by Tracy Farr
Some time passes. In the star-lack night, dark under a sliver of moon, Kurt wakes – does he? – all sick-mouthed, and sees – is it? – two people at the rocky far end of the bay. The two of them are walking close, as if in an awkward embrace, or holding each other upright. His eyes zoom in on them, broach – as if by magic – the distance between him (Kurt) and them (The Couple). She (The Girl) is slim, pale-faced, dark-haired, beautiful (how can he know that in the dark, from a distance?). He (The Man) is broader, taller; he is older (how can he tell?); he is brutish, hard-faced. They walk close to the water’s edge. They turn to face each other, their heads incline – his head bows down to hers – and they come together to kiss.
Kurt remembers to breathe.
Then another wave of dark comes.
Kurt wakes suddenly, sits up, stands up on the platform rock. The rain is heavier again, now; he must take care not to slip, so he moves slowly. He sees The Couple, further from him now, out on the point at the tip of the bay. Kurt lifts one hand to shade his eyes – that’s what you do when you look to a distant point – but The Girl and The Man merge together, no gap, no light, no space between them. They stay together for a minute, an hour, an age. Time stands still. Time is only now. Like music. Or comics: the now of the panel you’re reading, preceded by the past now of the panel before; followed by the future now, the next now. The now and the now and the now, all present at once, past and future bracketing the present, but all visible at once, all their own now. Here’s here in the now, the now of the shape of The Couple, there in the frame that his eyes can see.
Kurt remembers to breathe. The now and the now of it: breathe in now, breathe out now. The Couple dissolves and The Man turns and walks away up the rocks. The Girl is not there – not on the beach, not walking with him. Gone. Just like that.
Another wave of dark comes, wet with rain.
Kurt stumbles towards the point, boots crashing harsh over stones and sand, jacket flailing behind him like a great bird’s wings flapping across the beach.
He falls into the water. He’s on all fours. A wave breaks, and its foam surges up the beach, shushes up under him. He stands up. He wipes his eyes. He can’t see – what is it he needs to see? – and his eyes sting from the salt, and the night. He crashes again to his hands and knees, crawls up the shaley shore, stands again and turns to the sea, watches.
There: something. Is it? A dark star in the water. A pale shape, a slender shape, a dark shape. Moving or not moving? He moves closer. A wave comes, breaks, flows. The dark shape changes, slips sideways, as if turning in the surf.
He falls to his knees in the surging sea, and the dark comes again.
Everything goes dark
Luce wakes, fuzzy, from deep sleep to a buzzing, a beeping, a tiny light shining from the floor by her bed. Hello, she says, trying out her voice, clearing her throat, hello, hello, before she swipes to answer Iris’s phone.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that Iris Golden?’
It’s the person who phoned before. Luce can tell it’s the same voice, but she sounds different – formal, or something. Serious.
‘No, it’s me, Luce. Lucy.’
‘Could I speak to Iris, dear? It’s important.’
‘Just a minute. I’ll look.’
She looks at the phone for the time – 3:13. She opens the door to her room without turning the light on. The only light is from the rectangle of the screen of Iris’s phone, in her hand. The party is over. The lights are all off. She goes to Iris’s room, softly opens the door. There is her mum, big and fat and snoring. Iris’s bed is empty. She closes the door, sinks down onto the floor, her back against the wall of the hallway, holds the phone to the side of her head, whispers back.
‘She’s not here. Iris isn’t here.’
The woman on the phone draws in her breath – Luce hears it swhooooph suck in air. This is the sound of deciding what to do. Then there’s a sigh. This is the sound of telling the decision.
‘Lucy, it’s very important that I speak to Iris as soon as possible. Is she – when do you expect her to be back?’
Now is the time for Luce’s telling. She lets the words out in a rush.
‘She forgot her phone. She went to the hospital. About midnight. She’s not back.’
‘To the hospital? Here? To see Rosa?’ The woman sounds confused, or surprised.
‘No – here, Cassetown. She was sick. Iris was. Then she was better, she said. She took herself to the hospital, to get – um – like checked up. In her car, she drove. She told me not to tell, not to spoil the party. But she forgot her phone. I don’t know – everyone’s asleep. Iris isn’t back yet.’ Luce can feel herself getting panicky, the words mixing up in her head, coming out in the wrong order. Iris shouldn’t have done this to her. It’s not fair.
‘Look, don’t you worry, Lucy. I’m sure Iris is fine. You go back to sleep, dear. But as soon as Iris gets back, you must get her to call me. It’s important. Alright?’ The woman on the phone has a calming voice, one you sort of just want to obey, whatever she says, like a kind teacher, or the school counsellor.
‘Yeah.’
‘You pop off back to sleep, okay?’
‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Goodnight, dear.’
‘Night.’
The woman ends the call before Luce does. Luce hears the beeping sound of the disconnection echoing inside the phone. She taps it to end. She sits there – on the floor, in the hall, outside the room where her mother sleeps and snores – until the screen on Iris’s phone goes to sleep, and everything goes dark. In the darkness, Luce realises: the woman didn’t mention Rosa. She didn’t say that Rosa was alright, like she did before.
And Luce knows it from the not saying, and from the sound of her voice: Rosa is dead.
ROSA
One hundred fingerprints I hear
A hundred linger in my ear
Counting backwards I count you in
Kristin Hersh, ‘Counting Backwards’
100. Now
No earth move, no jolt, just empty whisper. Quiet in the night, night in the bed, bed lift me up, up and down like a bride’s nightie. Woman there, tap tap tapping on the thing, phone, she’s tap tap tapping. One two three tap, two two three tap, nine ten eleven tap, counting me in, counting me down, five four three two one … breathe in, breathe out, count backwards til I I I … O o oh. Rosa.
99. Two hours ago
There she is, Smits, in-charge woman, phone in hand.
Loose, she says. Loose-y.
Rosa, we’ve left a message for your daughter, she says.
Loose-y goose-y, lefty loose-y.
She says I was on the floor. They picked me up, she says.
I am in my bed now. No, another bed. No, it’s my bed, but there is a machine next to it; no, a thing. For diving under water. A tank. A mask.
I breathe in, breathe out, as she tells me to, and sense starts to remake itself: had a fall; took a turn; oxygen is helping; Lucy.
98. Two days ago
They are going south to Cassetown today. They’ve just popped in, can’t stay too long, got to beat the traffic, Mum, long weekends are hopeless.
Iris has brought the boy with her. Little Kurt (who is not little any more, but I still and always think of him as Little Kurt). He is visiting, staying with her, home for the holidays. He is dressed all in black. His hair is black, too. He looks like a big black crow, or a swan. Iris has brought the girl Lucy, too, the cousin. She is prickly that one, like a rose bush. Like thorns on a lemon tree.
But there is something prickly about the boy today, too, about Not So Little Kurt. He has a big black dog on his back. I used to say that to Iris, you’ve got a big black dog on your back, when she was in a mood like this. I would say it to the boy today, if I could speak. Instead, my hand just claws towards him. He jerks his hand back out of reach, instinctively. Then Iris moves her hand onto the arm of the chair where I’m sitting. She puts her hand there, near my hand, and s
o I claw at her. Big black dog, big black swan. There’s a big black mood in the room today.
The prickly girl, Lucy, is chewing her thumb. That’s a nasty habit. And Iris is folding my clothes. That’s habit too, that’s typical of Iris, making work where none exists; the clothes were already folded, or they wouldn’t have been in the drawers. That’s what the nurses do, or the orderlies, or whatever they call them. That’s their job.
Everyone here has a job. My job is as it has been for years now: to lie here, or sit here, and be subject to their jobs. Iris’s job is to worry, to mother. Poor Iris, no one’s ever really looked after her, picked up after her, made her meals, washed her laundry; not since her father. Frank, I mean.
97. Ten days ago
They have sold the house. Iris has come today to tell me this, and also that her boy will visit her next week, fly home from Wellington. His work (or is it study?) is going well. Something about film. Or perhaps I mean maps. Iris is vague. Or perhaps it’s me.
Yes, she tells me, they have sold the Cassetown house, so they must empty it.
In fact, she says, the whole famn-damily’s going down to Cassetown. She says, Paul and Kristin are going to bring the baby, and Marti’s coming, and Luce, and Paul’s organised a bit of a party on the long weekend, to lift the roof off the house, one last bash before we clear out.
Your things are there, she tells me. I’ll go through them. She takes my hand, rubs it, rub-a-dub-dub. I’ll take good care, she says. Kurt’ll help.
Now, she says, a verbal handclap to change subject, birthdays! It’s Kurt’s twenty-first, your one hundredth. We can’t let that go uncelebrated. Kurt doesn’t want to do anything, so he says. But I’ll talk him round, while we’re down in Cassetown, talk him into a family thing, celebrate your birthday and his together. We’ll all come in to see you. It’ll be good. We’ll have a cake. It’ll be lovely. All of us together, that’s the main thing. She takes my hand again, rubbity-rub, pat pat.
She stands, folds my few clothes in their drawers, straightens the tissue box by the bedside. She tweaks the curtains, stands there for a time looking out at the garden, says something about roses, and birds, and the sky, and the weather.
Honestly, I can’t be bothered listening.
She shoulders her bag, kisses my cheek.
I hear her talking with the manager woman in the hallway outside my door.
Box of birds, dear, she’s a box of birds.
The manager says that, and she means me. This old bird is a box of birds. The manager says this sort of thing: a box of birds, or one of fluffy ducks. Early birds and rare birds, a little birdie told me. Much of her vocabulary is bird-based. Strange bird, that one. I’m a kiwi, she tells me.
96. Two years ago
I don’t really know why, Iris says. Why now, I mean.
She is sitting in the chair by the side of my bed. She has fabric in her lap, a silver needle flashes between her fingers. Stitch stitch, snick snick with the scissors, the thrill of red thread, a knot, stitch stitch.
I don’t really know. It may not last. I just thought, you know, I’ve been hitting it a bit hard. It’s just easier to give it up completely, for a while, than to cut down.
She is talking about drink. She often sits and talks, these days. She talks to me more now than she ever has before. Now when I cannot answer her (and, of course, perhaps that is why). Lately she has been bringing needle and thread, and she sits and stitches and chatters away. This is a new thing, the stitching. She shows it to me. It’s not the little fine stitches of traditional embroidery, but big bold strokes that quickly make a shape, give a sense of colour and movement. Sometimes she stitches words, so the effect of words with simple shapes is of a cartoon, or a comic book. She experiments, she tells me.
The not drinking is a new thing, too. It suits her. Her eyes are brighter; the skin on her face is less marked and mapped by the fine red lines that had begun to define her. Or perhaps I’m imagining it.
It’s been a week now (she says), and I’m feeling really good for it. I don’t miss it. Not really. I don’t have any in the house. No wine in the fridge. That makes it easier. Of course, the real test will be staying sober next time I see Marti. I shouldn’t blame her, though. I’m an adult. I make my own decisions.
Oh, I remember wine in the fridge. I remember sobriety, and its opposite. I remember choice, and agency, and making my own decisions.
Those were the days.
I hear the tea trolley rattle in the distance. Or maybe it’s the medication trolley. They sound the same.
95. Three years ago
There’s a radio in my room, but they keep it tuned to easy-listening music, soulless stuff. I never hear the news any more, unless I catch it sideways.
Today, when they clean my room, they hobble me into a wheelchair, and wheel me to the day room. They park me there, line me up with the rest of them, facing early morning breakfast television. Our mouths gape, slack with age; we’re as helpless as baby birds. One of the staff points a black box, click, click, and the channel changes, flicking from a cartoon sponge to a cricket match, from a close-up shot of vegetables whirring in a blender to a news desk, a human face with a rictus slash of red lipstick, hair that doesn’t move.
They call news like this breaking.
There is a city, rocked by earthquake. The spire of a cathedral tumbles. A catastrophe of letters flashes on the screen: CTV, PGC, EQNZ, USAR. I sway in my wheelchair, as if registering the aftershock.
94. Four years ago
The boy, Little Kurt, when he visits is sweet, kind. He visits quite often, now that he has left school. He’s a good boy, underneath the black clothes, the hair, the look. He sits patiently, quietly. One day last week, when he visited on his own, he sat and rubbed my feet. He rubbed my feet! Imagine. The feel of it. His touch. He drank tea with me, from the small thick cups they always use here, cream with a red stripe around the rim, thick and heavy but too small for a proper cuppa.
The boy Kurt, my should-be-grown-up grandson, might have flown off by now to have his own life, I would have thought, might have left the limbo of adolescence. But he seems to cling to it, or it to him. Iris sits and talks about him. He’s only seventeen, it’s too young to know what you want to do, she says. I could tell her what I was up to at seventeen, curl her hair, turn her head. But he’s a good boy, at least, a kind boy (see: foot-rubbing, as mentioned. It’s a rare grandson that would do that for his poor dumb, bedridden crone of a gran).
93. Four years ago
Iris folds and refolds the clothes in my drawers, chattering all the while about god knows what. She closes the top drawer then turns around and leans against the dresser. Look at it, the sharp false wood of its cheap edge, look how it’s cutting into her through her jeans.
The Norwegian one, Kristin, has lost another baby (I could do a Lady Bracknell, say something about misfortune, carelessness). A late miscarriage, Iris says. Sometimes when she tells me these things I think she is telling them to herself.
It is hard to read her feelings now for Paul, but I think, I truly think, that he is family to her. He is and always will be the father of her boy. I do not think she aches for him. And I think she truly cares for the Norwegian. Poor Kristin, she says. Poor thing.
92. Five years ago
I sit in my chair, watching the door. (What else is there to do?) I can see reflections on its wood; light, coming softly through the curtained window, through cotton voile modesty drapes. I shift my hands in my lap. There is delicate pearl varnish on the nails, from Kurt’s visit last week. He painted my nails with such tenderness. His own nails had chipped black varnish on them. He painted over it with my pearl ivory varnish, after he’ d finished painting my nails.
Kurt was wearing black when he visited. Not just on his fingernails, on everything. He wore black pants, and a black t-shirt, and a shirt with buttons over the top of that, and that was black, too. His shoes were black. Leather, with laces; heavy on his feet, the soles worn dow
n at the toe.
I close my eyes, lean my head back against the chair. It is comfortable enough. My hands rest on the arms of the chair. I lift my fingers, play an arpeggio on the arms of the chair, both hands at once, from little finger to thumb, and back again from thumb to little finger. Pinky finger. This little piggy went to market. This little pinky. The nailpolish that Kurt painted over his chipped black nails; I can see it. Pearl islands in a pearlised black sea. His fingernails remind me of the photographs I used to colour, when I worked at the studio with Frank, painting flesh tones onto faces and hands, onto necks held high and proud, onto young décolletage and old crêpey bosoms. Pink flesh tones and rosy cheeks. Rosa cheeks. Cheeky.
91. Six years ago
Postcard from Dunsborough
Dear Mum,
File this under ‘sentences I never thought I’ d write’: my ex-husband’s wedding was lovely, and his bride was beautiful!!!
The ceremony, dinner, everything, was on a terrace overlooking the beach here (the beach on this postcard). Very lowkey, untraditional, but all very charming, elegant. I ended up giving the bridegroom away – sort of a symbolic handing over to Kristin. Kurt was Paulie’s best man – oh, Mum, it would’ve brightened your heart to see him, so beautiful, so serious (there’s nothing quite as serious as a 15-yr-old!).
Luce was her usual sullen self – the grumpiest 9-yr-old I know. Marti was a hoot, as always.
One awful, awful thing though, that Marti told me: Kristin was pregnant, but she miscarried the day before the wedding. So sad. Kristin’s a sweetheart (also filed under sentences I never thought I’ d write).
