that this meadow could exist in the centre of a city, tucked away from the buses, tourists and Big Issue sellers. Doug told me there were cows in the meadow in summertime. That, he said, was the thing that convinced him he wanted to take his job – the city cows.
As we walked along the Cherwell, he told me about getting his college position, and his mixed feelings about it, and I felt the bright egg-yellow swelling inside me until I was bursting with it.
So, yes, Susannah is right: I did know. I knew instinctively from that first walk, when the colours of the world turned up and everything was clearer, richer, bigger because he was there. He always said he knew too on that first day. That was our story: the daffodils, the instinct – the knowing.
We were engaged only a month later. My friends all assumed it was a desperate mistake. Alice was polite, though clearly dubi
ous; and my father asked if perhaps I could bring Doug to meet them. Only my mother got it – unquestioningly. I remember the vibration of happiness in her voice that I had never heard before. She, alone, believed that I could know after such a short time – and she’d never even met him.
Then again, maybe I didn’t know. Maybe all that was in my head. Perhaps Doug went along with the story for me. If he has had an affair then our story is twisted and stained now, like everything else.
‘Sore subject, huh?’ Susannah’s voice startles me. I find I can’t answer.
‘You want to talk about it?’
‘No.’ I sit up straight. ‘No. Really. So, anyway: your marriage lasted, didn’t it? You and your partner made it work.’
‘We were hardly love’s young dream, Kali. My son needed a father. And Marc was a pretty good father actually. For a while he lived on the island, but not with us, and then I had the studio built and he moved in, and we were all kind of together for a bit. Then he died.’
I can’t read any sadness. Just a statement of fact.
‘So, where’s your son now?’ I don’t even know her son’s name. It seems rude to ask now.
Her face clouds over. ‘Oh, that’s enough about my life.’ She picks up her wine and takes a slug. The Merlot has stained her teeth a brownish red. I realize she may be a bit drunk. ‘You had a good father too, in the end, didn’t you? I’m sure Gray was a wonderful father.’
‘What do you mean “in the end”?’
She swigs the wine. ‘You know what?’ she says. ‘You’re nothing like your mother.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
‘Elena was open and trusting. You’re the opposite.’
‘Open and trusting? My mother? You have to be kidding.’
‘Oh, yeah, well.’ She tosses up a hand and looks away. ‘I guess she changed. Of course she would. I knew her a very long time ago. People change. I’m not surprised. Who wouldn’t after what … we both changed. I did for sure.’ She drinks again and when she clonks her wine glass down, some spills onto the table, staining the pine. If either of us is like my mother then it’s Susannah – I can’t pin her down, even for a second.
‘So.’ She leans forward. ‘Tell me about your travel plans.’
‘Well, I’ll head back to Vancouver.’
‘To do what?’
‘I’m not sure. The aquarium?’
‘So you have no plans.’
‘Well, not really.’
‘Are you glad you found me at least? Are you glad you came on this great maternal odyssey?’
I try to ignore the sarcasm. The light above the table makes patterns, like jagged trails of frost, across her pale irises. Her hands, I notice, are broad and strong, with mannish veins running across their surface.
‘To be honest, Susannah, I don’t feel like you’ve told me very much about my mother, though I’m grateful that you told me what you did about my grandparents. That’s helped me make sense of a few things. But there are still some things I’d like to know.’
‘Like what?’
‘OK. Well, when my mother came up here to do the whale-mapping project, where did she live?’
‘Oh. They lived on their boats, mainly. But then she bought the floathouse and … ’ she stops. A blotchy redness spreads up her neck.
‘The what?’ I almost shout it.
She clamps her mouth shut.
‘A floathouse? You said she bought a floathouse? What’s a floathouse?’
I want to leap across the table and shake her.
‘Oh. Well. Your mother,’ she shrugs and takes another swig, ‘lived for a while in a floathouse, much further north.’ She tips the wine into her mouth, again, gulping it down.
‘Where?’
‘Oh, it’s just a little chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. Nothing there. Tiny, tiny community, like, maybe five other houses on the whole island. But orcas, year-round orcas, that’s why she went.’
‘But I don’t even know what a floathouse is!’ My voice is almost a wail.
‘Well. It’s a kind of houseboat: a house that’s built on a floating platform of cedar logs. You can drag it to whatever location you want. The loggers used to live that way, nomadic, moving whole communities – schools, stores, houses – from job to job.’ She waves her glass and then drains it. ‘Not that Elena was a nomad. She only wanted that place because of the orcas. She always said the island chose her, not the other way around.’
I lean over and pick up the wine bottle. It clinks against the rim of her glass as I pour her a generous amount. I notice that her hand is trembling as she pushes back her hair. She obviously minds that she has let slip about the floathouse, despite the bravado.
I try to wrestle the pieces of information into a shape: my mother dropped her PhD, shot up here to join some conservationists, lived on boats, photographed and recorded endangered whales. Then she bought a piece of land and a floating house – she must have felt that she belonged here. You don’t buy land if you aren’t planning to settle. Did she think she would live here for ever? If so, what about my father and his scholarship?
‘But wait – did my father come and live in this floathouse too?’
Her eyes go round and, startled, and she touches the side of her head with her fingertips, then she breathes out through her nose. ‘Gray? Of course not. I told you – Gray was back in California at the university, he had his scholarship to finish up. And really, Kali, can you imagine Gray up here?’ She gives an edgy, metallic laugh.
She’s right. I can’t imagine my father up here. But I can imagine my mother out there on that wild sea.
‘OK. Did something happen between my parents?’
‘What? Elena and Graham?’
‘Yes! My parents. Did they break up?’
‘OK.’ She sighs. ‘Sure. They did break up, yes.’
‘For how long?’
‘Shit, Kali, I really can’t remember – and honestly, this is ancient private stuff between them.’ She leans back and holds up her hands. ‘Ask Gray.’
‘OK, yes, you’re right. I’m going to – as soon as I get home. But just – just tell me this one thing. Where was the floathouse?’
‘Oh.’ She waves a hand. ‘It’s way further out … way up … ’
She’s using the present tense. ‘Susannah – are you telling me that my mother’s house is still up there?’
She shoves back her chair and rises to her feet. She is a little unsteady and her hip knocks the table.
‘Is it still there, Susannah?’
‘Just forget it.’ She looks down at me, then suddenly raises her voice, making me jump: ‘Just drop it!’ She turns away and walks, slightly waveringly, towards the sink.
She has finished the bottle of wine. I don’t move. I’m not going to let a bit of drunken shouting stop me now. ‘The floathouse is still up there, isn’t it, Susannah?’
The dogs scrabble off the floor and mill by her legs. Her back is to me and her shoulders are tight and broad. She drains her wine glass and rests both hands on the counter, swaying gently. I stare at her obstinate torso. Who is this person to decide what I should and shouldn’t know about my own mother? Who is she to keep something like this from me?
‘Susannah.’ I get up slowly. ‘Please don’t walk away from me.’
She turns. Her cheekbones look more sunken, her eye sockets deeper. A snake-like vein bulges down the centre of her forehead. ‘Shit, Kali, you really need to let this go! This is ancient history. You have no fucking idea why you are here! In fact, you have no idea what’s happening here at all. So, Kali my dear, I suggest you drop it.’
‘Everyone calls me Kal,’ I say, through gritted teeth. ‘Not Kali. I told you that before. No one ever calls me Kali. I hate it. Only my mother ever called me that – usually when she was angry.’
‘Seriously? But Kali means—’
‘Yes, I know what it means: the Hindu goddess of death and destruction,’ I say. ‘That’s why I’m only – e
ver – Kal.’
‘Oh no, no, no?’ She throws her chin up. ‘Seriously?’ Then she looks at the ceiling, as if addressing my mother in the heavens. ‘You didn’t even talk to her about your name? You didn’t?’ She gives a throaty laugh.
‘What do you mean?’ I fight the urge to look up too. I grip the chair back with both hands. I imagine picking it up and hurling it across the kitchen at her, the wood splintering against her muscular body.
‘Kali is the mother goddess – she’s Shakti – ultimate female power. She’s the goddess of time and change. She’s fierce – admittedly – some myths have her dancing on the corpses of demons she’s slain, not realizing that her husband’s body is among them. Huh? But she finds the infant Shiva on the battlefield, too, she stops slaying people and picks him up to protect him. She nurses him right there in battle, covered in blood. So no – Kali’s not death – she’s mother-power. She’s protection, nurture, defiance. Your mother and I talked about this a lot.’ She suddenly lowers her voice. ‘I was getting very into Hinduism at the time. We wanted a strong, fearless, warrior name. Ultimate female power – I mean, who wouldn’t love a name like that?’
‘You loved my name? Are you telling me you named me?’
She touches a dog with her bare foot. ‘Yeah, I guess I did in a way.’
‘OK. This is actually getting quite weird.’
‘I guess I was more into Hinduism than Elena.’ She waves a hand and laughs. ‘Look, it was California in the seventies. Everyone was a fucking Hindu. Everyone was everything! It was all about Eastern spirituality and mysticism. I went Sufi dancing at Big Sur, I chanted at Esalen, I studied the Bhagavad Gita – and the Koran – and the fucking I Ching, Kali.’
I stare at her. My mother never told me any of this. When I asked about my name, she just said she liked the sounds.
‘You do know I’m your godmother, don’t you?’ she says.
That’s it. Now she really has gone too far. ‘No, you’re really not.’ I turn and walk away from her, back to the table. I stand behind it.
‘No, seriously, I am.’ She saunters after me. ‘Though I guess I’ve been stripped of that title, huh?’