The last time she’d seen her mother, Margaret, sentences were clipped. There were long pauses over everything unsaid; inside, everything unsaid was a steel streak, vibrating. The anger was about everything and nothing. Sarah didn’t know absolutely that Margaret felt the same, but the air was silent with rage, and the tea grew cold in their cups. Outside, a kookaburra laughed: a madwoman in a B-Grade thriller. The giant gum in the centre of the circular driveway sieved the light through long drooping grey-green leaves. A shaft of dust-dancing light at an angle through the window ended at the corner of the coffee table. At the bottom of the garden, Sarah’s daughter Lissa climbed the old ivied tree that Sarah had once climbed, when she was thirteen, when she was bored and alone.
Later, the silence lay over the three of them while on the television news jets screamed behind the correspondent. He was hunched over his microphone, hand cupped to his ear, shouting about numbers dead and buildings destroyed. There was vision of a ceremony: medals pinned to formal chests.
The pub is done out in gothic black and doof-doof thump-thumps from maybe everywhere. Sarah squints around: too dark to see, everything sucked into black. The too-cool bartender has icecube eyes. Young, young man. Like Sonny. God. Sonny and Sarah and Jill sitting at a small wobbly table; Jill with a compressed grin staring at a punter in black leather trousers straining with packaged genitals. Sonny leans forward.
‘WANNA DANCE?’
He is a young man; he thinks this is dance music. He is living through some crush on an older woman: this is Sarah. Jill finds it funny. Music pulsing like blood through the heart. Hearts adjusting to it: amazing. Not a cell that isn’t throbbing in time. So tired after a day in the wind on the beach and face whipped pink with cold. Hot in here.
‘OKAY,’ she shouts back. Jill waves her glass in benediction, mouth mouthing ‘Go ahead,’ and a smile that reads: do you good. Get drunk and dance. The thing that you do at times like these. Sarah makes a face at Jill sitting there with her eyebrows all quizzical.
On the dance floor the music is bigger than life. The air itself boom-booms. Sarah shifts forward and back, forward and back, one foot to another. Self-conscious. Sonny has a wide grin. He leans to her ear and shouts: ‘YOU DANCE SO SEVENTIES. IT’S CUTE.’ She doesn’t answer; she raises an eyebrow. He has hair in spikes, many earrings and a boyish smile. Because he is a boy. God.
From somewhere someone has released chemical fog. Smells like candles maybe, long slow puffs rolling along the floor and up legs; there are people losing outline.
Everything has turned to fiction. This is not a happy place, it will not do any good. Black and stale. Blurred. Through the throb-throb all thoughts are chop-chopped. Shreds. A wisp of Sarah today driving an hour to the house. My house? My house? Margaret’s house….. Margaret weeks ago not so long ago dead on the cold marble floor damp from her shower, water needle-sprayed from steam hot becoming cold while the phone rang, while Sarah rang to say… to say… Not sorry. Never sorry. What was I going to say?
Sonny smiles. He is indistinct in the fog. She is polite and smiles back.
Didn’t go into the house today – Margaret’s house empty of Margaret – but slammed the car door, walked to the beach. Winding roads, patches of ti-tree, close-snipped lawns of saturated green, roses and birches, through the scrub and out onto the path over the hump of the fill to the beach with the sky overhead. Wind in the face. There’s no air here. The walls are gone and people are shadows. On the beach with the slamming sea and drunken spray and a seagull doing an air show. Banking, wings juddering. All those hours and days in Margaret’s rooms, all that whispering through Margaret’s papers. Margaret’s life packed up. Old letters, bills, aerogrammes. Remember aerogrammes? A picture of Margaret. Young, wide eyes and dark hair strong with curls, before she’d pulled it back and dabbed on the Chanel. Old postcards:
Am tan, fit and admired by all. I assume your envy. Back soon. Missing Margaret’s grace. You know we’re all in love,
Prepare the ice!
Cheerio, Jack.
Cocktail chatter, pearls and earring glinting and the shift of medals on a formal chest. Big men quiet with power; canapés borne by a serving shadow in white.
Sarah holding the postcard and in her head the murmur of adults and a light laugh, the clink of a glass on the glass-topped table and the movement of a warm-damp breeze, the rusty tingle of a cyclo passing beyond the hedge; a whisper of spinning spokes. The extended clatter of a motor-bike – imagine chickens stacked in baskets, swaying just a little.
On the beach the wet wind in her face had screamed; she’d gasped, screwed her face, clamped her teeth with cold. The fog has filled everything. I am wrapped in white. Everyone has gone. Boom-boom: I am inside a heart. Boom-boom. No floor, no walls. All the circling, mother and daughter. Arguments that never made sense. Come here; keep away. But what will you do? I’ll paint. But what will you do? I’m an artist. That’s what I do. What will you do? You’re not listening to me, are you.
(In Sarah’s corner of the vast warehouse artists’ workshop there’s a portrait of Margaret. In that space marked off with a concertina of louvred doors on one side. For months now, Margaret’s portrait leaning against the wall, Margaret pale, old, dressed in short colourless curls, despairing mauves and pinks and florals. Weak empty hands and dark eyes.)
Boom-boom. Everything has gone. White. Sarah alone, looking here, there, but everything has gone. Sarah compacted by sound: boom-boom. Where’s the air? There’s no air! On the beach she’d had gooseflesh from the wind. The sea clawed at sand. The sea swallows everything. I am wrapped in white and there is noise all around. Breathe slowly. There is no air! Breathe slowly. The sea swallows everything. Everything swallowed until there is nothing left. Nothing but me. The sea swallows everything. But not everything. Margaret (my mother, my mother) died alone in her bathroom. Cold, on the marble floor.
Breathe slowly. Sarah’s mother and Sarah’s baby, long ago. Her mother, Margaret, and her baby and her husband. David. Sarah and the toddler. Sarah and David, and Lissa in school clothes. Margaret and David. Margaret and David. Chuckles, he always made Margaret laugh. Unhappy, unhappy. Unhappied. I have been unhappied. So sore it smarts. There are photos Sarah will not look at now he’s left. I can’t see, I can’t see. David, always active, always on the go. And Funny. Margaret would always laugh. Great mates, the splosh and the rattle of the washing-up. Sarah’s father gone, dead long ago. Sarah in the corner, felt like always in the corner. Reading maybe. Sketching. I don’t know which way is up. Of course I do. When David left, Margaret rang him. She said so. Of course I do. Close my eyes. Oh God. Close them. Boom-boom. This way up. Margaret would watch Sarah, mouth shut. Not saying anything. Nothing about David frozen out and gone. Margaret angry at Sarah because David is gone. Saying nothing. I am the right way up. Open my eyes no there’s nothing close them.
Sarah went this morning from the beach to the path through the trees where the wind stopped screaming and silence fell, cheeks still red and warm after all that cold slapping. Down the path; down the slope with the dusty smell of ti-tree. Sat by the tiny stream hugging knees, watching minute flicking fish, listened to the wet burble of shallow water around pebbles like tiny eggs, grains like white and gray pearls. Boom-boom. Spent a lot of adolescence here.
When evening had fallen and all of Margaret was in boxes, Sarah’s brother asked about music for the funeral. ‘Jesu Joy,’ Sarah said. ‘She liked that.’ He said, ‘Did she?’ and it had a hollow sound like emptiness. His face tired with getting older.
Forgotten cousins at the funeral, blue veins on their ancient hands. Could almost hear Margaret: ‘Look at them. Poor old things!’ With a laugh, handing a whisky to David. As she used to to Jack, when her was dark, her chin firm, profile Grecian with a witty beauty lit on warm Asian nights accepting the plaudits of men in evening suits, Sarah’s father, and Jack…
Open my eyes. Steady. Wipe my eyes. There is a shadow; her feet are on the ground. There. Sarah is breathing slowly. There is a shadow next to the shadow. Sonny moving to the music. Keep my eyes on the shadows.
What was I going to say?
© J Crozier