Coming Up Roses, page 2
The words roll over Ella’s tongue, saliva springing to greet prunes, almonds and fennel bulbs. This might be better than eating. When she hears what she most wants, she opens her eyes.
‘Mario?’ she says.
‘Hassan,’ he replies.
‘No, no, you’re Mario.’
‘Would you like to order now? Or do you need some time?’ His face remains impassive, defying recognition. Why won’t he acknowledge her? It was only a few hours ago that she tucked that lock of hair behind his ear.
‘I’m Ella, don’t you see? We had sex. I’m sorry about Heather, but if this is your idea of a joke … you know me!’
Ella hears her voice as though it’s in another room, ringing through the walls. Other diners turn to look.
‘Madam, please, I must ask you to calm down. You have me mistaken. Now, would you like an appetiser to start?’
‘Actually, I’ve changed my mind.’ Ella pushes back her chair and gathers her bag in a clumsy embrace, knocking another customer’s wine across his plate of couscous. She runs out of the restaurant. The door tinkles as Mario runs after her.
‘Madam, madam?’ he calls.
She stops and turns.
‘You forgot your coat.’
She doesn’t move. She watches him as his extended arm drops. He shrugs, turns, then something catches his eye. He lays the threadbare coat over a homeless man in an alcove, his head rising and falling on the belly of an Alsatian.
BIRD SONG
STARLING
‘What do you think of Vasilisa?’ Barbara asks Lauren, the night Lauren touches the tumour in Barbara’s groin.
‘She seems young.’ Lauren thought she wasn’t much older than a child. Her bones were green branches to be pushed past on a path. She had penciled leaf shapes around her eyes. She was dressed in a short skirt, even though it was cold outside. Maybe it seemed warm to her compared with Russia, but her legs were mottled, and she had goosebumps where hairs once grew.
‘She’s twenty, you know.’
‘That’s a big gap.’
Patrick is forty-five. Lauren and Jack had decided he must be gay.
‘He seems quite taken with her. Strokes her as if she’s a cat. She might bite him if he doesn’t watch out. Oh.’ Barbara winces. ‘I think I should go to bed.’
Lauren heaves Barbara out of the armchair, her slight build a 45-degree counterpoint to Barbara’s bulk. She had thought cancer would waste Barbara away. But Barbara’s fat has been replaced by fluid, pooling in her ankles and wrists, bloating her tummy. Her breath is difficult in Lauren’s ear and, because the builder cut costs twenty years ago, skimping on hall widths and bedroom sizes, they cannot walk side by side to Barbara’s bedroom. Lauren must lead.
‘It’s pretty bad,’ Barbara admits, after Lauren has helped her remove her dressing gown and turned down her thin polyester sheets. Lauren is surprised; Barbara is usually stoic, even masochistic in her acceptance of pain. ‘It’s got bigger, too.’ She grabs Lauren’s hand and guides her finger from one end of the tumour to the other. It is the shape and length of a banana.
‘Oh my god,’ Lauren says inappropriately. Barbara believes, and as a boy Jack was hit with the jug cord for saying Jesus Christ. There are devotional messages cross-stitched along the hall, and on the fridge there is a photocopied article by Reverend Brittle, damning to hell the drinkers, the gamblers, the homosexuals and the aborters. Lauren’s had an abortion. ‘Maybe you should go see the doctor again.’
‘Yes, maybe I should.’ She slips out her teeth and her mouth becomes a bullet-hole.
Lauren is too embarrassed to stay any longer. ‘Goodnight,’ she says, switching off the light.
MOREPORK
I watch myself through my bedroom window. Before I left, I switched the light on because I thought I would read. I toss one way, I turn the other. My sheet swaddles me.
Morepork.
My cry ricochets around the valley, and my son comes out onto the deck, searching for me on the branches of the pine, the flame tree, the pohutukawa.
Morepork.
The sky is clear, stars salting its blue-black belly. Through the kitchen window I see my daughter-in-law making a cup of tea. She grimaces at my cups; she’s got airs and graces, frittering her money on fancy things. But she makes Jack happy, and they have a beautiful child. Polly is learning the violin and going to ballet lessons, something I longed to do. I am sorry I will not be here to visit as she grows.
Flying is like diving. I used to dive for scallops as a girl. They were very deep, but I could hold my breath for a long time, kicking my powerful legs to the sea floor. I would gather them up in a basket, then surface. I would eat some raw and take the rest back to the house, where my mother would fry them in butter for my father and younger siblings.
Morepork.
Jack has found me. He pulls Lauren outside too fast; her tea spills. She goes back inside to sponge her skirt and he is torn, the electric light spoiling his night vision.
CARRIER PIGEON
Lauren opens the wedding invitation a month later. Their names are scrawled in gold on cheap purple paper. The handwriting is foreign, echoing a Cyrillic script. Patrick wants to answer his mother’s question before she dies. Yes, he will marry — a girl he has just met, who may or may not be after his passport.
Jack phones Patrick to RSVP. He paces the hall, kicking up Lauren’s nerves. Lauren still doesn’t know where Patrick found her. On the internet? At some club? Jack won’t ask, and he won’t stay in the same room as her because she will shout questions over him. Jack and Patrick are brothers but they only communicate via their mother. Lauren wonders how they will talk once she’s gone.
Jack returns to the kitchen. Polly stares up at him as he maps out Barbara’s new tumour, its cul-de-sacs and terraces. Although the wedding is not until the weekend, Jack wants to fly up the next morning. Lauren can’t; she has an order of bed linen to dispatch, and new clients coming around to view Polly’s showcase room. She will drive up on Friday.
WILD GOOSE
Polly is singing the same song over and over again in the back seat. Lauren puts on a CD to drown her out. The traffic slows and then stops, the state highway doubling as a small-town main street. An Armourguard truck reverses towards Lauren, but she can’t find her horn. She waves and yells as the truck scratches the mint green paint off Jack’s beloved Citroën. Polly looks stricken, and Lauren considers turning back at the thought of Jack’s face. She doesn’t want to go to the wedding anyway.
The driver who climbs out is sexy, yanking at his black rock-star fringe. He scream-swears, Fucking-Jesus, cunt, mother fucker. He kicks his tyre. Then, aggression spent, he approaches Lauren and smiles. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘It was totally my fault. Can I take down your details?’
A white-haired woman approaches him. ‘Excuse me, young man, did I do something wrong?’
‘No, ma’am, I was just venting my frustration at backing into this lady’s car.’
‘My husband’s pride and joy. I’m in deep shit.’
‘Oh, I am glad,’ says the woman. ‘I thought you were swearing at me.’ She smiles at him, and climbs back into her red Honda.
By the time they reach the house, having missed their turn-off in the rain and driven an hour too far north, it is dark. Lauren carries a sleeping Polly to Jack’s childhood bed. Lauren wants to be defused, but she sees that Jack needs comfort more, his shoulders slipping off their bone hanger. He kisses her urgently but she breaks away, wanting to see Barbara before she loses her nerve. She is relieved to find her asleep, not so changed in the dark.
Lauren sits down to a plate of nacho chips soggied by mince and beans. At home, the cooking is her responsibility. She wonders whether she should have encouraged Jack a little more.
Morepork.
‘Can you hear that? I think it lives in a tree near here.’
‘Mmm,’ says Lauren, through a mouthful of grated cheese. She watches Jack open the ranchslider and lean into the night sky.
TERN
Polly and Lauren escape the house early the next morning, taking Hector on his chewed leash. Hector is strong: part Alsatian, part Ridgeback. Couch-ridden for Barbara’s decline, he yanks them down the hill and along the road. Moss tassels overhanging branches, tickling Lauren’s face.
The mist vignettes the sea. On the wharf there is a cluster of elegant terns, intent on a mussel. Hector breaks away from Lauren’s hand, snapping at a tern. Lauren and Polly yell at him to let go. Too late. The tern staggers to the end of the wharf, blood vivid against its white wing. It falls into the water. It drifts into the fog, the other terns orbiting their wounded mate.
‘Can we save it, Mum? Should we dive in and grab it?’ Polly asks. In the city they have nursed blackbirds to health. They have put sparrows with broken wings into shoeboxes.
PEACOCK
Lauren finds herself in the unlikely position of doing Vasilisa’s makeup. The bride appeared on the doorstep at two, a couple of hours before the wedding. She was wearing jeans, her dress hanging over her thin forearm.
‘You can help me?’
Lauren looks for Patrick, but he is at his house down the road. Funny he should finally find his own place when his mother really needs him. Jack had come home at 3am; they had decided upon a stag night after all. She had pulled him in off the deck — where he was singing to the moreporks — at four. His skin was ice.
‘Sure I can,’ says Lauren. ‘But don’t you have a bridesmaid?’
‘No. It is not Russian tradition. But you will be my sister soon.’
‘Well, maybe you should put on your dress so I can see what to do with your hair.’
‘I know what to do with my hair. Come to the other room.’
Lauren looks for Barbara, who likes to grant permission. But she is drowsing fitfully in the other room, a methadone tablet stuck in her throat. Vasilisa takes Lauren’s wrist and pulls her, and Lauren notices that her fingertips are clubbed, like frogs’ feet. She pulls off her T-shirt and jeans. She is wearing underwear with a profusion of lace and flowers, clasps to be undone, straps that cut into her skin. She puts on her satin dress and turns around so Lauren can zip her up. The zip catches on threads.
‘You made this dress?’
‘Yes. Barbara, she give me her machine.’
‘She did?’ Lauren had been going to ask for it; she had already cleared a space in her basement studio. Not that it is a particularly good machine, but it would have been useful for when Lauren needs to hire temporary assistance to finish the next season’s range. She wonders whether Barbara will be donating her wedding ring as well. She turns her own Mexican silver band in the groove it has ground for itself.
The sleeves are puffed, and a few of the pearls Vasilisa has stitched to the bodice fall off. Lauren picks them out of the carpet, along with grit and hair. The home help has not vacuumed this room. She is too busy sponge-bathing Barbara, rolling her from one side of her bed to the other to change the sheets. Lauren is glad it is not her.
‘This must have taken you a while,’ she says.
Vasilisa shrugs. ‘You think is tight enough?’
The seams are straining. ‘Yes,’ says Lauren. Her own wedding dress was a loose 1920s shift in a soft green, and they had the reception at the art gallery.
Vasilisa presents Lauren with her makeup bag, and Lauren is confused by the palate of emerald and lavender and scarlet. She applies light bridal sheens to Vasilisa’s lids, but Vasilisa scowls at the effect and asks her to put on more.
‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’
‘I cannot,’ Vasilisa says, demonstrating how her arms will not move in front of her.
‘Do you love Patrick?’ Lauren asks, painting a Hockney swimming pool over Vasilisa’s left eye.
‘He is good man. Yes, I will love him.’
‘You will love him? You mean you don’t already?’
‘We only just met. But it is not so good to love hard when you marry. My parents, their love was fierce and then it turn inside out and they hate each other. The neighbours, they always complain. My mother throw the television out the window. It is better this way.’
‘Where did you meet?’ Lauren suspects the Russian brides website she found on a Google search. She is waiting for Vasilisa to confirm.
‘At the Ceroc class. Is cheaper than language school, good for chat. He was the only man; the other girls fight over him.’
‘Patrick? Dance?’ Lauren can’t see it: his round belly doesn’t suggest grace.
‘He stand on my toe at first, but I think he improve. You will see. I teach him a Cossack dance for the wedding.’ Vasilisa looks in the mirror. ‘Yes, that is good. Thank you.’
‘Shit!’ Lauren remembers that she is meant to help Barbara get dressed; she is meant to do her makeup too. She doesn’t want to — maybe that’s why she blocked it from her mind. ‘Here,’ she says, putting the lipstick in Vasilisa’s hand. She goes next door to wake Barbara.
Polly is sitting on the end of Barbara’s bed. Barbara is awake, her pupils occupying too much of her irises. Polly is reading her The Velveteen Rabbit. It is Polly’s favourite book. Her finger holds the words in place long enough to say them. She casts sidelong glances at a grandmother who always corrects her. But Barbara just lies there.
‘Shall we get dressed, Barbara?’
Barbara’s pupils roll like ball-bearings. ‘No’, she groans.
‘Come on, you have to. Patrick wants you to be at the wedding.’
Barbara barely shrugs. If. You. Must.
KINGFISHER
Now that my daughter-in-law has put my teeth in, my beak is long and sharp. She pushes my arm into a shiny blue sleeve and they are wings. I am on the power lines, my reclaimed breast a creamy yellow.
I look at the ciphers in the sea. I dive, and the sprat is mine, a silver sliver slithering down my throat. Sprats once wriggled on the ribs of the Thomasina. I didn’t much like to sail; it turned my stomach. Harry did. He threaded silver on his hooks, exchanging sprats for marlin, tuna, hapuka and kahawai. He presented me their hefty bodies, bellies slit, scales still clinging. I filleted them. Too much fish. I froze it, I gave it to the neighbours. Harry packed the tin drum with manuka and smoked everything — my washing, my furniture, my hair.
Had I known that Harry would be dead when I got back from the dairy, I wouldn’t have gone. I could have made up powdered milk. I could have forgone the daily paper. I would have said something. But what? What do you say? I am giving them plenty of warning, and still they don’t know. They hold my hand even though I was never one for affection. They blather on, but I am sliding across currents that criss-cross my valley.
He was dead in his chair. I thought he had wet himself, but it was the tea I had made him before I left, black — three sugars. It spilt when his heart stopped.
CUCKOO
Lauren can’t find Barbara’s prosthetic breast. It is not under the bed, nor is it in the washing basket. She suggests that they stuff a sock down Barbara’s bra, like she did as an eleven-year-old, trying to see her future. Barbara shakes her head, and Lauren is embarrassed by her suggestion. The makeup doesn’t help. Beneath the powder she looks grey.
‘How do you feel?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ says Barbara. She can’t say whether she is comfortable or uncomfortable. She doesn’t know if she wants her feet up or down. She doesn’t know whether she needs a pillow behind her head. Lauren must decide.
‘Come into the living room. They’re waiting for us.’ They are going to do the photos before the ceremony, just in case. Patrick is clomping around, having shown Jack his boot full of vodka. ‘Bride insisted,’ he explained. Lauren wonders what Patrick’s teetotalling aunties and uncles will make of it.
Lauren heaves Barbara up onto her walker and pushes her out the door.
Step.
Step.
Step.
It takes longer than Lauren can stand. She will ring the hospice tomorrow, ask them to deliver a hospital bed. The ancestors beckon from dark photographs that tile the hall. They have saved a seat for Barbara in the shadows. She can sit down if she likes.
‘You’re doing well. Keep on going,’ says Lauren, as if talking to Polly. They break into the light of the living room. A few more steps and Barbara can slump into her chair.
Vasilisa is outside, imprinting her cigarette with scarlet. She sees Barbara and stamps it out beneath her gold stilettos. She expels the last breath of smoke and goes inside, taking Barbara’s hand. ‘Hello Mama,’ she says.
Mama? But Vasilisa barely knows her; even Lauren calls her Barbara.
‘It must be so hard for you,’ says Barbara. That is the most she has said all day.
‘Yes,’ says Vasilisa, the aquamarine of her eyes suddenly intensified. She squeezes Barbara’s fingers.
Jack has two different cameras, his Pentax SLR and his Nikon digital. He fancies himself as a photographer — always photographs Lauren’s range. After each crushing performance appraisal he talks about chucking in his government job, becoming a freelancer. But Lauren prefers at least one regular income.
‘Okay, Paddy, get in behind Barbara. Next to your bride. Now where the hell did you get that shocker of a shirt?’
It is red satin with mother-of-pearl buttons. ‘You like?’ Patrick says.
‘Sure thing, Santa. Hold on to your woman. Closer. That’s it.’
Vasilisa is the leaf curling around the fat tulip bloom of Patrick. Their bridal attire clashes with the homely armchair, covered in a crocheted blanket. Below them, Barbara tries to smile but grimaces instead.
‘Lovely, lovely,’ says Jack. ‘Polly, get into the picture. And you too, Lauren.’
Lauren has never felt part of this family but she stands among them anyway. They fan out behind Barbara. It doesn’t seem like wedding photos. Lauren is reminded of the portraits the Victorians took of their dead.
