by Cowley, Joy
* * *
That night he told Andrea about the meeting with the woman in the library. She was sorting the clothes in her wardrobe, and she listened but in a dreamy sort of way. At one stage, she asked, “Did you feel scared?”
He thought about that. “Not really.”
“She’s a strange old thing. If you feel threatened, you should tell someone.”
“I don’t feel threatened, and I’m telling you.”
Andy rattled coathangers. “You know what I mean, Squidge. If she’s following you, you should say something to Mum or Dad.”
He felt hurt by the way she had offloaded a confidential matter and he changed the subject. “I thought we were going to a movie today.”
“And I thought you were playing cricket.”
“Not all day, Andy.”
“Some other time, eh? Sorry, Squidge, I’ve got a lot of things on my mind. Yeah, we’ll do a movie. Promise. And I’m sorry about Eddie getting the push. I know you liked him.”
He nodded.
She put her hand over his. “He’ll get another job, and it will be better than this one. I mean, how would you like to work for Dad?”
He looked up at her and his smile met the laughter in her eyes. “I wouldn’t. But I had this idea –” He looked down again. “It seemed like I was the cause somehow. Dad told me not to talk to him, and I did.”
“No, no, no.” She shook her head. “It’s not you. It’s the way Dad’s mind works. He is so ignorant. Eddie is gay. He’s not a paedophile. Don’t worry, Squidge. The sacking of Eddie has nothing to do with you.”
“I hate it when bad things happen,” he said.
She didn’t answer, but she sat beside him for more than a minute, before getting up. “Have to go,” she said. “I’ve got homework.”
But when he passed her room a few minutes later, he saw she had on her headphones and was watching music videos on her computer. She wanted to be alone.
* * *
Everyone was quiet over dinner. Helen had cooked a meal, spaghetti bolognaise, and had defrosted an apple cake with a cinnamon crust.
Jeff was the only one who said it tasted good. Winston didn’t even ask him about the cricket. Andrea pushed her plate away, food half eaten, and went to her room. It was early evening and dusk seemed to bring a great emptiness as the sun dragged the light towards the other side of the world.
Light, Maisie said. Light had meaning for him. But what meaning?
After dessert, Winston pushed back from the table, screeching the chair on the polished marble. He said to Helen, “I’m on that early flight Monday.”
“Are you coming back the same day?” she asked.
“Yes. I’ll leave the car at the airport. Excuse me.” He stood, pushed the chair back in, and went down the hall to his office.
As Helen stacked the plates, she glanced at Jeff. “Sydney,” she said.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No. Nothing. There has been a little hold-up in the registration of the title deeds, and the quickest way to sort it is to be on the spot.”
“What’s wrong with phone and emails?”
Helen smiled. “You know your father. He likes to be hands-on, and I have no doubt that he wants to gloat over his Sydney property. I’m sure he’ll have the new house keys in his pocket before he leaves.”
Andrea came through to help with the dishes. As she stacked the plates, Helen put a hand out to stop her. “I’ll do these. Why don’t you two go into the theatre and watch one of your father’s DVDs?”
Jeff leaned towards Andrea, doing please, please, in sign language.
She laughed, nodded a yes, and they went into the theatre next to Winston’s office.
They had seen all the videos in the collection, but Jeff was allowed to choose and he pounced on Inception because it was one of his favourites – that and The Matrix. He’d already seen Inception three times and with each viewing it had revealed more to him, making the incredible credible. He loved the way people could go through layers of experience in the brain, descend one level after another and then come up again to external reality. But he seriously doubted they could do that in real life.
They had to keep the sound down because Winston was working next door. That was okay. They both knew the dialogue. They sprawled in adjacent leather chairs and Andrea put her arm over his shoulders. He rested his head against her and watched the film, her hair against his cheek. He wanted to stay that way forever.
* * *
Some days after school, Jeff went to the Argonaut Travel Agency to get a ride to the house with Helen. One of those days was Monday. The girls in the office knew him and took no notice when he found a chair and a magazine. He was a part of the place. However, the man and woman waiting next to him asked him where he was planning to travel.
“Home,” he said, and then he pointed with his thumb. “That’s my mother.”
He was proud of Helen at her work. She always looked elegant and she smiled a lot at customers, which made her eyes crinkle and shine. Behind her was a large poster of the Parthenon in Athens, white against a blue sky. He had seen it many times and knew it by its statistics, finished in 438 BC, sixty-nine and a half metres long and almost thirty-one metres wide. There were other, smaller scenes around the room: buildings less old, snow-capped mountains, white ships on blue oceans, no rain or grey skies to be seen. People said that photos did not lie, but that was not true. Photos lied all the time. Like movies, they could be mostly make-believe.
The couple in the seats next to him went to the agent near his mother. Helen was putting tickets and information in a travel wallet for the man sitting by her desk. She stood to shake his hand and then, as the man walked past Jeff and out the door, she turned off her computer.
Her smile was gone and she was Mum again, shrugging on her jacket and shaking the car keys at Jeff. He followed her out to the car park behind the building and waited while she unlocked the Audi. “Have you heard from Dad?” he asked.
“He phoned.”
He sank into the passenger seat and pushed his backpack in front of his feet. “I don’t want to live in Sydney.”
“We’re not. Who said we were?” She adjusted the rear vision mirror and backed out of the park.
He turned to face her. “Isn’t that why he went over today?”
“No. It’s something else.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing major. A small hiccup in the paperwork.” She swung the wheel and the car nosed into the traffic. “He’ll have it sorted by now.”
“When does he get back?”
“Late. We won’t wait up. We’ll get takeaways tonight and you can choose. What’s it to be – Chinese, Thai, curry? You like rogan josh, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer. When she said Thai, his thinking had flipped to Beckett coming back from Thailand and he remembered how he was supposed to tell people that his brother was not a part of their family.
Had they forgotten Beck’s laughter, all the tricks? Like the time he answered the phone, saying, “Good evening, this is the morgue,” and when he got Andy to burst a paper bag that had flour in it. How many times had their mother said, “Oh Beckett!” and flicked him with a tea towel? Had they forgotten who he was? Dad had been so proud of Beck. “My son’s getting a commerce degree,” he’d say, as though a BCom. was something extraordinary. Then Beck dropped out of uni, and the rows began, one after another.
“Let’s settle for rogan josh and mango lassi,” said Helen.
He nodded. Helen was a salesperson. She was like the posters in the Argonaut office that told lies by leaving out the truth. It’s what they needed to do to make people buy what they had to offer.
* * *
That night he looked up dementia and found that the old meaning of the word was “out of mind” – de-mentia. The most common form was Alzheimer’s, although people could get dementia at any age from brain injury, infection, strokes, loss of blood to the brain.
He went through the long list of symptoms and saw in them Helen’s Great-aunt Rose with her long wispy hair and doll-like eyes. She had memory loss, and couldn’t solve problems or do familiar tasks. She got confused about time and place and she thought the hospital was her old school. When she saw herself in a mirror, she was convinced she had a visitor. It was difficult for Great-aunt Rose to follow conversations. She kept misplacing things – like her glasses, which were on a cord around her neck but she took them off and put them in the fridge because they were a necklace from the Queen and needed to go into the bank for safe keeping. The more he read, the more he remembered the times he had visited her. He saw those pale empty eyes, the crooked lipstick, and the way her mouth trembled when she pointed at him and said, “Are you the doctor’s boy?”
He went from one article to another, but it was all about his faded relative who had once been a talented music teacher and singer. There was nothing he could connect with the Maisie woman.
The old woman who had come into his life had a different kind of craziness, and because he didn’t know what that was called, he couldn’t access information about it. Words like the names of foreign foods came up on the dementia sites – schizophrenia, paranoia, bipolar, Alzheimer’s again. They were all conditions tucked away in the brain, listed with their symptoms and their treatments. None of those were Maisie.
It was late when he put his light out. It seemed he had been asleep only minutes when he heard his father’s voice in the kitchen. He was home and they were having one of their arguments, Winston’s words rising in waves of sound, Helen’s a persistent current, pushing, pushing. He didn’t know what it was about but guessed that his father was going to make them all move to Sydney to get away from the publicity of Beckett returning to New Zealand.
A desperate thought came into his head. He didn’t mean it, but said it anyway, out loud and into the pillow. “I’d rather kill myself.”
6
SOUND is a sequence of waves of pressure through a medium such as air or water, and the perception of sound is limited to a certain range of frequencies. For humans, hearing is normally between the frequencies of 20 Hz and 20 000 Hz, although the upper limit often decreases with age. Other species have different ranges of hearing and many species have produced special organs to generate sound. Sound cannot travel through a vacuum.
They were not moving to Sydney. The argument was about something else, Jeff didn’t know what, that had put his father into a state of major irritation.
Although Winston had come home late, he was up early and pacing about the kitchen, phoning, checking emails, shouting at Helen for no reason. He couldn’t sit down for more than a few seconds. His arms moved, his legs twitched, as though someone was pulling strings.
“Have you got hold of him?” Helen said, as she put out the breakfast cereals.
“I can’t! I told you! His health won’t take long flights. He’s going back in short hops, Darwin, Singapore, Hong Kong, Rome, Berlin, London. Rest days in between.”
“Surely he can answer his phone,” Helen said.
“His bloody phone’s off!” Winston threw up his hands. “If you can’t say anything intelligent, just shut the hell up!”
Helen’s mouth went thin and her movements slowed. She put bowls deliberately in place, a glass of orange juice beside each, and told Jeff to go and wake up his sister.
Andrea was already up and dressed but she looked half asleep, hair all over her face and dark marks under her eyes. She, too, was grumpy. “I’ve been sleeping in a war zone.”
“It’s Sydney. Something’s gone wrong.”
“Who cares?” She picked up her hairbrush. “Listen to him! I don’t know how any of us put up with his moods.”
“Breakfast is ready,” he said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’ll be late for school.”
“Too bad!”
“Andy, you have to come for breakfast!”
“Oh, go away! You’re as bad as he is! Control, control!” She looked at him in the mirror and her expression changed. She jumped up and gave him a clumsy hug. “I didn’t mean it, little bro.”
He shrugged within the squeeze of her arms. “I know.”
“You’ll never be like him. Never! All right, I’ll come out and have some orange juice.”
* * *
It was Mrs Wilson’s birthday, although she wouldn’t say how old she was. Paul reminded the class that a lady never told her age, and Mrs Wilson said it wasn’t that, she had just given up counting when she got to a hundred. This made them laugh, everyone except Clive Fisher, who didn’t get the joke and remarked that she had to be exaggerating.
They had put money together to buy her a ball-point pen with a rolled-gold cap and her name on the barrel. Salosa’s father had a shop that did engraving, but because they were unsure of her first name, the pen simply had Mrs Wilson on it, which was appropriate for a school pen. They had all signed the card and Peter had written that the pen was designed to give high marks to pupils’ assignments.
They were right in assuming Mrs Wilson would be so pleased, she would fritter away a good percentage of a history lesson. “Do you know, when my mother was at school, the desks had holes for little pots of ink they called inkwells and students had to use pens with nibs that were dipped in the ink.”
They knew how to keep her stories going. Salosa said, “When were ball-point pens invented, Mrs Wilson?”
“Some time in the forties, I think,” she said. “But students were not allowed to use them. Teachers thought it would make their script sloppy. Ballpoint pens would ruin handwriting! That was the catchphrase of the day.”
“What about smart phones?” someone said.
Mrs Wilson chuckled. “I’ll leave you to answer that. Have you all got your history text? Turn to page seventy-three –”
Peter quickly put up his hand. “Is it true, Mrs Wilson, that ball-point pens don’t write in outer space?”
“Correct, Peter!” she said. “The first astronauts discovered their ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. So, do you know what happened?”
They all did, because she had told this story before.
“NASA scientists spent ten years and billions of dollars designing a ball-point pen that would write in any condition, upside down, under water, in zero gravity, in all temperatures and on any surface, including glass.”
They waited for the punchline.
“And do you know what the Russians did? They used a pencil!”
Everyone else laughed as expected, but Jeff merely shook his head. It was not a funny story. It was a comment on the evolution of the human race.
* * *
After school, Paul invited Jeff to come around and have a jam session in the basement. Jeff wanted to say yes, but couldn’t with the way things were at home. All day he had carried his father’s angry voice and while he wanted to get as far away from that as possible, he also needed to find out what was going on. He said, thanks, another day, to Paul, and then walked to Argonaut Travel.
Tuesdays, he usually took the bus home because Helen worked late, but today he didn’t want to go back to a house that echoed bad energy. Then there was the other thing, a stranger doing Eddie’s work in the garden. So much change! Even if his mother was working late today, she could spare a minute to tell him what was happening.
Because it was a fine afternoon, he walked along the wharf. At least, that was the reason he gave himself. Actually, he was hoping to see Maisie somewhere in that public space. All along the waterfront were seats where old people often sat, watching boats and enjoying the sunshine. It was a logical setting. Maybe she would be there.
He strolled past the three red tugboats snuggled up against the pier, past the Dominion Post ferry, past the restaurants, his head turning. There was a party of Asian tourists taking photos, a couple on a tandem bicycle, children, parents, some kids with rollerblades. No old Maisie. He got as far as Circa Theatr
e and went right, leaving the sea to walk into the city and his mother’s workplace. His sensible self asked him, how would Maisie know that he had decided to walk along the wharf? The answer was, the same way she knew he was going to be at the bus stop, the restaurant, the library.
Oh yeah? the voice argued. And how did she know that?
This time, the answer was silence.
By the time he arrived at the door of Argonaut Travel, he had walked two thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven steps.
There was a young redheaded woman sitting at Helen’s desk. She smiled. “Are you Jeffrey? Hi! I’m Amiria. I’m filling in for your mother. She went home at lunchtime. She had a migraine.”
Helen with a migraine? That was a headache, wasn’t it? He stepped backwards. “Thanks.”
“I used to get terrible migraines. Tell her putting her head under a cold shower really helps. Hope she’s better tomorrow.”
* * *
Helen was home, cleaning the fridge. Winston was at the office. Outside, the grey-headed man with a moustache was clipping the small box hedge that separated the herb garden from the roses.
“It’s a mess,” Helen said. “Your father’s trying to sort it out.”
Jeff poured himself a chocolate milk. “What kind of mess?”
“I’m not sure. Neither is your dad. He’s trying to get to the bottom of it, but it’s possible we don’t have that harbour property.”
“The sale’s fallen through?” He sat up straight, trying to conceal his pleasure. “So there’s no Sydney house?”
Helen took the chocolate milk packet and put it back in the fridge. “It rather looks like it. No house. No courier package.”
Jeff swallowed. The drink tasted wonderful. “No wonder Dad’s upset.”
“It’s not the end of the world. He’ll invest the money elsewhere.”
She shut the fridge door. “At the moment he’s talking about suing Mr Staunton-Jones’s lawyer, so that’s keeping him occupied. You’ve got chocolate milk down your shirt.”
