by Tobias Hill
* * *
It is humid today. The heel of my hand dampens the page as I write. I can hear the muezzin before dawn, after dawn, at noon. It is still an odd sound to me. Natural but out of place, like the moon in daylight.
There is the sound of children in a school nearby. Today they are being wolves, the playground is full of small lupine voices. Yesterday they were sirens. Police cars and fire engines. I can see them from the windows outside the stone room. They are six, maybe seven. It is an age I remember well in myself. Adrenaline gives memory great precision. What I remember of that time, I recall exactly.
The stone room clock ticks above me. It is an Ottoman skeleton timepiece, the works housed in a glass dome, as if time could be kept out with the dust; or kept in. It reminds me of the house itself, with its bare stone; and beyond that, of the life of the old woman. The transparency of her desire. I have been here two days and found nothing.
I am writing the story of myself, which is also the story of the Three Brethren. It is a question of perspective. The jewel has been the turning point of many lives, and mine is only one.
Have I written this before? But I am part of it, that is what I mean to say. The history of the Three Brethren does not begin with John the Fearless or end a hundred and fifty years ago in London. It still exists and I am still writing it. I am pulling the pieces together. One of them is me.
My mother was always clean. It was important to her, so it was important to us. She washed her hands before she ate and so did we. She never put off work and I still don’t. She kept silver milk tops in a jar, rinsed the bottles, recycled them. I remember sunlight inside the glass, webs of bubbles.
Edith. She was old when I was born. She still exhibited every year, and worked for Visual Art and the Sunday Times which was, she said, politically questionable, but the lens justified the beans. I remember not understanding her and liking it, laughing instinctively because it meant she was joking. She hated journalism, the lies and generalisations passing through her hands. But she was a good photographer, serious, with a dislike of light work – which meant social snapshot diaries, the tabloids were beyond her. Edith couldn’t credit a world that read page three and wrapped chips in the rest.
She wore prescription sunglasses. She believed in astrology but not in God. Her hair was magnificently white. She still had better legs than anyone else’s mother. Edith always meant to have a family once she had made a success of her career, and that was exactly what she did. Having a husband was not part of the plan. Edith liked things simple.
I remember very little of my father. His name was Patrick and he was Canadian. He was ten years older than my mother, who was old herself. Anne tells me he is retired now, living in Florida with a new American wife and grown children. I have little interest in him. He is not what I’m looking for.
He was an underwater geologist, and although I was too young when he left to have understood this myself, I remember associating him with the sea. I remember his clothes. He wore tweeds, cords, plaid, fabrics made in the colours of a northern country.
They smelled of damp. I imagined him walking underwater from Canada. He stepped out of the sea, clambered out on Southend Pier and walked the twenty miles to our house, the wind drying him as he came.
My mother lived without fuss, and when she died she left no mess. The washing was done. Her book was finished. She was reading – so I am told – Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I never went to the funeral, May wouldn’t allow it. But I saw her dead. There was no blood on her, not a speck on her. No proof of a life cut off in mid-step, of something unfinished.
Except in us. In me. I am unfinished business.
Afterwards we lived with May, my mother’s mother. She liked poetry and German cars. She hated the Prudential and Buckingham Palace. She’d worked as ground support in the war. Back then she could strip a car and reassemble it in fifteen minutes. There hadn’t been much else to do in Southend until the Blitz, so she’d stripped cars all day, timing herself. She was eighty-one when we moved in. Her arms were like the sailor’s on her cigarette packets.
Her house was a mile away from home, on the Southend road. It always smelt of cabbages, even though we never ate anything much except fish fingers. We made good school drawings: one grandmother, two daughters, three dogs. A pyramidal family was more interesting than the two-up, two-down units in picture books. There was a tennis court in the garden where we played goal-to-goal football. It only needs two of you, and there were only two of us.
My sister is called Anne. She is five years older than me. I used to love her like a film star. She used to understand everything, even Edith’s jokes, when I understood nothing. I remember her first boyfriend, Stewart. He was popular at school because he could fart like a seal barking. I was jealous of him, jealous of her for having him, proud to have them both.
These days she runs an international charity. She travels a lot. Her fiancé is called Rolf and he makes me laugh. Presumably he farts but not, I think, like a seal barking, not in public. I am public. It is years, now, since I have seen either of them. My sister has a life that works in all the ways a life should work, and I’m happy for that. I don’t want to get in its way. I try and keep away from Anne, not because I have stopped loving her but because she doesn’t understand what I’m doing and I wouldn’t want her to.
She left over a thousand photographs. Anne kept a great many of them, I think; I didn’t want so many myself. Now I have only three of the ones that fell, the photos that were there when I found her. I can take them out as I write, peeling them from their places, pressed between the pages of my notebook.
(1) 35mm, taken with the Leica. Handheld, shot from Edith’s height. Anne stopped in mid-step, catching herself in a photobooth mirror. She is eleven, dressed in her new school uniform. Already she is more beautiful than I will ever be. In the mirror she looks curious, still surprised by herself. It is the summer before her mother dies. Behind her, in the mirror, the tide is out. Southend Pier diminishes towards its vanishing-point.
(2) Monotone. A tripod shot. Mud at a farm gate. The soil is red, ferrous; Herefordshire, possibly, where Edith had friends. The shot is all texture, a Cufic of hoofprints and dog tracks. Bootmarks. The churned tread of a tractor. Mud slumps back into the ruts and cavities.
(3) Myself. An older photograph, a polaroid kept with the others for no perceptible reason. I am sitting at the kitchen table, barely tall enough to see over it. On the table is a birthday cake with chocolate icing and a pond of green jelly. I am wearing a floral dress and a small cone hat. My eyes wait for the cake. Head back, the hat-elastic white under my chin. Behind me, the dark is locked up behind the darkroom door.
I don’t keep it for myself. There is a blur on the image. Rare and precious, my mother’s finger, exposed in the foreground.
I’m moving in now. The events spiral towards their point. I’m getting to it one facet at a time. Skew to skill, bezel to quoin.
I am in my sister’s house. This must be five years ago. It is midwinter in London and the bookies are still taking bets on a white Christmas. It is my sister’s birthday. From downstairs comes the hubbub of party voices, laughter. I am taking off my great coat, throwing it on the bed, when I see Anne’s computer.
She was talking about it downstairs. I wasn’t really listening. It is a present from Rolf, her new German boyfriend. The desk is surrounded by empty oversized boxes, patterned with big black and white splotches. Like square cows, I think, but then I have been drinking already, was drinking before I arrived here. It is a week since I gave up my degree in linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I have other things to do with my life, although Anne doesn’t agree. I have begun to look for something.
Rising between the colossal boxes is an equally colossal computer. There are speakers, towers, the plateaus of a keyboard and scanner. It reminds me of a doll’s house, although Anne never had a doll’s house, was never a doll’s house kind of girl. The m
onitor is on, a screen saver spiralling through colourful abstracts. Pyramids, triangles, surfaces, planes.
I sit at the desk. The computer still smells of packing. It is brand new, like Rolf. I touch the keyboard and the patterns disappear. In their place is an Internet menu. Lazy sister, I think. Wasteful, to leave your computer on. Still, I am curious. I don’t have a real computer myself, only a second-hand college Amstrad that sheds a foul green light from its stained monitor. The Internet is new to me, and potentially useful.
It is thirteen years since my mother died. Two years since I saw the Black Prince’s ruby. I have been haunted by it ever since. It is five months since, while researching balas rubies, I first came across the story of the Three Brethren. I wanted it at first sight. I can’t say why.
I touch the keys of my sister’s computer, ta ta ta. The menu is a list of sites. The names rise as I move through them, a slow progression past www.anchor.ouija.co and www.big.bazongs.co.uk. If there are quicker ways to do this I don’t know them. I am an outsider here. A surfer; a traveller of surfaces.
I sit drinking, one finger on the down button. The wine stains my mouth, I can taste its residue on my lips. When I look at the screen again I have reached www.jewsforjesus, and I reverse and stop. There are almost forty sites that define themselves by the word ‘jewels’. I choose one at random. An hourglass symbol appears. When the sand runs out, the site opens.
It is a chat room, or at least a chat-room company. Along the screen’s edge is a menu of meeting places, space for hire, TV Soaps, Armchair Football, Lonely Hearts. Alongside them a user-name waits patiently in its box: STERNE7. I wonder why Anne comes here, who she talks to, and where. The cursor blinks on Jewels and Antiques (The Net’s Only Collectibles Chatroom!). I double-click and the room appears. Abracadabra. Boxes within boxes.
There are several people inside. Their texts scroll across the screen, one after the other, like waves. Two of them are discussing animal motifs in the Oxus Treasure. A third wants to talk about his revolutionary new method for boiling Thai rice. I leave a message anyway. My typing is fast but inaccurate. I always make mistakes. It isn’t just the drink.
STERNE 7 JOINING, HELO. I’M LOOKING FOR A JEW CALLED THE THREE BRETHREN. ANY HELP? K.SNERTE.
‘Christ, I can’t even spell my own name,’ I say. And then before I can correct myself my sister is calling for me. There is a question in her voice. I have been gone too long, absent from her celebration. I leave the screen and go down into the crowd.
At five in the morning I finish helping Anne clear up. My eyes sting with smoke and tiredness. Look, she says, leaning over the kitchen sink, snow! I go upstairs to get my coat. I am looking forward to being outside. The feel of first light. The fat flakes waking me as they fall.
The coat buttons are a complex manoeuvre. I am working at them when a movement catches my eye. The computer is still on. The screen saver tumbles through its blueprints of snowflakes and crystals. I go over, touch the keys. The chat room is still there. My message has been erased by subsequent small talk. Somewhere it is day, I think, and people are seeing this in natural light; and as I watch a new line spells itself out: 71192x. TO STERNE7 – WE REPEAT AGAIN: JEWEL. NOT JEW. WHO ARE YOU?
I feel myself come awake. Without intending it, my bad typing has produced a codeword. And someone has broken it. How interesting. I think how naive I’ve been, not to use the Internet before today. I type: STERNE7. TO 71192X – MY NAME IS KATHARINE STERNE. WHO ARE YOU?
The answer comes back immediately. As if the typist has been poised, waiting: 71192X. A WORKER.
STERNE 7. FOR WHAT COMPANY?
The screen stays empty. I look at my watch and wonder how long I can stay. How long Anne and Rolf will want me around. Outside the dark is fading to a cold morning light. When I look back again, a new message is already surfacing on the blue-lit screen:
71192X. WE ARE RESEARCHERS. WE WOULD LIKE TO MEET YOU. WE WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW.
I reach for the wine again, clumsily, so that it almost falls. I drain the glass as I type. Inattentive, already thinking of sleep. STERNE7. WHERE?
72292X. WHERE YOU ARE.
My mind blinks. The sensation is reptilian. A slow nictitation during which I think of nothing. Then the fear begins.
STERNE7. WHO DO YOU WORK FOR?
71192X.
I stab at the switch. The screen winks out with a small, painful grunt. I think of Anne, of Rolf. Should I tell them? But it could be nothing. I try and think if I could be found through the Net, but I don’t know. It is a world I have no experience in. I back away into my sister’s room.
It leaves too many fingerprints, the Internet. I don’t trust it. Inside the computer you never know when you are being watched, or where from. The next country, the next room. If there are other people looking for the Brethren, then the Internet is the worst way to make the search, the most dangerous. There are better ways to find a jewel.
I am not the only one looking. I don’t know who the others are. Even so, I take a certain comfort from them. As if their threat proves me right.
My first stone was a birthday present from May. I was eleven. It was an amethyst the size of an egg. The purple was so faint you had to concentrate. You had to hold it just right to catch the shade of wisteria flowers.
I think of my mother’s voice in my ear. Her cheek next to mine in the bathroom mirror: There. You’re so lovely, I could eat you up! The stone egg was like that. I wanted to consume it. To get it inside me. I slept with it in my bed, the way other children still kept their old toys. I walked to school with it in my mouth. Anne tried to stop me. She was afraid I’d swallow it the way, years before, I’d once swallowed a pencil stub. The amethyst clicked against my teeth like a Glacier mint. It stopped me getting hungry. I was filled up with stone.
I began to collect gems. At weekends when we went to Margate I beachcombed for carnelian and agate. I divided my stones on scientific principles. I didn’t love them yet. I liked their differences and their repetition. They were alike but not alike. Rhymes sung in different voices. There was something safe in that. Something to be sure of.
This isn’t the reason I’m looking for the Brethren. None of this. I am sure of it. I’m not looking for a means to escape the past. The past is there in everything I do. The need for something was there already, long before Edith died. I remember it, always. The feel of obsession: like a reservoir of love gone sour. Inside me there was a love waiting to happen, and eventually, the jewel is what it happened to.
Doctor Angel was not our doctor, Doctor Sargent was. The hospital was the same but the corridors were different. In this building the walls were green from the floor to the middle and brown from the middle to the top. In Doctor Sargent’s building the walls were yellow with a band of red down the middle. When I was smaller Anne told me it was a go-faster stripe. It made people get well quicker, she said. I didn’t believe that by the time Edith died. I missed the stripe, though.
‘Doctor Angel isn’t our doctor,’ I say. ‘Doctor Sargent is. Why can’t we see Doctor Sargent?’
‘Because Sargent’s a GP. This one’s a blood doctor,’ says Anne. We are walking down the two-tone corridor with a nurse. She has an old plaster on her left knee under cheap stockings. Knees are more important when you’re a child. At three you can recognise your parents’ knees at thirty paces. I read it in a magazine. At seven the effect is probably residual, but even so, the nurse’s knees are closer than her face. From her knees I know she doesn’t look after herself properly, and so, at first, I’m glad I’m staying with Doctor Angel. His knees are behind the desk. His head is red. He says hello, then goes on writing. I sit waiting to be noticed.
The room smells of disinfectant and unwashed clothes. The sign on the desk says: Dr Angel. Haematology. The third word is years beyond me. The doctor keeps coughing. It makes him sound like a small, aggressive dog. Ghrr-ghrrm. When he coughs I want to hit him. I think he’s rude, not to talk to me. People have been t
alking to me for days.
‘Ghrrm.’
I look around. There are no nice pictures on the walls, just a poster showing eight types of blood clot. Each clot has a name, Chicken Fat, Currant Jelly. Like flavours, I think. Chicken fat crisps. Chicken fat pasties. Currant jelly ice cream. Currant jelly jelly. I know what a blood clot is.
‘Ghrr-Ghrrm.’
‘You should make it better.’
‘Mm?’
He looks up. His eyes find me but he doesn’t see me, not properly. He has no feeling for children, no like or dislike: we are invisible to him. I don’t know this as I sit in the examination room. I see it now, watching him from my stone room in Diyarbak’r, listening to the tickertape of pigeons’ feet overhead.
‘You should make your cough better. You’re the doctor.’
He smiles as if I’ve made a joke he doesn’t understand, and goes back to his writing. I am already bored, have been bored for some time. From outside the window comes the sound of water. I imagine it. There is a blue fountain with red fish. I feed the fish. I have a packet of chicken fat crisps. I scatter them over the water.
I sit and watch Doctor Angel’s head. The bald skin is red. I wonder what he drinks. My mother drinks Dutch gin, neat. There are still two bottles left. I wonder if we can give Doctor Angel the leftover Dutch gin. It would make his skin redder. He feels me watching. He stops reading and looks up.
‘It’s Kate, isn’t it? How old are you, Kate?’
‘Eight,’ I lie. I want to see if he is clever enough to find the truth. It is a test. He winks and smiles. Already I am failing him.
‘Eight. You know, I have a patient who is eighty-eight. Eighty-eight, two fat ladies.’
I say nothing. I have nothing to say to him. ‘Kate, do you understand how your mother died?’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘I’m sorry? I–’
‘I don’t want you to say that word.’ But I shrug, as if it doesn’t matter. The window is open, but the room is still humid, overheated. My dress is stuck against my legs. I imagine being outside, running in the cold December air. The fountain, the fish. Blue and red.
