Christina places the pen on the table and loops her bag over her shoulder. She closes her hand round her car keys, the metal ring heavy in her palm and warm from the sun.
‘You’re not Gene and Etta’s wee girl are you?’ says Mrs van der Wyst, suddenly making herself bigger with interest.
‘No,’ says Christina. ‘You must have me confused with someone else.’ She walks to the door and steps out into the warm morning.
‘Because we used to have some Stiltons here, every summer.’ Mrs van der Wyst is following her down the steps, growing taller by the minute.
‘I’ve left the dirty towels in the shower,’ says Christina. ‘Thank you. Goodbye.’
‘Yes,’ calls Mrs van der Wyst. ‘Merry Christmas!’ Christina starts her car. She doesn’t bother to turn it around in a careful three-point turn like Gene always did. Instead, she eases down the drive in reverse. She can watch the lake the whole way. In the foreground is Mrs van der Wyst, waving madly. She’s still waving when Christina reaches the road.
She’s watching for the statue. Every year it had signalled to her that the car trip was nearly over, that she could undo her safety belt and get out, away from her parents and Bridget, and find her things exactly as she had left them. The statue meant there was only half an hour to go. Twenty minutes, with Christina driving. Another shrinkage.
On the passenger seat Christina has placed a cardboard box filled with strawberries. She can take or leave strawberries, but she knows Etta and Gene will be expecting them. She stopped at one of the market gardens just out of Levin that had huge berry and vegetable placards swinging from stands at the side of the road. A carrot as tall as Christina, an apple the size of her car. She parked in the shade of a giant loganberry.
‘So cheap,’ Etta will say. ‘You’d be a fool to pass up such a bargain.’
Christina got two kilos of strawberries for $5. As an afterthought she bought some nectarines ($1.50 a kilo), some sweetcorn (twelve for $2) and some green beans ($1 a kilo). She drew the line at watermelon.
The sun’s shining right on the strawberries now, making the car smell like freshly made jam. Christina’s tried putting the visor down but it’s no use; it’s coming through the side window. As she rounds a bend a few of the berries topple from the box. She can see them rolling around on the floor each time she turns the wheel.
And then the hillside appears, and in the middle of the rich green she can see a figure, tall, straight, completely white. It gleams in the afternoon sun. It seems to float. Christina keeps glancing at it and then back to the road. Statue, road, statue. Statue. Statue.
She hasn’t gone to church for years, not since she left school. Unless you count Midnight Mass, which she still manages to attend for Etta’s sake. She and Bridget sit at the back and snigger about the experimental choir pieces, the men who can’t stay awake, the woman who has supported the same bouffant hairdo for the last twenty years. Christina’s certainly never had a religious phase, like Bridget did. In fact, she likes to take credit for pulling her sister out of her churchy period by introducing her to pink Chardon – $4.95 a bottle and it tasted like fizzy Ribena, she told Bridget. So she cannot explain why she is now almost veering into oncoming traffic to see a statue of the Virgin Mary. She pulls over to the side of the road and eats a strawberry, flicking the star-shaped base out the window.
‘There’s Our Lady,’ Etta would say, turning round in her seat to the girls. ‘We’re nearly home now.’
Christina puts the box of strawberries in the shade on the floor and winds the windows up.
At the bottom of the track there is a cluster of pine trees. Someone has wound red plastic tape around them, looping from trunk to trunk, enclosing a small area as if for private use. Keep out danger keep out danger says the tape.
The walk is steeper than Christina expected, and she is panting by the time the trees start to thin out and the sky reappears. She watches the ground as she walks, watches her feet moving, listens to her breaths. One, two, three, four … Bridget had missed seeing the statue on the way home one year. She’d been asleep. There’d been a piercing tantrum on the Haywards Hill when she woke up, and Gene had finally turned the car round and they’d driven back. Bridget always got her own way.
When Christina emerges from the mouth of the track there is a sweep of grass sloping up from the edge of the hill. At the top is the statue.
She looks different up close. Cruder. It’s like seeing a famous person at a restaurant or in a shop, a person who was previously familiar to you only through photographs or film, and you realise he or she is fatter than you thought, or has bad skin, or thin hair, or is short. And you can’t help staring and feeling somehow betrayed; lied to.
Christina takes in the thick cables mooring the statue to the hillside, the crazed paint, the lightbulb halo. She follows her gaze out to sea. An empty horizon.
‘They had to turn her halo off during the war,’ Gene told them one year.
‘Really?’ said Bridget.
‘But we were never bombed,’ Christina pointed out.
‘Preventive measures.’
‘Actually,’ said Etta, ‘it wasn’t erected until well after the war.’
Bridget and Christina were silent in the back seat then, both refusing to believe their mother. Christina remembers rolling her eyes at Bridget, and Bridget laughing and copying the gesture. Their mother had placed her head back on her pillow, trying to out-sleep motion sickness, too weary to argue her point.
Christina sits down. She leans her back against the base of the statue, against the word conception. There are a few empty beer cans scattered around, and some cigarette butts, and there are floodlights positioned in the trees like Christmas decorations. It would be a great view from up here at night. Christina thinks of the statue during the war – she has decided that it must have been there then – camouflaged, stalwart on the dark hillside, her stone eyes scanning the horizon for threat. Or she might have sung to approaching men, drawing them to her, telling them lies, her white carved hair unadorned by electricity, her voice like the sea.
Christina closes her eyes. There is plenty of time. She is in no hurry to get home.
The front door is flung open and Etta runs down the drive to Christina’s car.
‘Thank goodness, thank goodness,’ she says, over and over.
‘Hi Mum.’
‘Where have you been?’
Christina frowns at her. ‘The lake,’ she says slowly, as if to a small child, and hands her mother the bag of vegetables and the strawberries.
‘ You said you’d be back for a late lunch. We were expecting you hours ago.’
Christina lifts her bag from the boot and walks up the neat drive. It’s still strange coming home to this small townhouse. She feels she should be dumping her holiday toys, sandy jandals, giraffe beach towel in the room she shared with Bridget and running out to the big garden to see if the plums are ripe, if the grass has grown knee-high.
‘We rang the motel and they said you’d checked out at ten,’ says Etta.
Christina deposits her bag in the compact guest room, with its twin beds made up for her and Thorsten, and in a few steps she is in the living room.
‘Hi Dad, hi Thorsten.’
‘Your mother’s been frantic. The quiche is ruined,’ says Gene cheerfully.
‘Now, then. I was wondering about lunch, that’s all.’
‘I stopped off for a while on the way home,’ says Christina.
‘Ah,’ says Gene. ‘The Army Museum.’
‘Christina’s brought us some strawberries, isn’t that nice? And some corn and things. I’ll bet you got a bargain.’
‘Did you pick them yourself?’ says Gene. ‘That’s what she’s been doing, she’s been out picking strawberries.’
‘We can have them for tea. You are here for tea, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘We put the tree up, do you mind? Thorsten helped me decorate it.’
�
�It’s very nice.’
‘Thorsten did the lights and the miniature apples. He’s been telling us about his operations. Imagine, two emergency appendectomies in one day!’
‘Why don’t you sit down, Mum, and we’ll get some coffee.’
‘No, I’ll get it, you’ve had a long drive.’
‘A very long drive.’
‘Gene. She’s here now.’ Etta heads for the kitchen. ‘How about a sandwich? Does anyone want a sandwich? The bread was still warm when I bought it.’
‘Mum, sit down, we’ll – ’
‘I think Christina would like to get the coffee,’ says Gene. ‘With her boyfriend.’
‘Oh,’ says Etta. ‘Yes. Actually, I’d rather have a cup of tea.’
‘So has Dad been keeping you supplied with beer?’
‘Beer, whisky, port … I can hardly remember Tuesday. I think we went on the cable car.’
‘Probably just as well then.’
‘They took me to the zoo yesterday. They thought I might like to see a kiwi.’
‘God, I am sorry. I had no idea.’
‘Couldn’t see a thing. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the dark the place was full of German backpackers.’
‘Nightmare.’
‘Your Dad kept trying to point out kiwis to me. All I could see were pieces of bark, or bits of neon clothing. And your Mum didn’t come in with us. She went and queued for icecreams.’
‘She’s not fond of small dark spaces. Except confessionals.’
‘She got me a double cone of hokey pokey. Chocolate dipped.’
‘She likes you.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘We took Thorsten to the zoo yesterday,’ says Etta.
‘Yes, he was just saying.’
‘He saw his first kiwi.’
‘Really? That must have been exciting for you, Thorsten.’
‘Oh yes. Such mysterious creatures. Very good at hiding.’
‘Thorsten? Are you asleep?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Is that a yes or a no?’
Thorsten opens his eyes. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Watching TV. General Hospital was on.’
‘Do you ever sleep?’
‘It was a double episode. They had a heart transplant from a baboon. Ethical challenges, pleading families, animal rights activists. Except you could tell it was meant to be shown in two parts, because after the first hour it said to be continued, and then there was an ad for The Amazing Abdominator, and then it did. Continue.’
‘You’re a robot, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I go to sleep now?’
‘No.’ Christina pulls back the blankets on Thorsten’s bed. ‘Isn’t that cute, all tucked up with his jim-jams on.’
‘Your mother’s taken to bringing me breakfast in bed. I can hardly sit up and take the grapefruit and scrambled eggs and toast strips – what do you call them? – with nothing on.’ ‘Soldiers. You never know, she might be hoping to catch a glimpse of your taut young European body and that’s why she’s bringing you food, did you ever think of that?’
‘I’d prefer not to. Can you pull the blankets up, it’s cold.’ Christina slides in beside him. ‘It’s the middle of summer.’ ‘It is in Sydney. This is not the tropical paradise they tell you about in Austria, you know.’
He pushes half the pillow over to Christina. She curls into his back, and breathes in the fresh laundry smell of his pyjamas. They smell familiar. They smell like the washing powder Etta has always used.
Snow
comes
inside
Before Bridget Stilton went to Germany to study, she made tapes of herself. She recorded words in English, with a pause between each one so she could say the German equivalent back to her own voice. She realised they would sound strange to anyone who came across them, but at that stage her main concern was to be able to understand, and make herself understood. She’d forgotten all her German from school.
‘Mother,’ her voice said, ‘Father. Toilet. House. To be.’
Etta worried about her going.
‘For God’s sake try not to look foreign,’ she said. She gave her objects which Bridget felt obliged to take with her. A sewing kit in a gold cardboard purse, an inflatable neck pillow, a My Trip notebook, a Saint Christopher medal. Etta had never been overseas.
There were tears at the airport; even Gene cried.
‘I’m not dying you know,’ said Bridget. ‘I just want to learn a foreign language. I am coming back.’
Which made Etta cry even more.
‘Ring us as soon as you get there,’ said Gene. ‘Don’t worry what time it is.’
Etta writes every week. Their new townhouse is wonderful, best move they ever made, Christina is coming home for Christmas with an Austrian boy, isn’t that a coincidence, it’s really quite hot now for November, Jimmy – no, I mean Jim – won a prize for a deer he shot, Colin and Janet had a boy and they want to call him Clifford, I mean I know it’s a family name but really. She hopes Bridget is making lots of new friends at university, and that her German’s improving, and that she’s not too cold.
Gene sometimes adds a note at the bottom.
When Bridget writes home, she is careful. She is not losing her English, exactly, but some of the words feel strange in her mouth. Sometimes she’s not sure if she’s said things quite right. She doesn’t want to make any mistakes.
Her room in the hostel is quite small, she writes, but it’s clean, the other students are friendly, there is one Indonesian woman who eats only in her room. The campus is huge, the European Languages department alone covers several kilometres, the students never call the lecturers by their first name. Here is a photo of the Wall, they left a bit of it intact as a reminder. That’s her on the left. Here is a key-ring for their new townhouse. It has a piece of Wall in it. She has a feather duvet which is very warm. There are huge black birds everywhere in the city, she thinks they might be crows, they have beautiful feathers. She would send one, a feather she means, but she thinks it would be illegal. She’d like to be able to bring some back with her. Remember when she used to collect feathers? She is very happy here.
Bridget used to collect feathers; Etta called them letters from birds. Sometimes she found pieces of curved blue eggshell, and she saved these too. She cupped them in her palms and carried them home as souvenirs of outside; pieces of sky. She laid them on clouds of cotton wool. Gene gave her swan and goose and mallard feathers after he’d been shooting. You could write a letter with those if you wanted to, he told her.
‘I have never been so cold,’ says Bridget. ‘How cold is it? No, don’t tell me.’ She stretches a cable-knit jersey over layers of shirts and sweatshirts.
Gülten cringes. ‘You’re not wearing that clubbing.’
‘Mum knitted it. She made me bring it. It’s her fault.’ Bridget pulls on her thickest jacket and tries to zip it up. ‘Damn!’ She pulls a tuft of jersey from the zip. ‘Why do they make jackets so small, when they know you’ll be wearing ten layers underneath?’
Gülten smiles. ‘I told you to get the XL,’ she says. ‘But no, Bridget’s not an XL, she’s not even an L, she takes after her grandmother, she’s at most an M. At most.’
‘Shut up, Gülten.’
‘Why are you going out today, anyway?’
‘I told you.’
‘Yeah, but why today? It’s on for another three weeks.’
‘I want to avoid the weekend crowds.’
‘You’ll get the school groups instead.’
Bridget pulls on her striped woollen hat. ‘How do I look?’
‘Like a giant mutant bee.’
‘Perfect.’
She has to wait in line to get into the exhibition. There are copies of the catalogue on sale, but she decides she’ll buy one afterwards. She is learning how to be sensible in this cold. Browsing through the catalogue in advance, she says to herself, is like having the answers to a test befo
re you enter the classroom.
Gülten was right about the children. There appear to be several separate groups, but it’s hard to tell how many schools they represent as none of them are in uniform. There are copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar on sale, in German. Bridget recognises the cover.
She moves past fibreglass insects as big as cars and with moving parts: a dragonfly whirrs its clear wings, broad as a hang-glider; a dung beetle manipulates colossal pincers; a family of grasshoppers, hugely green, sinks down on spindly haunches and rises up again in unison. Squat and up and squat and up; a strangely gymnastic demonstration.
Bridget settles into a curved wooden seat and pulls on a headset. A female voice tells her to sit right back into the chair, placing her arms on the rests. Bridget does so, peripherally aware of other people next to her, in other chairs, doing the same thing. The voice begins to talk about the Hawaiian wood cicada, and how the male attracts a mate by humming a low, searching song, and how the female replies with a higher-pitched, faster tune. Then recordings of both songs are played, the voice assuring the listeners that they will experience the songs from the perspective of a cicada. The panels in the back of the chair and in the armrests begin to quiver. Several people have stopped and are watching Bridget and the others in the chairs as if they are part of the exhibition. The Hawaiian wood cicadas sing and sing.
Bridget feels as if she’s eavesdropping and, what’s worse, being watched while eavesdropping. She removes her headset and vacates the seat, which is promptly taken by a schoolgirl.
‘This is the rude stuff Konrad was telling us about,’ the girl calls to a friend, who is examining a glass-sided ant farm.
In the next room there is a full-scale model of a Victorian study. Behind thick silky ropes which indicate that, unlike the other exhibits, nothing here is to be touched, pieces of sullen furniture cluster. There is a desk covered with bound notebooks, dark bottles of ink, a brass microscope. Seated at it, on a chair with a wicker back and twisting legs like the cables on Bridget’s jersey, is an old man. Or rather, a mannequin, dressed up like a Victorian gentleman. He is sleeping. Persian carpets, probably silk, overlap on the floor. A potted aspidistra perches on an oak stand. There is a cabinet with very shallow drawers; one of them is open to display various insect specimens, mounted and named. Clifford had a similar cabinet, Bridget recalls, which he kept polished stones in. He’d salvaged it from a printer’s; he told Bridget they used to keep rows of letters in there, entire ordered alphabets, commas, question marks, full stops. The pale interior wood – pine? ash? – had been stained with dots of ink.
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