by Fiona Kidman
Seth stood by her through all that and has stood beside her for forty or more years. He has put up with her absences and betrayals, the days when she’s somewhere else in her head. That’s Seth, rarely unkind. What will he make of her dead? She wonders if he will deliver a eulogy in which he bares the truth of what she’s really like. Perhaps Seth couldn’t describe who she really is. Nor could she describe him.
There’s nobody to tell what she’s just figured out, that she and Seth know each other for dear life, and don’t altogether know each other at all. Perhaps that’s what it’s like with most couples. She has read recently in the newspaper that couples who describe themselves as happily married might be divorced a year later, that happiness isn’t necessarily a guarantee of living happily ever after. How strange. She doesn’t think Seth would leave her now. But she might be leaving him. This may be what’s happening to her right now: she’s dying and leaving him, the way Janice left, simply not able to stay alive any more. And Grant had left. Not that she’s convinced Grant is dead. She believes she has seen him.
And there’s an irony about all this. There’s her sister Jessie, who deserted the family when she and her siblings were still children, a woman who had become famous for her exploits gathering news in the world’s hot spots, but couldn’t face the past. Now Jessie was coming back. She had emailed Belinda just the week before. Snatches of the message spool through her head. I hadn’t realised that you were the Belinda Anderson who made that splendid film about the aftermath of testing in the Pacific. I should have known. Well, yes, you should have, Belinda thinks. Jessie hasn’t even bothered to find out what Belinda has done with her life. Thanks for nothing, Jessie. When Simone was little Belinda had persuaded her to write a letter to her famous aunt, but there had been no reply. A few years ago, Jessie had been in New Zealand for the funeral of a friend and had written to suggest a visit, but Belinda was about to go to a film festival. That seemed not to have registered either. I would very much like us to meet again, Jessie had written. On the way to New Zealand, on this visit, she was planning to stop over in Cambodia to spend time with her daughter, whose name was Bopha. Jessie had adopted her after the civil war. Later, Bopha had elected to return to her country and help with its rebuilding. Bopha means ‘beautiful flower’ and she lives up to her name. I would be honoured if you would agree to meet me. I have so many questions to ask.
Belinda can’t get the letter out of her head. She has a few questions of her own. Like who belonged to whom in our family? What do you know that I don’t? Tell me about our mother, the things I never knew about her. You, of all of us, knew her. Don’t tell me about your beautiful flowers. Tell me why I share the DNA of a stranger I can’t even begin to trace. I would be honoured if you would agree to meet me. A wheedling note there. The cheek of it. How arrogant the woman was, expecting to turn up after all these years and pick up the reins again. Because that was what Jessie was like when they were children, the person in the driving seat. Besides that, Belinda had read plenty about this flower of Jessie’s. Jessie had written of the girl often enough, the way she had plucked her from the cesspits of human trafficking in the midst of a war. This was false modesty, the notion that Belinda wouldn’t have followed her grand life story spread through columns of newspaper space. Or rather that, in spite of discovering her talents as a film maker, she still doesn’t think of Belinda as very clever.
Her rage is unreasonable. Really, it’s a nice enough letter, but it’s come too late. Belinda will be dead before long. She will glower at Jessie from her coffin without an inch of forgiveness. But her anger is healthy: it revitalises her for a few minutes. The dahlia is fully in bloom now, glowing with colour in the muted light. She remembers that the dahlia is the national flower of Mexico. She was always good at Trivial Pursuits. The children had grown frustrated in their efforts to beat her at the game. The dahlia is the beautiful flower in Seth’s garden.
The hens appear to have retreated indoors, as if they’ve lost their expectations for the night, and accept that the morning might bring a better day. Only an occasional sighing squawk emanates from their house. The air has grown cold. A few drops of the rain, augured by the dark, rolling clouds above, splatter her. She gives herself up to the rain. The phone rings again. Don’t worry, be happy. She’s lost count of the number of times it’s rung. Simone, her own gorgeous daughter, for sure. She often rings after dinner when the kids are doing their homework. Or Seth, calling from Australia. He calls her quite frequently these days when he’s away, now that they live alone, just the two of them, in the big house.
It might just be the phone company offering her a deal. They do that in the evenings. Another call. Don’t worry … Soon the battery will run out. Dylan ringing her from Athens with an invitation to his wedding? That seems unlikely, too. He could see his mother breaking plates, and he didn’t need that, was what he’d said the last time she’d asked. This had offended her. ‘He wouldn’t get married without us, would he?’ she’d said to Seth. Seth had said, ‘Look, it’s not that important. I’m no Zorba the Greek. I’d be lost at a Greek wedding.’ But Dylan is, she’d said stubbornly, yes, Dylan is that kind of person.
It will have been a long meeting, the family will say to themselves when she doesn’t reply. She’s gone off for drinks. God knows she’ll probably be on the town half the night with nobody to go home to. Trust Mum to forget to switch on.
THE RAIN DOESN’T LAST LONG, but a mist seems to have formed in front of her eyes. She’s losing it, she knows, her sanity slipping away. Belinda would have liked to say goodbye to her children. She’s angry all over again that this is being denied her.
A late watery sun re-emerges, daylight-saving prolonging the hour, though the light is going, and she’s wet through. Nearly eleven hours since she fell. It’s now or never if she’s to save herself.
Belinda levers herself onto her elbows, heaving in her effort to roll over. Her scream startles her, a prolonged shriek, as alien as her trembling whispers of the morning. As she falls back, engulfed in a new and vicious pain, she thinks she sees a movement at the top of the garden.
‘Hello, is there anybody here?’ a voice calls. It’s Peter.
‘Here, I’m here. Peter, help me.’ Perhaps his voice is just another manifestation of her failing mind. But she sees his unmistakeable figure, looming above a low hedge.
‘Mum, what are you doing there?’ He’s leaping down through the terraces, his white clerical collar gleaming in the dying fall of the light, his suit coat flapping behind him.
He kneels beside her, one hand on her pulse, the other holding a cell phone, speaking rapidly, calling an ambulance. His expression is distraught. ‘An emergency, yes, she’s in shock. I’d say needs oxygen, yes, something for the pain. Oh God, hurry please, she looks awful.’ He slides the phone into his pocket. ‘Hold on, Mum. How long have you been here?’
Belinda is barely able to answer, her voice just a croak. ‘I don’t. Know. Morning. Long time.’
‘Come on, Mum, come on, don’t leave me.’ His voice is full of anguish.
‘How?’ she whispers. ‘How did you find me?’
She’s only partly listening as he explains how Seth has been phoning to let her know he was coming home a day later than scheduled, some change in the timetable. And when he couldn’t get a reply he’d rung Simone and asked her to come over and check on her, but she was at a parent teacher evening at the school and she’d rung Peter. Here he is. And she thinks, in some clouded part of her brain, that he has said it at last. He needs her.
‘I thought there was nobody home. I nearly fell over one of your bloody hens. I was figuring out how to get it back in the run.’
Bloody. Fancy that, Peter saying ‘bloody’. ‘Bundle,’ she says. ‘She must have got out after all. I think I was asleep, Peter.’ He holds her hand tightly. The wail of a siren draws near; soon there are lights, torches in the dark, people bearing a stretcher, a mask placed over her face. ‘You’ll feed the hens,
won’t you?’
‘In the morning, first thing.’
Belinda’s phone rings once, then stops. ‘My phone,’ she sighs. ‘It’s there. In your dad’s dahlia.’
‘I’ll find it later.’ His grip on her hand tightens.
‘But you’ll tell him, won’t you? I so wanted him to see it, his first dahlia of the season.’
‘You’ll tell him yourself, Mum, you’ll see.’
Peter rides in the ambulance with her, smooths hair from her forehead. A needle has been inserted in her arm. Above her mask, she sees that his face has lines around his mouth and that he’s still frightened.
‘My boy,’ she says. All the years have vanished. He must surely feel that immense surge of love filling her. She puts her free hand out to touch his face. ‘Such a beautiful boy. I won’t —’ she says and stops.
He leans to catch her words. ‘Won’t what, Mum?’
The morphine is stealing through her veins. She might yet survive. ‘I won’t go away, Peter. It won’t happen again.’
14
The book of leaving
2015
‘THEY SAID WE’D FIND YOU HERE.’ The speaker is a tall, thin woman, stylish in the way she dresses, but old beyond her seventy or so years. She leans on a wooden-handled cane. A puff of wind would blow her away, Belinda thinks.
The man at the table in the zoo café looks up slowly, taking them in, the muscles in his face not appearing to move. He has thick, neatly cut, grey hair, a grey moustache clipped in an exact line above his lip. Beside his cup there is a monocular that he has been using to observe the pygmy marmosets in the cage alongside the tables. Belinda has watched him through the glass as she and her sister Jessie mounted the stairs. She saw him, seemingly immersed in the activities of the swinging creatures, mothers with babies borne on their backs. It takes her a while to get up the ramp on her crutches because one leg is encased in plaster, by which time the man has turned his attention to their arrival.
He stands up to face them. He wears a collar and tie beneath a green cashmere sweater, trousers with knife-sharp creases, polished brogues. ‘The smallest monkeys in the world,’ he says, gesturing towards the enclosure. ‘Quite a primitive species. Did you know marmosets don’t have wisdom teeth? They’ve got claws, not fingernails.’
‘Grant, it is you, isn’t it?’ Jessie says gently, trying to stop this flow of information.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it’s me. At least I think it is.’
‘Have you got someone with you?’ Belinda asks. She sinks into a chair opposite her brother.
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s all right, I’m not rabid. They know where I am. I didn’t want you to meet me at the hospital, that’s all. I’m learning to live in the world again.’
‘Do you like it out here?’ Jessie asks.
Grant seems to sigh. ‘Joe Higgs liked the world. I’m not sure it’s got room for Grant Pawson.’
‘Jessie’s come down from Auckland to see you,’ Belinda says. ‘She’s going back to London tomorrow.’ She feels as if she’s speaking to a child, not her brother Grant. It’s like talking to a stranger. She remembers when she was young, just setting out on her career as a film maker, seeing the series of plays that are etched on her psyche. Talking to a Stranger. Judi Dench, Maurice Denham. She can’t remember who else starred. What she remembers is the pain of a family in the act of disintegration. Gladly, My Cross-Eyed Bear. It’s here, her own family drama, one she will never make. Grant had tried to reinvent himself as someone who didn’t belong to their family, taking on another identity, choosing to be someone else, until it all fell apart around him. This is where madness lies, she thinks. In the end, whenever the end comes, we can only be ourselves.
Jessie is talking again. No food for her but do either of them want something? Her hand holding a menu is almost translucent in its thinness. She has come on a day between dialysis sessions. Her whole journey from the other side of the world has been timed with careful planning to allow her to travel. She had arranged private care in advance for her stay in New Zealand. Her daughter, Bopha, hadn’t wanted to leave her, but she had promised her husband Tan, back in Cambodia, that she would return soon, not leave him and the children alone for long. Bopha had met all the family, except for Grant, and she and Dylan have only met on Skype, but they have promised to stay in touch. Belinda was surprised how well the two of them seemed to get along. It was Bopha to whom Dylan volunteered the information that he and his wife Cosima were coming to New Zealand. ‘Time she met the outlaws,’ he had said, referring to his parents. ‘Hey, I’ve just spoiled the big surprise.’
Belinda is finding it hard to concentrate on the conversation that’s evolving between Jessie and Grant. Young children jump and shout, high on the pleasure of their outing to the zoo; others are cranky and tired. It surprises Belinda these days, the way mothers allow their children to run riot in restaurants. It was something that her mother-in-law, Maisie, disapproved of, and Belinda had made sure that her children never did this.
Jessie, on the other hand, is smiling. ‘Remember how you kids used to play up when our mother took us to Kirkcaldie’s for afternoon tea? I could have died of shame. You used to bang your fists up and down on the tables, and blow sherbet all over each other through straws.’
‘We didn’t,’ Belinda says. ‘You’re making that up.’
‘No, she’s not. We did do that. You were the worst of the lot,’ Grant says.
‘Ouch,’ says Belinda, but she feels happier. Grant is remembering, something the hospital people had said he didn’t seem able to do, when they first called her, to tell him that he was a patient. At least he’d asked for her, that was something. His next-of-kin.
He and Jessie are talking about refugees, about all the places in the world where people are displaced and homeless. ‘What can people do about it?’ Grant asks.
‘I’m not sure,’ Jessie says slowly. ‘I think we stop trying to save all the world and focus on what good we can do for one another in the space we occupy. We become cells of good living, as best we can.’
‘But you wrote about the world’s problems,’ Grant persists.
‘I tried to tell people what was happening, that’s all.’ Her voice was wistful. Jessie had covered conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda (barely escaping with her life in a helicopter, while tides of people clambered to ride with her, their dark hands reaching out and imploring), Afghanistan, Iraq, Burma that is now called Myanmar, where she’d snatched moments with Aung San Suu Kyi while she was under house arrest, the genocide in Cambodia. It was only in Cambodia that she’d allowed herself to become involved, in a personal sense, when she’d taken Bopha, who, in time, became her daughter. Bopha could have led a professional life in London, but chose instead to return to Cambodia. Each step was a small one. Sometimes, Jessie said, Bopha and Tan felt their steps had a hollow ring, in a country that had had its heart emptied. Perhaps, she says, it might add up to something bigger in the long run, but that is one of the lessons you learn, that you do what you can and hope that the good will outlast you. It was too easy to be overwhelmed.
This conversation is of the kind Jessie has been having with Seth, about the environment, over the past week. At times, Belinda has felt on the periphery. The two of them seem in tune with each other, and now it’s happening with Grant, her strange lost-and-found brother.
Jessie looks over at Belinda, touching her hand lightly. ‘Recording angels, you and I.’ So that Belinda feels part of the dialogue again.
But she sees that Grant is drifting, his eyes beginning to cloud. He is weary of the world and its politics. ‘Such desolation,’ he remarks, tapping his fingernails on the table. His hands are neatly groomed and pale, but they carry scars, reflecting years of hard manual work on a farm down south. Belinda knows that’s where he tried to take his life.
‘I’ll go soon,’ he says. ‘What brought you back anyway, Jessie?’
‘I’m dying,’ she says. ‘And yes, I should have come b
efore but I didn’t.’
His eyes are following the marmosets again. One mother carries twins on her back, yet she leaps from branch to branch like spindrift in the air. Beneath them a giant green iguana has curled itself around a log. Do any of these creatures, Belinda wonders, believe that their temperature-controlled cage is really the Amazon?
‘Did you ever find out anything about those bits and pieces under the house?’ Grant asks Belinda, almost as if Jessie hasn’t spoken.
At first she hesitates, thinking that he’s talking about the picture of Janice. He knows that Janice has died. Belinda had asked the doctor to tell him this, if it seemed appropriate, because she thought it was something he’d want to know. But it’s the box of their mother’s belongings he’s talking about, not something she’d planned to discuss. She thinks that what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. But he’s onto her.
‘You did, didn’t you? What about that pipe?’
‘I had it tested for DNA.’
‘And what did you find?’
Belinda takes a deep breath before she speaks. ‘Inconclusive,’ she says. ‘It must have been under the house a long time.’ She knows he doesn’t believe her.
The mothers and their children have mostly taken their leave. The café is quiet. ‘I’m sorry you’re sick, Jessie,’ Grant says, as he stands up. ‘I hope you don’t experience pain.’
‘Nor you, Grant,’ Jessie replies gravely.
They all stand up then. ‘We can walk back with you to the hospital,’ Belinda says.
He nods at her leg in its plaster casing. ‘I don’t think so. Besides, I want to walk on my own. It’s such a good day for it.’
And he’s right. The sky is duck-egg blue, just the faintest breeze stirring the magnolia trees along Roy Street, the last of the season’s flower cups shining among the leaves. It takes Belinda back to nights she has walked along here after a protest march with friends whose names she barely registers now. Well, some of them she remembers better than others. They’re part of her history. Old times. Some of them good. She would rather be where she is now, her place in the world.
