The Ghost's Child (2 page)

The boy snorted, unimpressed by trees. “I bet when you were a little girl, you thought old things were horrible.”

Tea leaves floated in a penny-size pool of tea in the bottom of Matilda's cup. “Everything that's young is troubled by what is old,” she admitted. “When I was small, there was an elderly woman who lived at the bend of the road. She never said an unkind word to me, she never even looked at me, but I was frightened of her. She was so withered, so crumpled. I knew she had once been a small girl too, but I couldn't believe it. She was oldness, and nothing else. She was like an abandoned nest you find in a bough, tatty and disintegrating to dust. Even now, the memory of her makes me shiver. It is strange, that oldness is so hard to love or forgive.”

“Well, do you love it, now that
you're
old?”

Matilda gazed into her cup. She thought about the child she had been, and the person she was now. When she was young, she had sometimes felt old, as if she'd been born and lived life many times. As she'd grown older, she had often felt as inexperienced and easily fooled as a toddler. Time and wisdom were tricksy things. Hearing the silence, Peake lifted his head and stared at her; then stared long and hard at their visitor before laying his head down again. “Young people think oldness is the bottom of a mountain,” Matilda said finally. “In truth, it is the top. I am old, because I have lived a whole life. I have climbed a long, long way. When I look back the way I have come, I can see the town I was raised in, and my mother and father. I see houses I lived in, friends that I made, people and pets that I loved. I see the wrong turns I took, places where I tripped, places where I skipped and sang and ran. I can see for years and years. To have such a view, you have to be standing on top of a mountain. The top is a difficult place to be — it's windy and it's perilous, and lonely sometimes — but it is the top, and there's nowhere else to go.”

The boy had curled up on the settee while Matilda spoke, propping his chin on his palm. When she fell silent, he unexpectedly smiled. Smiling curved his eyes into crescents, so he looked like a sunny creature from a birthday card. Matilda guessed he was probably a clever boy, full of wit and curiosity, a thorn in his teacher's side, a ringleader of his friends. When his mother asked him to do something, he did it well, although only after the correct degree of complaint. “Are you warmer now?” she asked.

The boy glanced at the heater, where the row of flames was doing its agitated dance behind spindly metal bars. The dancers were blue and orange, tossing their heads and swinging their hips and kicking up their feet. His nose was no longer pink, and it creased when he shook his head. He raised a hand and pointed, saying, “From the top of the mountain, do you see a girl in a boat?”

On the sideboard behind Matilda stood a brown-and-white photograph glassed inside a silver frame. In the photo, a slim young lady in a long oilskin coat stood at the helm of a spry white boat. The boat's canvas sails were rolled, but a breeze was blowing the girl's dark hair about her shoulders and face. All around the girl and the vessel bucked a playful sea, and the boat was anchored into place at the end of a taut rope. It was impossible to decide if the photograph was a picture of a sailing boat, or the portrait of a girl.

Matilda did not bother turning in her chair — she knew what the photograph looked like. “Yes,” she said, “I see that girl. She is the one I see all the time, whether I'm looking for her or not.”

“She's you, isn't she?”

“She was me — when I wasn't an acorn or a tree, but somewhere in between.”

“Were you a sailor?”

Matilda shrugged. “When you're old, there are a lot of things you have been. A tree is just a single thing, but it has different branches. All the branches are important — all of them make up the tree. On one of my branches, I was a sailor. Although, in truth, more a searcher than a sailor.”

“What were you searching for?”

Matilda paused, wanting the right words. “I searched for the answer to a question. I sailed the world trying to find it, and eventually I did. But some answers don't finish a quest — they merely start it. If everything had been finished back then,” she told her visitor, “I don't think you would be here.”

The boy reached out and took a biscuit, broke it into pieces, and ate it in several resolute bites, as if to show that, now he was here, he did not intend leaving until he was good and ready. “And where would
you
be?” he asked, eyeing her steadily. “Would you be here, sitting in this room, with just a dog to keep you company?”

“Who knows?” Matilda contemplated the walls, the crowd of cold ornaments. “The view from the mountaintop is good, but you can only see clearly the road you took to reach where you stand. The other roads — the paths you might have taken, but didn't — are all around you too, but they are ghost roads, ghost journeys, ghost lives, and they are always hidden by cloud.”

The boy's gray gaze wandered over her face. In the shallow wrinkles of her skin were whispers of the girl Matilda had been. The boy himself was unmarked and flawless, nobody except himself. “I would like another biscuit,” he said somberly. “I would like more tea.”

T
he dark-haired girl who would stand at the helm of a lean white sailing boat was born in the grandest house of a town that sprawled along a pure-white coastline, its windows turned to the sea. Her parents named her Matilda Victoria Adelaide, but that is a big name for a small girl, so almost everyone cut its size down to Maddy. As a child Maddy was slender and silent, yet she was not a delicate thing. She lived what was rather a lonesome life, but she was never filled with pity for herself. She was like a wildflower which grows in what earth it can claim, what sunlight touches it, what rain falls on it, and is grateful and happy. She was like a piece of glass that has been tossed in water for a long time: mysterious but simple, without sharp edges, and not as fragile as it looks.

Her father was an important man, although Maddy wasn't sure what he did that made him so, other than being broad and gruff. She was rather scared of him, though he treated her with the same blunt fairness that he dealt out to all things. Her knowledge that Papa was important made him something to fear, maybe — most important things are also frightening. When she walked with him through town, which she did not often do, Maddy saw that people were pleased to receive Papa's attention — pleased, and also alarmed, like children being noticed by a nun. Maddy knew that her father had lots of money, because he was often away from home earning it. When she was small and her mother said the word “earning,” Maddy hadn't understood what she meant. She decided that Mama had meant to say “ironing.” So for much of her childhood Maddy believed that her father's job was to heat a great iron on a great stove and to press all the world's paper money flat so it would sit tidily in pockets and in cash-register tills. Such a job would be hot and heavy work, which explained Papa's gruffness as well as his importance. One memorable day the iron man visited her at boarding school, and cut a swathe across the quadrangle with his lofty imperiousness, and took his daughter out of lessons and to a restaurant for lunch; as he climbed into the brougham to leave, he gave Maddy a pound which he had ironed especially flat, which crackled like autumn when she closed it in her hand. She spent the pound immediately, but kept the recollection of that water-smooth note forever — as well as the memory of another gift, the first present Papa ever gave her, a toy felt giraffe that Maddy had desperately loved, that sat on her pillow and watched with beady eyes throughout the years of her growing up until the day when, feeling burdened and stormy and older than she was, Maddy threw it into a bag of castaways that were sent to the underdressed and toyless poor. And afterward, when the giraffe was gone, Maddy felt more impoverished than anyone who'd ever lived. She had discovered she could be callous and stupid. The discovery of these faults combined with the loss of her toy felt like a mortal wound. She looked at the lovely things that surrounded her, the ribbons and bracelets and necklaces and buckles and silk flowers and china-faced dolls, and none of them was a consolation. She pined for what she had let go. Then and there Maddy vowed that, for the rest of her life, she would hold tightly to what she loved.

The only person who called Maddy by her weighty Matilda-Victoria-Adelaide name was her mother, of whom Maddy was also afraid. As with so many grown-up ladies, Mama seemed to teeter forever on the crumbly threshold of fury. When she was furious, she did not shriek or hurl shoes. Instead she slivered her eyes and turned away, as if her daughter were the most disappointing, most disagreeable, most time-wasting creature in the world. Like her father, Maddy's mother had a job, which was to fret the fate of mites in foundling hospitals. The mites were not bugs, but children; the children lived in hospitals, but not because they were sick. In fact they were too healthy, and their numbers forever increased. Maddy found it all very confusing, but for Mama it was endlessly diverting. She organized money-raising occasions for herself and her friends — trips to the theater and races, card games, dress-ups, progressive dinners and guest speakers — at which the mysterious mites and their doctorless hospitals were rarely mentioned and never encountered, yet over whose fates there was nonetheless much fretting done. When she was little, Matilda felt some resentment toward these mites that Mama loved, and thought they should make their own mothers love them, and not steal all the love out of hers.

Once a month Mama stayed overnight in the city, bringing back from its fashionable stores hats and ties and furry cloaks for her husband and daughter so they would always be above criticism. But for her regular forays to the metropolis, Mama would have speedily expired from fresh air and ennui. “It's fine to be a big fish in a small pond,” she told her daughter, waving a dismissive hand at the shops and people of their town, “but give this fish the ocean any day.” In fact their house was only a short walk from the ocean, but Mama never visited it because the salt played havoc with her hair. As a child, Maddy thought her mother was beautiful, like a unicorn or an ivory carving. Mama laughed with fluty lightness, the way a handkerchief falls. Her nose was as prettily pinched as a thorn. Maddy loved to contemplate her; though not to touch or talk to her. Mama, as Maddy knew her, was blazing and reposeful, chilling and torrid. She was the four seasons put together inside a person. It was hard to know what to say to somebody like that.

When Maddy was home from school, the family ate supper at one end of the shiny dining table. Her parents asked her questions and listened to her, and Maddy tried to be interesting and worthy of their regard. Though she knew she was a small thing in their busy lives, she also knew they loved her as much as they could manage under the circumstances. Maddy had her drawbacks, and at the dinner table she was always heavily aware of them. She wasn't a doll, something Mama could pet and play with; clothes and parties confused her. She wasn't a boy, someone who could stand in the iron man's shadow and learn to be frightening like him. Maddy was, in fact, an overlookable child, doubtful and reluctant in her dealings with others, mousey as a mouse. She was easily hurt, deceived and dispirited. Left to her own devices, however, she was inventive and independent, and smart for her age. Luckily, she was smart enough to realize that her mother and father loved her as much as she needed them to. She wasn't necessary, not like money or the swish city stores: but she did belong, she had a place between her parents, and they would not let her go. They would not put her in a castaway bag and send her off to the poor. At home Maddy was safe, and she knew it. Just the same, she was a worried child.

The things that worried Maddy worry many children, although each believes that he or she is alone with their woes. She was, for a start, so diffident. There were countless waifish children in town, and at boarding school there were a hundred garrulous girls: but Maddy did not know the complex magic that turns an acquaintance into a friend, so no one was her particular confederate. Nobody bullied her or called her names — but many thought she was a snob, because shyness often looks like haughtiness. Others might have liked to befriend her, yet could find no way of speaking to her. She always seemed as nervy as a foal when approached. Mostly, other children rejected her on the grounds that she was strange, and strangeness among children is despised. In truth, Maddy was strange, the way an octopus or an anemone or a goat's eye is strange. She had a perfect right to exist, and she was perfectly made in every way . . . but she seemed not-quite-right for the world, as if she'd been raised by monkeys or wolves. Part of her longed to be scathing and poised, to whisper in ears and skip a long rope and receive perfumed invitations to parties — and part of her couldn't bear the idea. In her heart, Maddy knew she was good, and that difference is rare and special: the problem was that no one else seemed to think the same. And so she came to understand that she stood apart, and it made her feel important, and unwantedly sad.

She was happiest at home, by herself, on long weekends and holidays. She played with her dolls for days at a time, deep inside their intricate lives of deadly rivalry and adoration. On creamy summer evenings she walked to the beach, stepping through rock pools with her boots around her neck. She watched crabs digging their evening homes, knelt on the pier to see stingrays sweep the shallows. On scorching afternoons she roamed the hills, pressing her hands to the trunks of eucalypts, picking cockatoo feathers from the grass. She watched bull ants marching off to battle and mahogany snakes sleeping on stones. Rabbits thumped the cracked earth, the hot air tasted like medicine. The gum trees were friendly to her, nodding their olive heads. Bark peeled from them, brittle as cicada shell; in their branches stood tawny frogmouths, their beaks lordishly raised. In red shadows cast by rocky cliffs lived a nargun, who was also her friend. Shambling, old as the hills, larger than a draft horse, the nargun emerged from its cave snarling, its clawed feet crushing the leaf litter, the stink of stagnant water fuggy in its coat. Its tongue would flicker from its hideous head as it told her where an echidna lay buried, a fox was crouched. The nargun's eyes were bigger than top hats, its body groaned when it moved. Despite its size, it was a swift and formidable hunter; it dined on bullocks ambushed at water holes, and it snacked on unpleasant young ladies. Maddy wished she could ride the nargun to school — across the quadrangle and up the staircase and into the classroom. She heard the floor splinter beneath its terrible weight, saw her classmates fleeing like mice. She lay on her back telling the creature her troubles, and the nargun unlatched its scarlet mouth like a trapdoor to growl, “If no one cares for you, care for no one in return.” And under the brilliant sun, surrounded by trees, deafened by insects and dry with thirst, this sounded like excellent advice. Maddy didn't need anyone. She could live by herself in the bush, and nothing would matter to her.