Christina has heard rumours over the last few days, since she has been back in New Zealand, that this summer will be disappointing. She can’t be sure, though, if there really is a chill in the air, or just speculation clouding and spreading. At evening – or rather, that time just before, when you can no longer decently talk of afternoon – the oyster sky curves down around her and she thinks this weather will never stop.
Etta’s father wanted her to be called Eileen, but Etta’s mother insisted on Henrietta as a first name all through the pregnancy, and during the child’s dangerous unchristened days. Even on the way to the church, she argued with Owen. He was fond of the name Eileen – after a sister of his who died at birth.
‘There has always been a Henry Moynihan,’ Maggie stated. ‘The tradition must be continued, even though she’s a girl.’
As the priest held the silent child over the water, Maggie was still arguing. Henrietta prevailed, with Eileen as a second name.
Etta did not cry at her christening. It’s good luck if a baby does, but Maggie was not superstitious. Owen was glad that his child had been baptised; that her soul was now safely recorded. He did call her Eileen at times, though, when Maggie wasn’t around.
Christina is out quite far in the lake now; past the raft, even, that was always such a long way away. Etta never liked them swimming out to it, and warned of poisonous splinters, and probable head injuries if the water became rough. Christina laughs, and the sound seems to come from a great distance. And she floats on her back, catching accidental garlands in her hair, and watches the sky for changes.
Etta was always cautioning the girls to be careful in the lake. They think she was afraid of it; she is afraid of water in general. This extends to shower cubicles – she hates all that water around her face, she says, and the walls so close. She always has baths at home – shallow ones – but at the lake motel there was only a cramped shower. Mouldy, unhygienic things, she said, help me take down the curtain. She never came swimming with them, although there is a photo of her standing knee-high in the lake, her modestly frilled swimsuit awkwardly dry. She is clutching Bridget’s chubby three-year-old fists while Christina creeps up, ready to splash. Even at the hot pools, they had to coax her in by insisting it was just like a big bath. She could just tolerate sitting in the private, cubicled ones specially built for holiday-makers, as long as the girls didn’t splash, but she went nowhere near the outdoor pools. Splashing here was also prohibited; everyone knew that invisible bugs could crawl up your nose and make your brain explode. Etta would sit on a deck chair at the edge and call warnings.
Eileen Styles snorted at this. She went under all the time, she told them, it was marvellous, and Christina should try – Quick, girls, interrupted Etta, we have to get some eggs before the shop closes.
It is possible that Etta’s water phobia dates back to her early childhood. There is a rumour, some murky story about the stream on their farm, and Etta, aged about three, escaping from Maggie and wandering down to look at the wild swans. Christina imagines her reaching out to pluck a black quill, then suddenly finding herself under water. She does not imagine the actual falling or sinking, just her hair, tangling in the reeds and holding her under.
She had it cut soon after she and Gene adopted Christina, and Bridget was born. It was too much work, with two children under three. The last evidence of it appears in the first photo of Bridget. Etta’s exhausted face is turned towards a bluish bundle in an incubator beside her bed, and her hair is spread out around her as if the strands are reaching for the child in her glass box. (There are more photos of Christina than there are of Bridget – she was the first child, after all – but there are none of her this young. She was already two weeks old when Gene and Etta collected her from the Home of Compassion.)
As girls, Bridget and Christina were never allowed long hair. Too much work. It is a new feeling now, Christina’s hair fanning around her in the lake, writing messages just to the side of her field of vision. She had short hair then, and a flat body. Now she displaces the water in a much more complicated way; hollows and swells surprise her, as if they have appeared overnight.
She tested the ground before she came back to New Zealand. Not with her mother; she would have had to explain too much. Instead, she rang Bridget in Germany. It was simpler.
‘That woman who was there every year when we went to the lake, the one who painted.’
There was a pause, longer than the time lapse between Sydney and Berlin.
‘Eileen was her name. A Mrs Styles.’
‘Eileen?’ Bridget couldn’t remember any Eileen. ‘A painter? What did she paint?’
‘Landscapes, the lake … I think she did some horses – ’
‘Were there horses up there?’
‘I know she did watercolours of some of the baches.’
‘Sorry,’ said Bridget. ‘Hey, I hear Dad’s taken over the garage with his fly-tying stuff. Mum can hardly squeeze her car in.’
‘Yes, she told me in her last letter,’ said Christina, suddenly aware of her own voice, the way the words snagged. Lately she’d found herself making many such comments; casual challenges. It was as if now, in their mid-twenties and living in different countries, there was space enough for Christina to spread out their rivalry, to unroll it between Bridget and herself like a blanket on a beach. And then the jostling, the prodding would begin, because one of them could lie on it but not both, never both. If Bridget had received a postcard from Etta, Christina had been sent a fat letter. If Bridget mentioned a letter, Christina mentioned a phone call. And there was nothing Bridget could say about the family, no piece of information she could reveal, that Christina did not already know.
‘Don’t let him near you with those hobby scissors of his,’ Bridget was saying. ‘Before I left he was after me to give him some of my hair for a trout fly. Actually,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘I didn’t come over here to study German at all.’
‘No?’
‘No. I came over,’ she dropped to a whisper, as if Gene and Etta could hear her, ‘to escape from them.’
‘Ah.’
‘Nobody else’s parents are that old.’
‘No.’
‘And Dad will simply not admit he needs a hearing aid. Can’t even hear the phone ringing in the next room.’
‘Yes, Mum said last time she rang,’ said Christina. Another snagging in her throat. But she is sure she receives more calls than Bridget; she has not run off to the other side of the world. She is much closer. ‘I’m leaving Thorsten with the parents while I go up to the lake. For a few days.’ Another prod.
‘Is he aware of this,’ said Bridget, ‘or is it a Christmas surprise?’
‘He knows. He’s fine about it.’
‘Dump him. He’s obviously peculiar.’
‘Mum’ll love it. You know how she is with guests.’
Bridget paused. ‘You know the only thing she never wanted me to do?’ she said. ‘Have an abortion. She didn’t care what I did, I’d always be welcome at home. She didn’t care if I came home and announced I was a lesbian, but she never wanted me to have an abortion.’
‘She said exactly the same thing to me,’ said Christina.
Christina wonders what her parents do all day. If they enjoy pottering around the place, choosing curtain material for their new low-maintenance townhouse, paying some enterprising schoolboy to clean the cars, which are all of a sudden too big to look after. When she gets letters from her mother, Christina would like to know if Etta misses the house where she grew up; if she has bad dreams; if she ever wishes she had sons. Perhaps she really is writing these things; her writing is so poor Christina often has to fill the gaps in herself. She could make it up, she supposes, pad out the bones with muscles and tissue and blood and fat. But then it would be her story. Sometimes she can’t untangle the two, anyway; sometimes she thinks it is herself caught in the reeds and drowning; that she had all those unspoken miscarriages; that she was forced to become rig
ht-handed. She cannot add flesh, however much she would like to. She can only expose bone.
Etta must have begun school on her fifth birthday. Christina imagines she would not have cried when she was parted from Maggie, her mother, who had dressed her in gumboots because the unsealed road was muddy.
‘But remember to take them off at the door, my girl,’ Maggie would have said. ‘We don’t want you traipsing mud all through the place. We don’t want to have to get the strap out again.’
The nuns called her Ettie, and sometimes, on more formal occasions such as the calling of the roll, Henrietta. (But never Eileen.) They had white-framed faces and plain, sensible hands. Each wore a dull silver ring that married her to God, that old polygamist, and each had an oversized set of rosary beads at her waist. These were the only source of sound when a nun walked. Or floated; it was never proved. Nuns had no footsteps. They were, in fact, mostly robes. Black and floor-length, these both concealed and created mysteries, such as whether nuns had any legs at all. These women seemed to glide like the black swans on the stream. Etta was afraid of the swans.
The nuns had an astonishing range of powers vested in them. The wooden pointer, in particular, was a versatile tool. It could be vaguely swept over the map of the world, indicating the desert homelands of starving children. It could be used to single out the disobedient, and pointed like a dried bone at the trouble-maker. It could be rapped across insolent buttocks or visited upon lazy, scale-fumbling fingers. It could be slipped through the elbows of a sloucher, enforcing good posture, and it could be pointed like a wand at the alphabet that uncurled across the top of the blackboard, inciting the class to chant.
Ettie would have had no problems learning her alphabet; it was a nursery rhyme, a game. The nuns noticed nothing wrong with her. A little shy, a little pale, perhaps, and she seemed to bruise easily, but nothing troublesome. Nothing that deserved a dose of the pointer, certainly. Children like Ettie never needed physical punishment.
A flaw must have been discovered, however, when the class moved on to writing. Ettie would have gripped the pencil in her left hand, ready to express her five-year-old self. This was not a good sign. Sister Ignatius prised it from Ettie’s fingers and inserted it into Etta’s clumsy right fist.
Christina wonders if this moment was all-deciding. Etta might have become an actor, a dancer, a painter, had she been allowed to describe her world back-to-front. She might have become Eileen. But habits, once acquired, are hard to break. Each night when she goes to sleep, Etta still crosses her arms over her heart as the nuns instructed her. In case she dies in the night. Christina has observed her mother’s body feigning death when she has caught her sleeping.
There is a swishing in the tussock, a soft shattering of pumice stones. It is a woman, a little stooped, leathered arms bare in a brown swimsuit. An Indian print skirt flaps around her ankles, and the flesh on her back has been scalloped by gravity. Long, smoky strands of hair trail behind her. She shades her eyes and looks out across the lake.
‘Hello,’ she calls out to Christina’s bobbing, watching head. ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ Her old voice shivers across the water. ‘Don’t stay out too long, the sun’s pretty fierce.’
Exactly the sort of thing a mother – Christina’s mother – would say. She crunches away again, pausing at the peninsula to skip a pumice stone across the lake. It looks as if it will reach right to the other side. Christina doesn’t see where it stops, and when she turns back the woman is gone.
When she returns home for Christmas, Christina plans to try and write in her diary with her left hand. With the creative side; the female side. The awkward side. She imagines her hand shivering across the page, mapping out vibrations and fissures, jerking out jagged points like a seismograph. She sees days, stories lying parallel to one another, converging somewhere in the distance, at infinity.
Some time during her last week at the hospital, before she caught the plane to Wellington, Christina insisted on taking Andrew Martin out for a drink. To thank him for making her feel so welcome in Sydney, she said.
At the bar she leaned into him like a gossip. ‘Andrew,’ she said, ‘what do you know about mesothelioma?’
‘’Tis the season to be jolly, eh?’ He took tiny sips of margarita, trying to avoid the salted rim of the glass. ‘Nasty business, actually. Cancer between the lungs and the chest wall. Always terminal.’
‘Yes,’ said Christina.
‘Lies dormant for about thirty years and then up it pops. Usually from asbestos exposure years before. A lot of old electricians, plumbers, builders starting to drop like flies now.’ He licked grains of salt from his lips, screwing up his nose. ‘Costing the industry huge amounts in claims. Not that compensation helps the poor buggers much. Once it gets going they give you about ten months.’
‘Have you seen anyone with it?’
‘A couple. Like I say, they’re only just starting to pop up now.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Lot of cases misdiagnosed as lung cancer, in my view.’
‘Is it … painful?’
‘Like any cancer. You can choose between extreme pain and being lucid, or a lesser amount of pain and being incoherent on morphine and whatnot. There’s a guy down in Ward 9 if you’re interested. Go have a prod, he won’t mind. Won’t even know.’
‘Esther. I’ve been meaning to tell you, I can’t come to the wedding. You mustn’t hold it against Mum, it’s not her fault, you know how she is.’ The man clawed at Christina’s sleeve.
‘That’s all right, it’s okay,’ said Christina.
‘Poor Esther, her special day, her day …’
‘Yes.’
The man squeezed Christina’s fingers. ‘You will tell her, you’ll tell her, won’t you?’
‘Yes, it’s all right, try and rest.’ Christina summoned a nurse. ‘He’s quite agitated,’ she whispered. ‘Can you give him something?’
‘Are you all right?’ The nurse was looking at Christina, not at the old man. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Me, no I’m fine, goodness me.’ Christina took one of the man’s tissues – soft apricot ones in a floral box, not hospital white – and rushed off, looking at her watch. She found a spare seat in a corridor and sank into it, giving the bored people leafing through magazines something else to look at while they waited.
One year, they found Eileen Styles with her arm in plaster. She’d fallen off a horse.
‘I should know better than to go riding horses at my age,’ she said.
Christina asked her how she would be able to paint with the cast on, and Eileen picked up a pencil in her right hand and wrote ‘E M Styles’ on a ten-dollar note, right over the Queen’s face. Then she gave it to Christina, despite Etta’s protests, and said she’d simply taught herself to use her right hand instead. For the whole holiday, Eileen’s arm was cocooned and turning surprising shades of brown and purple, which you could see when you peered down the cast. But it didn’t hurt a bit. She showed Christina a painting she was doing of the lake; she didn’t normally let anyone see her work before it was finished, but just this once. It was a slightly different lake from her left-handed ones. Christina could take it home with her, if it was finished in time. It was a slow business, becoming ambidextrous, but well worth it. Christina should try it.
On the way home in the car, she held the lake on her knees. By the time they were back, she couldn’t remember the word Eileen had told her, the one for people who can use both hands equally well. Every time she tried to recall it, all she came up with was amphibian.
It’s getting colder in the water, but Christina doesn’t want to get out just yet. Her hair will probably be a mess of knots, she knows, but she didn’t want to plait it. It would have felt short. Thorsten tells her she has mermaid hair. He held it over her face once, and kissed her through it, and she felt like she was drowning. He doesn’t know what she looked like with short hair. Sometimes she threatens to have it cut, but she never would. She just enjoys hearing his protests.
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nbsp; He wanted to come with her. A few days at your famous lake would be great, he said. But she made excuses, slipped away, alone. Her parents were keen to show him round Wellington, she told him, take him Christmas shopping, make him feel welcome. They’d keep him busy. He couldn’t refuse; they’d be offended.
‘I think I do remember her,’ Bridget said just before she hung up. ‘She did pottery.’
‘That’s her,’ said Christina.
‘I think she had a crush on Mum. She was always patting her on the hand and giving her little winks when she thought we weren’t looking.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
Bridget laughs, confident of her own knowledge. ‘Have you seen the photos of what they used to wear? Not an elegant decade for swimwear, the seventies.’
Christina doesn’t know what she was expecting. Eileen would be elderly now, if she were even still alive. It’s hardly likely she would just come walking past, recognise Christina Stilton floating in the water and invite her home for a cup of tea.
Christina closes her eyes and summons Eileen’s face. Fleshy nose, she thinks. Rosy cheeks. Small eyes. It’s no use. Eileen becomes more and more transparent. She dissolves. Christina should get out now, she should go. There’s a chill in the air, and she’s wrinkling.
‘We used to come here all the time,’ she says. ‘Every Christmas.’
Mrs van der Wyst opens a drawer and rummages about. ‘You’d be amazed how many we lose. People just take them with them when they leave. I’m sure they don’t mean to, but it’s such a bother. Here we are.’ She hands Christina a pen.
‘We were always in Unit 2. Dad used to store his trout in your freezer.’ Christina signs the cheque with her physician’s scribble, one wavy line except for the capital S.
‘A doctor,’ says Mrs van der Wyst, reading the typed version of Christina’s name above the signature. ‘We didn’t know we had a doctor staying with us.’
In a Fishbone Church Page 15