Notorious (30 page)
I say, ‘And you wonder why I prefer to stay here with Pietr.’
He uncaps the flask again but he doesn’t drink. He stands there, swinging the bottle from side to side. He says, ‘I’ll tell Mitch you’re refusing to work unless you find out about your brother. He half expects it anyway. Maybe he’ll pack you off home, blame it on me, clean house. Mitch likes cleaning house.’
‘I won’t go.’ I start climbing the slope.
‘If I say you go, you’ll go,’ shouts Devlin.
I stop next to a clump of slender pine trees shuddering in the cold. Tears are burning behind my eyes but I keep my voice steady as I say, ‘You tell Mitch I know it’s about Iraq. Those old smuggling routes Pietr’s grandfather set up. It’s all about the Americans.’
The colour seems to be back under his skin. Now he knows I am staying.
‘I like it here, Dev,’ I say. ‘I like the cold. I can breathe, after years.’
‘You like being here with Pietr.’ From the way his eyes narrow, I know he regrets his words the way I do mine.
‘Think what you like,’ I say, trying to match his earlier dismissal. Trying to hurt him as much. ‘You know, it’s ironic. Everyone is always so busy telling me that they never ask me.’
‘Ask what?’ he shouts.
I start climbing.
‘Ask you what?’
I don’t stop until I have almost reached the ridge.
‘About Koloshnovar,’ I shout down. He moves restlessly at the name. ‘No-one ever asked what I saw at Koloshnovar.’
B
oth Pietr and Devlin think I have forgotten about my brother. But often at night I stand in the corner of my bedroom where the shadows are deepest. The lights lining the walkway send beams through the clouds of mist. I see faces there: at first it was only Devlin’s because I was always looking to see whether he was watching me in the forest. Sometimes I see my mother; not very often, my father. Lately, it has been my brother. Never clearly, always out of the corner of my eye. Always leaving me. As the clouds twist and turn like wringing hands, I slide into the deepest shadows. I want to ask someone, If you can’t see me does that mean I am invisible?
I wander the house at night. Rosza’s hot milk isn’t always enough to send me to sleep. I go into the small sitting room next to the back terrace to look at the bare ground running down to the forest. This is Rosza’s favourite room, she says. It is quite different from the rest of the house. Three whitewashed walls with a feeling of stone, not steel, behind them; tapestry rugs on the polished wooden floor, two broad well-sprung sofas facing the bay windows. Crocheted cushions, a knitted rug over the back of the sofa, assorted boots and raincoats in the wicker basket by the terrace door. Photographs on the walls; some are duplicates of the ones in the album: the happy couples, gleaming cars, tennis players prancing on velvet lawns. I still haven’t seen any photos of Rosza’s family. All these are from Czeslaw’s home. Koloshnovar.
The room has the warm smell of Rosza’s black cigarettes. Sometimes I find her sitting, looking without blinking at a roll of pages elaborately inscribed in ink, their parchment edges curling. The title deeds to Koloshnovar, she tells me. She likes to hold them. ‘If you’ve ever known real poverty where you eat anything you can – rabbits, dogs, wolves – then nothing matches the triumph of owning your own land.’
There are things left absent-mindedly – discarded balls of wool, half-finished knitting – and others left maybe not so absent-mindedly: loose papers, notebooks, a pile of Rosza’s accounts. I never touch those, I never even try to look at them. In the first days, it was because I suspected a trap: special powder to stain my fingers, a hidden camera to film me. Later, it was because I was ambivalent about my role in the house. Now it is because I don’t care enough to look.
I sit on the padded seat next to the window, hug my knees to my chest. Ice-crusted rain has been falling all afternoon and the ground is patched in grey slush. Every now and then, a snowflake finds another in the swirls of mist. They make a join-the-dots shape, a tiny grey figure moving through the air.
Stefano tells me the house has a ghost that arrives with no warning and goes through and wrecks the place: tosses books off the shelves, cushions off sofas, leaves doors ajar. An angry spirit. Stefano says it only happens when Rosza is away.
I wonder.
I hear the wind punching the steel shell above me. It scatters the grey slush like wet, shredded newspaper. A brief rain of pebbles clatters onto the terrace, a smell of salt and sulfur creeps in through the cracks in the glass. The mist scatters. There is a moon after all, lighting the grey patches on the ground.
I wonder what it would be like to sleep under snow. Animals do it. It must be warm enough, under the mulch, the dead leaves, the flaking logs with their little heaters of mould.
A figure moves where the bare ground falls into the darker pool of the forest. Somehow he can see into the darkness in the room. He raises his hand, beckoning.
This can’t be Devlin. Devlin is off the case, fed up with me, sick of the whole thing. Maybe he has already left.
I pull on a pair of boots from the wicker basket, put the shawl around me, a raincoat. I ease the door open. Too late I wonder about an alarm. I have never asked. But it seems obvious, in the Triangle of Hunger. I freeze but all I hear are the trees, sighing like the sea, shaking their fringes of leaves. Maybe nobody dares to rob Rosza. Not with the lake nearby. Not with her history.
I go across the back terrace, feel my way down the stairs and the path, clinging to the lamp-posts. The moon is dodging behind streamers of mist and cloud. There is enough light to see outlines but not details. No faces. The man moves slowly out from the trees and stops, watching me approach. The moonlight hits his hair. It is pale, much paler than Devlin’s, but not as blond as Pietr’s.
There is only one other person I know who has that colour hair. Had that colour.
The path has steepened or maybe the slush is thicker. My legs are growing tired, there is pain in my jaw. Please let it be him, I say to myself. The man hasn’t moved. He is the right height, almost exactly the same as Devlin. That was the first thing I did – compare Devlin’s height to my brother’s. As a way of choosing whether to trust. Stupid when I think of it now. Just an excuse, I suppose. There was only ever one thing uniting us. Guilt.
I slip and almost fall, stop, start again. The man approaches. The moon is emerging from its shield of clouds. The light is streaming down brighter than I would have thought possible.
The man has almost reached me. I still can’t see his face.
Please,
please
. The moon swings out, triumphant. He steps towards me. Now the light hits his face. A voice says, ‘You have to come. They want the book. You have to come.’
I see his face and I scream and scream and scream.
‘S
o this is the diary entry,’ I say to the psychiatrist, ‘for August the tenth:
I am standing in a field with ninety bodies. Incredibly, the sun
is still shining. The grass is very green and the nectar from the honeysuckle
almost covers the smell from the corpses.
‘The Corporal says, These are the lucky ones.
‘
I shake my head. Yes, lucky, he says. He holds his bayonet tight to him,
knuckles white in red, leaning on it. Lucky to have a doctor. His eyes are
white pebbles. Lucky to have you. There is a fly crawling on my boot. Its
wings are dipped in blood. Tiny, red, stained-glass windows moving on my
boot. Soon it will fly away and I will be left behind. In a field with ninety
dead bodies. I will be left. I will – ’
‘Yes, yes,’ says the psychiatrist, snapping his fingers, exuding busyness, control. ‘You see? Key dream words: behind, fly away, left.’
‘But the bodies – ’
He waves a hand. The bodies are just window-dressing. Signifiers to what really matters.
I think ninety bodies matter. I want to tell him that this is not a quick pan over artfully arranged dummies. I see every face. I smell the honeysuckle, I am in the field. Back in the field. I do not want to tell him that I see all this when I am awake.
I smile cautiously. Big smiles are not good signifiers – I’ve learned that the hard way.
He smiles at me. Would I like to read something else?
I pretend to consider. There is no fine line between disclosure and appropriation in a psychiatrist’s office. If I don’t read, he will take.
In the early days, I read my own poetry. But that is a long time ago now.
‘You know the arrangement,’ he says, moderating his tone, proportional to the huge fees we are paying him. They are paying him.
I untie the long red ribbon around my diary, flick through it, my left hand gripping the cover, fingers digging in. In such a rubbery spongy world, sometimes only the pale marbled cover feels real.
‘Here is a little something I wrote when I was sad.’ More sad, I almost say.
I read a poem about the beauty of a rose garden, a piece I have constructed using key phrases from Eliot with a few clouds from Wordsworth and some Swinburne to soup it up. My need is greater than yours, TS.
I am halfway through when the psychiatrist begins tapping his gold-plated pen.
‘It
is
a bit twee,’ I say.
‘I think you should start writing more realistic pieces. Daily doings. How you feel.’
‘My family is really not going to like that.’
I see the concerns scurrying under his skin: back and forth, to and fro, money, duty, money, duty. His face settles.
‘I’m in charge here,’ he says.
I rise, slowly, from the red couch they brought in specially for me after I complained about the black one. Absence is a doorway, like caves, like mouths to hell, I had shouted, while the receptionist giggled. But I heard that she had shouted too, when she was fired.
The silky cover of the couch, as lush as moss, is brushed against the nap. The shadow I leave looks like a butterfly. But butterflies only live for a day. Maybe I should not say that. I don’t care enough not to say it.
‘Butterfly.’ He looks pleased. ‘Chrysalis. Emerging. Maybe it is a sign that you are mending.’
Not for the first time, I wonder whether he is qualified.
As I go out, I see the framed photo of his wife. The heavy silver square is angled conspicuously on the desk to reassure his unruly female patients, like me. I met her once in the waiting room. She had a short skirt which rode up as she uncrossed her legs. I saw the cuts on her inner thigh. Cuts I recognised. Her shiny brown eye rolls up at me.
‘So I said to him that I feel like a plucked flower on red moss,’ I say to my best friend Anna. She is sitting in a plastic chair in the corner of the hospital terrace. The light breeze lifts the hairs in the wispy rug over her knee, making the long strands of wool rise and vibrate like exhaust smoke from idling cars. The rug seems amazingly thin.
Anna is shading with black biro under the eyes of faces in a fashion magazine. Occasionally, her own eyes fill with tears, they run down her face. I yearn to comfort her but big sentences confuse her. She seems to prefer sounds. Or small words.
She shades eye sockets intently.
‘Actually, I said to him, I feel like a fucked plougher on a bed of snots. That’s Freudian, what do you think of that? Seeds and furrows and whatnot.’
She nods, her lips move. Almost a smile.
She is more doped up than usual, because of the last incident. I am tired, too. Winter grinds me down. It is time for my afternoon nap but I have agreed to keep Anna company while they search her room.
Everything sharp must go, the nurse says.
That seems to be my doctor’s motto too, I say. But the nurse won’t comment. They never will criticise the doctors.
The breeze lifts the fine hair on Anna’s blue-veined forehead. For a moment I see her, all those years ago: the foreign girl, my new friend, daughter of my father’s new partner, lying beside me counting dragon shapes in the clouds.
‘Anna, you know I am – ’
She nods.
‘If there is anything – ’
She shakes her head. The tears run down her face.
She takes a drink of water from the plastic cup.
The sadness is shit in my mouth.
It is August 15 and I am writing in my diary, like I have been told to, like a good girl.
This is what I write:
AUGUST 15:
Here is a real thing to write down, doc. My parents
disappeared for several days. The chauffeur, the new one, tells me
they went to the island casino off WA. To get away from it all. At
first I think that means me but it turns out the nurses found a picture
of my brother hidden under Anna’s mattress. It’s a photo my mother
hadn’t seen before and it set her off. So now I am alone in the Manse.
The one thing my brother left me, the one intact thing, was a bonsai
tree. At first I barely looked at it, certainly did not water it. Then I
realised it was still alive, despite me. It was an entire little world: a
minute pond with a Japanese-styled bridge in shiny bamboo and a
tree. Under the branches, the ground was dark in its own shadow.
The tiny veined leaves curled like living scrolls and around the trunk
was neon-green needle-grass which I trimmed with nail scissors. One
day, I discover a small black beetle has taken up residence under the
bridge. When I pour water over the tree, the drops catch in the little
parallel branches, teeter on the needle tips, making a jewelled casket.
The beetle comes out and stands in the shower. His? her? its? feelers
wave gently. The water trembles in the angles of the jointed legs:
onetwothree fourfivesix. The beetle holds the droplets like a water
carrier, retreating carefully. The black shiny round body becomes a
hood. I peer into the little darkness. Maybe there is a face in there.
AUGUST 19:
The hospital entrance looks like a hotel foyer, all softly
rounded couches and very, very large pastel prints. Sizes are always
extreme in rich places. Can Anna get something woollier than that
thin rug? I say to the nurse behind the three silver computer screens.