Golden Deeds

by Chidgey, Catherine

  She should go home, she thought, just leave the reels of newspapers on the snapping shelves. But she was holding the January box now, and there was a gap in the row, a hole in time big enough to slip a hand between, small enough, perhaps, to stop up with a palm. She stood very still and listened, and everything was quiet, of course it was. She was in a library doing some research, because that was what students did, and she was studying history, after all, and had every right to investigate the past, and the ground had not opened beneath her feet, and the sky had not fallen in. She took the box and ran and ran past walls of white bricks, through tight corridors of news.

  Colette switched on the viewer and loaded the film, easing it between the squares of glass. They reminded her of laboratory slides, and she thought of school science classes, where she had seen skin cells and hair and grains of pollen under a microscope. She had been amazed at their secret shapes, and also a little afraid of the complexity of the world.

  There was a dial which controlled the speed of the film, and she discovered how to move from page to page slowly enough to read headlines and skim pictures, how to pause on a particular story and how to position it for photocopying. If she felt like it, she found, she could send the reel spinning, the back-lit pages a blur of grey, whirring past too quickly to make sense. Perhaps, she thought, this was something like the images people saw as they died.

  She didn’t find Laura until the beginning of March. After that, though, with each issue, her pictures grew larger, the headlines blacker. Several times the photograph from Ruth’s sideboard appeared; Laura stared out from the bush, an older version of Daniel. And soon, a week or so later, there was a photograph of Ruth and Malcolm. They were sitting in a room Colette recognised as her own, but the walls were covered with tennis posters and dog posters and the bed was wedged head-first into the arc of the bay window. Ruth held a toy bear on her lap. Colette fed the viewer with silver coins, and in a matter of seconds she received warm, dark pages that were difficult to read, but not impossible.

  As she descended the stairs she saw Ruth one flight down, chatting to a colleague. She turned on her heel and ran back up, then caught the lift to the exit level, avoiding eye contact with the other students. Nobody took the lift one floor, especially not down. For a moment she considered affecting a limp, but thought better of it. Her avoidance of Ruth was bad enough; there were only so many lies a day could accommodate. As she left the stairwell she heard Ruth’s voice floating down from the landing.

  ‘She’s a third-year student,’ she was saying. ‘He seems to have taken to her. As a matter of fact, he told me he wants to marry her. Of course, it’s early days yet.’

  Colette hurried away, the copies of Laura heavy in her bag.

  ‘I’ll be God.’

  ‘You were God last time.’

  ‘Which means I’m familiar with the role. A certain consistency must be maintained.’

  ‘It might help Patrick if we swap.’

  ‘Now, page twelve, wasn’t it. Here we are. No bread can satisfy this longing, no water can quench your thirst for me. Page twelve. Up the top.’

  ‘Only if we swap next time.’

  ‘Yes yes, we will, next time.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I promise. Page twelve.’

  ‘Right—food and wine taste only of earth. I fast until I am dizzy with bliss and can hardly move. My father tries to tempt me with plates of figs and nuts, but I refuse all nourishment.’

  ‘Ignore those who advise you to eat; their only goal is to distract you from me. Continue to devote yourself to prayer, and I will come to you.’

  ‘My stomach is a dark traitor, vulnerable to the devil’s suggestion, and I fear it constantly. When the devil seizes me, my own will is snuffed out. I watch my body eat as if watching someone else, someone who is familiar to me but over whom I have no power. Even though my stomach threatens to split and my jaw aches from chewing and my throat is raw from swallowing, I cannot stop. My eyes terrify me; they take on a glassy lustre, like those of a corpse.’

  ‘My love for you is a fire. You are right to spurn the attentions of earthly suitors; their tongues are made of glass, their promises fragile things, transparent and easily broken. Until one is able to live in a state of perfect love, every love should be held suspect. I will hold you so close you will forget your own body’

  ‘He holds me so close to his body I cannot feel my own flesh. I am told I lie on the cold stone floor and am seized by convulsions, but to me these moments are very still; he is the centre of my desire and I cannot move for pleasure.’

  ‘By sustaining the body, you sustain corruption and kill the soul, but if you fast and pray, I will reward you.’

  ‘A group of noblemen came to my father’s house and asked to see me at prayer. My mother was uneasy about it, but told me she could not refuse such powerful men. Because I love her I relented, and the men came to my room. I thought they would be content to watch me from the doorway, and perhaps to pray a little, but they entered and began to touch my dress, my hair, my face. One of them fell to the floor and kissed my feet, while another demanded I kiss his hand. Who am I to kiss a nobleman? Yet I did as he asked.’

  ‘I give you a golden ring to wear to show you are my bride. Each day at noon I will send you an angel who will feed you with his own hands.’

  ‘My mother insists I eat. She treats me like an infant, swooping morsels towards my mouth as if they were birds, and twittering and cooing to me. But still I refuse this food which has taken flight; if I ate it I fear it would spread its wings inside me.’

  ‘Your suitors will fall away from you like dead leaves, but your true bridegroom will wrap his promises around you, and you will feel warm, as if sitting by a fire.’

  ‘I wear his ring on my finger. My body aches with longing for him and my days are filled with waiting. I am consumed with waiting.’

  ‘In you I have hidden a great treasure. Others may—’

  ‘Colette,’ said Patrick.

  ‘—try to tempt you away from me, but—’

  ‘Shh! Did he say something?’

  ‘Colette,’ said Patrick.

  ‘I think he said Colette.’

  ‘I’ve been sending the newsletter to a Colette. She was in his address book.’

  ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘He had an affair with her, on a trip to New Zealand in 1976. He told me about it years later, after quite a few glasses of wine. He thought it wouldn’t matter by then. She was married, of course.’

  ‘So was he.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Patrick? Patrick, can you hear us? Are you there?’

  28 February 2000

  Dear Colette,

  You’ll be happy to know that Patrick has started to regain consciousness. Although he is still quite drowsy, he is a little more alert each day and is having speech therapy. He also has movement back in his hands, and is being taught to write all over again.

  Perhaps because there were two in his surname or perhaps because it was easy to form, lower-case e was Patrick’s favourite letter. It suggested an ear open to secrets, the coil of a shell, the fluttering start of life. To begin with, his letters were as shaky as a child’s. The pen was too thin in his hand, like a piece of straw, a matchstick, and it slipped and slid from his grasp, covered the page with blue nonsense. All colours were laid on twice in manuscript illustrations, he recalled. At first very thinly, then more thickly; on letters but once. He formed another e, wishing he could write in a colour other than blue. He thought of the medieval instructions for tempering Spanish green: pure wine was added, with a little juice of the iris, cabbage or leek if shadows were needed.

  ‘Good,’ said the physiotherapist, as if she could read his scrawl, Very good.’

  The next time she came she brought him a pen thickened with rubber grips, swollen like the spring bulbs his mother had planted each autumn.

  ‘Now,’ she said, �
��I want you to write your name.’

  The first time Patrick had learned to write, it had been a struggle.

  ‘His hand is lazy and untidy,’ Miss Phipps told his parents. ‘If he doesn’t show significant improvement he’ll be held back a year.’

  Every day after school, Patrick wrote out alphabets, copying the letters from a master page provided by Miss Phipps. He bent his face so close to the paper he could hear his own breathing. He made his letters so perfect it became difficult to tell which was the master page and which his copy. That was what his mother said, and Miss Phipps was pleased with his work too, but his father made him keep copying.

  ‘One more,’ he’d say, peering over Patrick’s shoulder at the completed alphabets. ‘We can’t have you falling behind.’

  Patrick kept writing until his father said he could stop; sometimes he was still copying when it was dark.

  ‘Am I dumb?’ he asked one evening, and his mother, who never shouted, shouted, ‘Who told you that? Did you say that, Graham?’

  ‘We can’t have him falling behind, Doreen,’ said his father.

  Patrick wasn’t held back, though. In fact, he was top of his class that year, and every year, and he devoured any book he could lay his hands on.

  ‘You’ve molly-coddled him, Doreen,’ said his father. ‘We’ve got a sissy on our hands.’

  In the new house, Ruth had found a space for almost everything. Sheets and towels were folded to fit new cupboards, Daniel’s bike was slotted in the garage with Malcolm’s gardening things, the ironing board had its own hook. The spare bedroom held a single bed and a chest of drawers suitable for a guest to use, and Malcolm’s mother’s tea set, minus one cup which had been broken in the move, was displayed on the dining-room sideboard. The silhouette picture, however, was a problem. Although it had been one of Ruth’s favourites, it was wrong in this open, airy house.

  One day when Laura was off school with chicken pox, a woman appeared on their doorstep. She looked about eighty, Ruth thought, although her voice belonged to someone much younger.

  ‘I am a silhouette artist,’ said the woman. ‘Is there anyone you’d like me to portray? Would you like to see some of my work?’ She opened a crumpled plastic bag bearing the words Mansfield’s—Jewellers of Distinction. ‘My portfolio,’ she said, fanning several silhouettes before Ruth like a deck of cards. There was a little boy, his high child’s forehead framed by curls. There were two young women face to face, mirror images of each other. ‘Twins,’ said the woman. ‘The space between them makes a vase, do you see?’ Another depicted a girl in a lace blouse, every ruffle picked out, wisps of hair curling at the nape of her neck.

  ‘They’re very good,’ said Ruth.

  ‘I also do pets,’ the woman said, ‘provided they don’t talk back. I had to do a budgie once. “I love you,” it kept saying. “I love you, I love you, do you love me? I love you.”’

  ‘We don’t have any birds,’ said Ruth, ‘just a labrador and a very old cat.’ She studied the young boy. Even the eyelashes were distinguishable. ‘These really are beautiful.’

  The woman withdrew another silhouette from the bag; her trump card. ‘Have a peek.’ It depicted a middle-aged woman with short, wavy hair, a straight nose, a long neck. It looked familiar to Ruth, but she didn’t know why.

  ‘Well?’ said the woman.

  Ruth frowned, shook her head.

  ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, really—’ the woman glanced over her shoulder ‘—but Her Majesty was one of my best sitters. Never moved a muscle.’

  It couldn’t hurt, Ruth decided. Laura had been bad-tempered all morning, pronouncing as boring every activity her mother suggested. She’d tied her Barbie doll’s hair in knots, broken a glass, scribbled across the pages of two library books. She’d stabbed herself with her embroidery needle, dotted blood across her bedspread.

  ‘Come in,’ said Ruth. ‘My daughter could do with the company’

  At the kitchen table the woman produced a sheet of black paper from her Jewellers of Distinction bag. She took Laura’s face in her hands, combed soft fingers through her bed-mussed hair.

  ‘What a pretty girl you are,’ she said. ‘You’re going to be quite something in a few years.’

  Laura was shy at first and wriggled in her seat, scratched her spots.

  ‘You’ll only make them worse,’ said Ruth, and Laura pulled a face and scratched even more at her arms, her chest, her back. ‘Do you want some more ointment? Shall I get the ointment, would that help?’

  ‘It smells funny,’ said Laura, frowning and picking at a spot on the back of her hand where the pink cream had caked and dried.

  ‘Don’t scratch, love, you’ll leave scars. And try to sit still for the nice lady’

  The silhouette artist gently turned Laura’s head to the side so she was facing Ruth. ‘Such a strong profile,’ she said. ‘Such regal lines.’

  ‘What’s regal?’ said Laura. The woman was rummaging in her plastic bag and appeared not to have heard. ‘Mum, what’s regal?’

  ‘It’s like royal, sweetheart.’

  ‘Do I look like a princess?’

  Ruth took in her daughter’s pallid skin, the shadows under her eyes, the swollen spots, the cracking bottom lip. ‘Yes, sweetheart, you do.’

  The old woman took a pair of very fine nail scissors from her bag, the kind with curved blades that follow the shape of a fingertip. Then she began to cut. She held the paper right up close to her face, and Ruth couldn’t see her as she worked, only her hands as they trimmed away strips of paper and let them fall like black leaves to the floor, and Laura stopped talking and stopped scratching and was very still, and although she was looking straight at her mother, Ruth had the impression she was looking right through her, seeing something else entirely: herself as a princess, a royal beauty.

  ‘My daughter had hair like yours,’ said the woman.

  As the black fell away Ruth saw the shape of Laura forming, and the silhouette artist’s own face becoming more and more visible. She turned and turned the piece of paper, adding more detail each time: the eyelashes, the flared ends of the hair. With one last cut she defined the curve of the throat, then placed the finished silhouette on the table.

  ‘Is that me?’ said Laura, smiling. ‘Is that what I look like?’

  ‘We hardly ever see ourselves in profile,’ said the woman. ‘It’s always a surprise. Like hearing your own voice.’

  ‘That’s you all right,’ said Ruth. And it was.

  After the woman had gone, Ruth cleared away the paper from the floor. Smaller scraps covered the table top, as fine as hair, and Ruth recalled how, as a girl, she had always taken her own clippings home from the hairdresser’s. She hadn’t liked the thought of leaving behind pieces of herself. She cupped her hand and swept the paper cuttings into her palm. These would make an image of Laura too, she thought, if she pieced them all together. A negative.

  The silhouette artist would be dead by now, Ruth supposed. She held Laura’s likeness against the walls of the hall, the lounge, the dining room, but it was wrong. It was nothing but a shadow; a black hole where her daughter once had been. She couldn’t look at it.

  A few days later, Daniel brought it in from the garage. ‘Look what I found,’ he said. ‘It was on the ground.’

  Before Ruth could answer, Malcolm was saying, ‘Do you like it, Daniel? Would you like to have it?’ And Daniel was saying yes please, yes please, and they were positioning it on his wall, above his bed, where it hung like a night-time window. Ruth sometimes heard him talking to it, saying good night or good morning, telling it stories. Malcolm never observed these odd little speeches, and Ruth never mentioned them, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Daniel was filling the frame with himself, taking over the outline of his sister.

  Colette had already thrown her jacket on her bed and had started brushing her hair when she saw the letter. It was propped against her pillow, as white and smooth as the clean sheets, the stamp perf
ectly aligned, her name and her old address dead centre.

  14 March 2000

  Dear Colette,

  If you are one of the friends who has been to visit Patrick, we’d like to thank you for your help. He has been making real progress over the last couple of weeks and his doctors are confident he will continue to improve. Please keep coming, even if it’s for just a few minutes.

  Were also grateful to those of you living further a field who have sent letters. We read them to Patrick over and over—he never gets tired of listening to them.

  A special thanks to those friends who have made donations to Patrick’s fund. The money will make a big difference to him when he is out of hospital.

  Warm wishes to you all,

  The Friends of Patrick Mercer

  Colette slipped the letter into her dressing-table drawer with the others. There was quite a pile of them now, all the same size, hidden like love letters under coiled tights, cotton pyjamas. At the back of the drawer was a pouch tied with ribbon—a sachet of lavender she’d bought at a craft fair with Justin because she’d wanted a memory of the day. She placed it next to the letters, then covered them with soft cotton, as if tucking someone into bed. Poor Patrick. She loathed hospitals, with their sour, sterile smell. The scent of lavender reminded her of summer, gardens heavy with bees and sun and flowers. She should write to him, she knew, but if she did she would be exposed as a stranger, not a friend at all, and the letters would stop coming.

  She’d heard her mother on the telephone once, crying.

  ‘You can’t just disappear from our lives,’ she was saying. ‘We never hear from you. What am I supposed to tell them?’ She sniffed, blew her nose. Her voice became louder. ‘Oh, you’d love them to know, wouldn’t you? You’d love them to know it’s all my fault. I’m surprised you haven’t told them yourself. No, wait, you only write once a year.’ She was silent once more, sobbing, listening. When she spoke again her voice had wilted. ‘Please come home,’ she said. ‘Colette and Dominic miss you. I miss you. It was a stupid, stupid mistake. Please come back.’