All the Voices Cry (11 page)

Soon they arrived at the edge of a garden where the trunk and limbs of a vast tree stretched along the ground like some great animal at leisure. Nailed to the tree was a sign in Tahitian.
Tabu,
the sign said,
keep out,
but not just in a
trespassers will be prosecuted
kind of a way. It was more sacred than that.
Tabu
was
keep out or something will get you.
Around about, thick banks of water fuchsia flourished unchecked in the humid air, the dark pattern of their leaves studded with scarlet flowers. Black crabs picked through the remnants of a balloon fish stuck on a fence post to dry, sidling sideways through a cloud of gnats. Penelope called ahead to Charles.

“I don't think we should go any further.” She pointed at the post. “These crabs give me the creeps.”

“Do you like this garden, is it yours?” asked Charles.

“What?” she said.

“Lowry,
Under the Volcano.”

“Oh, that. This looks like private property.”

“You're a bit scared, aren't you?” Charles tipped his hat back on his head. “Mistah Kurtz, he dead,” he said.

“Don't mock me Charles.”

“Miss-tah Kurtz,” Charles said with more sibilance. Penelope turned her back.

“I heard you the first time,” she said.

“Where are you going, Penn? Look, we've passed the peak and here's the end of the cove. This has to be the place that Stevenson refers to in the poem. The cave must be just around the corner.”

“Charles, we have a plane to catch.”

“Come on Penny, be a sport.”

“I'll wait here for you.”

Penelope sat in the green gloom swiping at mosquitoes. Once they might have walked to Stevenson's sea cave together. She would have laughed at Charles's obvious discomfort at having his trousers rolled up, he would have quoted somebody, and she would have thrown a piece of seaweed at him or threatened him with a crab. Now Penelope was glad that she would never find the sea cave, so that she would not have to hear the quotation with which Charles would adorn the view. Charles's mouth was a sea cave, with words rushing in and out of it, flecked with foam.

 

Charles hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, gleeful and shouting over the diesel engine.

“Magnificent, it was magnificent,” he cried. “There's a hole in the cave roof, fringed with ferns. It's a natural pantheon. I stood there and recited the whole poem. The words just boomed and rolled about. I'm more convinced than ever. No one in the world knows that Stevenson ever came here, except the two of us. Certainly not his precious Fanny. Hah!”

Penelope sat silently, submitting to the roar. Poor Fanny. She was tired and she wanted to get on the plane.

“Let's see if there's anywhere to cut across,” said Charles.

They drove up into a new subdivision where the houses sat on red earth blocks gouged out of the mountainside. One big rainfall and the houses could just slip off the side. Charles drove on the newly paved road with delight in his eyes. It was the look of being first. He had been first with Penelope too. Penelope had always assumed that she should comport herself as a married woman, a phrase that she always thought of in her grandmother's voice. She looked demurely, or sideways, under her eyelids at men. Charles's total freedom in this respect baffled her. When Charles was not reading he was talking about what he read with his female graduate students. And he would tell her about them too.

“Bit of a crush on that one,” he would say in a false and hearty voice, but she never knew why she had to be told that at all.

After the houses ran out the road became steeper. A barrier prevented them from going any further. Charles pulled out around it and kept driving.

“Are you sure we can take this road?” asked Penelope.

“Of course, it's a brand new subdivision,” said Charles.

“I don't think this is a good idea, Charles. Look at the creepers.”

They had arrived at a tight corner with a space to pull over at the side. Tiny heart-shaped leaves on runners stretched out over the tarmac like lines of liquid spilling out from an unseen source. Charles sighed and pulled over.

“Alright, you win, Penny. Perhaps it would be an idea to go and see what's round the corner.”

He disappeared around the edge of the cliff and Penelope was left alone with the gush of water in the bank beside her. The engine ticked as it cooled. The urge to drive away tugged at her like the currents pouring off the land into the sea. She saw the road empty, and Charles returning to find nothing but creepers fanning out over the centre line. Penelope climbed over into the driver's seat. Her shorts caught on the gear stick and ripped. She started the car.

At the airport, Penelope returned the rental car and lumbered along with both of their bags in a trolley. She found a seat between a pillar and a bank of tropical plants. After an hour had passed she thought, he knows now, he knows that I have gone. She thought of the puffer fish on the post and its empty eye sockets.
I have snapped,
she thought.
Like a sugar snap pea. I have no idea what I am doing.
The young couple next to her moved off to resume their kissing beside the bank machine. Several leis were draped around the girl's neck and her boyfriend rested his big hands on her shoulders, leaving brown creases in the waxy flowers. Once she had been kissed like that, with intent, on a hot hillside in Ireland, while the wind flicked through the pages of Yeats, discarded along with the empty wine bottle. Penelope had left her own lei in the hotel refrigerator.

“Penelope Pilchard, it's Penelope isn't it?”

She lifted her head out of her hands. Two puffy faces floated into her field of vision. It was Bevan and May Calder from Brockville in their matching sweatsuits.

“Penelope, dear,” said May, “fancy finding you here. But where's Charles?”

They looked around, as if he might be hiding behind the tropical plants. Bevan and May's cultivated innocence belied their thirst for gossip. They pecked about like hens in the dust, looking for titbits of news to relay to their travel club and their Bible-study group.

“He's dealing with the rental car. You know what it's like,” said Penelope. Bevan and May did indeed know. They launched into a story about sitting in the plane near some man who later pushed his wife down a crevasse.

“Can you imagine that?” said May. “We saw it on the news. And I said to Bevan that's the glacier man isn't it? And on the plane he accused Bevan of taking his pillow.”

“He was an impolite what-have-you, if you'll pardon my French, Penelope,” said Bevan.

May nodded. “I said to Bevan he ought to tell the police what he knew, about the pillow.”

“Well they got him, didn't they?” said Bevan, “and that's the main thing. Time to move on through, love. Wouldn't want to miss the flight. Are you on this one Penelope or later?”

“Three AM,” Penelope replied.

“You've got a long time to wait.” May pursed her lips and made a sucking noise in the air beside Penelope's cheek. “Tell Charles that we said hello.”

Watching the matching bottoms of Bevan and May recede into the crowd, Penelope realized that she was no better than their glacier man. Her actions were not private, they belonged in the tabloids and the Calders would make sure of it. If she were going to leave Charles, she had to leave him somewhere
altogether more ordinary, on the way to having her hair done or in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket. In the meantime she ought to find him and make a renewed effort to bring him back into her, into their life. He could not live forever in the literary room next door.

It was well after midnight by the time her taxi arrived at the barrier at the top of the deserted road.

“My husband, là-bas,” said Penelope, pointing, trying to make the driver understand where she wanted to go to. “Mon mari,” and finally, “mon amour est là.” But the driver refused to go beyond the barrier, so she asked him to wait before she got out of the car.

Darkness covered the cliffs. The moon had risen and transformed the sky over the sea into a luminous upturned bowl. Penelope's stomach retracted in fear that Charles might have been murdered, that crabs could even now be picking over his eyes. Surely he would be there, sitting on a log in the half-light, crossing and re-crossing his legs, twirling his hat around on his clenched fist, reading the
Times Literary Supplement
that he kept in his pocket, or stroking his beard into a sharp point. Penelope recalled the things he had once said to her, that she was the good solid earth beneath his feet, the sky over his head, the sun that kept the shadows under the leaves at bay. She thought of the way his mouth curled up at the edges, so that it looked like he was smiling when he was not. She hurried and her sandals went clack-clack upon the road.

Charles was smaller than she remembered. He stood up as she approached.

“There you are,” he said, as if she were a sock that he had mislaid under the bed. “May I inquire just what you thought you were doing, taking off like that?”

“I'm sorry. I needed to be by myself.”

“I see,” said Charles. There was a tight look about his mouth.

Penelope saw her husband's face framed by the great Pacific Ocean that glistened and stretched to the moon. They were trapped on this island, with no hope of swimming away. A truce had to be reached before they could travel on together.

“I'm glad you're still here,” she said. “I thought you might have gone to find a
glimmering girl.”

“I am not in the mood for funny phrases,” said Charles. “I have been waiting for you for three hours. Can you imagine how that makes me feel? Obviously not. Now. Shall we catch our plane before it's too late?”

They stayed far apart as they walked up the hill. In the taxi, Charles leaned back and pretended to sleep.

“Please don't do that again, Penny,” he said, his eyes still shut.

Penelope was silent.

“Ever.”

But Penelope had nothing to say. She was terribly afraid that she would do it again. They were in the middle of nowhere. All around the island the ocean glittered and beckoned. She sought out his hand and held it in the dark chirruping night.

A
T FIRST SIGHT, there was nothing special about St. James's Church. A stubby square tower sat up like thumb at one end, and at the other, a broad curve of windows overlooked a gully full of tree ferns. Inside, the couple lay collapsed beside the altar like tramps, their heads propped up on the stucco wall, straining to catch a glimpse out the window at some marvel in the sky. Eventually the woman sat up and rubbed the back of her head.

“I give up Gord, it's no use. You can't see the glacier from in here any more. Maybe twenty years ago. I told you we'd have to drive up close in the car.” Rita used the corner of the altar to pull herself up off the floor. She pulled down her jersey, puffed up her hair out of habit.

“Maybe if I get down a bit lower,” said Gordon.

“You can't go lower Gord, you're on the floor. It's no good. Here, take my hand and let's be going.”

Really it wasn't their habit to drop into churches in this way, but since Amanda had phoned from Canada with the news, Rita had taken to going into churches of all kinds. Private gods, public Gods, ancient gods, invented gods; she called on them all to spare her daughter. Gord, on the other
hand, kept his spiritual side tucked away out of sight, like his bald spot, which he hid under a flat brown cap, with a few grey curls licking out the back of it. Pressed, he would call himself a bet hedger in the God department. Still, he always tagged along when Rita went into churches.

Actually Rita and Gord were lucky that the church was open at all. A good fifty years had passed since the church had been built, with its view of the Franz Josef glacier out the front windows, designed to prompt prayer among the tree ferns and praise for the high and icy work of the Almighty. Now it was 1986 and the volume of tourists in the area was already increasing along with the number of fish-and-chip dinners served at The BellBird's Table, the theft of car radios and motel visiting books, and even the brass candlesticks from the very church that they had been lying down in.

Gordon was disappointed that he could not see the glacier. A great uncle had brought him to this church once before as a young lad. He remembered the twisted fingers of the uncle, gently pushing him to kneel down and crane his neck to see its great gritty tongue. He'd always liked the idea of the inevitable flow of ice that crushed mountains as it moved. Since Amanda's phone call, the glacier seemed to have taken up residence inside his skull, scraping along like a great cold headache. He wondered whether the man existed who would be patient enough to lie down and be run over by a glacier. It would be a slow death. A decade would be long enough, surely. After that the glacier would bear you along towards the sea, with a creaking, crackling pebble-strewn slowness; a good and natural way to go.

Throughout their West Coast road trip, Gord was continuously reminded of standard six and Mr. Watson in front of the blackboard, rapping with a ruler at the words
Plato's cave.
Something about light and shadow flickering on the wall, but you had to go outside the cave for the real thing. Once, when Amanda had been seven and leaping about in the shallows at Waikouaiti beach, the slanting green fronds of the aurora australis had processed in stately fashion over the clouds above her. Gord had thought to himself,
shadows and archetypes; gifts from beyond,
but he had explained it to Amanda in terms of charged particles because even then he could not remember enough about the cave.