Blue Shifting (13 page)

Philomena Duval
, I thought as I carried my tray upstairs.

~

In the morning my father was standing by the window in the front room, watching Philomena as she climbed into the roadster. There were times when I caught him staring wistfully, clearly in some secret psychological pain, though if I was aware of his anguish I chose to shut my mind to the fact that others, and especially my father, had their worries also. Only now, having reached the age he was then, can I look back and apprehend the events and incidents that made my father what he was. At the time I hated him.

"The mower's ready," I said.

He turned and stared at me. His silences could be as soul-destroying as his blows.

We mowed the vast lawn at the rear of the hotel until noon, and then he set me to painting the fence we had repaired the day before. I wondered if the task was in punishment for some misdemeanour on my part – the afternoons were usually my own – or merely the result of one of his moods.

I was still painting, hours later, when a shadow fell across the gloss white finish of the picket fence. One second I was alone, and then she was standing beneath the apple tree, watching me. I stood and made a performance of straightening my back. The colour of my face was not due wholly to the sun.

"We could go for a walk when you're finished," she said, one eye closed against the glare.

Her audacity left me breathless.

"I... I've all this to do." I stuttered, indicating the fence. "It'll take... take forever. I'll still be at it come dark."

"I could give you a hand."

"I've only one spray-gun," I said. I glanced, quickly, towards the hotel.

"Don't worry. Your father's drinking beer with Daddy on the front porch."

I muttered something under my breath.

She said, "You two don't get on, do you?"

I looked at her. "What makes you think...?" I began, grudgingly impressed by her insight.

"It's obvious. The way you act when you're together. You never speak to each other."

I shrugged, unable to find a suitable reply. I continued spraying the fence. Philomena leaned against the tree and watched me.

At last she said, "He's a strange man, your father." She paused, as if awaiting my reply. "The way he looks at people... I've noticed him looking at me. Why do you think he looks at me like that?"

"Like what?" I said. I was uneasy.

"Oh... like he wishes I wasn't here."

"I don't know. We don't get many kids here. I think he doesn't like kids."

She nodded, biting her lip. She watched me patiently as I sprayed one picket after another.

The silence stretched, and I felt the need to say something. In desperation, I pointed to a huge, red apple hanging above her head. "Would... would you like an apple?" I asked.

She squinted up at the swollen fruit. In an instant she had shinned up the tree and was sitting on a bough, crunching into the apple.

She smiled down at me, swinging her legs. "Beautiful tree," she said.

"It's special. I... we planted it when I was young, my mother and I."

She thrust out the half-eaten apple. "Like a bite?"

I shook my head, trying to think of something else to say.

"Is this..." I began. "I mean – have you been to Brimscombe before?"

She took a huge bite from the apple and shook her head. "First time."

"Where... I mean-" Rivulets of sweat trickled down my back- "where's your homeplanet? Which colony world?" I was embarrassed that I did not possess her way with words. I wanted to explain to her that I was fascinated with the Expansion, the history of colonisation, but there was no way I could embrace so complex a statement in simple words without making a stammering fool of myself.

She had no chance to reply. Her father appeared around the side of the hotel. "Philomena! Dinner!"

She gave a pretty grimace. "Damn! Look, can you sneak out tonight?"

"What do you mean?"

I mean," she said, as if explaining to a simpleton, "can you leave your room at midnight and meet me out here?"

I must have given a fair imitation of a frightened rabbit. She raised her eyes to the sky.

"I just want to show you where my home star is, okay? I'll tell you about my planet." She leaned from her perch and stared at me with exaggeratedly wide eyes. "
Comprendez vous
?"

My face afire with embarrassment, I nodded, unable to respond with words.

"Good. Midnight. See you then."

She launched herself from the bough and ran back to the hotel.

It was dark by the time I finished painting the fence. I took a tray of food to my room and ate slowly, thinking about Philomena. I set my alarm and woke up five minutes before midnight, then lay and contemplated whether I should remain in bed. But I wanted to hear about where she was from, despite my apprehension and feelings of inferiority.

She was waiting at the end of the garden, beneath the apple tree. She turned at my approach. "So... here you are. I didn't think you would come."

I shuffled, ill at ease with the new emotions personal contact stirred in me. "Oh," I said. "Why's that?"

She hugged herself, one foot wrapped around her standing leg, and smiled at me. "Just because you're you," she said.

"But you don't know me," I countered.

"No, perhaps I don't."

I looked back at the house, suddenly uneasy that my father might overhear our whispered exchange.

"I'll show you where... where I sometimes spend the summer nights."

I led the way through the gate and into the field that backed on to my father's property. In the dead of night, over a period of weeks, I had constructed an intricate maze through the tall grass. At its centre was a flattened clearing, perhaps twenty feet square. I sometimes brought a blanket and slept beneath the stars.

Moonlight silvered the layered grass. A warm wind soughed through the seed-heads swaying around us. Philomena dropped to the ground, cross-legged. I sprawled beside her.

"I come from a city," she said. "I've never been anywhere so absolutely..." she struggled for the word, "so
open
. And there are no people, also. Today as we drove, I saw only... oh, five people. It makes me feel uneasy."

I shrugged. I had lived in the hotel all my life. I told her that I could not imagine what life must be like in a city.

"Oh! But it's so alive! Everywhere, night and day, something is happening!"

I smiled, feeling inadequate. Her words meant nothing to me.

"Don't you have friends out here?" she asked me. "Kids your own age."

I could feel my face burning in the half-light. "You're the first person I've ever met who's the same age as me."

She exclaimed something in French. "You have not even brothers or sisters?"

"No," I said. "I mean, I had a sister. She died when I was two."

She was still shaking her head in cosmopolitan wonder at my isolation. "On Lascaux it is so different," she began.

She patted the grass beside her. We lay on our backs and stared into the night sky. "See there, that constellation...? The second star from the top is Vega. Its only habitable planet is Lascaux. I was born in the city of Apollonaire, the largest on the planet. For all its size, it is the most beautiful in all the Expansion, or at least its citizens think so."

I propped myself on one elbow and listened to her for what seemed like hours. She told me of her city, her friends, her strange life on a world I could only ever dream of visiting. She did not mention her mother or her mother's illness. Perhaps she spoke so much in order to forget.

After a while I think I did not even hear her words. It was enough just to watch her as she spoke rapidly in her lilting, sometimes ill-structured English.

"But listen to me," she finished. "And you've told me nothing of yourself. You are the quiet one! Tomorrow, okay? Tomorrow you will tell me all about yourself."

Then she said she was tired, jumped to her feet and pulled me through the maze. I was surprised by the warmth and softness of her small hand. By the time we reached the house my pulse was racing. On the verandah she reached up on tip-toe and kissed me quickly, once on each cheek, and I think it was then, with that casual intimacy, that my infatuation began.

~

Twenty-five years later I stood in the remains of my bedroom and listened to the phantom whispers of the children we had been. It was all I could do to hold back my tears as visions of Philomena filled my head. I stared around at the decrepit room and the whispers receded into the past.

I climbed carefully down the stairs to the ground floor, then made my way to the rear of the house. I paused in the kitchen, reviewing old and faded memories. The dining room was bright with afternoon sunlight. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped on to the verandah. To one side was the corner where my father had kept his canes, ostensibly for training tomato plants and runner beans.

The lawn was overgrown, the apple tree tall and gnarled through lack of attention. Beyond the garden fence, much of it torn down and rotting where it lay, a field of tall elephant grass undulated in the breeze – as if to reassure me that not everything had changed.

I stepped from the verandah and slowly walked the length of the garden. The maze would not have lasted, I knew, nor the flattened area where we had kept our nightly rendezvous, but nevertheless I felt compelled to step through the curtain of tall grass, move in some half-remembered approximation of the maze I had made all those years ago.

I discovered then that the flattened area was flattened still – not, of course, the same area that I had created, but the result of more recent storm damage. The notion that our trysting place had survived for a quarter of a century appealed to my conceit, and anyway its position in the field
felt
right. I sat down, overcome with emotion.

Every day for a week after our first midnight meeting, we kept our afternoons free for each other. We explored the coastline, the beach and the caves. Every morning, either working for my father or studying via the satellite link-up – while Philomena accompanied her mother and father to the shrine of St Genevieve's – I had thoughts only for the girl and the time when we would be together.

We were friends. At first it was enough for me that we meant this much to each other – after all, I had never had a real, flesh-and-blood friend before. Perhaps it was amazing that it took a week for our friendship to develop into something more, but if so then the fault was wholly mine.

I knew my body wanted something, but it seemed that what it wanted was too great a prize ever to be achieved.

~

That afternoon we sat on the grass of the headland that dipped towards the sea and terminated in a tumble of rocks and grottoes. Far below us was the concrete walkway that serviced St Genevieve's cave. The shrine was busy today. I had counted four tiny figures traversing the walkway.

Philomena lay on her back, her legs crossed at the ankles, hands behind her head. We had progressed to holding hands on our walk to the beach, and I tried to find some excuse now to reach out and take her fingers. I wanted to experience again that stomach-churning sensation of being connected to another human being.

Dreamily, Philomena had recited a few lines of her favourite poem, and then lapsed into silence.

I shook my head. "But it's so bleak," I said. "How can you like that?"

Her reply shocked me. "But life is bleak," she said, "on the whole."

I don't know, now, whether I was shocked that so young a girl could hold such views, or that her words indicated that she did not feel the same elation at being
alive
when in my company as I did in hers.

"Give me the Romantics any day."

She smiled at me, such an adult smile of indulgence on her little girl's face. "We like what is right for us at the time," she said, but deigned not to explain.

I changed the subject. "Let's go to the shrine," I said. "I haven't seen it for ages."

Such a crass suggestion in the circumstances! Yet I was new at the game of relationships, had yet to attune myself to the mysterious wavelength of another person's feelings.

She sat up and gave scrupulous attention to a graze on her knee.

"Philomena?"

She flashed a look at me. "Don't you think I see enough of the place?"

Her censure was enough to earn my instant apology. "I'm sorry. I didn't think..."

Over the past few days I had taken to closely observing her mother, trying to discern some sign of improvement, or otherwise, in her condition. I feared the day she decided that her obeisance had worked the hoped for miracle, or conversely that her condition was deteriorating, and elected to leave the planet, taking her daughter with her. So far, she seemed just as frail and ill as when she had arrived.

Philomena was sucking a graze on her knee. Her eyes regarded me above the process. Her gaze lingered without so much as a blink to break the intensity.

"What?" I said at last, uncomfortable.

She blinked, as if in reply, and kept on staring.

I felt myself redden, and looked away. When I glanced back, her eyes were laughing. Without a word she lodged her chin where her lips had been and hugged her shins. If anything, her stare intensified. She could not keep a smile from her pursed lips. Her timed blinks seemed at once innocent and coquettish.

In desperation, out of my depth, I turned my back to her. Perhaps I knew, or guessed, what was happening, and feared the consequences.

I heard movement behind me. My heartbeat thundered. She put an arm around my neck and hooked her chin over my shoulder. Cheek to cheek, she whispered my name.

Then she sat herself in my lap and kissed me, the intrusion of her tongue between my teeth a shocking but pleasurable sensation.

I held her to me so that my face was hidden from her eyes. I felt sick, and elated, and I wanted the moment never to end.

She drew back and regarded me. "Where?" she asked.

"Not here." I balked at the thought of being seen by the pilgrims. "The dunes?"

"Too sandy."