All the Voices Cry (13 page)

“My feet are so cold, I think I'm going to die!” Rae pulled her socks out of her pocket and used them to rub at her heels. “I don't know why I took my boots off in the first place,” she said.

“Old reflex, I suppose,” said Sheila. She opened the shutters, letting in a thin sliver of shoreline and the winter sky. “I haven't been here for years.”

“Me neither,” said Rae.

Rae sat on a bench in front of the window, and Sheila turned and lifted each of Rae's feet in turn. She brushed the sand off matter-of-factly as if it were not Rae's foot at all, but a piece of driftwood that she had picked up to take home.

“Better?” asked Sheila.

“Yes, thanks,” said Rae.

A penguin paddled in the waves just offshore, craning its neck to see whether the coast was clear. Soon another joined it, and soon there were three. When they felt safe they reared up off their chests like little toys and waddled towards the shelter of the flax bushes, inching their way up the hillside on their private tracks. The women sat side by side on the narrow bench, no longer touching, not Rae, not Sheila at all, just two women who had driven out to watch the penguins come in.

I wonder how long I can carry on not being me?
Rae thought.
This isn't me. Or perhaps it is me, but not a me that I know yet. I must see if Dad's nails need clipping.
She tucked the thought away, the same way her mother used to come in from the garden tucking stray wisps of hair behind her ears.

Rae could feel Sheila's palm warm against her ear, silencing the sea, leaving only the sound of her blood.

“You should look after yourself, you're looking a bit thin,” said Sheila. Rae was silent. “You okay Rae?”

“I don't know about this,” said Rae.

“What's there to know?” asked Sheila.

What was there to know? Only the agapanthus and the empty clothesline.

“Rae, come and stay with me for a while. Let me look after you for a bit. No, that's not what I mean. Come and live with me Rae, we'd be good together.”

It was as easy as that.
We'd be good together.

“Thanks, Sheila.” Rae looked at Sheila's small, perfect earlobe, unable to look her in the eye. “I'll think about it, I really will.”

“Do,” said Sheila, placing a hand on each of Rae's shoulders. “Promise me you will.” She kissed her on the cheek.

They left the bird hide and walked back towards the car. They passed only one family coming the other way, two adults and a child who ran in and out of the sea, oblivious to the cold waves.

“You don't have to go home, Rae. Come to my place.”

“Thanks, I know I don't, but I always go up to see Dad about this time.”

“I'll see you on Monday then?”

“Yes, I'm in from 11 until 4.”

The numbers defined the space between them. Of course Rae would see Sheila. There was work to do. If a life together were to be arranged, it would be thought out with the practicality of grown women, of egg sandwiches and a thermos of hot water, of teabags in a separate container. It could wait until Monday. They got into their cars. It was a relief not to be buffeted by the wind any more. Rae drove home past the spiked silhouette of a cabbage tree against golden sky, and a lone sheep, watching.

Rae went up the path to her parents' house, past the hydrangeas with their wet mottled leaves.
I don't know how to proceed at all from here,
she thought,
and I should. I am a middle-aged woman.

It was getting late. She picked up the package from the kitchen table. The postmark said Toulouse. She found scissors and carefully slit the brown paper apart. Inside was a packet of cigarettes, unsealed and then resealed. She pulled
the cigarettes out. There was no note, but on each cigarette a single French word was printed: plain, domestic words that ordered and reordered, told a different tale each time.
Monday, coffee, bed, chair, cheese, blanket, Wednesday, bread, Burgundy, Thursday, grass, cemetery.
One cigarette had initials on it, her mother's maiden name, K.M. Rae thought of her mother smoking random dreams at the bottom of the garden. Over time the famous year in France had fragmented into single words, brittle as shreds of old tobacco. She looked at a cigarette that said L.F. de R. for a long time before she put it in her pocket.

It was getting late. Rae ran a bath and got into it before the enamel had finished warming up. She lay there until the water was nearly cold, occasionally flapping her hands over the surface of the water. She thought of Sheila in her waxed jacket doing battle against the wind, the wind lifting her curling hair away from her forehead, her profile dark and intent.

Women do it all the time, pack up, leave, move in with their pastoral care officers, their nutritionists, physiotherapists, local health-food co-op owners; women who touch their skins and minister to their bodies and minds. Daily, thousands of women arrive with squashy bags full of sweatshirts at the front door of a place that isn't yet home. There was nothing to it. But how could she do that, if she did not really know what she felt? Why was it so hard to feel anything at all?

She dried herself and dressed and went out to find a few things in the garden to take up to her father. Rae's mother had loved flowers, but not in an ordered way. The garden was filled
with masses of nodding aguilegia seeded in clumps. The dried sticks of the flower heads stood above the scarred and dying leaves. Rae clipped some late heartsease and looked at their inquiring faces, wondering what her mother would have said about her father being in a home, and what she would have said about Sheila.

Rae's father had been at medical school with Sheila's father, so it was assumed that the two girls would get along. At school Sheila had been an aggressive hockey player, often getting called out for having her stick raised too high. She was at her best at school camps, making bivouacs and jumping into cold rivers with her clothes on. In class she fought with her teachers, struggled against their facts and their requirements, and their sheer stupidity. Her burning anger with the world gave her a kind of power. Many of the girls felt it and avoided her.

Not long after Sheila started school, Rae's parents invited Sheila and her father to lunch. Sheila had been patently bored. When the adult talk turned from fire alarms to stomach cancer, the girls asked to be excused. They went outside, following the path into the orchard. The quince leaves hung motionless in the warm autumn air, and walnuts in their twisted black cloaks lay ready to be picked up off the ground before the rats that lived in the hedge could get at them.

One of Rae's chores was to gather up the cooking apples and put them in a basket in the corner of the kitchen. On Friday nights, Rae's mother would sit behind the scales, slicing the apples with a firm hand. Rae had not collected apples
for days and a strong wind had scattered them on the ground. Sheila picked up an apple and threw it against the garage wall. The apple hit the bricks with a satisfying thunk, split in two and dropped off, leaving behind a few fragments. She picked up another and another, smashing the apples against the brick wall with fierce joy.
Sheila is happy,
thought Rae.
Sheila is having a good time at my house.
She felt proud to be pleasing Sheila when no one else could, so she stood and watched while Sheila went about gathering all the apples from the orchard and even pulling some off the trees and throwing them against the wall.

On Sunday afternoon Rae's mother was raking leaves for a bonfire. The smoke lay curled about the trees.

“Will you look at what those boys have done to my apples? It's a crying shame. All my apples.” She pointed at the bruised and smashed fruit lying under the garage wall, the brown fragments clinging to the bricks.

“That's terrible,” said Rae. She went inside to learn her French verbs. For a while after the apple incident, Rae avoided Sheila in the school corridor.

 

Rae sat in the chair on the porch and looked out at the grey lines of the sea. On Monday she would make her lame excuses to Sheila, and their friendship and everything else would be broken. All she could think of was the sadness in her mother's voice as she looked at the smashed apples. And in the same voice she could hear her mother asking,
where is love in all this?
Except that her mother had never said anything of the sort.

That afternoon she found her father in a sombre mood.

“It was my fault Rae. I killed her,” he said.

“Dad, you had a stroke. There was nothing you could do.”

Rae's mother had died shortly after her arrival at the hospital. It was a blessing, everyone had said so.

“Dad, I'm thinking of going away for a break. Just a fortnight. Will you be all right without me? My friend Sheila says she will look in on you. You remember Sheila's father Rex Haworth from medical school?”

“Fine physician.”

Rae had no idea whether Sheila would agree to it.

“So where are you going off to Rae?”

“Mum's cigarettes arrived the other day, and I thought I might go to France.” She tried to make it sound as casual as going to the beach.

“That's a long way from here. What do you want in France dear?”

“I want to tell that French woman about mother.”

“Who?”

“You know, the cigarette friend, the flatmate from the Sorbonne.”

“Well you're not going to find her, dear,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because it wasn't a woman.”

“It wasn't a woman?”

“No. I think you'll find it was a chap.” With difficulty Rae's father turned his head and looked out the window.

“Oh,” said Rae.

She turned and looked with him out at the wet
rhododendrons. Raindrops were making their way down the pane, separating and colliding and separating again. So change was possible, even after death. Deep inside Rae a great bird lifted off and the land below fell away. She was high above the white caps and there was no sound but the wind.

“Will you be all right Dad?”

“Yes. No. I don't know. You go on. I'll still be here.”

“Dad, are you sure?”

“I suppose so. Does this Sheila friend of yours make scones?”

“I'll ask Dad, I'll ask.”

T
HE TRACK TO THE salt marsh was crowded with lupins poised to shed their seeds with a twisted cracking of each blackened pod. Once on the sand, Hattie let Shelley off his leash and set out towards the channel at the harbour entrance. Shelley ran ahead, tongue out, weaving in and out of the tide lines as he sniffed the morning news. There had been a storm in the night. Papery sea lettuce and the green nubbled beads of Neptune's necklace lay slung about the flats in greater quantities than usual. More rain would come around eleven o'clock, and more again in the afternoon. Around five it might clear up. It was always this way.

When Hattie reached the end of the flats, she turned to walk parallel with the channel towards the sea. There she sensed the usual clutch of child-sized shades running before her along the beach, shouting at each other to come and look at a dead mollymawk where it had washed up against a piece of driftwood. Obediently she also stopped to look at the tide-rinsed bird, noting the sand already banked up against the sharp curve of its useless beak. Hattie felt the presence of the long-dead children every morning, and every morning she
had to stop and wait until the children's cries faded and her heart rate slowed. She turned towards the sea, and, frowning, concentrated on a couple of discombobulated sea slugs lolling like turds in the tide. Further along, bouquets of sea tulips lay tossed up among the confetti of shells. She passed them by; she had painted the fleshy heads sagging on their goose necks often enough.

Nearby, in the depths of the channel grew an entire field of sea tulips, endlessly flowering and feeding in the sea currents. Funny things, sea tulips. They start off as animals and end up as plants. Hattie often imagined the pattern that the stems and heads might make en masse, waving in the depths of the channel. She had a weakness for pattern and she knew it; wherever three or more objects appeared together, well, that created significance, even if it was accidental. Sometimes she would deny herself pattern; deny the repetitions that created rhythm and the links that made narrative. She would try to paint the object as itself alone and not seen in relation to any other thing, except her own eyes. Other times she fell off the wagon entirely and silk-screened whole rolls of wallpaper just to get the patterns out of her system. Some days she did nothing but sip her cognac by the fire.

Hattie. Her real name was Heliotrope. Her mother had been an artist's model back when there were only two models in the whole city of Dunedin and all decent New Zealanders considered modelling to be tantamount to prostitution. Heliotrope. What a name for a child. It was preposterous, redolent of ragged satin undergarments strewn over an
ancient odorous carpet. Hattie, on the other hand, was not a bad name for an artist, and Hattie had decided to be an artist at the age of six.

Now Hattie was seventy-three. She had yet to fall upon getting out of bed, and she had no children to worry about her. She had a good dog, a good stick, a seldom used lock on the door, and no external display of rot, barring the wrinkles and the rough patches. She had already decided to move into town once she could no longer make her morning walk, but she could not really see herself studying a hand of bridge in an overheated lounge decorated with the flesh-coloured spears of gladioli in vases.

The ghostly children scattered and disappeared. Ahead Hattie caught sight of the last three in a chain of linked dredge buckets, long since beached after the end of their useful life hauling silt out of the shipping channel. Occasionally, after a good storm, a section of the buckets would surface in bas-relief against the pale sand, hefty and mottled like the bellies of chained ogres or the vertebrae of long buried dinosaurs. Hattie loved the dredge buckets, mainly because she never knew when they would appear. For months she had wanted to paint a dredge bucket triptych. Now she stepped up to take a closer look at the spackled line of the sand around the edges of the hulks where they lay submerged in the sand.