In a Fishbone Church

by Catherine Chidgey

  The carpet on the stairs is wet too, and as they walk past the lounge door Bridget hears a trickling sound. She switches on the light and she and Etta both gasp at once. Water is streaming down the walls, and out of the light fitting on the ceiling. The torrent is gold in the electric glow, and for a moment both of them stand there open-mouthed. Then Bridget snatches at the light switch again, and the room is dark. All they can hear is running water and, above their heads, the strangulations of the draining bath. Etta bursts into tears.

  ‘Our house,’ she sobs, ‘our beautiful house, I’ve ruined it.’

  Gene appears at the door. ‘What’s going on?’ he says. ‘What happened to my concert?’

  ‘Mum, Dad,’ says Bridget sharply, ‘go and sit down in the living room. I’ll take care of this.’

  When they do not move, she takes them both by the wrist and leads them away from the dripping lounge. Then she puts the Mozart CD on again, and pours them both a sherry. Etta is still crying.

  ‘I’ve ruined everything,’ she whispers, ‘it’s all my fault.’

  ‘You have not ruined anything, Mum,’ says Bridget, trying not to shout. ‘You’re just over-tired. Now, drink this, and I’ll be back soon.’

  She grabs as many towels as she can carry from the linen cupboard and dumps them in the dark lounge. The ceiling lamp is still gushing, so she positions a bucket on the coffee table underneath it. Water drums against the plastic. Bridget can hear her mother sobbing above the flute music.

  In the cupboard under the stairs Bridget takes the fluorescent storm lantern from its labelled hook and switches it on. Straight away she sees that the cupboard walls are also drenched, and the uncarpeted floor is wet.

  ‘Oh shit.’ She crawls into the very back of the cupboard, where the back-to-front stairs meet the floor, and she drags out Clifford’s diaries, boxes of Gene’s old work notes, plans of various buildings, and bundles of family photos which have never been put in an album.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  A lot of the plans are soaking; they bend and wilt in Bridget’s hands, and she lays them as carefully as she can on the garage floor. The photos seem unharmed – they were in plastic bags – but the diaries have suffered. Bridget opens one and can hardly make out the entry on that page. Spots of ink spread on the wet paper like opening flowers; words melt into arrangements of blue and black.

  She removes load after load of stored boxes from under the stairs. She feels along the shelves at the very back, where it is darkest; she doesn’t dare turn the overhead light on, and in the narrow corner her own body blocks the beam of the storm lantern. The floor is cool under her stockinged feet. She feels as if she is conducting an excavation in some dripping underground cave.

  The insurance assessors inspect the scene the following morning. They stroll around with clipboards and step-ladders, prodding bubbled wallpaper and pressing their palms against the ceiling. It’s not as bad as some they’ve seen, they say. Sometimes people actually leave for work with the bath still running, and when they come home at night they find their furniture floating round the place. This, they say, gesturing at the lounge, is a routine accident. There is no serious damage. They’ll send the carpet men round and that should take care of it.

  Although it’s the middle of May and there is frost on the ground in the mornings, most of the doors and windows in the Stilton household are open.

  ‘I do apologise for the temperature in here,’ Etta says to visitors, ‘but it’s what was recommended.’

  She and Bridget have retreated upstairs to the warmth of Gene’s room, where the gas heater offers its steady blue flame and the air does not catch in their throats. Downstairs, the wet carpet has been lifted and huge electric fans placed underneath. All day these whisper to themselves in the deserted lower half of the house, expelling air as if through softly held lips.

  ‘It’ll just take a couple of days for it all to dry out,’ said the carpet men, flicking obedient cables behind them as they paced the lounge, the hallway, the living room in their workingmen’s boots, levering unwilling nails from the wood and soft wool.

  ‘Fools,’ says Gene that evening, rumbling down the stairs on his motorised chair, surveying the damage from above. ‘They have no idea about the flow of air. The behaviour of particle board when exposed to heat. Apprentices were they?’ He gestures at a fan. ‘That one at least should be shifted over here.’ He places a slippered foot on the billowing carpet and begins making his way to the far corner of the lounge, where the squat fan is murmuring. The carpet rises and falls beneath him, and for a moment it seems he will be lifted away on a wave of soft beige. His dressing gown flaps at his ankles. When he reaches the corner he turns back the edge of the carpet and grasps the fan, curving his arms around it and hugging it to his chest. The noise is louder now.

  Etta’s voice rises. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea, do you? Love?’

  Gene’s breathing becomes harder as he attempts to lift the fan.

  Etta crosses the rippled carpet and places a hand on his shoulder. ‘Sweetheart. The men put it there for good reason. They’ve done this hundreds of times before.’

  ‘Just get off my back, would you?’ snaps Gene, and Etta snatches her hand away. For a moment all that can be heard is the blowing of the fans and Gene’s careful gasps.

  Up 4 a.m. Cyril took his car & me to Barossa Station past Mount Somers (92 miles). We went up about 2000ft in search of Amethyst. I found a nice agate weight 36lbs & Cyril got a moss agate 38lbs and some nice pieces of crystal. I got a massive piece of Amethyst part of one I left there 30 years ago. We carried them out on an old army stretcher. When we arrived home Mum was showing some visitors the stones

  When he rises to his feet again he runs a soft foot over the particle board floor and clicks his tongue. ‘Look at this rubbish,’ he says. ‘All the leftovers glued together. On the old State houses the floors were heart rimu.’ He laughs. ‘State houses! Now they’re ripping up the carpet in them and polishing the floors. Or recycling the timber. Making coffee tables out of it.’

  ‘Come and sit down, love, please.’

  ‘They won’t be recycling this rubbish, will they?’

  ‘Love,’ says Etta, and she takes his loose hand and leads him back to his motorised chair, and he sways, as if the floor is shifting beneath him.

  The troops

  require

  sustenance

  Etta doesn’t say much on the way home from the airport, and Christina keeps glancing at her as if her mother’s white knuckles on the steering wheel and her tensed lips and her rigid eyes will reveal what is wrong. She decides not to mention meeting Joanne yet; she’ll wait until Etta asks. Instead she says, ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘A bit.’

  Etta continues to stare ahead at the road. A little bell sounds whenever she exceeds a hundred kilometres; Christina’s never heard it before.

  ‘There’s no hurry, Mum.’

  ‘I don’t like leaving him for too long.’

  ‘Bridget’s there.’ Bridget’s always there.

  The bell sounds again. ‘That is driving me mad,’ says Etta. She glances at Christina. ‘It’s very expensive to get it disconnected, Shirley told me.’

  Christina watches the sea. Even at low tide there is never much beach along this stretch; the waves seem to reach right up to the road, and it is possible to imagine she is in a boat. The motorway is all reclaimed land anyway, heaved up by the 1855 earthquake. She never feels entirely safe on it, and now, with Etta so distracted and with the jagged hills to her left and the harbour to her right, Christina can think only in single words: the sea, the green, the trees, the sea, the sea. The landscape is too extreme; it swallows her, occupies her.

  She can remember quite a big earthquake one summer, at the lake. It was the middle of the night and the jolt woke her (but not Bridget), and she’d not been able to move she was so scared. She lay in her bed until Etta came running in, snatching at the lightswitch,
and then Bridget had woken up too and they had both started crying. Gene told them the next morning that when he’d been out fishing at midnight, before the quake, he’d been amazed to find that the shallow water he was standing in, right near the shore, was thick with trout. He’d caught fish after fish. A local man, fishing alongside him, said they only came in that close when there was going to be an earthquake. And three hours later, just after Gene arrived back at the motel, it happened. This is a story Gene tells often. The biggest fish of my life, he says, and the best run. They were darting around my legs. Christina has always wondered why her father had not come straight home to warn his family, to save them from their nighttime alarm.

  She is relieved when Etta turns off at the landscaped sign marking the end of the motorway: Petone, spelled out in flowers.

  ‘I got you some Ribena,’ says Etta.

  ‘Thanks. You can get it in Sydney, though.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But it doesn’t taste the same. The water’s different.’

  ‘I hope you’re being careful,’ says Etta. ‘Remember that time at Christmas?’

  ‘Mum. I do know about these things, I am a doctor.’

  Etta swings the car into their street. The trees have been pruned again, their tops flattened so they’re not touching the power lines. They look like giant stalks of broccoli.

  ‘You’ll notice a big change in him.’ Etta turns carefully into their narrow driveway. Leaflets pushed only halfway into the letterbox flutter in welcome, announcing power-tool sales and discounted baked beans. Etta presses a blue button hooked onto the dashboard, and the garage door lifts.

  Just before they go inside she touches Christina’s arm and says quietly, ‘Don’t talk to him about Joanne, will you? It’d be too upsetting at this stage.’

  ‘How much longer do we have to listen to those bloody Christmas carols?’ says Christina. ‘It is nearly June, you know.’

  ‘I guess that depends,’ says Bridget. ‘Dad likes them. And I wasn’t here for Christmas.’ She leaves the room.

  ‘She’s being a real little bitch,’ says Christina. ‘She acts like it’s her house just because she’s been living here since she came back from Germany. Rent free, mind you. And Mum still does her washing.’

  ‘Maybe I could come over for a little while too,’ says Thorsten on the other end of the phone. ‘Take your mind off things a bit.’

  Christina can’t wait for him to arrive. It’s not so much that she’s missing him – and sex is the last thing on her mind, which she hopes won’t be a problem when he does get there. What she needs him for is to remind her that she has an existence apart from this family; something she has created by herself, and something they play no part in. She watches Bridget feeding Gene his jelly and custard and tells herself, I have my own life, I have my own apartment. I have Thorsten. I can go home whenever I want.

  The problem is, whenever she comes back to Wellington, and particularly this time, Sydney begins to seem more and more unreal. As if she has imagined some distant, ideal location where she would like to go for a holiday, if it really existed. She has lost the concrete details of it the way one loses the memory of a particular teacher’s face, the voice of a discontinued television presenter. Certain components can be recalled, but there is no completion. She creates inventories for reassurance: a yellow and white duvet cover, striped; a claw-footed bath; six matching ivory towels; a set of copper-bottomed pots and pans. An Italian café in Glebe that serves almond cake; a giraffe at the Western Plains Zoo that licked her hand with its long blue tongue. A red vinyl armchair in the hospital staffroom; two cut crystal vases (twenty-first presents); another armchair, covered in green velvet. This does not help. I know I have a bike, she can say, and I know it is blue. That is all.

  In Wellington it is other details that define her, items she would rather disown: the padded plush headboard on her parents’ bed, Bridget’s cheap stereo, the stuffed pheasant with the skewed neck (she can’t remember how it happened), the stag’s antlers in the garage. Sometimes she can’t imagine how she developed the knack of choosing lampshades to go with couches, or duvets to harmonise with curtains, or makeup to match clothes. It’s certainly not a talent she’s inherited from Gene or Etta. Or Joanne, for that matter.

  She stretches out in the bath and rests her head against the tiled wall. On her stomach she can see the sheen of her scars, three white triangles, stretched, a stylised ship in full sail. She fell on to a photographer’s lights when she was two and she and Bridget were having a studio portrait taken. She sometimes jokes – to curious lovers, beach companions – that Bridget pushed her. But she couldn’t have, could she? they say. She only would have been, what, ten months old? Christina used to think the scars were a sign that she would become a sailor, and for a while she collected objects connected with the sea: driftwood, shells given to her by a delighted Clifford, a broken barometer, a ship in a bottle. ‘That’s a cheat’s one,’ said Bridget, and pointed out the ribbon glued around the base of the bottle, covering the join where the glass had been cut and the ship inserted whole. Christina did not like Bridget to tell her facts such as these: Christina was the logical one, the one with common sense. I will run away, I will go to sea, Christina thought then, and they will be sorry. I will fill my school bag with bottles of Vitamin C and I will cure the crew of scurvy.

  ‘Christina!’ Bridget knocks on the bathroom door. The locked handle rattles. ‘I need to do my makeup!’

  ‘Dad, look who’s here to see you.’

  ‘Hello Gene,’ says Thorsten. ‘I brought you some fudge. It’s one of our favourites.’

  Wrote to Gene today & I am sending him 16 stones plus one brooch for Etta & they are beautiful they will be very pleased with them Dolly 6 p.m.

  ‘I hear you’re thinking about going fishing.’

  Gene stares at him, unblinking. Thorsten unwraps a piece of fudge and hands it to him. It rests in his palm like a pebble.

  ‘He won’t eat it,’ says Christina.

  ‘The trout won’t know what’s hit them, eh?’

  After tea Cyril & I went to Lyttelton & fished alongside the German boat the Rhein from Hamburg the Germans fished also they had a powerful light playing on the water we caught 50 little cod Cyril 1 Trevalli. The Barracuda gave us some fun but didn’t land any (neither did the Germans)

  ‘We got three Jerries,’ says Gene. ‘Straight through with the bayonets, like that.’

  ‘We’ve made up your bed for you in the guest room, Thorsten,’ says Etta. ‘Where you were before.’

  ‘Mum’s been relegated to the floor,’ says Christina.

  ‘Oh dear, I hope I – ’

  ‘Nonsense,’ says Etta. ‘She’s exaggerating, I’m on a perfectly comfortable mattress in with Gene.’

  ‘On the floor.’

  ‘Christina, Thorsten is staying in the guest room with you and that’s that,’ says Etta. ‘I’ve put an electric blanket on your bed,’ she says to Thorsten. ‘Christina said you were a bit cold last time.’

  ‘Not enough body heat,’ says Gene.

  ‘Don’t be naughty,’ says Etta. ‘You are a naughty thing.’ She arranges the rug on his knees, folding back the fringed edge so it won’t tickle his hands.

  ‘Mum. He’s not a child.’

  ‘Your father is unwell,’ hisses Etta. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed.’ She opens the door to the hall and aims her voice up the stairs. ‘Bridget! Come and say hello to Thorsten!’

  Bridget lies on her bed and wishes Christina would hurry up and go back to Sydney. Etta cannot seem to relax with her in the house; she’s always leaping up to tend to Christina’s every whim, and now that Thorsten is here she will be fussing even more. Of course, when Christina leaves, the guest room will be empty. Available for guests. Aunts Carnelian and Theresa have both been threatening to ‘come and help your Mum out a bit’. More cups of tea, more smiles.

  Bridget wonders what Gülten is doing. If she has managed to bed her DJ. She
wonders if Gülten still thinks about her; she has received no letters, although they promised to write. Antony is no help. Bridget tried to describe Gülten to him, and showed him photos, and all he said was, ‘She looks like a very nice girl.’ He emphasised the very in a way Bridget did not care for, and he asked if she had a boyfriend.

  She writes Gülten another letter and posts it to the hostel in Berlin. She wishes she had thought to get her parents’ address in Turkey off her; perhaps, she thinks, Gülten is lying in the sun in Istanbul, her hair pouring over the hot stone, thinking about Bridget. Perhaps she is taking a dark purple olive with her fingertips and saying to a trusted female cousin, or possibly a neighbour, yes, she and I were very close, closer than sisters.

  She wishes Gülten were here to look after her now, and not Antony. She can’t bear to be close to him any more; she shrinks from his walnut-shell hands. He’d been there at the airport when she arrived back from Germany; his had been the first face she’d recognised. Then when he stepped towards her, she’d seen Gene behind him, supported by Etta.

  ‘You must realise,’ Bridget said when they went out for a drink the next night, ‘that I’m still very jetlagged, and things are pretty weird at home.’

  He nodded, squeezing her hand.

  ‘And I’m very drunk.’

  He nodded again.

  ‘But,’ she said, looking at the hand gripping hers and noting the long milky nails and the spiderweb hair, ‘I see no reason why not.’

  They went back to his flat and had unsatisfactory sex, and then Bridget left to catch the last train home.

  ‘You can sleep here,’ mumbled Antony as she was leaving.

  But by then Bridget felt wide awake – from the jetlag rather than the sex, she decided – and she shut the door softly behind her.

  On the train, she sat behind an adolescent boy and a woman of about fifty. They didn’t seem to know each other, but the woman talked the whole time.