Pursuit Page 5

  I want to tell you how lonely it must have been, to be the one left behind, curating the contents of those barrels, waiting to show us when we came.

  How each person’s perseverance is only after all the simple matter of an accumulation of breaths.

  How these small acts of perseverance hardly ever add up to something history cares two figs about.

  How we left her that day, too, and drove back down to our hotel, and my brothers and I squeezed onto the concrete balcony and elbowed our way to the railing, so we could perch on the bottom rung and look out across the sand and whisper about the tourists, glossy with tanning spray, beating back against the currents of dark water swelling around their waists.

  How that last image is a palimpsest. Faint beneath it are men on ships, and fainter still the traces of all the bad things that followed them.

  How sometimes I hate the whole notion of endurance, mainly because it is the trick that hoodwinks us into staying in place.

  How breath is the only tool with which we fight extinction.

  For a long time I didn’t have the money or time to return, but, ten years afterwards, I travelled the Caribbean with a friend. Jamaica was on our list. We hitched a lift from Kingston to Montego Bay and waited in town for the Lambsriver bus. Shabba Ranks blared from a nearby sound system and I wandered over to a cart offering cigarettes for sale, negotiated a Benson & Hedges and a lit match from the woman tending it, standing to one side away from the crowd to smoke, wondering if anything would ever stop me feeling always and forever a visitor everywhere, but especially here.

  A slight, dark, gap-toothed man slotted himself into the space between cart and wall and hugged the cigarette-seller from behind. She kissed her teeth. ‘What you troubling me fah? You nah see me working?’

  But he spun around, addressing himself to the small crowd of us leaning against the wall. ‘You see this woman? Me love her bad, you see! Me love her bad!’

  You couldn’t help but grin, and when I looked at the woman she was smiling too.

  My friend and I, the people leaning against the wall, the music, the cigarette-seller’s lover, the way she laughed, leaning over the cart towards him, like she was peering into the bathroom mirror to paint her face. Here was a country. The place where, for me, desire had outlived memory. I felt my love for that whole place stir then; I felt love, like breath, conspiring with muscles and lungs and heart. I felt it as a thing harder to endure even than the history that had led to it.

  My friend and I took the bus to Lambsriver. My grandmother had sprained her wrist, but she’d still been cooking all morning. I made her sit at the table and, as I tied a makeshift sling across her shoulder, she spread the fingers of her good hand wide across the wood and seemed happy. I would have known what to say to her had the country not snapped itself in two, leaving her on one side and me on the other. I had one of those cardboard disposable cameras with me and I took a picture of her before I left, a snapshot that could not yet reach across the space and time between that moment and the one when I would find myself, about ten years later, driving slowly through her village, knowing that she was dying, when my memory of her sprained wrist and her joy about the sling would rear up at the sight of her little house, and I’d sit beside her holding her hand and trying to conjure up some important thing to say, when the woman my mum was paying to look after her rattled the Dutch pot in the sink as if impatient to see the back of me and it would strike me that it was too late for the thing I wanted: Gran’s approval, or at the very least, her forgiveness. As if guilt was the only thing I had to show after going out into the world, and coming back.

  ARIADNE

  Daisy Johnson

  A HOUSE

  MY mother has wandering hands and a restless body. She drags us between cities, on and off trains. The grass is always greener on the other side. She likes new things. When I was a toddler I grew used to the labyrinth of wine bars and pubs, to creeping beneath tables and lingering beside the swaying legs. I can find her in any room; I know the smell of her. She will not look for me but I will look for her. Each birthday she paints her face and bakes a cake that tastes of spice and too much lemon. I think she counts the days until I am old enough to fend for myself. She likes to blow out the candles together, counting down; she likes to tell me stories about her own wild teenage years. I think my father must be buried somewhere in the midst of them, staring out at me from all the other faces. His body looks a lot like hers and when he smiles he has her careful, doubting eyes. I see her, in spring, growing bored. She sits out on the stoop of our rented house until it gets dark. She chops her hair and leaves the enormous, lion’s tail of it in the sink. By summer we are on the move again. She buys me things but does not speak apologies. The train croissants dry my mouth out. She says the city we are going to has a wall almost all the way around it and a beautiful cathedral. I have seen it I have seen it I have seen it. On my birthdays I eat a cake with spice and too much lemon juice and I count each year until I am free. The house we roll up to has long solemn eaves crusted with old swallow’s nests and a narrow-shadowed garden churned by the roots of an oak.

  ANEW

  MY mother has always known how to bring love to her. In the summer storms drenched men come confused and frowning to our door saying they are lost and do not know where they are. In the mornings the postman stays for longer than it takes to deliver a letter. The galley kitchen smells of turmeric and babies’ breath. The long wooden table is already scarred with chopping and stained with juice from the herbs she has set growing. In the evenings the smell of her margaritas is strong enough to burn a clean path through the magic. She is gentler then. We watch cooking shows until late, her long legs on my lap. Sometimes she asks me to paint her toenails or plait her hair. I am undone by her. I see how it must be when she makes eye contact with someone in the bookshop or leans across to touch a barman’s arm. I see how everything about her says: I mean trouble and, also, I am for you. She makes me drinks but I will not have them. She is my mother but I keep my guard up by my face. I keep my wits about me. I watch her and so I know when she has met someone new, someone different. The kitchen smells like melted butter and she sings in the shower and as she gets ready. I watch the late-night cooking shows alone. She comes back almost speechless, seemingly undone. She strokes my hair. She stops chopping herbs and puts away her pestle and mortar. She bakes instead. The tall house is lifted with the smell of fresh bread, pastries. She puts on happy weight around her hips. She comes to my bedroom and stands in the doorway talking. She tells me she likes the material I have hung over the lamp, the colours I have painted the walls from old tester pots. I wait for her to turn. This house does not know us but I feel it waiting too.

  AGAIN

  THIS city was beautiful in the summer, but in the winter it turns hard. My neck hurts from watching my back. There is barely the relief of snow, only layers of ice over everything. The pipes burst and flood the kitchen. The turn I have been waiting for in her comes like the freeze. She berates the man who comes to fix the plumbing and will not pay him. She gets someone in to tear down the oak tree. I see her out there at three in the morning – stark by night-light – planting knobbly bulbs in the overturned dirt left from the torn-out tree. The windows of the house steam over and never seem to quite clear. She takes long, raging baths. I do not see her eat. I will not say that she sleeps. She locks herself in her room and I do not see her for months. She fills the air and I find myself scratching at the skin on my arms, sitting bolt upright in the night. I put on my coat and walk in the dead streets, through the gutted parks, the river like a black hole through the city. The walls close in around me. I know that at night she rages through the kitchen, eating everything that I buy. I never seem to be able to catch her at it, though sometimes the house trembles as she passes through, the shudder of her footsteps as if she has grown enormous. One night I am woken by her howls. They are sounds to wake the dead. The corridor feels full of hauntings. I bang my hands against
her door but she only wails as if torn apart. I sit on the floor and wait for it to end and – at some point – there is silence. I listen. The heating has long broken and I can see my breath like mercury in the air in front of my face. I hear something. Or think I do.

  A REPRIVE

  SHE comes back to me the way she always does. My seasonal mother. We read in her favourite bars or on benches in still-chilly parks. She tests me on my chemistry and philosophy. My birthday comes and – looking at her – I see not impatience but love, perhaps. A love made of hammers and nails. She makes friends with a butcher and brings home more meat than we can fit in the freezer. She likes them animal-like still: the ducks with their long, broken necks, the cloven pig hooves, the prairie oysters she likes fried on a chilly dawn. When she moves to hold me her pulse seems exuberant, inexhaustible. I know that she wants me wild and wilful as she but there is not room for two of us the same. I find myself drawn to quiet moments, to silent films and empty rooms. She laughs at me. In the night I think I hear scratching in the walls or in the attic above me. I tell her squirrels might have got in off the roof and she says she’ll find someone to sort it but never does. I do not think to berate her. How could I when she is the way she is, her bare shoulders, the cup of coffee she brings me in the morning, her fingers stained with blackberry juice?

  ANOTHER

  SOMETHING is wrong here. I wake again and again in the night. The meat supplies in the fridge dwindle as if my mother is midnight feasting though she laughs and says she isn’t. The ground once riddled with oak roots now grows a thick fur of poppy, the red heads tearing beneath my feet. The windows in the house sometimes shiver in their frames. There is a smell of mushroom-rot from the drains. A toilet blocks and when I work the blockage free I find a tangle of dark hair, thicker than a human’s, knotted to clumps. The squirrels – or rats – in the attic writhe and rocket around. My mother only tilts her head back onto the sofa and says she hears nothing. There are bruises on her arms and when she laughs at me I see a tooth is missing from her white smile. I do not ask her. I have never asked and got a simple answer. I wait for an evening when she, restless once more, says that she will go out. I help her pile her hair on top of her head. She says she’ll be back late, if at all. The house rings with her absence. There is a dusting of gold on my hands from her makeup. I press it to my face to try to steal some of her fearlessness. Something in the attic rolls and moans. I take the stairs two at a time. If I let myself I will be too afraid and do nothing. The smell from the attic is familiar. I do not turn on the light and something rocks and clicks in the darkness, skirting away from me. I get down on hands and knees. In the darkness something touches my hand. I am fearless I am fearless I am fearless. Something croons or cries. I feel its wet mouth on my skin.

  A LOVE

  I HAVE been angry at my mother before. Sometimes I think we are connected by a thread of rage towards one another. The time she cut her hair and then, hating it, cut mine to match. The stray schools I went to where she would appear to pick me up and I would watch her ranging through the fathers, jackal-hungry, never more wanting than when there was something she couldn’t have. The things she has said. The things I see passing over her face when she looks at me. I have been angry at my mother before but never in such a way as this. I have loved before. I love her often and enormously. I have loved people I’ve seen in the street, flashes of wanting: a woman with kind eyes, a man with long fingers. I have loved houses we’ve lived in, the tight corners, the different smells. I have loved before but never like this.

  A SECRET

  THE creature I find in the attic does not trust me and will not come close. He hates the light and screams if I turn it on. I gain an image of him from flashes of vision and touch. He is small and skinny, all ribs and ballooning belly. He smells like an animal, like the cattle on the farm my mother worked at – begrudgingly – for a season. His head seems too heavy for his shoulders and tips forward so that often – in the moments of light – I cannot see his eyes. His head is matted with hair and buried beneath are two sore nubs of bone protruding from the skull. I sneak away whenever I can and sit with him. He grows used to me. He has been in the dark all his life and so he uses his soft, damp nose and his mouth to feel his way around. Sometimes when he tastes my hand I think he can tell what I am thinking. When I am angry he rages too and I have to make myself small in a corner. When I am tired he sleeps and sleeps. Even in the cold dark I think I sense something of my mother in him, but at times I feel him losing sense of himself and then I am afraid. He clamps both hands over my arms and holds on tight. He grovels on the floor and reaches for fragments of bone left over from the meat she has been feeding him and grinds them between his teeth until they are dust. And then, again, he becomes calmer and we sit together listening to the swallows chittering through the walls. He does not speak but sometimes I do, quietly, and he makes sounds as if he understands what I am saying.

  AN ESCAPE

  HE will not speak but I have taught him one knock for yes, two for no. I bring him mice I catch in traps in the garden. I tell him everything I can about the world and the way I have lived in it so far. I tell him the plots of all the films I have seen. When my mother drinks we lie with our faces pressed to the dusty floor and listen to her smashing glasses in the kitchen. I tell him all the dreams I can remember. When I run out of things to say I let him put his tongue against my wrist. The sound of my pulse seems to calm him. I catch moths in jam jars with candles as lures and let them loose into the attic. He seems to like the sound of their busy wings in the darkness. I fill wine glasses with water and run my fingers around them to make them sing. It calms him to hear the sound. Some days my mother has new bruises or he won’t let me near him, howls and comes at me with his teeth. I find that cutting the soft pads of my thumb and letting the blood drip into his mouth brings him a degree of peace when he is at his wildest. I plan how to escape with him: I tell him about places I have heard of but not been to. He likes the sound of their names: Tasmania, Louisiana, Paris. I dream that we live in the sewers and drains beneath cities and come out at night. We live off takeaways frightened from the arms of delivery boys.

  AN END

  MY mother starts scattering her sentences with signs. She talks about getting someone in to kill the squirrels in the roof or doing the job herself. Once or twice I wake and she is standing over me, wild-haired and fist-handed, her nightdress glowing white in the gloom. Let’s eat cow tonight, she says, and I feel so afraid for him I sleep at the foot of the attic stairs. She never says: I know that you know. And neither do I. She never says: I see you’ve met your brother. We exist in the spaces between words, the silences when neither of us speaks. I catch mice by the dozen. I fill the bottom of a glass with blood and feed it to him. I say: when you grow strong – when you are better – when you aren’t afraid any more. He knocks his hoof-hand hard against the floor, once, twice, once again. What do you mean? I say and he knocks again twice, once, once again. What are you trying to say? But he is silent.

  AMAZE

  WE do not sleep. The lights in all the rooms blaze out the windows onto the streets. The cathedral weeps its bell song. There is the stench of boiled thistles and the sap from cedar trees. My mother’s arms are wrapped in silk she has ripped from her wardrobe, her hair has gone white overnight and her eyes are the colour of bees. I down coffee and play music loud but she seems to run on air alone. My brother wails and we no longer pretend we do not hear him. There is something growing in the garden, out in the torn earth where the oak tree stood. The dirt seeps water and our bare feet churn it to mud. Out of the wreckage corn is growing straight and strong and golden. The sound of her running her silk-wrapped fingers through it is a death rasp, a glottal stop. The corn grows in strict rows. I do not see it for what it is until I look out of my bedroom window and, peering down, understand what she is growing out in the garden. The higher the corn grows the more afraid I become. When I look down from my bedroom window I see th
at the maze does not only fill the garden but moves down beneath the soil, a rabbit tunnel of dead ends and no-ways-out. What are we doing here? How can we live this way? We tear the life from one another. We birth cattle from our raging bodies. My mother teaches me to drink in the herb-ripe kitchen. I lick the salt from the bridge of her hand. She holds a bottle between her thighs and pulls the cork. She will tell me soon whom the maze is meant for. If she chooses him I do not know if I will have the courage to offer myself in his place. I imagine dirt in my mouth and in my lungs, the dry seizure of the corn growing above my head. I imagine my skin becoming clogged with new-growth hair, my skull sprouting the horns I will soon grow.

  THE DEPARTURE

  Tash Aw

  MY father left for Singapore when I was about four years old. Of course, I can’t remember anything about his departure, though over the years I’ve convinced myself that I was witness to certain things that happened on the day he left. For example: that he left his bus ticket in the kitchen and had to rush back to get it, but when he got home my mother had already gone to work, and he had to break into the house to retrieve it. It was late at night, my mother had just started a job as a cleaner at a fish wholesaler down the road, and I had been asleep for a few hours. When my father broke the latch on the window it disturbed the dog in the yard next door, which began to bark. It was a thin mongrel the colour of sand, old and half-blind, and maybe because it was slow and couldn’t see anything it got spooked easily and barked at the slightest noise. I remember it well: eyes like glass marbles that seemed as though they might pop out of their sockets at any moment. You may think the dog is an incidental detail in this story. But I can remember it so clearly that it makes the rest of that evening seem real in my memory.