Going home took a very long time. On the plane Colette stared out the window at the miles and miles of ocean and wondered if she would ever pass over land.
The last time she took so long to return home was when she left Justin in London. It was the middle of winter, weeks after Paris, and her period was overdue. She was so cold she bought herself a woollen scarf and wrapped it around her throat and mouth. There had been bomb threats, and rubbish bins throughout the inner city had been removed. In the photos of Justin at Westminster Abbey, herself at Trafalgar Square, Justin at Piccadilly Circus, there were newspapers and McDonald’s bags cluttering the foreground. Once, outside a church she couldn’t remember, Justin pulled her scarf away and kissed her, and there was a stab of electricity between their lips. He laughed and said, ‘It’s just from the wool rubbing your mouth,’ but Colette was too cold to laugh, and besides, it had hurt.
Her period didn’t arrive until she was booking her ticket home. She was sitting at the travel agent’s counter, trying to get on the flight via Hong Kong rather than Los Angeles so she wouldn’t have to spend an extra night with Justin. The travel agent was saying, ‘No, I think it’s full,’ and Colette was saying, ‘Oh dear, really?’ when she felt a twisting deep inside.
‘I’m afraid I don’t feel well,’ she said. ‘May I use your toilet, do you think?’
In the cubicle there were brochures about Hawaii, Turkey, Greece. Smiling couples walked hand in hand on white beaches, tropical fish shimmered and shone and the sky went on forever. Colette caught her breath at a tug of pain. She could feel herself clotting. She bent forward, dropping the beach, the fish, the blue sky.
‘Are you all right in there, dear?’ called the travel agent.
‘Yes thank you. I won’t be a moment. Thank you.’
‘I’ve managed to get you on the Hong Kong flight.’
‘Lovely. Thank you.’
Expecting her legs to give way, she stood. And there it was, the tug she’d felt, the size of a walnut, perhaps, or her thumbnail. Too small to resemble much at all. She wiped herself clean with fistfuls of paper, ignoring the roughness. Gradually the thing the size of a walnut or a thumbnail was covered over, and she flushed it away and went and paid for her ticket.
‘Excuse me,’ the flight attendant was saying. ‘Ma’am? Would you mind shutting the blind now?’
Colette covered the window, pulled the complimentary mask over her eyes and tried to sleep. Sleeping made the time pass more quickly. She would be home soon.
‘Did you have a good time?’ said Nathan. ‘Is your friend all right?’
‘He’s fine,’ said Colette.
‘He must have been pleased to see you.’
Colette rummaged in her bag. ‘I got you some whisky,’ she said, ‘duty free.’
She scanned every page of the newspaper, even sections she normally never bothered with. She’d heard nothing about New Zealand in the three weeks she’d been away; it was as if home had ceased to exist. Now, to keep herself awake until bedtime, she read about tax cuts, bickering politicians, public transport, car crashes, burglaries, weather, the complications surrounding an All Black’s knee injury. There were few reports of violent crime. She should be glad, she told herself, to have returned to such a place.
She telephoned the Pearses to let them know she was home.
‘Daniel will be pleased,’ said Ruth. ‘He’s been quite unsettled. He hates being farmed out to friends after school.’
‘No more incidents with keys, then?’
‘With keys? What keys?’
‘Oh,’ said Colette. ‘It was when you were away. Nothing to worry about, forget I mentioned it.’ She yawned. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?’
When she finished reading she folded the newspaper neatly in half and placed it on the bench for Nathan. It looked almost unread. She couldn’t help being neat, she thought, couldn’t resist tidying things away, putting them in order. She pictured her mother’s house with its piles of washing, its dusty magazines, its shoes and bags and loose change and dead flowers. She wanted to ask her about Patrick, to pick at the tangle, tweak things into line. Bedtime was still hours away. She took a sheet of writing paper and a pen from her desk.
Dear Mum, she wrote, how is everything?
She thought of Patrick and Faye in the big, warm house on the other side of the world. She thought of how comfortable they seemed together, how Faye brought him glasses of lemon barley water, dishes of walnuts and almonds. Once or twice Colette had compared his features to Dominic’s and to her own, but had to admit that there was no likeness. And the timing was all wrong, anyway. She and Dominic took after their father, and their father was in Australia, and had been for years and years.
Patrick had talked about his work at the museum, and had shown her a manuscript he owned, something he usually kept locked away. He thought she might be interested in it, as a student of history, an admirer of antiques. It wasn’t richly decorated, but it was an important record of medieval book production. Colette could hold it if she liked.
She couldn’t make out the Latin text, but Patrick translated passages for her. It was a manual for writing, he said, a sort of recipe book. A book of spells. It was probably written by a monk, probably in northern Germany and probably at the end of the twelfth century. It was difficult to be one hundred per cent sure. He read her passages describing how to prepare parchment with powdered bone, how to compose colours with the juice of vegetables and flowers, how to make glue from the bladder of a sturgeon, how to burnish gold with stones and teeth, how to make ink from thorns. When he retired, said Patrick, he was thinking of donating the manuscript to the museum, with the proviso that it never be sold. He didn’t see this as a good deed so much as a way of safeguarding the manuscript. It was important to preserve such things.
Colette put away the letter to her mother. She was finding it difficult to keep her eyes open. One day, she thought, she would like to write about Laura. She would like to write her life. She already had the photocopies from the library, the bones of the story, its animal shape. It would not be sensationalist; any colourful speculation would be tempered with facts, cool statistics. Colette would keep things balanced. There would be a spread of light and shadow, a little vitriol. She wouldn’t rush into it. She would allow the story to thicken, to form its own skin. And then she would make Laura shine.
Malcolm and Ruth would have to collaborate, of course. They would have to provide anecdotes, photographs. There was a thesis in Laura Pearse, maybe even a book. It would probably sell very well.
‘Don’t overdo it,’ said Faye, ‘you still need to take it easy.’
‘I can come and give you a hand if you like,’ said Rosemary. ‘I haven’t got any lectures today.’
But Patrick insisted he’d be fine on his own. ‘It won’t take long,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a fairly good idea of what’s there.’
And in fact, the house didn’t take long. It was scrupulously clean; there were no smears on the glass, no scatterings of mould in the bathroom, no spider-web garlands. His mother had kept most things packed away, to keep them safe, and so that they could be retrieved easily in an emergency. A lot of her possessions were brand new. Patrick found unopened boxes of cutlery, complete sets of glasses, clothes which still sprouted cardboard labels from their sleeves and collars. There were boxed sheets, two new toasters cocooned in polystyrene. There were unread books, unused handkerchiefs, chairs in plastic wrapping. His mother, he realised, had tried to fill her rooms with things common to most households, but although she’d bought so much, few of her possessions described a real person. If strangers looked at these objects, Patrick thought, would they be able to say what she’d been like? Would they be able to give even an approximate summary of her? The china and linen, the rolled-up rugs, the boxed gadgets could have been anyone ‘s; they retained no traces of scent, no patina of daily handling. They were without fingerprints. He thought about saints’
lives, how they were constructions of many different lives. A vision here, a miracle there. Chinese whispers written down. Relics were just as untrustworthy. The multiple finger bones, the fragments of tibia, the many locks of hair would form monsters if assembled. Patrick leaned the third of four identical ironing boards against the hall stand and thought about Saint Hilla, about how impossible it was to tell whether the dialogues were her original words, or whether they contained pieces of other saints, embellishments added by various scribes for the sake of telling a story. He opened an unopened kettle and closed it again. His mother wasn’t here.
He didn’t want to keep many of her things. He had no need for them, not even for the sleek green fountain pen he found at the back of a drawer. The only thing he might have liked was his father’s Meccano collection, but that was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, he thought, Doreen had sold it after all. So she could buy more ironing boards.
The house was stifling in the early summer heat, and Patrick threw open all the windows. From the sitting room he could see the shed, right at the end of the garden, past the plum tree and out of harm’s way. When he’d finished sorting and packing every room in the place, he let himself out the back door and followed the curling brick pathway.
Patrick pushed the iron handle down. It was warm from the sun and rough, and flakes of rust came away on his palm like dry blood. He felt the hinges give but the door wouldn’t open, and when he prised the edges with his fingers the chalky paint deposited itself on him too. Where it had flaked away he could see layers of colour: green, white, buttercup yellow. Here and there the wood itself was exposed, grey and grainy like a blurred photograph.
Wood remembered, Patrick knew. It warped in bad weather, stiffened like an old man’s bones. It swelled and twisted, attempted to recall the curve of a trunk, the tilt and crook of branches. Old wood could crack with longing for the touch of leaves, for small cool hands that felt for the sky, collected light. And this wood was nearly fifty years old. Patrick’s father had built the shed himself right after they shifted into the new house.
‘Why are you building it out of wood?’ Patrick’s mother had asked. ‘Why not brick?’
He tugged the handle once more, and the door swung open and he was inside. In the gloom he could make out strange, angular shapes towering against the walls. He pulled at the old venetian blind blocking the window, easing the knotted cords this way and that. It wouldn’t move up at all, but he managed to open the slats and they lined the glass like a page, as if a message could be scribbled across the dry garden, the wide blue sky. Then he turned around.
The ship filled the shed, its masts aligned with the sloping rafters, its prow nosing the wooden wall. It was an impossible thing, fragile and skeletal and vast. There was no room for anything else. The shelves where twine and bulbs and packets of seeds and sacks of blood and bone had once stood were bare. The workbench was empty of tools; the hooks which had supported shovels and rakes jutted from the walls like bony fingers. Just enough space had been left for someone small to squeeze around each side of the ship. Someone Doreen’s size. It was a wonder Patrick hadn’t knocked the thing over when he reached for the window. He extended his fingers, and as soon as he touched it he realised. It had been constructed entirely of Meccano pieces.
They gleamed in the dim light, thousands of them, he estimated, each bolt tightened just enough, the red and green enamel in no place damaged by inferior spanner-work, the brass teeth new and unscratched. Here and there he saw valuable blue and gold pieces, taken from 1930s sets. He traced a hand over the hull, the fist-sized portholes, the wheel. There was an anchor made of Meccano, a crow’s nest, a row of lifeboats. Looking through the broken blind and into the garden was a Meccano figurehead, her green hair bolted into spirals and curls. Even the sails had been made from Meccano, hundreds and hundreds of pieces arranged to mimic billowing cloth. Many standard parts had been used to build the ship—the common strips and girders that came in every box—but as Patrick looked more closely he picked out all sorts of complex, advanced components. The sort contained in his fathers most prized sets. There were pulley wheels and crank handles, propeller blades and sprocket chains, compression springs, tension springs, hinges, grilles. There were lamp holders, wiper arms, pawls, trunnions. There were bell cranks and pinions, wire hooks and flywheels and worm wheels and healds. No instructions had been followed. It was a ship made of smaller ships, of motor cars, carousels, aeroplanes, clocks, cranes, looms, ferris wheels, searchlights, swing saws, windmills, bridges, lighthouses. It was made of everything Patrick had once wanted.
It was unseaworthy, of course; it was full of holes, like a loose piece of knitting. He opened the workbench drawer and dipped his fingers inside the dark recess, feeling for the torch his father had kept there for emergencies. He could sense the weight of the ship behind him, its shadow from the window enormous on his back, too big for the shed. There was no torch in the drawer. Instead, Patrick withdrew a neat bundle of cardboard. He undid the tissue paper and ribbon that had been tied gift-like around it and let it flutter to the ground. Some of the tissue still smelled faintly of soap. On the top piece of card was a picture of a boy dwarfed by a crane. In the background was the ocean, held at bay, and, in the border, the Eiffel Tower. He flicked through the pile: two boys framed a realistic Tower Bridge; another in a neat school blazer assembled a Giant Blocksetting Crane; another worked on a Walking Dragline. And he realised he wasn’t holding pieces of card, but dismantled boxes. Opened boxes, emptied of their contents and folded flat.
He thought he heard a sound coming from the garden, a light footfall perhaps, and he flicked the blinds shut. Crouching on the ground, so close to the floor of the shed he could smell the earth underneath, he listened. Now and then above him a Meccano bolt studded the darkness like a star.
He moved the blind to one side and peeped through the crack. There was the garden, as wild as before, and the bright sky. He thought he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked it was only a blackbird, almost indistinguishable in the shadow of the plum tree. Perhaps it had been there all along, perhaps that was what he’d heard moving outside the thin wooden walls. All the same, he left the blind closed, let the shed keep its secrets. He eased himself out the door and pushed it shut behind him, the swollen wood groaning, the rusty handle marking his palm. Walking back to his mother’s house, he rubbed his hands together, sprinkling the path with traces of rust and powdery paint. The garden was absolutely still; even the blackbird had disappeared. The only sound was the brushing of Patrick’s palms. It reminded him of the ocean.
As he pulled into Faye’s street, the rain began. It came from nowhere and it startled him; it was a sound he hadn’t heard in such a long time, not since he’d been out of hospital. It roared in his ears like an angry ocean, a million bony fingers drumming the windows, the roof, the streets, impatient and demanding attention. Beneath a tree, a blackbird drank from a puddle, bright beak piercing the water and then lifting high, its throat open, a straight line indicating the sky. And the rain poured on, filling Patrick’s head until he began to wonder whether the ship really existed, whether it was possible he had made it up. Perhaps it was an effect of the accident, or the mind’s way of plotting the information that his mother, like his father, was finally dead.
‘Faye,’ he said over dinner that night as the rain continued, ‘I think I would like some help tomorrow. I’ve found something of my mother’s that’s rather cumbersome,’
Faye nodded. ‘Will we be able to manage it on our own, or should I ring Rosemary?’
Patrick thought of the size of the ship, the way it took up the entire shed. It had been made, he realised, like a ship in a bottle; impossible to remove without taking it apart.
‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘perhaps I’ll leave it where it is.’
That night he dreamt of Doreen’s Meccano ship. It was adrift on the ocean, its silhouette a net against the sky. There were two figures on the u
pper deck, a man and a woman. They waved and waved at him, and called to him to come with them, and although Patrick couldn’t see their faces, he thought he recognised them. And then he saw that their arms and hands were made of tiny pieces of Meccano, and their bodies were Meccano too, and they weren’t people at all, just segments of metal bolted together to resemble human beings.
On the bench at Colette’s flat, tucked inside her newspaper, along with the exchange rates and the cartoons and the All Black’s problem knee, were the latest death notices. They’d been of little interest to her; she recognised none of the names.
The death of Edna Hicks, cherished wife of the late Walter, also escaped the attention of Ruth and Malcolm. Her name held no meaning for them, and they had no reason to care about her passing. They were having enough trouble getting Daniel to settle down.
‘What about a story?’ Ruth was saying as he flitted around the house toppling books, ornaments, a glass of water. ‘You can choose any story you like.’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him,’ Malcolm was saying. ‘He hasn’t been like this for ages.’
‘It’s my fault,’ said Ruth. ‘I shouldn’t have gone away, it’s been too upsetting for him.’
‘No,’ said Malcolm, ‘he was fine when you weren’t here,’
Ruth was quiet then. She tried to arrange a spray of late flowers Malcolm had brought in from the garden but they were too big for the new vase; it tilted with the weight of them, and she caught it just in time. Daniel rushed past her, a breathless blur. She severed stems, stripped away stunted buds and leaves until the flowers were small enough.
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