Trading Rosemary (11 page)

Ruth, as expected, had not understood. Had bitten back hard with the pleasure of injustice, wallowing in it, scaly belly scratched and scraping on the rocks of indignation. Had no child ever had such an overbearing mother, ever been so persecuted? She had fulfilled her part of the bargain, after all, and now her mother was welshing. Ruth’s entitlement was greedy and great—and unfulfilled. She would not listen, would not understand. Would not even touch that which Rosemary had, at the last, refused to give over, even at the cost of her own impoverishment.

Rosemary had stared at the sulking, wailing girl and tried to find an ounce of sympathy within herself, tried to think back to when Ruth was an infant in truth and not by choice, cocooned in the warmth of her mother and responding with kicks to her voice. She could not remember the beginning of it. That made her slightly uneasy, the loss of that shared experience, but then was that a reasonable attitude to take? Ruth, for all her blustering, could not remember it either, and wouldn’t have chosen to if given the choice. The girl had, after all, bartered her earliest memory for that of a classmate, swapping fishes for horses in a deal that set her on the path of her own obsession.

Rosemary had left before saying something she would regret. Something else. There was only so much impassioned bereavement that one could withstand before wishing another joy of it. In the cafe, cooled, Rosemary wondered if she had taken the wrong tack. She was partly in the wrong, she admitted it. But did that excuse the reaction, the underlying sense of pleasure she got from her daughter at being able to kick, at finally having a decent excuse to fully vent her resentment, her hysteria?

Halfway home, girded and once more reasonable, Rosemary knew that she had and was and that it did not. The piercing siren shriek, the shocked and sympathetic glances of her neighbors, the gathering crowd, and the half-ashamed, half-defiant look on the face of her daughter as white plumes spiraled from the windows of the library gave Rosemary to understand, in a split moment, that between them they had ruined their relationship beyond repair.

“You stupid,
stupid,
melodramatic little bitch,” she said to her daughter. “I should have slapped it out of you years ago, but you’d only have enjoyed it.”

“I wouldn’t have been the only one,” said Ruth, sniffling, for once the center of attention and perhaps not liking it as much as she had anticipated.

“No,” said Rosemary. “You wouldn’t.” Yet a part of her understood what Ruth had done. Had she herself not taught her daughter to value the library above all things? Ruth had learned well, had valued that same library—even its destruction—over her mother, her family, her duty. It was perhaps the only reason that Rosemary did not smack her hard across the mouth as she pushed past her, ignoring the cries of the crowd, and into her home, though her palms itched.

She thought she heard Ruth call after her, but refused to listen.

Smoked filled the corridors, and the walls were warm to the touch but Rosemary was more irritated than afraid. This was her library, whether it was whole or in ashes, the extension of herself, the repository of her memories. She could not comprehend that it could be a danger to her. One of the benefits of having the resources Rosemary possessed was that it gave her a thorough hold on her emotions. Having experienced so much—able to pick, choose, and disassociate—she was able to keep control over her feelings when necessary: a form of pre-production editing that kept fear in check. She was also too cross to care, determined to retrieve the coin she had kept, the fresh clear scent of it—a symbol to Ruth that she was not to be intimidated, was not to be bullied or to stand in sorrow and repentance, clutching her daughter to her breast. Rosemary liked to think she had learnt more of duty than that.

The cover glowed red with ash, fringed and crumbling to the touch. Rosemary’s fingers burned as she scraped the smooth sapflower disk from its mount, the surface heated though not yet to melting point. Ignoring the pain, the burnt imprint of the coin on her flesh and the floral scent that overrode the sweet smell of scorched flesh, Rosemary caught and kept it, turned to go amidst heat and chaos, but halted at the door, unable to leave without taking one last look. Sparks dropped off the ceiling beams, guttering in the thick carpet and leaving little round black marks—but some fell on the fringes and caught, adding a musty smell of burning hessian to the smell of the room. Most of the shelves were alight, and she knew exactly what was burning, and how irreplaceable it was. The door handle was almost too hot to touch and she had to grip it with the folds of her skirt, but she paused for so long that the skirt scorched and her burnt fingers smoked. It hurt to breathe, but she couldn’t stop herself from gasping—trying to get enough oxygen, trying not to cry or give way rising, unprofessional, unedited panic.

“Shit,” said Rosemary. “Shit, shit,
shit.
”

She couldn’t do it, couldn’t leave. There had to be time for her to save at least
some
of them. Generations of memories, of collecting, of planning, of improvement. Generations of her family’s work . . . there was no insurance that could cover a loss of this enormity. Even if the monetary value could be replaced, it wouldn’t be with memories of the same caliber—such did not exist, outside of other private collections or the world’s great public galleries and museums. Rosemary didn’t think she could bear a restitution made of up piles of commonality. That bloody child! She had destroyed works that contributed more to the human condition than she ever would. The capacity to understand and preserve simply wasn’t in her daughter, any more than it was in Rosemary to abandon what that daughter was trying to live up to, or compete with, or revenge herself upon, or whatever twisted reasons she would no doubt use to try and explain herself.

Rosemary had no intention of making it easy for her. Let the brat experience some real hardship for a change, and not by proxy.

Rosemary had never considered her talents as including the smash and grab, but circumstances were extreme, and soon slipcovers littered the floor, pillaged and thrown aside, coins like pieces of eight shoved into the corners of her dress, memories glowing through thin fabric and smoking the seams. When no more coins could fit into her pockets she started stuffing them into her bra. They burned her badly, but the pain was preferable to the loss. The coins she saved were fundamental parts of what Rosemary considered to be the human experience; they were museum pieces of consciousness. She could no more let them burn than the curators of the Louvre could have left a da Vinci—she was the curator, the responsibility was hers. Especially as it was her daughter who had wrought the destruction, who had lit the match, and turned off the sprinklers. Especially so, the charred reminder of Rosemary’s twin failure as parent and guardian.

Her bodice smoldered, and she had to beat at the sleeves to stop them bursting into flame. Her hands peeled skin, the joints blistered and painful, fingers too swollen to bend far. There was no room left in her bra, so Rosemary fumbled at her belt, but while her hands could loosen it she couldn’t grip it enough to pull it tighter, to pull her bodice out looser and secure the belt beneath the billowing folds, make a pocket against her belly. Instead, she used her wrists to pull the belt off, its clasp scalding pale skin. She pulled her dress with one hand, her skin oozing and sticking, succeeded in lifting the front of the material upwards, and clamped her forearm under the fold. With only one hand free, it was harder to wrench open slipcovers and dump their contents against her stomach. Her flesh cringed from the contact, some of the coins half-melted, their edges molding to her, making her bleed and blister.

At first, the smoke made her dizzier than the pain, but when her eyes smarted, swelling shut, Rosemary could no longer see the covers scattered around her feet, the furniture overturned and thrown aside to make access easier. When she tripped, hitting her head sharp against shelves and sent sprawling, the coins no longer collected at her waist but spread, shocked and spilling, over her chest. The softer disks, smoldering, caught and Rosemary kicked, involuntarily, the kick of a pike’s prey in murky pool, but here the murk was smoke and the pike long fled into clearer waters, her bony gape empty and vicious. The disks caught and spread, melting into skin and each other, and Rosemary was lost in pain and fire, dizzier than swirling ash and the clogging of her lungs.

Unable to move, uncomprehending of anything but her own burning flesh, Rosemary thrashed and cried; tried to scream but choked instead, smothered by hot air fiery with flecks. She clawed at the floor, at hard heated beams and overturned desks with black fingers and burning palms; curled in a ball, clutched herself to herself. Her hands clenched tight around small objects. Pressed to her breasts, the skin so charred she could no longer feel it, was an inkwell (so old-fashioned!), a keychain, a memory recorder, a paperweight (a butterfly immobilized in clear glass), a holographic photo frame that flickered, half melted, before her eyes, a three dimensional record of her life that merged with the shock of disconnected memories and sensations of the coins embedded in her flesh . . . Unconsciously, Rosemary collected until the end—blindly snatching and releasing in an attempt to find something to ease the pain, something to hold onto to make the horror less, to drain it away and leave her cooled and settled back into a body that wasn’t a torture to die in.

As Rosemary burned within the tinderbox of her library, chimneys of smoke belched sluggishly from the building. Choking the air, already heavy and thick from the unrelieved sun, the endless baking heat of the coastal summer, they towered above the hills, above the island. Above the fire service, arriving in a clang of burning bells and pumping sea water from the harbor to douse the flames. Above the birds that swung and tumbled in the hot currents, the albatross rising far above the earth and hovering, diving back towards the water when their wings grew too stained with soot, their feathers clogged with particles of past lives, of memories stored and catalogued, kept for rarity and praise.

The particles blew and smeared, stuck and clogged together, the ashes and remnants of a thousand lives, of ten thousand . . . The childhood experiences of a young woman mixed with the coin of one born generations after her death; the copper tang of the ocean dweller clung to the dried continental clay of a community that had never seen the sea; the subtle scent of charred beech overpowered by the quick, sharp-oiled manuka fire, which burned first and fastest, floating higher and higher above the rest and then sinking from the thinner air and down back into the swirling heated atmosphere, spreading and seeding over the land below, forming moisture banks and condensing into clouds.

She awoke to pain and the sound of rain on the roof, and little understanding of either.

Light refracted through falling water swept the ceiling, spattered above her, a scattered, fragile refulgence that caught her attention and held it—swept her away from her body to float above herself, skimming over the surface of her own consciousness. Her awareness of herself skipped like a stone over water, brief touches where she sank into her own body between hovering in the blistered brilliance of the light that drummed above her.

Cool linen surrounded her, anchored her to the bed. It was scentless, and slightly rough. The material caught at her chest, clung over her heart, while sliding over bare feet and lying smooth under her fingers. Those fingers moved slightly, unconsciously, a blind effort to prove that they could, and that her fingertips retained enough sensation to determine the woven texture of the fabric, a sensation that expanded and grew until she was surrounded, and the slight cobbled surface of the linen filled the entire world, surrounded her.

Faint breaths of wind swept over her exposed face and the hand that was closest to the light, the brighter half of the ceiling. It smelled of something she couldn’t recognize, a high sweet scent that calmed and flattered, stroked her skin, her forehead and her cheek . . . It soothed, but the sensation caught at her dimly. The faint touches seemed to extend too far over the dome of her head, slipped over her gently, smoothly, and she could not understand why that scented coolness didn’t catch at her eyes, but it was too hard to think, and so she closed her eyes and let the wind carry her upwards like a leaf, billowing.

Strange noises jarred her out of the endless, easy complications of light and dark. They boomed above her, carried by shadows that extended over her and then drew back. Different tones that rolled like the echo of thunder, into strange shapes that she could not recognize but which washed around her like waves on water. Pressure accompanied them, touches on her face and chest, movement and pain, but always the same booming, rolling tones that reverberated in her head, a puzzle of sound that shattered into fragments, brief, disconnected syllables that accompanied her but did not resolve themselves; she drifted on their motion.

Sometimes when she woke there was darkness outside her eyes as well as beneath them, and though the sound of rain continued, comforting and dim, there were no reflected patterns of light above her. She found the loss strange and a little sad, but hard to hold onto. There was still light, a glowing pallor of shape like a succession of pale slices outside her window, out where the rain was. It fascinated her, this smudged shape, and once when the booming came while she looked out one repeated sound speared her to its shape. The round faces of the attendants shone in the night, mimicked the moon, so was it so surprising that they knew it also?

Slowly her mouth moved, mimicked, found the fascination of discovering new muscles and lips shaped in a moue, the deliberate placement of tongue behind teeth.
Moon
she shaped to herself, silently, and the booming resolved like drops around her, became more intelligible. The sound was the shape, and she could feel the shape on her lips, round like she could not remember what, and tasteless.