Trading Rosemary (4 page)

(She tried to convince herself that it was a possum in the forest outside, but could not make herself believe it. Sound might carry between the trees, but the feel of breath on her ear and the echoes in the tent were not those of a possum.)

As soon as it was light Rosemary crawled from the tent, from the hard rooted slope beneath her, from nightmares and retching and hallucination. Lucidity had returned, but her throat was dry with thirst and screaming and the path she staggered along wove before her endlessly, the few short kilometers stretching into the future, hours for each one. She was hot, and then too cold to move, and her bright orange thermal blanket covered her like eggshell as she huddled beneath, in fetal position, and waited for rescue to come.

She had never been more grateful than she was to hear the sound of whistles echoing through the Hunuas, see the reassuring tramp of help come towards her.

“It’s a good thing you stayed on the path,” they said. “Someone got lost here last year, and we looked for a week but never found him.”

The trees have covered him up,
thought Rosemary, tired, and dizzy.
The monster in the tent got him, and the trees are covering his bones and waving their arms, pointing with mottled mossy fingers and a distant, woody curiosity.
What is that
, they say, the small white trunks all scattered across out dirt.
What is that?

“And you,” said Rosemary to the oldest brother, who was standing quietly behind the others, leaning against a window. “What can I do for you?”

“I went camping once,” he said meditatively. “Those two weren’t interested in the real stuff. They wanted me to go and bring back memories for them.”

“Last time I’m doing
that,
” said the youngest. “Hay fever and insect bites and blisters. He burned his fingers failing to light a fire, and came back halfway through with an absolutely
brilliant
sunburn.”

“You should have seen him trying to fix his dinner,” said the middle brother. “It was positively embarrassing to witness.”

“It wasn’t like I thought it’d be,” the oldest brother admitted. “I was hoping for more communion with nature, less being attacked by it.”

“In that case, I think I can help,” said Rosemary.

The Port’s Water Race that channeled through the Longwood Ranges was ridiculously overgrown, and Rosemary cursed it both under her breath and at the top of her lungs. At least for most of the track, the way forward was clear. The race, constructed centuries past for diggers to get sluicing water for the local gold mines, was a large ditch burrowed out of solid rock and, even if clogged in places, the overall direction was obvious.

Unfortunately, Rosemary had come to a point where the blockage was so complete her sense of direction became compromised. There appeared to be a fork in the track, with two possible directions. One way was well trampled, as if other walkers had gone before. The other, across a river and up a steep bank, had a rag-hung tree that usually signified the correct path but no actual evidence of any such route.

“Just make sure you stick to the track,” a local pub owner had told Rosemary the night before. “Some of those old mines are naught but deep holes in the ground, and all covered up by now with ferns. You fall into one, nobody will ever find you. That’s if you don’t break your neck on the way down.”

Uncertain, Rosemary took the former option, on the grounds that if she was wrong, the apparent path meant that other people had been wrong first, and that was always comforting. An hour later, as night was approaching, she was forced to realize that being wrong in company was still being wrong. There was no proof of the channel, and no sign of the conservation hut she had planned to spend the night in.

Unwilling to wander in darkness through the deep-dimpled landscape, Rosemary found a fallen tree and built a lean-to against it, cutting fern to weave the shelter from and for bedding. She was not afraid. There was no wildlife that could hurt her, and the weather was mild, with stars pouring over the trees in spider waves. Morepork owls cried in the night, and Rosemary could hear them hunting, hear the small rustles in leaf litter, the damp, clean smelling litter of beech leaves and black humus.

The next day she was able to navigate her way to the promised hut, through mud that came over her boot tops and sucked at her socks. Beside the hut was a small ancient dam. Trees surrounded its pond; podocarp beeches and silver birches, their branches bent to the water and doubled back in perfect reflection.

It was the quietest, most beautiful place Rosemary had ever seen. She stayed for two days, seeing no one but birds, the glimmer of fish, and the occasional quiet deer sipping the water. It was as if she was the last person left in the world, and the woods and the water were such that she did not mind.

“That,” said the oldest brother in satisfaction, “is perfect. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” said Rosemary. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“Why not stay for lunch?” said the middle brother. “Go on. Travelling’s hard work. Get a good meal inside before you set off again. You can tell us about the next walk you’re doing. You never know, we might be interested.”

“I don’t have anything planned,” said Rosemary, “but there’s a lake back home that might be interesting. Not very strenuous—I’d stay at an inn each night, and there’s a boat service that would carry the bags for me.”

“That sounds civilized,” said the oldest brother.

“Yes,” said Rosemary. “Just my speed. I think that I’d enjoy it.”

Regaining the second coin was as enjoyable.

Rosemary’s mother had collected more furniture than memories. The coins from her generation of stewardship tended towards craftsmanship and construction—the carpenter’s carving of a single sideboard, the potter’s throwing of a single set of crockery. For generations there had been a commune of artists in the Waikato hills who had recorded their experiences and destroyed their creations at the moment of completion. For the most talented of the artists, the coins resulting from their sculptures or paintings or embroidery were worth more than the concrete products themselves. The more accessible experiences could be recorded on multiple disks and would easily find markets among the common people, but the most capable artists, the most brilliant creations, had values that skyrocketed with rarity. A single replication not only of the experience of the artwork, but the experience of its creation, made the picking up a hammer or the lighting a match worthwhile.

When Rosemary visited, there was a large midden at the gate of the commune, an advertisement of the genius residing within, and a warning to passersby that they needed deep pockets to enter. The midden was a central feature of the commune, the one place all the artists gathered to relax, to drink on an overhanging balcony and cheer their colleagues when they came down the path to the edge of the pit pushing wheelbarrows or carrying baskets of ashes, well-shredded parchment, or canvas. The midden was their agora and café—the workshops themselves were off limits to any but their occupants, lest the experience of a piece be spread and the value of the resulting coin limited.

Rosemary knew that the people who lived and worked here would not have reacted as Ruth had. Coins were made to be traded. True, it was not entirely the same. Most of the artists who walked the line between destruction and creation had a second copy of their experiences locked within their heads—it kept their skills intact and allowed them to improve on their talents. It meant, of course, that the true value of a coin would not be fully known until after the death of its creator—the mere possibility of replicas kept prices artificially low. This form of double vision was seen as part of the eccentricity of the artist; only very few had access to memory machines that did not erase as they recorded, and these were usually reserved for educational institutions. There was something slightly disreputable about such a practice when performed by a private citizen. It was seen as an overly mawkish form of nostalgia, tinted with greed. The slight whiff of selfishness, of the covetous, hung around those that transgressed this social boundary, including many artists. An unfortunate necessity, thought Rosemary, but then she was secretly sure that artists were never happy unless they felt themselves to be transgressing
something.

The most talented of the artists, those that came along only once or twice in a generation, disdained the double memory. They possessed but a single copy, and traded it away, relying solely upon the latency of their talent for any future works. These were the most highly valued. Any who pretended to have such talent soon found their ability to create new and desirable works dwindling, and were soon reduced to creating and recreating what they had produced before. Yet even these had collectors willing to pay for the experience—some people would collect anything.

The great alluvial plains of the Waikato were once more submerged, this time with salt. The view from the Kaimai Ranges was no longer dairy farms but deforested ridges where sheep wandered, flexible hooves skittering over steep slopes, staring with vacant eyes over misty water. A calm surface on which to boat, the layered plains buried beneath while waves rolled in green chimes overhead. On clear days, when the air and the water were at their most still, shadowed remnants of drowned towns could be seen beneath—their gridded streets clogged with sand and spires reaching towards the sun. It was a popular place for diving, and Rosemary had swum there herself, clad in a sucking black suit and hearing her blood pulse, her heart beating like the ticking of a clock. A grandfather clock, with brass gongs kept free from seaweed and salt air, salt blood.

There was once such a clock in her mother’s house; a clock that had been navigated through the northern islands, bodies fitted carefully around it in the carriage, hauling it all the way from the old home to the new.

“I’ve always wanted a clock like that,” her mother had said in satisfaction, the trade concluded. And then the awkward trip home, balancing and maneuvering, the clock wrapped in blankets to keep it from blunting, from chipping, while the vertebrae of those around it stiffened and suffered.

Rosemary’s childhood had been one of geometries. The placement of furniture in a too-small room; the packaging of dining suites in the shed where chairs bred in dark corners and waited to be rotated into service whenever their wood came into favor. “I’ve had enough of oak, but did you see that walnut?” The constant puzzle of fitting clocks and mirrors, old gramophones and rocking chairs into vehicles where they didn’t really fit, their new owner squashed around them, roping struts and awkward corners into place. Then the unwrapping and the cleaning, the smell of waxy polish and acidic brass cleaner, and the small itch of broken cobwebs in the air. They tickled Rosemary’s nose until even the thought of more furniture made her want to scratch.

The possibility of mice and nursery rhymes, a vivid memory: when one wet night the cat found a nest of baby mice and brought them half dead, half drowned into the house to dry themselves on curtains and the dark carpet under the beds. Brought them in one by one and then left them to scatter, until days later scratching and skitterings unearthed them from new nests. All but one, who from distant scratching and muffled squeaks, was lost in the latest clock.

“At least there’s a bright side,” said Rosemary, as the clock was left to wind down. (They were mindful of toothed and grinding wheels and what they could do to a small furry body trapped in the machinery with dangling tail and twitching whiskers. The clock could strike two at once, and no mouse would run down from it. Better to let it come out in its own time than to have to take everything out and clean it of gore gummed up in the cogs.)

“It’s running behind as it is,” her mother complained. “I’d never get it going properly again.” Suspicious. “I’m sure it wasn’t like this when we bought it.”

“At least it’s quiet now,” said Rosemary, of the clock. It had ridiculously high-pitched chimes, totally unsuited to the broad solidity of the casing, a half-meter wide and taller than she was. People sniggered when they heard it, and Rosemary, for the first time in her life, was willing victory to a rodent. Perhaps it could damage the innards beyond repair, turn the clock into a blessedly silent shell that loomed in the corner, wafting linseed and lanolin.

“That bloody cat,” said her mother, bitterly, and the cat was banished from the house at night. There were no chimes, and no pitter-patter of small animal feet and no surprising finds of jaws and hearts from then on. Rosemary missed none of them.

A parallel library of hinges and paneling and glass. Rosemary had sometimes wondered if there was an acquisition gene, one passed from mother to daughter in the many generations of their family, a mitochondrial desire to collect and store and preserve. (Bright jars on a shelf, the sharp mirror of light on wax polish, a rainbow of slipcovers. Pickles and clawed feet and gold lettering on hinged spines.) Each of the family librarians had had their own interests, but Rosemary, the librarian of all librarians, cared for these interests only as they pertained to the coins as a group—new wings of the collection, preserving facets of human history. Rosemary valued each addition even if she didn’t care overmuch for the realities behind it, and even if she wasn’t interested in collecting sideboards and jamming them into every available room like some demented wood-loving magpie, she still kept a close—if unsentimental—eye on the relevant dealers of both sorts.

On certain items, most often another clock, her mother was plaintive. “Doesn’t it mean something to you that it belonged to your great-grandmother and to me? All that family history . . . one day it will be yours. Doesn’t it mean something?”

To Rosemary it didn’t matter one little bit, didn’t mean anything. No matter how plaintive the appeal or how long it had been in the family, the clock was hideous. It didn’t even
sound
like a clock, more like a demented call to the lifeboats. Her mother might love it, but Rosemary had associations of nothing but nuisance. It was a
thing
and only a thing. Its presence intruded, and the endless frantic noise gave her headaches and stoked her temper. She could not shut it out. If she wanted to hear a clock, she could hear one in her own time, and better. She could not value it, and did not wish to pretend.