Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  ‘A year. Yes. But it’s only a year and a half.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know you were coming back.’

  ‘You did. I said I was.’

  ‘You left. What do you expect?’

  ‘What do you mean, expect? I expect to come back and find my tea chests unransacked. I trusted you.’

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked imploringly, in an alarmingly high register.

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he glared. Then walked off.

  I ran after him, now angry. Incensed and wronged! He shut the door on me. Wouldn’t come out. I was at a loss as to what to do. And I could not believe it. I just couldn’t grasp that someone – I already suspected who – had jemmied off the nailed-on lids of my tea chests. Actually levered them off with a crowbar. I returned to the tampered chests. A rattling of detritus in each. I poked around. Where was my box with the leaves, and the clay pipe with the jester’s head on the bowl? I searched frantically but they were not there. Nor was my Guatemalan huipile. Nor the embroidered belts. Where were my old Rupert annuals? Gone. My drawings, gone. My sketchbook, gone. My jacket with the quetzals, gone. The books were scribbled on, ‘The Lament for Arthur O’Leary’ poem scrawled over, green crayon and a picture of a house drawn over ‘Finistère’. A subterranean heat began to rise. My blood steaming and charging through my body in frothing ferment. Then, a sudden chill in the pit of my stomach. Oh no, oh no! I scrabbled in the boxes in panic. Please no. Kept safe for twenty years. My precious Beatles cake decoration with ‘The Beatles’ actually written on the drum, with Ringo playing it, and the others with their guitars, inch-high in grey suits. But no, oh woe, not here. Fury. Devastation. Rage. I had been wronged most brazenly. I picked the tea chests up, one by one. Loaded them in the car. Face set, I drove off in a dirt spitting wheel-spin blaze.

  ‘What do you mean, ransacked?’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Everything is gone, or ruined. Someone has been through all my stuff!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Wanker!’

  Jonathan wanted to go round – in the New Zealand way. But I said I had to deal with this myself. I went to see my friend Mary, who was also a friend of Tim’s. She told me that last year she had seen Tim’s girlfriend, Diane, wearing my skirt. Then, she said, Diane was seen at a wedding wearing my Guatemalan huipile.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No!’

  Mary said she assumed I had given my things away.

  ‘Oh no!’ I said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mary.

  I was on the war path. I needed a conversation with this Diane. I knew who she was. I knew where she worked. But when I went looking for her she was not there. The shop where she worked – a second-hand junk shop, coincidentally – was shut. It looked like it was closing down. Then I saw her in Skibbereen – my best friend Helen O’Sullivan pointed her out to me; she was coming down the street towards us. I stopped in front of her. She side-stepped me. I side-stepped her back so she couldn’t pass.

  ‘Um, Diane,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she said aggressively. West Cork is a small place. She had heard I was after her, she knew I knew about the tea chests and how I felt about it.

  ‘Um, I would like my things back,’ I said righteously.

  ‘I haven’t got your bloody things,’ she said.

  Helen had cravenly slipped into the supermarket.

  ‘Well, how come you’ve been seen wearing them?’ I said.

  ‘Sod off,’ she said. And walked on.

  I trotted after her like a mad woman repeating myself: ‘I want my things, I want my things.’

  She swerved into the car park, got into her car and slammed the door. People were looking at me. My face was all red. Sweat beading on my brow. She gave me two fingers and drove away.

  I got nowhere in the quest to retrieve my things. Nowhere with Tim, who told me he was not getting back together with Diane after all, so it was nothing to do with him. I told him it was his responsibility. My things were in his charge. He must retrieve them. He disagreed.

  At night it ate away at me. I couldn’t let it drop. I went over and over it. I went on and on, bored everyone to death. Everyone was sick of hearing how I lost my things, how my past was stolen by that harpy witch. Jonathan said I should try and let it go. How could I let it go? What about my Beatles cake decorations? And my fractal leaves? And the shells of my childhood? And my grandfather’s horse postcards? Why would anyone want them, except me? It was a heinous crime. No one should be able to just get away with something like that. I obsessed, and I obsessed. I painted a big oil painting of an empty box with a baby’s bottle in the bottom, with strange Pandora birdlike creatures flying out wearing Guatemalan huipiles and smoking clay pipes. I put it in a group exhibition in the Triskel Gallery in Cork. But it didn’t have the desired effect, for the transgression was still in my head. I was still cross. Every time I thought of it, I raged.

  ‘Anyway, where does she live, exactly?’ I asked Helen one day. They had children at the same school.

  Helen told me. ‘But I wouldn’t go round there, I’d say,’ she said. ‘That Diane can be a nasty piece of work.’

  I decided to get my things back myself. I was going to take them back. I resolved to steal them back. When Diane was out. It would be easy. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? No one locked their doors in West Cork. Ignition keys rusted in ignitions because there was no crime. Except for hippies, of course, smoking their marra-jewarna. But still, marra-jewarna or no marra-jewarna, these were the days when you left your door open, because nothing was ever stolen. Except the precious things from my boxes in the trusted care of my friend. So, I would just walk in when Diane was not there and take my stuff back, I thought. And she wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. I smiled when I thought of her face. The realisation. Ha! The cold clunk of her heart, the soaring of mine. Justice.

  I drove to a small horseshoe close of new houses at the back of the village of Rosscarbery, just as Helen described. It was eleven a.m. On the seat beside me sat a large hessian bag with two strong handles for my swag. I parked outside. Sat for a moment checking up and down the street. I knew she was out, but I knocked all the same. No answer. I tried the door, surreptitiously, hum-di-dum-di-dum, the handle didn’t turn. It was locked! I tried again. I pushed. I nodded to myself, only a thief would lock their house in West Cork. I went round the back. I tried the door. Ah, the handle turned. I called out, as if I knew her. Diane, hello? My best friend. Diane? Nothing. My own heart thumping. I opened the door. I was in.

  I moved quickly. Kitchen. Sitting room. Upstairs. Bedroom. I couldn’t find anything. I went to the wardrobe. Dresses, but not my dresses. No huipile, no woollen quetzal jacket. I was starting to sweat. I wanted to be in and out, not poking around like this. I was expecting to find my things easily. But none of my books were in the bookcase, nothing was here. And I was perplexed. Because it was, well, so much tidier than I had expected. So clean and neat and ordered, and not what I had imagined at all. The kitchen sink was not full of dirty dishes, nor were there any sick-looking geranium plants, or ashtrays, or marrows hanging in slings. And the drawers were so neat and tidy when I slid them open on smooth runners. And everything was ironed. And I wasn’t expecting to have to open any drawers in the first place. But there was no trace. She couldn’t possibly have been expecting me. I picked up a photograph on the mantelpiece to see if she was wearing my skirt. But it was not Diane in the photograph. I picked up the next photograph. I didn’t recognise anyone at all. Not in this family group of husband, wife and three children. And that was the moment I realised I was in the wrong house.

  Which of course was exactly the same time that I realised I was burglarising the wrong house. Which was followed a few seconds later by the realisation that I was a burglar. And that any minute someone might come home. And while these realisations were stampeding through my brain, there
was, simultaneously and paradoxically, a horrible stuck moment. As if it all dawned in a collision. Or needed time to compute. In a nauseous wave. Like a cartoon moment, a butter-side-down bread moment, a ghastly sick feeling hovered above me in the Irish air, a swaying on the spot and a cold sinking when all my blood slumped into my feet and I couldn’t move. When I saw the headlines of the Cork Examiner. And the Southern Star. Then the glue unstuck, I pirouetted round on the ball of one foot, and as fast as a rabbit I was back down the stairs and standing at the front door. In my panic my hand couldn’t find the button on the door latch. My heart, mind, soul, spirit, desire, were already in the car, but my body was still standing on the wrong side of the door. Come on, come on. I went to the back door. I was out! I walked fast and in a ridiculous fashion down the side of the house, then round the front, and across to the car. Again the handle-function eluded me. I have heard how people in air disasters and car crashes can die because in their panic they can’t open their seat belts. Something like that was happening to me. Then the car door opened and I was in the car. I turned the key – thank God I’d left it in the ignition – and the beautiful noise of the engine roared into life as I drove jerkily away. Down the close, left, right, out onto the Skibbereen road, and then an involuntary jerk as my shaking right foot flipped off the accelerator, the car lurched, and my shoulders slumped forward. Oh!

  And my mouth probably gaped open, for I’d left my great big swag bag in the middle of the living-room floor.

  THE EXCITING INVITATION

  In 1990 Jonathan and I were back in Auckland. We had been living in Ireland for a year and a half in a very damp and tiny two-room cottage at the end of a pier called, appropriately enough, Pier Cottage. From our bed, early in the morning with the door open, we could watch an otter on his back in the bay, so close we could hear him crunching through his breakfast. Jonathan crewed on a commercial fishing boat, and I painted in the second room. But now it was Jonathan’s turn to be homesick. He missed his family and his parents were getting on – and they missed him. The distances between our homelands couldn’t be further and each upheaval was daunting, and expensive, and painful. This would become the pattern and dilemma of our life together. Where we would be. What we would do.

  This time, not tempted to return to our former restaurant lives – terrible hours, bugger-all money – we had enrolled as mature students to study at Auckland University. We were hoping to find our feet in New Zealand, and make up for our very different but similarly gappy educations. I was studying Fine Art at the Elam School of Fine Arts; Jonathan was studying Politics in the main university. We had both dropped out of the normal course of our ‘expected’ lives. He had been a primary school teacher, then a cordon-bleu chef in a smart restaurant in Sydney, and had then decided to walk across Spain; I had been upping sticks from different places and different situations trying to make a go of something . . . and now we were here. We had married on a wild whim after three weeks, but then I’d always had a nose for a wager. We had flown back and forth across the world together and were trying to make a life. For me in New Zealand everything was new. New family, new weather, new landscapes and seas, new critters such as possums and wetas, new birds like wax-eyes and tuis and fantails, and even fruit that I’d never tasted before. Oh feijoas! There was even a completely different night sky. There is something liberating about starting afresh. But here the possibilities for reinvention, in a place where one had no past, seemed boundless. And for the first time in my life I was doing all right in an institution. I was ten years older than the other students, and about ten years younger than most of the lecturers, so straddled a sort of in-between gap, but being an older student meant that you tended to listen, and I quickly discovered it was all very interesting, and the teachers were exceedingly good, and everything felt contemporary and pulsating with a kind of energy I had not experienced at school, and new worlds began to open up to me.

  Every chance I got I would enrol to study an English course in the main university to credit towards my Fine Arts degree. One of these courses was American Language Poetry taught by Michele Leggott and Roger Horrocks, who between them bombarded us each week with mind-bending contemporary American poetry by poets like Robert Creeley and Lyn Hejinian and Charles Olson and Susan Howe and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Adrienne Rich. Afterwards, for coursework, we had to respond to these lectures in our workbooks by discovering links and connections, and we were encouraged to express our own thoughts and ideas, so that our learning spiralled outwards. This was new to me, and suited me very well; and I flourished. And miraculously our tutors read every word in every one of their students’ workbooks, and interacted and wrote comments down the side. I felt liberated, which was in turn reflected in my work at the art school, where I was lucky enough to have a lecturer in printmaking called Carole Shepheard, who was not only an excellent teacher, but an artist who generously shared all her own methods and discoveries. With every printmaking technique she taught us – lithography, etching, screen-printing, woodcuts and linocuts – we tried to push each method as far as we possibly could. And all the gear to do it with was at our disposal. The combination of all this – the American poetry, the printmaking, the art theory and the fashion at the time of raiding high and low culture – sent me into a creative frenzy. With each new work I wanted something Bigger, Better, Different! There was a lot of strutting one’s stuff at art school, but it was also a communal bonanza of experimentation and young excitement where everything seemed fresh and new. The culmination of all this for me was deciding to do an enormous composite print in six pieces, using every printmaking technique there was, in which I was going to tell the story of, well, er, basically, Life.

  I had already begun to veer off towards storytelling in my work, indeed I was writing all over my paintings and prints – including scientific data about the life cycle of the albatross, or an iceberg, or lab mice, or literary observations about some Beckett character or a great Irish chieftain, mixed up with astronomy or biology or newspaper headlines. But this print, I decided, would be the most technically ambitious so far. And I would call it Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? referencing Gauguin’s famous painting (art reference: tick), not just for the prerequisite post-modern nod, but because I had fretted over The Meaning of Life for years. Not that I couldn’t see the irony; I was happy to mock the impulse and futile ambition. I set to, with the lithograph stones and the etching acid and the chemicals of the screen-printer’s trade, in and out of the darkroom, I scratched and gouged away at wood and lino with sharp instruments, and dissolved ink with fierce thinning agents that almost knocked you out, I transferred newspaper headlines, and carved into potatoes, and collected and borrowed and stole until I was quite pleased with myself.

  A floating mono-printed head looked out across a surreal landscape where dark clouds hovered over a caravanserai of linocut camels loping eastward towards a dangerous hazard: a lake of woodcut crocodiles. Above them, delicately etched corn-on-the-cobs zoomed like rockets amongst a hail of Stone-Age arrows. Three dark volcanoes blew their tops beneath Brâncuşi’s Endless Column; Joseph Beuys’ Fat Chair (a chair with a triangle of fat on it) perched in the desert alongside ink-thick lithographs of Plato’s cave, about to be invaded by an army of ants. And across this mad acreage were printed messages and scraps of ‘found’ poetry, and copy taken from ads: ‘Arrive in Style’; ‘Meet Your Competition’; ‘The In Group’, I transferred ‘MASSIVE TROUBLE’ next to the crocodiles. And I was pleased as punch. And this big-fish-eat-little-fish arty-myth-parable thing went on public display in the end-of-year university exhibition, and a week later I received a message that someone wanted to buy it. I can’t remember if it was $200 or $300, but it was a lot for a student who needed the money, and a feather in my cap. The person who wanted to buy it turned out to be a professor in the English Department, Michael Neill. I hadn’t taken any of his courses but his reputation went before him: a world-renowned Shakespeare scholar with a
trail of authoritative books a mile long, so I was clucking loudly at home at this development. Then I received a telephone call from Michael Neill who said he would like me to frame the print, which he would pay for (a relief, because it was very big and would not be cheap to frame); and would I deliver it to his home and help him hang it in his hall; he said he had just the place.

  So I had it framed, and we arranged a day to go and hang it, and we wrapped it in blankets and got it into a van, which Jonathan drove to the address we’d been given, and we rang the doorbell, and Michael Neill opened the door and we said hello and shook hands, then carried the print inside. It was large and unwieldy and heavy, but eventually we manoeuvred it down the stairs, into the hall, and after securing three screws into the wooden-panelled wall, we hung the print and stood back. Michael seemed delighted, and I was particularly delighted that it had found such a good home. And then we met his wife, who quickly disappeared pursuing a couple of small children who ran in and then out. We had a beer, and he asked me if I had read Wide Sargasso Sea, which I hadn’t (but I remember making sure it was my next book). Michael told us that his brother was a keen art buyer, who he was sure would be interested to see my work, and we nodded, and drank our beer. Then we said goodbye and off we went.

  And that was that. Until about six weeks later, the phone rang and Jonathan passed it over with wide eyes, saying, ‘It’s Michael Neill.’

  ‘Hello, Michael,’ I said tentatively, thinking the worst – that the paper had curled or fallen off the mount, or the screws had come out and the frame had fallen off the wall and smashed and the shards of glass had ripped into the print, and that a child had been under it and was now possibly brain-damaged.

  But no, Michael was ringing to invite us to dinner – if we were free, he politely added, on a date that was three months hence. Well, the long lead-time kind of threw me: I had never been to any event with so much notice before, except maybe a wedding (certainly not ours), but of course I politely accepted and thanked him and put down the phone.