Mother of Pearl (19 page)

In fact, the only way Rita recognised her in the end was that she was the only child not looking for her; she was looking for someone else entirely. She was almost at the end of the line, a sturdy, well-fed child, her nutmeg-coloured hair scraped back into regulation plaits from a pale, serious face, the little mark on her chin. Rita gasped involuntarily. Here was a ghost from her past. But not a ghost. She couldn't relate this live little girl with the stick baby she had brought into the world. She felt the child's size and health as a kind of rebuff, as if she could not have been so if she had stayed with Rita. Slowly she released Stella into Mother Benildus' arms and knelt down in front of the small stranger who stood gazing up at her. Mel's eyes greeted her; she felt a sharp pain and recoiled. She had thought, strangely, that all that would be asked of her was to point the child out, that she could leave then and go home to her simple life of two. But seeing those eyes – like Mel's reproaching her from the grave – she knew there was no going back. She remembered her years of prayerful bargaining for the baby: her trade-off with God. She had wished Mel away, in the same way as she had wished them to be together in the first place, and he had been taken. Now she was coming into her reward. God was honouring the bargain.

But she was being given back a stranger who had been suckled by wolves; who had lived among and been loved by the enemy, those very people who had killed Mel. She came as some gruesome kind of peace offering, a blood sacrifice from the other side, but with
their
blood not hers, running through her veins. A traitor in their midst; a child who lived because Mel was dead. A child who could never be trusted. Rita would never believe that this child and the lost baby were the same. Something had been lost in between. Her own innocence. And in its place a shame, the shame of a mother who, in her heart, had given up on her first-born as dead. How could that baby be anything other than lost, lost permanently? As she stretched out to touch the child's hand, Rita became the mother of three – the lost one, Stella, and now, this one, her third – and contemplated yet another fresh start, her final one. But every fresh start contained a lie, Rita knew, a making over of the truth. To start again, she would have to rip and undo. A stitch of memory here, a seam of longing there, all would have to be remade. For the garment to be passed off as the real thing, the child must never be told that here in the portals of The Cottage Home, her second childhood had begun. How else could Rita make a family of a murdered husband, the child of another man, the ghost of a lost baby and now an orphan of war? She planted her lips on the child's forehead and sealed her new and unknowing future – with a kiss.

 

I AM REBORN
. I have arrived at a bright destination after my long journey. I am swaddled in white sheets, wrapped tightly in them so that when I try to move, I cannot. When I woke I thought one of my arms was manacled but when I looked down it was the grip of my mother's hand on my wrist. I felt bruised and strangely tender, like the survivor of a huge public calamity. Trapped in a dark tunnel, its walls sweating and gelid to my grasp as I clamber towards the light. The hoarse cries of rescuers on the clamorous surface; it is all lights and noise up there. There is a great rumbling, the very earth's crust heaving as if in pain and a boulder eclipses the aperture that I am straining towards. Suddenly there is darkness – and silence. And then from above a tear in the sky and I am delivered from my tiny ante-chamber into a bowl of light.

I tried to raise my head but it was leaden, too heavy for the stalk of my neck. Strands of my hair were plastered to my scalp, the skin of my face smeared and scaly, though my lips were dry and cracked. There was a coppery taste of blood in my mouth. Words crowded on my tongue but only a bubble emerged. It was too early for words, or too late.

‘Hush there,' my mother crooned and leaning over me, brushed my forehead with her lips, ‘it's all over now.'

Somewhere a baby was crying.

‘Where's Jeff?'

My voice,
my
voice! It sounded strange to me, fogged and distant.

A picture of Jeff flashed through my mind, taken on the deck of a ferry. He looks fresh, windblown, healthy, his hand raised in salute. He is on an outward journey somewhere, the perspective is one of departure.

‘He's gone,' she said.

I knew then that all was lost.

‘Home,' she added.

I thought of our cottage home nestling in an optimistic bend of the road like the curve of a loving question mark. The scene of the crime.

My mother rose and went to the window, standing with her back to me. A bird, full-throated, was singing outside. The branches of a tree scraped against the glass. Not for the first time I thought she was about to reveal something momentous.

‘God, but I hate these places,' she sighed. She waved peevishly at the hospital cubicle, the sheeny nylon curtains, the savage insistence of fluorescence.

‘Oh, guess what?' she said brightly. ‘Good news! Stella is coming home. She booked a flight as soon as she heard …'

Stella, Stella! My thick tongue wrestles with her name. Stella, my long lost sister. The baby of the family. I have not seen her for seven years, a fairytale absence. Stella. Reduced to a series of pale blue aerogrammes which sail airily through the letter box and fall with a dying whisper to the floor. The shortage of space means that she writes a sort of telegramese, her life reduced to bare inscriptions. There are oceans and continents between us, half a world. It shows in her tan, the blonde streaks in her hair, in her strange, hybrid accent. I feel pallid and podgy by comparison, and creepily unhealthy as if I had spent my entire life in an institution. I used to envy her looks, the two years between us, her child-star name. Now I envy her flight, her success at getting away. And her new life. A husband and twin daughters – even at a distance, family history makes mocking would-be repetitions. I've never met them but I have the snapshots. The open-air wedding, bougain-villaea and jacaranda clustering in the background, a cloudless blue sky. The timber-frame house with the balcony and a view of the clothes hanger bridge that spans the harbour. The girls with bleached hair in shorts and T-shirts standing under the gum trees. They are so foreign looking, and yet so unmistakeably family. The dark shadows of the leaves dapple their skins; they smile for the future.

It is from this compact world – encapsulated neatly in wafer-thin paper and on shiny celluloid – that Stella has been raised from, her flight this time towards me. Dazed and fragile from her passage across the time zones she moves through the glassy halls of the arrivals terminal. Chauffeurs hold aloft white cards. She will scan them automatically looking for her own name there, or seeking out a familiar face in the crowd. But there will be no one to greet her. I see her driving from the airport through the slush-coloured dawn. The earliness of the hour, the unshaven city streets will add to the penitential air of her journey. She will have to cross the river. Ours is a divided city, a city of tribes, like twins divided at birth. At war, at war with itself. There will be soldiers with blackened faces on the bridge. They will peer in through the car windows, cradling their guns and ask Stella questions; her name, the purpose of her visit. Their questions make me angry. A proprietorial anger for a place I rarely visit unless I have to. A place of debris, stone and rubble, the ruined buildings sagging like flaky confectionery, the ominous, gap-toothed streets.

‘They eat their young over there,' my mother used to say.

The river will be in swell as she crosses, green and angry-looking. Sometimes it seems to seethe. Wherever you go, north or south, the river edges in; on their side it leaks into basins, hemmed in by the bleached husks of mills or shipyard docks, peered over by gantries poised like flamingos and the twin gasometers like intricate cathedrals to a sun god. On ours it laps up against the railway embankments and then, dispirited, it peters away, weakly threshing at the weirs downstream. It gives and it takes away. At full tide it trumpets restlessly; in summer when the waters recede, the detritus of the city rears up out of the slime. Battered wheel rims, the mangled frame of a car door, even the red and white cones which mark the boundary on the bridge struggle up from the river-bed in stricken gestures. And the odd bloated body is fished out, of course, the routine casualties of an underground war.

We don't consider it our war; indeed, for us, it is hardly a war at all, more a distant campaign. Mostly, it doesn't intrude. We don't have to suffer the growl of jeeps in the streets or the hectic clatter of helicopters overhead. Shots rarely ring out in the night. We don't hear the ominous screech of brakes as a car bears assassins away. When there are explosions we hear only a menacing rumble. The war for us is a series of small privations, some slight curbs on our freedom (all those questions, for example, which render every activity suspect). There are parts of the north side I have never seen. I know them only from the television bulletins as sites of slaughter, steep streets bearing the names of imperial battlefields and Slavic conquests. It is another world, yet familiar too like the portrait of an ancestor frowning behind glass.

The soldiers will lazily wave Stella on; she is a foreigner, after all, or as good as one. She will drive down the capital's main street, a veritable boulevard, basilica-grey, tinted with thumb-prints of green, the leaves of the sturdy plane trees marching down the central island. The pavements are broad and flagged, a haven for the superstitious. There is a statue of a patriot hero standing with his back to the thoroughfare atop a great, soot-coloured blancmange of stone. At his feet there are angels. Amazons, placid and stony in their regard although one of them, unfortunately, has a bullet hole in her breast, and traitors have been hanged from their giant wings.

Once past the angels, she will be entering familiar territory, the landscape of childhood, our shared history, or rather the history we have in common. One last phantom returning …

 

STELLA IS MORE
like a half-sister; the half she left with me is in fragments. The skinny girl with bony knees that is Stella, a limp, blond fringe falling into her eyes, pluckily climbing trees and throwing herself off with a glorious ‘whee!', arms aloft as if she might well fly. Teaching her to cycle on the Crescent. It is the only thing I can remember being able to teach her. Holding on to the saddle while she wound herself in under the crossbar – it was a man's bike – and wobbled ahead of me, roaring into the wind ‘don't let go!' But I did. Those days in a long-ago June, stretched in the garden sunbathing, lotions applied to a military gleam on her thighs and forearms, a transistor blasting at her ear. Painting her toenails in the bathroom. A paltry store of memories. Less, much less than what I accorded to a sister who never was.

She was the first born, who had come before me and Stella. The Cupid child my mother used to call her. She had brought my parents together; she had made my mother Mrs Mel Spain. My mother told us about the derelict house on Rutland Street where our sister was conceived (since demolished; otherwise we might have made pilgrimages to it), the rotting timbers, the gaping roof, the dying heat of a summer's evening. She confided in us, as girls, as if she were a glamorous, elder sister. She liked us to call her Rita. Her girlishness made me uneasy. I wanted another kind of mother, more serious, less gaily careless, whose life was not such an open book. It was one of my many guilty secrets, wishing for a parent other than my own. But it was more than that. Her delight in her own candour seemed to diminish our sister, as if she were a baby my mother had dreamed up to ensnare the object of her desire, her body obligingly swelling, engorged with lovesickness for a boy she never thought could be hers. A phantom pregnancy.

Stillborn, our sister never even had a name.

My mother called me Moll. A pet name I grew out of, thankfully; now it would make me sound like a revolutionary – or a whore. These days I answer to Mary. Those years as Baby Moll seem lost or like a former life, not attached to this one. As if they died with the name. And there is no documentary evidence. No baby pictures, no handed-down memories of my first tottering steps or the gurgling sounds that would one day become – a word. Sandwiched as I was between losses – my sister's just over, my father's about to happen – such small proud moments seem to have come to grief. If only I could have remembered them myself; there are people who remember being born. Imagine! But not me. It is all a blank.

Our first home, or at least the first one I recall, is a maisonette on the fourteenth floor of the Bridgewater Towers. I remember its shoddy newness and the dusty light at its high windows. Sounds of play drifting up from the playground. From our window, the glint of the river beckoning in the distance, a dagger of silver, a pearl in the gloom of brown spires and green domes. Stella rattling at the bars of the cot. The sounds of my mother working in the kitchen, the hiss of an iron. Whip of cotton, the shy shiver of silk falling from the shoulder of the board, the low crooning of the radio. I imagined her with high, honeyed hair, and a spangly dress with tufts of netting, dancing as the deepening shadows played on the wallpaper in our room. It was green, I remember, with a vertical knotted seam of white running through it, like an agitated river. My mother had hung it herself, inexpertly, so that the joins showed clearly. I picked at them constantly, edging my finger in under the curling edges to see what lay behind. I thought there was another room beyond, the colour of plums, smaller, darker, safer. While we, aloft in our high flat, seemed fragile, like a cradle in the tall branches of a tree, swinging airily in the wind.

The tower blocks loomed around us, frail and bespectacled. Below, far below there was a tarred patch with a listing carousel and a swing frame, its thick chains dangling uselessly. The seats had long since been torn off so we shinnied up the chains instead and hung, grimacing, by our toes from the crossbar overhead. A muted howling came from the underpass. Dogs roamed in packs down there, wild and ownerless, scavenging for food. Near the entrances fluorescent strips bracketed to the ceiling lit the way, but in the depths of the tunnel it was pitch black. I always thought of this spot when the priest intoned the Twenty-third Psalm.
The Lord is my Shepherd
,
there is nothing I shall want
… For me, this was ‘death's dark vale'. In the same way as the disused petrol station on the main road was limbo. It was the bleakness and neglect of the place, the weeds sprouting up through the cracks in the forecourt, the forlorn pumps, the derelict pay booth on the concrete island like one last lonely checkpoint between this world and that other one, thronged with the unbaptised, like our lost sister.