Dark Roots (4 page)

‘I don't want any of these drugs,' I had told Dr Mick with a firm resolve, gesturing to his happy little chart of radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments. ‘You've said yourself that it's too far gone.'

‘Well, I shouldn't have said that,' he replied, in a miracles-can-happen voice.

‘I'll choose my own drugs,' I'd said, and at that point the Colombian option had occurred to me.

‘Well, you let me know if there's anything I can do for you,' he'd replied sombrely. And I'd looked over at him, suddenly remembering doctors were allowed to sign passport applications.

The thing is, I still feel reasonably okay. On a sunny day when you're about to start a descent through angel clouds to land back in your hometown, it's just too hard to comprehend. I have an image of this thing on my X-rays, and it's low and it's dark. And so I will combat it, with high and white. Narcotrafico. My magic crystals. The no-smoking lights go on and I tune back into the guy next to me, who's setting off a volley of new squeaks as he settles into his seatbelt.

‘I don't suppose you've ever smoked,' he's saying to me.

‘No, never.' I allow myself a small smile. ‘We-e-e-ll — maybe a few puffs at school once, when we were all trying to be daring.'

He smiles and nods as I go back to my declaration, and tick that yes, I have something to declare.

Then I fold up my table, get out my passport, and it's in the hands of the gods.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. A perverse decision on my part, a memory of my Irish grandfather's favourite oath. A handful of coins each at the stall. All three looking grave, as if understanding what was going down. Jesus, like his dad, holding a carpenter's tool against his flowing cloak. I wonder if they made him make his own cross. Would he have chiselled and mortised the joints? Now that would be dying with dignity.

We descend and land and taxi into the unloading zone. I'm hot in my blue dress; it's sticking to my back. It's a wash and wear synthetic and I'm going to bundle it up and throw it in the garbage first thing when I get home. When I get home. I close my eyes and call up a vision of the kitchen, the smell of the lino, the chug of my ancient fridge. If all goes well, I can be there in a couple of hours. Just through customs, a short trip through the airport, past security, and into the taxi rank. I imagine pulling away in a cab, away from the airport and home free.

The thing to do now is forget about the cocaine, pretend I really am an innocent person. I keep my face demure as I watch the luggage turning on the silver conveyers. My case is an absolutely nondescript black. A luggage label in Spanish and English is tied carefully to the handle. Inside there are two changes of clothes, my toiletries and towel, a spare pair of shoes and three kilos of cocaine. Wonderful, splendid cocaine, meltingly pure and snowy. My superannuation fund brochure had outlined many exciting ways to spend your payment, but up your nose was not one of them.

I pick up the case. I carry it carefully to the customs declaration points and stand in a queue at the first gateway. I find that if I keep my mind on home and refuse to think about where I am, I can keep my heart rate down. Meditation, taken under sufferance at Dr Mick's urging, is proving to be an unexpected bonus. I meditate on the customs officer's hands as he takes my passport and declaration and notes things down, ticks boxes, glances into my face to check the likeness in the photo. His pen hesitates.

‘Something to declare?'

‘Yes.'

‘Go to number seven at the end there. Thank you.'

Thank
you
. Gates one to six, green lights, are choked with people, children, luggage trolleys and bags. They will be hours. Number seven, a red light, has two people standing in it, both holding yellow plastic bags of duty-free and whatever else they think is declarable. As I move into place behind them, the first one sorts out his query with camera lenses and moves off. Through this gateway is the escalator, then the forecourt, then the self-opening doors to International Arrivals, then out onto the windy pavement of the airport and the taxis. God, God. Hold it together.

‘I bought these lily bulbs in the airport in Hawaii,' the punter in front of me is saying, ‘and the girl said they're vacuum sealed and okay to take through without quarantine.'

‘I'm afraid there's always someone who'll tell you that,' says the man in the uniform shortly. My heart rate, despite me, goes up a few notches. A closed face, an unhappy mouth, a stickler for the rules and in a bad mood to boot. ‘They're illegal to import.'

‘What do I have to do? Have them sprayed?'

‘No, I'm afraid you have to surrender them to customs to dispose of.'

Down into the big chute they go. The passenger looks glum, but he's also through declarations in record time. I wonder if it was a deliberate ploy. His bags are searched in a rudimentary fashion. Cocaine is also surrendered to customs upon detection, and destroyed. Breaks your heart to think of it. All that brain-sharpening, energy-giving, nausea-suppressing potential chucked away.

I make my brain go somewhere else, focused anywhere rather than on the case in front of me. It has been my experience working with juvenile offenders that when they have stolen something their eyes keep swerving back to where they have hidden it. If it is secreted on their person they can't seem to stop their hands from going to that place. I look away, but there suddenly seems remarkably few places to look. My turn. Five minutes and I'm out. Five minutes. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

‘Good morning. Something to declare?' A deep breath. Hold body still, hold head still. Head-waggers are liars.

‘Yes, I think so.' I reach over and snap open my own suitcase, and dig down the side. ‘I thought I'd better check, better to be safe than sorry.'

I find the bottle and bring it out. He looks at it, noticing the seal, the liquid inside. He doesn't look surprised. Oh God, has this been tried before?

‘It's holy water, you see. From the font at the Sisters of Mercy mission in Popayan.'

He checks my passport stamps. ‘That's where you've just come from?'

‘Yes, for the Semana Santa. I promised I'd try to get some for an ill friend. Does it have to be confiscated?'

He pauses, rubs his chin. ‘Look, I'm afraid so. That water could contain all kinds of bacteria.'

‘I just thought ... since it was sealed ...' I trail off. ‘That's all right, I don't want to get you into trouble. I suppose the idea of water having healing properties seems quite ridiculous to you.'

He looks up briefly and gives me a quick, tired grin. ‘Not at all, I'm a Catholic. Or was.' He reaches over and opens the suitcase. ‘Is this your luggage?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you pack it yourself?'

‘I did, yes.'

‘Are you aware of its contents?'

‘Yes.'

He moves my clothes aside and takes out the three newspaper-wrapped packages. As he unrolls one I have a sense of standing looking at this scene as if through a long lens, the edges grey and prickling. When this happened when I was a child, it meant I was about to faint. Blue and white plaster appears, the face simpering with goodness. He raises his eyebrows enquiringly.

‘It's a statuette of Our Lady, from the sisters at the convent,' I say. He holds it in his hand. I concentrate on the bottom of the statue for a moment, down by the foot where she's crushing the snake, down where the minutest crack can be seen in the plaster. It's smooth but not machine smooth, not solid cast. No, it's smoothed by hand, sitting on the floor of Emilia's kitchen with plaster mixed up in an old tin. Me having an attack of nerves and gabbling about taking it back, forgetting the whole thing, pissing off home. Emilia's low and sombre voice as she crouched there:
I took this risk for you, yeah? Now you take risk for yourself. It will work, you trust me. It will work.

I can't drag my eyes away from that rough spot of plaster. Maybe it's an uncontrollable reflex after all. I look at the newspaper. The hands start wrapping the statue up again with quite careful deliberation, and he goes to unwrap the other two. Then hesitates. Oh Jesus, oh God, I promise with whatever time I have left I'll sing nothing but glory and praise to the short gift of my life, just please don't let him look too closely. I look at the coloured stamps on my passport, the ridiculous photo that Dr Mick had signed after a similar long silence of fervent prayer on my part and professional hesitation on his.

The customs guy smooths the newspaper and packs the statues carefully back in the case.

‘I'm afraid I have to confiscate the water,' he says, his face grave.

I lower my eyes. ‘Well, don't feel badly. I should have known you'd have to.'

He leans closer to me — God, another person about to betray an intimate confidence. ‘You know what we sometimes do,' he says in a low voice. ‘If the person's a really devout Catholic, say, and they've just made a lifetime trip to Lourdes, and the bottle's unsealed, then I say I just need to take the holy water into the quarantine office for a moment. Then I tip it into the disposal bin, and fill up the vial with ordinary water out of the tap, and take it back out to them. And they're as happy as Larry.'

He smiles again and I smile back, finding it easy now to look straight back into his eyes. ‘Thank you for telling me that story,' I answer, ‘because it doesn't matter a bit, you know, whether it comes from Lourdes or the tap. Because it's the faith that matters, the faith which heals. That's how you're blessed.'

He snaps my suitcase shut and turns it towards me, stamps my passport and hands it back.

‘I'll let you get on your way then, Sister,' he says. ‘Best of luck for the future.'

‘Thanks,' I say, moving away towards the escalator and the doors out. There's a future out there all right, and once I get this outfit off I'm not going to miss one sweet open-mouthed breath of it. I am as light as a cloud as I walk towards the doors. I am free as air. I am blessed.

Flotsam

Out here there's a headwind, but they helped me drag a chair onto the verandah. A stupid chair, a white lounger with plastic webbing. It weighs next to nothing. Here the wind streams like liquid straight against my face.

I am smiling, inside the pouring hiss of wind. I expected change, certainly, but I thought that the place would have crumbled, as I have, by years of sting and salt. I never would have expected this gentrification, this odd new architecture of lime-washed palings and curlicues of wood, the weathervanes and lofts of American farmhouses. The shacks under their layer of pine needles gone without trace. The hotel's become lime-washed, too — all white in the dining room, polished boards revealed from under the carpet. The pub's nautical theme back in my day was twice-weekly fishermen's brawls, now it's gloss-painted; ceiling fans, brass fittings, mint-green trim. It's all polished up, sanded down, swept clean. I can't get used to it.

Out here the sea picks up the dark volcanic flecks and looks for something, sighs distractedly, turns them and searches. Small dark heaps of seaweed lie tangled at high-tide line, where the lip of the highest wave, draining away, has formed a long curving line of black. It's not very good sand. I went to pristine beaches later in my life where the sand squeaked, where it broke like a loaf of sugar. My feet were hard here, and crusted with mica and dark grains. The sea dipping in a sudden churning trough, a dangerous choppy pull, then you'd go out further and it would calm down.

Red needles up under the pines in the dark. Brushing them off your back. Matthew whispering,
Now you'll be for it
. A dusted salt rim on your legs, feet filthy. Don't know why I bothered going into the city to buy those shoes. A labour of love, my mother said, but that's what you did in those days. That's what you did.

Took them off after five dances because Matthew wanted to go outside and you didn't want to ruin them. Everything you owned was crusted with salt and mica. Pine needles and the smell of resin reminding you of your brother's violin. Resin, rosin, were they the same thing, you kept thinking, lying looking up through the pines, knowing that this was it now, actually happening, and all the wondering and unease that had come before had been like walking miles to buy the shoes.

The kids in the shacks sold bait to the drinkers in the hotel.
Look at your hair, you're like one of the shack kids
, your mother would say, or,
Look at your sister's runny nose, you'd think she lived in the shacks
. But when she was pregnant she pressed money into your hand and made you go down there and ask them for a bag of pippies, and she sat on the porch in her chair, feet flat and apart, belly huge, sucking the meat and salt water from the shells and looking out at the horizon but her eyes inward, focused on the task. As she bent down to get another pippy out of the bag she'd exhale, licking her lips. It was the sound Matthew made when he took the first sip of beer. The same craven absorption.

Can't we go for a walk, Lornie, let's just go for a stroll on the beach. Lornie, we can listen to a bloody pub singalong any time.
There were big cracked bamboo chairs on this verandah then. Pinching your legs through the fabric of your dress.
Don't rip this, will you, Lornie, or you'll break my heart
, your mother had said, pinning the alteration under the waistband to her good dress from out of the trunk, refolding the crease with fingers suddenly deft and stroking.
This silk comes all the way from Siam.
Your younger sister watching silently from her homework on the kitchen table as your mother methodically stuck pins back into the pincushion. You, slim as a reed in the kitchen with shaved legs stinging, smelling the woody smell of Siam.