The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  Her arms were full of papers again, maybe the same stack she was carrying the other day. It seemed larger now. There were red pen marks on one of the pages: a circle around a word, a question mark in the margin and some scribbled comments. It felt like spying. I looked away. Trinh struggled to balance the stack of papers as she unlocked the door.

  ‘Come into my parlour.’ She gave me a conspiratorial glance, eyes narrowed, over her shoulder.

  ‘Did I make a mistake?’ I asked. The rules of etiquette felt strained in that place, redolent of power imbalances among the people who inhabited it. The rooms and halls seemed designed to accommodate the rules of relationships between teachers and students and did not admit others easily. ‘About yesterday, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Did you?’

  Trinh busied herself arranging the stack of papers into several piles on her desk. She straightened up and smoothed the front of her clothes. Both her fitted, collared shirt and slim skirt were tailored with tight precision. They were a dark blue colour that was not navy. It suggested indigo as I

  looked at it. Or ink. I could taste the thick feeling of the word in my mouth.

  Trinh seemed distracted. ‘I have to meet with students soon so I can’t see you for long. But I thought of something for you.’

  She walked over to the tall bookshelf in the corner. Its shelves sagged under a chaos of objects: books, folders, papers, boxes, a mug, an ashtray showing traces of old ash. A small, ornate urn rested on its side on the top shelf.

  ‘We cleared off Ingrid’s desk weeks ago, then someone found this box when we were going through the desk drawers. Would you be interested in taking it?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  Trinh reached for a box that rested on one of the lower shelves and handed it to me. It was the size of a large shoebox, made of stiff brown cardboard.

  ‘What was she working on?’ I asked. ‘I don’t even know.’

  ‘She was putting together a project on the Roman-British curse tablets.’

  ‘Curse tablets?’

  ‘She was concentrating on the tablets found at the shrine to Sulis Minerva in Bath.’

  When Trinh looked up she saw the confusion on my face. ‘Ancient writing tablets. Do you know what I mean?’ She smiled.

  ‘Yes, yes. I think so.’ I remembered pictures of the Rosetta Stone, its huge slab face covered in lines of mysterious figures. ‘Stone.’ I rested the box on the desk.

  ‘These ones are mostly lead.’

  ‘And they’re cursed?’ I imagined the tombs of the Pyramids in Egypt, the rumours of a curse that followed the Westerners involved in their opening.

  Trinh laughed a little. ‘No, they are not cursed. They are curses. Curses are written on them. They’re thin scrolls of lead. If you wanted to curse someone, make bad fortune come to them, you would write down the curse, scratch it into the tablet, or hire a magician to do it for you, and roll it up. Sometimes people stuck them through with a nail to hold them together. And then you would leave it somewhere, a tomb, bury it. So the gods could read it. In this case people threw them into the water at this shrine, a spring.’ She looked at the box. ‘Sulis Minerva was one of those deities that Ingrid was interested in, a goddess that incorporated the Celtic Sulis with the Roman Minerva. The gatekeeper goddess. I think those tablets at Bath are all asking the goddess to curse the person who stole a pair of gloves, or a cloak, or money. Theft. All the British tablets are like that.’ She sighed. ‘Greek ones are so much more interesting. Look – why don’t you read Ingrid’s paper? There is a draft of it in there, I’m sure. It will tell you all about them.’

  I took the box into my hands, and looked back to the shelf where it had left a gap, already filled now with books collapsing sideways into it. The box was heavy with the weight of paper, needing two hands to hold it.

  Something shifted in Trinh’s expression as she looked at me. She seemed nervous, as though she wanted to help, and as though she was uncomfortable with the feeling.

  ‘So, Julia, are you doing anything tonight?’ she asked.

  I found myself wanting to lie. Not because I didn’t want to see Trinh again. I did. I felt a little in awe of her glamour, as though I were back in early high school and Trinh was years ahead and ready to graduate, groomed and accomplished. My night seemed empty, and I wanted to hide it.

  ‘Did you like the Lilac?’ she continued. ‘I could show you around a bit but I’m boring, I go to all the same places all the time.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, abruptly.

  ‘OK, I’ll see you there. I’ll be there at nine.’

  I thanked her again for the box.

  Back out in the hallway a student, a boy, was walking in my direction. I looked the other way and saw Jones. He flicked away the weight of hair that fell into his face with a horselike snap of his head. It looked as though he was about to greet me when his eyes fell on the box in my hands. His steps grew faster. He let out a quick hello, opened the door with some force and entered Trinh’s office, closing the door behind him. Muted voices were just audible from inside, no distinct words. The two voices sounded in quick succession.

  The boy reached the door. He stood in front of it, sighed, and dropped to sit on the floor to the side in one disconsolate motion. No more sounds came through the door, and it remained closed.

  I carried the box out of the campus and made my way to a coffee shop across the road. The tables were filled with undergraduates studying outsized textbooks and Victorian novels. I sat at a table and inspected the box. It had been my plan to sit with a drink and look through the contents, but as I looked at it I became more uncomfortable. The box appeared to grow in mass, absorbing energy from around itself. It reminded me again of the tomb-explorers. The box seemed like a coffin, a receptacle for the remains of the dead. I did not want to open it there.

  The box fitted awkwardly under my arm, too heavy. I went to the counter and asked for a coffee to take away. Too late, I thought about how it would be to carry it back on the subway, hoping the carriage would not be too crowded, that there would be a seat for me and a seat next to me for the box. My coffee arrived and I hoisted the box to my hip a little more, picked up the Styrofoam cup with its plastic lid and left.

  By the time I got back to the apartment most of the coffee was on my shirt, a wet stain against the white cotton. The street was hot and the building cool when I opened the front doors. I paused inside and considered Mrs Bee’s door and thought about knocking. The box was heavy. I went up to the apartment and deposited it on the chair in the bedroom.

  Matt was in the living room, snatching up his keys from the table and readying to leave. He was agitated.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  He gave a frustrated shrug. ‘It’s these fucking snails. In the piece – the installation I was telling you about – there’s a bunch of snails crawling around on a couple pieces of Plexiglas – their trails are lit up – some of them have sort of strings attached to their shells – it’s hard to describe. Anyway. Some animal rights activist has decided that we’re oppressing the snails and keeps coming in and taking them. Setting them free.’ He pulled on a frayed denim jacket. ‘I think I know who it is. A woman.’

  ‘What does she do with them?’ I asked.

  ‘I have no idea. But I have to go and find a bunch more snails right now. Do you want to come?’

  I said no. ‘Where do you get snails?’

  ‘I have a friend who works in a restaurant who’s doing me a favour. These things are fucking expensive, for snails.’

  The phone rang and he answered it. The voice on the other end was loud. ‘I’ll take a cab,’ he said after a minute, and hung up. He left and the door closed behind him.

  In the kitchen there was a hot patch on the linoleum floor between the sink and the window where the sun shone in. I took off my shoes and stood there, pale feet in the strong light. I took a glass of water into the bedroom and sat on the bed and looked at th
e box. It didn’t exude the same stern aura as it had earlier and instead looked quite demure, with its slightly battered and creased cardboard. The sense of aversion I felt was recognisable now as coming from myself rather than being projected by the box. I lifted the lid gingerly and saw a stack of pages inside, a couple of pages photocopied from a book and a page with its corner sticking out underneath them covered in Ingrid’s writing in a heavy pencil. It was enough. I let the lid fall and, without thinking, went downstairs.

  Mrs Bee opened the door and looked as though she were expecting me.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I was just going to make some tea.’

  She waited for several minutes after my tea was finished before examining the cup. She tilted it back and forth with little expression. Her eyes were shrewd when she looked at me. ‘Well, you’re making some progress,’ she said evenly. She placed the cup back in the saucer.

  I looked surreptitiously into it, not wanting to be seen showing too much interest in the contents. There was a scatter of leaves against one side of the cup. It reminded me of seaweed, browning against the rock of tidal pools as they dry in the sun. I thought of the brown stain on my white shirt, thrown onto the floor of the bedroom upstairs. The pale brown box on the chair came into my mind, the whiteness of the inside of the lid, the surprising heaviness of it, the fold of the cardboard around the edge of the lid. The taste of the black tea was strong in my mouth.

  Half an hour later I looked through the box with more determination. The pages in Ingrid’s writing appeared to be her notes on a book chapter or article. There was a printed draft of an essay titled ‘Theft and Vengeance in Curse Tablets from Roman Britain’. It could have been an early or late draft; some twenty pages, lightly edited in Ingrid’s hand, every page showing a word or two crossed out, a comma added, some whole sentences struck through and new phrases written into the margins. I skimmed it over and rifled cursorily through the rest of the contents. More drafts of papers, more photocopies. No more pages of Ingrid’s writing. There were no revelations. It was disappointing.

  What did I expect, I asked myself. A journal? A memoir?

  I pulled out an image of Mercury, what looked like a reproduction of a fresco. He stood in profile, about to start running. The paper was worn and there were marks on the back of the page where the picture had been tacked up on the wall. I remembered the several desks in Ingrid’s old office and the walls above them, covered in images and quotations and notices. From some deposit of memory I knew that Mercury was a messenger, a go-between, and also that he was one of the gods responsible for escorting the souls of the dead across to the underworld. What message was he carrying here, I wondered; who would he accompany across the river?

  The next page in the pile, the title page of a book on Minerva and other goddesses, showed a single faint print against the paper, the trace of a finger marked with toner from the photocopier or printer. Something gave way then and the impact of the tragedy struck me without warning. I remembered Ingrid’s fingers pulling her mass of hair back into a braid, the sun in it, the colour of it against the tortoiseshell clip she wore. It seemed long ago, another life.

  I suddenly wanted to call Ingrid and hear her voice on the phone, forgetting for a short instant that this was impossible. She would have pushed her hair back with one hand as she brought the phone to her ear. I looked at the black phone on the dresser next to the bed. When was the last time we had spoken?

  I didn’t want to call anyone else. I piled the pages back on top of the fingerprint, closed the lid, left the room and turned on the shower.

  Under the hot water I scrubbed my whole body and washed my hair, wringing the water out of it more fiercely than usual. Steam billowed out in clouds to fill the small room. Water beaded on the tiles. I thought of Jones in the corridor today, the flick of his head as the hair fell into his eyes – I saw now how much it was like Ingrid’s, that dark blond colour, straw in the sun and shade, or how that might look since I had never actually seen such a thing, only imagined it by how it looked like something else. One of my hairs had stuck to the tiled shower wall, a straight dark line. Dead already, I thought, and washed it down the drain.

  When I met Trinh that night we didn’t talk about Ingrid, or the box. As she was ordering us another round of drinks Jones showed up at her side, folding his arms and leaning on the bar. He gave me a nod and a smile but kept his attention on Trinh. They shared a joke, a minute of talk, and he walked away to a table behind us. A while later when I came back from the bathroom he was there again, sitting in my seat this time. The place had filled up by then. He stood up when he saw me and said, ‘Saving it for you.’

  Trinh got talking to a friend of hers who had showed up not long after Jones, Darryl or Cameron, a woman with a name that sounded to me like it belonged to a man. When I rose to leave Jones said he was leaving too. Trinh looked at us, from one to the other, and wavered for a second, as though she wanted to say something to me, but thought better of it, or couldn’t, with him standing right there. She just said that she would see me soon.

  Jones and I took the stairs up to the street. ‘Can I get you a taxi?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. The night was warm and my head was fuzzy from being underground for so long. I wanted to walk. He seemed pleased, and said that he’d walk with me. It was hard to tell how late it was. The streets and bars were still busy, still a few people in the small restaurants we passed. We crossed Broadway and walked together back up to the Village. He didn’t walk as fast as he had the other day, when he’d taken me to lunch. We passed the dorm where my NYU student boyfriend had lived and I told him the story. He laughed. As we went he pointed out a storefront here and there, explaining that this boarded-up place was once a restaurant, this restaurant was once a pharmacy, this was where his old friend had made cabinets in a studio upstairs. When we reached my building we stopped and stood there outside.

  ‘This terrace of yours,’ he said. ‘I’d love to see it.’

  I took him upstairs, through the French doors and back out into the cold. He looked around, inspecting the birdcage, assessing the space. I stayed by the door and watched him, then went to him when he stopped at the tall parapet for a while and leaned his arms on it. We looked down at the street below, and south to the sky full of lights. He smiled in a very contented way, as though he had arrived somewhere he wanted to be. Or maybe he was just a little drunk. After a time he walked back towards the doors and I followed him.

  Just before we reached the doors he took my arms, both arms above the elbows, and pushed me back against the wall. The strings of coloured lights across the terrace glowed faintly but we were in shadow. He kissed me roughly. His hand was under my skirt quickly and I felt myself making a sound as my throat tightened. It didn’t sound like my voice. One arm was still pinned against the wall, and the other fell slack by my side. He should have tasted like cigarettes but he didn’t. He withdrew his hand and took his face away so that he could see me, a cool, appraising look. I wanted to keep looking at him. We were both breathing fast. He said something like ‘Hummm’. Very softly. I wanted him to say it again. I was about to force my hands from their place by my side to touch him when he moved, very subtly, in another direction. He pressed his cheek against mine and said ‘Goodnight’. My face burned. I stayed where I was in the shadow as he walked back through my room and to the front door. It closed behind him with a neat click.

  In the room the box was still there on the bed, Mercury inside, poised and ready to run. I put it on the floor and lay down in the depression it had left on the mattress.

  My dreams were filled with ringing phones trailing coiled, snaking cords. Whole banks of phones ringing and ringing, and me too afraid to answer any of them, knowing it is Ingrid on the line, and afraid of where she is calling from. At the end of the dream, Ingrid sitting patiently at the end of the bed, waiting for me to answer.

  The next morning I called Ralph. Aaron answered. Ralph couldn’t come to the phone
, he told me. He was resting.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s resting a lot. He’s fine. It’s … you know. He’s tired a lot.’

  I waited. ‘Please ask him to call me when he’s feeling better,’ I said.

  ‘OK. Can I give him any message, Julia?’

  ‘I’m through here,’ I said. ‘That’s the message.’

  ‘I’ll let him know,’ Aaron told me in his sweet, neutral voice. The sound of a bird calling somewhere in the distance came through on his side of the line in the faint rustle of the heat. I put the receiver down.

  ‘I’m through here,’ I said to myself, as though it were a line I was practising. ‘I’m done.’ I sighed and knew it wasn’t true.

  Without thinking, I showered and dressed and got on the subway all the way to the university uptown, and knocked on Jones’s door and walked right in without waiting for him to respond. It was still early and the halls were almost empty. He raised his eyes from his desk calmly as though he was expecting me, and said my full name. I closed the door and moved the plastic chair so that it jammed under the handle. I couldn’t see how to lock the door without a key. He checked his watch.

  I stood just near the door, a few feet away from him, and we looked at each other. A whole conversation seemed to take place between us in the silent seconds that passed, which felt like long minutes. Questions, explanations, prevarications, invitations. By the time he drew breath and spoke it felt as though we had come to some kind of agreement.

  ‘Later?’ he said, completing the dialogue we hadn’t been having. Casually, in that voice I remembered from the museum.

  I nodded. As I turned to unjam the chair and open the door he moved swiftly to my side. One hand circled my wrist, gentler than before but still deliberate, and the other held my face and lifted it up, thumb against a vulnerable part of my throat, so that he could kiss me. My arms were alive this time, and I pulled my hand free from his grip to touch him, the warmth of skin through his shirt. Voices sounded in the corridor outside, no words audible, the sound of an irritated explanation and a laugh that sounded wrong in response. Jones didn’t seem to notice or to mind and kept his mouth on me. I pulled away soon after, unnerved by the presence of others beyond the door.