Claire's Head (18 page)

I
n less than twenty-four hours Claire was to leave for Amsterdam. At 3:07 a.m., she had woken cleanly and completely, Stefan shifting restlessly beside her. She was travelling back to Europe for the first time in eight years. She and Stefan had been to St. Kitts and San Francisco and London, but London was not (quite) Europe. They had spoken of going to Brazil together and to Dubrovnik, where Stefan's father's family had come from, now that things had settled down in the regions of the former Yugoslavia, but so far had done no more than speak of these trips. Amsterdam wasn't Frankfurt. There was no reason to think that Rachel had gone from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, was there?

There were times when Claire became obsessed with the minutiae of decisions that had led to her parents' death. Which of them had booked the flight to Frankfurt, and why that flight and not another? It wasn't that she wanted to blame either of them (there were other people, companies, who had legally been declared responsible for the accident), only to understand the
sequence of events at every point along the way, as if knowledge of each moment would help to make sense of the calamitous whole. Had her mother or her father picked out that luggage cart? Why that escalator? Why were they riding an upward bound escalator anyway, leaving the arrivals level, rising towards departures? Were there better cafés on the departure level? Were they lost?

At 3:17, Claire slipped from bed and made her way along the hall. In her study, she switched on the light and crouched in front of the bottom shelf where she stored the family photo albums.

Allison had asked for the albums. When they cleared out their parents' house, the three of them had decided that Claire would take possession of them, since she was the most organized and therefore the albums would be safest with her. These days it was possible, even without the negatives (which, in any case, Claire had) to make copies of the photographs and grew easier, as the technology developed, with every passing year, but Allison didn't want copies, she wanted the originals, photographs held in place by little black triangular tabs and labelled in their mother's neat hand. It was true that by the time of the later albums, Sylvia had dispensed with much of the labelling but the earlier albums were all carefully annotated, some photos simply identified with the place and the date, others more suggestively or cryptically marked. The labels, less reproducible than the images, were part of what Allison wanted.

She'd asked to keep the albums – keep them for a while, anyway – at her house. She wanted, she said, to show the albums, the history of their family, to the girls, now that they were old
enough to take some interest in them, rather than trying to rip the photos off the pages. Since their actual grandparents weren't there for them to meet, this was the closest they could come to them. Allison didn't come out and say that Claire should think about passing the albums on (at least for a while) because Claire did not have a child, although, to Claire's way of thinking, this was the implication. Allison seemed to be assuming that Claire and Stefan were not going to have a child, perhaps because it seemed likely that if they had been planning to, they would have done something about it, or tried, by now. Claire had not confided in Allison about the current nature of their dilemma or negotiations. She did not think that Allison could help her. Stefan's desire for a child was normal, it was entirely understandable; the problem, if there was a problem, lay with her.

Soon she would hand the albums over. (Wasn't there a certain logic to the contrary argument, that she should retain the albums precisely because, lacking a child, she had no genetic proof of her parents' presence?) She dipped into them occasionally but not often. There were a few gaps on the pages where Rachel and Allison had already taken photographs that they particularly desired. Mostly, the albums just sat on the bottom shelf, lined up chronologically, dusted every now and again. When she and Allison were teenagers, they had sometimes descended to the basement of the Rockingham Drive bungalow to giggle over the pictures of their childhoods, the winged haircuts, bad sunglasses, mile-wide pants. And to puzzle over the earlier photos, from before they were born, photos that gestured towards stories, stories they partly knew but now would never fully know and whose details they now had to reconstruct for themselves.

Claire pulled out an album marked 2964.

Near death in Samburu-Land
. Sylvia stood stiffly beside a dusty, aging Jeep, one back wheel missing, replaced by a jack. She must have been twenty-seven. After the year teaching in Addis, Hugh and Sylvia (who was already pregnant with Allison) and Rachel set off south through Ethiopia and Kenya towards Tanzania. In Kenya, somewhere in Samburu country, they got a flat tire (hardly their first) on a stretch of desert road. Perhaps a thorn had tumbled across the tarmac. Watched by a gaggle of goat-herding children, Hugh was trying to boost the vehicle when the unoiled jack seized up. Rachel, only a toddler, was buckled into the back seat (these being the days before and a place out of the reach of mandatory child car seats). Kneeling beside her, Hugh was in the midst of extracting a shovel from the storage space behind the seat, when Sylvia, standing outside, kicked the jack so hard that it released, jouncing the Jeep and Hugh and sending the shovel end veering towards his head – two inches closer and it might have broken his neck.

(Wasn't every life full of potential abandonments and near-escapes from accidental death?)

Bogged down by Lake Bog
. Sylvia, pale and squinting beneath a sun hat, was holding hands with Rachel, beside the Jeep, axle deep in mud. Beyond them stretched a bleak lake, Lake Bog-something, whose shore was speckled with white dots. The dots were flamingos. Sylvia had been driving, desperate to get as close as she could to the shore and the birds, when the Jeep went down in what was perhaps a rainy-season riverbed. Frantic, Hugh was convinced it would take days to get them out. He'd heard tales – people stuck for weeks. They were in the middle of a wildlife
preserve on a Kenyan national holiday and no one was about. Perhaps Sylvia offered to go in search of help, since she was the one who'd got them stuck in the first place, but Hugh refused and told her to stay put. He left Sylvia and Rachel in the Jeep and trekked four kilometres out to the park entrance and beyond, until he stumbled upon a farmer ploughing his fields, whom he convinced and paid to drive his tractor back into the park. Four hours later, perched beside the driver on top of the tractor, Hugh returned to find the Jeep, mud-mired, sun-soaked, and empty. He panicked. He banged open the Jeep's doors, screaming their names, until, rising over a lip of land, down near the shore, a tiny figure in a hat appeared, waving, calling out, Hulloo, hulloo, an even tinier figure attached to it – as the flamingos rose up en masse, leaving nothing but a sea of guano, and fled to the far bank.

There were no photographs from either their mother's or their father's childhoods during the Second World War, only ones taken before the war and after. Hugh had spent the war years in London, apart from some months when he was sent to stay with cousins in Surrey, until, in his presence, a dog fight tore down the main street of Oxted – a German fighter plane, a Messerschmidt, twisted on its side, two English pilots in pursuit, wing tips inches, or so it seemed, above his head as he fell to his stomach in the middle of the sidewalk. After that, his parents demanded his return. Sylvia lived through the war at home in Norwich. Her house was not bombed, although the school at the end of her street was. She claimed not to remember the bombs, not to remember the war at all.

After the war, Sylvia's father, Granddad Hill, who had worked for the airforce in civil defense, went back to his job in the city hall library, a job he hated and from which he could not get promoted because the man he worked for was mean and possibly crazy. Frustration made him unhappy. Unhappiness made him angry. Her mother, who suffered from what she called sick headaches, would close the curtains and take to her bed. Eight when the war ended, Sylvia was nine when her parents sent her to stay with her father's aunts, Lucy and Nell, in the countryside near Newmarket. It was her duty to go, they told her. In times of hardship, everyone must put up with things.

The years after the war were as hard as the war in their way. There was little food (endless meals of bread and dripping) and little coal, and what coal there was was lousy and barely stayed alight. They were always cold. There was not much more food at the aunts' (no more sugar, no more meat) and the house, being made of stone, was even colder than Sylvia's parents' house had been. Her first winter in the country, the terrible winter of '47, it did nothing but snow. She and the great-aunts all suffered chilblains but at least the aunts were cheerful about them. Sometime around then, Sylvia's own headaches began. She was allowed to keep Slim, the aunts' wire-haired fox terrier, on her bed when she felt ill, although the company she really craved was that of their parrot, Dottie, who spoke in a Norfolk accent as broad as that of any local farmer. In addition to the dog and parrot, they kept a goat and chickens and harvested apples from their half-wild orchard. The aunts insisted Sylvia keep bird lists. They rewarded her with an apple for each new bird she spotted. They made apple sauce, apple pie, apple bread, apple charlotte,
apple snow, apple wine. Every few months, they sent Sylvia home to her parents for a visit, laden with goat cheese, eggs, a bag of apples. She must have assumed that her life, at least her childhood, would go on like this, in the company of the great-aunts, visiting her parents, that she had been partially, if not wholly, given up by the latter, which was not, perhaps, such a terrible thing. When she was eleven, however, her parents sold their house in Norwich, stole her back, and took her away with them across the ocean to the farthest fringe of Western Canada to begin a new life (another new life), where there were green mountains but where she knew none, or almost none, of the birds.

High Park, Toronto, April, 1960
. At twenty-three, her spring coat open, her dark dress flowing over her knees, Sylvia sits on a picnic table, her toes pressed against the picnic bench, her heels raised, her low pumps slipping away from her feet. Her posture is a little stiff, as if she is about to take flight but is restraining herself. Her expression is quizzical or self-protective, nearly a squint. She is not obviously beautiful, not glamorous, her dark hair puffed and a little mussed. She seems about to raise her hand to shield her eyes as she faces the young man, the medical student, behind the camera.

What did she hope for her future?

She lived in an apartment in Toronto at the corner of College and Dufferin with two other girls. She owned a parrot named Lucy. (Her first parrot, Frieda, she'd bought for herself, over her parents' protests, at thirteen.) Back home in Victoria, she'd proved herself an able birder. She'd even won a New Year's bird
count, the year she turned sixteen. She would lecture anyone on the intelligence of parrots. Now, a year out of university, the first in her family ever to attend and graduate, she worked for a distributor of religious books, not because she was particularly religious or even because this was the only job she could find that had any connection to winged creatures, but because it was the best job she could turn up. It was steady. She needed the money. She wanted to be able to look after herself. She recognized, especially given her combination of job and interests, that others might find her odd. She had fallen in love with another English major, blond and sunny, a fellow birder not nearly as good as she was; she had given herself wholly to the dream of their life together when he up and left her for a brassy redhead who wanted to be an actress.

A year later, the wound of this abandonment was still raw. Four years before, when she'd moved east, an acquaintance in Victoria had given her the phone number of her brother in Toronto. Sylvia had written it dutifully into her address book but had never called. When she stumbled upon the number once again, she had no idea if it was current. The male voice that answered still bore a trace of an English accent, but then he had come over later than she had, at sixteen. He seemed at first subdued but roused himself to gregariousness. He mumbled something about having been away, having taken a semester off. He was returning to medical school in the fall. In person she warmed more to him – he entertained her and was clearly smart – although a certain sombreness never left him. He carried Charles Dodgson's books of mathematical puzzles around in his pockets the way other people carried paperback thrillers. One
afternoon he went out and bought a car, like that, and picked her up at work in it. She sensed things churning beneath his surface, the pressure of unspoken things, but this didn't frighten her exactly. It felt familiar. He was going to be a doctor, a good career. The past was the past, they both said: whatever it was, you put it behind you. If his attentions towards her had been too dramatic, without some tempering of caution, she might have mistrusted him, for all that she was eager for, was desperate for, love.