Mazarine Page 3

  Kicking the takahe, it was her special brand of iconoclasm that went with cracking up at funerals — a lifetime of scorn and derision for all forms of piety.

  In silence, we watched Greg lurch away, trailing a crooked feather.

  When I tried to write this scene into an episode of the soap, there was objection from the team: even allowing for our low standard of plausibility, it was felt that no one would believe it. A chorus of voices around the table. Kicking a takahe? No one would … It’s like, nearly extinct. You know?

  I earned a bit of money from the television writing but didn’t take much pride in it, and when my short story collection was published I felt I’d achieved something more serious. This was what I tried to tell an interviewer from the Herald magazine who came to the house and diligently recorded me as I droned on. At some point I lost my way, and sat staring at her with an inane smile. Her write-up was fantastically generous; in particular, she’d been charmed by my dog, and for that I owed him.

  The interviewer asked, why the title, Dragonfly? And why did dragonflies feature in some of the stories? They were a motif, I told her, representing the story as surface — that which is vivid, colourful and ephemeral set against what lies beyond: the eternal mystery, the blackness. In one story, a sister foresaw her brother’s death in a dream full of glittering dragonflies. (I was thinking of Frank, struggling at the time with his addictions.)

  While writing the collection, I visited a tattoo shop in Karangahape Road, where I instructed a handsome Maori youth named Ra to draw a dragonfly on my hand. I liked the idea of a tattoo, I wanted to hazard myself.

  When Maya saw it, she said she wanted one exactly like it, and even though I thought I should discourage her I was touched, and gave in pretty quickly. And so my daughter and I ended up with identical tattoos, Ra’s small, delicate dragonfly design, inked in the same place on our hands. I thought of it as a symbol — of my not having done to Maya what my own mother had done to me. Maya might have gone to the other side of the world, but I hadn’t lost her.

  And more important, she hadn’t lost me.

  FOUR

  Nick had never actually moved in to my townhouse, and it had taken a minimal amount of time for him to remove all traces of himself from it. I’d relocated soon after we split, and was renting in a suburb close to the city, a small bungalow in a quiet street that ended at a reserve, a gully full of native bush with a stream running through it. A path led through the gully to the bottom of the hill and the park, with the estuary on one side and the supermarket on the other.

  The house was an eccentric little place, full of light in summer, but not so comfortable when the weather turned cold.

  In the winter the stream swelled with rain and poured in a silver torrent under the small wooden bridge, the planks turning green and slippery with mould, treacherous to walk on. I seldom met another walker in the gully. The tangled vegetation muffled sounds of traffic, and even though the distance between the cul-de-sac and the park below was relatively short, the middle of the reserve felt like a remote bush spot.

  That morning the stream was full, roaring out of its narrow race under the bridge and threatening to spill onto the path. The wild weather stirred the tops of the trees, and it was like walking along the bottom of a pond, all swirling fronds and silvery light.

  The dog and I climbed the concrete steps to the street and stood at the door while I reached for my keys. The dog started to whine, then bark. He had his nose down at the crack under the door and was scrabbling with his paws. He went on sniffing and scraping, then let out a series of barks, bowing down on his front paws, bright eyes on me, tail straight up in the air.

  I found the keys. More barking. Eyes intent, paws firmly planted.

  As soon as I unlocked the door he charged inside, barking. He’d gone to the other end of the house. Now there was silence.

  I walked along the hall, checking rooms as I went. I said his name, quietly, the sound of my own voice making me uneasy. I looked into Maya’s room, where Bernie was sitting in the middle of the floor, wagging his tail.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  He lowered his ears, his tongue lolling, and gave me a goofy smile.

  I walked into the room, checked inside the wardrobe, turned, and the big oaf jumped up, planting his muddy paws on my chest.

  Opening my laptop, I checked email and Facebook, and sent Maya a text and a longer, more insistent Whatsapp message. According to Viber, she had been online two days ago, which possibly only meant her phone had been switched on.

  Perhaps I’d communicated too much, and she was trying to let me know. But that didn’t fit with the easy way we had. Could she have changed? The boyfriend maybe, Joe Libard, a sulkily handsome youth with a guarded, ironic manner. As far as I knew he was an intelligent dropout who’d turned up his nose at university, and worked in Auckland as a barman. In London, he’d got a job as some kind of translator: he spoke fluent French.

  I could see the point of him; he was attractive and definitely bright, although I’d always hoped Maya might get with someone who wasn’t too cool for university.

  The only other notable thing about Joe Libard was that he had two mothers. When he first started going out with Maya, his gay mums, who’d been together for ten years, were going through an acrimonious divorce, and Maya had witnessed a shouting match in which one threw a shoe at the other.

  It was pretty much all I knew, even though Joe had come and gone through the house for a year before they left. He was one of those young people who’s just friendly enough to be polite.

  There was an electrical smell in the air and the trees were thrashing at the end of the garden. Rain was coming down in great sweeps, blown horizontal by the storm, and from the west, over the Waitakere Ranges, came a series of lightning flashes and booms of thunder.

  I worked through my inbox, answering emails. Nothing from Maya. But Nick. In my park …

  I’d had this thought in the past, because of his work, which involved computers: was it possible Nick could get into my laptop or phone remotely, and read my emails or Facebook messaging? Like everyone else these days, I knew my computer could be accessed from the outside, and like most people I assumed Big Brother wouldn’t bother unless I did something wrong. But what if Nick bothered?

  We’d been apart for months, we’d got over our disputes about money, we had no further connection. There was no reason for him to bother. So, what then? Only …

  My phone rang: Natasha, wanting to talk about Frank, who had behaved oddly at a recent family dinner. She was seeking a debrief. I’d been there (despite my estrangement from Inez I was always included; this was part of the rigid insistence that all was normal).

  ‘Hi Frankie,’ she said — my nickname, short for Frances. When we were kids, my brother and I were always Frank and Frankie.

  She said, ‘He seemed triste, somehow.’

  Look at it out there, the whole world in tears. Batten down the hatches, draw near, light the magic lantern. And let’s call a spade a spade, dear sister. Triste isn’t the word. Triste doesn’t cover it. Let’s say: stoned.

  Frank, fallen off the wagon — I knew all the signs. It didn’t happen often, but when it did everything went up a notch, his smile was too bright, his opinions progressed from intense to vehement to wild. Frank was an associate professor at the law school; his specialty — he was known to be brilliant on the subject — was the tort of negligence. At home in his house in Freemans Bay, he was obsessive compulsive, could spend whole days devising methods for the maintenance of household order.

  He once sat me down, beaming intensely, and explained to me his system for marking student exams, which involved multiple minute grade points between, say, an A and an A-plus. I nearly went insane just listening. Before he started taking drugs to control his problem, he spent a whole year making an inventory of the tiles on his office ceiling.

  She said, ‘He was wistful, somehow.’

  That word: ‘somehow�
��. It was such a tell. This was obedient Natasha channelling Inez, giving a pitch-perfect imitation of Inez making out that something patently false was true. Inez would never admit that Frank had issues; instead she blamed everything on his wife, the furious and long-suffering Aurora. And so, in Inez’s book, Frank was never high or obsessive compulsive, he was always ‘triste, somehow’ or ‘melancholy, somehow’ or ‘just needing to get away from that abrasive Aurora, somehow’.

  According to Inez, Aurora had ruined Frank’s life through insensitivity.

  I listened, watching the raindrops merge as they ran down the window.

  ‘He seemed upset by Aurora, somehow.’

  Sudden anger. Must repress. No point in coming out with something savage to Natasha. So Aurora’s cold, non-empathetic, a solipsist. Who do you think Frank was seeking when he married her? Who hard-wired the poor guy?

  And me. There was my first serious boyfriend: old Stuart. He was a creature of smoke and mirrors, on the surface all charm and warmth, and underneath an inventively cruel operator. I escaped him and fled into the arms of straightforward Patrick. Natasha herself went out with an absolute shit who gave her a black eye, before she found someone sane and kind. Escapes, though, can be a matter of luck. It helps if you’re tough, and our brother was never that.

  ‘Poor Frank,’ I said.

  Poor everybody.

  ‘I was just writing something,’ I told her.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I was thinking about Christina Stead. She said a writer has to have a Christ-like sympathy for everyone.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But it doesn’t mean you can’t describe things authentically, that you don’t try to get at the real essence of a character.’

  ‘David Foster Wallace,’ said Natasha, ‘the writer who killed himself. He said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being.”’

  ‘Right. Yes.’

  ‘How’s Maya getting on?’

  ‘Maya is … fine.’

  She hung up and I was glad I hadn’t said anything harsh. I loved my sister, and I understood her habit of denial, or at least of looking away, to be a kind of hypersensitivity. There was a lot she just couldn’t stand to know. So, Natasha lets herself off the truth. Give her a break. It means she lets others off, too; it’s a sort of kindness. Except when it amounts to looking away from injustice.

  Injustice. Honestly, listen to me. I looked at my reflection in the window, silver raindrops streaming down my face. Would I go quietly, bitterly mad here alone, with only the dog to talk to?

  Thoughts of Nick. Sudden memory: once, when I was sixteen and going through a plump and awkward phase, I fell deeply in love with a boy. We got friendly and I became aware, to my exquisite misery, that he was very taken with another girl in our class. She had just dyed her hair blonde, and kept hanging about, looking especially radiant.

  I made the mistake of bursting into tears and confessing my despair to Inez, who, after listening with beady eyes, swelled in her tiny boots, clenched her fists and let rip with a strident harangue. ‘This sort of jealousy, Frances,’ she pompously intoned, ‘it’s something bad in you. It’s something bad in your self.’

  Old Inez. She didn’t leave it at withholding kindness, but must hold forth, exert power over her plump and sobbing daughter, inform her that her very self was bad.

  We were in the old Holden at some point during the exchange. I remember jumping out of the car at the lights, her tirade ringing in my ears. I was at the very peak of emotional pain. Pain on pain: there was no empathy, no comfort (and no boyfriend), only the cold black universe and the little tormentor shouting after me, ‘You are bad in your self.’

  How do we limp away from such moments (feathers trailing) and retain our self-esteem? I’ll tell you this: I understand, from the inside, the motivation for self-harm. These memories make us who we are, I suppose. Bad.

  Once, when I heard Inez had crashed her car, I rushed around to the house to commiserate. Forgetting myself I went to hug her, and she drew back, blenching, with such a look of distaste that I froze.

  When I’d had surgery for a sensitive complaint, Inez got me on the phone and loudly, heartily, made jokes about my body.

  And not long ago, when I had surgery for a minor heart ailment, Inez went for a record and held it: she never asked about the operation, never referred to it, not once, though she knew I’d been unwell and afraid.

  Perhaps I’d annoyed her by having a lively rapport with the Judge: he was more neutral and fatherly with Natasha. She was low-key and mild, always practising the piano, my demure sister. Inez was proud that Natasha and Frank could sing in tune; I on the other hand was known to hit wrong notes, and to send Frank, who was said to have perfect pitch, into a pantomime of agony during those forced singsongs that accompany the procession of birthday cake and candles. To this day, I can’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’.

  I hear my Maya’s mocking whisper: oh, first world problems.

  Inez was famous for her child-like enthusiasm, her games. I recall her laughingly telling dinner guests, ‘School holidays. I was in the garden all day helping Natasha. Do you know what she wanted us to make? Honestly, we spent hours. We made a quicksand trap, so Frances would fall in and disappear!’

  Still, I was a devoted and loyal daughter, both to the Judge and to Inez. I did more for them than Natasha ever did. I used to listen to Inez’s complaints about her health and about the Judge, when Natasha, the sensitive one, would block her ears and run away. For most of my life I believed Inez: that any unhappiness, any disagreement I had with them, was a result of my being bad in my self. I used to run around after them, look after their house, do their admin when they were overseas. I was so reliable. At least the Silent Treatment let me off all that. It’s certainly less work, being the black sheep.

  Last time I saw the Judge, he told me he was writing his memoirs.

  An email appeared in my inbox. It was from Gene Jacobs:

  Hi Frances, hope you’re well. Sorry about the delay replying, I’m on holiday on a yacht in Croatia, which is v nice. I haven’t heard from Maya lately, but I know she’s doing well at Arlington Books. Aiden Wood’s death will have hit the team hard though — did you ever meet him? Very sad.

  More soon, will absolutely look Maya up as soon as I get back in a fortnight.

  My best

  Gene

  Aiden Wood. I googled his name and found a photo: yes, I vaguely knew of him, Patrick had interviewed one of his authors; we’d met at parties, one in particular I remembered, involving an art exhibition near the Serpentine; afterwards we’d walked in a group through Hyde Park in the summer twilight.

  There were a couple of short biographies online: Aiden Aldous Wood, Creative Director at Arlington Books, a photo of him posing with an author at the James Tait Black Memorial prize. A Twitter account, mostly re-tweets of book publicity and publishing news. I found his Guardian obituary: he had died at the age of forty-two after being struck by a train at West Hampstead station, north London.

  That afternoon, I had an appointment at the dentist.

  In the clinic, soft muzak played, the lights gave off a high-pitched buzz, and the screen on the ceiling displayed pictures of swans. My teeth were so sensitive and I always squirmed so much, the hygienist had taken to giving me gas. The nitrous oxide made me dizzy, and for a short, intense period I thought the swans were radiating mood — one was angry, another sad, and then I was intensely sad, and a tear ran down inside the mask.

  The hygienist picked and scraped. A giant block of time passed. The swans glowed in their blackwater pond. She had raised me up, but her voice was very far away. ‘You look pale. Lie back down for a minute.’

  One of the swans looked at me with its round black eye. The eye said, You need a friend.

  When I moved my head, my vision stalled into frozen images.

  ‘Rinse.’

  The blue water, the swirling plughole. And then a moment later th
e distant voice: ‘Bit drug-sensitive, eh?’ She was talking from the end of a long tunnel, but then she was guiding me towards reception, where I shakily swiped my credit card through the machine.

  I felt better driving, but when I got out on the motorway, even the light striking off the raincloud was too much, and in the supermarket park I misjudged and scraped the car door against a pillar. I clambered out stooped and squinting, feeling like I had a bad hangover, though I hadn’t suffered one of those since Nick and I split up. He was a big drinker, any excuse to open a bottle. A bad influence. Have another one, he’d say. Yolo.

  The sky was a jumble of massive black rainclouds shot through with beams, painfully bright. Squalls of wind blew rubbish off the top of bins; a plastic bag scooted across the forecourt and whirled up into the air.

  A woman’s voice: ‘Hi.’

  She was standing in front of me holding a shopping bag, a brown-haired woman in a trench coat.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m recovering, I’ve been at the dentist.’

  ‘Oh. Are you numb?’

  She was not familiar, and I couldn’t place her. A dog owner perhaps, someone I passed in the park. It was a problem I had, encountering faces I couldn’t identify. Since I’d moved to the area people had started to know me, I exchanged greetings, but I had such a habit of loneliness I didn’t bother trying to identify people. I wasn’t good at recalling faces, but it wasn’t just that, it was a kind of avoidance. Inez did always call me ‘too different’.

  But the woman was gone. A heavy shower came down and people started running, heads bowed. Umbrellas opened in sudden bursts of colour, and now there were shiny black holes in my vision. Could it be a migraine? I locked the car and headed for the park, deciding I would walk up through the gully and pick up the car later.

  Rain soaked my scalp and shoulders as I crossed the boggy cricket ground and took the path into the bush. The stream was rushing, and a jet of water from the overflowing storm-water drain spilled across the path. The bush gave off its rich, spicy reek. The trees lashed, raining down twigs. The concrete steps were streaming with water and I jogged up them on aching legs.