Drowned Sprat and Other Stories Read online

  Rex hasn’t noticed they’ve gone. He’s still out there going round and round on his little tractor on the lawn. There isn’t a tree or a shrub or a flower on this quarter acre — they wouldn’t stand a chance. With Rex and his mower I’d have to fence them in, like they were wild animals. Last spring I pushed some bulbs into the garden next door, a bach that belongs to some Aucklanders. I was a bit embarrassed when they came up — paper whites, jonquils and Earlicheer. Didn’t think they would come up, really; I’d just loosened the dirt under the ngaios on the border of our sections and shoved them in, hadn’t given them any care at all. I wonder if the Aucklanders know who planted them — their grandchildren picked them all. I should tell Rex that, that it was me, to see if they’ve already mentioned it to him, if the man did during one of their fishing conversations.

  Round and round goes Rex, the name on the side of his mower flashing in the sun — ‘John Deere’ — round and round, his cap on backwards like he’s a teenager, not a bachelor of forty.

  Oy Joy.

  He hasn’t noticed the boots are gone.

  When I was up on the rock I had one of my nerve attacks. Froze rigid and had to sit down on a really knobbly bit, which dug into my backside even though I took my coat off, folded it up and stuck it under me. Got drenched from the spray. The surf creamed and boiled around me on three sides and I must have been there for at least ten minutes, quarter of an hour, before it was thrown up at me.

  It landed at my feet, legs spread, eyes staring. It must’ve been hit on the head trying to swim through the breakers, or maybe it had been wounded at the mouth of the bay where the rollers start. There was such a gash in it, I thought it was dead. I poked it with my big toe. Then it rolled a bit — just its head — rolled over to look at me and I looked into its bulgy eyes. I think I screamed then, but nobody would have heard me because the surf was so loud. Just as well they didn’t hear me — I’d be embarrassed now and there was no reason to scream. That octopus looked at me with such love — there was love in its wet, grey eyes; it looked at me with the love of a child. And then I noticed it had a mouth, a small, round mouth with thin, black lips, full of sea-water. That octopus had been a fighter in its time — its head was covered in old scars, and it only had seven legs. I struggled up with it in my arms, waited for the next wave to suck out and ran back along the beach. Its head was heavy, its long legs dangled, I worried a bit it might wrap itself around me and trip me up. But it didn’t. It must’ve known I was trying to help it.

  Now all I’ve got to do is wait for the easterly to swing around and the surf to go down, then I can put it back in the sea. The river would be another place to take it — sometimes you see octopuses in the river — but I haven’t got anything big enough to transport it. Besides, if any of the people over there saw me they’d think I was cracked. So it’s in the bath. I carted up a couple of buckets of sea-water and tipped them over it. Don’t know what Rex’ll say if he sees it there. It’s still alive — it looks up at me when I go in to check it, looks up at me with its lovely eyes.

  Rex has turned his mower off and he’s climbed up the water tank to check the level. There’s been no rain for ages, but it’s a big tank and I’m careful. Don’t know why he worries.

  ‘Mum!’ He’s calling me. ‘Mum!’

  I put my head out the bathroom window.

  ‘What’re you doing in there?’ he asks. ‘You’ve been in there for ages. You feeling crook?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I’m going to have a drink with Valmai,’ he says. ‘See you later.’ And he’s climbing down the ladder quick-sticks, because I usually whine at him and suggest that a cup of tea with me would be better for his health.

  In the kitchen I open a tin of sardines and feed them to the octopus one by one. While I’m doing it, perching on the lav and leaning over, dropping them in, I remember from one of Rex’s school books that octopuses don’t usually have mouths, they have a kind of beak. This must be a rare breed, maybe a new one none of the scientists know about. It opens its mouth obedient as a baby in a highchair, and swallows the sardines whole, because it doesn’t have any teeth. When it’s finished its mouth keeps moving, as if it’s still hungry or trying to say something, the mouth pursing, pushing air in and out.

  ‘Oy Joy’ it says, but I’m not sure if that’s it; I’m not sure that’s what it’s trying to say, I’m not sure at all.

  Red Lolly

  When I was a girl, my Papa would say to me — he was a New Zealander who met my mother here in France during the War — he would say to me, ‘Stop playing to the crowd! Stop holding the floor!’ he would say. ‘Get back in your box.’ He did not understand that, for me, to turn away from an admiring face is entirely against my nature; he could not comprehend that his idiomatic command to retreat to my box only brought into my mind a horrifying image of myself lying in my shroud, hands clasped.

  So, I have played to audiences real or imagined all of my life — and it has brought me no end of pleasure. I like to imagine what thoughts go through their minds, every detail of their appreciation of me. Right now, for instance, there is a boy, outside the beach kiosk, watching me. He has two sisters flanking him, but they are younger and more interested in the twenty flavours of icecream brought down to Menton from Nice, some of them so disgusting that just to read their names is enough to make one bilious: beer, licorice, mimosa.

  The boy’s mother has seen me now too, and she pauses in the lighting of her cigarette. It is hot today and I can see she is overdressed and bothered, and would like to be like me, stretched out on my foam-rubber pallet, entirely oiled and lying on my back in the sun. Would her breasts be as beautiful as mine, as firm to the touch, as sweetly positioned on the top of her chest? Mine are smooth with silicone, buoyant and brown. Would her stomach be like mine, sculptured stone? Would her limbs be as fleshless?

  They don’t have the technology yet for my neck, for my upper arms, my thighs — though it’s on its way and will be available by the time my admirer requires it. Smoking now, about forty and overdue for some eye-work, she is sitting on a low brick wall on the other side of the narrow road between the beach and the row of kiosks.

  And she will require the work eventually, my admirer, who is drawing in toxic smoke over there, watching me. Every woman in the world will want it, eternal youth — and if they can afford it, most will succumb. The money I’ve spent! From my third husband I inherited a fortune — and most of it is gone.

  When I sit up the beach spins around me — the brown of the basting bodies, the gaudy towels, the bright primaries and whites of the beach umbrellas — a whirl of colour. So lightheaded am I that I must roll first to my hands and knees before gaining my feet. For seven years I have had trouble with this manoeuvre, and every time I attempt it I remember the face of the liposuction operator who damaged the nerve in my right leg. I remember his Oriental face and I imagine him watching me now, his narrow eyes heavy with remorse. What grace have I inhibited? he asks himself. How fortunate it is that her beauty overwhelms her halting step!

  A man has joined the woman now, a Saxon with close-cropped hair in a golden fuzz. He’s big, like a German, like a Swede, like an Australian. Like her, he’s seen a lot of harsh sun and is prematurely aged. Bulging slightly in her Lycra shirt, her bra straps cutting little valleys into her shoulders, his tired-faced wife smiles at him and offers him a drag on her cigarette and it occurs to me then — it makes my performance all the more bittersweet, the pleasure I take in it more acute — that he reminds me of my father.

  Now I am promenading towards them, towards the shower by the path, my thighs slipping noiselessly past each other: they haven’t touched for thirty years. Do they guess that I am fifty-five? I place each foot carefully, one in front of the other in the sand, so as not to jar my tendons, my distended knees. I would like to have some bone shaved from them, and my elbows, to bring the joints more into the line of my limbs.

  For my next operation I will travel to A
lgeria. Surgeons in the south of France are grown reluctant to touch me, because of my little heart problem.

  My feet find the concrete disc set into the sand, my hand finds the tap. I know this tap well, its little idiosyncrasies, because I’m here every day in summer — even through these August crowds. A slight jerk, the metal pipe gurgles and one drop extrudes from the showerhead. I extend my tongue and turn, so that the handsome blond brute can admire my derrière.

  ‘Look!’ It’s one of his children. ‘That lady’s got no bum cheeks!’

  The dear, sweet little family. They know not, but they will be my favourite audience of the day, for no other reason than that they are my father’s countrymen. To hear their English — the thick, slightly stupid-sounding vowels, the muffled, woolly consonants: it is like a nursery rhyme from childhood, a cosy song sung by my late, lamented Papa.

  ‘She’s incredible!’ comes the mother’s voice as I turn back to them slowly, taking another drop on my tongue on the way through.

  ‘Don’t stare at her,’ says the father.

  ‘Why not?’ says the mother. ‘It’s what she wants. Incredible.’

  She said it again. Incroyable.

  I turn once more, another jerk of the tap, another drop to the tongue. I don’t want the water to touch my skin and ruin my carapace of oil. The boy says something — I don’t catch it. It’s earnest, serious, querying, like Jacques Cousteau or whatshisname, David Attenborough. Perhaps he is asking his mother a scientific question about how I came to be like this. The girls listen to her whispered answer too, their mouths full of icecream. Children generally like my hair, which is a pure blonde, tied in a high, smooth bun on top of my head, my blue bandanna a moat to its castle. Wearing it up so soon after a lift shows my stitches, but I decided this morning after close examination in a mirror that the space behind my ears would benefit from some air.

  Anyway, the family won’t be able to see the wounds from where they are, on the other side of the road. And the hairpiece does hide away my burnt, broken ends.

  A final dart of water to slake my tongue before I begin to make my way between the bodies, back to my sponge pallet on the sand, carefully, carefully …

  ‘That was lunch,’ I hear the woman say, and she laughs.

  My thong, my old brown favourite, flops between my legs like a bandage. I don’t enjoy the sensation and look forward to lying down. I always liked to walk slowly anyway, to give people time to appreciate me. When my beauty was more widely appreciated, I was sought after all up the Côte d’Azur, from San Remo to Saint Tropez …

  Now, if I raise my head from my pillow, I can see the family finishing their icecreams and the mother wiping the face of the smallest girl. They are obscured for a moment by crowds and then they come past me, towards the point, which they will not enjoy. It is thick with dog shit, which the Antipodeans seem to dislike even more than the Americans do.

  The little girl has come to stand beside me. She is perhaps four years old. In the high sun her fair hair flares in a nimbus around the dark shape of her head. I would squint up at her, but my face is both chemically paralysed and surgically tight, so I cannot. My poor eyes take the full brunt of the sun. What is she doing? I don’t trust her.

  Head on one side, she puts her still-sticky hand deep into the pocket of her shorts and produces a glob of red sweets, jellies, all glued together. With the utmost concentration, ignoring her sister calling from a distance away, she detaches one moist oval pastille from the bunch and holds it out, briefly, over my stomach. After a moment she reconsiders and bends over me to gently insert the sweet between my lips. I can see her face now, the maternal tenderness in her blue eyes, the way her little mouth is pursed with concentration, the way she devotes herself to the impulse to sustain me. The sweet adheres to my teeth, it clamps my jaws shut. Then a second sweet is held to my mouth between the black-nailed thumb and forefinger, and the tiniest frown — or is it just the desire to frown? — shifts the pale skin of her brow. A moment passes before my little saint understands that I cannot accept another and so eats it herself, very quickly, chewing and swallowing so close to me that I can hear every pulse of liquid mastication.

  ‘Anna!’ The sister is calling again.

  The child jumps up as quickly as a bird taking flight and I turn my head to watch her go in her little red sandals, her hurrying, plump legs still with a baby’s shape to them.

  A drop of water, a tear — I suppose that’s what it is — rolls from the corner of my left eye, over the bridge of my nose and into my right. Through it the little girl blurs and jumps, taking her waiting sister’s hand and hurrying with her down the concrete path towards her mother, between the high fence of the Stade Rondelli and the smooth, sunbaked rocks above the sea.

  In a Language All Lips

  The window is jammed. It won’t open or shut, and the sun struggles to pierce the greasy glass.

  As usual, when I wake she is still asleep. She sleeps through anything.

  A fly rubs its paws on the bridge of her nose. One morning I entered her and she woke up only when I started moving. She is a stupid woman, but I like her red hair, white skin and lilting voice. She says she loves me.

  There were tears last night. There will be tears again this morning when I wake her to ready her for her journey. I will prepare her in ways she will not know until it is too late.

  She rolls over, her hair shifting on the pillow like weeds in the Sargasso Sea. Her violet eyes open and look at me. I bask in the purple light for a moment. I can’t help myself. A small white hand threads itself through my chest hair, she nuzzles her moon face into my breast, and soon I feel the tears slip over my skin like silk. I turn her over, and we dampen the bed another way. Towards the end she smiles at me, fleetingly.

  I smile at you because I love you. I smile at you because I don’t want you to know how heavy my heart is — how I’m dreading this separation even though it’s only for a few days.

  But I will be home. Home in Ireland. And you will follow me there. If only it could happen as quickly and as fearlessly — this flight from living death to something I can scarcely remember. As quickly as conception, that confident leap to existence. That happens all too fast. I amaze myself. Even among this heat and misery, with no money of my own, I’ve held on to my resolve not to tell you. Not until we are at home. We will visit my parents in Armagh, and my angry, always angry sister in Belfast. Perhaps she is still in Belfast. Perhaps she is in another country, her red hair stinging the air in hotter streets. She talked once of going to Australia, where her eldritch voice would captivate, and her anger calcify into white turds of boredom. In my experience angry women are the most bored of anyone when they give up. If it were to happen to me, that calm, I would float in it like seaweed in a pool, different cool lengths of me fingering different depths, and too pliant for even the sea to enjoy manipulating me.

  Your hand on my stomach is so heavy I can hardly breathe. It’s as if you already know I am inhabited and would press it out, a pulpy mass on the sheets.

  Ah, my lovely — you have seen the stupidity of the situation. I saw it flash through those lilac depths, a tiny silver fish. You are onto something.

  You are wanting to take coals to Newcastle, as the English say. This is sillier. Place us in the same fireplace and one of us would refuse to burn. We would never burn together.

  Your father was a fighter. I could’ve talked with him, hey? After the silence, the sizing up. You know what they will say afterwards — only an Arab could’ve done that. The paradox is that they won’t know what I’ve really done. They will know I have killed you, and others besides, but they won’t know why. Your death to me is a tool, for them an instrument they scarcely know the use of. But I will make myself clear, and will not be regarded as a fanatic. Perhaps we will lower them all to a crouch, inches away from falling to their knees.

  You are out of bed, looking for your clothes, complaining once again of how filthy you are. You don’t know what filth
is.

  I know you are looking at me. I know what you are thinking, but I have turned my back. I have never known a man with such resistance in his eyes. If it wasn’t for the warmth of your hands, the beautiful things you say in a language all lips, the shift in your voice when you speak of the future — I wouldn’t believe you love me.

  I close the bathroom door. I don’t know you well enough to piss in front of you.

  I must move quickly to check your bag, make sure everything is in place. We will leave for the airport in fifteen minutes.

  In the bathroom you — what? Surprised there is still no blood? Do you think I haven’t noticed you haven’t bled, not for eight weeks or more?

  My shirt is damp from yesterday’s sweat. My skin is crawling.

  No matter where you are in the world you continue to do some things in the way you always have. I brush my hair in long lopes, from my scalp an orange slide to my waist. As a schoolgirl in front of the kitchen mirror I brushed my hair like this to catch the light. Now I do it to remind me of who I am. It reminds me of more than a dim reflection.

  Once we were on a cliff top. The wind blew my hair into your face. You said my hair was a simoon, hot and laden with dust, a gust of Arabia in the salt air. You caught it and held it against your lips.

  The walls of this room are pitted grey, made of something that used to be shiny. I dig the brush into my scalp and leave it there. I will have a pitted head. And my heart is pitted already, the bomb site of the soul.