Remember Me, page 9
Any unusual vehicles in the area? Nope. I served every customer who came through that day, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about any of them. I knew just about everyone, by sight at least.
Anything I wanted to add?
Just that it was raining cats and dogs, I reminded them. Heavy cloud, right down to the foothills. She was setting out into terrible weather, and she knew it, but she said it made it easier to find snails.
They nodded sadly. They knew about the weather. Anything else?
I tried so hard to remember anything that might help, anything at all.
I even told them about Vince Price. Yes, they sighed, they were aware of Mr Price’s theory. He’d called the hotline a number of times. But they felt, on balance, taking everything into consideration, that alien abduction was unlikely.
•
The first notes of despondency began to creep into newspaper headlines: IRA PARATA: ‘I STILL HAVE HOPE. IF ANYONE CAN SURVIVE UP THERE, IT’S MY SISTER.’ And on the television news: Hopes fade for the missing conservationist.
I hear Dave Perry explaining to Raewyn that Leah may have become disorientated in rain and low cloud. The most experienced trampers and hunters can and do get lost, he tells her. She could have slipped and fallen down a bluff or gully, or into a flooded river. In sub-freezing conditions, with high winds, she’d be fighting a losing battle with hypothermia.
‘Will she be suffering at this moment?’ asks Raewyn. ‘If she’s up there hurt, and still alive, is she suffering?’
Dave, like my father, has been a volunteer searcher for years. He’s rescued people in the last stages of hypothermia; he’s recovered the bodies of those who couldn’t be saved. He looks at Raewyn for a long moment before shaking his head.
‘I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘She’d probably just fall asleep.’
Poor Raewyn looks out at the snow-clad peaks, and shudders.
•
One sunrise brings the sight of a heavy fall of snow on the ranges. I huddle in my warm bed, looking out at the murderous beauty and shivering with horror for Leah. Later, Dave Perry rings to say that the official search is being called off.
This is the only time I’ve ever seen my father cry. He looks spent, his unshaven cheeks hollow. He’s fifty years old, give or take. Until this week he could easily have passed for thirty-five, but not anymore. The tragedy has depleted him. He looks crushed, as though physically carrying some great weight. He’s pulled a calf muscle, which is the first injury I can remember him sustaining. He keeps leaning down to massage it. I’m unnerved—okay, I’m also jealous—to see my granite father so close to collapse. But he’s known Leah since she was eleven; he walked beside her family during Manu’s lingering death. Of course he’s devastated. We all are.
‘The snow,’ he groans, staring towards the peaks. ‘She’ll be covered in snow.’
Mum makes him a cup of coffee and tells him to get some rest. She’s due to fly back to England tomorrow.
‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘I must go and see Raewyn.’
‘Raewyn’s got plenty of support! There are about fifty people in her kitchen.’
‘She’s my patient.’
Mum shrugs, grabbing her jacket from its hook. ‘Okay, okay, okay.’ She sounds weary. ‘Do whatever you want.’
She bangs out through the sliding door. Seconds later I see the glow of her cigarette on the porch. It’s like old times, and not in a good way.
•
The next morning I drive Mum down to Palmerston North airport, leaving extra time because of the weather.
‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if you were coming with me?’ she sighs, and I agree. I wish she wasn’t leaving so soon.
‘The last time I made this journey,’ she adds wistfully, as we pass the Fortieth Parallel marker, ‘I was leaving my husband forever. Leaving my children. I was most worried about Eddie; he wasn’t in a good place. He worked so hard to try to get into medicine. To be like Dad, to make Dad proud. That was his dream.’ She shrugs. ‘A pipe dream.’
‘And I was eighteen.’
‘Yes, you were only eighteen, and I’m sorry. I did invite you to come with me.’
Which is true, though she knew darned well I’d refuse. I was a first-year university student—a small-town girl hitting the big city and partying like there was no tomorrow. No way was I giving up all that lovely freedom.
I mutter something passive-aggressive about how it was fine, she had her own life to lead, yada yada yada. I hope she’ll have the tact to drop the subject, because I haven’t really forgiven her at all.
Tact was never her strong point. Two minutes later, she’s chuckling. ‘I laughed out loud when I stepped on that plane. The cabin crew must have thought I was a real old soak. I told them, I’m not drunk—I’m laughing because I won’t have to look at those bloody mountains anymore!’
I’m concentrating on the road, which is slick and treacherous, especially when mud-splattering cattle trucks thunder past in the other direction. My windscreen wipers aren’t up to the job.
‘Sorry, I’m being crass.’ Mum’s suddenly sober again. ‘I make it sound as though I didn’t care. Of course I cared. You were too young; what kind of a mother was I? And I still love Felix, whatever the hell that means … but he’s so relentlessly bloody perfect, isn’t he? And relentlessly miserable—that’s what brought me down in the end. I tried to fit in. I got that job at the library.’
‘You did.’
‘I mean … there wasn’t even a hairdresser in Tawanui when we first arrived, d’you remember? No traffic lights! I didn’t know a single thing about pickling gherkins, or bottling peaches, or having baking days. Felix lives for all this’—she gestures out of the window—‘this nothingness, this wilderness. But it terrifies me. We’ve sod all in common. He had no interest in me, emotionally or intellectually or …’ She turns up the heating, rubbing a hole in the condensation on her window. ‘I wasn’t asking for a grand passion, but not even to be mates with your husband?’
I don’t want to hear about my parents’ love life. I turn on the radio, but that doesn’t stop her.
‘I was depressed here,’ she says. ‘I ended up on little yellow pills. Did you know?’
‘I didn’t. That’s awful.’
‘Felix couldn’t help me. He couldn’t even help himself.’
Our route to Palmerston runs through the Manawatu Gorge. A wall of rock and scrub edges the narrow road to one side; on the other is a blood-freezing drop down to the river. Its headwaters are in the Ruahine Range. I slow to a crawl, steering around piles of boulders and mud brought down by the storm.
‘Awful to think of Leah,’ says Mum. ‘Still up there. What if they never find her? What if they never know what happened, or where she is?’
The Manawatu surges through the gash in the landscape, swollen by rain and snowmelt. Murderous, muddied currents.
Mum covers her eyes with her hand.
‘Imagine never knowing,’ she says.
TWELVE
March 2019
The new normal. I surprised myself. I took one day at a time, got on with my work and let the weeks drift past.
I finished and delivered an existing project, a first reader, and was paid for it. Meanwhile I’d begun work on a storyboard for Admiral Flufflebum and the Christmas Kitten: a rough layout, thumbnail sketches of various sizes with random ideas scribbled among them. The largest were double-page scenes, but miniature images were dotted through the text: a kitten’s tail and ears appearing from behind a giant exclamation mark, the Admiral leaping from one word to another. My sketchbook was already full.
‘How are you feeling?’ asked Sarah, when I phoned her on her birthday.
‘Very guilty! I promised to take Toby to Legoland next holidays. I bet he hasn’t forgotten.’
‘Legoland will still be here when you get back. I’ve got a wonderful man lined up for you. Soon as you’re home, I’m going to get you both over for dinner. He’s melancholy and creative, just your type.’
‘I don’t think I have a type.’
‘He’s only been divorced once. Not a bad record.’
A thin parcel arrived in the post that morning. It was from Mum: a glossy Yorkshire Dales 2019 calendar, with glorious photographs. I thought it might help Felix’s memory to look at scenes from home, she wrote.
‘How very kind,’ said Dad, and he put it up on the kitchen wall. The image for March was of Fountains Abbey, with blooming daffodils in the foreground.
I set up shop in the kitchen, ironing a pile of Dad’s clothes. He’d done all these things for himself in the past, but nowadays he struggled. I’d forbidden Raewyn to act as his housekeeper any longer.
Seeing me with the ironing board out, Dad decided that today was the day to polish his shoes. This was one of his favourite chores. Perhaps it made him feel he still had some kind of control. He’d lined up a row of brogues and hiking boots on newspaper on the kitchen table and was wielding his age-old shoe-cleaning kit: dubbin and polish, brushes marked ON and OFF. We had Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto on the stereo, the doors and windows open to catch any breeze. We were content.
‘My mother spent half her life ironing,’ he remarked, as I sprayed mist onto one of his shirts. ‘Starched everything. Sheets, pillowcases, underwear! Shirt collars so stiff they hurt when they rubbed against my neck. She’d have starched Helen and me too, if she could. I remember that very strong smell of laundry.’
He had such vivid recollections of his childhood. They seemed to be bursting into life now that his short-term memory was failing.
‘What was Nan Kirkland really like?’ I asked. ‘Mum’s not a fan, I know.’
He was prising off the lid of a tin of brown polish. ‘Thing is, my mother had faith.’
‘I know that.’
‘Yes … we’re not talking about a bit of church on Sundays. Hers was the real thing: unequivocal, unquestioning faith. Imagine that! Her belief in a rigid moral system, imposed by a higher power, was at the core of everything she did, or thought, or said.’ He dipped his brush into the tin before dabbing soft polish over a boot. ‘This was the 1940s and ’50s, remember. She got mixed up in a very conservative church. Even by the standards of the day, that mob were zealots.’
‘Sounds grim.’
He raised his eyebrows as he picked up the other boot.
‘Mother once caught my sister and me sitting in the same bed. It was pocket money day, and I’d bought sweets. We’d made a tent with the blankets and my torch, and were having such a lovely time! A midnight feast.’
‘Cute.’
‘Mother didn’t think so. She shook with rage. Shook! What’s going on? What’s going on? I can see her now!’
Nut-brown polish splattered around the table as he imitated his mother’s fury, wild-eyed, brandishing both fists.
‘She hauled me right off Helen’s bed, threw me on the ground. My arm hurt for days. In retrospect, I’d diagnose a moderate soft tissue injury. If I ever, ever catch you in her bedroom again! If I ever catch you touching one another again!’
I’d put down the iron. ‘Touching?’
He shrugged, calmly resumed polishing. ‘Helen was snuggled up to me. We were great friends. After that, I was always locked in my room at night. Father fixed a bolt on the outside of my door.’
‘He did what?’ My jaw dropped in outrage. ‘He was as bad as her!’
‘In his way. I’ve fewer memories of him. He was conscripted, fighting in Burma when I was born. Nobody knows what happened to him there, and he never said a single word about it, but Mother said he came home a different man. Black moods, nightmares. He wasn’t interested in us. I don’t imagine she was an amiable wife.’
‘PTSD?’
‘They didn’t call it that back then.’
‘Your parents were totally screwed up.’
He seemed to examine the idea, his head on one side. ‘Yes, I agree entirely with that assessment. Mother honestly believed that a six-year-old and an eight-year-old might be harbouring incestuous passions. We grew up with their faith, of course, but I had an ep—an epi … oh, damn!’
He banged his forehead with one fist, while I feverishly hunted for his lost word. Epileptic fit? Epidural?
‘Words, words,’ he grumbled. ‘Tip of my tongue … you know, when the scales fall from your eyes.’
‘Epiphany?’
‘Epiphany.’ He exhaled in a rush. ‘Thank you. I had an epiphany, when I was fifteen or so. Jesus wasn’t watching me! He couldn’t hear my private thoughts! Gosh, that was life-changing. I tried to help Helen to see what I could see, but I failed. If only I could have got through to her, I believe she’d be alive today.’
I was all ears now. Aunt Helen was a mythical creature, her short life over long before I was born. The subject was taboo in our family. We knew only that Dad once had a younger sister, and she died, and that was sad.
‘What happened to Helen?’ I asked.
He picked up another shoe, holding it in both hands.
‘She fell pregnant at the age of seventeen. The boy was from the same church, neither of them knew anything about contraception. I suspect Helen knew nothing about sex either, since it was never mentioned. She had no idea she was pregnant. She went to the doctor with vomiting and … oh dear, my poor little sister. Imagine! An unmarried teenage mother, in that church, in the 1960s. The sky had fallen in! Deep, deep disgrace. The two families got together, the young couple were rushed into marriage. Just kids, the pair of them. And’—he shook his head as he unlaced the shoe—‘there were complications in the pregnancy. Of course, abortion was absolutely out of the question, a mortal sin, even though Helen was risking her life to carry that child to full term. By getting pregnant, she’d become a vessel. Expendable.’ Dad put the shoe down. ‘I was a medical student at the time. The first I knew was a telegram notifying me that Helen had died, and so had her baby son.’
The iron stood upright, hissing steam. The shoes lay half-polished. Mozart played on, unheeded.
‘How could you ever forgive your parents?’ I whispered.
‘Why d’you think I was so determined to emigrate? Why do you think I never went back, not even for their funerals—not even to save my marriage?’
I’d never questioned his keen desire to move all this way. I’d simply assumed he was drawn by the lifestyle, the space, the weather.
A speck of polish had smeared his sleeve. He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, licked it and dabbed at the spot.
‘Mother had a real hang-up about touching people. Any touching at all. I never saw her and Father embrace, let alone kiss. I have no idea how we were conceived. I remember one awful time, when she was about three, Helen fell over and was crying. When I ran to comfort her, Mother slapped my leg. I crept off and got a biscuit from the tin and sneaked it to her.’
My heart ached for those two little children. If Nan Kirkland were still alive, I’d have phoned her up to tell her she was evil.
‘What the hell was wrong with her?’
He was still dabbing at the speck of polish. ‘I have a theory about that, actually. D’you want to hear it? Gosh, the family skeletons really are trooping out of the cupboard! Well, Mother was estranged from her elder brother. Harry.’
‘Harry.’ The name rang a bell. ‘Is he the one who died in the war?’
‘That’s right. Killed in North Africa. My grandfather—his father—used to raise a glass to Harry over Christmas lunch every year. To Harry. But my mother would leave the room. She never, ever spoke his name. She had no photos of him, nothing. When I asked about him she went quite white. She said she hadn’t seen him since she was thirteen, and he was a pervert who would have ended up in jail if he hadn’t got himself killed. She thought that bullet was God’s judgement on him.’
‘Hang on. You mean Nan’s brother’—I paused, blinking, as the implications sank in—‘he maybe did something to … you think that’s why she yanked you out of Helen’s bed?’
‘I mean precisely that. I suspect her parents disbelieved her, or at least tried to hush it up. People didn’t talk about such things in those days.’
It was disturbing, and yet it made sense. This unmentionable, long-dead Uncle Harry might be ground zero to all the dysfunction in our family. Dad knew his memory banks were being wiped clean. He was passing his stories on to me. I was the keeper of secrets now.
‘Maybe your mum was a victim,’ I said. ‘But it’s no excuse for being such a bitch to you and Helen.’
‘People in glass houses.’ Dad had picked up the OFF brush and was scuffing it across the toes of a boot. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t a much better parent.’
For years, I’d complained bitterly about exactly this: that he’d barely been present in my childhood, uninterested, incapable of showing affection. Now I found myself hotly defending him.
‘You never locked me in a room!’
‘Pretty low bar, isn’t it?’
Putting his boots to one side, he began to pack up the shoeshine kit. It took him a while to stow everything away. He seemed suddenly deflated. His energy was gone, his shoulders drooping.
‘One day,’ he said quietly, ‘you’ll be ashamed of me. You’ll know what I really am.’
‘Rubbish.’ I turned away from him to fill my iron with water from the kettle. ‘That’s Nan talking, isn’t it? Nan’s guilt schtick.’
It wasn’t until I turned back that I realised I was talking to an empty room. I heard Dad’s steps in the corridor, his study door shutting. Mozart played on.
THIRTEEN
Todd Tillerson’s office was a converted villa on a side street in Tawanui, with a magnificent wisteria curling over the porch. An aquamarine sign at the door proclaimed that this was Smith and Harley, Legal Services.
The office administrator was one of those well-dressed, grey-haired women who still go jogging in their sixties and make me feel like a squashed elephant. Bet she came first in the school cross-country.
‘Dr Kirkland,’ she cried, as soon as we set foot on the plush carpet. ‘How lovely to see you!’
