The Erratics

by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

  Fourth Estate

  an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  First published in 2018 in Australia and New Zealand

  by Finch Publishing Pty Limited

  This edition published in 2019

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Vicki Laveau-Harvie

  The right of Vicki Laveau-Harvie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  ISBN 978 1 4607 1196 5 (ebook)

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  Cover image by Justin Mullet/ stocksy.com/ 1908356

  Author photograph by Michael Chetham

  Tens of thousands of years ago, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet snaked down the east side of the Alaskan Rocky Mountains, through what is now the province of Alberta in Canada, and into the US state of Montana. As it moved, it deposited gigantic rocks called Erratics along its path. These form what is known as the Foothills Erratic Train.

  One of those huge boulders sits in the foothills a few miles from the Canadian town of Okotoks, in a landscape of uncommon beauty.

  Countless years ago, the Okotoks Erratic fell in on itself and became unsafe to climb upon. It dominates the landscape, roped off and isolated, the danger it presents to anyone trespassing palpable and documented on the signs posted around it.

  For Laurence and Simon,

  and for Irene

  Chapter 1

  My sister unhooks the chart from the foot of my mother’s bed and reads.

  My mother is not in the bed. My sister takes her pen, which is always to hand, around her neck or poked into a pocket and, with the air of entitlement of a medical professional, writes MMA in large letters at the bottom of the chart.

  MMA.

  Mad as a meat-axe.

  My sister learned this expression from me yesterday. She has latched onto it like a child wresting a toy from another.

  We have come to visit my mother, in rehab for a broken hip in this prairie hospital, a place that could be far worse than it is. It is set down here, plain and brown, on flat farmland, but the foothills start rolling westward just outside town and you see them from the windows. They roll on, smooth, rhythmic and comforting, until they bump into the stern and inscrutable face of the Rockies eighty miles thataway.

  In summer the fields are sensible, right-angled squares of sulphur-yellow and clean, pale green, rapeseed and young wheat. In winter the cold will kill you. Nothing personal. Your lungs will freeze as Christmas lights tracing the outlines of white frame houses wink cheerfully through air so clear and hard it shatters.

  MMA, I say. They won’t know what that means. You don’t say that here in Southern Alberta, even in urban centres. It’s a down-underism, an Antipodianism. Maybe they’ll see that on the chart and give her some medication called MMA and kill her.

  Do we care? my sister asks. She hangs the chart back on the foot of the bed as my mother wheels into the room, gaunt, her favourite look, with a black fringe and bobbed hair. Hats off for carrying that off at 94. Her sinewy hands coerce the wheels of her chair forward faster than you are supposed to go if you need this chair.

  She is wearing a hospital gown and a pair of fuchsia boxer shorts. Not hers. Obviously not hers.

  She remarks that it is strange that she cannot have her own things to wear, that she must wear this strange outfit. We don’t think to question. We believe in strange. We believe whatever. There’s no other way to go at this.

  We have run the nurses’ station gauntlet to get to her. We have announced ourselves at the counter as her daughters, on our first visit to this rehab ward. We are her daughters we say, when challenged about why we are in this corridor.

  No, you’re not, the nurse says, not even looking up from her papers.

  But we are. We’re sure.

  No, she insists. She only had one daughter and she died a long time ago. Now she has none.

  My sister cries out from the heart, startling me. Look at me, she cries. Do I look dead?

  I don’t think she is looking too good, but there is something more pressing. Why, I ask her, are you the daughter who gets to exist? Even if you’re dead now. Not to put too fine a point on it but if anyone should get to be dead, it’s me. I was born first.

  The physio strolling by stops to ask who we are and what the matter is. We stare at her, wanting to say all that is the matter, wanting to unroll the whole carpet of what is the matter and smooth it out, drawing attention to the motifs, combing the fringed edges into some order, vacuuming the patterned surface until clarity emerges. We wonder how to begin.

  They are saying, the nurse tells the physio, that they’re the duchess’s daughters. But she has no children.

  You’ve got it wrong, the physio says. Little bird of a person, you’d never know it of her, but she had eighteen kids. Imagine, eighteen. And only one boy. Heartbroken she was. Told me herself. In tears. Oh, she had kids all right. Nobody around when you need them though.

  I draw breath. I can work with this. See, I say to the nurse, there you go. We can’t speak for the others, but we’d like to see her.

  Just in case we’re having too much fun with this, let’s go back a notch in time. Only a little while, don’t be afraid, not far enough to get caught in the starry wheeling vertigo of the slow-mo free-fall no-up-and-no-down that is the more distant past. We will go there – chronology has its uses – but not just yet.

  Some weeks earlier then. The beginning of winter.

  When winter comes, summer is the memory that keeps people going, the remembrance of the long slanting dusk, peonies massed along the path, blossoms as big as balloons, crimson satin petals deepening to the black of dried blood in the waning light, deer on the lawns, stock still. Some people here, not transplants from the city like my parents, still make preserves in the summer, crab-apple jelly, tomato chutney, apple butter. They keep the jars safe through the autumn months, when the hay is rolled and the young coyotes practise yipping at the moon from the edge of the stubbled fields, to eat when the snow flies.

  My parents live in paradise, twenty acres with a ranch house on a rise, nothing between you and the sky and the distant mountains. Overlapping cedar shingles on the roof that will last for generations or until the house falls down.

  No near neighbours.

  The house is paradise in the same way the Hotel California is: a fortress with many bedrooms, a wine cellar, a mud room, a huge windowless library, a grand piano in the great room, two furnaces and a bomb shelter dug five metres deep into the hill in case Cuban missiles are ever aimed at the Turner Valley oilfields or the trout in Sheep Creek.

  The doors of this house open to no one. The phone rings unanswered, unheard by my father who finds his life liveable if he takes t
he batteries out of his hearing aid, and ignored by my mother, who knows the world is out to get her. The leaves of the trembling aspen can shake all day like gold coins in air as clear as cider, but this is not a welcoming place.

  So, early winter in the house a mile from the six-lane highway running straight south to the States. On this day a solid ribbon of eighteen-wheelers is gunning it full throttle for Great Falls, Montana, or Boise, Idaho, making the most of the open roads and hardly believing their luck, just a drift of powder across the road when you gear up, like icing sugar from a cruller donut.

  In the kitchen, my mother’s hipbone crumbles and breaks and she falls.

  They must have phoned someone. They must have opened the door to strangers who came to help. These strangers will have walked into this time-capsule house sealed against the outside world for a decade. The breaching of the no-go zone must have made a sound like a crowbar splintering wood.

  Chapter 2

  Some days later, at the hospital, I prop myself up in a mid-blue tub chair in the social worker’s room. Outside the sky is colourless, the landscape dun and dry, a wasteland waiting for snow.

  The year’s work is done on the land and the wards on the floor below my mother’s are full of farmers and ranchers under observation for a vague and undefinable malaise. It’s the same every year. I blame the landscape, out there pining like a suitorless spinster for the snow, for the blinding swathe of white that will mask its disgrace and wrap it in beauty until the spring when, against all odds, bountiful things will pierce the earth, grow and flower.

  At my parents’ house, where I stay with my sister, my stick-figure skin-and-bones father creeps along the hallway at night to turn the thermostats up on the furnaces. My sister sighs and mutters as she turns them down and slams the door to her bedroom.

  I don’t care either way. I just wish she wouldn’t sleep with her window wide open. Hasn’t she read In Cold Blood? These sparsely populated spaces where the buffalo no longer roam draw sociopaths, people with guns and opportunistic local crack-heads.

  We are no match for any of those, such as we are: two women well past any semblance of bloom, often mistaken for twins in supermarkets and gas stations, which pisses off the younger of the two, and a shaking, shambling old man who is not, as I first feared, terminally stricken. It is simpler than that. He has been starving for some time and suffers, like Patty Hearst before him, from Stockholm Syndrome.

  So I sit in my tub chair facing the young social worker dispatched to get a bead on us, and we are broaching the subject of my mother, her fractiousness which is disrupting hospital routine, her dicey rehab prospects, and her eventual discharge.

  Or at least my vis-à-vis is trying to broach. I am gamely trying to pretend that I do not see her flipping through the index pages of the Family Justice and Equity Handbook in her mind, looking for an appropriate heading. My mother has told her that my sister and I disappeared decades ago and that the investigators she hired on several continents found no trace of us. But now, somehow sensing her frailty, smelling death and money, we have come in to land feet-first, like vultures in a western, wanting to put her away.

  The last bit is true.

  The young woman eyes me cautiously. It must have been hard when you were growing up, she begins.

  I look balefully at her. I mean, she says, with a mother so … Her voice dies out. She looks to the landscape for help. I want to get this over with. I help.

  Extreme? I say. Mercurial? Challenging, yes. Quite a vibrant personality, my mother.

  To be blunt, she says, your mother can be difficult.

  So. They’ve noticed.

  I’m ready for this. I have rehearsed with my sister for this. I have had to, because here is what happened yesterday.

  Suppertime, yesterday evening. My sister is carving a chicken for dinner when the phone rings. She speaks on the phone for some minutes, carving knife in hand, then she hangs up and announces that they want to see us at the hospital to talk about my mother, in particular about something they call her difficulty adjusting. My sister looks to the ceiling and begins to exult like a true believer giving praise.

  Finally, she cries. Somebody will finally believe us! They can see how crazy she is. They’ll believe us now. She skewers a couple of the old non-believers from our childhood on her carving knife on the way back to the stove.

  In a flash I see our situation clearly. It’s like a split screen, a two-part problem my sister and I have not spoken about in clear terms in the hours since we arrived here.

  My mother is, by virtue of a crumbling bone, an osteoporotic hip, confined exactly where we need her to be: in a hospital, for an extended period of time, away from my father. If we’re smart enough, we’ll use the respite this broken bone affords us to make sure she never comes home at all, that she will remain confined, not for her hip but for a completely different reason, and that my father will have room to recover from her regimen of starvation and brain-washing.

  They don’t care about crazy, I say. It’s not about crazy. She’s in there for hip rehab and she’s giving them a lot of trouble. They just want to make sure that we are ready for her to be discharged as soon as they can decently do it.

  Watch what you wish for, I warn her. We won’t want them to believe she’s always been crazy. If they believe that, we can’t make a case for keeping her confined from now on, somewhere where she can’t kill Dad by increments.

  Or in one go, I add, thinking of the rifle in its chamois cover propped in a corner of the study downstairs.

  We’ll need them to believe in a slightly modified metaphor: an unstable slope that has recently given way; a slippage like the Frank slide in the Rockies that killed scores; a sudden cascading deterioration, maybe during the anaesthetic for her hip. It could be true. It happens. We need her not to come home because she will perish in this house and so will her husband, so she must be seen as unable to cope now, not as having always been that way.

  This upsets my sister. She wants validation, vindication. She wants it to be about crazy. She wants to paint ‘I told you so’ on the walls of the hospital, in blood. She has a case, but she can only indulge herself at a cost I am not willing to pay. I know I’m right.

  I win. With bad grace, she rehearses with me after dinner. We stand, like airline hostesses, feet together. Here, I say, is your normal range of personality traits. I hold my hands a foot apart, waist height, palms facing, as though pressing on the ends of a wholemeal sandwich loaf.

  And this, I say, spreading my arms wide as though indicating an exit on the right, we wish, and an exit on the left, if only, is my mother’s range. Tendency to extremes, challenging for loved ones. ‘Loved’ in inverted commas.

  And now, just recently, this unfortunate slippage, which has pushed her beyond any parameters our arms can encompass. Eyes down, palms up, helpless.

  That is what we will say.

  Repeat after me.

  So, back in the room with the social worker. I know she’s just doing her job, trying to decide if she can believe my mother about us, to make a call about how safe my mother will be if sent home to people like us.

  You must surely, she says, harbour some, like, uh … She gives up.

  Resentment, you mean? Anger, hurt, confusion? It’s a continuum. I stop short of dead-straight pain, rage, despair and homicidal acting out. She nods and nods.

  I think suddenly of the jack pumps they put on well-heads to pull the crude oil from the earth around here. My dad would take me with him sometimes, out to the oilfields on weekends, and I would watch the pumps, their heads pecking patiently at the ground like big clumsy birds, reliable and benevolent, assuring the prosperity of all and sundry.

  No, I say, I do not feel those. She blinks. You wonder why? I prompt, pressing my advantage. She does.

  Because my mother opened doors for us, I say. I stand up, for effect and because I have a cramp in my foot, probably DVT, and fling the door open to illustrate. My sister, eavesdropping
on the other side, takes a hit on the nose and staggers out from behind the door. I glare at her.

  Music, literature, languages, I tell the social worker. My mother opened those doors. I am grateful.

  This is not untrue. My sister feels differently. She has her truth and I have mine but she isn’t the one doing the talking right now. She is standing in the doorway practising the first hand position we rehearsed, the one indicating a normal range of emotional responses.

  Ah yes. Knowledge, says the social worker. Culture. The world. You must have so enjoyed your time in Venezuela.

  Clever girl, to go fishing like that. My mother has told her the tale about Interpol looking for me in South America. She has been telling the neighbours the same tale and it will take them some time to open their doors to me.

  Before he got old, my father was a great dry-fly fisherman. It was his communion, those mountain moments immobile in his khaki hip-waders in the icy brook, the almost imperceptible flick of his fly rod sending the lure to land weightlessly, a dragonfly settling on the lip of the current, just within reach of the trout resting in the brown shallows under the overhanging rock, facing upstream.

  I’ve watched a master do it. This little bureaucrat is going to have to do better than that.

  I am suddenly lie-on-the-floor tired. My eyelids are lined with ground glass from opening into the wrong light in the wrong time-zone, my lips are chapped and my hair is standing straight up, shocked to attention by the negative relative humidity of the western prairie microclimate.

  Reassure me, I say to my sister. Did any one of us ever live in Venezuela?

  No, she says. Lots of places, but not there.

  Chapter 3

  Banks of fog, impenetrable to the untrained eye, lie across questions of where in the world we have been, fog that makes you stumble, hands straight out in front of you. And that’s not all. The glare of black ice obscures other matters: who we are; what we are.