by Grant Stone
I upended the contents of my briefcase, and snatched up my small roll of cellotape. It was ancient, gone yellow, barely ever used. I savagely attacked it with my nails until I found the where the tape began, and then I took Jenny’s Tiny and I rolled it, rolled it, rolled it until the entire body and head were covered. I was panting. My hands shook. But she was covered. Silent. Blind.
I opened the door. It was the hotel attendant who had brought me my coffee. He handed me a large bouquet of flowers, then held out his hand expectantly. I shut the door.
The card on the flowers read, ‘To Jenny. We all hope for your speedy recovery. Michel and Team.’
I dropped the flowers on to the bench next to Jenny’s mummified Tiny and left. On the elevator down I sent a message to Madam Bellarina’s number, informing her that I’d meet her outside the hotel. As I passed through the hotel’s foyer I saw her, standing next to a taxi outside. She looked old and haggard in the daylight.
TWO HOURS LATER AND a good deal poorer than I’d have liked to have been, I sat on the toilet in my hotel room and slowly unwound the cellotape from Jenny’s Tiny. Through the thick yellow cocoon she looked like a sleeping pixie, her features smudged, hard to define. The cellotape’s colour reminded me of a condom. When I was down to the last few winds the tape stuck in the Tiny’s hair, and I had to tug hard to get it off.
‘Jenny?’ I asked, hoping like hell that she wouldn’t reply.
And, she didn’t. I prodded the Tiny’s chest hard, but not a sound. She was gone.
The Tiny was still disconcertingly warm. I reminded myself that it wasn’t Jenny that made it warm, it was the fact that it was turned on.
I thought of calling Jenny, or at least sending a message to her vice, but decided against it. I’d be home in four days. Four days till the shit hit that fan, four days to prepare myself. I wondered which vessel she’d choose to burn my things in this time. I cringed, thinking that my newest golf set was likely to cop it first; titanium-infused steel wouldn’t deter Jenny. I made the decision to take some time off work, take her somewhere nice. We went to Fiji for our twentieth anniversary, stayed in a resort run by a local village. I couldn’t remember the resort’s name, or even the name of the village, but figured it probably still existed.
I AVOIDED RACH’S CALLS for two days. Either she was calling to chastise me, and perhaps blackmail me – I wouldn’t have put it past her to suddenly bring up my older crime, 24 years later – or she was calling to inform me that all of my possessions had been expertly destroyed. I even imagined her there with Jenny, the flames illuminating their faces orange, cackling as they once more reduced my life to ash. But eventually she sent me a text message.
‘Mum is in a coma,’ is all it said.
I flew straight home. I waited outside the terminal for twenty minutes before I finally made my way to the taxi stand. I’d told Rach my flight details; I thought she might come. When I arrived at the hospital she was there, swollen eyed. She’d spread a colourful blanket over the hospital bed, and Nico was curled up on top of it, beside Jenny’s knees, sleeping. I gave Rach a hug but I wanted her and Nico to leave. I wanted to be alone with my wife. I pulled another chair in from the hallway and sat, silent. Watching Jenny’s chest rise and fall.
In those first few weeks the doctors thought Jenny might soon come out of the coma. She still had flecks of paint beneath her nails. She still smelled of soap and washing powder. Her grey-auburn hair spilled across the pillow. Her brown eyes were closed, but seemed like they could open at any time. Life-sized eyelids. Life-sized lips. When I arrived back at our house, the night after I’d come home to Auckland, I found my Tiny in the bed, next to where she’d been lying. It was wearing pyjamas.
I held Jenny’s dry hand, while doctors rolled in and out, giving me conflicting hypotheses about what had happened. Some believed that although her body hadn’t suffered any physical damage the brain had believed that it had, and so had shut itself down. Others, as far as I could tell, believed that sheer fright had made her mind turn off.
‘What did you expect?’ one nurse asked me. She was overweight and her shoes made sucking noises on the floor. ‘Putting things into your head? Transmitting images into your mind? It’s not natural. I’m surprised things like this don’t happen more often.’
FOURTEEN MONTHS AFTER her admittance to hospital, I won the settlement and had Jenny installed in a luxury suite overlooking the Parnell Rose Gardens, where she now lies in plush comfort on a king-sized bed, receiving therapeutic, aromatic massages each morning.
The day she was transferred there I was due to fly to Sydney, and before I left I propped up my Tiny next to her hospital bed, against a blue vase. I should have bought her some flowers, but I didn’t think.
That was two years ago. And so far, there’s been no change to her condition. Her nurses humour me by always keeping the battery charged on my Tiny, always keeping it switched on at Jenny’s end. I switch myself on most nights, to check on her.
The Ghost of Matter
Octavia Cade
CAMBRIDGE, 1930
He had become a man with grandchildren. A grandfather, and that in its way was easier than fatherhood, and more rewarding. Eileen had been a beautiful baby – Ernest remembered writing to his mother upon her birth, praising the infant’s marvellous qualities – but the older his daughter got, the more difficult he found it to connect with her. Eileen moved in fast sets, and Ernest – so well versed in physics, in atoms and magnetism – could not understand what drew her to those parts of others that were so different to himself.
There were times when that difference was a delight to him. He remembered the pretty little girl she’d been, the way she’d sung and skipped about the garden on small dimpled legs. How she’d taken her dolls so seriously, brought them to him for stories and tea parties.
He’d been so glad she was a girl, during the War. Would never have said so, not to colleagues and friends who had their own loved ones posted out of reach, in the trenches, at the Somme. Eileen would never find herself on the end of a bayonet, with a grenade being thrown towards her, in a field hospital with her life leaking away from dysentery. Ernest knew he had a reputation as a slow thinker. Powerful, but slow – a bright giant glacier of a mind, one that pinned down and ground all boulders before it. There’d been four years of war to watch other people’s children die, four years to try to understand, to focus the cold strength of his concentration on finding the factor that made sense of it all, that put organisation into grief. Four years, and at the end of it all he could find was relief – relief that it was over, and that his girl wasn’t part of it. Relief that he’d never be one of those parents, those poor grey miserable creatures that had to bury their children. That had to see them buried and gone on to a place different than theirs, and unreachable.
He’d been lucky. Eileen had been there all along, bright and difficult and spoilt, too – yes, he could say that and say it with honesty, for he was her father and half the spoiling could be laid at his feet. But for all he’d been irked sometimes, confused and frustrated at the growing distance between them, he’d never stopped feeling grateful for her life.
His only child, and he found it easier now to talk to her children, to entertain them, for the little ones would listen without rolling their eyes, found him fascinating, found him not-wanting. There were three of them.
No, four.
Four now, although the fourth was but new born and brought death with it, perhaps, for his daughter who was so full of life and rebellion (for all that she had married a physicist like her father) was failing in her strength, failing after labour.
He was never very good at waiting. Feet together, back straight, hands clasped together in his lap so that he wouldn’t fidget, wouldn’t have the temptation to smoke. It would have been easier to smoke. He wouldn’t have felt so much like a schoolboy then, waiting so primly for news of a lesson he couldn’t hope to understand. There had been so few of those – an early life o
f success in scholarship had given Ernest the expectation of understanding – but he couldn’t find anything to understand in this, the long deep quiet while he waited to be informed of his daughter’s death.
Ernest had seen what burying children had done to his mother. He didn’t want any part of it. His two young brothers had drowned in the Sounds, drowned at Pelorus, and all he had of them now were the wet little footprints that followed him about sometimes, the salt smell of the sea in the corners of his laboratories. He would have liked to see the boys now – the ghosts of their presence, at least. The ghosts of their matter. He had said that once: I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter. It had been a joke, a private joke. One his brothers might have appreciated, had they lived, though no doubt they would have corrected him, or tried to. ‘You didn’t break anything, Ern. We were broken before you knew,’ with their lungs all torn apart from water, with their bellies stuffed round with it. ‘And I couldn’t put you back together,’ he would have said. No more than he could put Eileen back together. If it had been cancer, maybe. There were promising results with radioactivity, with radiation therapy. He could have helped then. Done something that wasn’t waiting like the boy he no longer was, hoping for the presence of other boys that no longer were.
It would have been a comfort to have them beside him. To sit so upright in his chair, with little pools of salt water welling up on either side in solidarity. He wouldn’t even mind if they got his boots wet. Wouldn’t step around the damp patches, wouldn’t look away. He was an old man now, set in his principles and his successes, the medals, the authority. Surely old men should not look away so easily.
‘Charles,’ he said. ‘Herbert. Are you there?’ He’d cringed from the sound of them once, the little ghost cries, the eerie giggles come out of the dark when the curtains were all closed about, when he was trying to adjust his eyes for radiant sparks and luminescence. There was a reason he’d taken to leaving the labs before dark, and it was different from the reason he used to encourage everyone else to leave as well. ‘You need time away from the instruments, time just to think,’ he’d said. It was a good reason, and one he believed whole-heartedly regardless, but it wasn’t the truth of it. Not the whole truth, at least. That he couldn’t give: ghosts in the lab, spectres in the glass, the reflections of past lives.
‘They’d have thought I was telling a practical joke,’ he confided – to thin air, to the absence and the presence. ‘They’d have said “Rutherford’s gone round the bend, the old crocodile. Can’t see his tail any longer, spends too much time in his own head. That’s what trying to crack your teeth on physics gets you; that’s the taste of atoms. Too much time breathing fumes, too much time around the radium. D’you think it’s made him mad? Could be, could be. They say the Curie woman’s strange as well...”’
No. Much easier to insist on proper rest, on time spent in consideration rather than at experiment. The greatest experimentalist of the age, they called him; but he thought about what he did and it was that which made the difference.
What would they have said if they’d known?
MANCHESTER, 1909
Contamination was the bane of his life. The experiments, the vacuum chambers ... even the tiniest bit of dust could throw the whole thing off. And it wasn’t just the dirt – light was just as bad. Ernest would have to sit in the dark for half an hour sometimes, until his eyes were so adjusted he could see the scintillations that marked the little sparks of matter. Even then there was squinting and relays, as he and the other members of his team took turns in search of alpha particles.
Contamination could ruin experiments. It could ruin, too, the ideas come from experiments, when the outcomes given were false and nobody knew why. Ernest’s strength was his experimentation: the way that he could track down and expose every probability, the way that he could cross them off until only one practical result remained. Even when he worked in teams, this was his method.
Only once had he failed to explain away the source of the intrusion – the voice in the waves, the one that could only be heard by himself, whether there were others listening or he was alone and tinkering. Ernest still thought about it sometimes, still turned that enormous brain to shadows and the inexplicable presence of sound, but he had never come to a satisfactory conclusion.
But years had passed since then and if he had not forgotten, Ernest had at least pushed that girl’s voice to the back of his mind, to uncommon areas where problems of little import were stalled and sorted. That was why, when he was washing his hands in the laboratory’s WC and found himself washing with salt water instead of fresh, he thought it was something he could explain.
It was the texture he noticed first. The extra softness of the water, the way it felt a little more slippery under soap. The colour was different too, but colour change in tap water was something that could be attributed to old pipes and bad plumbing ... or at least it could have been, if only the shading were different. If the water were tinted red or brown, Ernest would have explained it as a result of rusted piping. Yet the soft slippery water in the basin was unusually cool in colour, reminiscent of the blue-green waters of the Sounds under cloud.
They were so different, the colours of his home. The blues and greens more vivid, undiluted by constant rain. He missed it, missed them. Missed the smell of mānuka and lemonwood and five finger, missed the bright colours of kōwhai and rātā, the way the tui would glisten in the trees, the thick plump bodies of wood pigeons. He missed winters where all the trees weren’t bare. It had taken a long time, that first winter in a foreign land, to understand what was so uncomfortable about the landscape of the place his mother called Home – how skeletal and dead it all was, with frozen mud underneath instead of humus, instead of red beeches where all the leaves stayed on.
Science had taken him away, and necessarily so, for the small settlements at Brightwater and then Havelock held no mysteries for him, and the damp half-cellar of Canterbury was a depth he had already plumbed. Still, for all the excitement that came with being at the centre of physics there were times when Ernest missed his home with an intensity that was almost painful, that lodged beneath his breastbone in stutter-silence, and when he leaned over the basin to examine that strange, sad water he breathed in the scent of it, and knew it.
It was sea water, salt water, and no lad who had ever grown up on coasts, within the reach of tidal swell, would ever mistake it. More than that, though, it was the salt water of the Sounds, the salt water of too-many-thousands of miles away. Ernest wouldn’t have thought he could have recognised it, but the mix of salt and sand and colour was different to the British beaches. Different, too, to the coast of Canterbury.
‘It can’t be,’ he said. ‘You’re imagining things, you silly fool.’ He wasn’t in the Sounds now, or even in New Zealand. He was in a closed-up washroom of a physics laboratory on the other side of the world from what he smelled, and the coast was nowhere near him. ‘It must be the pipes,’ he said, knowing as he said it that it was a foolish thing to say, for all the water piped here was fresh.
‘Damned imagination.’ And yet Ernest knew that it wasn’t. He was imaginative enough for a scientist – not as flashy with it as Einstein, or with the deep melancholic imagery of Bohr – but his thoughts had meaning. They didn’t pop out of the depths of his brain for no good reason. There must be connections he was making that he didn’t realise yet. Something to do with sea and salt, and that’s why he was thinking of them – thinking that he felt them, smelled them. Signposts, that’s what they were. He’d turn the tap off and it would all go away and sooner or later – probably later – the link would spark within him and he’d know what, and why. That was the way it worked for him.
And yet when Ernest turned off the tap, saw the absence of spouting, he did not see the absence of water. It bubbled up out of the plughole, blue and green and with beech leaves in it – bubbled over the edge of the basin and onto the floor, and there was nothing he could do to stop t
he flood.
Later, looking back, he would think he heard the echo of giggles coming from the drain. Little noises, and echoing like rat scratches in the pipes, but the bubbles were so loud and so many that Ernest told himself again he was imagining it.
HAVELOCK, 1886
Martha sat at the Broadwood piano that was the pride of her house, the favoured instrument of her life. Her feet were placed carefully together as if at parlour, and her hands were clasped in her lap. She stared at the keys as if they were waves, as if they were boards bound together as boat ribs, and unsinking.
‘Mum?’ said Ern, standing awkward in the door and not used, yet, to looking down on the woman who had birthed him and raised him to competence in the midst of farm and flax and reed. He was growing up now, would be a man before long and not the first she had raised. One day soon, he hoped, he’d go away to school – but he’d come back again to the house where he still felt like a child, because that was where his family was. ‘Mum?’
‘It came all the way over from Home,’ said Martha. ‘Like I did.’ In the room that smelt always of lanolin and polished wood, her voice had lost all its shine. She spoke in flats. ‘I was going to teach my children music. I thought it was important.’
‘You did teach us,’ said Ern, halfway across the room now with his quick, heavy strides and his boots still damp with dirt from last night’s searching. His mother’s boots were neat. Polished, even. She must have cleaned them during the night, he thought, in the few hideous hours before dawn, the first night her boys were lost.