Saltskin (8 page)

'Where are you?' His voice was hard.

'I'm at the marina.'

'Prove it.'

'Well, the ocean is behind me and I think the yacht
club is that big white building on the hill in front. Where
are you?' Gilda glanced at the guard, who waited for her,
and, disturbingly, eyed her.

'I'm not there, I never was there, and in half an hour
I'm changing the number on my phone so you can never
reach me again.'

'Oh, okay, I'll call you back then,' said Gilda, trying
to hide the effect of Allan's words, but she was horribly
embarrassed. The guard had probably heard every word.
She shoved her stuff in her bag, said to the guard breezily,
'Change of plans,' and ran back along the wooden wharf
to the gate. She fumbled and cursed the lock and, once
through, ran up the nearly vertical stone steps. In a normal
frame of mind she would have had to pause partway for
breath, but she was angry. Once up on the parade she rang
his number. He answered.

'Okay then,' she said, 'did you ever love me?'

He hesitated and she sensed his quandary. She knew he
had. Once. But he replied, 'Probably not.'

'Then how dare you marry me if you didn't love me?'
she fired back, turning in circles as she spoke. 'You know
what? Do change your number. I never want to speak to
you again either, and you know what else?' She forced her
voice calm, steely. She stopped, stood very still. 'One day
you're going to go looking for the love of your life, and
she is not going to return your phone calls.' She hung up
on him and walked very fast along the parade, her dress
moving against her body, her long hair bouncing.

Waves shuffled to and fro on the beach down to her
right. She had done all she could — travelled to the other
side of the globe for love. She had proved to herself that
she at least took love, loyalty and marriage seriously.
She had fulfilled her role as wife as far as she had been
permitted. And now she felt excused of all responsibility
to her vows, and, for that matter, all responsibility to love.
The nuptials had never been legal, such was the rush, but
she had considered that it was pledging your bond in a
ceremony that made it real, not the red tape. No one had
been married in her family as far back as anybody knew.
Nor had any boys been born. Men drifted in and out,
telling the women how to use their bodies.

The adrenalin drained away and a peaceful lull took its
place. She had only wanted him to want her. She realised
she didn't really want him.

Gilda sat on a bench facing the ocean.

An elderly gentleman sat down beside her, his hands
propped on a walking stick. He had the grandfatherly air of
a character in an Enid Blyton book, his moustache curled
out past the edge of his nostrils in a waxed grey half moon.
He wore a tweed waistcoat over an open-necked shirt, long
shorts and sandals. His legs looked handsome.

Gilda gazed out at the long, pebbled beach, blue sky
and sea and brilliant sunshine.

'Turner painted this exact scene,' the man said. 'I'm
Cecil Mills.'

'Oh. Gilda.'

'Are you a painter?'

'Yes,' she said wistfully, although she wasn't. It was
easier to just go along, and in a way as a photographer she
was at least image-oriented.

'Care to have tea with me?'

'No thank you. I'm not very good company at the
moment.' She half smiled and the mole above her lip lifted
and partly disappeared in the crease from nose to mouth.

'A walk, then.' He stood.

As they walked the promenade he told her of the great
works of art he had seen, and asked her conversationally
what museums and galleries she had visited on her journey,
noting her Pacific accent.

'I'm going through a tapestry phase,' Cecil said. 'The
workmanship is a delight. There is a particular one in a
private collection in Nice, on the French Riviera, of a
mermaid reclined on a rock — my, but she is a sight.' He
felt her interest rise. 'Are you fond of tapestries, dear?'

'I don't know much about them but I've always liked
mermaids.'

'Well, you must see this one,' he said, and tucked her
hand in his arm. Their eyes met and for some strange reason
she experienced the sensation that sometimes precedes a
fortuitous sequence of events, the insight that God might
have prepared a plan for her. She had no faith in God —
there was no plan, and God could go get stuffed — but her
body sprouted goosebumps and she felt her sweat cool.

He noticed the change in her and let go of her hand.
He coughed, and suddenly she felt terribly protective of
him.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I must learn not to touch — that's
what they say to me in galleries: "Please sir, don't touch."'

He chortled, and for a moment she saw what he must
have looked like as a young man: earnest, cheerful.

She said nothing but linked her arm in his again and
they strolled silently along the promenade, away from the
marina. The walkway curved down to the beach. An old
caravan in garish colours, rust-chipped, stood beside a
small Ferris wheel with no children on it. It looked sad in
its faded splendour. A few derelict old men were sunning
themselves on the shore, white handkerchiefs tied in
four knots on their heads. It was a peaceful scene. Gilda
removed her boots, letting the pebbly sand mould around
her feet. She had always hated her feet, but for once she
let the world see. She felt peculiarly drained of pretence,
like a peeled banana. She left the boots where they fell and
smiled into the sun, gave a little sigh. Cecil, with just the
briefest glance at her feet, squeezed her arm in his.

They moved closer to the water's edge and sat down. He
asked her where she was from and she replied, 'Riverton,
New Zealand. I'm going home.'

'Ah yes, now wasn't that once Jacob's River, a whaling
port?'

'Yes,' she said, mildly surprised that he might know of
such a remote place. She only recalled its former name
herself when he mentioned it. History wasn't her strong
point. Like most colonial countries, hers had a recorded
history that went back only so far. In the early days there
were few records kept and she had no idea how her family
had arrived in New Zealand. But they must have come
from somewhere else because everyone did. It was one
reason she had wanted to visit England — she thought her
ancestry might stir in her. But it hadn't.

Why Jacob's River had changed its name was a mystery
to Gilda, but she recalled the fat river that ran through the
settlement and into the inlet.

'Hungry?' Cecil asked, and when she nodded he
ambled, leaning on his cane, to the caravan and bought
a pottle of chips smothered in vinegar and one of baby
octopus. He returned to her with small wooden forks
like the spoons she used to eat tubs of Tip Top ice-cream
with. They sat and ate the brine and salt of the meal. The
octopus flesh squeaked as she chewed, and he told her
about his retirement from the family ship-building firm,
here in Ramsgate; how his interests were now more in art.
He told her his son was smart and single and, with a lovely
glint in his eye, he spoke of his faithful wife, may she rest
in peace, and how they used to walk along this beach.

He looked so content with merely the memory of his
beloved that Gilda smiled sadly and told him he was lucky.
To which Cecil replied, 'You are lucky, my dear. Love will
find you.'

Then Cecil asked her to wait there. He had something
to show her; he would be back soon. He half walked, half
ran up to the road. But Gilda did not wait. She squeezed
her thumb and forefinger together to ease a headache
that was increasing in pressure. She hadn't dreamed for
a while — too long — and if a drought went on too long
she would be overwhelmed with an orgy of dreaming. She
would faint wherever, and not wake up until all the dreams
had spooled, like a film from a projector, and if a blackout
was close, even an ordinary environment could become
frightening. She wanted to be alone, to get somewhere
safe. She was so hot she worried maybe she had a fever.
She walked the few short streets to the village centre and
saw an Oxfam shop about to close.

She quickly selected an old peach petticoat, changed
into it, sliding her hands over her waist and hips where
the garment hugged her frame, and left her other clothes,
symbolically, on the floor of the changing room, like a
shed skin.

She made her way back to the station, the paving stones
warm and smooth under her bare feet, her boots abandoned
on the beach. In her mind she worked out what time she
would be back in London and hoped she could make it
before one of her turns. She hadn't had one since she
had been abroad and she found herself welcoming it, the
way an injury can make one feel special. She admonished
herself.
Think like a victim, live like a victim
.

A black cab pulled up beside her and she recognised the
driver's hairy face. He was grinning at her and she laughed.
In that moment she realised her old laugh had returned,
and with it the beginnings of a spiralling feeling, like water
down a drain. She felt almost drunk.

'Hop in, love,' the driver said, and she climbed in the
back. Black cabs are so roomy and lush, she thought, and
fancied she was on a before-and-after TV show and had
rounded the partition to show her transformation.

She was pushed back in the seat with the movement of
the cab.

'I came all the way from New Zealand to Ramsgate to
meet a man I thought I loved and he didn't turn up.'

The driver glanced at her in the mirror. He knew
everyone in the village and most everyone got in his cab
and just talked. He nodded, as he always did, as if to say,
'Aye, life's queer, many strange turns and full of shitty
surprises.' And somehow his nod also conveyed that all
was perfect, and that all she needed was trust. But he was
shocked. She was so gorgeous.

'What?' he said, turning around in his seat, taking his
eyes off the road. 'But what's wrong with him? Don't know
what's good for 'em, do they? Got heads like logs. Well,
I'm sorry for you, dear, but he just wasn't the one.' He
turned back to the road, then back to her and back to the
road, shaking his head in disbelief. 'I'll let you in on a wee
secret, dear. Love will find you.'

'So I hear,' she said. 'So I hear.'

In her London flat — with most of the fence taken away
during the war to make bullets — she waited for the
blackout, like a knock on the door by a rascally child, but
it never came. This annoyed her because she needed relief,
and now the looming threat/promise of it would be with
her until who knew when. She might faint tomorrow or
not for weeks.

She gave notice in her job as a photographer's assistant.
Packed her bags with treasures she'd found, said goodbye
to her Polish flatmates, sculled vodka with grass in it. She
was loath to leave London and the pocket of reprieve she
had found in the streets where no one knew her. She loved
the freedom, the clash of cultures, the markets and jazz
clubs, the museums — she loved that everything was new
and ancient at once. She didn't want to go, but she had to.
It was like a magnetic pull.

Still, it was another few months before she boarded
a bus and a train and then an aeroplane that flew her
homeward, and Gilda felt she were being banished from
the world at large. A map was projected on the screen of
the aeroplane bulkhead: a tiny red plane over the vast land
of Europe, slowly, slowly, slowly making its way across
zillions of miles.

Over Eastern Europe, over Asia, over Australia to
the most far-flung, forgotten, godforsaken islands in the
boondocks and backwaters of the world: New Zealand. And
to the smallest town at the very bottom of the country:
Riverton, née Jacob's River.

Gilda:

Eve comes out of the sea towards me, fishes and lobster and
sea fruit of all kinds all over her, the way natives wear feathers
and bone as ornamentation. What a glorious sight. She walks
towards me, water streaming off her body, sparkling droplets that
twinkle in the sun like sequins. The way she moves is as though
she has been strolling on the ocean floor simply picking the fish like
apples off trees, and she is serene, enchanting and powerful and
her presence washes over me like a blessing. The scene is always so
natural and ordinary.

A little girl in a white petticoat, barefoot, runs to her and
takes the fish off in layers, like unwrapping a kimono, with Eve
turning a little to help her unwind a long piece of kelp all tangled
like necklaces. Layer by layer, she removes snapper and every fish
you can think of and great clusters of mussels in their hairy husks,
and oysters with their flawed pearls. The little girl prises these
open with a fruit-knife and sucks them from the shells, lets them
slip down her throat. I often wake from this dream with the briny
slick of oyster juice in my mouth as if I've swallowed the whole
sea.

A fire burns, the flames orange and sparking. Fish, guts and
all, go in the flames, as the woman and child huddle for intimacy
rather than warmth, faces oily and slick from fish juice. They're
covered in sand but they don't mind; you get used to eating bits of
grit, just the same as soil on a carrot pulled fresh from the ground.
Eve is there but she is absent, too, and in her eyes there is nothing.
They're empty like a baby's, except she is not waiting to be filled
up, but rather she has been drained, and even though I want to be
close to her, to know her, I want also for her to go away.

Wood smoke from chimneys settled a bluish cloud over the cribs, and through
it shone the last shards of the sun that her mother used to call the fingers
of God.

Nothing had changed.

Gilda slowed; the shingle snagged at the tyres, forcing
the car to follow the ruts. She wound down the window and
dinner smells from the village tugged at her, made her feel
lonely and homely at once. She took in the ship-building
yard and the ruin of the whaling station — in its cavernous
depths she had snogged more than her fair share of boys in
a race to grow up, to be the first to fall in love, and to dig
for it in all the wrong places, in all the wrong pants.

What — scared you'll get pregnant or are you a lezzo?
Boys who
were different in shape and shade and yet indistinguishable
from one another, as if made by a cookie cutter. The same
lust and the same puckered expression when relieved. She,
elated at her own power, spread-legged and bountiful but
all too fleeting.

She gave a wry smile, for it all seemed so long ago, and
as she continued driving, her gaze went to the fishing boats
lilting in the harbour, as pretty as books on a shelf. The
inlet, where the fat river teeming with eels met the ripple
of Foveaux Strait, a sheet of blue out to the horizon. It was
exactly the same as it had always been, and there was solace
and annoyance in that.

There, right on the beach, the homestead was circled
by a veranda that offered shade or sun any time of day. It
was a mongrel of amateur extensions, like something old,
something new, something borrowed, something blue. It
always seemed to Gilda to be a house of secrets about to
topple. A turreted tower, round and white, hogged half the
roof and overlooked the sea. This was her bedroom.

She sighed. Why had she come home to stale memories and the
watertight reputation of being unlucky in love?

Gilda sat, eating marmalade on toast, sweet and runny over
the butter, while her aunt made coffee. Outside, the dew
had frosted on the sculptures in the garden: sun and moon
entwined, lovers embracing, faces half trapped in rough
stone. Overhead the mist was being blown out to sea.
The open fire glowed warm and bright. Cousin Martha's
footfalls sounded through the ceiling, moving about as she
ran water in the claw-foot bath.

Aunt Maggie, permanently covered in a film of sculptor's
dust, brought the coffee to the table and put a generous
spoonful of sugar in Gilda's cup. 'Sugar and spice and all
things nice,' she said, and slid into the chair opposite. She
held her cup in her hands the way people do settling in for
a long conversation when they have something on their
mind. A long grey plait hung over her shoulder.

Gilda leant forward. 'Go on, then. Spit it out.'

'All right, I will. I want to know if you have been having
your hallucinations.'

'Hallucinations — is that what we're calling them now?'
Gilda laughed but without mirth and shifted in her seat,
her face flushing defensively.

'Please don't be prickly. I'm just asking if you have had
any more of your episodes — any recent blackouts.'

Silence.

'Ginger, honey, I don't have a standpoint on what they
are, really I don't. I'm on your side — if there could possibly
be any other side. I'm curious, not concerned. What are
you now — thirty? Surely we've moved on from asylums
and can talk about this rationally? It's accepted that you
experience
things
.'

It sounded odd said out loud, and Aunt Maggie curled
her mouth in a comic face, a face that had always made
the child Gilda laugh, so she smiled obediently but said,
begrudgingly, 'Is it crazy to act crazy in a crazy situation?'

'It's perfectly normal.' Maggie slapped the table in
agreement.

'I have a question. Where
do
all the hysterical women
go now that they've closed the institutions and invented
happy pills? Now there are no funny farms to go to to
be looked after, no electric shocks like cattle-prods for the
masses. I couldn't even go to rehab without an addiction,
unless unrequited love is an addiction, but that's irrelevant
now anyway.'

Tirade over. And she half meant it as a distraction
technique, to turn her aunt from enquiring about the
dreams that had tormented and yet soothed her for as long
as she could recall.

'I guess they just marry farmers and go barmy in
the wopwops.' At the word marriage Maggie looked up
sheepishly.

'It's fine. It's over,' said Gilda. 'I've lived it out. I can't
believe the fuss now.' She sighed and softened.

'Oh, I am pleased to hear it. Wet rag, that one. And you
know, the episode really wasn't about him, honey. He was
just a reflection.'

Gilda rolled her eyes. Could her aunt be any more
Mother Earth if she tried? She said testily, 'I worked
that out. It was like he lit a fuse inside me to a bomb of
melancholy that was always there. He was the spark and
so I blamed him, but I have always felt bereft, as if I've
misplaced something important — a person or a thing or
just a way of being.'

'You wouldn't be the first to use a romance to fill
a void, Ginger. God, it's a trait of the Page women, like a
gypsy curse, and whatever he was, it was amazing you even
managed to wed, to actually have a wedding! We were all
so astonished — it was like you'd cracked a code. You know
you come from a long line of unwed mothers in this clan.
Seven generations,' said her aunt, remembering the legend
passed on from mother to daughter.

'Spinsters and soiled women and proud of it!' said Gilda.
They clinked their coffee cups in a toast and sighed.

It wasn't that the Page women could not get men.
They most certainly could, and did. Droves of them, like
fleas stupid with lust. Coats, jerseys, socks and gumboots,
fishing rods and even old vehicles lived on at the house
long after the men had rolled on. Whenever there was a
half-hearted spring-clean these items always managed to be
kept. Some of the suitors were mourned, others forgotten
as if they had never existed. But none of the women could
claim to have secured love.

Outside, the frost was beginning to thaw. The morning
sun began to filter into the kitchen.

Aunt Maggie went on. 'You were never hysterical in
that sense — it was never like you were mentally defective.
No one would've put you away just because you were
grief-stricken — I wouldn't have let them, but no one really
meant to. The psychologists and do-gooders just wanted
to get to the bottom of it. For a while it seemed like every
charlatan and soothsayer crossed that threshold but in the
end no one could make it out. You were so small — a wee
bird of a thing.' Maggie's face softened like melted butter.

'Are you still talking about the break-up?' said Gilda
drolly, although she knew her aunt wasn't. 'Fixing Gilda'
seemed to be Maggie's sole purpose in life. But then
Gilda knew that wasn't quite true. Nevertheless, she was
annoyed.

'Oh no, you took it hard, ending before it had begun,
I'll grant you, but show me a woman with a broken heart
who doesn't fall apart — one arm under the bed, leg on the
bench and heart gone to the chooks. And people who had
never really loved in the passionate way you did, or who
could not take the rawness of your sadness, saying, "Pull
yourself together!"'

Maggie thumped the table, furiously protective, and the
sugar bowl jumped. 'It's not that easy, and I know. People
don't understand it's not that simple to just pull yourself
together. It's like a broken triple strand of pearls that must
be rethreaded one by one. Like your poor mum — and
yes, I am going to talk about her, because the past must be
purged. I've always maintained that grief needs to be done
on the spot, and be damned if others can cope or not.
Grief is good. We should have had an official mourning
period. Hired some wailing women and done it all proper,
instead of making out nothing awful had happened. But
there was no corpse, was there, Ginger? No body to bathe
and balm and send off to heaven. No body of your mother
— and none for Allan, either, for that matter.'

She sat back and nodded at her niece, drumming her
fingers on the table as she thought. Then she leant forward.
'I think you've come home to sort out the past. It's a plain
fact it's time to face it head on.' She reached out and
clutched Gilda's hand, and when Gilda removed it Maggie
toyed with some spilt sugar.

'I know,' said Gilda, draining the last of her coffee. She
stood and fetched the coffee pot, poured some more for
Maggie, resting her hand on her aunt's shoulder as she did.
She knew it was true: the dreams and the tangle of the past
had pulled her back like a magnet. But it was all a puzzle.
Gilda looked up at the ceiling and thought of all the Page
women who had lived in the old house. She knew the clues
to the past were in there somewhere.

'You were just a wee tot,' whispered Maggie.

Martha entered, wrapped in a robe and with a towel
about her head. She kissed her mother on the forehead,
gave Gilda's grey streak a tug and slouched in a chair.

Gilda poured her cousin a coffee and started to laugh
when she looked at her. Martha had drawn a beauty spot
above her lip just like Gilda's, just like she used to when
they were little. Martha had always coveted the mark, and
Gilda had always wanted straight black hair like Martha's
instead of being a gingernut with an odd, skunk-like grey
streak in a cowlick that had been there since she was born.

Martha sat there with a poker face. 'I've decided to get a
beauty spot tattooed on, then everyone will know we truly
are sisters.'

'You'll look like a gang moll. That's what women in
prison get — you've seen them with the dots on their faces.
It would go green, anyway. Don't do it,' Gilda warned, but
her eyes sparkled as she turned to put more coffee on.

Martha was aghast. 'Thanks for telling me — and in the
nick of time: I was about to make an appointment. So what
were you guys talking about?'

Something in Martha's voice made Gilda glance sharply
at her, just in time to see the look exchanged between her
cousin and her aunt. It made her uneasy.

'Oh, nothing; just catching up,' said Gilda.

Gilda leant on the empty bar at the Qualm's like a jaded
war veteran. But she was determined to take it all on and
treat it like one of life's great adventures. She felt a lift at the
decision and noticed, with joy, the absence of lovesickness.
She did a wee jig.

The mirror behind the bar reflected the room. In
the mid-afternoon light the place could have passed for
swanky, although the crystal chandelier done up with roses
and feathers was as dusty and cobwebbed as if it belonged
to Miss Havisham. But the wooden tables were well
polished over their dents, the red of the walls set off the
floral colours of the carpet, and the black cigarette holes
were barely visible under the sunlight that speckled the
room in rainbows.

Gilda was reflected too, her auburn hair ablaze and the
stains on her jeans barely visible. She struck the pose of
a 1950s Hollywood starlet for the mirror, all boobs and
pout, one hand splayed on her neck, her mouth open a
little, the other hand on her jutted hip. She turned and the
sun caught her like a stage spotlight.

'A bit more shimmying like that will make the cream
rise in the punters! I'll put a clause in your contract that
you'll be bound to by law,' boomed her boss. Sophia Rose
was not entirely kidding. 'You've always been fascinated
with mirrors,' she mused, drawing on her habitual cigar
and picking tobacco off her lip.

Gilda laughed. 'I've started collecting compacts.'

'Speaking of reflections, have you managed to make
any sense of those dreams of yours?' asked Sophia. She
still wore safety pins for earrings and coveted Vivienne
Westwood designs.

'Gosh, that was subtle. Why is everyone pouncing on
me about the dreams? We haven't talked about them in
years. Can't we just leave it be? I'm over the past, Sophia.
You know what they say — one day spent in the past is two
lost from the present. I just want to live from here on.' She
twirled to show her new attitude.

'What? You're the one who's been blabbing on about
them since you could talk! In fact I remember only one
brief period of silence and that was only because you had
an invisible gobstopper in your mouth!'

'I was a child.' Gilda stopped twirling.

'I could probably recite your dreams back to you. You
were so sure of them — I wish you'd be as sure of yourself
as you were about those damned dreams. You'd sit us all
down with our toy teacups and rattle off these stories, and
your mother and I, we'd sit there bloody nearly entranced
because you spoke with such feeling. Anyway, what are
you all deflated about? Why have you gone all saggy?
Straighten up there, you — tummy in, tits out. The real
question is: Have you got to the bottom of it?'

'Not exactly.'

'But that's why you've come home, isn't it? I'm right
about that, and I don't need you to confirm it. What about
the blackouts? I kept imagining you unconscious in all
sorts of dangerous places.' Sophia watched Gilda bristle,
saw her brow set, the shift of gear that preceded one of
Gilda's feisty outbursts. She chose to let it slide rather than
have the lass get her knickers in a twist — when Gilda got
angry it was as impressive as a stampeding horse.

Some men watched out for her outbursts, for when
Gilda's anger took control her skin flushed, her breast
heaved, her hair seemed to spring wantonly and they all
wondered what she would be like in bed. But only one
man had ever witnessed Gilda truly making love. Sophia
pondered that in another time she could have put Gilda to
work and made a filthy profit. She watched Gilda's cheeks
redden.