Sixty Lights (8 page)

“Well, here we are then.”

“Can I hold your elephant stick?” Lucy suddenly asked, bold as brass.

Thomas glared across at his traitorous sister.

“And would you like tea?” Mrs Minchin added.

Thomas switched his glare to the purple woman. He was concentrated and preoccupied, formulating Brazil. In his head long-limbed monkeys swung loops on jungle vines and screeched “Gold! Gold!” There were waterfalls, panthers and quick carnivorous fish. Bronze Indians, neat and featureless, looked on contentedly. Not this grubby fellow, this phoney uncle, who was so unlike their lost mother and so outrageously unkempt.

Over tea Neville presented Lucy with twelve violet glass bangles – six for each arm, he needlessly instructed – and to Thomas a small silver dagger, curved like the moon. Thomas instantly capitulated:
a silver dagger.
He had never been given so grown-up a gift, and was in a turmoil of mixed-up gratitude and distrust. Perhaps he would discuss Brazil with his uncle. Lucy had put aside the elephant stick and was sliding the twelve violet bangles up and down the length of her arms so that they chinked like twelve teaspoons against the sides of twelve teacups. From beneath her loose curly hair she smiled up at her brother. Thomas realised he had almost forgotten his sister's smile.

That night Thomas took the dagger with him to bed, and wondered half-awake what it must feel like to kill someone. Between the ribs, a deadly moon. (“Take that! Aargh!”) He held it up in the darkness and saw it faintly.
Silver.
Bronze Indians, brassy sister, this silver weapon: all his imaginings were flaring metallic. He saw himself as a hero, keeping Lucy safe in a treacherous jungle. Ned. A gun. Sailing ships. Horseback. Charging fast-motioned at the unknown future. He felt he possessed a private world, which would one day soon materialise and invite him to enter. From the kitchen floated the sounds of Uncle Neville and Mrs Minchin in friendly conversation. Thomas listened as he grew sleepy, but they spoke their own over-syllabled, long-distance language:
Calcutta, Mahableshwar, Bombay, Hyderabad.
While he, already journeying, prepared to dream of Brazil.

Neville Brady was sleeping fitfully in his sister and brother-in-law's bed, and woke in the middle of the night to see his nephew standing in the centre of the room. The boy was naked and held before him the Indian dagger he had received as a gift. For an irrational second or two Neville thought that the boy had come to murder him – his earlier antipathy had been
so undisguised – but then he noticed his automatic movements and vacant eyes, the thin body tilted slightly in its state of suspension. Neville rose and led the boy gently, guiding him by the shoulders, back to his own bed, and felt in this act, however gratuitous, a first intuition of the existence of paternal tenderness. He uncurled the boy's fingers from the silver dagger, laid it on the floor, then lowered the child into the bed and pulled up the cover, smoothing and tucking it. Then, pausing again, he watched the boy sleep. The eyes were closed now, and the eyelids flickering. The face was pressed into the pillow at an awkward angle. The room was hushed – no wind outside, no-one astir – which made audible, just barely, the small boy's breathing.

“Honoria is dead,” Neville Brady whispered to himself. “My sister, my lovely sister, Honoria, is dead.”

How large the night was. A black shadow, sucking him in.

SHE WOULD LIE
on her back in the world of scurrying alive things – slaters, ants, earwigs, grasshoppers – and she would look up at the hard enamelled blue sky, and feel the sun on her cheeks, and see it as a pink-veined coin through her closed-up eyelids, and she would listen to leaves brush and rustle, and detect the light currents of a breeze – feeling the world as a princess feels a pea – and wonder why her adorable parents had died. Against the specificity of things leaned her own vague questionings; and against these small solidities, familiar and comfortable, a larger tenuousness. The world was untrustworthy. It held in cruel secret the possibility of erasure.
Death
, what an odd word, Lucy thought.
Death, breath
, she rhymed to herself.
Breath, death. Death, breath.
Her body carried trapped within it a sensation of shivering; even though the air was hot Lucy seemed to exist in a chilly grief-envelope. She tried hard to remember her mother's face, so that she might expel this unaccountable sensation, but already it was a vestige, already it was a hieroglyph. It could not be willed into vision. It could not be called, or fabricated. Instead she was met everywhere by involuntary and mostly trivial recursions. Once, having fed the chickens, her apron full of eggs, her boots plastered with grey muck, Lucy turned back to the house and caught sight of a pure white blouse, one of her favourites, flapping on the
clothesline. It bounced as though it was electrically animated, the long sleeves waving. Lucy remembered her mother removing this blouse, pulling it up slowly over her head; but the garment snagged halfway, so her mother opened the buttons from the inside-out to reveal her face. Lucy had her arms held up, her girl-face peeped through its linen encasing, and she stayed like that, comically misshapen, for their mutual amusement. Just this small occasion. Just this scrap of a moment that in another time and other circumstances had no real employment as a memory. All this from the happen-stance of a fluttering blouse, while she stood there with her lap of still-warm eggs, and her filthy boots, and her child's sad perplexion, all gathered together in a tiny tight loop of time.

What Lucy could remember were her mother's stories. They are now the matted fabric she clothes herself with, to try to smother her persistent shivers. Fairy stories. Childhood stories. Invented combinations. One of the stories is about a Dutchman and an Englishwoman. The Dutchman is a balloonist; he sails the world using the sky as his private ocean. Winds are his tides. Stars his companionable fishes. Night is the depthless wave that sweeps him smoothly along. When he sleeps, on turquoise silk cushions in the shape of fingers, and in a long wicker basket that looks like a Venetian boat, he looks upwards and spies a second black ocean. This man travels on his own unanchored dream which lists and uplifts, ripples and swoops, bucks, crests, glides luxuriantly along, all in the realm of an endlessly imponderable journey. (Lucy loved the way her mother would tell it, this crazy sailing. And she loved the embellishments:
turquoise silk cushions in the shape of fingers.
)

The Flying Dutchman is on a quest to seek a particular woman. She grew up in an ice cave and is known for the icy-pale translucence of her skin and for the ethereal quality of her
character and intelligence. She bears a strawberry birthmark on the left side of her chest – just like Lucy – and is so sensitive to the world that she uncomfortably detects a single pea tucked away beneath mattresses. The woman is imprisoned in a small room in a palace in India; but has read of the anti-gravitational Dutchman, and planned her own rescue. She composes seductive messages, which she writes along the slippery lengths of satin ribbons, ties to pigeons and balloons, and then sends skyward, knowing they will find him. Floating endearments and invitations drift on the tidal winds. Longings-to-escape festoon the sky. So when the Dutchman, all alone, roams his oceanic space, accustomed to birds and clouds and the ornamentation of stars, he now meets sinuous sentences and multicoloured enticements. He steers his strange vessel in the direction of India, and systematically hovers over each one of its hundreds of palaces. One day the ice-woman looks up and there he is: it is magical; a sky-boat! It is her vision of liberation. She hastily writes a letter and ties it to a balloon, and up it goes, her freedom, her hope. The Dutchman is so excited to have at last found his journey's end – he has even glimpsed her pretty, shining face appearing at a starshaped window – that he leans forward a little carelessly to claim the letter, topples from his basket and plunges to the earth. The woman sees him falling, flailing and desperate, the unread letter clutched tightly in his hand. His body is crushed below her on tessellated paving stones, his bright blood channelled into diamonds and hexagons. The Venetian boat, captainless, sails slowly away. No-one knows where. And what became of the woman? Her window was bricked up as a punishment and in her isolation and darkness she eventually went insane. For a long time she held fast to the vision of the wicker boat in the sky, full of romance and possibility, full of various transportations, but by the end of her life saw only Mogul patterns
of Dutch blood, glistening in the heat of Indian sunlight.

Lucy's mother changed the story many times, but the end, in every case, was never a happy one. The Dutchman missed his target, or found the wrong lover and was doomed to a miserable and mistaken partnership. Or a storm swept the basket to the top of Mount Ararat, and the Dutchman died there, stranded and lovelorn. Or he arrived too late, sliding on his belly through the star-window to discover the woman long dead from loss of hope. Or the Englishwoman grew old, continuously sending out messages; or she grew blind with her effort and wrote something indecipherable. In the worst version the ice-woman was so distressed by the tragedy of her unanswered ribbons that she set fire to her room, and burned down the palace around her, her face appearing one last time in a flaming star. The palace simply melted, Honoria said.

What shall Lucy do with her inheritance of story? Now she is left with a repertoire of exasperating desire, of hokum, memory, nonsense and tall-tale, that she has siphoned into herself as a stream of chill water. These stories fill her with an amorphous dissolving feeling. Even now, in the coin-light of warm summer sunshine, with her eyes closed and her mind bent on rational summoning, she is swept away and lost. And her mother's face is so vague it might be a wet footprint, shimmering thin as a breath, transient as a sundial shadow, poised on the very edge of complete disappearance.

LUCY WORE HER
new white blouse and her new straw bonnet (topped with a posy of artificial violets), and carried on her arm her old herringbone coat; Thomas looked serious and grown-up in his best cap and stovepipe trousers and new navy serge jacket. Uncle Neville had arranged for the luggage to be sent ahead, so together they appeared as a group on a Sunday outing, all nervous expectation and dressed-up best-behaviour. The driver lifted Lucy by the waist to sit beside her brother, then Uncle Neville pulled himself up, setting the cart jolting and tilting with his awkward weight, and they perched there, all three, looking down at Mrs Minchin. To the children's horror she began to cry; they had never seen Mrs Minchin cry before. Her face smudged over and the tears gushed, and Ned, by her side, let out a long, plaintive howl. Up to this moment the children had been restless and flushed with excitement, but now they too collapsed and Uncle Neville, with no experience of wailing children and fulsome scenes of departure, looked alarmed in his
loco-parentis
incompetence. He was unused to these hyperbolic displays of emotion. Honoria, he recalled, had been a fantasist: she had clearly inspired in her children these crude and exorbitant performances.

In truth, Neville had been flattered by Arthur's request that he adopt the children. He had never met his brother-in-law,
but since his life had been so far more or less dissolute, wrong-headed and fixedly geared to failure, he was pleased to be considered from a distance as parent material. Far from resenting the inflicted responsibility, Neville now saw his own role as heroic redemptor; the family tragedy required his intervention and confirmed his authority. In time, he believed, the two children would learn to respect him. He would be reformed, upright and a model substitute.

Neville retained a memory of Honoria he could not quite dispel: when he announced at eighteen that he was going to India, she laughed out loud. After all those years of sheer waiting and spiced-up visions, after all the adolescent torment of his own workaday isolation, he expected, at the very least, mute sisterly deference. But she threw her head back theatrically and laughed out loud and only later confessed that she was truly envious: “Have an adventure,” she whispered, “have an adventure and I shall come flying over the ocean to join you.”

Lucy and Thomas sat high on the cart and looked into the future. Their odd uncle beside them was silent and preoccupied. What they saw was all they had known sliding backwards into oblivion, and ahead, a gigantic, unknowable chaos. Lucy took Thomas's hand and it too was clammy. Sister and brother stared resolutely straight ahead. Without turning to look, they knew that behind them everything was already coated with the alluring patina of loss. It shone as it receded, like embers in a dying fire, and held for evermore the smouldering glint of their pasts.

PORT MELBOURNE
.
THE
departure. The exiting of a continent. The dock was bone coloured with weathering and stank of stale ocean. Wood had extraordinarily clear grain and looked more weighty than usual. The wind was salty, acute. The air held an amethyst tinge. Lucy gazed at the horizon and wondered why everyone's face seemed fluid and much less distinct than their harbourside surroundings. Perhaps travellers before a sea journey take on certain qualities of ocean, or at least respond in some way to the restless swell of parting tides. She could see mouths opening and closing and embraces exchanged. She could see Thomas and Neville in the distance, talking together to a sailor.

Lucy missed her parents. Lucy missed her dog. Around her neck hung the gold locket that contained her mother's face, rendered in black. If she were asked she would say: “Yes, I am an orphan, like a girl in a book, travelling with my brother and an uncle I barely know.” She has devised this little speech so that it will guard and protect her, and make her seem more plausible and real in this wash of rowdy strangers. People were already heading up the gangplank and shouting back at the dock. Most were excited and loud and condescended to the crowd who would be left behind. Lucy wanted Thomas and Neville to return so that she could join this elect
group and head up to their place on the decks, up at the railing, looking down. She was worried that she might be pushed by the crowd into the harbour. She was worried that Thomas and Uncle Neville would not see her at all, and would decide conspiratorially to head off to England without her. Lucy could not remember ever being alone in a crowd before. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. She hid in her herringbone coat and imagined what it must be like never to be found. It must be like death. It must be like having a face that was a nothing, a mere cut-out in black, sealed where no-one in the world could see it.