Anticipation (25 page)

There’s a long pause.
No
looms large between us. I’m surprised at how nervous I feel.

‘How about,’ says Jake carefully, ‘we do it together? Split the profit. You and me.’

Interesting. I bring my eyebrows back down, play for time. ‘Yeah? Those sorts of deals can get tricky. There’d be a lot of sorting out to do. You know, contracts, lawyers — who’s liable for what, and all that.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Jake nods. ‘There’d be all that to go through.’

He watches me for a second or two.

‘Or we could just shake hands.’

I laugh. ‘On what, exactly?’

‘I put up half the cash, and we split everything down the middle. Fifty-fifty. Profit and expenses.’ He straightens up, takes a step forward, dusts his hands on his jeans and holds the right out to me. And I’m reminded, for some reason, of the kayak instructor at fourth form camp, his extended paddle arresting my drift downstream.

‘Fifty-fifty?’ Always the odds, if you think about it. Yes or no. You will or you won’t.

‘Straight down the line,’ Jake says firmly.

I take his hand. An oddly intimate meeting of palms. Fingers closing. Our first premeditated touch. We stand there in the midday light, agreeing, waiting for someone to let go.

It’s a slow-moving disease, SCA3. It won’t kill Maggie for six to twenty-nine years, so it’s okay if I can’t get back down south for a while. There isn’t any hurry.

It’s an awkward time for me. Gillian and I have just bought the business, and suddenly I’m up to my ears in accountants and printing bills and complaints and receptionist applications. Meanwhile I’m putting together commercial deals on the side to pay for it all, because I can’t be seen to compete with the rest of the agents in the office. There is no
I
in
team
.

When I do manage to get away for a couple of days, I find, to my surprise, that Maggie is much better. Physio three times a week has improved her walk, and drugs have almost stopped the shaking. Bradbury Street has changed a bit too. It’s not that it’s shrunk and grown more ordinary — I saw all that last time I was here. But from the moment my taxi crunches up the drive I can sense an alteration. Perhaps it’s a shift in tense. My past coasting down to a full stop. This is where my mother lived all my life — the part that she was there for.

The first thing I notice, when we sit down in the eighties-tribute lounge, is that Maggie’s knitting bag is gone. For as long as I can remember it’s lain on or beside the sofa, squishy and fat and needle-spiky, the closest thing we had to a family pet, and its absence leaves quite a hole. That wrap-over cable cardie will never be finished now. My mother has purled her last row.

She doesn’t seem too sad. ‘I don’t have much time,’ she explains, ‘for knitting anyway.’

Looking at the hospital appointments calendar stuck to the fridge, I can see what she means.

‘What did you do with it?’ I ask. ‘The knitting bag?’

‘I gave it to Jeannie from Institute.’ Maggie looks at me sharply. ‘Why? You didn’t want it, did you?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘It’s not as if you’d ever use it.’ She smooths a fold in her skirt. ‘You were always such a clumsy knitter.’

It’s not just the bag. My old bed, I discover, is missing as well. In its place is a brand new queen-size mattress and base with lofty sham pillows and brand-name sheets in a surprisingly tasteful pattern. I have to admit, once I get over the shock, that it’s comfortable. I lie back in its scented depths, watch the moon climb over Queens Park and wonder whom Maggie plans to impress — I can’t imagine anyone coming to stay here.

It’s a shame I don’t go straight to sleep, it turns out, because Maggie has a busy morning planned for us, and if I was going to make a dent in her to-do list I should have been up with the neighbour’s rooster and the bright white southern dawn.

First of all, we have to go to the supermarket, because even though she gives her helper Lorraine a list of things to pick up every week, it’s not the same as going yourself, and Maggie can really get around quite well as long as she doesn’t have to push the trolley. Next, we go to the other supermarket — the one that has the nice bacon — and the bottle store for whisky and wine, which she can’t ask Lorraine to buy because Lorraine is a member of one of those fierce new churches that have sprung up all over town, and we also need printer ink and begonias on special at three for ten dollars.

It’s a beautiful day, with a clear blue sky and a wind like a knife. I navigate the wide empty streets in my mother’s Yaris, braking too late, missing crucial turns, indicating with my windscreen wipers. Apparently I don’t know the back of my hand all that well. Maggie is tight-lipped in the passenger seat. She never did like me driving.

It’s a bit like taking a theme park ride through my derelict life — tootling through the haunted mine, knowing that any second now, some ghost from the past will leap out, the jaunty confronting bones of abandoned friendships. Invercargill isn’t that small a town. There’s no reason why we should bump into anyone I know. But of course we do.

There they are in the garden centre, Greg and Cheryl, choosing a potted rose bush. I can still pick the back of his head out of a crowd. Which is lucky, since it gives me time to duck into the hedging section before they turn their trolley around. Through a
stack of leylandii, I watch them walk up the aisle.

Cheryl, I see, is pregnant. They wheel past me, Greg’s face above a mass of salmon-pink blooms, and I realise that we’re strangers.

Maggie emerges from Evergreen Shrubs and gives me a look, but doesn’t say a word, and I’m sufficiently moved to buy a bunch of sunflowers for her on our way out.

Back at Bradbury Street, I make us a cup of tea. A temporary respite, because my tasks are far from over. There are the begonias to plant. And it’s such a shame all the plums off our tree are going to waste, just lying there on the ground.

Inside, Maggie’s had nice new curtains made (a first for this DIY house) for my bedroom, which need hanging. And Jodie the cleaner can only do two hours a week and has a shoulder injury, so while I’ve got the stepladder out, the high-up things need dusting. There’s a speech recognition programme to install on Maggie’s computer, and since she isn’t too good with scissors these days, a daunting pile of ‘Dear Dinahs’ is waiting to be scrapbooked.

The secret to good embroidery
, I read, pausing to rub my arms,
is tension. It is vital to ensure that each stitch lies against its ground just so, neither loose nor tight, before proceeding to the next. This is especially true when embroidering silks, because an ill-judged stitch cannot be undone — the mark of the needle, once made, is indelible
.

Ah, the nimble-fingered Hardings. I cut the column out and paste it into
2004
, trying not to smudge the soft ink.

Unless you alter the pattern, your mistake will always show
.

On Monday, I drive Maggie across town to her appointments, and it’s just like old times, except the waiting rooms are bigger.

Her presence in the hospital creates quite a buzz, my one-
in-a
-hundred-thousand mother — around here, everybody knows our name. The nurses are charming and chatty. Hurrying doctors pause to say
Hi, how are you
, which is nice, even if they don’t have quite enough time to wait for a reply. And a few minutes after we arrive, it’s as if a fire drill’s been called, because children in scrubs are coming from everywhere, cupboards and corridors, and they all pile into the exam room we’re waiting for and then our name is called.

The students look and listen very hard. One gets to hammer Maggie’s knees, and one shines a light in her eyes. They’re all very sweet, but behind their concern you can see that they’re excited. Even Dr Singh, who’s in charge, has a glint in his eye. I don’t begrudge it to them — what triumph doesn’t stem from someone else’s misfortune?

‘Lily and James are doing a paper on me,’ Maggie explains, as the rest of the crowd moves off, leaving two of the students behind.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ says James, flashing me a smile.

He’ll be really quite handsome when he grows up. I’m tempted to say I do mind, just to see what he does. ‘Not at all,’ I tell him.

You can always count on us Hardings to do our bit for science.

When we get home, Maggie and I talk about the students for a while. Then we watch TV and wait for the dark. I’m getting used to my bed.

I
n Emily Place, the apartment is down to a bare shell now, its old bones scraped — rearranged a little, here and there — and ready to take on whatever new form we decide to give it. A
do-over
, as the Americans say. A chance to rethink old choices.

Of course, not everything can be changed. We can’t alter windows or the location of drains. The chimney has to stay where it is, if we want it at all, and the cleverest design in the world won’t gain us an extra square centimetre of floorspace. But within the confines of the shell, we’re free to do as we please.

As was its previous owner, the cousinless orphan spinster Mabel Johanssen, only child of only children, who had the temerity to die without blood in the privacy of her room. She could have been anyone, Mabel. Anyone she wanted to be, anyone she said. Who was there to argue?

I’ve taken out her living room wall. Or rather, Jake has. The proportions are better with the old hallway gone. More relaxed, as if the apartment can finally spread out, stretch its legs after all these years.

We’ve ripped out the little eighties kitchen too, knocked it through to the master bedroom next door so we can put in an
en-suite
bathroom. I was worried it might be cramped, but now it’s plastered up I can see that everything’s going to fit in nicely.

I’m popping over to see the work most days now. After breakfast, Ella and I bring the boat across, have a run on the beach and take Jake a coffee about ten-thirty. There’s not always that much to see or discuss — he knows what he’s doing, after all — but it’s nice to catch up, just in case. Stay involved with the small stuff. And if I can’t make it — because the weather’s too
rough, usually — Jake calls me to check in.

Since I’m passing, I quite often call in at work as well. Ella, despite the crushed scallop shell sand she leaves all over the floor, is a bit of a star with the team, and Gillian is starting to threaten us with an office. Some days I have lunch with Sally, or Andy, or Paul, or all three. More often, I just pick up something for Jake and me, and now it’s getting warm again, we eat out on the terrace. I do my best to avoid the evening traffic, but even so, it can be six o’clock before I make it back to the island.

Looking around the apartment today, I have to say that it looks so good, stripped back like this, all the rubble gone, it’s almost a shame to put anything back. Clutter the old girl up again with fluff and trinkets, when I could leave her clean and white. Empty except for a couple of bento boxes and two deckchairs. But we’re doing the final measure for the new kitchen today — open plan, naturally — and after I’ve seen the joiners, Andy wants to take me shopping for taps and bathroom tiles.

‘Not that you really need me,’ he insisted, over lunch last week. ‘You’re perfectly capable of choosing on your own.’

Which might be true. Maybe it’s something to do with the sound insulation Jake’s put under the floor, or the emptiness, or the double-glazing, but the apartment has a particular kind of quiet now, an acoustic clarity — unaffected by power tools or
Afternoons with Jim Mora
— in which it seems easy to decide what will work and what won’t, what should stay and what should go. Voices don’t linger longer than they should. There are no echoes to confuse me.

On my final day at Bradbury Street, I go through Maggie’s wardrobe. No skeletons, just jumpers. A woolly montage of old times. The Arran sleeve that grew beside me on the plane to London, knit-one purl-one through thunder clouds in the dark. The Kaffe Fassett coat that took most of the nineties. And tucked away to one end, out of sight, a big double-breasted cable cardie,
navy with gold buttons. Six of them, anchor-embossed. I used to play with them when I got home from school — for months they lived, like sweets, in a little white paper sachet inside the knitting bag, along with a picture of a handsome blond man whom my father, even when identically dressed, did not at all resemble.

It’s not that long since the last time I was down here. It was 18 November, to be precise. The day after Maggie’s sixtieth birthday. (We had a quiet dinner at home, in the end. Apparently she’d been celebrating all week — at the paper, the hospital, with the Institute girls — and she was sick of parties.) I remember thinking she looked thinner.

I left her working on her column. Answering a question about tatting, one key at a time,
tap, tap, tap
, with the rubber end of an HB pencil. On a glorious morning, sharp and gold and blue.

She thought she might do a bit in the garden later on. I told her I’d see her on Christmas Eve. It’s not often that I’m early.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Dr Lily told me, when I got down — she’s had her braces out now and is working Critical Care. ‘The paramedics stabilised her on the way in — there’s no way they could have known.’

Known?

‘About your mother’s DNR, I mean.’ I must have looked at Dr Lily oddly, because she stopped and caught her lip in her straight white teeth. ‘Maggie has said that if anything should happen to her, she doesn’t want us to resuscitate her,’ she explained. ‘I assumed you knew.’

I wasn’t surprised — I’d assumed I’d know too. As it was, I was unreasonably shocked. That’s the danger of assumption. Maggie, perhaps, had assumed she’d be dying of complications related to SCA3, not a heart attack suffered while trying to raise the tulip bulbs. And I didn’t know whether to be pleased for her or sorry.

‘We’ve made her as comfortable as we can,’ Dr Lily went on. ‘Now we’re going to be moving her into another room. You’ll have some privacy there.’ She stopped again, frowned, and looked up at me earnestly. ‘At least this way, you get time to say goodbye.’

Ample time, it turned out. We were in there for three days. Although, in fairness, Maggie didn’t know who I was for a lot of
it. She was sinking under a stream of morphine, going down and down. But she kept taking breaths, open-mouthed and
ragged-throated
.

In, two, three, four.

Out, two, three, four.

Five. Six. Seven.

In
.

Those hind-brain neurons pulling themselves together, doing their job just fine. Nobody to help her. I wasn’t brave enough. The others had their hands tied.

Through the night, they became the only sounds in the world, those breaths. And when they stopped, the silence was perfect.

I stayed for a while. I wasn’t sure of the order of things. What stops first. If Maggie was still alive under there, her mind’s eye open, looking up at the light. It was five in the morning, and for some of us, the sun was coming up.

‘At least it’s all over now,’ Dr Lily said.

Grandpa William said the same thing twenty years ago, at Nanny Biggs’ funeral. They were both wrong. It isn’t over. It ends with me.

I’m not sure what to do with all the jumpers. If I knew how, I’d like to take a piece of each one, cut out squares, sew a patchwork Maggie-blanket. Wouldn’t that be nice? Something cosy to remember us by. But I don’t, and I can’t. It has to be all or nothing. And I really don’t have the room.

In the end, I give most of them to Jeannie from Institute. She says they might try and put together a show — a kind of ‘Dear Dinah’ retrospective. I tell her Maggie would have liked that. I think it’s true.

I do keep one or two things. The vest with the rampant stags I envied so much when I was six. Roger Galbraith’s cardie. (I like to think it smells of him, but it doesn’t really — it’s just the embroidered pot-pourri sachets that Maggie had hanging in the wardrobe.) And the Kaffe Fassett coat. I drag it home with me
on the plane even though it takes up a whole suitcase. I have no intention of wearing it. But maybe I’ll have it framed, tell my friends it’s textile art — that sort of thing’s hip these days.

Before I go, Dr Lily offers — not for the first time — to test my genes, and I wonder if she and James have finished their paper.

I’ve still got the coat. I never did get round to having it framed. But since I moved to the island, it’s hung from a pair of vintage oars above my stairs. Even after four years, it’s too bright not to notice there — every time I pass it, it makes me smile. My artful mother, paddling at last.

It was the week after Maggie died that I first came across the island. I’d planned to spend that Christmas in Invercargill, you see. But I flew back, excess baggage and all, which is how I came to be in my apartment browsing the Real Estate Institute database on Christmas Day.

I could have called someone. Sally, or Andy and Paul. They would have set an extra place for me, made room. But I was alone and I wanted to feel it. A test, if you like. Because from now on, it all came down to me — everything, small and large, that had passed, all those years, between Maggie and me, could only be as I remembered it. No one else knew. There could be no correction, no argument. No
she didn’t, it wasn’t, you were
.

I held — I hold — them all by myself, Maggie and Vivien, Sarah and Will, Ted and Harry and Babs, Joshua and Marguerite and Tobias and Beth and Hal and Marialuisa, a finger’s breadth above the surface of non-existence. They’re going down with me.

But until that day, I want — I wanted, then, five years ago, the summer my mother died — to remember clearly. To keep my dead close. Like the mediaeval monks who set the corpses of their brethren up to putrefy around the dinner table, just in case anyone should forget, as they ate their soup, what was coming to them, lest anyone rot without warning. They got used to eating that way, I dare say, in time. People always do.

On Christmas Day 2006 I made macaroni and cheese for me and the dead. And at some point before evening, I passed the test — or perhaps the test failed — because I found I wasn’t alone enough. Eight floors and a video entry-phone could no longer provide enough distance.

It wouldn’t take much. A thoughtless finger on the entry button. Stepping outside at the wrong moment, letting the door swing shut, forgetting to check over my shoulder. Someone could get in. A foolhardy Girl Guide or pizza menu leafletter, clients in the neighbourhood, Jehovah’s Witnesses, friends’ husbands passing by. A Ben Berkeley or a Roger Galbraith, my Anthony Boucher or Lester Bodgewick. Slipping in like moths at dusk, unnoticed until I turned on the light and they began to flutter. A sliding door left open to the night, that’s all it would take. An unattended flame.

Moths never fly out again — have you noticed that? No matter how many doors and windows you leave open. Once they’re in, they’re with you till they die. However they come to do so.

Actually, I don’t believe flame draws them in — not particularly. Those bodies we find in our cooling candle wax are just coincidence, bad luck, a function of probability and population numbers. If you watch, you’ll see that it’s white light most moths crave. They think it’s a far-off moon, some scientists say, and no matter how many times they bang into it, are incapable of learning from their mistake.

In time they’ll evolve. The moths that don’t batter themselves to death on our bayonet bulbs — those without interest, or faith, in the moon, those that fly by other means — will go on to breed, pass their DNA down. The moths of the future will avoid artificial light. Which will be much better for all concerned, don’t you think? We’re only hastening the happy day, when we leave the porch light on.

But I’m digressing, and I really must move on — Jake’s opening the champagne.

That night, the island appeared on my laptop screen — nothing more than an aerial shot, taken at low tide — as if I’d wished it into being. A gift from the dead, or the gods — or, as it turned out,
the administrators of the defunct Shining Spirit. There were no additional pictures to click on. Just that one brusque image from Terranet, with the boundary lines overlaid, the sort you download for ten dollars fifty.

A good agent would have paid for a photographer, had the boatshed shot from the water at high tide, staged a table at sunset with flowers and wine. I checked the listing date. A good agent would have dropped it years ago and stopped wasting their time.

Still, I saw something in that one uninviting photograph, the scruffy rocks and off-putting mud, the arbitrary red lines. Containment, I suppose. So I called, even though it was Christmas Day. And Dion answered.