Limestone Page 8

  The fruit and vegetables that gave us our strong bones. The fruit and vegetables that by some miraculous process of molecular transference contributed to the nucleus that began to beat in our mother’s womb one night after sex on sheets so white they crackled, for they had been boiled in the copper then soaked in water tinted with blue bag, then hung in a fierce sea wind to dry, then folded perfectly, corner to corner, edge to edge. For you never knew, did you, when there might be an accident and strangers might have access to our mother’s cupboards. What if they were to discover disarray? They might recall then that Mrs Lacey was in fact Kath Mulcahy whose family was that rough lot who had the pub out at Annandale.

  I think about that instant of my own conception. Kath is lying on a towel to keep her sheets from stain. There’s a heave, a grunt and that’s that. My mother turns on her side, tugs her nightie round her feet while I get on unattended to the business of gestation, DNA blending, making a billion minute choices, for better or worse. And over the days and weeks that follow, calcium forms its tiny cloud in my foetal bloodstream and then the cloud clots to bud and cartilage and the forms required of spine and thigh, knee joint, hip, skull, thumb. Fed by my father’s wild garden I take shape, a rich brew of mineral salts and crystals, phosphates and carbonates of calcium transforming into the ripe red marrow and shell-like coating of my bones.

  I am made. I am born. I grow up, a child of limestone country. I live in a yellow bungalow behind a wild hedge of olearia threaded with honeysuckle and a wild rose that springs away in high canes of lolly pink with savage thorns.

  At first glance, the hedge seemed impenetrable, but it was possible to find a way through, at ground level, to the smooth space that lay at its dusty heart. Here, midway between home and street, was a cavity where it was possible to watch strangers’ legs walking by only a few inches away, though they could never see us, concealed beneath the olearia’s wrinkled leathery leaf.

  It was forbidden to venture further.

  Once, however, my mother was making soap. She stood red and sweaty by the copper and some roiling mess that smelled like the Sunday roast, and I was to keep out of her way or I’d get burned like the little girl whose photo was in the Woman’s Weekly. Her skin had been boiled away by an electric kettle so that she was pink and ugly, though she was smiling for her picture in the magazine and wore a blue ribbon in her poor sad boiled hair. The world was full of terrors.

  I would have stayed as instructed under the hedge without venturing onto the street had a cat not walked in and persuaded me to follow. A little half-grown tabby kitten that ran just beyond my grasp, out through a hole and away toward the distant corner by the school. The cat paused, waiting for me to catch up, then ran ahead, its tail waving like a beckoning finger. I ran after. I followed the cat for a long way, past the shops and round several corners, until my legs were tired and I was crying because suddenly everywhere seemed strange and I did not know how to get back to the honeysuckle hedge and the steamy wash-house and our hot cross mother and I needed to go wees. It was so urgent that I did go wees. I felt the flush of warm water running down my legs and soaking my knickers, so I took them off and put them behind a tree where no one could see. Then I sat crying on the edge of the gutter while the cat sat itself down a little way off and tipped itself upside down to lick its puckered pink-button bottom.

  Ozzie Moses came by in his truck. He pulled over, old American army surplus brakes groaning.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘You’re Kathleen’s kiddie, aren’t you? You’re a long way from home.’

  He was a big man. A heavy soft dark man, with huge hands and a full-moon face. Mum said when he was young he had played for Old Boys and could have been an All Black except he lacked ambition. He lived a few doors away on our street with his mother who had been widowed in the war and had something wrong with her bones that meant she had to stay in bed, surveying the street from the vantage point of the front bedroom. You could just make her out, an observant wraith behind white net curtains. On warm evenings, when Ozzie got home from his work at the quarry, he carried her out tenderly to sit in a cane chair on the veranda, tucking a picnic rug around her knees and helping her with her dinner, for she could scarcely manage a knife and fork or lift her cup. Her hands were bent sideways as if they had forgotten how to be hands at all. She was all twisted like a plant that had been left to grow too long in the dark. He helped her eat her dinner, then read to her from the Bible because she was a Proddy and very religious. They sat companionably contemplating the apocalypse, the Last Days, pestilence, famine and death, until it was dark and time for him to carry her indoors and put her to bed.

  During the day, neighbours sometimes stopped by to stand on the veranda and chat through the bedroom window that was kept ajar for just that purpose. Our mother never visited. She said Mrs Moses was an old bigot who had got what was coming to her and she was lucky in Ozzie, who was kindness itself, too soft for his own good. He had been married when he was younger to a woman just like his mother who had run him ragged till the day she upped and left with the Bon Brush man. Ozzie had no luck with women at all.

  ‘Are you lost?’ said Ozzie, and when I nodded because words were impossible with my throat wadded full of furball crying, he picked me up in his big hands. ‘Uppsy daisy,’ he said, and he placed me in the front seat of his truck. The cover was ripped and sprouting grubby stuffing. The floor of the cab was covered in a heap of tools and pie wrappers, and the windows were a foggy blear. A posy of plastic flowers hung from the rear-vision mirror and a hula girl with a pink grass skirt swayed on the dusty dash.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ozzie, swinging up into the driver’s seat and giving the door an almighty slam. ‘Let’s get you back where you belong!’ And I was crying because I knew I should get my knickers from behind the tree or Mum would be cross, but Ozzie was already revving up the engine and saying over the deafening roar, ‘Come on now, Clare, no more crying. We’ll have you home in two ticks!’ Hearing my name made me cry even more. Then he put his hand in his overalls pocket and took out a packet of Jaffas. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Hold out your hand.’ So I did and he poured a whole handful of Jaffas into my cupped palms. Then he flung a fistful into his own mouth and shoved the truck into gear.

  The cat, having caused all the trouble in the first place, paid no attention to our leaving. It sat preoccupied with its bottom as the truck pulled out from the kerb, then, grinding from gear to gear, everything rattling and shaking, turned this corner, then that, and I sat up high in Ozzie’s cab, looking out the bleary window right over the fences and into all the houses. And the tears stopped, because you cannot cry when your mouth is sweet and filled with chocolate, more chocolate than you have ever consumed in one go in your entire life. Round another corner, along a street and there were our shops! I recognised our Four Square, and the school opposite, and the corner that was our corner with the flowering cherry tree, and there was my mother running toward us, peering distractedly into the Powells’ garden with its ornamental fishpond and entrancing golden fish, and the Wilsons’ next door with their enticing old air-raid shelter held up by nothing but a few rotting struts.

  She came running toward us with her hair sticking out at any angle, her pinny covered with slimy smears of soap. Ozzie ground down through another selection of gears and the truck pulled to a stop. He got out and took me down from my vantage point on the front seat.

  ‘Here you are, Kathleen,’ he said, handing me over. ‘This might be what you’re looking for.’

  My mother grabbed me and held me so close my face hurt against her collar bone.

  ‘Thank you, Ozzie,’ she said. ‘Oh thank you!’

  ‘No harm done, eh,’ said Ozzie, and he patted her shoulder awkwardly, his big hand like a bear’s paw on my mother’s floral print. Our mother leaned against him and I was squashed between them as he put his arms about her. ‘No harm done, Kathleen,’ he said, the words a warm hum somewhere above my head. ‘No harm …’

  Ou
r mother straightened up. She seemed to remember that there might be people watching. They might see her, Kath Lacey, standing out there in the middle of the road making a spectacle of herself. She had a dread of that: that she or any member of her family should become a spectacle. She pulled away, clutching me close to her bony chest.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d best get back to my soap. It’ll be ruined. Thank you for your assistance, Ozzie. I’m most grateful.’ Then she held her head high and walked off with me up the front path between naked winter flower beds.

  I could see over her shoulder. Ozzie stood at our gate, looking after us. He lifted his hand and waved, and I waved back. He waited till we were safely inside, where my mother stood me on the hall floor and slapped my legs and said I was never, never to go through the hedge again. It was dangerous. I’d had her running all over the place like a madwoman, thinking I’d been abducted like that child in Westport who got into a car with a stranger on her way home from school and was never seen again. And her soap would be ruined. And what had I done with my knickers? Had I gone out without any knickers on? But I was crying too much to explain so she smacked me again and said I was a naughty girl and she would tell my father when he got home though god knew what good that would do. She’d been on and on at him about that hedge, telling him to prune it so it wouldn’t grow out at the base, because there would be an accident one day, for sure, one of us knocked over by a car or drowned in the Powells’ fishpond, but would he listen to her? No. She slammed the door and walked off briskly to rescue what she could of her day’s sweated labour.

  I was left with stinging legs, regarding my face in the hall mirror. It always looked interestingly different when I cried, another face entirely from the one that looked back at me when I wasn’t crying. I stood looking at my red open mouth and the way the water squeezed from my eyes, and after a while my legs stopped hurting, though they carried a bruise the exact shape of my mother’s hand for days after. I ran out of tears and hiccupped to a stop. I left the mirror and looked out through the pink glass panels that bordered the front door, and our yard did its usual magic trick of turning rosy and new. I stood in the hall looking at the beautiful garden and thinking about sitting in Ozzie’s truck and the taste of orange and chocolate: the sweet, sweet rewards of disobedience.

  My father shrugged when he got home. ‘Ah sure and there’s a wide world out there,’ he said, ruffling my hair. ‘But she’s seen enough of it for now. You’ll not be going wandering off and worrying your mammy again, will you now, Clare?’ And I said no. And I never did. I stayed within the prescribed boundaries while the hedge remained as it was, a tangled mess, full of holes. My father never quite got around to mending it.

  He was a careless man. Small and gingery, fast on his feet. He said he’d done boxing when he was younger. Bantam weight. And whenever he said that, I saw our rooster, Snowy, strutting about tiptoe among his retinue of chubby hens in the hen house by the back fence. I saw the same hint of a swagger, the lick of a rakish red comb over pink-rimmed eyes. Our father was quick and impulsive and an artist. He could take a pencil and in a few seconds conjure up Maddie’s face, or our mother seated by the sewing machine. (‘Stop that,’ she said. ‘Stop looking at me!’ But not with real anger. Sometimes there was a gap between the words, which sounded angry, and the look on her face, which was almost pleased.) We leaned against the table and watched the pictures emerge like magic from the tip of his pencil. He drew little things to amuse us: dancing rabbits in hats, naughty puppies, faces on our boiled eggs, a little girl with her arms outstretched who turned miraculously into a whole row of little girls holding hands when he unfolded the paper. He drew proper pictures too, like the one that was framed and hung above the dining table of the farmhouse with the well in front and the girl leading a donkey. He had signed his name in the bottom corner. M. F. Lacey in a faint pencil scribble. We stood watching his hand move over the blank page, drawing forth puppies and rabbits, and tried to be first to guess what the lines might become.

  And all over town we saw his more pragmatic handiwork.

  Shop windows announced THIS WEEK’S SPECIAL!!! Or SALE!! or SHOP EARLY FOR CHRISTMAS!!! with little pictures of smiley pumpkins or written as if all the letters were made of swirly ribbon. He didn’t seem to think these things mattered.

  ‘Is that yours?’ we’d say, pointing to a sign advertising Fresh Fish in lines of wavy ocean blue, and he’d shrug and say it was, but without the pride we thought it warranted.

  Once a year he was employed to paint a special snow scene on the window of the Four Square on Arun Street and Maddie and I were allowed to watch. At home, the house bristled with irritable busyness, for the weeks before Christmas were when our mother made some extra money sewing lavender sachets and quilted coat hangers for the Christmas stall at the Farmers. The dining room was piled with little squares of white muslin and lengths of lace and tulle, and the table vibrated to the hum of a Singer sewing machine at full acceleration.

  Brian was confined to his playpen for the duration while Maddie and I were dispatched to watch Dad. ‘You can come and help,’ he said. ‘Tell me if I’ve got the spelling right.’ He had to paint the scene and write HAPPY CHRISTMAS back to front on the inside of the glass so that the people standing outside on the footpath could read the letters the right way round. Maddie was only on Janet and John, but I was older and on Level One, The Story of Chicken Little.

  ‘If you spot any mistakes,’ said Dad, ‘you just knock on the glass and I can fix it before everyone can tell for sure that I’m a complete eejit.’

  He got us each an iceblock and we took up our positions on the bench by the rubbish bin. A gusty nor-wester tugged at its cargo of discarded wrappers, chippie packets and fizz bottles. We licked our iceblocks and watched as our dad entered the little stage that was the Four Square window. He bowed to us, very formally, then laid out his paint pots and brushes, looking fine and serious with a cap on his head and a rag hanging from the pocket of his paint-spattered white overalls. He surveyed the wide blank glass, wiped it clean with the rag, then set to work.

  The wind stirred up miniature tornadoes of dust and dead leaf on the street. Dad drew a wavy line in white paint, a cluster of rectangles, a circle. We swung our bare feet, and licked icy raspberry in the dry heat of a New Zealand summer as our dad drew forth the fantasy of snow and cold, thatched cottages surrounding a pond with skaters, a big sleigh drawn by reindeer flying overhead through a starry sky, and a fat smiling Santa waving. Above it all, smoke that had curled from one of the cottage chimneys turned into big letters: HAPPY CHRISTMAS!!

  Except, of course, he was writing it the other way round. !!SAMTSIRHC YPPAH. He spelled it right, though he forgot halfway and had to turn and mime, ‘What comes next?’ through the glass and we had to tell him, ‘C! It’s C for Christmas!’ And he nodded and said, ‘Ah so it is.’ No one would think him an eejit after all. He had painted the Christmas village for another year. The whole icy fantasy that was back to front for him, the wrong way round entirely.

  ‘I wish we had snow,’ said Maddie as we sat that night eating fish and chips because our mother was too busy to cook a proper tea with the table inches deep in lavender sachets. ‘I wish we lived in a cottage in a village.’

  Dad dunked some battered cod in a pool of tomato sauce. He was morose tonight, the earlier playfulness completely displaced by the bleak mood that came upon him for reasons a child could neither understand nor anticipate. It was just something that happened: unpleasant, unpredictable, but ordinary. Like the cat deciding to scratch when she had previously permitted herself to be petted and carried about tucked in the dolls’ pram. Or the weather switching from sun to shower.

  ‘You’d soon get sick of it,’ he said. ‘Villages and snow. People died in places like that. They had to scrape through the snow to find a few mouldy potatoes and think themselves fortunate. There was a woman tried to sell her own dead baby for bread. She came into a shop with it wrapped up like a p
arcel.’

  ‘Mick!’ said our mother. ‘That’s enough! Why are you telling them all that old stuff? They’ll have nightmares.’ (I did. For months after I dreamed of a woman handing over her baby to the grocer at Four Square. He in his white apron. The baby like a withered banana in its wrapping paper.)

  ‘They should know,’ said Dad. ‘They should know where they come from.’

  ‘Well, they don’t come from there,’ said Mum. ‘They come from here. This country. Not that other place. Now, who’s for more chips?’

  We did come from here, children of the White Stone City. But I could never quite forget the other place because that was where my name had come from. I was Clare, and Dad told me it was not just for the pious nun insisting upon the privilege of poverty, but for a beautiful place he knew well in Ireland. Maddie was named for a saint notable for her wisdom and charm, Brian for a hero, and the Laceys were all lords and ladies with castles and we were never to forget it, even when we lived in a small house and didn’t own a car or have a seal with a silver ball on its nose placed just inside the gate of the Best Garden two years in succession. I carried this other place about with me, like a code, tucked into my name. Maddie was named for a saint described in our Little Book of Saints as modest and sweet, Brian was named for the man who had ruled all Ireland, and me? I was named for a poor, sad desperate place where people had to try to swap their dead babies for bread.