The Intentions Book

by Gigi Fenster

  When Craig spoke they kept quiet. Craig wouldn’t let them go any further until they’d listened.

  Morris would explain to Rachel as Craig had explained to him. Even if she didn’t want to listen, he would explain. He took off his pack and sat against a tree.

  She glowered down at him.

  He had to explain. He was her father.

  ‘The thing is, Rachel, water is dangerous. Even if it’s just a shallow stream. Even if it looks calm. There’s often a hidden current.’

  She wouldn’t meet his eye, but he knew she was listening. ‘Promise me you won’t try to cross flowing water on your own,’ he said, and she gave a small nod, then went to sit at a bit of a distance from him.

  When they heard the other family approaching, he picked up their packs and went to sit beside her.

  One of the boys said, ‘Who have we here?’ and another one said, ‘You thought you’d slip out on us, didn’t you?’ before their mother shushed them and bent down to ask Rachel how she was.

  The men stood on the side of the river with their legs planted wide. Stones were thrown in and the water speed measured with sticks before it was decided (I’ve been trying to tell you this since you arrived, thought Morris) that it would be safe to cross if they held each other across their backs, in a chain. ‘Like we were taught in Scouts,’ said one of the boys. ‘Strongest on the outside, weakest in the middle.’

  They put Rachel in the middle. A young boy on either side of her, then the mothers, then the larger boys, Morris (making one side longer than the other and so destroying the symmetry) and then, on either end, the fathers.

  There was no doubting that Craig would go on the outside. Morris was next to one of the beer drinkers. The boy was breathing fast. He gripped Morris’s waist hard and, when they were about halfway across, whimpered. Morris’s feet lost the ground and flapped useless in the current. Someone gave a grunting sound. A stone hit against Morris’s calf. His foot found a rock, then lost it, and both his feet were sweeping away, down the river and away from him.

  It must have taken about thirty seconds to reach the other side. Someone said they could have died. Someone said, ‘Man, I’m pleased we decided to cross. That was the right decision.’

  Craig didn’t say anything. His beard was red against his face.

  One of the fathers kept shouting instructions. ‘Arms around backs. Arms under packs. Hold on tight to those on either side of you. Hold tight now.’ Morris looked down the line to Rachel. If she turned, the others would turn with her. If she moved, the whole line would move.

  ‘Ready, steady,’ called the shouting father.

  Rachel was the first to step forward, toes pointed.

  ‘Hold your horses,’ said one of the boys.

  ‘One foot in front of the other,’ called the shouting father as they went.

  The water wasn’t very deep and they kept their footing, but still there was a fuss on the other side. One of the mothers said that Rachel had done really well for such a slip of a girl.

  They walked as a group for the rest of the day.

  ‘Smallest on the inside,’ one of the boys joked. Rachel went and walked near the back. They’d made a mistake to put her in the middle. A mistake to think her the weakest.

  David sits down heavily and reaches across the table towards Wendy’s hand. ‘The good news is better than the bad news is bad.’

  ‘The bad news isn’t even that bad, ’cause your dad says she knows what to do around water.’

  ‘And she’d know how to deal with landslides. She’s always been sure footed.’

  ‘A broken leg is probably the worst we’re looking at. A broken leg at worst.’

  ‘A broken leg isn’t the end of the world.’

  ‘Don’t come running to me if you break your leg.’

  The soup stains look like the ten plagues, spelled out in wine on the Passover saucer. Blood, Locusts, Pestilence, Killing of the First Born.

  Then there are the hours of waiting. The dark hours when the rivers are rising, the land is slipping. The world is sleeping and the family is not.

  They have the drugged-out look of people who have just stepped off a midnight aeroplane—glassy eyed, fiddling with their watches, testing the ground with each step as if unsure it will hold them, telling themselves to be alert, there is still passport control to get through, and Customs. There are still questions to be asked and answered.

  Wendy takes Panadol. She offers one to Morris and he refuses it. Later, when it feels as if the throbbing in his head must be visible, he reconsiders but doesn’t ask.

  David will make up beds for Wendy and Morris. Morris isn’t thinking of going home is he?

  Morris is thinking of going home. He wants to be alone with a desk, a pen and paper, a computer. A door he can shut behind him. He wants a large sheet of paper and a thick black pen.

  He has a reason for needing to go home—the cat must be fed.

  David tries to make a joke. ‘Oh all right then, but come back. Don’t try to make a run for it.’

  Neither Wendy nor David offers to accompany him, and Morris realises that David hasn’t been to the house in some time. It’s not that he and David haven’t seen each other. They’ve seen plenty of each other—dinners at David’s house and trips accompanying David to garden centres, hardware stores, Benjy’s clinic visits. If Morris’s phone has rung in recent months it’s probably been David with an invitation. ‘On Sunday Emma’s playing soccer. Come on, come and see a bunch of four-year-olds kick a ball around. It’s good for a laugh. And a hot chocolate afterwards.’

  The invitations are well meant and generous but behind their warmth Morris hears whispers of shame, as though David is embarrassed that his father has not planned on seeing another human being for the whole weekend. ‘You can’t pass an opportunity for hot chocolate,’ David would say. ‘The whole weekend,’ his scandalised shame would whisper down the phone line.

  ‘If you’re not back in half an hour,’ David is still trying to joke, ‘I’ll send Wendy to come looking for you.’

  At the front door Morris lifts his jacket from its hook and finds, hiding behind it, a row of little hooks at child’s height like in a kindergarten or an orphanage. The red hook holds a red raincoat, bright and shiny. Red is a good colour for a little girl’s jacket. Clearly visible. Morris bends down to the hook, reaches out to the jacket, feels the earth sliding beneath his feet.

  ‘Back already?’ says David. ‘Couldn’t keep away? Dad, you’re pale. Sit down. I’ll get you some water.’

  David is all activity, calling Morris’s neighbour who has a key.

  ‘Sorry, Dad, I should have thought to call her in the first place’

  A neighbour has a key?

  ‘Yeah, yeah, you know, Mrs Mac. She used to come in sometimes if Mum was going to be alone … when you … were at work or something. Mrs Mac. She’s had a key for ever.’

  Mrs Mac still has her key. Mrs Mac will be happy to feed the cat and no, David assures her, no, there’s nothing more she can do.

  You can give me back my key, thinks Morris.

  David conducts phone calls, glasses of water, tea. He provides toiletries, shakes sleeping bags into duvet covers.

  Morris gets the spare room, Wendy Emma’s room.

  Morris wonders how David made the decision. Did he consciously avoid putting his father in little Emma’s room, worried that Morris might fall over the plastic ballet bar or get tangled in the plastic chandelier? Bump his head on the top bunk. Leave a trace of what? Farce?

  Morris stands in the doorway of the spare room, turns on the light and finds himself gazing into a room which is at once completely strange and wholly familiar. It seems to be furnished entirely with things that Morris and Sadie once owned. He recognises the chair, the desk, even the curtains and bedspread. Things he has forgotten he ever possessed or ever lost. Things that left no gap when they were removed.

  There was a time when a lot of construction work was being done
in Wellington—buildings being demolished, rebuilt, demolished again. Sadie would point out building sites as they drove. ‘Look at that, children—not you, Morris. Eyes on the road, hands upon the wheel—see that crane.’

  She’d wonder aloud what was going to go in all those new buildings, who would be living there. And what of the shops? What would they sell? She’d make up stories and Morris, eyes on the road, hands on the wheel, would try to remember what had stood there. Before the To Let signs and the building site there had been something. It worried him that he struggled to remember what it was.

  He never mentioned this worry to Sadie.

  I would have told you that no one remembers what used to stand anywhere. We forget. We adapt. That’s the beauty of human beings.

  It worried Morris that the world could shift around him. Whole buildings could be created to fill a gap he hadn’t even noticed. Chairs and desks, curtains and bedspreads can move from house to house without your noticing their absence. Linen can take its smell of lavender and cloves and you’d never even notice they were missing. The earth can slide beneath your feet.

  He switches off the light and turns from David’s spare room without stepping over its threshold.

  David says they have to sleep. There’s no point in being exhausted. But for now they sit at the kitchen table. There’s a bottle of wine. Wendy turns it round and round.

  ‘It’s not like I’m going to be driving anywhere,’ she responds to Morris’s glance when she refills her glass.

  He pours himself a glass to show that he didn’t mean, that he wasn’t suggesting …

  His head aches and no amount of brushing with the tiny airline toothbrush David supplied will get rid of the dry, dull mouth of too many cigarettes for a man unaccustomed.

  He wants to ask David about the furniture in the spare room. He’d like David to remind him where each item used to stand.

  David would know but Morris can’t ask him. If he did, David’s face would crease and Wendy would burn. She’d point her finger at him and ask him who he thinks he is, making the boy feel bad about a few chairs, things that he never missed anyway. At a time like this. She’d drag hard on her cigarette and demand to know what kind of a man gets upset about the gaps left by a chair but finds himself thrilled—yes, thrilled, he told me—by the gaps left by the melting Arctic ice. She’ll say something biting about priorities and working out which gaps are important. Morris will be at a loss.

  There’s a bowl of nuts which David eats, replenishes, eats again. Morris has brushed his teeth and hadn’t intended eating anything more. But now he’s drinking wine and he’s going to have to brush his teeth again anyway.

  They talk about Sadie. David’s face gets its creased look. He covers his mouth with a handful of nuts and says that he really misses her jokes.

  ‘The only jokes I get now are those awful ones that are mass emailed. Even if they’re funny they’re not as funny as Mum’s. It was something in the telling.’

  Wendy picks up her glass. ‘She was telling jokes right until the end. You have to wonder where she got them. I mean, could the nurses have been sticking their heads in to say, “Mrs Goldberg, have I got a joke for you”?’

  ‘What was that joke about the definition of a schlemiel?’ Morris asks.

  ‘Oh God, I remember that one,’ says David.

  Wendy shushes him and raises her glass. ‘What,’ she asks the wine, ‘is the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel?’

  ‘No,’ says Morris, ‘not that one.’

  ‘The schlemiel,’ David says, ‘spills his soup on the schlimazel!’

  ‘The schlimazel spills his soup on the schlemiel,’ says Wendy.

  David makes a sound which is part laugh, part sigh.

  Wendy takes a large gulp of wine. Her eyes are shining.

  Morris’s head throbs.

  ‘The schlimazel spills his soup on the schlemiel,’ says Wendy. She brings her shawl to her face.

  ‘Not that one,’ Morris says again. ‘A different one. About a man who lives in a vacuum.’

  Wendy lowers the shawl to look at him blankly.

  ‘I mean, a man who sucks the air from the room.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s one of Mum’s? I don’t remember it.’

  ‘It’s about a schlemiel or a schmuck or something.’

  ‘A schmuck,’ says Wendy. ‘Now there’s a different variety altogether.’

  ‘When he walks into a room it’s like the air leaves,’ Morris says.

  ‘I know that one,’ Wendy and David say together.

  ‘But it’s not about a schlemiel.’

  ‘Or even a schmuck.’

  ‘It’s definitely not about a schlimazel.’

  It’s like watching a comedy routine where they’re the jokers and he’s the fall guy. Any minute now one of them will punch his nose while the other pours water over his head.

  ‘It’s about a nebbish,’ says Wendy. ‘When a nebbish walks into the room you feel like someone’s left. When he leaves you think someone’s arrived.’

  ‘A nebbish,’ says David, ‘Not a schmuck. Or a schlemiel. Definitely not a schlimazel. A nebbish.’ He smiles. ‘Try to keep up, Dad.’

  Wendy gives a wild laugh.

  It’s a laugh that Morris has heard before.

  Sadie and Wendy were eating cake and laughing. They laughed so wildly, so hard, that crumbs flew from their mouths. Their eyes watered. Their noses dripped. Sadie put down her cake, wiped her hands on her pants, made a show of trying to stop laughing when Morris entered the room.

  ‘You know how some people say that depression makes them want to stop eating?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Wendy. ‘God, I hate those people. They’re the same ones who say, “When I’m busy at work I completely forget to eat.”’

  Sadie spluttered and picked up her cake. ‘Well, when I’m grieving, I can’t stomach a mouthful.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Wendy ran a finger through the icing. ‘I’m afraid I might waste away altogether.’

  Their father in faraway England had died. Neither of them was going to the funeral. They said they couldn’t afford it.

  They thought it was a joke.

  Now David’s doing it too—laughing and joking like he’s at a carnival. He and Wendy are carrying on like circus clowns.

  Wendy abruptly stops laughing and says, ‘God, I wish she was here now.’

  ‘Me too,’ says David.

  They must mean Rachel.

  David is going to sleep. There’s some discussion as to what to do with the phone. It’s finally agreed that Morris will keep it close to him. He’s a light sleeper and he’ll wake the others if there’s any news.

  Wendy stands up to hug David at the door, to tell him he mustn’t worry and she’s sure that when they wake up it will be to good news.

  Morris expects Wendy to go too, but she sits down opposite him.

  Morris is alone with his sister-in-law who seems to have used up all her softness in hugging David and is facing him now with a hard, tight face. His sister-in-law who is (he can almost see the smoke coming out of the top of her head) burning. He can smell her cigarettes. He can taste the ash in his mouth.

  If Wendy is burning, then Morris must be the burnee.

  ‘You never were a great one for hugging, were you?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Or touching.’ She pours them both some wine, as if he’s going to need it. ‘Sadie used to complain about it.’

  Sadie complained? She discussed this?

  ‘Oh come on, you must have known she would complain to me. I know she complained about the touching to you, and if she complained to you, chances are I knew all about it.’

  Sadie had complained to him—repeatedly.

  When David left home: ‘There goes the only person in this family who’s not tactile defensive.’

  When she was worried about Rachel: ‘Have you noticed how she stiffens when I try to hug her? She’s like you in that way
.’

  When he pulled away in a movie, surprised by her hand on his thigh: ‘For God’s sake, Morris, I wasn’t going for your popcorn. I was trying to touch you. Mind you, you probably find that way bloody worse.’

  ‘I did touch her. We …’

  ‘Don’t even think of mentioning sex. I’m not talking about sex. Sex doesn’t count.’

  ‘Sex doesn’t count.’ Sadie’s exact words. ‘This is not about sex. I’m talking about a hand on the knee in the movies, holding my hand even for three small seconds. Hugging me maybe. Once or twice a year. Every six months. Turn back the clocks. Check the fire alarm. Hug your wife. How hard can it be? Humour me.’

  And even—Morris blushes at the memory—‘I’m not having sex with you if you haven’t touched me at least three times since we last had sex.’

  She should have known that would cause a stand-off. She should have realised that he couldn’t, even if he wanted to, touch her after that. It would have been forced and dishonest, done just so he could get her to have sex with him.

  Wendy takes a large gulp of wine. It does nothing to soften her face. ‘What good was sex to her when she lay in that horrible hospital bed? That awful metal bed. And when she came home you still slept in your bedroom even though she was downstairs in the spare room.’

  ‘She couldn’t make it up the stairs. The spare room was best for her.’

  ‘Of course she had to be downstairs. But so, Mr Morris, should you have been. You should have slept downstairs with her. Not up those fucking stairs and so far away.’

  ‘It was a small bed. I thought it was best. I …’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t best. She needed someone close. Even if you couldn’t bring yourself to sleep in the same bed as your dying wife you could at least have sat beside her, held her hand. Something. Anything. Jesus Christ, Morris, I know this sounds corny, but couldn’t you see that she needed to be touched?’