Magpie Hall (26 page)

And everywhere the clutter that I had failed to finish sorting through. The rest of my family would swoop on it, clear it in time for the renovations. No doubt most of it would end up at the Salvation Army or, worse, the rubbish dump. I glanced into each of the bedrooms, soon to be turned into guest accommodation with ensuite bathrooms and new beds, and finally rounded the end of the hallway, turning a sharp right to the servants’ wing, with its stark skinny rooms and cold bathroom. I hesitated at the door to the tower, but pushed in, up the stairs to where the room was bright with light, and the view to the hills was breathtaking. I said goodbye to Gram, dead-heading the roses in the garden, and to young Charlie, taking off up the hill on horseback with the other kids.

Finally I turned away from the window to say goodbye to Tess, who sat on the mattress with a sheet knotted above her breasts, her long smooth legs crossed in front of her. She was smoking a cigarette, one of Josh’s rollies, and as I looked at her she blew a stream of smoke into the air around us and picked a piece of tobacco from her tongue.

‘You’ll be all right?’ I asked her, but she said nothing, just smiled and turned her back to me, presenting me with her bird tattoo for the last time.

My nose wasn’t broken, but it was close. I looked a sight and they sent me away with a prescription for some strong painkillers, which I took immediately, falling asleep in the car. Charlie drove me back to the city, after some feeble protest on my part that I wanted to go back to Magpie Hall, that I had left all my work there, that I hadn’t finished with it. But I knew that I had. Charlie promised to pack up all my things and bring them to me later in the week, along with my poor car.

‘You need to rest, anyway,’ he said. ‘No more work.’

He dropped me off at my little flat above the tattoo studio and I sat for a long time after he left, looking out the window at the lights of the port as workers laboured through the night to load containers onto the tall ships that loomed out of the black sea. It was Saturday night, so I knew Rita wouldn’t be home for a long time, and I hoped that she would turn up alone, without any sailors in tow. Shouts and taunts floated up from the street below as people spilled out of the pub on the corner and lingered at the window of Roland’s shop. Perhaps in another time the shop would have remained open to catch just such clientele, the flotsam from the ships and other misfits. The odd gentleman.

As the painkillers wore off, I sat up in bed, unable to sleep. I turned on my lamp, which cast a pink glow about the room and up the wall that housed the tattooed women I had collected. I looked at my own tattoos and thought how much more beautiful, more refined, they had become with technology. I had pictured Dora’s tattoos as being fine-lined and artistic, but in reality, if she’d had them, they would have been as rough and cartoonish as the ones in the photographs before me, with thick, wobbly lines and an absence of delicate shading and subtle colour changes. I wondered, then, how much of what I had imagined could possible be true. The collector in
me had gathered together shiny facts and tried to assemble a nest for Henry and Dora.

I heard Rita come in, clipping across the wooden floors in her heels. She stopped outside my bedroom and knocked softly.

‘I saw the light,’ she said. ‘Mind if I come in?’ She held a bottle of red wine in her hand as she sat down on the end of my bed. ‘Jesus! What happened to you?’

‘How long have you got?’ I smiled, and it hurt.

‘Wait there.’ She put down the bottle and left, coming back a moment later with two glasses. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘I’ve got all night if you have.’

She shed her leopard print coat and shook off her shoes.

So I started at the beginning, told her everything that had happened to me at Magpie Hall in the last week. She coaxed out details — she was good like that — and by the end of half an hour she had heard everything there was to know about Sam, and about Hugh.

‘I knew there was something going on you weren’t proud of,’ she said. ‘You were so secretive about him. So unlike you. You should’ve told me. I wouldn’t have judged you.’

I shrugged and took another couple of painkillers.

‘So which one of those bastards did that to you?’ she asked. ‘Or did you fall down the tower steps?’

I took a deep breath and told her about Josh, but realised halfway through that I was going to have to tell her about Tess as well, or it wouldn’t make any sense.

‘Have I ever told you,’ I said, knowing the answer, but stalling for time, ‘about my sister Tess?’

‘Sister? You’ve got a sister? No, you never said.’

‘
Had
a sister,’ I said. ‘She died. When I was thirteen.’ And then I started to cry.

It felt good to confess. I had never discussed it with anyone, the guilt I felt over her death, the part I played in it, not even with my parents or with Charlie. Josh had given me the opportunity and I had turned away from it. Afterwards, I felt spent, drowsy, but that could have been the effect of the wine and the codeine. I lay my head on my pillow and Rita said nothing, just stroked my hair until I fell asleep.

The renovations to the house began that week, as if my family were taking advantage of my woozy state to rush in before I could block them further. I don’t know what they expected; perhaps they imagined me lying down in protest in front of the trucks as they rolled in. The truth is, I was too tired for any of that, too tired to argue any more.

I wasn’t there but I imagined it: the clearing of the clutter, the demolition. Pulling down the wallpaper and sarking to insulate and reline, knocking holes in the kitchen walls to put in french doors. Replacing all the kitchen appliances, installing new bathrooms. Tearing out walls that separated the rooms to make them open-plan and modern. Letting the light in.

I wish I’d seen their faces, their puzzled looks, when they found the contents of Henry’s cabinet. They had been there all along, of course, not the cabinet, or the crate it had been packed in — they were long gone — but the curiosities themselves, hiding in the walls wrapped in cloth, like secret offerings. We could only surmise that Grandpa’s father had put them all there after Henry died, under the pretext of dividing the house’s massive rooms into smaller, cosier spaces. The cabinet of curiosities never made it to the British Museum because Edward Summers had opened it and been aghast at what he found.

The builders had smashed through the walls with a sledgehammer, and what they found caused the work to stop for a considerable amount of time, even though the weather was foul and they’d had to drape the holes in the outer walls in tarpaulin to try and stop the incessant rain and wind from causing too much damage.

Human remains. I suppose that Henry’s son had believed the rumours about Dora, that his father had murdered her and hidden the body, and here he was, hiding the evidence, to keep the family’s secret safe once and for all. He probably imagined the house would be a constant in everyone’s lives for many more years.

I could tell you that what they found were perfectly preserved sheets of human skin, which they at first took to be a series of paintings on parchment: eggs, butterflies, a hummingbird and, most impressively, a huia, delicate and life-like, glowing with the light that fell through the vellum. Only after careful inspection would it be revealed that the ink was embedded under its surface; that it had been tattooed there, not painted. That Henry had kept a beautiful memento mori of his wife, and that he wanted it to be preserved and displayed forever at the world’s greatest museum, so that Dora might live on.

But that would be a lie. Oh, there were human remains all right, but the walls of Magpie Hall were full of bones, not delicate parchment. They could have been the bones of a young European woman, and Edward might have thought he was hiding the evidence of a terrible crime, but then that would not explain why there were so many of them, of all different sizes, mixed in with the bones of a large flightless bird, so that they knocked together like percussive instruments. There were skulls, too. Not just one, but several. One no bigger than a child’s.

After the police had been called, and experts brought in, it was decreed that they were most likely bones taken from a nearby Maori
burial cave sometime in the late nineteenth century, but they were much older than that: probably pre-European contact. They would be returned to the ancestors. The artefacts found with the bodies gave the most clues — adzes and fish hooks made of greenstone, tools and ceremonial weapons — and I would have to tell you that Henry Summers was not the noble gentleman I had made him out to be, and that Grandpa had wished him to be, who shied away from dishonourable collecting. In fact, my ancestor was nothing more than a grave robber, breaking tapu and indiscriminately collecting the remains of women, children and warriors alike. Nobody could pretend otherwise, not after the cabinet curiosities offered up their incontrovertible truth. And perhaps his first wife did drown in the river and her body was never found. Or perhaps he murdered her, as the rumours suggested. We will never know. End of story.

Charlie delivered my car and my work to me a few days after he dropped me off.

‘You’re looking much better already,’ he said.

I touched my nose. Still tender. I looked as though I’d been in a bar brawl and I hadn’t left the flat since I arrived. I couldn’t bear to face the questions and the looks. Instead I’d stayed in bed, sleeping or talking with Rita as she made pot after pot of tea and blew cigarette smoke all over my room.

Charlie carried my things up the stairs to the lounge. He waved the printed manuscript at me.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘I thought you were writing a thesis, not a novel.’

‘Did you read it?’ I asked.

‘I’m sorry, I did. Do you mind?’

I shrugged.

‘How did you know all of this about him? About what happened to Dora?’

I hesitated and thought briefly about lying, about saying it was a true and accurate account of a genuine love story that had taken place in our very own family history. That I had found evidence — a diary, photographs. A cabinet of curiosities furnished with human skin.

‘I didn’t,’ I said instead. ‘I made it up.’

‘Well, that’s quite some imagination you’ve got. You’ve written the perfect love story. But as if he’d have all those tattoos. A bit of projection on your part, I think.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Now that bit was true. The letter from Grandpa, remember?’

Something about being in the house that week had compelled me to write that story, to believe that Henry and Dora had lived as happy a life together as they could before she died, that she and I shared some kind of profound connection. Call it too many Victorian novels, call it a desire to believe that someone in my family had experienced the kind of love I knew was out there. But even as I wrote it, the house started to lose some of its magic for me, and by the end I had decided that Magpie Hall had been a prison for Dora, and for Henry. Certainly for Tess’s ghost. Perhaps even for Grandpa.

It could have been true. Henry had the tattoos after all. It was all there in Grandpa’s letter. But when I later found out the truth about his collecting, I realised that the picture of the man I had built crumbled under the slightest of touches. Perhaps it wasn’t the fact of his skinned wife that had driven him mad, but the knowledge that he had broken tapu, inviting a curse upon himself and generations
to come. Perhaps it is Henry I can blame for my family’s misfortune — for all of it.