The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  I carried my basket to the lake, where I could watch the white geese and mallards paddling around. Some were trailed by lines of tiny chicks, cutting wobbly V-shaped wakes behind their parents. I pulled the Margaux cork, picked up an enormous turkey sandwich, and ate my picnic, sunshine warming my face and wine and the grass, making my world smell like French countryside. On the far side of the lake, by a fallen tree trunk, two geese started a honking competition. I poured more wine. The honking competition ended in a flurry of feathers and a swift, sharp arc of water from one to the other that glittered in the sun like a diamond necklace.

  Why do you do this? Julia had asked, and I didn’t know. I would be better off working as some kind of park ranger or planting trees, and instead I had agreed to accompany Julia to Oslo. I was going to go on and find out more—the identities of those men, who they worked for, why they carried knives—when really I could not care less. What did it matter? They had no idea who I was and all Julia had to do to be safe was stay out of the way for a few weeks while Denneny and maybe the DEA sorted out the whole mess. But I’m Norwegian I had told Julia, and Norwegians were supposed to tidy away what they had disarranged, finish what they started.

  And Are you? she had asked. In Oslo, perhaps I could find out.

  I put the remains of the picnic in the trunk and had to search a minute or two before I found the head of the trail. It was laid with mulched bark weathered by sun and rain to a crumbly punk, soft enough for bare feet.

  Under the trees it was another country, with sounds and scents from another age. The air was rich and still. If you stood quietly, you could imagine the trees were breathing, the soft sigh of ancient forest. But this wasn’t an old wood. Through the thick foliage of mature birch and yellow poplar, the sun was bright on the fresh new green of sycamore saplings and young birches. The flash of thrush wings stitched bronze-black threads between tree trunks. A busy clutch of finches twittered, green-patched heads turning this way and that, while somewhere over my head a cardinal fluted.

  Such small birds for a such a big sound. I had a sudden vision of yellow beak opening to show startling red and pink throat and tongue, feathers swelling as the tiny creature tried to fill the world with song, tried hard enough to shatter its fragile, hollow bones, and all it was singing was, This is my tree, my tree, my tree. Keep away or I’ll break your wings.

  A twitch of movement up the bark of a white pine: a lizard with a blue belly and tiny glittering eyes that would not have looked out of place as a jewelled pin on a woman’s evening coat. It skittered around the other side of the trunk.

  The trail dipped. To the right the ground was boggy. Swamp oak loomed over reeds and a stand of yellow iris. Damselflies hummed in and out of the shade like tiny titanium helicopters. Some bird flashed through and snipped a couple out of the air. Beauty and innocence never saved anything.

  Just past the dog violets on the right, on a crumbling log, sat a salamander: five inches long and fire-engine red with black speckles. I watched it sunning itself for five minutes before something I couldn’t see or hear startled it. It moved so fast it seemed to disappear. Perhaps thirteen years ago there had been salamanders in the woods on the northeast side of the apartment complex at Northwoods Lake Court. I hadn’t been there long enough to find out.

  The trail was just over a mile. It came out above the lake, less than a hundred yards from where I had picnicked. Full circle.

  Northwoods Lake, the first place I had lived in this country, was less than a mile up the road, but no friends, no family had ever seen it. It was only two minutes’ drive; perhaps it was time to make the journey, go back, find out for myself what I had missed. But perhaps they would have cut down all the trees by now, drained the ornamental lake and leveled the brushy slopes to squeeze in a few more units. Perhaps I would find that my memory had played tricks on me. Perhaps I would find I had not lost a wonderland, that I was who I was not because I had killed someone but because that’s just the way I was born. I had never talked to anyone of what had happened there. Not even to my mother. No doubt the consulate had apprised her of events, but we had never spoken of it.

  I stood by the lake for a long time, through the full heat of afternoon, through a light shower of rain whose big drops felt unrealistically light, as though they were hollow. I stood while the mall traffic turned to rush-hour traffic, until the sun started to bloody the horizon. That’s when a blue heron glided in over the lake. With head tucked back on the long neck and legs dangling, it looked impossibly prehistoric, a pterodactyl with feathers. It alighted on the dead limb of a white oak hanging over the water, where it immediately assumed the pose of a Japanese painting: a single vivid brushstroke, stark against the gold and orange of the sky. It edged forward a little and turned its head this way and that, watching the lake intently. It stood nearly four feet high; its beak—a dead-looking thing of yellowed ivory—must have been ten inches long. Its plumage was slate blue with a powdery pinkish undercast, the topknot of four or five head feathers—like a silly chapeau—almost white. After a while it gave a little skip and a jump and hauled itself back into the air in a clutter of legs. With a couple of powerful wing beats it was gliding once again, sure and silent. Its shadow rippled over the darkening water and it headed southwest towards the city, the opposite direction from Northwoods Lake Court.

  I watched it awhile, then drove back towards the interstate. The water bottle lay broken open on the road. There was no sign of the man or his board.

  A fax from Benny waited for me at home: no matches on the blood type or fingerprints found at Honeycutt’s house from local files. It would take several days to run them against the FBI’s enormous file but the preliminary results were interesting: professionals who were not yet known to local law enforcement. Interesting but ultimately uninformative.

  I called Denneny’s voice mail again. “Brian, my client and I are leaving the country for a week or two. We leave the day after tomorrow, arriving Oslo on the first of May, and will be back midmonth, depending.” Depending on a lot of things. “You might be interested in the reported burglary at Honeycutt’s house last night.”

  He should have everything taken care of by the time we got back.

  I called my mother, who stayed up all hours. I talked to her secretary. It was a new one. “This is Aud Torvingen. Her daughter. Can you tell me what her schedule is like later this week? No, no, I’m in America. I’m…No, no, I’m Her Excellency’s daughter. Yes. Aud. I’m flying into London the day after tomorrow, from America. I want to find out when Her Excellency will be free so I can perhaps arrange an overnight stay before completing my journey to Oslo. No, no, I’m not in London now.” I switched to Norwegian. After two sentences she let me know that Her Excellency was in fact fully booked for the next ten days. “Then will you tell her to please call me?” I gave her the number, then repeated it just to be sure. “Tell her…tell her that I hope she can rearrange her appointments. That if she can’t, I’ll be passing back that way a week or two later and will be happy to fit in with her schedule. But I do want to see her. Please make that clear. Say I particularly asked to talk to her properly. Yes. Properly.”

  Properly. We had never really talked to each other after I was nine years old. She had been busy and I had been resentful. I had grown up independent, and then she had not known how to find her way back to me. I wasn’t even sure she wanted to, or what she might find if she did.

  The nights were getting hotter. The dogwood blossom was gone, azaleas in full bloom, and the air cupped my cheek as softly as a woman’s hand. I strolled through Little Five Points, careful not to swing my left arm too much and pull the healing cut over my ribs. The tables outside cafés and bars were full. Four different sets of street musicians competed with traffic and the ecstatic shirring of crickets and tree frogs. One woman on six-foot stilts was trying to play the harmonica. As I crossed the street, some man with sideburns and an apron was waving frantically at Stiltwoman. No doubt he was trying to point
out the power lines that ran quite low near his bar. I stepped into the orange glow of Borealis.

  Dornan beamed. “Ah, Aud, don’t you just love the beginning of summer? So wonderfully good for business. Lattés here, Jonie, please.”

  “What is that thing you’re wearing?”

  “This?” He flicked a finger under the gaudy purple bandanna around his neck. “Tammy gave it to me. She says it makes me look wicked.”

  With the red shirt, colour-blind was nearer the mark. “She’s gone again?”

  “Some godforsaken place in the Midwest. But she’ll be back in time for the grand opening of the Smyrna café.”

  “Another one, Dornan?”

  His beam stretched even farther. “Yes, indeed, business is good. You’ll be coming?”

  “When?”

  “What other day is there for an opening but Saturday? Saturday, when we can snag all the young mothers going to the Y to work out; all the teenagers coming out of the mall; all the angry young things who are too young to go to a bar.”

  “I’ll be in Norway.”

  “Norway? What’s in Norway but a miserable wasteland of snow?”

  “Blossom on the fjord, spring sunshine in Vigeland Park, a country waking up from a hard winter. I’ll be there a week or two, depending.”

  “On what?”

  “How long it takes Julia to get her business done, whether I’ll fly via London on the way there or back to see my mother.”

  “Julia, is it, and for two weeks? And no doubt seeing your mother was her idea.” He nodded wisely. “Always the first step. Tammy wanted to meet my mother, too.”

  “Dornan, it’s business.”

  “Two weeks isn’t business, it’s a holiday.”

  “I’ll be translating for her.”

  “Of course you will,” he said.

  There was a message from my mother when I got back.

  “Aud. How nice to hear from you. I’m afraid this week I am fully booked. The embassy is hosting the acid rain negotiations.” The Norwegian government was protesting about the acid rain damage to their forests caused by British power station effluent. “My government also wants me to open dialogue with regard to a touchy North Sea oil matter. Of course, if it is imperative that we meet, I can cancel one or more appointments. However, I would very much look forward to seeing you on your way back. And if you will be taking a holiday while you’re over there, please remember the seter. If you see Tante Hjørdis, give her my regards.” A slight pause. “Aud, it is good to hear from you. Please let me know, when you can, what date you will be returning through London.”

  She spoke in English.

  I got changed and went to the workroom. The chair was done, but raw. It needed finishing. I studied it. It was plain and graceful and strong. Not varnish, which could be hard and brittle when dry, and not paint, which would be cold in winter. Oil, then beeswax. I hummed as I pried the lid from the linseed oil and soaked the rag. I rubbed glistening liquid onto the armrests and imagined the hands that would touch the wood, perhaps resting there between turning the pages of a book, perhaps stroking the smooth wood, absently at first, then slipping a bit as the owner slept.

  eight

  Some wield money like a blunt instrument, bludgeoning their way to what they want. Others hold it up like a flashing light: Look! See how important I am! I prefer to employ it as a lubricant, to ease the wear and tear of daily living. The first time I had crossed the Atlantic as an adult I had spent nine hours folded up like an accordion in coach class, surrounded by children coughing up their childhood diseases into air that was changed only five times an hour. So this time, when dinner was served, about an hour into the flight, we were sitting in business class, on leather seats with footrests and individual screens. The cabin attendants were slightly older, with the expert makeup and extra pounds that come from confidence and efficiency. There was even room for our attendant to hand the tray directly to me in my window seat rather than resort to the pass-along method used back in steerage. My steak and Julia’s salmon were presented on real plates, and we had a choice of wine. Julia had mineral water. Afterwards, we sipped coffee. Julia’s was decaffeinated. She was the one twisting restlessly in her seat.

  “Perhaps you should try to sleep.”

  “Yes.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  The cabin attendant whisked away my empty cup and I pulled down my window shade, dug out blanket and pillow, and prepared to get comfortable, which was more difficult than usual because of the healing gash along my ribs.

  “Won’t you be too hot?”

  “My body temperature will drop when I’m asleep.”

  “What about your sleep mask?”

  “They’ll dim the lights soon enough.” Wearing something over my eyes in public has never struck me as particularly safe. I reclined my seat, pulled up the blanket, and listened to the muted roar of the plane as it hollowed through the night.

  I woke up five hours later to find Julia looking at me. There were dark circles under her eyes. “I don’t understand how you do that. I just can’t relax with all these people around.”

  “Your body would wake up if necessary.”

  “At least you’re not claiming it’s a Norwegian thing.” She looked better than the other passengers, most of whom were far gone down the red-eye, puffy face road to transatlantic hell.

  I stretched, carefully, folded away my blanket, and pulled up my window shade.

  Imagine a blood orange, torn open, and a highly polished mahogany desk. Smear one over the other and add a wash of light blue: dawn over Ireland; rich, unearthly colours that reached past my eyes and stole part of my soul. People were not designed to see such things. I felt the cellular hum of four hundred people as they dreamed or worried or rehearsed speeches in their head in this steel and aluminium shell thirty-three thousand feet over the sea, hurtling through air that is just that, thin air, and knew we were remote from the world, separate, aloof, supported by nothing but speed and physical laws I could recite but have never really believed.

  A few minutes later lights were going on, the smell of coffee seeped back from the galley, and people woke and murmured to their companions. A full English breakfast brought me back to the real world, then we started the ear-popping descent.

  I joined Julia in the noncitizen immigration control line. She said nothing when I got out my American passport, though I knew she must be wondering. I was wafted through but they asked Julia a dozen questions. She was smart enough to keep her temper but by the time they let her go her eyes were snapping.

  “So, do you suppose they have X-ray eyes and can see through your hand luggage to your UK passport?”

  “It’s the smile. Make it sympathetic but mechanical, as if to say: Jeez, bet you’re as bored with your job as I am with you doing your job, again. Let’s be quick and efficient and pleasant about this.”

  Her irritation lightened to amusement. “It’s nothing to do with the smile. It’s the eyes. They say: Nothing personal, but delay me and you die, old bean.”

  “Old bean? They stopped saying that a decade before the war.”

  “Which one?”

  “Here, ‘the war’ means only one thing: World War II.”

  “You’re a chameleon, you know that? Ten minutes on British soil and you’re already in their mind-set.” She eyed me speculatively all the way to the SAS gate. It was a three-hour layover, so we waited in the business-class lounge. I pulled out an Iain Banks novel but every time I looked up she was watching me.

  Eventually I put the book away. “Give me your ticket.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to check something.”

  To my surprise she didn’t argue but handed it over. I wandered out to the concierge, who was very helpful and did a lot of telephoning on my behalf.

  Julia contained herself until we were aboard and tightening our seat belts. I made sure she had the window seat this time. “Okay. I give in. What were you checking?”

 
; “The flight path. That we were seated on the left-hand side of the plane. That we could get our luggage sent on to the hotel at the other end so we don’t have to wait.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “They don’t offer, but if you ask, and pay, they can be persuaded.” Another of those clubs that you have to know exists before you find out how to join.

  The plane taxied for takeoff. The pulse in Julia’s neck beat faster. “And what about the flight plan, and seats?” The plane jerked a little as the pilot braked. The huge Rolls-Royce engines turned now in earnest and one of the overhead bins began to rattle. It was an old plane. The rattling got louder and faster. Julia’s nostrils were pinched and white.

  “Just after takeoff, there’s something I think you might like to see.”

  The engines suddenly roared in release and we lumbered down the runway. A bump, a lift, and we were airborne, the pilot hauling back on the stick so hard I thought he was trying for a loop-the-loop. Julia’s fingers dug into her armrest.

  “Look down now. It’s Windsor Castle.”

  We flew just a few hundred yards above the now-gracious showpiece of robber barons turned monarchs: the cathedral-sized chapel; the huge hall built by Edward III to bolster his new order, the Knights of the Garter; the vast outer ward.

  The plane groaned. Julia breathed very fast. “Edward rebuilt everything in stone, starting about 1350,” I said. “Trouble is, that was just after the great plague. There weren’t really enough stonemasons, carpenters and other artisans to go around, so Edward scoured the whole country and brought them all to Windsor. They demanded bigger wages because now demand outweighed supply. Edward outwardly railed against it, but privately paid them what they asked. Medieval inflation.”

  We were leaving the castle behind. Julia’s breathing had evened out a little. “I’ve never seen a castle before.”