All the Voices Cry (14 page)

She patted her pockets and cursed. No sketchbook. Irritated, she walked around the buckets, memorizing for later.

When she got back to the house Hattie quickly drew what she could remember of the dredge buckets. The most difficult
thing was catching their weight in relation to the sand, which at one moment could lie waterlogged and banked up, and at another could blow away. By the time she had finished, the mid-morning clouds had rolled in from the sea and the rain had begun.

While she drank her coffee she looked out the window and considered the childish shades. Once a day she permitted herself to think about them, no more. Even once a day was too much, by some people's standards. The shades were girls, all of them, and one of the shades was Hattie's daughter, running ahead, the first to tumble shrieking and splashing into the waves. The other girls shouted for her to wait, while they scrambled over the dunes behind her. Far behind, two mothers ambled along the beach, towels slung about their necks, linked tennis shoes dangling from their wrists, slowed down with baskets of iced buns and fruit, spare sunhats, seaweed strands and shells. Hattie remembered that the mothers had been discussing varieties of cooking apple.

She poked at the fire. The grate was small and it never gave off a great deal of heat, but the colour always warmed her, as did the bronze velvet curtain that screened off her bedroom. Absently she looked out the window. At the time, she really had been very good friends with the mother of the other two girls. They had congratulated themselves on sharing the same values. Neither of them had any time for husbands or fathers. Painting, baking bread, sprouting mung beans in jars on windowsills, knitting chunky jumpers, and being ready to swoop in like hungry petrels to scoop their children out of difficulty;
this was what was important. In the end, they turned out to have nothing in common at all.

The rain had settled in for the afternoon, slanting along in front of the headland, striating the reddish rock and the green slopes on top with grey. Without seeing them she knew that the houses in the settlement looked like wet boulders lying close to the land.

 

Shelley was barking. A couple, a boy and a girl, students perhaps, were coming down the driveway. They were hurrying, holding a large rust-coloured jumper over their heads for shelter.

Hattie saw them pass the side of the house, heard the squelching of their sandshoes on the gravel. She held still while she waited for the knock at the door and wondered whether she would answer it. She moved into the kitchen and took a quick glance out the window at them. Young and lithe as eels, the couple stood on the step laughing in the wet air that was no discomfort, since they were together. The girl's dark hair stuck to her cheeks in licks and inverted question marks. The straps of a purple bra plainly showed around the edges of her robin's egg blue tank top. She wore a necklace of seaweed. Hattie decided to open the door for the sake of the necklace, if not for the colour of the shirt.

The girl spoke first.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said, “but we were wondering if we could use your phone? We forgot ours. The mini won't start.”

Hattie had owned a mini herself once. She still remembered with pleasure the cresting waves of mechanical sound between the gear changes and the flashing of the speckled tarmac in the road passing by through the holes in the floor.

“Of course. Do come in out of the rain.” She held the door open for them. They wiped their sandy shoes on the mat and came into the galley kitchen, glancing around at the low slanted ceiling, taking in the cracked enamelled sink and the leaking tap. There was sand on the backs of their necks from where they had been lying in the sea grass before it began to rain.

The boy dropped the wet jumper on the floor by the door.

“I'll just leave these here.” The girl had picked up a bunch of sea tulips attached to a mussel shell. She placed them on top of the wet jumper where the sandy heads lolled back like pale chunks of meat.

“This way to the telephone,” said Hattie.

The students followed her up into the sitting room where the long windows on either side of the fireplace let in strips of light and a view of cabbage trees threshing the grey sky. The couple stood with their backs to the fire, rubbing their hands together and casting surreptitious glances around the room and into the studio beyond.

“It was only an eight-hundred-dollar car,” the girl said, “I hope they don't have to tow us back into town. We were chased by a seal,” she said happily.

“That would be Victor the sea lion. He does get territorial,” said Hattie. She showed the boy where the phone was.
He dialled and spoke. His voice sounded impatient as well as apologetic. She could see that he was a good boy, even if he did not take particular care over the jumper that his mother had knitted for him.

“We'll be late for dinner,” he said, turning to look at the girl.

“With his mother,” said the girl, blushing. “Are you an artist? It's so wonderful to be in the house of a real artist. I'm studying art history. I have to do an essay on someone contemporary and maybe I could come back one day and talk to you about your work, and your influences?” The words came hurrying out, ending in a raised squeak.

“I'm usually working at this time of day,” said Hattie. “I don't have any influences. But feel free to look around.”

The girl blushed again. She stepped up into the studio where Hattie saw her taking in the shelf of maquettes, the notebooks recording the heights of the tides, the shells and the sea glass, the bones and the buoys, the driftwood and the comparative logs tracking the heights of the tides and the patterns of the seasons, all in the attempt to make sense of the anomaly that had overtaken the rhythm one summer afternoon.

“I'll make tea,” she said.

She was annoyed to find her hands shaking as she filled the kettle. It bumped awkwardly against the tap as she filled it. The girl came back in. She seemed tall in the galley kitchen.

“I'm sorry if we have disturbed you. Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.

“You can find the cups if you like,” said Hattie. “I like your necklace,” she added, trying to make up for not having any influences. Tied to a piece of twine, the fresh fan of nubbled sea beads lay at the girl's neck like a damp hand. “You did a good job of tying it together. My daughter always used fishing tackle to attach the ones she made me, but they do tend to come apart after they dry up.”

“Thank you,” said the girl, laughing. “Kevin made it for me. We are in love,” she added shyly. “Gosh, I don't know what made me say that. Is that your daughter?” She pointed at a discoloured snapshot of a little girl waving a large piece of seaweed.

Hattie nodded.

“She was one of three,” Hattie began, and she saw the girls smacking the water with the flat of their hands to make it spray up at each other, heard them shrieking. Over the years she had painted these children in so many different ways, descending among the sea tulips as water babies, naked except for fins, or bedecked in brassy oval leaves like weedy sea dragons. She had painted them as adolescent albatrosses that have left the cliffs, never to return to land. She had painted them as the girl guides they were, gifted at tying knots and at making cups of tea, but unable to solve the puzzle of the currents.

The sound of the rain on the tin roof slowed to a series of dull raps. The young man hurried in.

“They'll be coming soon. We should wait by the car,” he said. The girl nodded.

She put down her barely sipped tea.

“She was one of three girls,” Hattie finished. They were not listening.
We are in love,
the girl had said. Why not, for once, leave it at that?

Hattie stood watching them go. At the end of the driveway they stopped and glanced back at the house. She ought to have turned away by now. But she could not take her eyes off the girl, the same age as her granddaughter might have been, and the boy, who might have been her boyfriend, and the jumper, which she might have knitted for him. To that girl, I am nothing but a tissue of influences, she thought. She took off her glasses. The rusty jumper and the eggshell blue tank top stood out against the dusty darkness of the macrocarpa hedge and the strip of grass beside the road. I will paint them, she thought, as a tartan rug for picnics, and lying under it, a sea lion.

Hattie collected the cups and turned the tap onto the dishes in the sink. The afternoon had cleared up nicely. Soon the students would be back in town, the sand rinsed off their feet. Perhaps the girl would say,
we were chased by a seal
, and the boy would correct her,
it was a sea lion,
and then mother would say,
when I was young a rogue current pulled three girls out to sea there and they all drowned; it's a pity you were late, the casserole has all dried out;
and the boy would reply,
taste's fine to me, mum.
Then the young ones would look at each other, already in a hurry to get back to their flat, to the sagging line of washing, to the bed propped up on beer crates.

Hattie was in the middle of lacing her boots when an earthquake shook the windowpanes. Annoyed, she moved to
stand in the doorway while she listened to the sea glass and the bones rattle on the shelves.
Go for higher ground,
the civil defence page in the back of the phone book said.
Don't go down to the sea to watch.
Hattie never paid any attention. Tsunami or not she would go down to sketch the dredge buckets before the light faded. Let any old tsunami take her; just let it roll her into the underwater fields. Wasn't the better part of her there already?

O
N SATURDAYS AT FIVE Archie McLean visits the retirement home to take requests at the piano. Each week the seniors try to trip him. “Robins and Roses,” they'll say, naming some old tune that they used to dance to on the wind-up. They can't catch Archie out. Archie knows them all and he sings in that old-fashioned radio way, leaning back on the piano stool, nodding to the ladies. At the end, he opens the piano lid right up and plays an extra fast bumblebee song. I'm usually out in the garden when Archie gets back after the tea and scones, and then he leans over the hedge to tell me about it.

“Well Ruby,” says Archie, “I think we wowed them today.” It always makes me laugh. You would think he was a whole orchestra the way he talks. Archie is a nice young man. Genteel, my mother would have said. We play Scrabble on Wednesday nights. He's been my neighbour for nearly fifteen years now. Back in March, he celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and I made an eggless chocolate cake, because Archie doesn't believe in exploiting the hens. He served me a slice and said, “so when's your birthday, Ruby?”

“Get away with you,” I said, “a lady doesn't admit to her age until she's in for a telegram from the Queen. All I'm saying is I'm not old enough to be your mother. Have some more cake.”

Last week, when he had finished toting up the score for the word
umbilical,
Archie told me that he has to move, because his landlord wants to sell the house. I was very sorry to hear that. Archie has been a great friend to me.

After mother died, three years ago next February, Archie got me started volunteering at the retirement home. He said it was better than hiding in the potting shed. At the time, I said that I wasn't hiding and that I'd think about it. Now I take the seniors out on wee trips in the car. Archie is the piano man and I am the driving jukebox. They tell me where they want to go, and I take them, within four hours and within reason. Often they like to go back to where they were born, or where they've had picnics in the past. One afternoon I drove ninety-year-old Willy Callaghan to Oamaru. We idled outside a renovated villa on Vine Street while Mr. Callaghan wept for the loss of the corrugated iron sheets on the roof and the front room where he had been born. I said that a nice conservatory full of tomatoes was nothing to cry about. Still, I let him have a good old weep, and then we went for an ice cream and came home. It takes me a year to get through all the seniors, so some of the older ones don't come more than once.

When I arrived up at the home last week, Mrs. Webster was waiting for me in the foyer, all wrapped up warm for her
outing. She always wears mohair cardies that her niece from up Ranfurly way knits for her. The light catches in the hairs.

“You're glowing, Mrs. Webster,” I said, and she was pleased. Mohair keeps your chest warm, but it's not cheap, and it gets stringy. Better to mix it with a bit of wool.

“Anyway,” I said, “where are we off to today?” Mrs. Webster wanted to go to the nursery at Blueskin Bay, to buy a miniature rose for her bedroom. She had a coupon from the paper. They do love coupons. So off we went, out through Pine Hill and over the motorway to the nursery. She got a wee apricot rose to match her curtains. I almost got one too, but then I thought it was silly to get over-excited about plants that don't survive the winter.

Mrs. Webster was sitting in the car looking at the rose bush on her lap. Then she looked at me quite shyly.

“Do you think we could take the road along the coast, through Seacliff?” she asked.

“Of course we can, Mrs. Webster,” I said. “My wish is your command.” So away we went, winding along above the sea, past the rabbit holes in the yellow clay banks and the twisted macrocarpa trees along the fence lines.

“Seacliff always makes me sad,” I said, just to make conversation. It's the kind of thing that people say when they drive through Seacliff. The paddocks there fall so steeply towards the sea that it's hard to tell how a sheep might hold on in the wind, let alone a farmer on a bike. And you think you might hear some ghost from the asylum wailing away in the breeze. It was a grand old place, the asylum at Seacliff,
majestic and crenellated. They had proper lunatics in those days.