His car hurried on towards his mother’s house, jolting slightly as it reached the bridge. On either side was a row of thin bars, like a cage to keep out the river. Grazing animals flickered behind them; projections from an old film, a trick of the light. He thought he saw hares and squirrels. The sun was so bright on the grass that it hurt his eyes, and beneath his chilly feet, under the metal floor of the car, the tyres, the asphalt and the concrete, was the water. He thought he could hear it rushing, and he was rushing too, going far too fast. He would be retiring soon. Then he could slow down. He thought of Saint Hilla, who had lived on holy water and communion wafers for weeks at a time. The animals flickered and shook, the grass burned his eyes, the river cut into the ground and he had to get to his mother’s house, his old house. His smooth-soled shoe pushed harder against the accelerator and then there were no more animals, no grass, no river, no bars; speed blurred them to a ribbon. And above the sound of the icy water and the rumbling of the engine there was another sound, a noise in fact, and it was the side of the bridge collapsing as the car struck it, and the bars fell away like kindling. And then Patrick was falling, the car a loose carapace around him, and unicorns, letters, angels, ivy leaves fell and fell, and his lecture notes fell, and everything he’d just said was all mixed up, and the water tumbled closer, rushed to him, all jumbled with sky and unicorns and words, and Rosemary’s phone number flitted, a white moth, and then the sun burst, and it filled the car.
Every contact leaves a trace. Colette re-read the letter and tried to remember if she knew a Patrick Mercer, whether he was someone who should be familiar to her, whether she might have met him when she was overseas. As you will have heard, the first line assumed. She wondered how concerned she should be about his hospitalisation, his serious condition, his bruises and grafts. His unconsciousness. There was her own name at the top of the letter, added by hand in the space after Dear, and her own address—her mother’s address—on the envelope. We’re asking all of his friends to send letters which can be readout to him, or tapes. Surely, she thought, she wouldn’t have forgotten a friend. She ran her finger over the stamp as if doing so might provide her with a clue. She checked inside the envelope for something she might have missed, some other document which explained everything. On the back was an English address she didn’t recognise. Perhaps, she thought, she’d been at school with him. Most of her year were overseas now, New Zealand having become too small for them. She studied the tiny alpine scene on the stamp. There appeared to be a figure standing on the mountain, legs astride. An English explorer, perhaps, anonymous in his fur-lined cladding, about to plant a flag into the snow. Colette held the envelope right up to her eye, so close she could smell the sour white paper, but the explorer was inked over with a blurry date. It dirtied the whole mountain, and she couldn’t be sure he was there at all.
Her mother’s key turned in the front door, and Colette pushed the letter between the pages of a magazine.
‘How’s the packing going?’
‘Fine.’
‘I’m glad you’ll have your brother looking after you. Make sure you take him along when you’re flat-hunting. There are some odd people around.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘I bought you a new duvet cover. Your old one goes with the curtains, so I’d like to hang on to it.’
Colette wished her mother would stop giving her things. She’d been trying to sort through cupboards and drawers for days, culling her belongings, ridding herself of dolls, picture books, cheap music boxes; the encumbrances of childhood. She couldn’t wait to move up country, couldn’t wait to leave behind her like a bad dream the cold south and all its clutter, its many layers of insulation. She took the soft parcel. The duvet was pictured on the bag, all flounces and roses and gaudy butterflies. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and didn’t open it. She pulled another cardboard box from its hiding place at the back of the wardrobe, sighed, shook her head. ‘Mother,’ she said in her strictest voice, upending the swollen carton, ‘is it necessary to keep my first pair of shoes? A brick from the Victory theatre? Mr Stott’s funeral leaflet? It is clutter, Mother, and your life would be so much cleaner without it.’ She snatched a selection of objects and dropped them at her mother’s feet for emphasis. She had no wish, she said, to be reminded of her own birth, a felled tree, the loss of a tooth.
‘I’m sorry you find my life unclean,’ said her mother, catching a cracked leaf before it touched the floor. ‘I’m sure, in the north, there are clear surfaces in abundance.’ She handed her daughter a pile of clean underwear. And, knowing that in a long thin country the distance between north and south is considerable, she unzipped Colette’s pack—it folded open like a flower—and slid some family photos into an inside pocket.
That night Colette lay wide awake in her old room, in the bed that matched the curtains. Her eyes itched and streamed, her chest hurt and she sneezed and sneezed. She wasn’t sick; there was nothing wrong with her. It was the dust that caused her discomfort, the minute particles she’d raised during the day. They hung in the air, scraps of her past, irritants that filled her empty room and kept her from sleeping. She scratched at her eyes. Her mother had never been a tidy person, but after Colette’s father left, all housework ceased. She refused to throw anything away. She surrounded herself with piles of washing, newspapers, mending; she nestled in the centre of her mess like a rat. Colette never brought friends home.
She wondered why her mother bothered about the duvet matching the curtains when the rest of the house was in such confusion; when dust furred every surface, even the slippery leaves of the rubber plant. And the duvet didn’t match the curtains, anyway. It had been washed too many times and the flowers—daisies, violets—had faded, as if bred in the dark. Colette pulled at a thread and it unravelled in her hands, and she kept pulling and pulling until it broke, and her fist was filled with undone flowers. She imagined the whole house unravelling, carpets and curtains and bath-mats and cushions and even clothes fraying and unspooling. And then she imagined opening all the doors and windows and letting a gale inside, letting it pick up all the messy, grimy threads so it could whisk them away like tumbleweed.
In the north, when she found somewhere to live, she would paint her walls white. She would find a room in an old house, somewhere with high ceilings, tall windows. Bare wooden floors, perhaps. She would polish her antique furniture with beeswax and position it out of the sun. Selective buying using money her father sent at birthdays and at Christmas meant she now owned a walnut dressing-table, a low nursing chair, a Scotch chest—good, expensive pieces which responded to care. She had no time for the glassware and china her mother hoarded. Dinner sets were all right, but Colette couldn’t see the point of fussy vases and ceramic birds and horses and winsome children. She reached a hand behind her head and felt the bars of her white iron bedstead; cool, smooth. In the north, she would buy white sheets and white pillowcases and she would wear white shirts which she would hang out to dry by their hems, not their shoulders, and they would billow on the line like sails, like a string of ships.
Colette scratched at her eyes again, which only made them worse. She lay on her hands, her knuckles like stones in the small of her back. Finally she turned on the light and began flicking through a magazine. From its glossy pages, from its articles on finding a man, pleasing a man, keeping a man, slid the letter. She read it once more, noting the polite appeal for donations to help meet a number of costs. Perhaps, she thought, there was no Patrick Mercer. Perhaps this was the work of some con artist, someone who had gleaned her address when she’d used her credit card or entered a competition or answered a survey. She wouldn’t reply. Even if Patrick Mercer was real, she disliked the thought of sending news about herself across oceans, her life being used to generate sparks in a stranger’s brain.
There wasn’t much to sort through the next day, just her dressing-table. She turned out her sock drawer and picked through the contents, discarding several pairs which she hadn’t worn for
months, but which her mother deemed still useful. Bunched up like a mean thought was a nightdress given to her by an ex-boyfriend. It was too short and too blue, and the lace chafed her. Once, when she had worn it all night, there had been scratches on her chest in the morning. She stuffed the flimsy garment into the rubbish bag. She didn’t know why she’d held on to it; she hardly thought of Justin now. She continued clearing her room, throwing away little pieces of her life. Like a thief she emptied earrings and bracelets into a pillowcase. She discarded sachets of lavender that had lost their scent, shook a jersey not worn since last winter. It smelled slightly musty, but she would rinse it out at her new flat, when she found one. She folded the arms across the chest and rolled it into a tight woolly bolt.
Paris. Justin had bought the nightdress for her in Paris, in one of the cheaper chain stores.
‘Nobody has to know it’s not from the Champs-Elysées,’ she said, squirming against him in the thin blue silk. ‘We’ll tell everybody it’s from the Champs-Elysées.’ But she wore it only a few times because it always made her feel sad, not quite good enough.
She and Justin hadn’t stayed together for long after that. She’d left him overseas, in London, which was as far as they got on their round-the-world trip. She couldn’t believe he wanted to work in a pub instead of coming back to New Zealand to resume his law degree.
‘Don’t you want to be able to afford nice things one day?’ she yelled, aware of how ugly she sounded.
‘There’s nothing in New Zealand I want to afford,’ he said, and that was that.
Dear Patrick, she composed in her head as she continued sorting and packing, this is embarrassing to confess but I’m not sure where we met. I think it must have been when I was travelling the year before last. I’m back in New Zealand now, and about to move up north, where I’ll be finishing off my history degree after the summer. What I should be doing is earning some real money, but two thirds of a BA isn’t worth much. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a holiday job.
Patrick was real, of course he was. She must have met him when she was overseas, but she had no idea where, or under what circumstances. She sealed the letter from his Friends inside the last box. Then she closed her empty drawers and her empty wardrobe and looked at the reflection of her old room in the mirror. She’d always hated the fact that she could see herself when she was in bed, but there wasn’t enough space to arrange the furniture differently. Some nights she used to cover the mirror with a sheet, as if someone had died. Once upon a time, she remembered her father telling her, people covered their mirrors to protect the dead, to keep them from glimpsing their departing souls and taking fright. Colette began filling out address labels, watching her hitcher’s thumbs—her father’s thumbs—curling away from her hands. She was very like him to look at, her mother often told her. Sometimes, she said, it was as if he were still there. Colette addressed label after label, directing her belongings to her brother’s flat, writing her name so many times it became unfamiliar.
Malcolm liked to read in bed until late, until he couldn’t hold his eyes open any longer. Their bedroom was at the highest point in the house. It had a turret overlooking the harbour, and although the view was spectacular, it could be cold. He’d switch on his bedside light and lean into his pillows, tucking the sheet around himself so that Ruth didn’t complain of the draught. Then he’d read and read, folding the evening paper into portions the size of fat letters. They inked the sheets, but Ruth had given up trying to remove the marks. The twenty-first century was almost here, she said, and she had better things to do with her time. Reading bedtime stories to Daniel, for instance. She knew he was a demanding child, but she was sure he’d love a story from his dad now and then. And besides, she said, repeated exposure to phonemes developed a child’s auditory cortex, resulting in greater brain capacity. They had to accept the fact that Daniel wasn’t like other children, that he needed all the help he could get, especially to prepare him for starting school the following year. Malcolm felt stupid doing the voices, though. He was hopeless at mimicking a lion, a tree, a car. Ruth was much better at make-believe. And so, in the evenings, when Daniel wouldn’t settle, Malcolm was left to read the paper and to cover the sheets with ink. Mostly it dissolved in the washing machine, but now and then a ghost showed against the cotton, shadowing Malcolm’s side of the bed like an intruder’s fingerprints. And sometimes, he knew without seeing, ink lay smudged under Ruth’s cool feet.
‘Are you still reading?’ she’d mumble late at night, squinting at him as if she’d forgotten something. ‘It’s time to sleep now. It’s dark. Go to sleep.’ She didn’t understand Malcolm’s hunger for information, his need to watch the world for signs. She didn’t understand that he read to identify danger.
‘It’s important to know what’s going on,’ he told her. ‘How do you expect to get by, if you don’t know what’s happening around you?’
But Ruth closed her eyes, turned her back on the bedside light. She never read the paper now.
‘A periodicals librarian who doesn’t read the news,’ said Malcolm, ‘makes no sense.’
It just depressed her, Ruth said, all those robberies, guns, deceptions, wars. There was enough sadness in the world without having to read about it at bedtime.
When he was collecting the first photos of Daniel on his tricycle, Malcolm bought a plastic key-ring and had a copy of Laura’s bush-walk photo made. He knew it wasn’t a true representation of her, but then, few photos were. It disguised the puppy fat around her chin and jaw, laid shadows along her cheekbones. It made her older. And Malcolm took comfort in that, because as long as this version of his daughter existed, he could believe there was a chance for the other one, the real one, to grow older.
There was something unsettling about cutting a photograph. He was tampering with the past, trimming it to fit his current requirements. He removed a very narrow strip from one side. At least, he thought, there were no other people in the photo, nobody from whom he had to separate his daughter. She was surrounded by nothing but bush. That was where he’d felt most at ease with her; under the close-knit canopy, the dangerous sun diffused by leaves, she seemed to relax. On walking holidays she led him and Ruth along tracks that wound and branched like green veins, going slowly so her aged parents could keep up, she said, but she was always pausing to feel some bright moss, to run her finger over spores clustered like Braille on the underside of a fern.
He cut away another strip of bush, careful not to damage Laura, the glossy paper curling at the touch of the blades. He could almost smell the damp foliage, fallen trunks alive with insects, the wood so soft that it broke away like cork in your hands, and the leaves rotting underfoot. In drier spots you could find their skeletons, as fragile as the wings of dragonflies, and if you held them up to the light they broke the sky into a jigsaw. Malcolm sliced away another strip, and another, and ribbons of bush were falling around his feet, and he kept cutting and clearing until he reached Laura. And then there was no more bush, and only she remained, isolated, out of context. She was the right size now. He slid her into the plastic cover, then prised the double ring apart with a coin and attached his keys. She would come everywhere with him. She would unlock doors, start the car. She would fit in his pocket or the palm of his hand like a lucky charm, sealed under plastic so that no water could get in, and no dust. And at night, she would deadlock the door of their house, and they would be safe.
The man didn’t have much luck with girls. It didn’t seem to matter what he did—asking for a light, paying them compliments on their figure, buying them drinks all night, hinting at his skill between the sheets. The ones who did agree to go out with him knocked him back after a couple of dates at the most.
One night, at the pub, he tried to chat up a girl sitting at the bar.
‘Have you got a mirror in your pocket?’ he asked her, but she turned away and kept talking to her friend, who was a bit of a dog. ‘Hey,’ he said more loudly, ‘I said, have you got a mirror in
your pocket? Because I can see myself in your pants.’
She didn’t even laugh. She just grabbed her bag and shifted away from him.
Summer had arrived early, and there had been no rain for weeks. Even though Malcolm insisted on watering the garden every evening, the soil was cracking like old skin, the zucchinis swelling, turning to marrows overnight. Daniel refused to eat them, and Ruth was sick of the sight of them too. Things were going to waste. Heavy-headed roses shed their petals at the slightest touch. Even the birds sounded tired.
When Ruth unlocked the front door each afternoon, a wall of trapped heat rushed against her. She dropped her bag on the couch, shucked off her sandals, opened every window.
‘Draw Daddy another picture,’ she’d say to Daniel, sitting him down with paper and crayons and sometimes, if he’d been good, paints. Then she peered into the bathroom mirror and dabbed her face with cleanser, rubbing it in with the pads of her fingers. She did this very gently, as the magazines suggested. Dragging the skin, especially the delicate area round the eye, caused premature ageing.
‘Why don’t you leave some windows open during the day?’ Malcolm said when he got home. He was standing at the front door as if he couldn’t bear to come inside, fanning himself with the newspaper.
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