As the Earth Turns Silver

by Alison Wong

  She had worked at the hospital and seen horrific injuries and diseases. During the flu epidemic she’d watched patients spit pus and phlegm, greyish-white and bloody; watched them drown in their own secretions. They lost their hair, fingernails, toenails; lapsed into coma or delirium. Great strapping lads and men in their prime, boys like George McAlister, the varsity wrestling champ, the suddenness of it all, his skin translating to deep crimson then, just one look away, and he’d turned, in an instant, jet-black . . .

  And yet this was worse. This was her punishment – her prayer had been answered.

  She stared at Robbie and did not know what to say. Realised she didn’t know what she’d say even if he were well.

  She’d stood on the wharf waving goodbye to Dr Bennett, just as she knew her mother must have done to Robbie. What had this war done? Dr Bennett had risked everything serving the wounded in Serbia. Bombs landed beside her, she contracted malaria, her beloved brother died at Passchendaele . . .

  Edie held Robbie’s hand. She opened her mouth, let words stumble out.

  Bírds

  Katherine looked out the window as the train passed through Port Chalmers and left the harbour. Gulls disappeared as they climbed the hills; through the trees glimpses of blue water. Edie sat making notes from some thick medical text. Perhaps it’s easier like this, Katherine thought, the rock and jerk of the carriage over rails, drumming in the ears. Easier than fractured conversation.

  The carriage filled with smoke in the tunnels and the lighting was too dim for reading. Even without looking, Katherine sensed the stillness of Edie’s pencil – as if caught in photographic plates – then pressed to paper again as they were thrown into daylight, as they rattled down along the cliffs above Waitati.

  Katherine gazed at the beaches, the seaside cottages. She remembered laughter at Island Bay, Edie collecting shells and stones, molluscs, small marine animals, Robbie kicking a ball over sand. They passed through rolling sheep country, and before she realised it the porter was calling, ‘Seacliff! Seacliff!’ and the train lurched to a halt.

  Edie packed her books into her bag and they disembarked.

  We don’t know how to be together, Katherine thought. We don’t even know how to be silent. She glanced at Edie, bag swinging heavy in her hand; looked at the road ahead of them. Ten minutes, Edie had said. Ten minutes’ walk.

  ‘Does he speak?’ she asked at last.

  ‘No,’ Edie said. Softly. Like a sigh.

  The sound of their shoes on gravel.

  ‘Does he know you?’

  ‘Mum, are you sure you . . .’

  ‘Does he recognise you, anyone?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘What do they say about his . . . prospects?’

  ‘I think it’s too early . . .’

  Edie kicked stones along the road. Kicked again and again. Don’t. Don’t, Katherine wanted to say.

  ‘Why is it so hard?’ Edie asked.

  What are you asking me? Katherine wondered. What can I say to make any of this easier? She gazed at her daughter, all of her life ahead of her. ‘There’s so much we don’t understand,’ she said at last.

  Sunlight fell warm on their skin. They walked listening to birdsong, everywhere lush green, flowers blooming, the sky too blue. Why is it so beautiful? Is this supposed to make it bearable?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Mum?’

  ‘What, Edie? What didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘About Mr Wong.’

  Katherine took a sharp breath. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about you and Mr Wong?’

  She knew. All these years she knew . . .

  ‘I . . . I didn’t think you’d understand . . . didn’t think you’d approve . . .’ She stopped and looked into her daughter’s eyes. ‘I didn’t want to have to choose between you.’

  ‘But wasn’t that choosing?’ Edie kicked a stone ferociously into the grass. A bird flew up across their path, a flurry of brown wings.

  ‘I’m sorry, Edie . . . I . . .’

  Edie stared at the road ahead of them. ‘You loved him, didn’t you?’

  Katherine blinked. They walked in silence.

  ‘We’re here,’ Edie said at last. They turned through the hospital gates, up the twisting driveway, past the orchards and raspberry beds to the huge greystone building.

  Katherine took his hand, squeezed it, and he turned. She took him in her arms and held him, his cool face against her throat. She could feel his bones, the thin strips of his ribs, his shoulder blades like wings. ‘Robbie,’ she said, a whisper into his hair. ‘My son.’ She felt the slight weight of him, the subtraction of what she had known. She kissed him lightly, afraid if she pressed too hard he might dissolve.

  He leaned into her, held onto her, and she felt him begin to shake, small sobs wracking his thin body.

  Afterwards Katherine could not return to her rooms. Edie gave her a hug – how long had it been since Edie embraced her – and then went back to Medical School, leaving her to wander the city. She walked up Lower Stuart Street into the Octagon, stared at the statue of Robbie Burns sitting on his tree stump, quill in hand, scroll at his feet. As she watched, a seagull flew down and settled on his head. It looked so ludicrous, Katherine almost laughed. It could happen to anyone, even the high and mighty. Life could come out of the blue – and crap on your head. She started to shake but it was not laughter that came, that wrenched itself in waves from her body.

  She fled, trying to control her weeping, trying to control the shaking. She heard horns, the screech of brakes, almost collided with someone whose face she did not see. She tried to slow down her breathing, tried to slow down.

  Wiped her face with a handkerchief. Opened her eyes.

  The building represented everything she did not believe in, its spire reaching into the sky as if to strike the fear of God into the city. First Church. The One and Only unyielding God.

  She walked through the iron gates, passed the manicured lawn, the quiet trees, up the bluestone steps, let the limestone swallow her.

  In the foyer, she walked through the open door, into the belly of God.

  The church was empty. Late afternoon sun fell through the rose windows, leaving highlights on the western pews and across the straight-backed seats of the choir. She sat in the last row, looking over lines of wooden pews to the front of the church where pipes like silent cannons reached upwards. Two British flags hung from the wooden archway, one on the east, the other on the west, overhanging the altar. She sat alone, fragments of pink light streaking across the ivory walls.

  In the silence words resonated, words like forgiveness. Redemption. But she had no words to speak, no words to share. She looked down. On the back of the pew in front of her someone had scratched in angular letters, GOD IS. What? she wondered. She had heard many words. Righteousness. Justice. A consuming fire. And words like love, which could slip off the tongue too easily. A word spoken with the mouth or eyes, with small acts of sacrifice or large. A word with many facets, capable of great clarity and great misunderstanding.

  What would she have done differently if she had known? What would she have chosen?

  She buried her face in her hands.

  The Watch

  Robbie was weeding the rose garden when the stranger came upon him.

  ‘It’s only fools who believe roses are symbols of love . . .’ The voice was strong. Authoritative.

  Robbie looked up.

  The man was clothed completely in white. He had long, slightly wavy white hair, a long white beard. Like an Old Testament prophet. Like God. He was flanked by attendants wearing Seacliff uniforms. ‘What do you say, son?’

  Robbie looked down again, concentrated on the rich, brown soil, the feel of it between his fingers, under his nails.

  ‘It’s the colour that’s of utmost importance,’ the man was saying. ‘Take white, for instance – white roses symbolise eternal love, but did you know they also indicate s
ecrecy and silence?’

  The man laughed. ‘People don’t usually think of love hiding secrets, do they?

  ‘And black. There’s no such thing as a black rose. In truth they’re more the colour of dark crimson or red, but such is the power of symbol. Death, my son. Mourning . . . Personally, I don’t see any reason for mourning. Death is inevitable. Sometimes it can even be used to prove a point.’

  The man bent under a rose bush, in an area Robbie had already weeded, and pulled out a poor straggling stem with fine root hairs, flicked it onto the weed heap. ‘You let one small evil take root and within the blink of an eye the land is overrun with unspeakable horror.

  ‘What’s your name, young man?’

  Robbie didn’t know. Nothing seemed to fit. But he kept hearing the same name over and over. Robbie. Robbie. He heard it in his dreams.

  ‘Has the cat got your tongue?’

  Robbie’s throat felt dry, as if words no longer lived there. He tried to cough. A nomad crossing a desert.

  One of the attendants said, ‘His name’s Robert. His sister calls him Robbie. He doesn’t speak. Just spends all his time in the garden.’

  ‘Robbie,’ the man said thoughtfully.

  Robbie looked up at the man’s face, surprised by his silence. Suddenly he remembered his father – it was his father – opening the back of his pocket-watch to reveal the cogs with their tiny teeth clicking, clicking in never-ending circles. ‘Nothing is still,’ his father had said. ‘Even if we don’t know it, even if we do nothing. The earth turns, and everything in it . . .’ His father spoke so quietly that Robbie did not recognise him. He gazed into the middle distance, seemed to forget Robbie’s presence. ‘Is this all there is? Are we just cogs, our lives running inexorably to their conclusion?’

  He turned, looked Robbie in the eyes. Suddenly laughed. ‘Don’t look so serious, son.’ He ruffled Robbie’s hair. ‘Off to bed with you now. Everything always looks better in the morning.’

  But it wasn’t, was it? In the morning. That’s when they’d pulled him out of the water.

  The stranger was talking again, his speech forming a disturbing background hum, but all Robbie could see were greenstone amulets, his father’s ink-stained fingers, and water, endless water, closing over . . .

  The Returníng

  From the first-floor window in the room he’d inhabited as a child, Robbie looked down on the garden. The rata was still there, the wooden battens he’d nailed to the trunk, the overhanging branch he’d sat on, raining down on his sister small stones, acorns, boiled Brussels sprouts he’d squashed in his pocket from dinner. The grass was very long, full of dandelion and daisy that in summer would bloom again wildly. Once there may have been a vegetable garden, flower gardens, in a time before they moved there, but all his memories were like this: weeds like too many thoughts run rampant.

  He had lain in the white softness of his bed for almost a day and night after the long journey by train and boat from Dunedin. He’d drunk his mother’s vegetable soup, performed the rites of the invalid. The room was the same as he’d left it, but he did not fit any more – like the clothes his mother had kept hanging in his wardrobe or folded in the oak chest of drawers. He tucked his shirt into his trousers, which hung from his bony hips till he fitted the braces, pulled on a jersey to cover the gaping at his waist. Then he took down his model aeroplanes, trains, the postcards and posters on the wall, shoved them in a heap at the bottom of the wardrobe.

  He did not want to remember.

  He grimaced as he squeezed his feet into shoes and went down the stairs.

  He did not stop to reassure his mother, just walked out the back door, through the grass that tugged and pulled at his ankles with its long wet leaves, and on to the iron shed. Inside, bright motes of dust drifted in the morning light. On every shelf and surface, grey-brown dust settled in a layer of dirty felt. There, between the wooden ribs, he found spade, rake, pruning shears, trowel.

  He had never dug in this garden before, having from an early age inherited his mother’s disdain for gardening. But his time at Seacliff had left its green-fingered mark, and now he could not look upon a neglected wasteland without envisaging an English garden, a garden à la Truby King.

  Every morning after breakfast he entered the world of his garden. He slowly walked a full circuit, examining each corner, every aspect, planning his work for the day. Then he extricated the tools he would need, long shafts of wood and metal that came to feel like extensions of his limbs, his own body.

  Over the days, weeks, he found in the shed small pleasures: a collection of nails, a hammer and a saw, a stack of wooden boxes. He levered and banged out the nails from the boxes, and then at the back of the garden built one much larger: tall, bottomless, with a sheet of wood that sat on top, and a few holes around the base to let in air. There he layered grass clippings, sweepings from the range and fireplaces, vegetable and fruit scraps from a bucket his mother kept in the kitchen. Earth to earth, dust to dust, the promises of sun and rain.

  Pansies, fairy bells, lilies, lavender, roses. Rhubarb, cabbage and parsley. He would build a trellis to hide the outhouse and train climbers over it. Honeysuckle, his mother had said, or maybe clematis. Why not jasmine? he wondered, but he didn’t care. He just wanted flowers. The shy awakening of spring bulbs, the drunkenness of summer blooms. He wanted their living, breathing colours, their seductive smells.

  Winter passed into spring and spring into summer. Light slipped under, around the edges of the blinds, onto sleepy skin. If Robbie were a cat he would have purred. He lay in bed and did not know where dream and its awakening lifted and drifted apart.

  He ate porridge with his mother, stirred sugar crystals and milk in a thick whirlpool in his bowl. He drank tea with milk and two sugars.

  His mother was running water to wash the dishes – he knew she was about to get the kettle from the range – when he bent down and kissed her lightly on the cheek. He picked up the scrap bucket, opened the door, walked out into the garden. Into the bright morning air.

  Píneapple

  Katherine had never bought pineapple, never tasted it. The spiky skin seemed too daunting, like a huge fruit half-pretending to be a cactus, but Mrs Newman had offered ten shillings extra a week and Katherine felt like celebrating. She was walking down Tory Street, thinking of buying cakes – Queen cakes or doughnuts or kisses – when she saw the pineapples in the shop window. She stopped and stared, and when she looked in she saw Mrs Wong smiling, motioning for her to come in.

  ‘Pineapple very good,’ Mrs Wong said. ‘Come, I cut for you.’

  Katherine followed her out the back of the shop and into the kitchen. She watched her run the pineapple under the tap, then cut off the top and the bottom. Leaves like aloe, Katherine thought, as she watched them tumble into the sink. Now Mrs Wong was trimming off the skin, turning the fruit little by little, bringing the cleaver down quickly.

  Katherine watched pieces of skin fall and be swept into the sink – slices of orange-green reptile. She watched the transformation, the pale yellow flesh still studded with dark verrucas. Mrs Wong turned the pineapple at an angle, slid the knife in, first on one side of the ingrowths, then the other, slicing long Vs down the flesh like trenches.

  Katherine marvelled at how quickly she worked, how the fruit turned before her eyes into a soft yellow barrel covered with spiralling trenches. Now Mrs Wong sliced the pineapple into rounds, and the rounds into quarters. She washed her hands, took from the shelf a flat porcelain bowl, and from a cupboard a large glass preserving jar.

  ‘What’s that?’ Katherine asked, watching her spoon white crystals into the bowl.

  ‘Salt,’ Mei-lin said, pouring water from the kettle over the salt and stirring with her fingers. ‘Make it sweet.’ She dipped a slice of pineapple into the brine and handed it to Katherine.

  Katherine had never tasted anything like it. Juice spurted out as she bit into it and she laughed, sweetness coating her chin.

  As Mrs
Wong packed a preserving jar with pieces of pineapple, Katherine thought of Robbie working in the garden. Since he’d returned, he’d never touched fruit – apples, pears, oranges – but surely pineapple would be different.

  Katherine followed Mrs Wong back into the shop. A man stood at the cash register, counting out change to a customer. Katherine felt the colour drain from her face. He looked up, nodded to her, and she saw he was very young. She realised it was not him.

  That night, Katherine used a fork to spear pineapple pieces out of the jar and into two blue-flowered bowls. ‘Pineapple,’ she said to Robbie, savouring the word on her tongue as if it were a piece of magic.

  She could barely close her mouth and chew without sticky juice leaking out. She closed her eyes. It was like devouring sunlight made juicy.

  ‘Come on, Robbie. Try it. It’s delicious!’

  When he still did not touch it, she pierced a piece with her fork, held it up to his mouth. Take some sweetness, Robbie. Take it into your life.

  Robbie knew that fragrance – the slight, sweet, tropical taste of it in his nostrils. A window of light in winter darkness.

  He’d lifted the pineapple to his face. Inhaled.

  ‘Pineapple very good,’ the Chinaman had said. ‘Very sweet.’

  Bastard, he’d thought. Is that how he sees my mother? He’d put the pineapple down. Next to the apples.

  There were four just the same in the fruit bowl at his mother’s. But he refused to eat them. He’d heard stories about how the Chows polished their fruit, rubbing them with spittle to make them shine.

  ‘Apple very good, you want to try?’ The Chow was looking at him expectantly. Without thinking, Robbie moved the pads of three fingers over an apple. Even through his gloves he could feel the cool smoothness of its skin; the redness of its cheek; his mother blushing. He wiped his fingers against his coat.