Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  Maddie’s eyes glazed over at the thought of it: the house with its twinkling windows overlooking rolling paddocks, a bit of bush for shelter, the distant snow-capped mountains … Meanwhile, he visited Maddie as often as he could manage, whenever he was over on the rodeo circuit. Visiting Maddie he felt happy again, as if there was still hope in the world. He came over, stayed a few days and fucked Maddie silly. Then he went back home.

  ‘He just loves that kid,’ Maddie said. ‘He’s such a good father.’ Her eyes filled with tears at the thought of such parental devotion.

  ‘Have you actually seen him?’ said Clare. ‘This child?’

  ‘Well, I’ve never met him, of course,’ said Maddie. ‘But Lloyd talks about him all the time.’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ said Clare.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Maddie.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Clare. ‘I’m sure he talks about his son all the time, being such a devoted father and all.’

  ‘You think he’s just making it all up,’ said Maddie. ‘That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You think he’s just made up this story about his son so that he has a reason for not wanting to come and live with me.’

  ‘Well, think about it for just a moment,’ said Clare. ‘You’ve never actually seen the boy, not even a photo, and wouldn’t he carry a photo? In his wallet? That’s what men like him do, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean, “men like him”?’ said Maddie, and her voice had taken on a cool and dangerous note.

  ‘You know. Travellers. And what kind of name is “Colin”? No one calls their kids Colin any more.’

  She could feel the tie that linked her to her sister beginning to fray, tiny threads breaking as if they were in some suspense movie. She hung a couple of hundred metres up off the edge of a building with cars like ants way beneath her feet, but a kind of recklessness was on her. Here was Maddie, her beautiful little sister, bright-eyed with illusion, flinging her heart into the hands of yet another loser.

  Maddie was checking the ends of her hair for splits, the thing she always did when she was really angry. ‘So, what are you saying? That he doesn’t love me? Is that it? That he’s some kind of con?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Clare.

  ‘But you’re implying it,’ said Maddie. ‘I can tell. You think he’s lying and that he’ll never in a million years come and live with me. He’s got a wife and a life up in Queensland where he’s comfortable and I’m being an idiot. That’s what you mean, don’t you?’

  Her voice was becoming squeaky. Her eyes were brilliant blue, the same brilliant blue their father’s eyes became when he was angry.

  ‘I didn’t say any of that …’ said Clare.

  ‘You are so smug!’ said Maddie. ‘You’ve always been smug. So sure you know everything, with your stupid boring academic job and your stupid boring academic clothes — you don’t have to wear black all the time, you know. Life’s not a fucking funeral. And your stupid picking and dieting, and it’ll never do any good. You’ll never be thin like me. You’ve got fat legs. You’ve always been boring. That’s why you can never find any man who’ll live with you for more than a few years. You bore them into leaving. Rick, Pete, whatsisname, the one with the beard, they’ve all just got bored and gone. And don’t think Paul will be any different. I give him another twelve months, tops. Then he’ll go just like all the others, not that he’s any great loss. He’s even more boring than you. And you’ll end up a bitter old woman with a too-tidy flat and a too-fat cat and no man around at all, just like Mum.’

  That was when everything tumbled. She had gone too far. They had both gone too far. They had crossed a line they hadn’t even realised lay between them, holding them in exact territorial balance as sisters. They parted in frozen fury and did not speak again. No tentative offer to negotiate a reconciliation over a coffee in town. No phone call. No wheedling, no apology. Just silence. Maddie disappeared, presumably to Australia to be closer to her little ferrety soul mate. She vanished into that big red continent, leaving not a trace behind. No forwarding address, no emails, no postcard of the Opera House or the Harbour Bridge. Sometimes Clare wondered if she should contact someone, report her sister’s silence to the police before her decomposing body was discovered by backpackers in a shallow grave under some crackling mulga scrub. But somehow she didn’t think that was what had happened. Maddie was simply sulking, doing No Speaks exactly as she had always done, refusing to say a word for days till Clare was reduced to a fever of not knowing and eventually to abject apology. Maddie had worked out long ago, back when they still shared a single room with twin beds either side of an exactly partitioned bedside cabinet, that the one thing her older sister could not bear was silence and that sooner or later sheer curiosity would force her to make the first move.

  This time, however, Clare was resolute. She would not give in. They had crossed the boundary to that strange fierce country inhabited by other siblings, the ones you read about in the papers. There was a glimpse of the gun with the silencer, the kitchen massacre, the stealthy bedroom assassination, the blood feud, all the worse for its intimate origins. She was almost fifty years old, but Clare Lacey was not going to say Pax. Or I Surrender. She had not spoken to her sister in three years.

  Yet here she was sitting in row 66 on Singapore Airlines Flight 298 to Heathrow, trying with a kind of hopeless desperation to find her sister among the endless ranks of fierce warriors, each of whom had been digitally enhanced and multiplied to infinity. She thought she might have spotted the original of Chester with his white fetlocks and black tail, but really it was impossible. The warriors all yelled and hacked and charged and retreated, and their mounts whinnied and reared up and fell on cue, and it was all so pointless that somewhere west of Alice Springs Clare gave up. Maddie was there, but lost among multitudes. Vanished, as her family always managed to do. Dwindled to a dot. To a kind of nothing …

  She flicked over to Friends, an episode she vaguely recalled, but they were all the same, weren’t they: chatting up, falling in love, falling out of love, the one-liners cracking along at precise three-second intervals, the formulae of relationships working out as they were supposed to. She read the in-flight magazine, drank more water.

  And then she had to go to the toilet. She put it off as long as possible but finally there was no option. She had to exit across Murray’s recumbent bulk. She dreaded waking him, though he was sleeping deeply, mouth sagging, a tiny spool of drool moistening his chin. She managed to stand up and step over him, but her weight dragged inevitably on the seats in front.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said as she scrambled out onto the aisle.

  The nice man looked round. ‘No problem,’ he said. His eyes crinkled a little at the corners when he smiled.

  The woman beside him was less forgiving, especially the third time when Clare accidentally caught a few strands of her blonde ponytail in an attempt to leap clean over Murray and land neatly in the aisle. The woman was sleeping by then, with a mask over her eyes. The nice man had on his reading light. He had laid aside The Economist and was reading a book. And it wasn’t about Masonic intrigue and the putative descendants of Jesus or Judas either. Clare glanced down in clumsy mid-scramble over meaty North Canterbury thighs: The Ancestor’s Tale. Richard Dawkins. He was reading Richard Dawkins.

  ‘Oh,’ she wanted to say. ‘Isn’t that the most amazing book?’ Had she been seated where the sleeping woman was seated, she could have said that. She could have said, ‘All that stuff about being descended from marine worms! I mean, I knew about the primates, the little shrew, all that — but a worm! A marine worm that turned over and began swimming on its back and that’s why our spines are where they are! Isn’t that just fantastic!’ And then she could have made some joke about not wanting to talk about the book too much before he’d finished reading because she didn’t want to give away the ending.

  It wasn’t a very good joke. But he looked like the sort of man with whom you might risk a joke like tha
t. And then they could begin talking about marine worms and the Great Cretaceous Catastrophe and why they liked reading about that sort of thing, and then the conversation could bounce off in a thousand different directions, about other books they’d read or their interestingly dysfunctional childhoods or truly wonderful places they had visited or movies they loved or what they believed or what they planned to do next with their lives or … anything really: one of those conversations that is perfectly balanced, turn for turn, no monologues, no set script, not too leaden and not too light, with just the right mixture of laughing and hearing yourself saying things for the first time because he is listening to you and to what you say. He’s not agreeing blindly and you are having to work here, think things through and be truthful, not reach for some handy ready-to-serve cliché. That might be good enough for the party with crumbly canapés and too-high heels and everyone leaning against the bookcases chatting beneath a miasma of boredom. Those endless social evenings wasted on an imitation of conversation.

  That would not do at all. Not here, in the tail of the plane where you are talking to a stranger, the words flying freely from your mouths and meeting in mid-air, like hands touching, fingertip to fingertip. So that by the time the conversation draws to a close — for it must end, they always do — you can part easily. You can say goodbye feeling very happy. Because you haven’t wasted your time on Flight 298 to Heathrow. You have met someone. In fact you have met two people: you have met the stranger, and you have met yourself. An interested, alert, engaged self who has been worth talking to. So you can bounce off down the concourse, dragging your little suitcase on its wiggly wheels, feeling content. How good it is to be human and free to use words, rather than being a dog or a cow! Perhaps their worlds are as satisfyingly filled with scent and taste, but how good it is to be able to dance about in language. How fortunate that that ancestral worm flipped onto its back in the primeval ocean to look up at the primeval sky. How lucky that it passed its novel swimming skills on to its little eggy offspring and so on, down to the fish and the lizards and the tiny furry mammals, and so to you with your spine at the back and your lungs and heart and brain all slung from the scaffolding of bone. And all those thousands of words banked up in your marvellous convoluted miracle of a brain. How fortunate you are! With your brain and heart and bladder …

  Your bursting bladder …

  Somehow she contrived to leap over Murray in a kind of clumsy Fosbury Flop that caught the woman’s ponytail, so that she said, ‘Ow!’ irritably from behind her black mask, and Murray stirred, said, ‘What the fu … ?’ before slumping back to slumber.

  Clare escaped to the tiny toilet cubicle. She splashed cold water on her face. She worked some moisturiser into her dry skin. Brushed her teeth. Did six knee bends and some leg swings in the gap by the emergency exit, then returned to her seat in the darkened cabin. The nice man had his head down, reading in his own little circle of light; the woman beside him slept neatly, compactly, her mouth closed and her hands clasping the airline blanket to her exquisite chin. Carefully, Clare scaled the bulk that was Murray and sank back into her awkward, uncomfortable seat.

  What a waste. What a dreadful waste.

  Twenty-seven hours of getting to somewhere as distant as Mordor, twenty-seven hours watching the tiny plane on the flight information screen creep slowly, slowly over continents. Twenty-seven hours of canned laughter and foil-wrapped stroganoff. Not to mention ten hours’ delay while they waited for the fog to lift before departure and two hours of perfume and autobiographies in the bookshop and another hour and a half of Euromen and the smoking enclosure …

  After all that, you’d be bound to feel ragged.

  Wouldn’t you?

  But here she is on the final leg. The plane flies out from Heathrow into the twilight over the Irish Sea. The jittery, glittery fabric that is the evening landscape of southern England recedes and now there is nothing beyond the window but the blink blink blink of the wingtip light and gathering darkness. Around her in the brightly lit carton that is Aer Lingus 623 to Cork, the accents have taken on a singsong lilt. Words are taken at a reckless speed and with a new emphasis. They blur in her befuddled brain into a kind of static from which phrases rise with sudden clarity like the motifs on an electronic score, devoid of literal meaning. The cabin crew — Teresa and Joanne — make a final transit, pushing their laden trolley: a final glass of water in a plastic glass, one last packet of pizza-flavoured nibbles.

  Far below she can see a single light. It swings wildly like a ship’s lantern way beneath the aeroplane wing, then out again. Another light flies in to join it. And another. The plane tilts toward them, the hum of the engine alters, the belts are buckled, there’s some cheery meaningless static from the cockpit: ground temperature, precise time of arrival, thanks for flying Aer Lingus and have a good evening. And they are dropping. They are swaying down towards land through gauzy wisps of cloud. A bump, a roar of brakes. They are there.

  The other side of the world.

  Clare has flown through day and night, through shoals of hours and minutes. She has left on 20 April and yet here she is, after hours of fog and foil-wrapped dinners and perfume and Euromen, arriving on 20 April. She has crossed the world and is arriving no older than she was when she left home a lifetime ago. It is as though she has hovered in mid-air while the earth has spun beneath her, just as those old navigators put it when they said that islands swam towards the waka while they floated motionless in the midst of the ocean.

  Here she is at the end of this strange day, returning to land.

  A migratory bird.

  One of those species that flies between hemispheres, spanning the globe.

  She has reached Ultima Thule.

  Eire.

  Ireland.

  Three

  Location/Dis-location. That was this year’s theme.

  Location/Dis-location: The shifts, historical and contemporary, in the location of the studio and the academy in relation to the concepts, values and practice of art history.

  That was to be the theme of the 33rd Annual Conference of the International Association of Art Historians at University College Cork, and I meant to address it. Truly I did. I spent months preparing my thirty minutes.

  Cave/Cathedral/Carpark: the wall as visionary locus. That was my working title.

  It’s listed in the programme. A thirty-minute presentation concerning the elemental attraction of the blank white wall, the primal impulse to transfer imagery to stone. The projection of iconographies of faith to cavern limestone untouched by wind or rain, offering its perfect blank. Or to the chapel prepared for the artist’s brush with a virgin wash of white lime plaster. Or to the concrete walls of an era unconvinced by black or white, where limestone blends with earthier stuff to create a city’s bare grey pages whereon the tagger is the moving hand. That kind of thing. But now there is so much more I want to add.

  I want to add to limestone and art and belief, other details, like bones and a pony and a movie and a Toyota Starlet and a blind man at a corner where two roads meet and a woman in a tower and a quest for a father and an old song and a baby and a whole flood of tiny particles that I don’t think could settle down neatly into a solid thirty minutes, allowing time for questions.

  I want to tell you everything: you shadows who wait out there in the dark, listening.

  Yes. You.

  This is my address to you, my presentation, composed as I drive south through unknown country, following the bright and narrow path laid down by a pair of headlights. A stone wall races by on my left, a grove of dark trees swishes by on my right. I pass through small shuttered towns as if I were no more than the particles of dream: the sound of an engine nearing, the gleam of headlights across a bedroom wall, a glint at the edge of a mirror, and I’m gone.

  I was born in limestone country.

  I want to begin with that.

  I want to tell you about being the child of limestone, born in a place that styled itself The
White Stone City.

  That’s what it said on a sign at the edge of the town where I was born. Welcome to the White Stone City.

  And lest that conjure up some image of New York or Paris or Singapore — apartment blocks making their idiosyncratic cool riffs on verticality, boulevards lined with twinkling shop windows, a square with a domed cathedral and spindly urbanites sitting on spindly chairs drinking urban coffee — let me make clear that the place where I was born was not a city at all.

  It was a small town set down with all the tenuous bravado of a seabird colony on a shingle spit between the surge and bash of a wild ocean and a former coastal terrace which rose a few hundred metres inland, prime location for houses with picture windows taking in the view over the town and the railway line and the vast blue savannahs of the southern Pacific.

  A temporary settlement. If someone had invented a time machine and say you got into it on the main street, and say you rode back in it for millions of years and got out at the exact same place, well, you’d be underneath the ocean, and if you looked up there would be dinosaurs swimming with enormous sharp teeth, like the tooth Ozzie Moses who worked at the stone quarry gave to our little brother Brian because he liked stuff like that. Brian was small and scaly like a lizard himself, on account of the eczema, but he could draw all the dinosaurs and knew their names, though he couldn’t blow his own nose or tie his shoelaces. He said his tooth probably came from a plesiosaur. So you’d stand with your hair floating, holding your breath and hoping that plesiosaurs didn’t recognise human children as food, looking up at the heavy crocodile waggle of their tails swimming about over your head where the main street now stood with its shops and banks and the post office and the shoe shop where you could watch your own feet wriggle in the black depths of the machine, delicate as white fish bone.