Golden Deeds

by Chidgey, Catherine

  Patrick peered at a page. ‘What about the gold?’ he said. ‘What was that made from?’

  Gold was made from gold, said the curator, and he described how the metal was hammered until it was tissue-thin, how gold-beaters could produce one hundred and forty-five leaves from one ducat. Gold leaf had virtually no weight. If rubbed between the fingers it disappeared, if dropped, it hardly seemed to fall. It could be unwrinkled with one gentle breath; it could be eaten. It was best applied in wet weather, or in the early morning, and it would never tarnish.

  ‘And the dots?’ said Patrick, gently touching a beaded, glittering border.

  ‘The design,’ said the curator, was picked out in gesso—plaster or chalk mixed with glue—and allowed to dry. The illuminator then breathed on it to make it sticky—’ he exhaled, as if trying to fog a window pane ‘—and laid the gold leaf on top. It adheres very easily,’ he said. It almost seems to jump into place.’ He opened a drawer and withdrew an instrument: a long handle mounted with a stone. ‘Agate,’ he said, ‘for burnishing the gold. Dogs’ teeth were also recommended, or teeth from any carnivore—lions, wolves, wild boars.’

  Patrick ran his finger over the agate. It felt smooth, just like a tooth.

  Malcolm looked out at their new, paved back yard. A garden without grass, without flowers.

  ‘Phil’s passing through next week,’ he said, ‘on his way to a big conference down south. I’ve asked him to stay for a couple of days.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ruth. ‘Oh. I suppose so.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for years, you know.’

  ‘No.’

  The last time had been at a staff Christmas party, right before Phil moved to the Sydney office.

  ‘Congratulations, mate,’ Malcolm had said several times during the evening, slapping Phil on the shoulder, the back, shaking his hand. ‘You deserve it, mate, you really really deserve it.’

  That was their first Christmas without Laura. Ruth hadn’t come to the party, so Malcolm spent the night telling people he was drinking for two. He couldn’t remember much more than that, but he did remember Ruth’s white face at the window when he arrived home.

  ‘I was worried, I didn’t know where you were, I was so worried,’ she said.

  Phil had left for Australia a few days later, to take up the job Malcolm had wanted and probably would have got if it hadn’t been for Laura.

  ‘He’ll only stay for a couple of nights,’ said Malcolm. ‘It’ll be fun, you know what Phil’s like.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Ruth.

  He hadn’t changed much in twelve years.

  ‘Ruth,’ he said, enveloping her in a bear hug, ‘still as lovely as ever.’

  After dinner they drove out to the beach. In the back seat Daniel giggled as Phil tickled him and told him jokes.

  ‘Does your dad still grow flowers?’ he said. ‘Does he still bake bread?’

  Daniel laughed and laughed.

  Malcolm parked the car as close to the water as possible and they began walking, past the silky mudflats, past the knotted, twisting mangroves to the sea.

  ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Come on then,’ said Ruth, but Daniel said no, he wanted Malcolm to take him.

  Ruth and Phil continued along the beach. In the gathering dark the sand was almost black. Phil lit a cigarette and the smoke drifted past Ruth’s face and out to the wide water.

  ‘Can I have one?’ she said, and he lit it for her. ‘Don’t tell Malcolm, he hates it,’

  She watched the white hook of moon on the horizon and waited for Phil to speak. She wondered whether he would suggest a swim; it was warm enough. In a way she longed for the water, its salty grip, the danger of stingrays and sharks, perhaps, and jellyfish which numbed careless swimmers. Ruth remembered reading that drowning was peaceful. There was a romance about it, a sallow glamour. Limbs were made graceful by water; a wrist curved like a dancer’s hair ribboned out in slow motion, wreathing the silent face. At certain stages of development, Ruth recalled, a human foetus has gills, a vestigial tail. It lives in fluid for nine months. If Laura had drowned, if this was the wrong place she’d come to at the wrong time, perhaps it had been as easy as swimming.

  At the pub the next night Phil ordered round after round, refusing to let Malcolm pay.

  ‘Hey Mal,’ he said, ‘whatever happened to old Joanna? You ever hear of her these days?’

  ‘Who? Joanna?’

  ‘You remember her—big girl, sweated a lot. Worked in admin.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know who you mean,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘Joanna. Fat Jo. The office bike.’ Phil was becoming impatient.

  ‘No,’ said Malcolm, ‘I don’t remember any Joanna.’

  Phil took a long sip of beer, head back, throat open, his eyes on Malcolm the whole time. ‘Okay,’ he said, wiping his mouth, ‘all right.’

  Joanna had been wearing tinsel round her head at the Christmas party. As the night wore on she added extra decorations: a star in her hair, a bell looped over her wrist, a plastic snowflake on each breast. Malcolm avoided her; he disliked her over-friendly way with all the male staff. Didn’t she realise that they were revolted by her? That they called her Pig and Buttockface? At some stage he stumbled to his office to phone Ruth and tell her not to keep dinner for him. And Joanna must have seen him leave the party, because suddenly she was in his office too, and he didn’t phone home, and then she had her hands down his trousers and he was fumbling to undo her bra and his hands were full of her, and she was pulling him down to the floor and at one point, when he looked up, he thought he saw Phil watching from the corridor, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Every now and then, if Ruth was silent too long, Phil touched her on the arm and asked about her job, or about Daniel.

  ‘He’s a good kid,’ he said, ‘once you get to know him. And your babysitter’s so great with him. She’s not much more than a kid herself,’

  ‘She’s twenty-one,’ said Ruth, gulping wine so she didn’t have to talk.

  ‘You’ll have to come over to Sydney again,’ said Phil. And make sure you get in touch this time. We’ve got plenty of room, Daniel would love it.’

  And Malcolm said Ruth had been pestering him for a holiday for ages, and Phil should watch out, because they might just take up the offer.

  On one of Phil’s many trips to the bar, Ruth saw an attractive young woman approach him and chat for a few minutes before he returned. The next time he went to get drinks the young woman engaged him in conversation again, and Phil brought her back to the table with him.

  ‘This is Paula,’ he said. ‘Paula, Ruth, Malcolm.’

  Paula smoked long, thin cigarettes and wore a charm bracelet which tinkled each time she moved. She was a pharmacy assistant, she said, but really she wanted to go to medical school. She was going to apply next year, when she’d saved a bit of money. In between mouthfuls of wine, Ruth watched the charms on Paula’s wrist. There was a rocking chair, a pair of tiny silver shoes, an alligator jointed at the legs and jaws which writhed as Paula moved her hand. There was a heart, a ship, a crown, a key. Ruth could picture her working in a pharmacy, her neat, polished fingers gift-wrapping soap, perfume, bubble bath for men to take home to their wives. She would tie each parcel with ribbon, using scissors to curl the ends until they spiralled like ringlets.

  When Phil next patted Ruth’s shoulder and said, ‘So, you’ve got the new house looking really great,’ she shook him away.

  ‘Don’t touch me please,’ she said, and Paula stopped talking and laughing and flicking her hair and stared at Ruth, and Malcolm and Phil stared too, and Ruth said nothing. She couldn’t explain what was wrong, that it was this bland, inoffensive girl who’d upset her. She couldn’t say that she remembered the way her daughter had been around Phil, that he was the type of man Laura fantasised about in her diary. And that here Paula was, hanging on his every word, applauding his clumsy games of pool, sipping with freshly painted li
ps the drinks he bought. She didn’t know a thing about him, this girl. He could have been anyone at all.

  ‘Just calm yourself down,’ said Malcolm, moving Ruth’s glass from the edge of the table.

  ‘Perhaps we should take her home,’ said Phil, reaching down and attempting to retrieve Ruth’s bag.

  ‘Leave my things alone,’ she said in a low, steady voice.

  ‘But you’re all hooked up here, Ruth. If we can just get you to move your chair a bit—’

  ‘In Sydney they snatch your bag right out from under you, don’t they?’ she said. ‘I had my bag snatched in Sydney the second day we were there, didn’t I? Remember that?’

  Malcolm nodded, his hand on his wife’s elbow, trying to pull her to her feet.

  ‘The policemen were so nice. They didn’t find my bag for me, but they told me what to do in future. You have to be cunning, you see, Paula. You have to be sneakier than the bag-snatchers.’ And she tilted the chair forward on two legs and unhooked her bag. ‘It’s not possible for us to visit you in Sydney, Phil,’ she said. ‘Malcolm doesn’t have time for holidays now.’

  Nobody talked about Laura any more. Nobody had mentioned her for what seemed like years. It was as if she had never existed, and Ruth understood that now, for most people, she hadn’t. If a person could disappear without trace, then perhaps they had only ever existed in the imagination of someone else.

  Except Laura had left traces of herself, things useless to all intents and purposes, and of no interest to the police or to the careful searchers. She’d left her tennis rackets, her hair clips, her little bottles of nail polish stored in the fridge to keep them liquid. She’d left earrings, school blouses, half a bag of toffees, three rented movies. They’d been hopelessly overdue by the time Ruth returned them. The boy behind the counter started to tell her how much she owed when he stopped short and peered at her and then said, ‘That’s okay, Mrs Pearse, you’ve got a lot on your mind.’ Ruth wanted to tell him that she hadn’t forgotten about the tapes. On the contrary, she’d kept them stacked on top of the television, in full view, for when Laura returned home and flopped into her armchair and aimed the remote control.

  ‘Don’t you find it strange there are so few clues?’ Ruth asked the detective inspector. ‘Perhaps there’s something you’ve missed, someone you could speak to again?’

  He tapped a sheaf of papers into alignment. ‘There is always the possibility,’ he said, ‘that Laura doesn’t wish to be found.’

  Ruth liked to imagine her daughter as a star. Laura, she decided sometimes, had run away with the circus and was performing to adoring, foreign audiences. She was as strong and graceful as a diving bird, her costumes stitched with jewels, sleek plumage glinting in the spodights. On the trapeze she slipped through the air as if it were water. Her judgement was perfect; she was always in the right place at the right time, always met her partner mid-air. Laura would understand that one split second could upset everything, could mean tragedy. And she would understand, too, that this was what thrilled the crowds: the knowledge that, because of a fraction of a second, her partner could turn to catch her and find his hands meeting with nothing but air. But Laura never fell.

  In more sensible moments, Ruth knew her circus imaginings to be nothing more than a dream, her own silly fantasy of years before. Her mother had sent her to gym classes, and while other girls had flipped and arched and made bridges and pyramids of their bodies, Ruth puzzled over what to do with her head during a forward roll.

  ‘Come along,’ urged the instructor, ‘surely you can manage one?’

  Ruth watched her classmates tumble across the sticky red mats one after the other, a blur of red leotards and pointed toes. They tucked their sleek, braided heads into their bodies, formed themselves into tight coils. Any daughter of hers, she’d decided, would be graceful.

  The problem she always encountered, though, the thing that hit her in the face, was that she had no idea what Laura would look like. It had been twelve years; she would be twenty-seven by now. When Prince Charles had married Diana, a women’s magazine had featured an artist’s impression of their offspring. Ruth remembered studying the sketches of golden, toothy pre-adolescents. She’d thought that they looked artificial, lifeless, like identikit pictures rather than princes and princesses. She wondered what the artist would make of a grown-up Laura, which features would be more pronounced, how her hair would be cut, where wrinkles would fall. When she tried to picture her now, all she could see were photographs. The images she summoned were static and clouded, as if seen through the translucent leaves of a photo album. Ruth had such an album. The pages separating the photos, protecting one moment in time from another, were patterned with cobwebs.

  ‘Nobody’s irreplaceable,’ said Jan. ‘And it’s Easter coming up. We can cope without you for a week or two, don’t worry.’

  Ruth didn’t pack much. She’d been monitoring the weather reports and was confident it would be warm up there. It was closer to the equator, as close as you could get without leaving the country. She tucked a note inside an envelope and left it propped against the electric jug.

  Two American women reached the check-in counter just before she did. They were twins, she realised, and she looked from one to the other without trying to hide her curiosity. From the way they were dressed, it was obvious they enjoyed the attention, and Ruth could see the man at the counter—Dennis, according to his name tag—staring too. Both women were dressed in track suits, one pink and one yellow. They had the same haircut, the same sunglasses, the same black money belts locked to their stomachs.

  Before Dennis could smile and ask how they were today the pink twin said, ‘We’d like 5a and 5b.’ She presented him with their tickets. ‘They’re the ones by the emergency exit.’

  ‘Not that we think there’ll be a crash,’ said the yellow twin, ‘but there’s more leg room there.’

  ‘No, we’re sure it won’t crash, it’s the leg room, that’s all.’

  The yellow twin heaved a suitcase on to the scales. It was made of thick brocade, like a lounge suite, and was secured with a tiny gold padlock. She wore a black ribbon around her neck. Ruth suspected that hanging from it, nestled in her wrinkled cleavage, was a tiny gold key. The needle swung wildly as Dennis positioned the case, and Ruth was pleased to see that here they still used manual scales. Like a one-handed clock, she thought. She disliked the electronic ones, with their digital panels set into the counter top so that the exact weight of a holiday was displayed. On the way back from Bali, her case had weighed twenty-five kilos. A third of a person, she’d thought as she read the glowing panel, she was carrying a good third of an adult. Or half a child. It was Malcolm’s masks that had weighed her down; he’d bought seven or eight of the things, each one carved from thick teak. He thought they’d look good hanging in the bedroom, but they didn’t.

  As she waited to board the plane she sat opposite the twins and a young couple. On their honeymoon, perhaps. The woman read the paper while the man held the latest copy of Woman’s Day. Fergie’s Fab New Figure, read the cover, the elaborate pink letters curling and creeping between his fingers. Next to him the yellow twin took a lipstick from her money belt and began applying it.

  ‘No, Lois,’ she said as her sister reached for the tube, ‘you know this colour doesn’t suit you.’

  Ruth had never been on such a small plane. Out on the runway it looked like one of Daniel’s toys, like a model pieced together by a schoolboy. There was no handrail, just a thin blue cord that indicated the edge of the stairs, the point at which they fell away to nothing. The pilot stood on the tarmac, his shirt whiter than the billows of cumulus piling overhead. He took Ruth’s boarding pass and, like a cinema usher, tore off the stub. As she moved up the stairs he said, ‘I hope you enjoy your flight.’ A gust of wind buffeted her and she grasped at the blue cord, which felt like string in her palm.

  There were only two seats in each row, with the aisle running between them. Behind Ruth the American
twins were settling in, arranging their legs around their hand luggage.

  The pink twin smiled and said, ‘Isn’t it nice, we all get a window seat.’

  The walls of the plane were covered with cream vinyl, like the interior of an old car. Laura’s car. It even smelled the same. Ruth closed her eyes.

  ‘Well what am I going to read then?’

  ‘I don’t know. The emergency procedures card.’

  The young man and woman from the terminal were taking the seats in front of Ruth. The woman rolled and punched her anorak, squashed the air out of it.

  ‘You hate Woman’s Day,’ she said. ‘You think it degrades women and insults their intelligence, remember?’

  ‘It does. That’s why you should read something else.’

  ‘Such as?’ The woman rammed her anorak under the seat.

  ‘You should have brought the newspaper with you.’

  ‘It belonged to the café, it wasn’t mine to bring.’