Golden Deeds

by Chidgey, Catherine

  Ruth watched the woman at the furnace door twirling the pipe. When she withdrew it, the bulb on the end was red-hot. She rolled it on a metal slab, then placed her mouth to the cool end and blew, and the glass stretched and swelled, as pliable as hot toffee. It was a versatile material, the woman said, turning and shaping the glowing bubble, flattening the base with a spatula, defining the neck with narrow tongs. Glass was made of melted sand, and sometimes formed naturally when lightning struck a beach. When it was hot enough to be poured, it coiled like a snake. Flat panes, she said, nodding towards the window, were made by drawing a ribbon of molten glass across liquid tin. If an object—a vase, a goblet—cooled too quickly, it was pushed back into the furnace through a space called the glory hole. Glass even made it possible to take pictures inside the human body.

  Ruth went to the gallery every day and looked at the perfume bottles, the vases, the bowls and goblets that were for sale. There was always a small crowd watching the glass-blowers. One day she saw the young couple from the plane there. They left with their little fingers linked.

  The motel unit was like a miniature home. It had tiny soaps and tiny bottles of shampoo, and in the kitchen there were tiny sachets of sugar and jam and coffee. There was a little oven and a little fridge containing a carton of milk and blocks of butter suitable for a doll’s kitchen. Even the television was small, the actors’ faces illegible. Ruth gave up trying to improve the reception; she couldn’t get rid of the ghosts. On the bedroom wall hung a round mirror. Sometimes, if she woke at night, she thought the moon had come inside.

  She went to the beach most days and swam and read frivolous magazines, the sort frowned upon by the periodicals department. Her skin darkened more each time, which made her feel healthy. Some of the beauty articles she skimmed warned that any tanning indicated damage, but others insisted that a little exposure afforded protection from the sun. Both couldn’t be right, Ruth knew, so she believed those that suited her and discounted the others, left them face-down in the sand and headed for the tepid water.

  In the gift shop she fingered postcards glossy with sun. She was reluctant to send a mountain, a beach, a particular church; unwilling to choose a scene that pinpointed her location. There was always the chance, of course, that the postmark would give her away, but often the ink was blurred, indistinct. She would take her chances. She chose a card shaped like a shell, an oval paua. It was blue, green, turquoise, teal, all the colours of the sea and sky mixed together. They were making paua pearls now, the man at the counter told her, and he showed her necklaces and bracelets and rings. They were big business. The pearls didn’t occur naturally, of course, but were cultivated from a grain of sand inserted into the soft mollusc body.

  At night it was too hot.

  ‘It’s fine to leave the doors and windows open,’ said the motel owner. ‘Just hook the fly-screens shut.’

  When Ruth looked through the fine metal gauze to the bush, the water, the shimmering sky, the view was blurred, broken into thousands of tiny dots like a newsprint picture. The screens were very fine, she thought; anybody could break them with a fist. Still, she needed to let her miniature home cool down. She needed to let the air circulate. And, even though there was only gauze between her and the night, something not much stronger than paper, she slept soundly.

  She cut her knee on the fourth day.

  ‘It was silly of me,’ she said. ‘I slipped when I was getting out of the shower,’

  The motel owner produced some plasters from a first aid kit. ‘It doesn’t look too deep,’ he said. ‘It won’t take long to heal.’

  He was right. It soon ceased to sting, although for the next few days Ruth was careful when she moved around her compact unit, her toy house. She stepped gingerly, protecting herself from knocks and bumps, avoiding the low couch, the sharp-edged coffee table. Her progress made her think of a game Laura had played as a child, where the idea wasn’t to avoid the furniture but to cling to it, to move from room to room without ever touching the floor. Laura amused herself for hours by skipping over chairs and foot-stools and tables, moving them if necessary, taking the most circuitous path possible. Once she had a new route memorised, she flew through the house, breathless, the floor a blur beneath her.

  ‘You’ll break something,’ Ruth always warned. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

  But Laura never did.

  When she next went swimming, Ruth pulled the plaster from her knee and examined the cut. It had a smooth, glazed surface. It was a chink of glass, a window into herself. She lay on the beach and read a magazine article on iron deficiency which was, apparently, epidemic among young western women. Blood, it said, was renewed every three years. Ruth thought of the cathedrals Colette had told her about, the ones she’d seen when travelling in Europe. More often than not, they were swathed in scaffolding. It was necessary, Colette explained, for ongoing maintenance. As the stones deteriorated, they were replaced with new ones cut to the exact size of the hole. So eventually, Ruth said, there would be nothing left of the original walls? One by one, stone by stone, entire cathedrals would be replaced? Colette had laughed and said she hadn’t thought of it like that, but Ruth had been unsettled by the thought of such trickery, such sleight-of-hand right under the noses of the faithful. She ran across the hot sand to the water, her feet moving so fast they hardly seemed to touch the ground.

  The day she returned home, she stopped in at the gallery and bought a glass vase which was flecked and dappled like the breast of a thrush. She was looking forward to having flowers in the house again. She held it on her lap all the way back.

  Colette could see Nina eyeing the factory yards, the enormous oil reservoirs that stretched to the water’s edge.

  ‘It’s not like this further round,’ she assured her cousin. ‘It’s really very beautiful.’

  Gradually the industrial landscape gave way to gorsy hillside, rocks, grey beaches. At the side of the road a sign read Little Blue Penguins crossing at night.

  ‘Blue penguins?’ said Nina. ‘I thought they were black-and-white.’

  ‘They’re a bluish black, I imagine,’ said Colette. ‘You know how black can sometimes—’

  ‘Maybe they’re depressed penguins,’ said Dominic. He began singing ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’. ‘Do you like country and western, Nina?’

  They drove on through the bays. There was the occasional cluster of shops: arts and crafts, dairies, small cafés. Now and then they passed joggers, teenagers walking large dogs.

  ‘Where are all the people?’ said Nina.

  ‘I think we’ve missed the crowds,’ said Colette. ‘And it’s late in the season. You wouldn’t want to be here in midsummer, it’s overrun with tourists. Not that you’re a tourist,’ she added. She chewed the side of her mouth. ‘Look, someone flying a kite.’

  Nina peered out the window. ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘Over there, in front of that house with the brick fence. Oh—no, it’s gone now.’ The kite had plummeted from view like a bird felled by gunshot. Stupid country, stupid people, thought Colette. Couldn’t get anything right.

  Dominic saw the shop first, and he groaned and pulled into the curb.

  ‘Antiques!’ said Colette, throwing off her safety belt, and Dominic groaned again.

  ‘We have to humour her,’ he told Nina. ‘She’ll sulk for the rest of the day otherwise.’

  ‘This is a bonus,’ Colette was saying, already out of the car. ‘I didn’t know there was an antique shop round here.’

  ‘She has a thing about old stuff. When we used to go on family holidays we’d take twice as long to get there as anyone else. She’d make Mum stop at every junk shop along the way’

  ‘Only at the antique places,’ said Colette. ‘Only at the good ones.’

  She thought of the many shops she had dragged her mother and Dominic through. Shelves bowing with dinner sets and tea sets; glass cabinets holding letter openers, pen knives, hairbrushes with elaborate handles; the smell
of beeswax and silver polish and golden linseed oil: these were the things she associated with picnics and barbecues and days at the beach.

  ‘So you’re a junkie, Colette,’ said Nina.

  Dominic laughed and said, ‘Junkie! A junkie!’ but Colette didn’t hear. She was already inside the shop, scanning, assessing.

  The quality was excellent. A lot of large pieces of furniture, some silver, a few elegant sets of glasses. Not much china, which was good. There was a beautiful octagonal lantern hanging in the window, made of bevelled glass and decorated with sharp brass leaves and flowers. Spanish, said the label. Seven hundred and fifty dollars. She examined an oak coffer, opened a writing desk.

  ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ said the woman, who sported the usual fob chain and lavishly sprayed hair. ‘It’s late Victorian.’

  ‘A pity the inkwell’s gone,’ said Colette and turned away, smiling to herself. It was a game she liked to play in any new shop, a way of establishing her credentials.

  ‘Why do you insist on proving yourself like that?’ said Dominic when they were back in the car. ‘It’s embarrassing. She’s been doing it since she was about ten, Nina.’

  ‘They take one look at me and think they can sell me any old junk,’ said Colette. ‘You have to show them who’s boss.’

  ‘Er, wouldn’t that be the owner of the shop?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Did you see that basket of tassels? Fifty bucks each. For a tassel.’

  ‘They were handmade,’ said Colette. ‘That Spanish lantern was gorgeous.’

  ‘Oh God, here we go,’ said Dominic. ‘You see, Nina, Colette fancies herself as a bit of a connoisseur. She does know her stuff, granted, but unfortunately she doesn’t have the bank account to support her habit.’

  ‘You’d love Mom and Dad’s place,’ said Nina. ‘It’s stuffed to the ceiling with antiques. They buy them up cheap on their trips to India and Turkey.’

  ‘The thing with Colette,’ persisted Dominic, ‘is that she tends to fixate. She sees some hideous old piece of wood, usually way out of her price range and full of borer, and she talks about nothing else for weeks.’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘She obsesses over them as if they’re blokes she fancies. “I saw my Scotch chest again today, my Swedish dresser is hiding in the back showroom now, the hooks on my hall stand are all original—”’

  Nina laughed, flashing her sharp, straightened teeth. Colette was glad she’d never had braces herself. She liked the gap between her front teeth; she decided it gave her face character. Her mother had told her it was a signal that wealth lay ahead.

  ‘Of course, it never worked for your father,’ she said.

  ‘That’s the other thing,’ said Dominic. ‘She talks about them as if she already owns them. “My hall stand, my inlaid tea caddy. Can you lend me a thousand dollars towards my lady’s travelling case, Dominic.” There was this blanket chest—’

  ‘Give it a rest, Dominic.’

  ‘There was this blanket chest she saw when she was about eight. Monstrous thing, painted with wonky birds and grapes and flowers and God knows what else. It was in one of the shops she forced us to stop at when we were going on holiday.’

  ‘Dominic.’

  ‘It was right at the turn-off to head north, one that’s really easy to miss.’

  Colette could remember their mother missing it once. The antique shop hadn’t even been there then. They’d ended up on the wrong side of the island, staring up at the wrong mountain. The shop became something of a landmark when it appeared.

  ‘Every year we’d have to stop and see if the chest was still there,’ said Dominic, ‘and of course it was, for ages, because it was so ugly nobody wanted to buy it. Then one year we went in and it was gone. You should have seen her. She cried for the next hour, until, to shut her up, Mum said something like you never know what’s happened to it, it might still be around. Which was a huge mistake on Mum’s part, because Colette took that to mean that she’d bought it for her, and it was somehow going to materialise under the tree on Christmas morning.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Nina, laughing.

  ‘So when she got the My Little Pony stables, you can imagine the sort of scene we had on our hands. We had to stop at the antique shop on the way back and Colette marched in and asked the owner what had happened to the chest. And he said it hadn’t been sold, it was out the back filled with bits and pieces that needed repairing.’

  ‘So she bought it in the end?’

  ‘Oh no. It wasn’t for sale any more. That’s the tragic part. It hadn’t been sold, but it was unattainable. Colette was vile for months afterwards.’

  They parked the car where the gates began. The beach was jagged here; no more smooth stretches of sand. Rocks may fall, warned a sign. Colette looked up at the cliffs—crumbling, toffee-coloured, dotted with gorse. Along the path were small heaps of rock, shattered and resting at the bottom of slips. Now and then large boulders blocked the way. Nina tiptoed around them as if they might explode.

  ‘We’re quite safe,’ said Colette, glancing at her brother. ‘Arent we, Dominic.’

  ‘Safe as houses,’ he said, prodding a small slip with his toe. More toffee shards came scuttering down. ‘In a few years the whole country will have crumbled away’ He laughed and tweaked the hood of Nina’s jacket.

  Colette wished her brother would stop making an idiot of himself. He was acting like an adolescent, all chummy slapping and energetic displays of how fast he could run, how much he could lift. Colette hated to think what Nina would tell her friends about them when she went home.

  As they rounded a bend they came face to face with a sheep. It gave one loud bleat, then continued nibbling at the windswept grass. Colette scanned the hillside for others, trying to see where it had come from, but the gorse cover was too thick. The sheep turned its attention to a gorse bush, manoeuvring its lips around the thorns, coaxing the flowers off one by one.

  ‘Do they bite?’ said Nina.

  Dominic smacked her on the arm. ‘Don’t be silly!’

  ‘Maybe she’s never seen one before,’ said Colette.

  ‘Of course I’ve seen sheep before,’ said Nina, in a slow, bored way that Colette didn’t like, ‘just never up close.’

  ‘Oh. Well. They don’t bite, no.’

  They continued in silence. A ship glided past, its destination a faint silhouette beyond miles of dark ocean. On days like this Colette found it easy to convince herself that no other land existed, that here was where the world ended.

  ‘It’s a bit cloudy today, I’m afraid,’ she said, wishing she could stop apologising to Nina for her country’s shortcomings. ‘Are you near the beach at home?’

  ‘It’s California,’ said Dominic. ‘It’s one big beach.’

  Colette kicked a stone with her foot. Down on the shore, someone had pushed a row of sticks and driftwood into the sand. They formed a brief fence between Colette and the sea; a childish attempt to keep the water at bay. It would be washed away with the next high tide.

  ‘So,’ said Nina, ‘what’s your dad up to these days?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Dominic.

  ‘He’s still in Australia, of course,’ said Colette, ‘but we hear from him every now and then, don’t we?’

  Dominic didn’t answer.

  ‘You should come and stay some time,’ said Nina. ‘Mom would love to see you.’

  ‘Colette’s not known for successful overseas trips,’ said Dominic.

  ‘Well, we’ve got plenty of spare rooms. It’d be fun. I could show off my exotic cousins.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Colette, ‘I’ve been thinking about doing some more travelling, maybe next month. I want to visit England.’

  ‘Is that the lighthouse?’ said Nina. In the distance was a tiny white column, almost luminous, a bleached bone nestled into rock.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Colette, ‘except that’s the new one. I thought we’d climb up to the old original one.’ All thr
ee pairs of eyes lifted to the cliff above. There was the older lighthouse, murky against the clouds, the ghostly sibling of the one on the beach.

  ‘You and your bloody antiques,’ said Dominic.

  ‘The lighthouse-keepers daughters buried up there.’

  ‘Do not collect shellfish past this point. Do not swim. Do not fish,’ read Nina. ‘This is a sewage outlet?’

  ‘It’s treated,’ said Colette. ‘You can’t tell, apart from the sign.’

  Nina just stared at her.

  As they trekked around the coastline the lighthouses appeared and disappeared, sometimes straight ahead, sometimes obscured by curves of land. The gorse thinned and pasture took over, sheep negotiating the precipitous terrain like mountain goats. In some places the fence posts were almost horizontal.

  ‘Why would you bother fencing that?’ said Nina, but neither Colette nor Dominic knew.

  As they arrived at the lower lighthouse there was a gust of wind from the south, and all three covered their mouths and noses against the stench.

  Colette pointed to the track leading up the side of the hill. ‘It’ll be better once we’re on higher ground.’

  It was very steep, but none of them dawdled. Their feet sent stones and clods of earth tumbling down the track, over the edge of the hill to the beach. Alongside the crash and rumble of the sea Colette could hear Nina taking tiny gasps through her mouth, trying to inhale as little of the foul air as possible. Even Dominic was subdued.

  They were puffing by the time they reached the top. There was a stile to cross, the wood grey with moisture. Dominic jumped over first, then took Nina’s hand and helped her across. In front of them an expanse of green pasture sloped gently downhill, away from the sea, and as they descended the noise of the waves subsided. They could have been in the middle of the country. Sheep grazed quietly, untroubled by the arrival of three humans, and the air smelled clean and cold. Dominic led the way and they crossed the shallow dip of land, none of them saying a word until the path began to wind uphill again and the lighthouse loomed against the sky. Just below it was the grave, a modest plot about the size of a bed, fenced with white pickets.