Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (20 page)

“Do you mind if I come in?” she said in a stage whisper, but she was already through the door. Mrs. Cass hadn’t altered since I had last seen her that day at school; she might have been born plump and grey-haired. Her lipstick was too red and her eyeshadow had settled into the folds of skin across her eyelids. She tried to hide her shock at what she saw—the wound dressing still covering my ear, my stubble hair—but I caught the look on her face before she changed it to one of sympathy. “I thought you might need some company,” she said.

I had shifted my furniture around, pushing the bed and the chest of drawers toward the door and moving the desk so I could open the window. I needed to lean out over the glasshouse and garden, toward the cemetery, to breathe in the smell of trees and green and the cool air of autumn. It took an effort to bring myself back into the room and face someone new.

“You look so like your mother, it’s uncanny, even with your short hair,” Mrs. Cass said. For some reason she seemed unsure what to do with the tea, and rather
than pass me a cup, she sat on the edge of the bed and balanced them both on her knees. “It must be nice to be back in your own bed,” she said.

“I had my own bed in die Hütte, in the cabin,” I said.

“Of course, but it’s not the same as being home, is it? With all your old things about you.”

The two of us looked around the room—the books kept by Ute but too childish for me now; the empty wardrobe, waiting for Ute’s return; the chest of drawers with its row of teddy bears and dolls on top, from which Phyllis was forever absent; and across every surface and taped to the walls, the notes and cards welcoming me home. An uncle I had never met wrote me a long letter about the importance of family, a neighbour had put a postcard of a cat through the letterbox and said I could drop in any time, and children from the school I never went back to had drawn me pictures. And then there were the letters not on display, those that Ute tried to tear up before I could read them: complete strangers offering me their spare rooms in return for unspecified favours; people who wanted to write my life story; and others, assuming I had already sold it, asking for money. All of the things around us belonged to a different person, someone whose bedroom I had temporarily taken over until I could return to the forest.

Mrs. Cass lifted the cups off her knees and we both saw that the bottoms had left circular marks on her skirt. “And you’ll have a whole new wardrobe when your mother gets home.” She looked at the clothes I was wearing: the checked skirt I’d been given, which I’d grown fond of, but which was still held around my waist by safety pins; and a blouse and cardigan that Ute had selected from her own wardrobe, both far too big. “Teenage girls always find new clothes exciting. I know my granddaughter does—she’s about your age—Kirsty, always down the shops buying something new. I’m sure she’d be happy to take you, when you’re feeling a bit more up to it.”

I couldn’t imagine ever feeling up to it. She rambled on, and I let my mind drift away, remembering the anorak I had left behind and my father’s boots that I would never see again. Someone must have thrown them away without realizing how precious they had been to me, how much more cherished than all the things I had returned to. Only the balaclava remained, hand-washed and line-dried, hidden under my pillow. It was the one thing I had brought home, and Ute had allowed me to keep it.

“There must have been plenty of things you had to do without, though. I just can’t imagine it, all those years alone in the wilderness.” Mrs. Cass shook her head.

“It wasn’t the wilderness and I wasn’t alone,” I said.

She made a dismissive noise. “That man. I never thought I’d say this about someone, Peggy, but maybe he deserved what happened. He took you away from your family, from the people who love you. It was wrong, Peggy. He was a bad man.” She stood up, the cups still in her hands.

“I didn’t mean my father.” I turned back toward the window and leaned out over the sill, suddenly desperate for air.

I don’t know what Mrs. Cass thought I was about to do, but alarmed, she cried out, “Peggy!” and came toward me.

I was afraid she might touch me. I tried to take a breath, but my lungs wouldn’t fill. “I just need air,” I said, panting. “There isn’t any air in this house.” I grabbed at the window catch and we both heard the front door open and Ute shout something into the road. The door slammed.

“Yoo-hoo,” she called from the hall.

I couldn’t catch my breath, and the ends of my fingers tingled. Mrs. Cass looked stricken, and she cast her eyes around the room as if she thought climbing into the wardrobe or hiding under the bed might be a good idea.

Ute appeared in the doorway, laden with shopping bags.

“That reporter is still outside,” she said, concentrating on squeezing between the furniture which blocked the
doorway. It wasn’t until she was past the chest of drawers that she saw Mrs. Cass. “Angela,” she said, surprised, but when she looked at me she dropped the shopping and clambered over the bed so that she could hold the sides of my head and make me breathe in time with her. We counted to five, in and out, until my breathing slowed.

“I was just seeing if Peggy would like a cup of tea,” Mrs. Cass said, holding the cups out as proof.

“Peggy takes her tea black,” said Ute without turning around.

“Well, perhaps I’d better get off.” Mrs. Cass and Ute manoeuvred past each other. “Remember, Peggy,” Mrs. Cass said, “whenever you want that shopping trip with Kirsty, just let me know. It won’t be any trouble.”

Ute had filled the wardrobe and drawers with my new clothes. She had guessed at the size of my waist and breasts and feet, but now, two months later, the skirts and trousers she had chosen were already too small.

I ignored the clothes she had left out on my bed and looked inside the wardrobe. I flicked the hangers and then opened the chest of drawers and rummaged through jumpers, T-shirts, and jeans. Just like the toys and books, none of them were mine. Wearing the same dress I had put on that morning, I went back downstairs.

18

One summer I found Phyllis lying face down in the dust under the bed I still shared with my father. I hooked her out with the broom. Her nylon hair stood up from her head in a tangle as if she had been struck by lightning, and she was naked apart from her painted black shoes, so I could trace the seams where her plastic body had been fused together in the mould that made her. The colour of her rosebud mouth was garish, and her eyebrows were crooked from where I had drawn them on when I was younger. I didn’t understand how I had ever thought she was beautiful. I sat her on one of the shelves next to the stove.

I had other things to do than play with dolls. That year, the sunny days had started early—when I planted
the carrot seeds—and it stayed warm right through to when I pulled up the first little finger-sized sticks of sweetness, which I ate with my back to die Hütte and my hand in front of my mouth. Everything about the heat irritated me: the flies which came into the cabin and wouldn’t leave; the mosquito bites in the middle of my back I couldn’t reach; the noise in my father’s throat when he swallowed a cup of water; and the ants that marched along the shelves to our honey store. I swiped a fingertip through their advancing army, stopping the queue in its tracks, until the ants found another route. I watched them for a while and then picked through the stuff Phyllis sat with. We never threw anything away: the pen with its insides written clean; my father’s compass—broken when he had dropped it in a bucket of water; the last pieces of the map, written and rewritten on, until there was no green left; the rusty spyglass; our toothbrushes—hairless sticks; and the empty tubes of toothpaste which we had sliced open summers ago and licked clean. I picked one up and sniffed it. In the corner of the folded metal was a memory of mint. In an instant I was back in a proper bathroom, in front of an open medicine cabinet, packed with a jumble of bottles and tubes: a grown-up’s cupboard I had been forbidden to look in. Ute called my name from downstairs, and I swung the mirrored door shut, bringing
my guilty eight-year-old eyes into view. At night, in die Hütte, I would sometimes let my fingers wander over my features, the bump in my nose, the jutting cheekbones like my father’s. Once, I took a full bucket of water into the daylight and looked down on its surface, but with the sun behind me, only my silhouette was cast back—a thicket of dark hair over scrawny shoulders. I longed for a mirror.

My father was fond of saying, “If you own too many possessions, sooner or later they start owning you.” So I’d had to make do with “treasures” I had collected: rocks from the river in the shape of horses’ heads; a fistful of crumbling flowers, dead within a day of picking because we didn’t have a spare water container; jay and magpie feathers; a crisp snakeskin; pine cones of different sizes lined up like an opened Russian doll; acorn cups for a miniature tea party; a bird’s nest lined with downy feathers and full of speckled eggshells which I had found cracked, under the wintereyes. Only Phyllis reminded me that once I’d had a different life from this one. I kneeled in front of the shelves, sorting through a pile of flints my father thought we could sharpen into spearheads. Every autumn he still hoped we would catch a deer. I took a flint and, crouching beside the stove, gouged
Punzel
into the wood of the wall beside the word
Reuben
that I had found all those years ago.

“What are you up to?” asked my father, coming in and setting down buckets of water.

“Nothing,” I said, jumping up, holding the flint behind my back.

“You should do your piano practice,” he said, as if he had been thinking about it while he walked up from the river. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard you play.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not as though I’m going to be a concert pianist, is it?” I said.

My father looked over at me as he scooped water with the billycan. “That’s not the point. It’s about commitment. Saying you’re going to do something and then doing it. It’s the worst kind of person who goes back on a promise, even one they made to themselves.”

“I never promised, and anyway there’s no point.”

On the shelves, the ants were back in the honey.

“Come on.” My father pulled out the stool from under the table and nodded at it.

“If I were a concert pianist I would have something nice to wear,” I said, my arms folded. “And I would be able to see what I looked like. If we didn’t live in this horrible dirty house with ants in the food, then everything . . .” I trailed off.

“Sit,” he said. He moved a wooden bowl with the remains of breakfast crusted around the edge.

“I hate living here. I wish it would all burn.”

“Play!” He picked up the stool and thumped it down.

“I wish I was dead!” I shouted at him, my head pushing forward.

“Sit down!” my father bellowed, and slammed his fist on the piano table.

The wooden keys jumped and rattled against each other. I sat heavily, my hands in my lap, my head down, jaw clamped. He snatched up the bowl and threw it hard toward the wall. It bounced off the stovepipe and onto a shelf, scattering acorns across the floor.

I slammed the flint down onto the table, spread my fingers into claws, and jabbed at the keys, growling. I stabbed at them again and again, making sounds no human should be able to make. Just as suddenly the anger left me and my fingers found the familiar comforting pattern of
La Campanella
, but after a moment they paused, and instead reformed themselves into a different shape and I played “Oh Alaya Bakia,” humming it to myself. I couldn’t remember the last time we had sung it. I made up some new words: “In the forest there are trees, oh alaya bakia.”

And without hesitation my father, from behind me, sang, “Deer and wolves that no one sees,” and we both laughed and the sour feeling which had filled die Hütte left.

After a few false starts, I added, “There’s no suitor left for me, oh alaya bakia.”

There was a pause while my father thought, and in a rush he sang, “Still it’s better to be free,” and laughed again. “Hang on,” he said as I started to play the whole thing through. He snatched a stick of burned wood from the fire and wrote our new verse on the wall above the piano table. We sang the whole song together, as loud as we could, until the sound filled the cabin. I imagined the music bursting out of the door, bouncing off the mountain, flying over the river, spreading out through the trees on the other side, and even crossing the Great Divide. If there was anyone else out there in all that blackness, a solitary note might flit through infinity and land on a shoulder to find its way inside that person’s head.

I gave myself to the music as if it possessed me, consumed me, letting the tune go off in a different direction, my fingers running up and down the clunking keys. Singing with me in harmony, my father drew five long horizontal lines on the wall in front of the piano table, the treble clef, and five more lines below with the bass clef curled upon them.

“Key? What’s the key?” he asked frantically, seemingly worried that if he didn’t put it down fast enough it would be gone.

I stared at him.

“What key is it in? How many sharps, how many flats?” he continued.

“I don’t know. I’m just playing.” It was like shouting over the roar the river made after the winter thaw, but speaking stopped my music. “It just came out,” I said, slumping on the stool.

My father sagged too. We looked at the empty bars he had scrawled. The lines jumped and wobbled where the charcoal had followed the grain of the wood. They were unequal distances apart and sloped at such an alarming angle that any notes placed upon them would have tumbled downward, bumping into each other until they formed a heap of sticks and balls at the bottom. My father rubbed the back of his arm across the charcoal, smudging the lines, turning the wall and his arm grey. He lifted the knife from his belt and scored the lines into the full length of the plank. He did the same to the plank below and the one above, carrying on up the wall as high as he could stretch. I sat and watched, fluttering my fingers in a trill, on the keys.