On the sideboard stood family photos in heavy silver frames. Mother, father, Colette as a baby, an older brother. The whole family had a similar look: lean, with attractive, slightly elongated features and pale eyes.
Dan’s eyes were the colour of the dark slate floors in the second bathroom. This thought had occurred to him the night before, when he’d escaped the awkwardness at the table to go to the bathroom. He’d sat on the toilet, guts uneasy, examining the marks in the tile. Knowing that Colette was waiting in the room next door, ablaze, expectant.
Up on the rock, Dan felt a dreamy vertigo. Like he might topple onto her, all the way down there. He imagined something happening to her at that moment: an assault, a seizure, a horrible accident. He would see it all reduced, the kicks and struggles – tiny flickers against the green grass. Maybe, a fraction of a moment later, a thin cry floating up through the air. He’d be too far away to prevent it, to catch or hold her – to be held accountable. He was much too high.
So high, there was nothing but blue sky all around him, no substance, nothing to lean on. He swayed. A tremor shook his legs and he went down on his knees, clutching the rock.
He was able to crawl away from the edge. The other side of the rock turned out to be easier, sloping gently. At its base he crouched in the bushes, legs still shuddering. The dogs licked his face. All he’d wanted was to be up there, at the top.
That night, miraculously, despite his clumsiness and the constant slight trembling that he was feeling now in her presence, he didn’t break a thing, or bite a section out of the rim of his glittering wine glass. He drank glass after glass, and the more he drank the brighter and more finely drawn her face seemed on the other side of the polished table top. Her eyes so bright he could not look.
She was going to dump him. He knew it absolutely. He looked at the cream and silver surfaces of the house, and felt his wrongness there quite clearly. The house could not tolerate his touch. He didn’t know how to stand here, how to sit or hold things. Of course this was plain to her as well, and any minute now she would dump him. He was quite drunk.
When her cellphone rang, she stared at the screen for a moment without answering.
“Who is it?” he asked, too loudly.
Instead of replying, she took the phone through into the bedroom to talk.
“Who was it?” he said when she came back.
“What? Dan, god,” she said, dropping into her seat. She kicked off her grown-up shoes and pulled her feet up into the chair.
“Who?”
“It was my dad, okay? Look, I’m sorry, but he wants to come out here tomorrow.” She didn’t look at him. “And anyway I think it’s better, don’t you? This isn’t really working out.”
“What? What do you mean?” He couldn’t hear her words, only his own, noisy in his head. “What’s better?”
“If you go.”
She would leave him, she would dump him, she was doing it now: he could see her mouth moving, saying the words.
That night, he ended up in the spare bedroom with the dogs. And by morning the boulder was there.
The sun was already high, and the boulder had almost no shadow, just a thin rim of black around its base. Now Dan recognised the rock – it was the one he’d met before, up on the slope. Here was that particular lip that he’d used as a grip, just canted over. He could climb it easily now, but the impulse was gone.
He squatted down and peered into the crack under the rock. His thumbs tingled, remembering being hit by hammers, caught in car doors. He lay on his stomach and put his face as close as he could, but saw nothing in the darkness. When he put his hand flat against the ground and slid it in, his fingertips touched something rough and dry. He worked it back and forth until he could pull it free. A splintered wooden slat, still attached to a strip of deck-chair canvas, candy pink.
He hurried into the house. Black spots mottled his vision. The living room was dim but he did not switch on a light. Out the front, her car was still in the driveway. He sat for a while on the huge white couch, heart hitting the front of his chest. He picked up the phone to call her cellphone, but then put it down again without dialling. When he tried a second time, it was off. Swallowing back the sickness, he went outside to peer again at the boulder, underneath it, careful not to touch it with any part of his body. He’d kicked at that thing, up there on the mountain, only yesterday. The dogs trailed him back and forth, wagging their tails uncertainly.
He sat again on the couch, big as a bed. The sweat cooled in his palms, and he wiped them on the white fabric. Waiting for them to come and find him there.
All at once there were cars drawing up outside, a clatter at the door, a strange man’s voice. Without thinking, he was up from the couch, through the glass doors and out into the garden, not looking back.
He squeezed in behind the boulder. It was the first time he’d actually touched it since its fall. Here the neat boundary of the garden had been breached: he saw uprooted tree stumps, split stems, mashed petals. The garden wall had been smashed through, but it would be impossible to climb out over the big shards of precast concrete; anyway, directly behind the property an overgrown bank rose steeply, impassable. There was no way out.
Only a strip of lawn was visible from where he stood. There was a moment of quiet, in which he breathed in the smells of dog shit and damp soil, and then he heard the patio door slide open.
The man’s voice again, deep, and shadows moving on the lawn. Shadow people merging, separating. Shadow dogs. A man came into sight, pacing backwards across the grass. Lean build, pink polo shirt, thinning sandy hair. He stopped dead and gazed up at the boulder, hand slapped against his forehead in what might be amazement or horror. “Colette!” he shouted.
Silence. The man remained frozen, staring.
“Bloody hell,” he said more quietly.
Dan recognised him now, from the pictures in the silver frames. Her father.
“Bloody hell!” he said again. “Colette!”
And then he was shaking his head and – could it be? – laughing, and gesturing towards the house. A slim figure sidled into the crook of his arm. Arms folded, coy and fidgeting, digging a toe into the grass like a kid. Dan let out the breath he felt he’d been holding all morning.
“We should get that chappie from the Cape Times in here,” the father continued. “Photographer chappie. They’ll want this for the front page. Can you climb up there, Col? Get one of you on top – in your bikini. Hey?”
“Dad,” she said, rolling her eyes.
She swivelled out of his clasp, arms still clutched across her chest. Dan could see she was tense – shooting glances back at the house.
It’s me, he thought. I’m not supposed to be here.
And for the first time in all the time he’d been with her, he knew what she was thinking.
He liked the dogs. They were gentle with him and well trained, never barking, just giving their alert attention where it was needed. Which is what they did now, coming to sit directly in front of him, side by side, pointing their snouts at him with quiet, friendly curiosity.
But the father was already going back into the house. “I need a drink, sweetheart,” Dan heard him rumbling.
Colette remained standing on the lawn, hip cocked, arms crossed, swaying a little left and right as if in a light breeze. As she rocked he saw her eyes take in the dogs, pause, adjust, then follow their gaze to find him there. Her small personal breeze stilled completely.
Only hours before, he would’ve been mortified, would’ve shrunk away from those eyes, would’ve wriggled more deeply into the crack or rolled over onto his back like one of the dogs. But now he just stood there.
She gave him a small smile, and for a single moment there was something between them that had never been there before: some kind of recognition. He saw a glimpse of what that might be like, for two people to look at each other frankly, without fear. Perhaps it was possible to show himself to her again, differently. To start over.
He was stepping out from the shade of the boulder, feeling a hesitant gladness, when she glanced at the house and her smile stopped short. Without moving her body she gave a tense shake of the head. No. One finger lifted from her forearm, stilling him. Another look at the house, and then she stepped closer.
“Where did you go?” he asked.
“Out for breakfast,” she said in a low voice. “But I couldn’t keep him away all morning.” She folded her arms tighter. “Dan, what are you doing here?”
He still had one hand against the cool of the stone.
“You were supposed to be gone already. I told you. I told you. Last night.” She looked at the rock with disgust. “And this—”
“Colette,” came a call from the house.
She glanced over her shoulder. “Just … I don’t know. Just don’t let him see you. We’ll sort it out later, okay?”
She turned her back on him and walked away.
He was still standing like that, one foot forward, pointing like one of the dogs, when he heard the front door open and close – and then the four beeps of the alarm setting itself.
It took him a moment to realise what had happened. He came out from behind the rock and stood on the grass. There was no movement inside. He cupped his hands and peered through the patio door, tried the handle. It wouldn’t move.
“Colette?”
He rattled the door. Banged his fist against the glass. She’d never given him a set a set of keys.
“Colette!”
Now the dogs were whimpering by his side, scrabbling at the doorframe. They were not used to this treatment either. Dan backed away blindly, came up against the boulder. For one moment he tried to bring it back: her smooth body against his own. But all he could feel now was the stone.
His skin prickled. It was like electricity coming through the rock – the energy of its descent, finding a new conduit. Through his shoulders and down his arms, into his chest, his groin, into his feet and back up into his face, which burned with it. Momentum. Forward motion. It kicked him again towards the house. All the rolling motion of the boulder now in him.
His reflection faced him in the patio door, standing against the pale shapes of the furniture inside. Such an indulgent expanse of glass. Her parents’ delight.
He picked up a heavy plant pot and threw it. The glass shivered and came down like water. Easy.
The alarm whooped around his ears. But Dan moved steadily, confidently. Nothing could stop him. He was carried by gravity, down through the white spaces of the house. This was the ancient route of boulders; they had always come this way, long before houses. The building was fragile, paper and glass. As he walked he raised his hands and let them trail against things on the shelves, picture frames and vases falling left and right. What broke he couldn’t really say; he didn’t look back, but he felt that the whole house was coming down behind him.
He touched the front door and it fell open. He went out into the sunlight, over the front lawn and the two lanes of the road and the seawall, and then down onto the white sand of the beach.
Already he heard the sirens of the security guards, but he knew he was safe; he could not be stopped.
Dan walked down the beach until he was out of sight of the house. The dogs ran with him, looping down to snap at the breakers; one pushed a muzzle into the palm of his hand. He fussed over them, rubbing their ears and the wet fur on their chests. Then they left him, chasing each other back along the sand.
That was okay, he’d be all right. He’d make his own way home. But first, he reached down to pick up a handful of fine sand and put it in his pocket, to take with him. It was what you did when you went on holiday to the sea.
Porcelain
The pieces of broken pottery in the sand revealed themselves subtly. Marion tried to be patient, letting her eye pick out the particular shade of blue, dulled by a crust of sand and salt. She took small steps, eyes fixed on the ground, squatting for a closer look when soft colour glimmered up from between the stones and shells. Mostly, it turned out to be nothing more than a mussel shell, the surprisingly pure blue of its inside margin tricking the eye. So far she’d found only five bits of porcelain.
She couldn’t see the breakers from here. The beach sloped up quite steeply from the water, flattening out into this broad stretch of sand before entering the milkwood forest. Here, in a series of oval depressions, was where the high-tide debris of the Indian Ocean had gathered over centuries: cracked pieces of fine old porcelain along with sand-frosted bottlenecks and rubber flip-flops. Not a few old sailing ships had come to ruin off this part of the coast – Dutch, Portuguese, British, journeying eastwards or hurrying home, laden with fancy goods.
The china was dry and porous, the glaze worn off and the edges smoothed. Triangular shards, holding no trace of the fury of the waves that had shattered them. The pieces grew warm in her palm, and clicked against each other when she opened and closed her hand in time to her steps. She crouched to examine a piece of bone – slender and white, probably a gull’s. Perhaps there were sailors’ bones here too.
Standing too quickly, Marion was struck by a sudden dizziness, as if the world were surging backwards, or as if her own life had sped up for an instant; but it was only the cold wind quickening. She stood still, waiting for this little tremor, this moment of imbalance, to pass.
An observer would see a tall, full-bodied young woman with a pink-and-cream complexion, her coarse hair twisted up and caught in a tortoiseshell clip. Her cheeks were flushed and her brown eyes clear. The hands cupped around her finds were dimpled and pink and slightly blotched in the cold, and the tapering fingers delicate. Hers was not a modern beauty. Marion looked like the women carved on prows of old ships: the heart-shaped face, the creamy bosom, the small mouth with its rose-petal lips, the classical nose. Looks that would have aroused admiration two or three centuries before. As if to enhance this impression, she was given to wearing layers of lace and corduroy, long dresses and blouses with low bodices to show off her neck and cleavage.
They were impractical clothes for beach walking: the hem of her skirt was crumbed with sand, and the dark-red crocheted shawl draped around her shoulders was damp at one end.
The wind picked up, strafing her cheeks with sand. She pulled the shawl across her face, her other hand closing around the porcelain chips. Then the cold rain came in from the sea, wetting her through and tightening her clothes against her breasts and thighs. She started to trot towards the trees, skipping awkwardly in the damp skirt, gasping with pleasure. She was young enough to be sped along, without warning, by such moments of animal exhilaration.
Breathless, she peeked into her palm, where the blue-and-white china gleamed. The rain had washed away the dullness. It was bluer than new, as if the pigment were still wet, the glaze just applied. As if it did not know that it had been mortally damaged, its pieces scattered and lost.
She allowed the squally wind to pull her up the beach and along the gravel road, towards the old wooden house that stood beyond the milkwoods. Pausing just before the veils of rain obscured the view completely, she saw, far out on the horizon, the faint suggestion of a ship – just a hint of tall masts, misty shreds of sails unfurling, palest smoke on pearl. Eyes closed, she put her head back and gave her neck and chest to the rain. When she looked again the ship had dissolved into cloud, but she stood for another minute or two in the downpour, staring out.
The wet steamed off her in the fire-lit house, where the walls were festooned with dry seaweed and strings of sea-urchin shells. Amelia, Marion’s aunt, was sitting in her swivel chair at the trestle table in the corner, glueing together the pieces of a vase. She scowled through her spectacles, their mauve plastic frames clashing with her brown eyes.
Aunt Amelia had a special technique: she would fashion an armature out of chicken wire, vase-shaped, onto which she fastened the broken bits of china with Prestik – a lark here, a pagoda there, two lovers on a bridge. So fragile, these ghostly vases, m
ore air than porcelain. All around her, arranged on shelves and bookcases and table tops and in big woven baskets on the floor, were other pieces and assemblages: piles of shards, cracked plates with triangular bites taken out of their rims, undone jigsaw puzzles of smashed china.
“I saw the ghost ship,” Marion said, unwinding the damp shawl from around her neck.
Aunt Amelia held up angled tweezer-tips and gave Marion a keen glance. “Did you really?”
Marion looked into the round mirror on the wall. She understood at once what had given Amelia that apprehensive look. In the mirror she saw not her own face, but her mother’s: high colour in the cheeks, bright hair darkened with dampness that could be rain or sweat, eyes glowing as if they were melting in her face. Celia’s face. Marion quickly looked away.
“No, of course not really, Auntie A. It was just the cloud coming in.” She went towards her aunt with her hands cupped together.
“Ooh, what have you got for me?” Amelia swivelled in the chair. She was in her late fifties, compactly built, although rounded and busty like all the women in the family. Despite the rainy weather, she was dressed as always in a loose short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals. An outdoors woman: her calves were muscular and her biceps tight, beneath skin that was crinkled from years of solitary beach-walking. Hair that had once been gold was greying now, cut short every month with the kitchen scissors by Auntie Belle. As a result it always looked a little tufty, with an irregular fringe.
Marion unclasped her fingers and let the chips of blue and white trickle off her palm and onto the table. They were still slightly damp.
“A good haul,” Amelia said intently. The gleaming points of her tweezers, like a fussy beak, teased apart the five shards. One with a tight geometric pattern, mesh-like; two plain white; one white with a narrow double band of navy; and the last, the smallest, showing the roof of a tiny pagoda.
“Will they fit?” asked Marion.
“Hard to tell …” Amelia turned the pagoda fragment with the tips of the tweezers, flipping it over. “This one – possibly …”
Homing Page 7
