The Grass Sister, page 12
Rose Kincaid stood watching Ann-Clare cutting my hair, standing against a blue hydrangea whose flowers had sprung through a missing plank in the wall. We told Rosemary how we were going to mend the shattered glass windows and fix up the rotting floorboards. One day too, said Ann-Clare, we’d install an old tin fan to spin cooler air into the room on hot January days, onto our arms still sweaty from a day in the paddock.
In all the minutes I sat having my hair cut, not one reference was made to Ann-Clare’s haircut and subsequent crying fit of a few days before.
As Ann-Clare snipped and organised my hair, I too felt friendly towards Rosemary, suggesting that if she ever wished to emigrate later on in her life, she would be more than welcome to come for a holiday to our house, which would maintain a certain dilapidated air because that was what we liked.
In this same friendly spirit, Rosemary showed us two small round rugs of hair on the back of her thighs and said though she used to borrow her father’s razor to shave it off, she now rather liked their hairiness.
The tanneries were boiling down blood and bone and I said I rather enjoyed its smell. Ann-Clare said she smelt the beginning of despair and held her breath.
‘A terrible, sad smell,’ said Ann-Clare.
‘It signifies endless transformations and possibilities,’ I said adding that Ann-Clare was morbid.
‘I think actually that it smells like a braai,’ said Rosemary Kincaid. Anyone else hungry?’ From her pocket she took out a piece of the biltong her parents had left for her to chew. ‘Bil,’ she said, meant buttock in Afrikaans. And she waggled her bottom. Tong was tongue. The meat was cut from the buttock of a beast but looked like a tongue. ‘Want some?’
Rather gingerly my sister took a piece of the meat. I went outside with my finished haircut, to catch sight of it in a window and to feed a horse handfuls of blackberries. The saliva frothed up. As the horse moved his head he dabbed the purple froth on my shoulder. I looked over to see the shade as dark and cold as a sheet of glass, cut deep across the hills.
Rosemary’s hair looked more yellow than orange in the crinkle lines left from plaits.
The land began to curve in the late light. The wind whistled through my legs and skirt. It rustled the fallen gum leaves.
‘Hey,’ I called out to the Abandoned House. ‘Let’s show Rosemary the tumbling trick.’ This trick, taught to us by our father, involved gripping each other’s arms, holding our breaths and somersaulting between each other’s legs. Once in motion we couldn’t stop. Our limbs were locked into a continuous, caterpillaring somersault. Grass seeds clung to our sweat.
Rosemary’s eyes grew glisteny with excitement. She said she would like to have a go at it with Ann-Clare, who was more her size. Their attempts looked like the mating ceremony that a strange African insect might adopt but I tried not to pay the thought much attention.
‘Come on Ann-Clare,’ I said. ‘We should go home.’ I was stung by the look of eagerness in my sister’s face.
‘You don’t have to go with her,’ said Rose. ‘You’re not her slave.’
‘I think I will stay for a while,’ said my sister, not looking at me. Sweating from her exertions.
‘We’ll be back by six,’ said Rosemary, her accent making it sound like sex.
I shrugged my shoulders. Rosemary Kincaid made me think of thin blades, slicing off our nipples in the night. She’d already told us how she’d tried to slice off her own but that they were too tough, like old field mushrooms.
In the middle of Rosemary’s wild-coloured eyes lay her maddestmost point. I found I couldn’t tell Ann-Clare or anyone that the girl’s madness might be contagious or that her proximity would draw out our own grandmother-inherited but hitherto hidden madness. I couldn’t say to Alana that Ann-Clare’s haircut was nothing to do with the tears she had cried for five hours.
It wasn’t the haircut I gave Ann-Clare that made her disappear into the rain crying. The haircut had been an act of free will. She’d been happy as I draped her shoulders with a piece of shower curtain and whirled the old typing chair on which she sat. ‘With stupendous style, the girl barber will give her sister an undercut.’ I spun the sewing scissors near my sister’s ears. I cut off Ann-Clare’s bunches first. They had never hidden her ears, only emphasised them. By the end of a school day, I could always recognise Ann-Clare in the bus line by the way the light shone through them, lighting up the veins. I remember the frizz of broken hairs around the rubber bands Ann-Clare used to keep her bunches in place. I remember the snip of the scissors but not at what exact point in the haircut that I mentioned the incident that prompted Ann-Clare’s tears. Something shifted in the dry rot of the windows so that I expected to look up and see a face framed by orange hair. My sister’s tears were to do with Rosemary Kincaid. I said to my sister that I had seen her with Rosemary down near Jesus Bird dam beyond the graves. I had seen them I said.
‘So,’ said my sister, but even as I held her head to tidy up the hair around her ears, I was aware of the possibility of tears. The back of her neck, so skinny and exposed, went red.
‘And I saw you,’ I said, ‘with the kittens. Near the chimney.’
What could she have been thinking of, I wanted to know, showing Rosemary that? For I had actually seen my sister demonstrate to our visitor how the black kittens mistakenly believed that the piece of skin between the legs of girls was the mother cat’s teats. After Rosemary and my sister came back to the house, they went into the kitchen. I was there ahead of them, drinking the last of the red cordial.
‘You know,’ Alana said to Ann-Clare, ‘we’ve got to find a home for your little charges soon.’
‘Yes,’ said my sister, holding a kitten’s face up to her own. As if she was totally innocent.
I don’t know why I bothered to mention the incident with the kittens as I snipped and trimmed. I don’t know if I knew the word lesbian then. It is possible. I think it’s possible I even said my sister had been a lesbian with Rosemary Kincaid as the tears began to drip from her eyes and she said she couldn’t wait for me to finish tidying up the haircut I’d begun. Even now it is a strange, sliding word in my mouth, with its inappropriate man’s name contained in the first syllable.
‘Come on,’ I said to Ann-Clare, who had taken the scissors from me and was cutting out a piece of the shower curtain. Under the noise of the increasing rain on the roof, my voice bounced off all the empty cake tins in a line near the ceiling. It became important to me that she stay and I tidy up the haircut. But my sister had fastened the makeshift rain hat onto her head as determinedly as any old lady. My sister was on the bolt from me again. I had called her that curious word.
Whereas Alana said Ann-Clare seemed like a little pixie with her short hair, when she saw mine, she shivered and said, oh, it’s a hyena’s cut.
On our morning swims, I try to ask my father why it was Alana didn’t like me, but he can’t answer.
He says, ‘Oh, she loved you but she was always afraid.’ My father pauses, thinking about his words.
‘That’s right, she was afraid of me.’
‘Well. We were sometimes worried one of our girls might go a bit like my poor old mum. We sometimes worried about that, you know. Brrrrr,’ he says, ‘cold this morning, isn’t it?’
‘But she was afraid of me. And whatever I did was always the wrong thing. Anything. Don’t you remember when I took her for that massage? When she was only just diagnosed? Anyway,’ I say, turning the attention back to Betty though still thinking of Alana’s look of fright when we arrived at the masseur’s. ‘What exactly was wrong with Betty? Really? I mean she survived all those years on her own. She can’t have been too bad.’
Alana had glared at me and the man, and in the end he had only massaged her toes. Afterwards her silence nearly withered me away. She leaned towards me but it was only to pull a loose hair from my head and to put it with great care into a street bin we were passing. I tried to take her arm. I was over thirty years old. Pretending not to notice, my mother swerved into the cafe for an icecream, more determined to deter any affection than to live. ‘I’m a soul with a goal,’ she said, asking for a double butterscotch.
‘Well,’ says my father, ‘it’s hard to explain. You ask such nitty-gritty questions. I’ve told you, haven’t I, how Budge came to marry Betty in the first place?’ And though yes, he has, goes on to tell it again. ‘Betty had actually fallen in love with Tin, I think. That’s what I always gathered?’ Trevor Irwin Nevitt, Budge’s father. But for Betty to marry him was out of the question. He was old and unsaucy with a cough that would turn to throat cancer in no time. ‘He had just enough dash left in him I suppose to attract the attention of Betty. Her terriers were on a badger hunt with his in Kent. Oh dear. The cruellest blood sport. I think the dogs actually bite off the noses of the badgers. All rather awful.
‘They came to this kind of compromise. Budge, who was already in Africa by then, would marry Betty but Tin would come to live with them, which he did, because I can remember him. There you go. Isn’t that amazing? To think I can recall him so clearly.’
‘Ann-Clare thought she looked like him.’
‘Well I remember him as an old man with a big pipe and a terrible cough. Budge had a large rondavel for him. You know the family motto?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘That’s terrible! Haven’t. I ever told you the family motto?’
‘No.’
‘Virtus est vitam fugure. Virtue is when vice flees, but Budge used to tell me that after you have worked through all your vice, then try virtue.’
‘If only Ann-Clare—’ I begin.
‘Yes,’ agrees my father. ‘Before Jonathon Michaelhouse.’
‘Alana used to say Mr Michaelhouse was like an old grey pasty. Virtus est vitam,’ I test the family motto out.
‘Fugure,’ finishes my father for me.
My father considers his memory to be invincible, but the histories stay gapped and fragile. The dam water parts and folds before my fingers. It is numbingly cold but I put my face down into it anyway for the final overarm sprint to the side we call the jetty. When I look up Ally is looking down at me, laughing. ‘Your lips are blue, Mummy.’
‘Look, an Onthophagus gazella,’ my father tells Ally, on the walk back to the house, rolling open a dung pat with a piece of gum branch. ‘Now that is quite a rare dung roller for here.’ And absent-mindedly puts one in his pocket. His profile is steep and old but from the front, if he is laughing, he is young again, his face the kind that doesn’t easily age. His legs are very white from the knee down, from the wearing of long socks, then abruptly brown. To our right every ridge is exposed; the deeper the ridge the deeper the blue.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘How many more letters, Able?’ Lavinia is always asking. ‘And how long before you are finished with them. How long before you can move?’
‘Not much longer now, Lavinia,’ I am always replying but even as I try to speed up, the letters slow me down as I read the correspondence which passed between Ann-Clare and the mouse man of the Faraway Group. His letters are huge, detailing as they do every mannerism of the marsupial mice he has been trapping for years in state forests and along dry riverbeds of the Lindley district; the dance of their tiny legs as he watches them mating at ten minutes after midnight.
‘The thing is I don’t want to miss anything, Lavinia. Lavinia?’
‘I wish you’d begun to read them years ago.’
‘Yesterday I found the letters from a writer who used to correspond with Ann-Clare from her sewing machine. I mean she used to use it as her desk. She was a doctor in a tiny country town.’ I too once wrote the doctor a letter, indicating my relationship to Ann-Clare, shouldering in on my sister’s correspondence. I longed to receive the doctor’s witty and erudite treatises on books and writing, her amusing descriptions of patients, but the effect of my letter was an abrupt halt of the doctor’s letters to Ann-Clare. Although I sent several other pleading notes, the doctor never replied to me.
‘It’s clear to me, darling, that you must soon curtail your letter reading.’
‘With every letter I read, I see another sprig of another story. I’ll stop only when I’ve read every letter there is to read. If only you could meet Ann-Clare.’
‘You know,’ Lavinia says, ‘there are plenty of people whose sisters are alive, who haven’t seen them for decades. Who choose never to see them again. Who find it a nuisance to be phoned in the middle of the night with the information that their sister in England has just died.’
‘I know. You told me that story. But Ann-Clare. I don’t know if you can understand. We were inordinately close.’
‘Able?’
‘Iris still keeps in wonderful touch with all her sisters.’
My lover’s arms encircle my middle. She changes tack. The skin on the inside of her forearms skims my navel. ‘I remember this belly. Our first night.’
‘I know. It was showing off. For you.’
My father suggests the mail I am reading become a bonfire. If not before it has been read then immediately afterwards. Without reading one letter, he tells me, he put a match to all his mother’s correspondence with his childhood teddy bear on top of the pyre. He says all the idle paper is encouraging rodents and insects into the lining of the house. As if to underline his point, something rustles in the roof and small fibres arrive in a waterfall into the fruit bowl. I don’t mention how I think he may be right about the bonfire. And has he noticed too how the house has begun to smell like the obscure library where I worked? That to slide open a drawer in my mother’s desk is reminiscent of an old card catalogue, the entries handwritten on thick yellow cardboard you can’t buy today, in handwriting so full of loops and flourishes they were like tiny works of art. When Ann-Clare used to visit me at the Romance Library she would sometimes come in disguise. So that for a moment I wouldn’t recognise the old man with the moustache having trouble finding his way around the catalogue or the old lady weeping with laughter in front of the new detective titles.
Whenever Ann-Clare came to visit at the Romance Library, I’d feel sad when it came time for her to go back to the turkey farm, for some chore or other Mr Michaelhouse had left for her to do, or to put on the roast. He used to write my sister lists he expected her to complete in the single day she’d already set aside for me. The library would seem emptier without her presence at the reading chair to the left of the tall wooden windows. I would hurry little Mr Pocock along, encouraging him to vacate the chair early if Ann-Clare had written, alerting me in advance of the day she was coming. I would send Mr Pocock outside to paddle his feet in the sea or to fetch the newspapers. I would go into the office, close the door and climb on top of an empty bookshelf to see if my sister was anywhere in sight.
When it came time for my sister to leave the library, to catch a bus and then a train back to the turkey farm, she’d linger at the door, as if wanting to tell me something. She would hug me goodbye, tucking her face for a moment into my neck. After she left, I’d close the office door and again use the bookshelf as a kind of stepladder. I would watch her walking along the side of the building. She’d know I was watching. She would turn her head round on her long neck, knowing that I was crouched up near the ceiling. As she rounded the corner into the street where she waited for her bus I could see her body’s final relief at having escaped my gaze. The last flick of her heels before the building cut her from sight. The bookshelf beneath my feet was very beautiful—the fine red grain of cedar or rosewood that may originally have been cut from the forests around Lindley. Then Marguerite Rawlings knocking on the office door; the smell of leaking gas suddenly more prevalent than the smell of the waves I could see breaking, the holiday feeling of having my sister at work fading fast.
Although I once worked in the Romance Library by the Sea, shelving or ordering or lending out books as I tried to be an artist after hours, I’m a rememberer now, if there’s any such word.
Or I’m a preserver, Lavinia tells me, sitting in the chair I’ve made for her back garden using railway sleepers and cedar left behind years ago by cutters in the forest. I insist she must be blindfolded before she’s allowed to sit. I feel in advance my delight. For it is a chair for a giant, so that to sit in it is to find again that feeling of being a small girl, one’s legs unable to reach the ground and an acre of space around your small bottom bones. The dangle of your feet over the edge.
If I attune myself to my sister’s past, if I try to make myself as quiet as Ann-Clare used to be, as still, if I act as though no noisiness has ever propelled me, I am more able to understand my sister.
When I do this, I can hear the way my fingers move along the edges of thin paper, looking for the right words in Alana’s old dictionaries. Remembrancer—isn’t that the word I mean?—related to necromancer in more ways than syllable stresses.
Then I’m often waylaid by a word previously unknown so that I forget my original intention. My eyes fall upon archaisms that are lovely to utter because of their unfamiliarity. For instance the archaic word springal or springad, as in youngster or stripling.
‘Hello, darling springal,’ I will bend to my daughter putting my arms around her shoulders from behind.
As well as writing letters when she was married, my sister was secretly reading Mr Michaelhouse’s old correspondences. Idleness or boredom or her inclination to seek out the secretive things and ways that run an invisible route behind every usual track brought her to the point of reading all her husband’s letters. Or perhaps it was me, letter reader of the future, on one idle afternoon, whose drifting hand touched a letter that had fallen out of the top of a box and began as a joke, to read it aloud to Ann-Clare. Like Ann-Clare, Mr Michaelhouse kept copies of his replies, putting them into the same envelope, before tossing them into boxes.
