by Katie Munnik
‘Hans told me about Sally,’ Marie said. ‘I am sorry.’
There was a pause before he answered, the sound of the river running through. ‘She would have liked it here, I think. The river is lovely. Look at that – how the water moves, but the light stands still. Maybe that’s just the last of the mist I’m seeing. I could stay here all day watching that. Looks like light walking about on the surface, doesn’t it?’
Back in the van, we opened the windows wide and the warm wind blew in, ruffling hair and clothes. For a while, I pretended to sleep, letting my body slouch and feeling all the vibrations of the road. Annie sat between Marie and me, turning pages in a book, while Bas drove. He spoke with Hans, half-sentences blowing between the seats, some English, some Dutch, but too few words to follow. When I opened my eyes again, we were crossing the bridge. I could see the Parliament Buildings, blazing in the sunlight, their roofs coppery green, like the dome of the bank in Edinburgh. Green like lichen, green like pennies. When I was small, my dad taught me to wash pennies in vinegar and set them on the window sill. If you could wait and keep your fingers away, the pennies would turn green. Fairy money, he said. Perhaps if you left them under the orchard trees, you might find fairy gold left in exchange. But I hid mine instead, wrapped in a rumpled handkerchief at the back of my sock drawer, the perfect green saved.
Annie parked behind the old teachers’ college on Lisgar Street. More green roofs and a sign high up on the wall read: DANGER. BEWARE OF FALLING ICE. Dandelions grew on the thin strip of grass beside the kerb. We walked along Elgin Street past a church, a movie theatre, a grocery shop, old women in day dresses pulling flowered shopping trollies, with dogs on coloured leads. Annie bought a bag of cherries and shared them around and I remembered I’d finished my airmail paper and popped back into the store. When I came out there was a discussion about the best place to find the television set.
‘Bank Street? Or the Hudson Bay Company over on Rideau? Where’s the best price going to be?’ Bas asked. The image of him trading in beaver pelts amused me, but I didn’t say anything. Maybe they’d make the same jokes about Woolworths and fleeces.
Annie leaned over and gently touched my arm. ‘You girls going to be okay? I don’t mind sticking with you, if you’d prefer.’
‘No, we’ll be fine. Happy as clams at high tide.’
‘Price doesn’t matter,’ Hans said to Bas, rolling up his sleeves. ‘I’ve got the funds. But you’ll look after Marie, Felicity? She isn’t used to big cities, you know.’
‘Hey, that’s not fair. Big cities don’t scare me.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And Montreal turned out completely fine, if you ask me.’
Hans put his bare arm around Marie’s slight shoulders and gave her a squeeze. ‘Better than fine. Couldn’t have been better. I just want Felicity to know to keep an eye on you, that’s all.’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘And she can keep an eye on me. Bellies stick together, right?’
‘The gallery’s up the street, about ten minutes,’ said Annie. ‘If you get up to the British High Commission, you’ve gone too far. But the canal’s close by, too, if you just want a shady place to sit. It’s going to be a hot one.’ Annie checked her watch. ‘Back here about noon. Does that suit?’
‘Don’t worry about us. We’ll be absolutely fine.’
The gallery was a block building built like a ship – all concrete, brown siding and windows. Inside, we were given a map and invited to explore.
‘The Rembrandt exhibit won’t open till next month, but there’s plenty to see in the Canadian Collection. And Contemporary American and British Prints, if you like. It’s all on the map.’
The floating stone staircase made us both a little dizzy and we held hands to keep steady as we climbed. The rooms upstairs had low, tiled ceilings and fluorescent strips that washed the paintings in modern light.
Let’s see. Canada. The frozen north, indeed. Just the sort of thing I’d imagined in the North British lobby. We wandered past snowy forests, lonely teepeed prairies and strange saints with cringing faces. A continent of longing, strange and wonderful, and after a while, Marie let go of my hand and wandered off to look at more trees. I walked slowly and was caught by gold. Gold and a vast pregnant belly. Obviously one of Klimt’s and she was naked, the walls around her stark and white. Gold the tuft of hair at her sex; red-gold the hair on her head, wild and flecked with forget-me-nots. Her nipples stood red and her pale fingers, clasped together, were thin and protecting. Behind her, there was a blue panel marked with Japanese block prints, reminding me of Basho and then of Asher.
But her face. Her face. Her blue eyes were calm, her brows slightly raised. Her mouth, those thin lips, might be my mother’s, her pointed nose. Her hair. My mother not my mother. I stood and stared at her wondrous naked face.
No one was naked when I was growing up. Maybe because there were no other children in my house. I couldn’t compare with anyone, and my parents’ naked bodies were unimaginable. My father rolled up his sleeves to wash the dishes and my mother held up her skirt to paddle in the sea. Nothing like naked.
Even children’s skin was only exposed for needles, vaccines, stitches, examined for rashes, flushed with fevers, but never flaunted, never really seen.
I remembered Bethanne nursing, holding out her nipple like a cigarette and teasing her baby’s opening mouth.
I stood a long time with Klimt’s portrait before I noticed the skulls behind her, or the black ribbon entangled around her legs, the clawed hand emerging from the shadow. She stood before a complicated darkness, encroaching but held back by her nakedness. The painting was called Hope. No, better than that – it was called Hope I. Like more hope might follow. Hope and again there might be hope. Despite all those skulls, there were things yet to be born.
‘She looks like you,’ Marie said, startling me, and I laughed.
‘No, I don’t think so. Her hair is so red. She’s lovely, isn’t she?’
‘Do you think she’s scared?’
‘Could be. But strong, too.’
‘Yes,’ Marie said, holding her own belly. ‘Yes, I think so too.’
‘Come on, you, let’s find some fresh air.’
But stepping outside, the sun was hot and the air heavy and humid. My skin felt sticky as we crossed the street and found steps leading down to a shaded pathway beside the canal. That was better. It was like a sunken green tunnel here, and cool in the shade. A pebbled concrete wall held back the slope of the hill and Marie climbed up to walk along it, holding out her arms for balance like a child. I was happy to sit down on a bench, my hips sore and my legs heavy.
A tour boat came through the shadow under the bridge, women sitting on plastic benches with sunglasses and headscarves, husbands with cameras. One woman waved at us, her hand bright white in the daylight. Marie pirouetted and waved back, then retraced her steps to sit cross-legged beside me.
‘Do you have ideas for names yet?’ she asked.
‘No, not really. It still feels early.’
‘Time isn’t long, though.’ She smiled and gathered her hair, twisting it into a rope and holding it up off her neck.
‘But what about you?’ I said. ‘Any names? No – first, boy or girl? What do you think?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t know what knowing would feel like. But I hope a little for a boy. Like Hans.’ She let her hair fall down over her shoulders. ‘But if it were a girl, I could call her Felicity. It’s a beautiful name.’
‘You’re sweet, Marie.’
‘Either way, I will choose the name. Hans said I could. So, I will have to think hard about it. But Felicity?’ she said, hesitating. ‘Can I tell you something? Would you promise not to tell?’
‘If I can, yes.’
‘It’s just I don’t want Hans to know because it feels like a lie now. My name, it isn’t Marie. I made that up.’ She picked at a mosquito bite on her leg, the crust of skin flaking off under her nails, a little blood showing. ‘I
t’s Eugenie. But I don’t feel like a Eugenie. And my family called me Lunette. Which just sounds silly. I don’t like that, either.’
‘It’s pretty,’ I said. ‘A little moon?’
‘Yes. Silly. But I … I don’t know. When he asked, I didn’t know what to say. I was so scared. We’d just met. So, I said a little prayer – silently, of course, to the Virgin – and then when I opened my mouth, I just said Marie. Without thinking about it at all. But don’t tell him. Please. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it doesn’t matter. Marie is a lovely name. And he loves you as Marie, so Marie you are.’
She threw her arms around me and laughed, surprising the ducks on the canal, who quacked loudly and splashed away.
‘Yes,’ she said, grinning. ‘Yes!’
* * *
We hadn’t meant to stay away so long. Traffic was bad over the bridge, and we sat for ages in the still hot air. Mosquitoes took advantage of our open windows, Annie climbing over the seats to squash them. Marie and I sat together in the back, our babies both kicking, so we rolled up our T-shirts, placed our palms on each other’s bellies and laughed at how strong they were getting. Finally, the car ahead of us moved, and we headed up the highway. Bas drove quickly, and that must have been why we blew a tyre before we got much further. We were lucky, though, because it was just on the edge of a small town with a garage that could fix us up. An old school bus was parked at the edge of the lot, Casse Croute painted on its side in ice-cream colours. Hans bought us paper bags of chips laden with cheese and gravy, and we sat at a picnic table, eating with plastic forks. There were other people at the tables, too, children and thin men in baseball caps, women with thick jellied arms, bare and sun-browned. They wore their hair curled and tied with bright scarves, tight, bright sandals on their feet and thin gold chains around their necks, hung with charms or tiny crucifixes. Bas used the payphone but there was no answer at the farmhouse.
‘They’ll all be swimming on a hot afternoon like this,’ he said.
I asked if I could use the toilet at the garage and was led past rubbish bins, pin-up-girl posters and a disassembled motorbike on the grease-stained concrete floor. The toilet was screened from the rest of the garage by a dirty gingham curtain thumb-tacked to the wall, but once I drew that closed, everything looked surprisingly clean. The walls were white, the soap uncracked and the floor scrubbed. On the wall above the sink, where I’d have expected a mirror, the sacred heart of Jesus hung, framed in gold.
The farmhouse was dark when we drove in.
‘The bugs will be bad,’ Bas said. ‘Everyone’s hidden away.’
Climbing down from the van, my back felt a wreck. ‘Isn’t it weird how you feel more pregnant at the end of the day? This baby gets so heavy.’
‘Well, time to sleep then,’ Bas said. ‘Should have had you home hours ago. Rika’s going to give me a talking-to, I imagine.’
‘Toilet first,’ Marie called out, scuttling towards the farmhouse. ‘Better here than the outhouse with the bugs.’
‘I’ll find you some citronella candles for the bunkhouse,’ Annie said, heading inside.
James came down the path, the tip of his cigarette like a lightning bug. ‘I heard the van. Everything okay on the road? Rika’s been worrying.’
‘We blew a tyre,’ Bas said. ‘We called, but there was no answer.’
‘You missed the trouble here.’
‘Carole? Is it time?’
‘She’s gone. Seems she called her parents and told them everything. They came to pick her up this afternoon. Rika’s inside.’
* * *
She sat at the table with a glass of water.
‘The little bird flew,’ she said, but she didn’t cry. She sat at the table and her wrists looked like things made of wax as she held that glass of water, and looked dead ahead, her brittle voice straight as a road.
We sat down to listen. Bas put his hands on the table, his ring sounding against the wood, and Rika’s face was set.
‘It will mean surgery,’ she said. ‘I told her that, but it was too late. She’d already called home. But no hospital these days lets twins come naturally. If she’s really lucky, she might get to deliver the first one, but the second will be C-section for sure. And full electronic monitoring throughout. And an IV. No space to move or figure out what she needs or anything. Imagine Carole all tied up like that. It’ll break her.’
Bas reached for his sister’s hand. ‘They’ll be doing it to keep her safe. You know that. They will be trying their best.’
‘I know, but … I know.’ She stroked his fingers as she spoke, and her voice was level and paced. ‘She must have used the telephone when I was swimming. I went down to the lake after breakfast and when I came back, she had this look on her face. Stung, I thought. I wondered if she was starting. So I gave her some space and some tea. After a while, she came to find me in the garden and she told me what she’d done. She spat the words out at me, like I was the one who was running away. I tried to talk her through it. She was hurting and not listening. When her mother arrived in her city car, she leaned on the horn to get our attention. James and Eleta came running to see what was happening and it was a mess then, it really was. She assumed he was the father and said some ugly words. And … and Carole climbed into the car and they drove away.’
Her eyes stared from a face flattened by the day, and she looked out towards the lake, but it was too dark to see. Annie found candles, set them on the table and lit them with a long fireplace match, the flames reflecting and doubling on the window panes, and Rika stayed quiet. Marie tucked herself in under Hans’s arm and asked what would happen to Carole’s babies.
‘I imagine they’ll be adopted in the city,’ Bas said. ‘Split up probably. They might end up anywhere.’
‘In a sad way, that might be for the best,’ Hans suggested. ‘Carole could never have managed them, even if she had changed her mind.’
I asked how Eleta was taking the news.
James shrugged. ‘Philosophically. Faithfully. Says it wasn’t meant to be.’
Bas nodded and looked away.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
10
SOON AFTER THAT, THE STUDENTS STARTED ARRIVING, setting up tents in the field beyond the farmhouse. The summer days stayed hot and Annie stayed at Birthwood. She said there was nothing happening in the city these days and the woods were a better place to be. Hans finished the cabin and helped Rika and Bas build a stall for the end of the road where Annie might sit to sell our extra fruit. It was a simple box with a counter and space for a couple of chairs. I liked the idea of sitting out there, surrounded by fruit baskets and all the fragrant pies and tarts Bas baked from the berries too soft to sell, but I couldn’t hack it. The road was dusty and the men who stopped stank, their snap shirts wet at the armpits, their hands dirty. Annie was good at grinning and teasing them in lazy French. I stuttered, shrank back and rearranged the pies.
As July wore on, Marie and I spent our time sitting in front of the birthing house. Hans moved the rug frame outside so we could work together in the shade where it was cooler and the orange wood-lilies grew tall as children. Annie had said she was more than happy to manage at the road stall by herself, which made Marie laugh.
‘How can you be more than happy? Doesn’t happiness fill you up?’
She did look full of happiness, sitting on her stool in a brown sundress with her skin browned to match. She kicked off her sandals and planted bare feet on the soft pine needles, the basket of cloth strips beside her. Blue and green and gold.
‘Doesn’t the light dance on the lake like diamonds?’ she asked. But that was easy and not even apt. No, the sunshine on the lake came in broad sheets of light in those afternoons, layered and shimmering like feathers or fish scales. At home, July brought days when the sea was flat slate grey under a warm dull sky. But when the light did come through, even just a crack, it could catch on the surface and run right to the east with a bright skelf of si
lver. Diamonds were too easy and out of reach. But Marie wasn’t used to living by the water. She told me the house where she’d been born was surrounded by trees, and she drew more blue wool through the sacking of her rug, widening the river again.
The shocking colour is necessary, she said. The clash of violent pink against soft blues and greens. It sets the whole piece. Rug makers call it poison but it brings sharp life into being. It makes the image sing.
Sometimes Rika sat with us, knitting baby shoes. ‘Just in case,’ she said. ‘They always come in handy.’
I might have expected a sadness about her, or a briskness to keep sadness at bay. But Rika wasn’t like that. After Carole left, she grew softer, slower, more willing to linger. She took time to admire the colours of Marie’s rug and asked me questions about Scotland. Sometimes, she told us local stories, too. Stories about the woods, the villages both French and English, and the things she’d learned about the land. About healing plants, logging camps and old farms, travellers along the rivers, Algonquin traders and Nicolas Gatineau. Stories you’d tell children, and she soothed us with them, drawing us close. She spoke as if she’d been there a long time, though the camp was still new. Five years before, it had been empty, and they’d lived different lives. Now this was permanent. A place with roots and with a tomorrow. That’s why they spread the word about Rika’s midwifery skills. All part of the plan to be self-sufficient.
‘Forty years from now, fifty, these cabins are still going to be homes. That’s our hope. Maybe our homes or maybe someone else’s. It will keep going. There’s virtue in persistence and from that, freedom. Which is what we’re looking for. Long term, ongoing goodness and freedom. And babies and berries and tomatoes.’
When it grew too hot, Rika went inside to lie down, and Marie and I sat on the flat rock to cool our toes in the lake.
‘I think I could tell you anything,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’d be shocked.’
