Owls Do Cry (18 page)

And I kept saying —It’s not a dream, it’s real, I know it’s real.

How stupid of me. I think now it was those salt crackers and cheese that we had when the Broadfoots came last night, and all the worry of getting ready for them, and thinking what to wear, and trying to remember what books I had read lately and what music I had been listening to.

But my dream, that made me cry in the night, let me tell it.

It happened that Tim and I were preparing in the middle of a desert for a party to be given to two people. I remember the scene well; everywhere lay sand and rotted trees and clumps of withered bushes, and the sun was as hot as if it shone through glass. No river flowed through the waste, nor were there any pools that you might imagine in a desert, with date palms and fringe of green beside the clear water. Nor were there any other people save one, a shrivelled child, an Arab girl, with a white garment wrapped about her, sitting so still she may have been dead, upon a grotesque rocking-horse which rose out of the sand and was painted black with its tongue a bright red and yellow and blue, striped three times.

I have said that Tim and I were preparing to entertain these two unknown people; but we had no food to offer them, nor drink, we simply sat cross-legged upon the sand.

You shall sing for them – Tim said to me – if you can find a song.

And I replied to him —You shall dance for them.

And although I knew there was no food or music I kept staring about me for the coffee and sardines and the radiogram with its Fifth Symphony ready to be played.

And then suddenly the Arab child began to rock upon her rocking-horse, disturbing the sand and dust until they rose in clouds and I saw the sand was of grains of gold and the dust too, and I cried out to Tim – Tim, Tim, make her stop it, make her stop it, she is destroying the gold. Look. All those grains will fly up in the sky and we shall never see them again. Make her stop it, Tim.

And Tim answered —But Teresa, she likes it. Look, her little Arab face is covered with smiles. Let her keep rocking.

And I cried back —But the gold, Tim. The gold. Stop her.

So Tim went up to the little girl and spoke to her whereupon she climbed from the horse and both horse and child vanished leaving no trace but the red and yellow and blue tongue, striped three times, grown larger now, and spread out like a carpet upon the sand. Then appeared our two guests, walking upon the carpet. At first I thought they were Alison and Herbert Bessick, indeed they
were
Alison and Herbert Bessick; but as they grew closer I saw they were Tim and me, but different; for Tim was smiling cruelly, and I was holding my hand over my side, under my breast, and it is amazing that I was able to walk, for blood flowed from a wound in my side, and fell, as if in a predisposed pattern, upon the red stripe of the carpet. And
so the two dream people approached us, and I began to cry, and turned to Tim for help; but he was not there, I could not see him anywhere, only the two dream-people advancing; and I began to sing, a child’s song we had at school, years ago, about Miska and Panni,

Miska came riding by gay was he

Panni stood by the stream fair was she

red his coat yellow boots none so gay

but the stream stood between Panni and her love’s way.

And after I had sung the song, the world grew dark suddenly, as I remembered from my geography that it grows dark in the desert, like a cutting off of the sun’s life; and I saw, far away and not able to reach it, our house, I could see the louvre windows and cantilever terrace, every detail to the yellow eaves, yet the house seemed made of paper for the walls flapped and fluttered. Now I think of it they were black walls, for I watched them flapping backward and forward for many seconds before I realized I was watching something else flapping. It was a black paper man dangling from the sky.

—Dr Bessick, I cried out.

Then I saw it was Tim, and he held under his arm a portfolio with gold writing on it, I could read it from where I stood, and it said —Sales Account Sales Account Sales Account.

I thought this very funny and began to laugh and then I felt my side hurting and could stand up no longer so I lay down upon the carpet spread in the desert, thinking, I shall die now. Where are Toby and Francie and Daphne? And my mother and father? Francie, Francie, I called out. Toby, Toby. Daphne.

Nobody came. I felt a sense of desolation and unhappiness that nobody came to me. The little Arab girl had appeared again, but was changed and happy, standing smiling and holding a feather of toi-toi in one hand, and a salt cracker, spread with cheese, in the other. I do not think she saw me. I began to cry again, and that was when I woke up and saw in my half-dream state, the black paper man lying dead beside me; and I cried out, it was all so strange; and for one second apart from all the other time, I wanted to be a little girl with dark hair and a dirty spotted pinafore, sitting in the rubbish dump and looking up at the clouds like white slippers or silk fish in the sky.

Now telling that dream has exhausted me. Goodnight.

Saturday

I think there will be a certain delight in returning to Waimaru – in revealing to the people who knew me as a child and have me in their memory as a ragged little dark girl, a
chicken
, a quiet shy high-school girl with a tunic so small it could not cope with my even so slight development; a draggled-looking outcast going messages to the butcher’s or grocer’s or papershop, and saying, afraid, for I had no money warm in my hand —Sixpence-worth the mince, please, or —Two pounds of skirt steak and twopence worth the mince for the cat; will there not be a crowing delight when I return and people realize that I am grown up and married, with children (two boys and a girl – where would any distribution be found more favourable?), that my home contains a washing machine, an Electrolux, a refrigerator, a steam iron, an electric range, and all the
modern devices that my mother never dreamed of, and that half my former friends, I am sure, will never have. Oh, stuck in Waimaru, how shall I bear it, if it were not for what I have to
show
?

Wednesday

News this morning that mother has died. The telegram said she passed away peacefully in the night, and that all is well. How strange to have written all is well! It almost seems like a postscript delivered by my mother herself.
Is
she dead? I have not cried yet, it all seems so far away. We are not going south for the funeral, it is impossible with the children and everything, but we have sent a beautiful wreath of earliest violets and narcissus and a card bought from Petersons, who specialise in tasteful printing for funerals, weddings, birthdays, and other important occasions.

But what will mother look like? Will she look like parchment and her eyelids hang like yellow crepe, as I have read in a book? I do not really believe she is dead, yet I am glad, I am glad of her death.

Thursday

Have received a few telegrams and cards of sympathy from friends who know about mother, or read it in the papers. I wish Dad had not put –

I go to prepare a place for you,

or some other text in the paper – it seems so lacking in taste; and now I suppose every year the family will think of some rhyme to publish in the memorial column, and disgrace me in front of my artistic friends.

The funeral today.

Peter had a letter from the school nurse to say his teeth needed attention, and will I take him to the clinic next Tuesday at three o’clock.

Mother will be buried in the family grave if there is room for her. But my father will languish, I fear he will die, and how strange with my father dead, the little hopping man of cruelty, tyranny, and child-like dependence. What will Toby do? And Daphne?

Oh my mother was as big as the arm of land will hold sea and not spill. I cannot imagine her death. I think of her at home putting the pikelets on the girdle or singing her kind of half-song as she wiped the dishes with the end of a dirty and wet tea-towel, or standing in the snow when we lived in the deep south in the railway huts red like geraniums; with her boots bogged in the white, standing and saying to us, —Kiddies, kiddies a little waxeye has come to us in the cold weather, and meaning, Kiddies, kiddies a waxeye had come to
her
to hide from the snow and find honey in her, for she knew her bigness and sweetness and could not move for spilling some of it, though I would have held my arms, like land around a lake, tight about her, and not let her spill over for anyone save myself, for I was youngest; and yet it is not my mother I grieve for, it is herself as grandmother for my children; only, yes, it is my mother too, who should have died long ago she was so tired with sweeping out her house and the world; and I used to climb on her knee and pull open her blouse, and take her tittie in my mouth, for there was no one who came after me, to say

—
It’s mine
.

Oh, I don’t know, I am half Daphne in writing this, it is not my usual way; as if a spell had come over me.

Friday

Back to normal. I seem to have lost count of the date. Toby is coming next week for a night. I have prayed and prayed that he will not come, for we are friends now with the Broadfoots, and if Harold, that is Dr Broadfoot, sees Toby and perhaps guesses that he takes fits – it is manifest from Toby’s eyes and his flushed face and his occasional stumbling in speech, almost a drunken slur if Harold notices it all, I shall never recover from the disgrace. Toby, why do you not see that I don’t want you, that you have no part in my life, that I, who played with you as a little girl, finding treasure and curious wonders in the rubbish dump, am a grown woman living a happy normal life, and want nothing, ever, to do with your strange ways and your falling down in fits.

Toby did not read any more of the diary. He closed the book and leaned forward and thrust it upon the fire; then, remembering that he had seen in the garage underneath the house a wooden rocking-horse, he crept outside and down the stairs, turning the light on in the garage, and looking at the bright blue rocking-horse with its gold stirrups and silver bit, everlasting in the wooden mouth, and the marble eyes that blinked once, twice, in the light; and Toby picked up the rocking-horse and holding it before him, he climbed the stairs and carried the bright blue toy into the middle of the sitting room where it stood upon the green-leaved carpet like a living horse in a warm forest. Then Toby went to Sharon’s room. The child lay uncovered and flushed in her cot, her hand upon a half-empty bottle of milk which she drew, in her sleep, towards her, sucking, and wriggling her toes with the pleasure of her dream-tasting.
Toby lifted her and she began to cry. He covered her with a blanket from the cot and carried her to the sitting room where he put her in the saddle of the rocking-horse, closing her fists upon the reins.

—Rock, he said gently.

And he chucked her under the chin and said,

—Oogle, oogle, oogle,

the way his own uncles had done, or his imagining of their way, when he was a child, but a tiny starveling with no rocking-horse.

—Rock. Go on, rock.

The child seemed not to understand, and kept crying, and Toby leaned forward, rocking the horse but the child did not stop crying, softly now, and dribbling over her fat chin; so he took her, his dirty and hairy hands encircling her warm silk body, and sat by the fire. The diary was almost burned now, he felt no guilt that he had burned it. The flames liked their food and poked, like a row of vindictive eyes, through the half-drooped glass eyelids of the space-heater.

—Now, have you had enough warm? Toby asked his eleven-month-old niece who could not, because of drowsiness and the silence that babies have, say one word in answer, but slept now in his arms.

He carried her back to the cot, covered her, tucking her tight; and returning to the now empty and damp forest, treading upon the dead and dying leaves, he replaced the amazed and blinking horse downstairs in the garage. There was a frost upon the grass, shining like dibbles of white soup upon a green beard, and Toby’s breath as he
climbed the stairs, came out like smoke from the mouth of no dragon, only from Toby Withers, numbed cold and not knowing where.

And then he took his folding suitcase that sank, when empty, like a concertina; that had belonged to Uncle Louis who died of cancer in the small upstairs room of lanoline and yellow skin and the smell, in early spring when he died, of raspberry cordial flowing through the air coloured blue and too sweet for tasting, put in his pyjamas, hairbrush, brilliantine, soap, electric shaver, jersey; snapped shut the worn empty-of-music suitcase and left his sister’s house, and crossed by the ferry to the city they called a jungle.

And he felt tired and his mother said goodbye to him
from the platform, taking out her lace handkerchief, the only one left from the first war, when Bob sent them from Paris —
Toujours L’amour
embroidered across the corner; to wave goodbye, Toby; and tell, with the aid of a waving handkerchief, what to remember and do on such a long voyage from home to a strange city of trams and traffic lights and trolley buses and gangsters – yes gangsters walking in broad daylight, with guns in their hip pockets; and masks of black silk ready.

—Goodbye, Toby.

And then what to remember,

—Remember the train goes right through to the boat. Don’t get off at Christchurch.

—Remember not to put your head out of the window when you’re travelling, or it will be sliced off, and roll down between the rails and be mangled, Toby. Mangled.

A man was mangled last week, leaving a wife and three children.

—Remember, Toby. When you get on the boat ask politely the way to your cabin if you get lost; then go to bed; eat a water biscuit; and go with the motion of the boat.

—Also, don’t put your head out of the porthole.

—Aunty and Uncle will be there to meet you in Wellington and they will take you to the train at night. Take your pills, Toby, and be good. And never never speak to strangers, and if a nice man offers you a bag of lollies or an ice cream, say No thank you.