Ricochet Baby (20 page)

‘That’s me, but you can forget the ceremony. Just go,’ says Glass, his hand instinctively tightening round the gun.

The man is insensitive or a fool or both. He doesn’t appear to understand the danger he is in. ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Nichols, but what you are looking at here is the expression of a higher form of intelligence. Surely you wouldn’t deny access
to one of the great mysteries of the galaxy.’

‘There’s no spacemen here. Now bugger off.’

‘What we’re looking at is a mathematical formula denoting infinite chaos, which may relate to the pattern of worlds beyond ours. You see, these circles, they just keep going on and on
multiplying
. There’s no knowing where they might go next.’

‘Infinite chaos, is it?’ says Glass, lifting the gun a fraction higher.

The man called Norm says, ‘You don’t need to worry. They only seem unpredictable, like earthquakes. But that’s because we don’t have the correct mathematical equations to describe the dynamics of their system. Once we know that we’ll be closer to understanding how chaos is generated. You see?’ His face gleams with perspiration and what Glass perceives as mad, moist eyes
glistening
behind his spectacles.

‘I’m going to shoot you bastards.’ Glass raises the gun.

‘I think he means it,’ says one of the men, and most of the group begin to climb back into the van. After a moment, Norm decides to join the retreat. A very old man, wearing a raincoat over his shorts, takes longer than the rest. ‘Don’t shoot me,’ he says, putting his hands up, as Glass takes aim.

Glass meets the eye of the old man, and lowers the gun. When they’re gone he sits down in the paddock, his head on his knees, and weeps. He, Glass Nichols.

S
ARAH AND
E
LLIE
and Jack begin to eat dinner together again. Once more she prepares food every night, her recipe books strewn around the kitchen. Her job in advertising is going well; she has a promotion and hasn’t had to ask the barbecue manufacturer and his new wife for extra money for some time. She has passed through her crisis, she has moved on. The children’s school reports have improved already. One evening, Sarah makes spinach quiche and tossed salad, which the children eat without asking for McDonald’s. Ellie, who is doing a genealogical table for homework, wants details about her grandmother’s family.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t know them,’ says Sarah.

‘Don’t you want to know?’ asks Ellie.

‘I guess so.’

‘I want to know everything about Wendy,’ Ellie says. She has a tremble in her voice, and Sarah thinks, damn, why is there always just one more thing to solve. Except that lovers and husbands and disputes go away but mothers don’t. ‘I miss her,’ says Ellie, ‘and you don’t even care.’

Sarah tries to ring Wendy at the camping ground the next day. It is hard to remember clearly why they quarrelled in the first place but now this amorphous disagreement has escalated. Sarah dismisses Wendy in her head as a vain, interfering old woman, a lifelong misfortune she has to endure. While she had felt injured and bereft about matters in general, she had written Wendy a
letter
she has since regretted. There has been no reply and she is ashamed.

‘Your mother hasn’t been here for months,’ the camp
proprietor
tells her. ‘There’s a big pile of mail sitting here waiting for her, but we don’t know where to send it. Will I redirect it to you?’

‘I suppose so,’ says Sarah, with the old impatience. Her mother is as irresponsible as ever; it isn’t all her fault that they have quarrelled. When she hangs up there is a moment of unease, but then she tells herself, Wendy has shifted so many times, at such short notice, that it’s no cause for immediate alarm. All the same, she thinks she will soon make some enquiries.

When the mail arrives, in a bundle held together with a
rubber
band, the envelopes are brittle and discoloured where damp teacups have sat on them in the camping ground proprietor’s office. Sarah thinks of herself as a principled person in this respect. Whatever her failings, she has never opened other people’s mail.

She rolls the rubber band off the half dozen or so envelopes. There is a renewal form from the electoral office, two unpaid bills — one for a veterinary account for a seagull with a broken wing, the other for the repair of a heater. And there is a letter addressed in her own handwriting which causes her to gasp with relief. She rips it in two without looking inside, and shoves it in the rubbish bin. There is also an official-looking letter from a government department:

‘Actually,’ says Sarah, ‘I believe I know the owner of this piece, I’ve seen it before.’ The Earl of Maudsley’s silver bird lies gleaming cold fire as Gunther Sterling wraps it in tissue paper for her. ‘Funny, I
could have sworn it was part of a pair. You couldn’t let me have the name of the person you got it from?’

Gunther has fair, smooth features and a spiky haircut. He bunches up his mouth over his secrets.

‘I couldn’t divulge information like that,’ he says.

Sarah eyes light on a gold sovereign chain. The price label says five hundred and ninety dollars.

‘Just what I’ve been looking for,’ she exclaims.

Their eyes lock. Sarah’s mouth is open and excited, as she holds the chain in her hand. The tip of her tongue hovers on her upper lip. Gunther reaches for her credit card again.

‘I think I have a recent address for the lady,’ he says. ‘She rang the other day to see if it was sold.’

Sarah is certain, as soon as she sees it, that this is a number she has rung before. She is at once disconcerted and reassured.

‘S
O WHERE IS
she?’ Ellie asks that night.

‘She’s staying with some friends.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ says Ellie.

Sarah points to the bird on the mantelpiece. ‘I expect she’ll come and see us when she’s good and ready.’

N
URSE
P
EACH WAYLAYS
me to report that I have a visitor. I have refused so many visitors that she is concerned about how I will react. ‘I’m sorry, she’s really insistent,’ says Nurse Peach. ‘I told her you didn’t have to see her if you don’t want to.’

‘Who is it?’ My first thought is to go and look for Jed and see if he wants to bite some ears off. This is what he does to people who get in his way.

But before Nurse Peach has a chance to answer we are at the day room door, and I can tell that she has been charmed by my visitor and wants to give it a chance. Marise has her back to me when I walk in. From the way she stands, I can see she is
nervous
. I would be, too. A commotion is in progress down the
corridor
where a man is being committed. You might think you are voluntary in here, but it can be an illusion if you start causing problems. He wails and shouts for help; the doors have been temporarily locked. Nurse Peach has to leave me alone with Marise.

When she turns round I see she is more beautiful than ever, the butterfly wings of her grey silk hair cupped under her chin, an uncertain smile illuminating her face. She has put on weight. Marise is pregnant.

Whatever unpleasant thing I was going to say dies on my lips. I hurry towards her and we are in each other’s arms, embracing. Then I hold her from me so I can examine properly the interesting bump of her stomach.

‘Three months,’ she tells me, proudly. ‘I’m showing early, aren’t I?

‘You were always so thin, you’d show a pea in five minutes. Is Derek pleased?’ I don’t ask aloud if it’s Derek’s baby.

‘Yes,’ she says, answering the spoken and unspoken questions at once. ‘I think he’s pleased, but scared as hell, at our age.’

‘Yes, I can understand that.’

‘Oh sweetie.’ She is still holding me, the first person who I’ve allowed to touch me like this in months. ‘I reckon it was you and Nathan that did it. Rush of hormones, you know?’

I don’t really. She always thought I knew things like this, but I didn’t; Nathan just happened, like part of a programme.

‘When are you going to see him?’ Marise asks.

‘Is that what you’re here for? Did they send you?’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Look, Marise, I’m right into therapy now, and it’s working.’

‘He’s only a little baby,’ says Marise.

‘Have you seen him?’

She avoids my eye. ‘Not for a while. Roberta, please listen to me.’

‘Don’t start lecturing me, Marise. They’ll throw you out of here, if you do.’

‘Well, it’s quite a little hidey-hole you’ve got here, isn’t it?’ She looks mean and calculating, just the way she does when somebody is telling her obvious lies about their tax evasion. I really hate her at moments like that. ‘Why don’t I just leave now?’

I sit down in one of the big dark blue chairs and stare at the notice board on which we wrote at the last group meeting: I Want to Have a Happy Life. No Nuclear Bombs in the Pacific This Week. I Want My Little Girl to Get New Friends Who Don’t Know Where Her Mummy Is. May Nurse Peach Burn in Hell. This last, added after the meeting, has been clumsily half-erased. Lucky for them I don’t know who did it.

‘Quit staring over my shoulder,’ Marise says.

‘I thought you were leaving.’ I’ve learned a few tricks of my own in here.

‘Now you just listen to me,’ she says. I can tell that she has worked out that she has to get this in quickly, while the staff are preoccupied. ‘I’ve got the placenta of your baby in my freezer.’

I sit up, appalled.

‘Yes, well actually I’m not very keen on it, either. To tell you the truth, it makes me sick looking at it. I thought it was kind of sweet when your friend Josh rang me up about it, and I agreed to take it from him. But I can understand why his wife didn’t want it — it gives me the creeps too.’

‘I didn’t ask you to keep it. Get rid of it.’

But while I am sitting there, within shouting distance of the insane and our keepers, something is boiling up inside me. It is feeling. It is the look of Nathan when he was born and the milky smell of him when I held him. It is the way he lay in my arms in
the train and trusted me, rockin’, rollin’ all the way, and I betrayed him.

‘I’ll tell them I’m going out.’

‘Now? With me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Won’t they stop you?’

‘I doubt it.’

Marise looks agitated. ‘Roberta, Josh Thwaite is with me.’

‘Why? What are you up to?’

‘Nothing. I’m not up to anything, you silly, self-centred bitch. He rang me to see what I’d done about it, and I told him I wouldn’t do anything without telling you. So he said if you didn’t want it, he’d fix it for me. The guy’s responsible, even if he’s a bit off the planet.’ She glances around. ‘Well, you’ve got kinkier friends than Josh Thwaite, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

We stand glaring at each other. Marise doesn’t seem phased that she has just abused me in these surroundings, as if she’s stopped noticing them. She even looks pleased with herself. ‘He said I shouldn’t have to do it on my own, so we agreed to drop by and tell you before we buried the thing.’

‘Okay, I’m still coming.’

Things have died down in the corridor. I go along and find Nurse Peach. ‘I’m off out with my friend.’

She is startled. ‘Are you sure this is a good idea, Roberta?’

Marise appears behind me, looking ethereal, and totally
trustworthy
. ‘We’ll only be an hour. It’s such a lovely day, I thought Roberta might like a drive around the bays. We might go for a
little
walk.’

‘I’d love that,’ I say, like a child pleading for an outing, and Nurse Peach looks reassured and pleased for me.

‘Take a jersey’ she advises, as if she is my mother.

When Josh Thwaite first sees me, I think he is going to jump out of Marise’s car and run away His brown, shining curls have grown longer, gripped in their pony-tail with one of those coloured elastic bands that girls buy from the supermarket. There is black stubble on his chin.

Marise hesitates, then throws him the car keys. ‘I’ll get in the back,’ she says, before either of us can argue. A faint bitterish smell of sweat clings to him. I like it.

It is a still, translucent day, more than a year since my family had celebrated the coming of Nathan, and here I am, riding along beside Josh Thwaite in Marise’s sleek red Porsche to collect his
placenta
. This strikes me as so peculiar and funny that I throw my head back and laugh. The sound startles me as much as it does my companions. I don’t remember when I last laughed out loud. I try it again. Ha ha ha.

‘It’s all right, I’m nuts,’ I say.

Josh glances at Marise in the rear vision mirror.

‘No, you’re not,’ replies Marise sharply. Josh gives an almost imperceptible nod.

Simmer down, I tell myself. If you don’t shut up, they’ll take you back.

At her house, Marise orders Josh to pull into the driveway. ‘I won’t be long,’ she says, disappearing through her shrubbery.

Josh and I are left sitting alone, side by side. He rests his hands over the leather steering wheel. I look for signs of paint under his nails and see none.

‘I’m on ACC right now,’ he says, and shows me the scar of a healing cut on the palm of his hand. I touch it briefly, brushing my fingers over his. We smile at each other nervously and glance away.

This is unfinished business; some day I will want to reflect, in tranquillity, what it was like the day Nathan was born, the way Josh kept me safe. I’m not ready for it yet, but I guess this will be the last time I see him.

‘Why did you do it?’ he asks.

‘Please don’t you start.’

‘Was it because of me? I mean, did you get in that much
trouble
?’

‘It was my trouble, not yours.’ I can see he doesn’t believe me. ‘I couldn’t look after Nathan. I couldn’t keep him safe.’

‘Are you sorry?’

I shake my head back and forth. ‘Don’t ask,’ I tell him,
hearing
a quake in my voice that threatens to get out of control.

‘Do you dream about him?’

‘Why should I do that?’

‘Because I do,’ he says.

‘Josh, I don’t dream about anything. I take medicine.’

He sighs. ‘What would you like to do with the baby’s
placenta
?’

‘What did you have in mind?’ I had thought that perhaps we should just get rid of it at the tip, but now I’m not so sure.

‘Leda buried hers and we planted a tree over it.’ This reminder of Leda brings me back to reality; I definitely won’t see him again. But in a way, this knowledge makes me bold.

‘Did you have a boy or a girl?’

‘She had a boy. She’s got one of each now.’

This is an odd way to put it, as if Josh is disclaiming the
children
. He runs his fingers nervously through a strand of his rich hair, and for a moment I think he is going to tell me something, but then Marise appears, a plastic shopping bag and a spade balanced in one hand, a picnic basket in the other. Josh gets out to help her put the last two in the boot. She holds on to the bag.

‘Can I look at it?’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ says Marise, but I do anyway. The contents of the bag are a shrunken, livery-looking bundle.

‘Where to?’ asks Josh.

I
CHOOSE A
hill covered by pine trees at the back of the zoo where it is quiet. The hilltop is reached by a rough road and walking tracks that peel off from its edge. Sunlight slants through the trees on to the merry scarlet car.

‘Remember what you said about shadows on the sun, that time?’ I say to Marise.

She smiles at me, in acknowledgement, and nods her head. It feels right, that this part of me should be laid under a soft coating of needles illuminated by fractured sunlight, where nobody is likely to disturb it.

As Josh points out, it is important we that bury the placenta deeply, safe from marauding animals. We choose a young, straight sapling. Marise and I sit among the pine needles while Josh starts digging beneath it, protecting his injured left hand as well as he can. Soon I take over, enjoying the swing of the spade and the earth turning in the cool, damp air. They seem surprised by my strength.

When the hole is dug, I lay the placenta in its bag in the ground. We look at each other uncertainly.

‘Should we say something?’ says Marise. ‘You know, sing, or anything like that?’

‘It’s not a funeral,’ says Josh. What he means is, we shouldn’t get too solemn and ritualistic.

But then I remember the way my mother used to sing to me under her coat and, without looking at them, I begin to sing the first thing that comes into my head, some lines from ‘Morning Has Broken’. ‘Morning has broken/like the first morning,’ I sing. ‘Blackbird has spoken/like the first bird.’ They begin to hum quietly along behind me. ‘Praise for the singing, praise for the morning …’ And that’s all I can remember.

I ask Josh if he has a pocket knife. He doesn’t but Marise has a fruit knife in her picnic basket. I want to make a nick in the bark of the tree so that I will remember the spot. I can’t make much of an impression on the wood, but I think to myself that Dr Q would approve. The placenta is buried deep in the woods but I have instilled the memory within myself: I am not ready to slide into oblivion.

D
R
Q
HAS
tripped and fallen as he was running for the bus this morning. He looks pale and out of sorts.

‘Look,’ he says, in that slightly accusing way men have, when they have hurt themselves. He shows me the mud on his jacket, the place where he has grazed himself. I don’t touch him, the way I did Josh, but I am pleased he has shown me. I take it as a small sign that he sees me as a real human being with whom he can share his
discomforts
, rather than someone for whose needs he must always cater.

‘You never believe it’ll hurt so much when you fall,’ I tell him. I explain how I used to be a gymnast.

‘Do you remember the worst fall you ever had?’ he asks with interest.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘only don’t try and analyse it, okay?’

Taking his silence as agreement, I recall for him the last night I went to the gymnasium. ‘I tried to do a cat twist. You know how a cat lands on its feet when it’s dropped?’

‘Yes, I do, but you’re not a cat. I mean, human beings aren’t cats.’

‘No, but it’s possible to learn the same principles of motion. This is to do with Newton’s Third Law of Motion. For every action force there’s a simultaneous force, equal in magnitude but opposite in direction. By varying the moments of inertia, a body changes its resistance to motion. That’s what a cat does when it’s in the air, and ends up on its feet.’

‘Hmm, that’s interesting. I had a cat that never used to land on its feet. It worried me.’

‘You need more than one trick to be a gymnast,’ I tell him. ‘Amplitude, that was a word my coach used. It means breadth and abundance, so that for every jump and swing you take you have enough range to complete it. And courage. You have to have courage to perform. You can’t have amplitude without courage.’

‘Quite so. I can see that.’

‘Do you think I lack courage, doctor?’

‘That’s not the way I see you.’

‘But I didn’t complete the jumps.’

‘You lived in the country. Who took you to gym?’

‘My father, as a rule. My mother made me all the fancy
outfits
, made sure I had the snazzy leotards. She’s clever like that. I think she was trying to make up for my communion dress.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Doctor, we had a deal.’

‘Yes, so we did, Roberta. I apologise.’

I can’t hold it against him. I’ve got here on my own. In a way, I don’t care whether he listens or not.

I
T WAS AT
church that my mother got to know Alec McNulty, the man who was with Father Bird in the cemetery on the day of my grandfather’s funeral. This is the man I call my mother’s prince of darkness. Alec was the church organist, although you wouldn’t have thought so if you’d seen him. I think he once played in a dance band. At some time he turned up in Walnut as a farm labourer and, finding himself the only man around who could tickle a tune out of the church organ, he was persuaded to play on a regular basis. Alec, who was about fifty, had close-cropped hair and heavy wrists, and eyes that looked at young girls. My mother wasn’t young when they became friendly; she was in her late
thirties
.