The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Essentially, yes,’ Taryn said.

  ‘You think very highly of yourself.’

  ‘This isn’t a matter of my thinking highly of myself. It’s common politeness that when someone asks, “What do you want?” you make some attempt at a frank answer. If you want your needs met, you say what those needs are. But what you wanted was to scare me.’

  He stared at her, sullen and thwarted. A small spirit seeking a large experience—that’s what he was. Taryn leaned across the table and said, very deliberate, ‘What have I to do with you? My time has not yet come.’

  The chain slithered off her shoulder and landed heavily on the bench behind her. She got up, and didn’t even check to see whether he would pursue her. She walked between the tables towards the back of the garden, as if she were off to look for a toilet. The pergola climbed overhead, receding until it was the canopy of a forest, trees just coming into leaf, each branch a tile in a tessellated pattern. Crown shyness, Taryn thought, as she had when she saw it the first time.

  She arrived at the mountain meadow. It was smudged grey. The deep, smothering silence of thick tree trunks had become something deeper. It was as if the vegetation, ancient trees to blooms ordinarily gone overnight, had stopped all at once, ceased to respire and draw energy from the earth.

  Taryn stood in the ghost meadow and waited for the young deer she remembered. The deer that didn’t know to be afraid. But the young deer was her sister, and she had to stop trying to find Beatrice, because Beatrice wasn’t to be found here.

  Taryn turned around and went back the way she’d come. McFadden had gone. The chain was still lying half on and half off the seat. Taryn hoped that the chain was there to offer her the gesture of walking away from her old bond, as the Muleskinner apparently had. But nothing here was that designed. She could summon things that were meaningful to her, but there wasn’t any meaning in the things themselves; the chain didn’t know to stay there so she could leave it. Nothing was that tidy, and no soul stuck in this supremely suggestive and unhelpful place could feel its way out of its errors.

  Taryn wandered all day. She made an effort to do what she should and kept her mother in mind at every street she chose to enter. She let her feet demonstrate her faith, and walked and walked.

  At dusk she could walk no more, which is to say she sat down for a short space and then found herself unable to get up again. It wasn’t weakness, but a lack of communication between her volition and her spirit’s limbs. She had been too long away from her body.

  She felt fairly calm about being stuck. After all, the souls around her were still going places, moving in an intent way, motivated by things they needed, to find places they thought would be better for them than where they were. Souls didn’t die, so if hers was losing vitality wouldn’t it just fade out of this world and return to where it belonged? That made sense. But then Taryn remembered the precautions they’d taken before they left, the careful ways in which their bodies had been arranged, the hair she’d sent her father, Petrus’s instructions and injunctions.

  She sat, in a state of doubt, able only to wait for whatever would happen. She thought of all the times when there were things she might have done, acts she could have performed, and hadn’t. She had stuck to habits, like the habit of being careless with her father, the habit of giving her friends only what they asked for, habits of secrecy and solitariness, of ‘good working relationships’ and postponed connections. She was as bad as Shift, and if she ever saw him again she’d ask him not what his plan was, but why he wouldn’t tell her what his plan was.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve got rid of that chain.’

  It wasn’t dusk anymore, but night. Shift was standing before her, taking up too much space, his mantle all bristle and shine. The air was tepid and smelled of rain. The low clouds reflected the town lights—such as they were, a yellow like the electric lamps in a painting by Edward Hopper.

  Shift pulled her to her feet. Her legs wouldn’t support her. He held her upright and frowned into her face, disconcerted.

  ‘I think I’m now reduced to a kind of poseable figure. So you had better figure out what pose you want me in.’

  He laughed. It was the only laugh she’d heard all day, and all the night before, and all the day before that.

  Shift picked her up. Bundled her under his mantle. The matter tapped and tickled her. It seemed very little reduced, as if he’d taken the time to pick up as much of what he’d dropped as he could.

  ‘Being purposeful is the mistake people make here,’ she said. ‘And it seems you’ve got stuck on keeping yourself decently clothed.’

  ‘My mother would always say that the dead have no new ideas,’ he said. ‘And decency isn’t a thing I’ve considered before.’

  ‘We’re not dead. And you’ve formed habits.’

  ‘Yes, Taryn.’

  She glowered at him. He wasn’t agreeing with her. He was acknowledging how like her this remark was. She could tell by his smile—which wasn’t directed at her, because he was watching where he was going.

  Taryn was too limp to nestle. She was a dead weight. But he carried her easily. She was a sylph-like eighteen-year-old who fitted the skirt with the geese.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I’m walking you about.’

  This wasn’t a reassuring answer. She had walked herself about all day and got nowhere.

  The hardpacked ground, the mudbrick walls, the parched bordertown look of the place seemed more real every minute, thickening around them as Taryn grew thinner. She felt she didn’t have long left, to herself, as herself. He wouldn’t be able to tell she was going—she wouldn’t grow lighter; she’d just lose substance all of a sudden. She should say something. Something real. Maybe goodbye.

  Now and then they passed a lighted window. All of the windows were well above their heads, set into walls between dark, enclosed courtyards. There were timber gates and wickerwork gates, all material, not imagined. Sometimes they caught the scent of the oil people were burning in their lamps—something faintly camphor.

  ‘Wait,’ Taryn said. ‘Go back.’

  Shift took several backward paces and raised his head to look where she was looking.

  Taryn was peering at the top of a wall and a wedge of ceiling visible through the window of an upper room. The room was illuminated by more lamps than most. The roughcast surfaces had been whitewashed, and the wall was decorated in a muted palette—dark olive for the outlines of vines, leaves and flowers, and the outlines filled in with dull but softer greens, some mustard yellows, greys, mushroom browns. The mural looked like a pattern on 1960s Scandinavian crockery.

  Shift didn’t ask Taryn what she wanted. He just pushed the gate open with his foot and crossed the courtyard, which was bare but not completely featureless. It contained a large rock, not meant as a seat, since it was set nowhere convenient. It had probably simply been enclosed when the courtyard was built.

  Shift carried Taryn upstairs to a single, sizeable room. There, small against her frescoes, mixing paint, was Taryn’s mother. Not her jaundiced dying mother, or ailing, parchment-pale mother, nor even the smartly dressed, nervy woman Taryn the teenager would often look at with irritation. No, this was the mother of Taryn’s childhood—slender, her red hair short on the sides and long on top, wearing a too-big shirt, sleeves rolled up, and cotton tights, baggy at the knees.

  Shift kicked a battered cushion to Addy Cornick’s feet—moving her worktable out of the way with one hip. He put Taryn down on the cushion and leaned her against her mother’s legs.

  Addy Cornick thanked Shift politely, put down her palette and brush, and placed her paint-freckled hand on Taryn’s cheek. ‘So good of you to visit me,’ she said, and her daughter heard in that one sentence all the things she’d forgotten: the Manor house, the private school, the riding lessons—everything short of a debut, since Addy came of age in the late seventies and wouldn’t have had a bar of that old nonsense. Taryn heard and saw the poise, the breeding
, the signs of class she’d never really noticed in her grandfather, and which Kiwi Ruth never demonstrated.

  ‘Adelaide Cornick of the Northovers,’ Shift said, in formal greeting. He rested his hand momentarily on Taryn’s hair, then left her with her mother.

  ‘How thoughtful that you came.’ Addy Cornick’s reiteration of her gratitude said a great deal. Taryn now understood how little her mother had expected of anyone in the final years of her life.

  ‘But, dear, I would have thought you’d done better for yourself,’ Addy said.

  Taryn didn’t want to say she was only in Purgatory temporarily. All its permanent residents had let themselves or others down, and it seemed irrevocable. Anyway, anything she said would sound like an excuse. Like the remark offered by Ruth Northover’s friend when she introduced her daughter to Taryn in a café in Whitianga. ‘Justine is only here for a visit. She lives in San Francisco.’ Justine, a crab who had climbed out of the bucket of crabs. Taryn had nodded, but felt a kind of baffled pain. She’d just spent an hour sitting on the stone pier on the far side of the harbour mouth, lulled by the sound the water made pulling and purling against the structure as the tide turned; listening to the water, and dropping deeper into the self that didn’t need to make decisions. No one with the option to walk to that pier every day needed excuses made for them.

  Taryn didn’t tell her mother she wasn’t stuck in Purgatory. She just said, ‘Ma, I’m satisfied with what I have.’

  ‘I often am too,’ Addy said, and looked around at her handiwork. ‘Honestly, Taryn, if this wasn’t difficult I wouldn’t enjoy it. It’s such a challenge to find pigments. I don’t like to roam too far—you know how the roads and trains can carry you away with no guarantee they’ll bring you back again?’

  ‘I noticed,’ Taryn said.

  ‘I’ve made do with what I can source locally. But I have recruited a few people to bring back anything they imagine might work. That’s how I acquired that almost yellow.’ Addy pointed at the washed-out ochre trefoil flowers on the painted vine that reached the top of the wall and crept across the ceiling.

  ‘How do you get up that high?’

  ‘I put a chair on a table. There’s no one here to scold me. And I’ve taken no harm on the occasions I have fallen off.’ She stroked Taryn’s hair. ‘You could help me mix paint if your arms worked.’

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘That must have been dreadful for you when you were alive. Was it like your Uncle Taylor and his motor neurone disease?’

  Taryn barely remembered Taylor—a non-familial ‘uncle’, and her godfather. She was eight when he died. She remembered only his wheelchair and cyborg-like array of tubes.

  ‘This paralysis happened since I arrived.’

  ‘Well, dear, that means it didn’t happen,’ Addy said sternly. ‘It’s only your mind imposing on your soul.’

  Taryn asked her mother to tell her about Taylor. ‘My memories of Taylor are sketchy. How did you meet? What did he do? How long was he sick before he died?’

  As Addy told Taylor’s story, it began to rain. Taryn gazed at the sparks of silver dropping past the window and the sill darkening as the rain seeped inside. There were flowers painted under the window, piles of loose and battered blossom. Taryn saw they’d been designed to look as if the seepage had washed them down to collect against the floor. This made the mural less purely decorative than a 1960s Scandinavian crockery pattern.

  But of course that wasn’t what it really reminded Taryn of. Really it was Moominmamma’s painted garden in the lighthouse. The one Moominmamma vanished into, leaving her handbag sitting on a kitchen chair.

  Addy broke off to remark, of the rain, ‘That’s good. I was just about out of water.’ Then she asked whether Taryn minded if she finished this batch of paint. ‘It’ll be a waste if I don’t get it on the wall.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘You can talk to me as I work,’ Addy said.

  Taryn’s mother had always put whatever she was doing aside as soon as her daughters walked in the door. Daughters, or husband. She gave them her undivided attention. It drove Taryn crazy. She had never been able to see where Addy had got the habit. Addy’s parents were always busy. Ruth tended to leave the vetting at her practice, but she always had a book on the go, and wouldn’t look up from it if she was at a vital part. And James Northover was involved with local committees, his Historical Society projects, and bookmen all over the British Isles. He busied himself ineffectually with the farm, and hopefully with the rewilding group he joined late in life. Addy’s habit of abandoning herself to pay attention to others had often looked to her daughter like a mute demand: I’m paying attention to you, so you must pay attention to me.

  And here she was, with her back to Taryn, dabbing moss green paint on a wall.

  The rain had stopped. The dripping and gurgling gradually quieted down and the night seemed to fall asleep. The lamplight steadied. Addy worked on.

  Taryn wondered whether she should catch her mother up on news. Talk about Grandma Ruth, how she had gone back to New Zealand to be near her sisters. Or she could say, ‘Dad is so famous these days that it’s very odd going anywhere with him. When I was in hospital recently, I swear the whole nursing staff stopped by to gawp at him. And—Ma—that whole business with the saltwater crocodile was always going to be the big news of its cycle, but with Basil Cornick’s daughter the author Taryn Cornick involved it was everywhere. Writ large!’

  Where to start?

  Taryn didn’t offer news. Instead she thought of more questions. Her mother was responding cogently. Telling stories. Expanding on things. She had metabolised her friend Taylor’s death long before she had died herself. That she could talk about. There were other things Taryn wanted to hear about. Her mother’s miserable year at Girton. Her months-long trip around India in a battered Jeep with friends. Tents. Scorpions. Trains. Tiffins. How her friend Toby kept going barefoot and picked up hookworms.

  Taryn knew that if she mentioned Basil or Beatrice her mother’s flow of talk would break up, like phone reception in a tunnel under a river.

  Taryn listened and responded with the right gentle urging interest and kept thinking, dazed, It’s Ma’s voice. This is a story I haven’t heard. Or it’s one told differently—to an adult listener.

  She slumped against her mother’s chair, watching Addy sidelong; Taryn herself was utterly inert and largely silent, but her head was singing. This is her, her voice, her stories, her mural, her work she has found to do, her new idea, which the dead are said not to have, or an old idea, Moominmamma’s garden, which made her cry from her own unhappiness, an idea renewed and now making her happy, or content, since in this dry, dim, directionless country, happiness might be impossible.

  Addy Cornick was now telling Taryn how she and Wally—another friend whose name Taryn had scarcely deigned to notice before—had prised the globe in the library out of its cradle and rolled it down the lawn into the lake.

  Taryn remembered the story, then the library. She let her mother finish— ‘Well, of course Wally was never invited back’—and said, ‘Ma?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I believe you helped Grandad, before he died, figure out who Grandma might sell his books to?’

  ‘I did. It wasn’t going to happen until he was gone. He didn’t want to see the sale of his books. He was very clear on that.’

  ‘Once he was gone, did the sales go according to his plans?’

  ‘More or less, as I remember. He knew who had made inquiries about various items. He made a list for me and I just had to contact people and ask if they were still interested. It was a few weeks’ work. Phoning around and comparing offers, because there were usually several interested parties, and your grandfather wanted to get as much as he could from the library, for your grandma.’

  Taryn waited for more. Addy was talking as she had been, comfortable, and with some spirit, and Taryn thought it better not to interrupt.

  ‘He carefully
set aside a few gifts for his antiquarian friends. Like that globe Wally and I nearly ruined. It went, as I recall, to Jack Small in Liverpool. Mr Small had always admired the globe because it had trade routes. Do you remember? Sugar and spices, porcelain and so forth—everything but slavery. That was the glaring absence.’

  The glaring absence wasn’t something Taryn had noticed about the globe. Glaring absences were a sense people didn’t tend to get until adulthood—if ever.

  ‘Ma, do you remember an old scroll box? Very old. Maybe fourth century?’

  ‘You mean the Firestarter,’ Addy said, and continued, her wrist cocked with an orchestra conductor’s expressiveness, to dab her tiny vine leaves on the wall.

  ‘Yes, the Firestarter,’ Taryn said.

  ‘I don’t recall ever asking its age. It was very old. If memory serves I’d say its decoration was late Romano–British. It was quite badly charred. I tried picking it up once. It lurched in my arms because there was something heavy sliding around inside it. It didn’t feel like paper. It felt like another box inside the first one.’

  Taryn’s hearing was doing something strange, as if the pressure in the room kept changing. She could take in everything she was being told, but the fact that she was still alive was having some effect on her experience of hearing about the Firestarter. Taryn wished Shift had not left them alone. It was considerate of him, but beside the point.

  ‘Did Grandad sell the Firestarter?’ Taryn asked—though she already knew no such sale was recorded in the papers she had from Ruth.

  ‘Heavens, no!’ Addy said. ‘It wasn’t his to sell. He wasn’t ever easy in his mind about it. I remember him telling me that he’d written a number of times, over a number of years—whenever he remembered he had the bloody thing—to its owners, the British Museum. You see, they’d left the Firestarter behind in the caves after the War. Along with steel shelving and sandbags. Your grandfather said he didn’t find it until he went into the caves to store clover seed after the roof of the feed barn caved in. That would be 1953, the year he met your grandma.’