Mazarine Page 2

  Thus defended, Inez sailed past me in the street, with perhaps one mordant, sideways look before she was gone. There was an aura of black comedy about her. She loved a laugh, was capable of getting absolutely convulsed with mirth. We used to get on well, Inez and I, we would meet for coffee and I’d make a lot of jokes. She always said you could die laughing. I loved her; people commented on the rapport between us. When I was a child, she used to call me hard as nails.

  One evening she rang me from London, seeking to have a laugh about her brother’s funeral. She hadn’t gone to it herself; she hadn’t fancied coming back from her overseas holiday, she told me. (Instead she arrived back three days later, a fact resentfully noted by her niece.) But I had gone, and she rang to hear details, because she wanted to have a chuckle about how tasteless she felt sure it must have been.

  I’d been affected by the eulogies, by my cousins’ grief and the vulnerability of the frail widow, my aunt, and when I refused to give comic examples of dowdiness and frumpiness, and told her, stiffly, that the funeral had been rather touching, she was irritated, sulky, disappointed.

  I felt the maternal pressure to supply her with what she wanted, and I, spoilsport, resisted. This was something new. In the past I would have obliged with a stream of jokes at the expense of the bereaved, and she would have rocked with laughter until she cried, pressing her tiny fists to her eyes.

  Honestly, her own brother, from whom, I might add, she had not been estranged. They were close in age, Inez and Old Tyson. They’d spent a lot of time together. As a child, I was sometimes sent to stay with Tyson and his daughter, my cousin Aria, at their house at Rimu Lake. And now Tyson was dead, all she wanted, little Inez, was to have a good laugh about it, one that would reinforce the notion that we, unlike her dead brother, were neither tasteless nor frumpy, nor humourless; au contraire, we were aesthetic, sharp, witty.

  I think I hung up on her in the end, or did she slam the phone down on me? It didn’t end well. I told my father, who wearily rebuked me. He said, ‘She has always been here for you.’

  Admittedly, there was an element of pot calling the kettle black in my description of Inez’s diaries, given that I also wrote everything down, and kept my own accounts. It could have been the Sinclair motto: Live by the pen, die by the pen.

  With family, though, an element of pot and kettle is surely inescapable, since the pot was raised by the kettle. Since the pot learned everything at the kettle’s knee. If I were to rattle on in this way (perhaps this is what senility will be like), I could have said Inez and I were like apples and oranges, we were chalk and cheese …

  In my short story collection, I made a cameo appearance myself, although I portrayed myself as a man. Well, I described Frank, who is my nice brother after all. I gave to this male character the dragonfly I have tattooed on my hand. ‘I’, with my distinctive tattoo, appeared in a few stories, a kind of watcher or spy from another world.

  The stories were set in one of my favourite places, a peninsula west of the city where, incidentally, Nick had gone to live, in a house next to the estuary. I went there one evening, to the peninsula, to remonstrate with him about something, money I suppose, and when I got home afterwards the idea came to write about it. It’s a gorgeous piece of territory, stretching out into the silvery water, all surrounded by mangroves and tidal flats. I enjoyed setting my fiction there, ‘mentally’ going to work each day in such a beautiful place.

  I liked Alice Munro’s stories about family, and aspired to her subtlety, but I struggled with some kind of blindness about my own people, and hadn’t based my characters on them. The silent treatment rendered me invisible; that it was denied added to its effect. The Judge would hear no alternative pleading, no view that contradicted the official line; his own take on the family tended to be rigid and two-dimensional. My perception, my very experience, was flatly rejected, and the more I tried to describe it, the angrier my family became.

  On my last birthday, my father arrived to drop off a present, a book: The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Before he left he gazed off into the distance with a shifty expression and murmured, ‘Inez sends her love.’

  He left me standing at the gate with the book, the suicide diaries, in my hand. Inez never called.

  After Maya left for London, I put on my desk a photo of us taken in the Dordogne around nineteen years ago, when she was one and something, one and a quarter perhaps. I was sitting on a plastic chair at the edge of a swimming pool, wearing jeans and a loose jersey. My feet were bare, my brown hair was cut in a fringe. My mouth was in a half-smile and I was holding the edges of a large plastic box. Maya had climbed in and was sitting inside it. She wore shorts and a T-shirt, and sat with one bare knee up, her dimpled elbow resting on it. She was holding a plastic sippy cup and looking straight into the camera.

  I looked so young. Early twenties: Patrick and I had left Auckland, settled in London, and I got pregnant when we were both ridiculously youthful and ill-prepared. Later I took a shot of the old picture with my iPhone, and emailed it to my sister with a clumsy caption: Me and my inner child, with my child in a box.

  Am I right? Was it nineteen years ago? It was late summer, and we were staying in a stone house with a mill wheel that Patrick and I and some friends had rented for a holiday. I remember the old house, its dim, cool rooms stuffed with kitsch French furniture, the gloomy kitchen, big square windows framing the blazing light outside, the view over the lawn and pool and beyond to the rows of the neighbouring vineyard. Hot blue August days, the tiny country roads winding between orchards and grapevines, the village with its faded awnings and stone well and single shop, an old dog sleeping on the pavement by the café.

  Ancient memories: Maya’s tiny face in the dark, a faint glow of dawn at the window, her arms reaching up. She was sensitive, given to skin flare-ups, infant fevers and colds, she seemed always to have a runny nose. Surprising that she grew from that restless, uncomfortable little being into a tranquil sunny-natured girl, generous, intelligent, slow to anger, beautiful.

  As soon as she was born, at five o’clock on a sultry London morning, Maya made it clear: there would be no slacking. Every time I tried to put the hot bundle down in her plastic bassinet, she screamed herself purple.

  A plumply glamorous nurse came by and lounged against the basin, a faint smile on her lips.

  ‘Any ideas?’ I asked.

  She considered us, me in my sweaty, crumpled hospital gown, the convulsed and shuddering infant.

  ‘If cry, put in bed with you,’ she said and flounced off, her shoes squeaking.

  Later that day, in agony, I rang the bell by the bed. A smocked cleaner drifted in, holding a mop.

  Over the screams I told her, ‘I need pain relief.’

  ‘I look for nurse, give Panadol,’ the cleaner said, but never returned.

  Two hours later, Maya and I were standing on the side of the road outside University College Hospital, while Patrick searched for a cab. We had been judged in good health, and briskly kicked out, twelve hours after a long, gruelling labour.

  Patrick had disappeared. It was a testing moment, since I was already beginning to be ill with the infection that would lay me low in those first stunned weeks. Maya had been shocked from a restless sleep, and was screaming with renewed energy. The gritty summer air was raining down seeds, heat rose from the pavement and nearby a jackhammer thudded.

  ‘Hang on,’ I whispered, as her strong little fingers raked her cheeks, ‘Daddy’s hailing a cab.’

  Daddy. How odd it seemed to attach that word to Patrick!

  She went quiet for a moment. Her eyes, swollen and red-streaked from the birth, scanned my features. She was starting to learn my face, and I, in turn, already had hers so firmly mapped in my mind that for the next year I would judge all faces by hers: older children would look weirdly large, their features inflated, and friends’ babies had an otherness that was uncanny, and faintly shocking.

  For twenty years we were seldom separated, except
for short periods. And then she was gone, flown away to London to follow her boyfriend who’d left Auckland two months before. To me, there seemed only a brief time between her decision to leave and her actual departure, after which I stumbled away from the airport gate blind with tears.

  I should have foreseen it; it was only natural that she would return to London, where she grew up and went to school. Patrick’s parents had helped us pay for her to go to a private school, Latymer Upper, to spare her the savagery of our local comprehensive in NW6, now an academy.

  She left, armed with her arts degree from Auckland University, her British birth certificate and passport — no immigration issues, lucky girl. She told me, in one of her droll emails, that every time she let slip among expatriate New Zealanders that she had a UK passport, she ended up with another marriage proposal.

  First, she moved into her boyfriend’s place in Stockwell and then, in the last communication I’d had, she told me they were moving to a new flat in Queen’s Park. I’d contacted Gene Jacobs, who’d been a friend of Patrick’s, and whom I knew from working in publishing, and he’d helped Maya get a job as an assistant in the publishing company where he worked as an editor.

  Maya and I had talked regularly by phone and online, yet still I had a sense of dizziness after she left, a feeling that a space had opened up next to me and I might overbalance. For twenty years we had moved in a close orbit around each other, held together by the force of love. After she left I woke in the mornings wondering what huge thing had gone wrong in the universe, what catastrophe.

  Maya, gone!

  It made me pause and take stock. Nick was living out west of the city. Inez was showing no willingness for détente, and my occasional complaints about the silent treatment had caused a secondary rift as my father and sister rallied to defend her. Frank was … well, he was Frank, busy with his mad obsessions, not to mince words, my poor brother.

  And so. Family off-side. Nick gone. Maya flown out of orbit and lost in space. Not to be melodramatic, but I was losing my few connections at such a rate, I began to wonder if I would lose my self next. The fragments of first novel I’d started writing, what were they all about? An attempt to go back to where my self was formed, to revisit the past, to understand what I’d lost. How did I ‘lose’ my adoptive mother? What does it mean, to ‘lose’ someone? Did I ever ‘have’ her in the first place? Or was our relationship an illusion all along, made up of my need for a mother and my hope that I was loved?

  As infants, our first task is to learn our mother’s face. Once we learn it we are bonded, and when she leaves us we believe, in our immature panic, that it might be forever. But we carry her image in our minds, and it consoles us.

  Left alone, we try to conjure up her presence. If we have learned that early lesson, her face is an image imprinted on our consciousness, and we go on trying to conjure it, because we yearn for what we’ve lost.

  THREE

  All that reminds me: Maya was born unexpectedly early, and Patrick and I had bought hardly anything for her, certainly not clothes. Just before we left the hospital that morning, Patrick had rushed off and bought the jumpsuit I’d awkwardly pushed her into. Such ineptitude. God, how uncertain we were. I was terrified of getting it wrong; bathing her, changing her, even putting on her clothes made me shake with nerves at first.

  We muddled through and we were happy, Patrick, Maya and I.

  Many years later came the calamity: Patrick’s illness. There were months of treatment, the last happy year when he went back to work at the Guardian and we thought he had recovered, the sudden decline. Maya was fifteen when he died, not long after we came back from a holiday in the same old mill house in the Dordogne where I’d been photographed with Maya all those years before. He’d been well in France; we’d swum in the pool, sunbathed, taken long walks to the village. As soon as he got back to London, he fell ill again.

  Walking out of the hospital on that hot London morning, the first day of Maya’s life, the fever I was starting to suffer had made the air seem to pulse with the same threatening brilliance I saw fifteen years later in the sunlit courtyard of a different hospital, where the neurosurgeon had ushered me to hear the worst: Patrick would not survive the procedure he’d just undergone, surgery for a meningioma that had been pressing on his optic nerve and threatening to make him blind. The surgeon had removed the brain tumour but Patrick had suffered a catastrophic stroke, and would not live for more than twenty-four hours.

  The doctor put his hands on my shoulders.

  I said to him, ‘But we have a daughter.’ I meant, He can’t leave us.

  ‘Well. That’s something,’ he said.

  I talked to Patrick while he lay unconscious. I hoped he could hear my voice and know I was there, even if he couldn’t make out the words.

  After he died, I was laid off from my publishing job. I borrowed money, moved to a cheaper flat. I’d had a couple of short stories accepted in London, and tried to write more while Maya and I lived in the dreary apartment in Kilburn. It wasn’t the worst street, but on weekends youths gathered to drink and fight in the local park, and left condoms and broken bottles in the playground. For a whole winter, I was grief-stricken and depressed: the writing was no good, and I needed money. I threw out a drawerful of dud fiction and spent the year in grim part-time jobs before, in some desperation, borrowing money and enrolling in a university course on writing film and television screenplays.

  I finished the course, but London was bleak without Patrick, and I consulted Maya: would she like to try living in Auckland? She was game, so we packed up and left a whole life behind.

  Not so long ago, after years of living only with Maya and having no permanent partner, just one or two short relationships that went nowhere, I met Nick, and he ended up spending quite a lot of time in my rented townhouse.

  Nick Oppenheimer, from Cape Town. He had a job in IT, something to do with cyber security, advising companies and banks on risk. What was he like? Good question. A gentle manner, a quiet voice, a quality of stillness, and some unusual talents: he knew how to handle a gun and was a black belt in karate. He said this was a result of having grown up in crime-ridden South Africa.

  Maya once told me this: one day, as she passed my room where Nick was in bed after coming home jet-lagged from a trip, she heard him talking on his phone in a language she’d never heard him speak before.

  ‘Afrikaans,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she insisted. Not Afrikaans. Different.

  My girl has a flair for a good anecdote, and she never liked Nick. I didn’t believe her, but still.

  Did I ever really know Nick Oppenheimer? We grew close very quickly and were loyal to each other while we were together, although secretly I still missed Patrick, even after all that time. Nick seemed a good partner, he was mild and tolerant, had no serious bad habits. We were happy, but there was something enigmatic …

  Anyway.

  When Maya and I first landed in Auckland I started working as a freelance journalist, taking on any assignments I could find, interviews, opinion pieces, reviews. And then, thanks to the screenwriting course I’d taken in London, and because I’d published some fiction, I got a job as part of a creative team working on storylines for local television, including an implausible popular soap opera. The soap turned into lucrative work, and the series became successful when it was taken up in the US. After a while, I was the only member of the original writing team who hadn’t moved on or been fired, and I had a degree of control over the scripts.

  In the years I spent thinking up soap plotlines, I had one creative source I never revealed: anecdotes borrowed from the file of Inez Bravo Sinclair. It was the spirit of Inez I sometimes called on when I worked on our madly far-fetched characters. In particular, her outrageous black-comic qualities.

  How to explain?

  Well, there was a day trip Inez and I made with Maya, out to the island bird sanctuary of Tiritiri Matangi. I was on good terms with Inez then, although I alw
ays had to be the one to make the approach. She would never dream of ringing me, but would graciously accept or decline whatever invitations I presented to her.

  By the time we got to the port at Whangaparaoa, the weather had deteriorated, there was a strong gale and all other ferry rides had been cancelled, but a rugged young guy emerged from the office and made the shouted announcement that we would ‘give the crossing to Tiri a go’.

  After the ferry had reared and plunged its way across the Gulf, we landed on the island and walked through the bush to the lighthouse, where we were given a lecture about the protected native wildlife. One of the most exotic and endangered birds, we were told, was a resident of the picnic area: a takahe named Greg.

  Takahe were so rare they were once thought to be extinct, but had now been nurtured into a population numbering a few hundred — the only takahe in the world. We were warned that Greg was rather pushy, owing to his highly protected status, so could we please guard our picnics, as he liked to plunder food.

  I watched Greg strutting about on his big awkward legs while tourists lined up to take his picture. With his giant beak and clumsy gait, he seemed pompous, lordly, vulnerable. He was poignantly an anachronism, an avian prototype, much in need of streamlining.

  He came near the picnic table where Inez, Maya and I were preparing to eat our sandwiches. With narrowed eyes, Inez followed Greg’s progress as he disappeared under the table, heading for our hamper.

  I leaned down to admire his plumage.

  ‘Oi,’ Inez said, and kicked him with her tiny boot.