Magpie Hall (11 page)

And what would you know about pain? spits Henry.

Nothing, my friend, absolutely nothing. I have seen only the instruments of pain and the magnificent result. These men and women walk taller when they have the moko. This I have seen.

Schlau stands and walks to his horse, which is already saddled and ready to move on. He rummages through his bag and pulls out a small sack tied with string.

You call yourself a collector, do you not? says the German. Well, don’t you think these would make a fine addition to your collection?

He passes the cloth bag to Henry, who opens it carefully and extracts the contents. They are manmade artefacts, beautiful examples of craftsmanship — a fine bone fish hook, an adze of jade, with an edge so sharp he cuts his finger. He extracts a long piece of bone with sharp, comb-like teeth embedded in the ends.

Now that, says Schlau, is the tattooing instrument. It is dipped in ink and tapped with a small mallet.

Where did you find them? Henry asks. He thinks of the needle he took from Hori Chyo in Japan, and how this Maori instrument would further enhance his collection.

Oh, I have many such items in my collection, says Schlau. Some of them I have traded with the Maoris. Others I have found in abandoned pa. Burial caves. It hasn’t been hard. Do you like bones?

Bones? It depends what creature they have come from. I should like some moa bones for my collection.

What about human? Of a primitive people. I have two mummified bodies, and many bones.

You took them? From these burial sites?

They have proved to be my greatest challenge. I think the joy of the collecting is in the stories we live to tell, don’t you?

Henry shifts uncomfortably on his log. Schlau is trying to prove
himself, to put himself on a par with Henry. Let him, Henry thinks.

I can see you are itching to tell me how you acquired these remains, sir. Do go on.

Schlau then launches into a convoluted story with many side branches that go nowhere. Henry is surprised — for a man of few words, once he warms up, the German seems to use a lot more than are necessary. Henry finds himself tapping his foot and nodding with impatience every time Schlau starts to wax lyrical about a pretty bird he saw on the way, or when he fills in the background of a character of absolutely no consequence.

This is the essence of the story: Schlau travelled to the top of the North Island not long after he finished mounting the museum’s collection in time for its grand opening. There he gained the trust of some local farmers, with whom he stayed, and a tribe of Maoris to whom the farmers introduced him.

They trusted me, you know, says Schlau, because I am not
English
. His voice is suitably scornful.

There he purchased some items for a very good price, but when he started asking questions about a nearby abandoned pa, and whether he might visit it, the Maoris became less charming.

They told me it was tapu. Are you familiar with this word?

Henry isn’t, although he guesses, correctly, at its meaning.

It was sacred, not to be touched. They said that anyone who broke tapu would pay a terrible price.

Such as? asks Henry.

Death. Of course, this was in place to stop the superstitious Maoris from going there, but it wasn’t going to stop someone like me.

Schlau tried to visit the pa on his own one day, but the Maoris had become suspicious when he had disturbed a flock of river birds, and were patrolling the area. He climbed a tree to hide from them
while Brutus lay quietly in the undergrowth below. There he waited until nightfall, because he knew that the Maoris were superstitious about the dark.

From the huts, he gained a number of precious artefacts, which he declared were just lying there, next to the bodies, unprotected. He dragged the skeletal remains, including several skulls and a carved thigh bone, into the forest and hid them, while he deposited the tools and weapons he found in his satchel, intending to dispatch them by river steamer the next day to rid himself of the evidence as soon as possible. He also sawed the carved wooden head of a tattooed chief off the middle post of one of the huts, being careful to let the sawdust fall into the river.

But the next morning he was awoken early by the farmer he was staying with. The chief and a prophet from the nearby village had come by and voiced their suspicion to the embarassed farmer. They asked to look in his bag, but Schlau was prepared for them. He had been told by the farmer in passing of the Maori belief that lizards and sometimes insects acted as guardians of the dead and that they were greatly feared. He had been collecting spiders and centipedes as well as lizards, and he opened the specimen tins in his satchel, letting the contents fall at the feet of the prophet. The creatures crawled over him, causing both men to back away in fear. The furious farmer banished Schlau from the house immediately, but the German was happy with his collection and continued on his way.

And here you see the results, says Schlau. The skulls and the carved leg bone and wooden head fetched a healthy sum, and I have been on the lookout for such opportunities ever since.

Henry is appalled at the man’s trickery, but has to admire his gumption. Perhaps he has underestimated him. It is just this kind of sly ambition that makes a successful collector, particularly of
manmade artefacts. But Henry’s sense of honour is too great. He would be ashamed to have such a story to tell and he tells Schlau as much.

The German shrugs. That is your opinion. He looks with pity at Henry, who can see any respect Schlau had for him drain from his eyes.

Rosemary

I took a couple of paracetemol tablets and got into the shower. Beyond the dirty window, the rain clouds hung black over the hills. A crack of thunder rolled from one end of the farm to the other, telling me that the weather was here to stay, at least for the day. The shower was falling to pieces; mildew swarmed up the walls and lifted the veneer. There was no fan to pull the moisture away, and the shower itself had only two temperatures, cold and hot, with nothing in between. I was reluctant to admit that this bathroom needed an overhaul: they all did. I don’t know how we had let Grandpa live in these freezing, damp conditions for so long. Why hadn’t we insisted on his installing some decent, modern heating? He had still used the wetback on the wood-burning stove in the kitchen, to save money it seemed, but why he needed to I didn’t know. I wished he’d spent some of his money
on himself instead of keeping it out of some misplaced idea that his children needed something to inherit.

Now that Sam was gone, I didn’t even want to think about him, let alone line him up to be my next boyfriend. The sex had been all right, but he was clumsy and a little selfish — through youth and inexperience, I supposed. He had moved too fast for me, but I had let him. It was as if I couldn’t be bothered telling him to slow down. So many parts of me wanted to sleep with him that the parts that didn’t were quickly dampened down. He had asked me how old I was and he was surprised when I told him. ‘But your skin is so smooth,’ he’d said, as though women over thirty instantly turned into wizened crones. Maybe they did out in the country.

After Hugh, in his forties, Sam’s body was so young, with no unnecessary flab and so much change ahead. I suppose trading an older model for a younger gave me a curious sense of satisfaction, and for a moment I could see what motivated middle-aged men to have affairs with their secretaries and to buy sports cars. But Sam was a distraction, nothing more. What I really needed was to be alone, but I’d told myself that so often and every time I had ignored my own advice.

I had been standing under the shower for so long that the cold water announced itself suddenly; I swore as I turned it off. Now I was shivering again, drying myself quickly so I could get my clothes on and warmth back into my bones.

After a quick breakfast, I sat down again at my desk with my coffee and started up my laptop, but the words on the screen blurred and the effort of adding new ones proved too much for my hangover. The day stretched before me — miserable and wet. I considered packing it all up and going back to the city.

But I hadn’t finished my business here. I stood up and dawdled
from room to room. I glanced into the tight spiral stairwell that led to the tower, but couldn’t bring myself to go up. Instead I investigated the smoking room and the library, on the south side of the ground floor, a room with a permanent darkness protecting the thousands of books from the bleaching sun. The lower shelves housed Gram and Grandpa’s paperbacks — lines of Catherine Cookson and Jeffrey Archer and the like — and picture books that family had given them as presents over my lifetime, of New Zealand history and birds and animals. There was Buller’s
Birds
, just as colourful as I had remembered it, with beautifully preserved plates of the kakapo and the kokako, and the books I had read to Grandpa in those final months. It was in this library that I had first discovered the books that would lead me to where I was today. It wasn’t hard, as a young teen, to imagine Magpie Hall in the place of Thornfield Hall and Wuthering Heights, myself always the heroine, dreaming that I too would find a great, passionate love. Perhaps it was in this very room that I had set myself up for perpetual disappointment.

Upstairs, I wandered about the bedrooms, opening dresser drawers, cupboards, not really sure what I was looking for. I wanted to at least cast my eye over everything before my fastidious aunts had it cleared out in a day, their eagle eyes lighting on anything of monetary value and the rest burned or donated to charity. Most of the cupboards were full of sixty years of accumulated stuff: linen, towels, endless stashes of recycled wrapping paper, envelopes. Gram and Grandpa had clearly never thrown anything out since they got married. Every time they bought something new they just stacked the new one in front of everything else: ancient vacuum cleaners, suitcases — one full of nothing but navy-blue pyjamas. In their room, Grandpa’s Savile Row suits, barely worn, and a pile of exquisite vintage women’s hats, which I carried back to my room.

I tried to straighten some of the clutter, dusting between objects and books, making a start on throwing out newspapers and magazines. Every surface was covered with
things
, whether it was books piled horizontally on mantelpieces or clothes lying over chairs. In the middle of cursing the mess I realised that one day someone would do the same for me and be just as appalled by my accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of stuff.

I didn’t think of myself as a hoarder, though. I was a collector. Not just of tattoos but of vintage clothes and accessories, antique china, books, shells, birds’ nests — the list went on. One wall of my bedroom was devoted to pictures of the tattooed circus ladies of old. They either stared defiantly at the camera while displaying their ink, their faces sometimes beautiful, sometimes plain, or they were depicted by full-colour paintings in posters advertising their extraordinary illustrated bodies and the myths that accompanied them. My whole flat was also stuffed full, every horizontal and vertical surface covered. It encased me, made me feel safe and small. I dreaded to think that one day Roland would close the tattoo parlour and I would have to pack everything up and move it.

My flatmate Rita complained about the clutter, but I knew it was what made her fall in love with the place and move in. She felt more at home in my flat overlooking the port than she had anywhere. She worked two nights a week at a little cabaret bar around the corner in what was built as a movie theatre in the 1930s. The rest of the time she seemed to sleep; what little money she earned she eked out on cigarettes and endless pots of tea. We shared cheap bottles of red wine on Sunday nights and she told me stories in her sing-song voice about the weekend’s mishaps and adventures. The cabaret was a favourite haunt for the artists and students who lived around the port and for the swing kids who’d come in from over the hill on a
Wednesday for some social dancing, dressing as their grandparents did during the Second World War. It also attracted sailors from the boats, many of them Russian.

Rita had an abundance of pale skin, and she lolled around the flat draped in a silk kimono that had trouble staying shut. She had just one tattoo, Japanese style, which rolled its way from one shoulder, across her back, to the other, waves that danced with fish and flecks of foam, in rich blues and blacks. She squeezed her ample flesh into corsets for her burlesque act; by day, when she could drag herself out, she dressed like a 1950s diner waitress or a Hitchcock blonde, with high heels and tight woollen suits, her bleached hair immaculately coiffed.

Occasionally Rita brought people back to the flat after one of her shows. She didn’t have boyfriends — she ‘took lovers’. And these lovers were frequently the transients who came through the port, which suited her fine. Even I had a boyfriend for a week from one of the many that she brought home with the promise of a party, a Russian sailor with a tattoo on his bicep of a heart with a dagger sticking into it and a drop of blood. The name
Tatiana
was written underneath. I asked him about her one morning as we lay in bed and listened to the foghorns calling from the port. ‘She
cut
my heart,’ he said. The word ‘cut’ knifed the space between us and he would say nothing more about her.

Mikhail and his friend stopped at the tattoo parlour before they left but Roland refused to give them the Maori design they wanted. When he tried to explain that they had to earn it, they looked at him as if he were deceiving them, although they weren’t sure how or why. They left, stopping on the footpath outside to shout something in angry Russian at him. ‘Friends of yours?’ asked Roland. In truth, I was glad to see the back of Mikhail and after that I avoided Rita’s new friends. I changed the sheets and forgot about him.

The damp from the rain began to seep into the house, rising up from the basement and penetrating the walls. I could taste it in the air.

In the upstairs hallway a narrow door opened onto an equally narrow staircase that led to the attic. As children, we were not allowed up there because of the dust and the precarious accumulation of ephemera, but we had sneaked up when we could and invented games of escaping from orphanages and finding treasure. The closest thing to treasure chests were old leather trunks still carrying stickers from the many voyages in my grandparents’ and their parents’ past, but they contained nothing that could interest a child, just more linen, photographs, junk. Now, looking at all the gathered objects, they lost some of their wonder and became what they were: the lives of my family, stuffed into boxes.

Something was eating at the edges of my memory — a rainy afternoon in the attic, with Charlie. A huge painting of a woman in white, leaning with its face to the wall, as if hiding. A trunk filled with old clothes, carefully wrapped in blue tissue paper, which we raided for dress-ups, Gram shooing us away from it with a gardening fork in her hand. My brother, wearing a top hat, giggling his way down the stairs, while I tripped and fell after him, bruising my hip. Someone else, behind me, picking me up and half-carrying me the rest of the way while Gram thundered down the stairs after us.

I went further into the attic, shuffled some boxes around. Some of them toppled and Christmas decorations, shedding tinsel where they landed, spilled onto the dusty ground. As I moved the boxes, I uncovered piece by jigsaw piece of the large portrait that leaned against the wall. Its heavy gilt frame, the colour of hokey-pokey and rough to touch, was dulled by dust. I sneezed as I picked it up and heaved it closer to the stairwell, where the light was better.

A woman stared out of the painting, the expression on her face demure but with a hint that she might be hiding something. To me, even the placement of her hands looked furtive — they were crossed, her left hand grasping the wrist of her right, in which she held an open fan. Long gloves almost covered her arms. Her white gown, in the late Victorian style, was for the evening, exposing more flesh than would have been seemly during the day, but the fan shielded her, as though she were trying to hide behind it, or at least to project a false modesty. Only the skin on her long neck and pale face was visible. Her hair fell in blonde ringlets around her cheeks.

Could it be Dora, Henry’s first wife? Yes, quite possibly. I
wanted
it to be her, and I could see no reason why it wouldn’t be. After all, the portrait was in the attic, not on display, as if banished here by a jealous second wife all those years ago.

I opened one of the trunks and felt the excitement, the exquisite sense of potential, that I always get when walking into a vintage clothing store. It was a treasure trove: a fox fur, complete with little paws crossed elegantly; 1940s crepe dresses with intricate beading, in mourning black and daytime mauve; chemises, petticoats and corsets. Thick silk gloves with pearl buttons.

I knew there was a reason I had been made so small and slight: it was so I could fit into antique clothes. So many of my taller friends had to resort to making their own clothes in the vintage style, whereas I had always been able to wear the real thing.

Towards the bottom of the trunk I found silk. I pulled it out, scrapping with the tissue, and clasped the dress to my body, measuring its tiny waist against mine. Yes, quite possibly, I thought. With some effort, I put it on. It was snug, but it fitted me. I gathered the skirts together and went downstairs to my room, where there was a full-length mirror inside the wardrobe door.

There was no doubt that it was the dress from the painting. Dora and I must have been the same height, but there the similarities ended. My rumpled, bobbed hair was much darker, and the tattoos were vibrant and sharp on my arms — the flowers, the magpie, the horseshoe, the mermaid, the cursive script. The dress was low enough to expose the bluebirds on my chest, the ribbon in their beaks. I put on the gloves. They weren’t as long as the ones from the painting, but they came above my elbows. I remembered seeing a fan in my grandmother’s dressing table and after I had retrieved it, I stood in front of the mirror again. I assumed Dora’s pose and examined the results. The fan covered the bluebirds, and if the gloves had been longer they would have covered the only tattoos visible now on my upper arms. If I had been painted like that, nobody would have known that I had any marks on my body at all.