All the Voices Cry (8 page)

Dress, he said dress. Isabella looked at him, fascinated. He was one of those men who do not know the difference between a dress and a skirt.

“What else?” he asked.

“Sheep sorrel,” she said.

“Look beside your car at le parking. Small flower, red. Next?”

“Some kind of rhubarb.”

“So is it the Indian rhubarb
(Rheum officinale)
or the Turkish rhubarb
(Rheum palmatum)?
”

“I don't know,” said Isabella.

“Listen to me, mademoiselle: order it off the internet,” said Pascal.

“I just thought it would be more natural to make it. It's supposed to be a miracle cure, and I don't want to buy a miracle mail order.”

“So you think a miracle is
naturel?
Let her die. This is
naturel
. What do you do for a living?” he asked.

“I'm an actor.”

“
Tabernouche,
” he muttered.

“What difference does that make?” said Isabella. “Are you this nasty to everyone who asks you for help? I'm doing this for my mother, you know.” She opened her eyes as wide as she could, looked up at him from under the heavy burden of her dark green hair.

“Excuse me,” he said finally. “I am very busy today. I have to check some permit of fishing at Lac Parker. Come with me. I will show you some plant.”

Pascal took the track up the hill in short quick strides, pushing his mountain bike in front of him. Isabella picked up her skirts and hurried behind, keeping her eyes on his calf
muscles.
My cherub,
she might call him, if he were to become her lover, if he were to leave the forest, come get a job waiting tables in the big city. She wanted him for his youth, for the hard thin torso beneath the skin. His skin would be satiny. There would be a line where the tan stopped.

She began to perspire. Now she was having a real experience, surging onwards in the wake of Pascal making his way up the hill. Why, there were even berries beside the track, three on a narrow stem; globes of bright dark blue like the sky in a storybook. They were passing a spot where the rocks hung over the river and you could slide in under the ledge where the water foamed alongside. You could scrub it down, get rid of any slime that might grow in the shadows.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the base of a birch tree where a white plant was growing out of the leaf litter.

“What's that?” she asked.

“Indian pipe plant.”

“Is it in the Elcarim recipe?”

“No. Look. It is a plant without chlorophyll.”

The pipe plant grew singly and in clumps, not tall, its head drooping over in a bell. The whole plant was white, not clean white like paper, not translucent like cooked fish, but ghastly white. It had thin waxy stems, frilled about like a toadstool, and at the opening of the bell, where a bee might land, there was a black rosette, puckered like a tiny dark mouth.

Pascal was looking hard at her.

“Now ask me why I'm showing you this,” he said.

Isabella asked. She was good at taking directions.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“Because it looks dead, but it is alive,” he said. “We call it Corpse Weed. The living dead of nature. You see? Death grows, it lives with you. Go to your mother, sit with her, and listen to her.”

“But I can't stand it,” said Isabella.

Once, long before theatre school, before high school even, at the age of 11, she took up her mother's guitar and began to play, thinking to please Moira with a song that she had made up herself. Moira came into the room, drink in hand. She sat down to listen. Part way through the second verse, Moira stood up and carefully placed her drink down on the coffee table.

“You have made a mistake,” she said in a quiet, cold voice. Before Isabella could ask how Moira knew that when she had written the song herself, Moira grabbed the guitar out of Isabella's hands, and swung it, smashing its back against the stone wall of the living room.

“I said you have made a mistake,” she said again, without raising her voice. “I am the singer, not you.”

The corpse plant was stupid and ugly and the colour of an old dog turd. Isabella wanted to crush it under her heel. Hopelessness crept through her skull like mist, hung like a damp aura about the bright vision of her mother, once Moira Delacourt the lounge singer, now spread out upon the couch at the motel, aggressively eating donuts to show the world that she could still do something. Isabella did not especially want her mother to live or die, what she wanted was a different mother.

“How come you know so much, Mr Pascal Park Warden?” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I said how come you know so much?”

“Mother, sister, breast cancer. Okay?”

Her mouth refused to work. She could not think what to say.

“Okay,” he said, looking off up the hill. “So now I am going to check the permit of fishing. You know where to go? Down the hill, along the lake.”

Her mouth unfroze long enough to twitch out the words of thanks for his time.

“No problem.
Bonne chance
with that miracle.” He disappeared up the hill on his bike.

Isabella took off her skirt, suddenly sick of it, and bunched it up in front of her. Barelegged she started down the path, kicking at the brown stones as she went, reciting Ophelia's lines in a sulky voice.
He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone.

She was surprised by the tinging of bells ahead. Two men on mountain bikes were making their way up the track, ringing as they went. They looked at Isabella's legs and with some enthusiasm announced that they had seen a bear, so she ought to make noise as she went. Show tunes, they suggested. Show tunes? Isabella could do show tunes.

She knew it looked out of the ordinary: a woman with dark green hair emerging from among the trees, her legs scratched by briars and thorns, belting out that the sun would come out tomorrow; singing to keep the bears at bay.

C
ARL COULD NOT HAVE been out of sight for more than seconds before Robyn could no longer hear the sticks cracking under his sandals. The sound of the boy's movements had blended into the overhead rush of the leaves and the rustling of the river water around the rocks. Robyn sat very still on the riverbank. A lone maple leaf spooled past in the current. It was silly to panic on a Sunday morning.

“Let's cut through the trees here. The portage trail must be over the hill.”

Robyn's older sister Sandrine had made the suggestion not five minutes ago. They were supposed to be rock-hopping down the river to the next lake. Robyn knew that the river would arrive at the lake and so would the portage trail, but that did not mean that the portage trail would follow the river. She didn't want to cut through the trees.

There was already a woman missing in the national park. Yesterday they had seen her picture on a poster at the gate. She was older than Robyn, 33, 5'6,” 140 pounds, with pale curly hair. She was last seen wearing a green polar fleece. Her mountain bike was silver with yellow panniers. The woman did not have the appearance of someone who wanted to leave
life behind. She looked happy enough to stay with the person who had taken her photograph. There must have been an accident.

The water flowing beside Robyn made a hollow gollop as it fell from a pitcher-shaped scoop of stone. Perhaps the photograph was old. Perhaps the woman did want to be lost. Robyn could not remember her name.

 

The day had begun well enough, fresh and bright, with only the slightest hint of fall coolness in the wind that blew the hair back from their foreheads while they ate their oatmeal. They had camped the previous night at the head of the lake, and now they hoisted the cooler up high beyond the reach of animals, stowed their gear in the tent and set off.

Where the river left the lake the rocks were large and encrusted with algae. The morning sun winked off the tepid pools between them. Carl walked along the riverbank, startling a large green frog back into the water. They all crouched down to admire its strong kick.

“A frog knows where it wants to go,” said Carl. It took ten minutes of effort, but he caught the frog in a net and put it in his collecting jar where it scrabbled at the plastic sides, its scythe-like swimming toes still kicking.

Robyn wanted to return the frog to its habitat, but Carl was determined to let the frog go at the next lake.

“It will start a new colony there,” he said.

Sandrine went first, leaping from rock to rock down the middle of the river. Her boots had a good grip. She did not
care if she got wet. Robyn and Carl idled along the river's edge, stooping under branches, swinging around the up-thrust ruddy trunks of the cedars, and squatting to examine fat caterpillars that had fallen off the maple trees into the pools. Under an overhanging bank Robyn found four toadstools arranged like orange candles on a cupcake of moss. To Robyn the day felt as special as a birthday. She was showing the toadstools to Carl when Sandrine turned around and shouted back up the river at her.

“Robyn, come on.” Sandrine lengthened the syllables in a flat sing-song way.

“Don't get your knickers in a twist, Sardine,” said Robyn under her breath. Carl looked at his mother, surprised.

“Sardine?” he said.

 

June and Jonathan Cleghorn had two daughters: Sandrine and Robyn. Sandrine was the athletic one and Robyn was the younger one.

Nothing deterred Sandrine. In March, all through high school, Sandrine was up before dawn, skiing out over the back field until the sky turned pink and Robyn appeared on the back porch, her windmilling arms the signal that breakfast was ready. Then Sandrine would jump and turn to halt, the hardened snow crystals skittering out behind her. No matter what the season, when you hugged Sandrine, you could feel the cold air in a cloud about her cheekbones.

For the last six years, Sandrine had spent the summer months of the Northern hemisphere working as a Nordic ski
instructor in the South Island of New Zealand. Robyn had seen photos of the apricot sunset behind the mountain tops, but she still could not imagine Nordic skiing above the treeline. It was just like Sandrine to find a previously un-thought of way to perform a regular physical activity. All she had to do was go to the other side of the world to do it. This year, rain had ruined the southern ski season. Sandrine had not been home three days before she decided to take Robyn and Carl on a camping trip.

Robyn had no need to make grand trans-Pacific migrations. She lived what she thought of as a kitchen-centred life. She located clean gym shorts for Carl, she used up the rhubarb at the back of the fridge, she worked shifts at Clifton's Greek & Italian Restaurant and she ferried Carl and his cello to music lessons.

Robyn was always amazed by the way that people without children appeared to have no idea about the elastic skein of responsibility created by motherhood. Dashing about the globe, people without children just slid in and out of other people's kitchencentred lives like, and here Robyn could not think of a word that was not vaguely slippery. Whatever it was, it was frustrating. People without children even had time to find the words for things.

Occasionally, Robyn would remember that ten years ago she too was a person without children. Usually her next thought would be
and that's how I got pregnant.

 

Robyn sat on the riverside in the wavering forest light.

“Come on Robyn,” Carl called out from the other side of the river.

Robyn looked at Carl's strong knees and ankles. He was standing on one leg holding onto a cedar branch for balance, his collecting jar in the other hand. Whatever had happened to
Come on Mom?

Sandrine started off into the forest. Carl, drawn by the charm of her energy, turned his back and bounded up the bank after his aunt, pushing his way through the spindly lower branches of the firs until he disappeared over the top of the incline.

So, Carl had left her; Carl was nearly ten. Adolescence could not be far off. Earlier in the week Robyn had heard him practising his cello against her. He was in his bedroom with the door shut, playing minor scales, all the way up and over the extended penultimate interval, but stopping short of the top. He knew that she would be listening at the bottom of the stairs; he was not going to give her the satisfaction of the last note.

Robyn looked at a black spray of weed that floated in the current. She turned her mouth down. She did not move from her rock. All she could think was:
I'm the mother. I should get to decide whether we cut across.

In order to tell them that she was not coming she would have to go far enough into the woods to be able to see them; it would be the same as following them. Sandrine might stop and call out, but she would not turn back. Robyn would be
expected to follow because Robyn always did follow Sandrine, and because Carl was there.

“I don't want to,” she said aloud, but there was no one to hear. She stood up and began picking her way downstream over the rocks.

 

Carl's father had been a guitarist in a band called The Chokers. He had been Robyn's chiaroscuro lover for one week only; appearing golden out of the darkness of a basement bar. The unexpected pregnancy had terminated Robyn's studies in art history. She had returned home to her parents' brick house at Stonehaven where she took on the life that was expected of her.

In Stonehaven there was not much room for words like chiaroscuro. Clifton's Greek and Italian Restaurant served pizza for the boys and salads for the girls, with the olives and feta on the side, since it was Stonehaven after all. Robyn was one of the girls, a group of women who plated the house salads, served the meals and scrubbed off the tomato splatters that the chef baked onto the stovetop.