Singularity

by Charlotte Grimshaw

  Beth went close to the body, her fists clenched, eyeing it beadily as she might have looked at a piece of beef at the Remuera delicatessen: ‘She looks very nice, Chrissie.’

  ‘She’s never left alone,’ Matiu said. ‘We talk to her, keep her company until she goes. In the Maori way.’

  ‘That’s right eh, Mum,’ Chrissie said. ‘Never leave you alone.’ She stroked the dead white face. ‘I’ll make some coffee, eh?’

  She took the children into the kitchen. The Reverend withdrew with a discreet cough, leaving them with the body.

  Beth sank down, sighing, on the couch.

  Emily said, ‘The Reverend’s taken over.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she minds.’

  They looked guiltily at the coffin.

  ‘We’re not Maori, Jenny’s not. Why do we have to do things the Maori way, just because Chrissie married one?’

  ‘How about that coffee,’ Beth said.

  Emily bent to look at a photo on the wall. ‘What about not leaving her alone?’

  ‘Oh …’ Beth waved her hand. ‘We’re going for coffee. All right?’ she said to the body.

  Emily followed her from the room.

  Jenny’s son, Don, was in the kitchen. He wore his peaked cap pulled low over his eyes. Two young Maori women came forward. Don gestured, awkward, looking away: ‘Aunt Beth, my cousin Emily — this is my girlfriend Hine and her sister, May Rangi.’

  Hine was thin and pretty; May Rangi was heavy, puff y-faced, her hands and arms marked with crude tattoos.

  Hine went to the sink. ‘I’ll make coffees for youse. Chrissie’s feeding the dogs.’

  Through the door to the backyard Emily could see Caro standing near a slavering Rottweiler. The Reverend appeared.

  ‘We’re having coffee,’ Beth said. ‘Jenny doesn’t mind.’

  Matiu smiled in a forgiving way.

  ‘She can hear us from here,’ Don said from under his hat. He looked sideways at Beth and let out a giggle. Beth grinned.

  Matiu pursed his lips. ‘Ah, times of strife, eh,’ he said into the air.

  ‘It’s very sad,’ Beth said. ‘We did have some nice times at the end.’ She wiped away a tear.

  ‘Kia ora,’ Matiu said softly.

  The dog barked. Caro shrieked.

  ‘Is that dog all right with kids?’ Emily asked.

  ‘Get away you bugger,’ Chrissie growled from outside. She crossed the yard wielding a big bone. The dog swiftly followed. There was another shriek.

  ‘No, good as gold, mate,’ Hine said comfortably. ‘It’s the other one you’ve got to watch, but he’s got a muzzle on. Take no chances with him.’

  May Rangi laughed. ‘He’s a bad one.’

  Emily went out to the small concrete yard, bordered on one side by the warehouse wall and on the other by a corrugated-iron fence. On a wooden picnic table were three institution-sized cooking pots, one of which contained cuts of raw meat and bones. There was a barbecue and beside it a cactus grew in a concrete pot. The sun came into the yard and a gust of wind blew the fly strips on the door. Caro poked one of the dogs with a stick. It whipped its head around and stared at her, then turned back to its bone with a groan.

  ‘Better not do that.’ Chrissie took the stick. Bored, the children trailed inside. She wiped her hands on a stained towel. ‘Is Uncle Per …?’

  Emily’s father, Per Svensson, had been at his sister’s bedside when she died — a prolonged, horrible dying: he’d described it to Emily, tonelessly, over the phone. Then he’d gone, not home, but to the studio where he worked. Emily had driven there after the phone call, wondering whether there was something she should do. She’d said, experimentally, ‘You must feel very strange.’ He didn’t reply. She said, ‘Should one …?’ They were at the door. He didn’t invite her in. He was holding the cordless phone, pointing the aerial in front of him like a weapon. He looked fierce. She left. Whether he cared or not, she wasn’t sure. But he wanted to be alone.

  And now Emily’s brother Larry and his wife Raine arrived. They were Bennie, Paul and Antonia’s parents. Raine had been to an expensive school down south; her vowels had never recovered. ‘Gorgeous shirt, Beth,’ she said, reaching over to finger the breast pocket. ‘I’m making a dress in that colour. It’s going to have paua-pattern shoulder pads.’ She smiled and smiled, widening her blue eyes.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Beth.

  Larry stared and tensely grinned, as though he thought something was going to lunge at him and bite.

  ‘How are you Larry?’ The Reverend’s tone was caressing.

  Larry cleared his throat. He said faintly, ‘Good, Matiu. Working seven days a week. It’s a fairly big job I do. A lot of responsibility.’ He stared at the Reverend, defiant, cornered, managing to sound pompous despite the thing that waited and watched.

  ‘Poor Jenny,’ Raine said. ‘The children are with her. But Bennie’s hiding in the car. He doesn’t like bodies.’ She let out an abrupt cackle.

  In the sitting room the other three children were sitting in a row, their feet up on the edge of the coffin, watching The Simpsons.

  Raine had one of her rushes of energy. She wrenched open the front door.

  ‘Bennie,’ she shrieked. The children looked up, startled.

  She marched to the car and dragged him out, loudly telling him off. She hopped about on her thin legs. To the children, she sounded like a strange, harsh bird: Caw. Caw. She pulled Bennie into the room. But he shrugged and veered away and wouldn’t look.

  ‘It’s only Mum,’ Chrissie said, coaxing. ‘Don’t you think she looks lovely?’

  ‘She looks dead,’ he said rudely.

  Raine yanked him into the hall. The door slammed. ‘Locked him out,’ she said. She gave her ‘simple seamstress’ smile.

  Emily pulled back the net curtain. Black clouds were gathering over the street. The sun shone, and there was a strange, green-gold light. Colours were sharpened; for a moment the houses and fences gleamed, pearly-white, and then the clouds crossed the sun and the street went dreary and dark. It was hot. A strong gust stirred the rubbish on the grass. She saw her father’s car turn slowly off the main road.

  Beth and the Reverend got out a photograph album. There were ancient photos of Per and Jenny, little brother and sister, posed with their mother, playing at the beach. Twins, but different: already pulling away from one another, going in opposite directions. Later pictures: Jenny with her husband, the genial Barry, war veteran Mason, lawnmower salesman, who’d taken care of his invalid wife until he’d died. Their children, Emily’s cousins: Don, Chrissie and Ray. Things had got tough long ago, when Jenny first fell ill. Don ran away to live with the Maoris at the end of the street. At seventeen Chrissie married a drug dealer who carried a gun (but now she was a vicar’s wife). Ray was the solid, dependable one. He lived in America. He was in sales.

  Emily went back out to the yard. Don stood looking over the fence, smoking. This was Don at family gatherings: his back to the group, his cap pulled down low, staring out at something, silent, absorbed. Waiting to be released.

  The sky had turned dark over the warehouse roof. Emily watched a bird floating on the wind. Beams of sunlight broke through, shining on the twisted, hairy limbs of the cactus. She thought of the death notice she’d read that morning. It had been placed by Chrissie, Don and Ray: ‘Mum. You were a breath of fresh air when all else failed.’

  Fresh air. When all else failed? She said it over to herself, frowning.

  Don’s shoulders twitched. She wondered, with a little thrill, whether he was crying. But he turned and ground his cigarette out on the wall, and in his blue eyes she saw something remote, secret, hard.

  Larry burst through the plastic fly strips, brushing them aside, his chest puffed out, like a lifeguard emerging from the surf. He looked side to side and announced carefully, ‘Hello.’

  ‘How’s work?’

  He looked high-minded. ‘It’s fairly demanding, Emily. I’m handling literally millions of
dollars of orders. I’m responsible for the whole city now. It’d be easier if I didn’t have to spend so much time fixing other people’s …’ But his voice trailed off. His eyes grew fixed. He was staring at the cactus. There was a silence.

  ‘That’s an interesting plant you’ve got there, Don. Is it …?’ He stood up and fingered the ugly, ridged green stalk.

  ‘Yeah, it’s one of those,’ Don said. ‘Boil it up, drink it, you’re stoned out of your tree. Visions. Flying.’ He spat over the fence. ‘It’s not my thing though, eh.’

  Larry gave a strained smile. ‘Not your thing,’ he repeated.

  But it was definitely his.

  The clouds were rolling in, gathering against one another, dense and black. Emily drove along the Onehunga Mall. There were three children in the car now. Bennie, in disgrace, had been squashed into his parents’ car with a group of relatives.

  ‘Something stinks,’ Caro whined.

  ‘You were a breath of fresh air when all else failed,’ Beth said in a faint voice. There was a heightened silence. They didn’t dare look at one another.

  Per was in the carpark talking to a slim woman in a blue dress. He leaned close and she threw back her head and laughed out loud.

  Beth said thoughtfully, ‘Per drives like the wind, doesn’t he. Like a fiend.’

  ‘This is Ray’s wife, Sherry. From America,’ Per said, very taken with the tall stranger who tossed her red hair and shook hands and said how nice to meet noo family. She was sorry it was the loss of Ray’s mom that …

  She was all smiles but Per abruptly tired of talking to her and said, ‘Why don’t we get started?’ He glared around the group. Sherry was disconcerted; Beth looked amused. They started to file into the chapel.

  Piped music played. At the front, by the closed coffin, stood a woman in a suit. She was the functionary laid on by Griefcare Funeral Services.

  Heat from many bodies in a small space spread through the room. Children’s heads drooped, the adults stared, open-mouthed, their eyes glazed. More piped music; they rose to sing. A series of prayers, more singing and then a pause. Emily looked up from a daydream. People were stretching and looking around; the woman in the suit waited with an encouraging smile. ‘We can all share memories of Jenny’s life. Who would like to be the first?’

  Movement in the front row. Someone standing. And a sudden ripple — Per half-rising, signalling angrily, ‘No.’ Beth turned, startled.

  It was Bennie, pushing his way along the row, ahead of everyone, about to ‘share’ something about his great aunt, whom he had met only once on a hospital visit, when he and the other kids had paid brief, unwilling homage before sitting out the boredom in the TV room with a row of tranced old folk. He was determined, frowning, his fists clenched. He turned to face the room.

  But Per’s ferocious expression made him waver. He paused. The silence seemed to last and last before, slowly, he made his way back to his place and sat down.

  Emily craned to see his face. What an odd boy he was. He hadn’t known Jenny at all. What on earth could he have been going to say?

  The children came bouncing out with Chrissie’s sons, who had made a speech about their grandmother in charming, piping voices.

  Per said, ‘I didn’t mean to be repressive. But what was he going to tell us about Jenny? And to push in front of her grandchildren …’ He looked around. ‘I suppose Raine and Larry are annoyed with me now.’

  But Larry, striding out of the chapel, had his mind on other things. And Raine, who thought Bennie would at least have been well spoken, unlike some other people, only smiled and jabbed her son lightly and said, ‘Zip up your fly.’

  ‘Are you going to the wake?’ Emily asked Larry.

  ‘So it seems.’ He glanced behind.

  Talking to Larry was like interrupting a watchman on a lookout (on a parapet, on a tower of melodrama): he answered but he stared beyond at some dark distant thing, his replies were cursory, secretive, condescending, because you, poor innocent, didn’t understand what was out there …

  Three o’clock. Hot, mid-afternoon gloom. The city waiting for the storm that went on threatening but didn’t break. The clouds were so black they looked purple; sometimes they parted for a moment and a ray of sun lit the green slopes of the mountain. Light and dark on the hillside, shifting shadows.

  Emily was driving home. There was a gap in her vision, a black hole with glowing outlines. The pain was gathering, waiting to break through in unbearable streams. She was desperate to get home.

  At the wake she had glanced up at the crowd and seen, opening up before her, a long shaft of pure blackness, as if her aunt had carelessly left open a doorway to death, and she was staring directly into it. She’d waited a moment, until she was sure the migraine was really coming, then she went looking for her mother.

  And Beth had said, ‘Bad luck. You go. We’ll bring the kids home.’

  She drove recklessly, yearning to be upstairs in the empty house, surrendering to it. She was capable of a kind of furious ecstasy during these crises of pain, and of a strange sense of luxury afterwards.

  She shouldn’t be driving. It was like accelerating into a black tunnel, its edges shimmering with vivid purples, starry greens. The visual distortions came first, the strange light effects, black holes. The pain was the second stage, the full force of the storm. Her eyes throbbed. And the sky, as if in answer, bulged and swelled with its own troubled atmospherics. The clouds hung heavy with rain, sheet lightning flashed, there was a rumble, then a crack of thunder. She thought the weather had brought the migraine on — the stifling sense of energy, pressure building. And the difficulty of talking to cousins she knew but ought to have known better. Per and Jenny had been twins but remarkably different. There hadn’t been many occasions when the families had got together. There were the bare outlines: Jenny’s husband was dead; her son Don, since running away to live with the Maoris in his teens now spoke, lived, and looked like a Maori, and ran a stall with Hine and May Rangi at the Otara Market. Chrissie, along with the Reverend Matiu, had some line in good works (social work, counselling?) Ray (the boring one) had escaped to the States. They all had children whom Emily didn’t know, although Per had mused, after meeting a daughter of Don: ‘Funny about the genes. I felt as if I was talking to my mother.’

  Emily drove with one eye closed. The visual distortion, the agonised hour in the darkened room, then the languid recovery — it was an intense, private battle. As she turned into her street the sky unleashed itself. Rain spotted then blurred the windscreen, and intensified to a roar. The noise on the car roof was tremendous. The last barrier broke inside her head and the pain flooded in.

  Lying on her bed upstairs it occurred to her: this is what dying will be like. And she thought of that first warning at the wake, the shaft of absolute blackness splitting the air, as if a door had opened to …

  Larry was alone. He got out of the car. Everyone was still at the wake and he had slipped away, saying he wanted to buy cigarettes. Don’s house, hard up against the warehouse wall, was small, shabby and deserted. He knocked on the door and called, ‘Hello.’

  There was a garish pulse of light, followed by an abrupt boom. He stepped off the porch and peered down the south side of the house. The gap between the house and the warehouse wall was too narrow — or was it? Could he squeeze his way along to the backyard? He imagined, with a shiver of laughter, getting stuck halfway; his smothered cries, scenes of consternation as they returned from the wake. On the other side of the house, a corrugated-iron fence blocked the way. Larry dithered, looking at his watch.

  Next door was a ‘duplex’ — two state houses stuck together and sharing a front yard. There was a driveway, a dead car on the lawn, and windows patched with hardboard where the glass was broken. There was no sign of life. He walked along the drive, until he was level with Don’s back garden. He could see the cactus, up against the barbecue, too far away to reach — he would have to climb the fence. He glanced back at the d
uplex and thought he saw one of the blinds move. He couldn’t wait; they might be calling the police already.

  He began to climb the fence. It was rickety and unstable. When he was wobbling on the top of it the iron buckled. He lurched sideways to steady himself, cut his hand, and his jacket snagged. For a second he struggled, teetering, and he chose to fall forwards — no going back. He landed in the yard, his jacket ripped, his hand bleeding.

  He peeped over the fence. A window had opened next door. He ducked down. The sky was black and the green cactus rose, no reared, against it, looking … magnificent. He was struck with such an exquisite sense of comedy that he leaned back against the fence and shook. Here he was, preparing to steal (and for what a bad, immoral purpose) while the family, all ignorant, were solemnly grinding through Aunt Jenny’s wake. He felt in his pocket for the knife, and the fact that he’d swiped it off the refreshment table half an hour before struck him as hilarious. It really was true: he had the funniest time when he was alone.

  He inspected the plant, gauging how he could cut the most off without it being noticed. He was expert at brewing up this kind of cactus; if you did it properly it would keep you high for days. What visions, what vistas. It was like booking the most exotic and dangerous holiday. Absolute secrecy was required of course. He had a private place where he could brew up — a flat belonging to a friend. He began to saw. Careful. Mustn’t be greedy.

  A car door slammed. His scalp prickled at the thought of being discovered. Especially if his father … He felt cold at the thought of Per. Don’t panic. Don’t give up now. The stem was tough but he got through it with a last effort. He wrapped it in the torn jacket, climbed the fence, and was up the neighbour’s driveway in a flash. He tipped the jacket into the trunk of his car and drove away, stopping at the petrol station for cigarettes and a plaster for his hand.

  Raine had been searching for him. He looked strange, pale, almost radiant.

  ‘Larry. Larry.’

  The children lifted their heads, startled.

  He went obediently towards her.