Burn Patterns (23 page)

Iris recognised her father's growing panic. Nicholas understood the war but was incapable or unwilling to intercede. He would chide Iris on Elsie's behalf. He might even punish her at Elsie's urging. Iris was denied outings, toys, school excursions. Her father would then find secret ways to compensate her, a piece of chocolate or a new book hidden under her pillow. Late at night, Iris listened to her mother's screams about lovelessness and ingratitude, his weak appeasing.

Grown Iris pruning in the garden tried to imagine the picture she'd have drawn as a child, based on her current understandings of child psychology. How big would the house be? Would a path wind up to the door? She would have drawn her father and herself on one side with the tree and the rainbow, her mother on the other. How big would she have drawn her mother? She
imagined the drawing of her father with a smiling face, her mother with no mouth.

Elsie did not have a psychiatric disorder. She would not have qualified for any category listed in the
DSM-Four
psychiatric handbook. Adult Iris developed theories about her mother's personality, her uncommon beauty, her poor rural upbringing, Elsie's tough mother, violent father. How ill-equipped she was for life with a doctor. Whatever Iris's attempt to reconstruct the formation of Elsie's social and physical DNA, it always amounted to the same conclusion. Her mother was just plain mean. She was a cow, in the parlance of Elsie's hometown. She was hard, selfish, determined to keep those around her down at her level.

Nicholas was not the first man to fail to consider the later consequences of marrying a gorgeous spitfire. Iris's father had been weak but also intelligent and giving. He became an anaesthetist at the prompting of his wife because that's where the money was, yet he still insisted on working in a public hospital. He was interested in the arts, particularly in reading history. His hobbies were of the mind. And Iris knew he adored her. She certainly adored him. Iris supposed her father saved her. He saved her from her mother, from her becoming her mother. The two of them made Iris something else of course.

Iris was only sixteen when her father died. Firefighters cut him out of his car, which had gone off the freeway into a bridge stanchion late at night. He had been on his way home from eighteen hours at the hospital. He'd had a heart attack. Iris imagined the firefighters talking to Nicholas as they worked to free him, giving him a joke, asking about his loved ones, giving secret sad looks as they passed each other equipment to extricate the dying doctor. A romantic story of course, constructed, for he was probably dead before the car even left the road. Elsie broke the news in the morning. ‘Your father's dead. You broke his heart.' Iris did not believe her until she telephoned his hospital to confirm it for herself.

Iris did not break down. She grieved quickly. She studied. Iris's father clearly knew Iris would need protecting. He bequeathed Iris a large sum to be used for her education. Elsie went berserk. Not figuratively. She became deranged, physically out of control.
She took to Iris's bedroom, tearing the room apart. It was like a scene from
Citizen Kane
. No doll unbroken. No dress untorn. No papers unripped. She broke a door off the cupboard, cracked the window glass. This event probably did qualify as a bona fide psychotic episode.

Iris became a boarder at a private school. Elsie sold the family home, moved down the coast, went a little hippie. She had several boyfriends. Charlotte and Iris kept in contact. Their relationship had always been difficult. They were never close but regarded each other with sympathy tinged with envy. Charlotte left school early, married young, moved east. Elsie followed her but never found or gave peace. When she died of cancer, Iris did not go to the funeral. She could admit it to Mathew, to Frank and to herself that knowing her mother was no longer on Earth filled her with enormous relief. Her shoulders were lightened. Dr Chew, I did not like my mother. Dr Chew would not be shocked. Narrative therapy accepted certain filial ties are the worst ones for our health.

Rosemarie, then three years old, would never have to meet her. Yet Elsie remained, it seemed, inside Iris and between Iris and her own daughter. Iris loved Rosemarie with an ache. She missed her enormously, yet she didn't seem capable of maintaining the narrow bridge between them.

Mathew, Mathew's whole family did it with such ease. Iris was careful to a degree that was fearful. This is who her mother made her, what she'd not been able to overcome with her husband or her daughter. Not all her fault, to be sure, but real. She loved in her own way. She was not able to change, no matter how often it was identified by Frank and others, no matter how many affirming, outreaching positive potential narratives were offered her. There was no counter-narrative she could transplant onto the person she'd been made into in her childhood. She was closed often to herself.

Iris saw movement through the French doors. Mathew? She waved but the figure had gone. She looked again. The sun was low, reflecting the trees back onto the glass. She took more prunings to the pile. She would clear them tomorrow. She put her shears, gloves and hat on the patio table and went in.

‘Mathew?' she called.

Iris went into the kitchen, drank a glass of water, wandered upstairs. ‘Mathew?' Was it Sunday? No, Saturday still.

She searched through their bedroom, the exercise room, the upstairs lounge, finally down to Rosemarie's end. Her study and her rumpus room were empty. Her bedroom smelled musty, covered with posters of bands whose names Iris couldn't recall. The lead singer with the dark hair and blackly made eyes. Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands. Butterfly stickers covered the ceiling where they had remained since Rosemarie had been small. None of them, least of all Rosemarie, wanted them removed. Some still glowed in the dark.

Iris thought she heard a door close. ‘Mathew?'

She went downstairs. ‘Mathew, is that you?'

Mathew's office was empty.

Iris opened the front door. She thought she'd locked it, but now wasn't so sure. The front gates were open. She went out to the garage, flicked the button for the gates. They swung closed, clanged pleasingly, signally, the end of the day.

The trees shimmered, darkly. The sea breeze was in. Iris could smell smoke. A neighbour was barbecuing something plummy.

Iris slept late. Another restless night. She recalled feeling hot. She remembered dreaming, images she couldn't quite recapture. She'd stayed off the alcohol before bed so maybe that was it. The word menopause flashed into her mind. What if her troubles had been masked or enhanced by pre-menopause as well as the wine, the overtiredness? Would that be a comfort or cause for further angst? Or completely beside the point?

‘I need butterflies,' she said to the ceiling. ‘I need to stop talking to myself.'

The zoo teemed with all manner of human creatures. It was Sunday. The monkeys got antsy on Sundays and school holidays. The baboons liked to disgust by throwing their poo, spitting. The lions would try to spray.

Iris bought a coffee, stood watching the otters. It was warm already and they were gliding miraculously under the cool water.

She switched on her phone, saw lots of missed calls, cued texts. She ignored them, dialled Rosemarie.

‘Mum.'

‘Hello, darling. How are you?'

‘I was going to call you later.'

‘I've saved you sixpence.'

‘Brodey and I are shopping.'

‘Sounds like he's house-trained. Brodey?'

‘I've told you about Brodey. Or Dad. Didn't he tell you? Anyway we're doing the grocery shopping.'

‘I did the same yesterday. I made sushi. I used the special roller pad. You used to love helping with sushi.'

‘Yeah, well it's easier to buy them made here.'

‘How's uni?'

‘Waiting for results. You know.'

‘I was thinking about our walks to school.'

‘Oh.'

Iris ignored Rosemarie's tone. She said, ‘Remember how it used to be my job to tell stories on the way to school and your job to tell me about your day on the way home?'

‘Kind of. I remember you telling me about it. You had to pry it out of me and at some magic point I became articulate and impossible to shut up.'

She was including Brodey now, Iris supposed.

‘I also remember playing I Spy, very early on. This wasn't in the car. It was on a walk to school.'

‘No, butter. Not margarine.' They were still shopping.

‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S.'

‘Hmm.'

‘I tried and tried. Stones. Stop sign. Sign. Street. I went through every S word in the entire dictionary, everything that could possibly be seen or passed by on the way to school, including some pretty esoteric words like sister and sunshine and story. Finally, I gave up, which, as I recall, was pretty uncool with you if I didn't keep trying. And the word was …'

‘Cement.'

‘Yes. Cement. I didn't have the heart to …'

‘Tell me until later. I became a bit obsessed about the S sound.'

‘Yes. You were around ten years old. Ceiling. Centipede.'

‘Cereal. Centre. Celestial.'

‘I'm not sure whether celestial was one of your ten year old words, although you were pretty precocious.'

‘A smart only child. Ha ha. Mum, I pretty much have to go.'

‘Oh, I thought I'd call. No problem. See how you're going.'

‘Yes. I'll call you later. Oh, but there's a thing after.'

‘Yes. Love you.'

‘Yes. You too. I'll call. Which does start with a c, rather than salute.' She said it with the Italian accent. Witty girl. ‘Bye mum.'

‘Bye.'

Iris stared at her phone as though it were a young child's hand. She felt a little weak at the knees, a little like tears, but happy too. And sad. Melancholy. Why has melancholy got a ch that is not a chhh sound? Rosemarie became a bit obsessed in high school about the many inconsistencies of spelling and sounding in the English language. If it's an s sound write s and not ce. Silent letters infuriated her. Gh and ps and particularly the silent s such as in Grosvenor Street.

‘French!' she declared one day at the dinner table. ‘The bloody French ran everything and they've made all the words unpronounceable.'

‘It was the language of diplomacy,' said Mathew.

‘Autobahn,' said Iris. They shook their heads at her, moved on before Iris could explain about words constantly being added from all over. Schadenfreude. Viennese Freud words.

‘I've seen a documentary,' Mathew explained. ‘The history of English or the story of English. It was spoken by only a couple of suburbs of London.'

Iris grinned at the memory. She headed to the native bird section as she dialled Mathew. The blue wrens weren't very blue. She stood searching for them in the fake undergrowth.

‘Iris. Good morning.'

‘How's it going?'

‘Oh, you know. Lots of roundtable reading of documents. Lots of long dinners. Field trips of very hot tramping over red rocks with the Nullabin.' When Iris didn't reply, he asked, ‘Is everything all right?'

‘Yes. I'm at the zoo.'

‘Oh, I thought you hated it on weekends.'

‘It's nice today. I've been talking to Rosemarie.'

‘Excellent. How is she?'

‘Good. She was shopping. With Brodey.'

‘Yes. Met at a rally or student gathering. The sciences. Something sciencey.'

Neither of them spoke. Iris filled the space. ‘Do you want to get a dog?'

‘Certainly,' he said rather quickly. ‘Yes, let's both think about a breed. Nothing small and yappy, I hope.'

Iris laughed. Asked, ‘Shall I cook when you get back?'

‘Yes. Perfect.'

‘When are you back?'

‘Should be tomorrow the way we're going.'

Iris took a breath, said, ‘I miss you, darling.'

After another slight pause, Mathew said, ‘Good. I'll see you soon.'

Was someone else listening in? He could have been talking at breakfast, surrounded by Chinese and Nullabini. There might well be no arts bureaucrats there, he might not have been in his motel room still at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning. He might have been still peeved over his missing socks. There could be all number of reasons for his guarded, determined brightness on the phone.

Iris saw finches. Many finches, drab, camouflaged. Camouflage was undoubtedly a dastardly French word, like bureau. Unspellable.

Iris headed for the butterfly enclosure. She checked the messages. Missed calls from Gillian, Patricia, Frank, Detective Pavlovic. Her gang. Pavlovic and Frank had left a number of messages. She'd check them later. She'd been hoping for news from Chuck. A development in the teenage theory. She'd call them all in the afternoon. She composed a text message for Frank.

I am not having a breakdown. I am having a recovery
:) x

Iris paused before pressing send because a monarch landed on her telephone screen. It was a darker orange than the garden variety. She examined the markings on the wings, like veins branching out to the black perimeter. Lighter dots like desert painting. Iris blew gently, watching its wings vibrate, its long dark antenna quivering in her breeze.

It was warm in the butterfly house, humid. In the summer, the glass portion was dismantled because the temperatures outside were sufficient. Small sprays behind the special plants kept things humid. Water trickled in a channel alongside the path leading from entrance to exit. They'd created a tropical rainforest inside a tent.

Two girls and a boy came to Iris almost immediately. ‘Look.' The children gazed in awe. Iris knew a number of butterflies
must have landed on her yellow blouse.

‘Are they yellow?' asked Iris. There were common grass yellows tumbling about up near the net roof canopy.

‘Black,' said the girl in the pink t-shirt.