Trading Rosemary (7 page)

Why not?
she thought, when he came back early from shore leave. Rosemary had not wanted to leave the boat, had come back as soon as she was able, once the arrangements for the following day’s trade had been completed. The necklace hung prettily around her neck, coins twisting against her skin, brief contacts flashing through her consciousness, the smell and feel of the coast.

She helped him stow the supplies, unsurprised when one of his hands brushed against hers in the galley, and again on the deck. She had spread blankets there to sunbathe, and the wool caught against her bared skin. Why not? There were no responsibilities here, no child or library or household to consider, just the warmth of the wind on her bare skin, the gentle rocking of the boat, the smell of the sea around her, and the shadows of gulls passing over the boat.

Always strong-stomached, she enjoyed the sunlit rocking, tempered as it was in harbor. The heat of the sun left her dizzy, closing her eyes against the brightness.

Above her, he smelled of cockles and fresh thyme, the faint astringency of lemon. Her breath seemed magnified in her ears; the slap of water loud against the side of the boat. She moved with him and the boat, and the memories jostled against naked skin, changing positions as she rocked, bright flashes before closed eyes.

Jam jar gleams green in the sun, a plastic roof tied taut, tight with rubber. Many hands pass it along, octopus-like, but unlike the octopus no one opens the jar—although why they don’t is beyond her. Probably no one would let them do it, for fear it would upset the parents. But then, passing a poisonous spider around in a jam jar was okay, especially when the one who was poisoned was doing the passing.
Got bit several times,
he said.
Felt like being pinched with pliers,
he said. She peers closely through the jar, at the multifaceted eyes within, but the katipo is small, inoffensive, and when it waves its legs it is impossible to see where its mouth is, when it would bite.

They live in driftwood,
he said, the dry salt scent of driftwood. The afternoon sun fell golden around, golden outside and greenly within the jar.
If you’re going to sit on driftwood at the beach, be careful,
he said. These would sting more than the hot sand, be more cutting than the spiny dune plants on the tender feet of a new summer.

There’s driftwood on the beach at Brighton, but it doesn’t glow, or show what lives within. It’s bleached bone white, with tints like it has leached the color of sand. There is no red stripe down its back, and there is not even the warning of a plastic cover, or the hovering poisoned man grown to love his poisoner, showing her off to gaping children.

This is where she bit me,
he said.

The intertidal zone breathes around her, a damp and lisping littoral lung. When the sea inhales, the coast is exposed, and the beach is ripe for shaping into crumbling buildings and sand-shedding beasts. Rosemary builds alligators with shells for teeth and women with algae for hair. Then the deep watery exhale . . . the muddy scent of wet sand, and the sculptures are eroded, their temporary solidity denied.

A steep shoreline, it’s a precarious perch for building, but one that is tolerated because of the view. The shining plain of the Pacific, which defines the horizon and reflects around it, is a match for the sky. It is blue when the sky is blue, but more often, when the clouds have come over the coast it darkens into choppy roughness, into restless waves that can be seen from far above: the view of seabirds with salty feet. It remains their view first, as over the decades the water level rises, waiting for the dunes, hungry for them, a menacing patience that bites into the beach. There are museums on the coast that show a different shoreline, and her mother tells of beaches that have shifted inland, and higher, as the water rises. The ocean’s breath deepens, and there is less room for the children’s castles, the strange and wonderful beasts, the mermaids that guard them, the architectural, cockle-studded bestiary of the tidal zone, the sand castles that Rosemary builds and gleefully knocks down again. The sandy bodies drown in the tide, and remain as ghosts, disembodied on the sea floor, when one day their small sculptors will evacuate, full grown, to higher ground, leaving their childhood behind.

She always looks for it last, it’s so hard to find. Looks with specimen bags and neatly written labels, with alcohol to leach out the amino acids and a guidebook to aid identification. One-thousandth the size of kelp, and not as bright as the green sea lettuce, for all that they’re part of the same class, both Chlorophyta—a strange kinship on a far-from-Latin coast. It’s feathery, is
plumosa
,
but only when it sways in the water and the barbs curl in the current. Otherwise not. Green feathers, like a fern with all the starch taken out, hiding in shallow crevices where the sun doesn’t reach, a green and secret smell, salt rotten and tinged with traces of methanol. Feathery like the rock wren, tiny and shy, that flirts with the wind and still stays close to shelter, bright eyes gleaming out from shadow.
Bryopsis
has no eyes, but it flutters like the wren, and its feathers plume from the rock. Brightly, knightly, like a coat of arms, like a flag, or the decoration of an unseen helmet. Perhaps it dreams of dragons, but when she attacks from above the brave feather dies, lies limply over one finger, a soggy mass with all the barbicels laid low, and the green darkened to death.

This is what the rock wren leaves behind in summer storms, what remains of the helmet when it leaves the safety of the crevice and returns headless, shorn. It is what the fern loses when it stays in shadow.

It lies on the beach, washed up, the limbs heavy and spread. It is stripped of bark, and only a few tatters remain, but underneath the smooth white wood is hooked with spines—they are irregular enough to surprise fingers, and it is hard not to touch it, to feel the catch on smooth skin. Rosemary is not the only one who does—people are drawn to it, the carcass on the beach, and a girl with dark hair leaves her rock pools and her hunt for the glistening paua to stroke the bare branches. Its limbs are as naked as hers, damp wood mixed with sweat and perfume and the hard brine of rock pools.

Standing on the rocks, from the perspective of height, the branches reach like fingers; like tentacles. From an angle, it is hard to tell if they are branches or roots, but the confusion doesn’t matter as they no longer strain towards sky or earth, but lie, out-flung, to the surrounding stone. They are as long as the trunk, or longer, and stretch like a giant squid in rigor mortis, its tentacles straining for water as the roots once reached for moisture in the soil, or the leaved branches stretched under the wet sky. There is no water here, among the tide pools, just the thin crust of evaporated salt, and the drowning on dry land.

There’s a fur seal on the rocks. It looks as if it might be dead. It smells as if it is dead: a sweet rot, rancid fat spoiling on stone.

It’s hard to see, the rough coat against the rock bank, the hairs the same shade as stones—like one of those three dimensional paintings that must be stared at, cross-eyed, before the image can be seen. It’s easy to lose by looking away, but who isn’t fascinated by death? No one looks away, no one isn’t fascinated, doesn’t want to poke it, to knead it between still living fingers, feel the newly rotting flesh to see if death is catching.

Poor seal. It looks asleep, but what a lonely place to die, in front of a wildlife viewing platform where, for once, no one was around to look, or to call for help. Better luck next time. It must have been recent, there’s no smell. Someone clambers down to it, but it isn’t Rosemary. She is not yet completely sure the seal is dead, and the nearly dead bite, their stinking jaws jealous and ready for company. So someone else goes, on the grounds of better him than her—but he doesn’t dare to touch. Above, her fingers clench on the railing, wanting to know the feel of the wet, jagged fur. Beside her, there is a call.

“Can you get me a whisker?”

A
memento mori
? Perhaps she collects—an album of animal parts, an extended family shot. Or perhaps it is something to cook with, to flavor eye of newt. There aren’t a lot of newts round here, but it is hard to see how whiskers substitute, or blend together in the pan as the rocks blend with the fur. What would she cook it with, Rosemary wonders? It seems like grave robbery—but worse, for this is not for gold but for gustatory self. Still, to know the feel of the whisker—the crisp roughness like no crisp roughness she has felt before . . . to not be jealous of her possibilities, that she will take something that Rosemary doesn’t get to take.

The caller doesn’t get her whisker, but now Rosemary wants one. Alas, the viewing platform is filling up, and mutilating the dead is not for an audience.

Laying down quadrants in cockle beds, digging down with small shovels and counting; sorting and sizing and measuring, mapping the relationship between tide and depth and length. Slopping up and down the beds in gumboots and sunburn, decanting the cockles out of the weighing bucket and back into their stretch of sand, making sure that they would not spend the afternoon in the bucket, beneath the hot sun.

At the end of the afternoon, another dig, but this time for cockles to take home, a full bucket with fresh seawater and the winding drive along the peninsula to another digger’s flat. Rinsing the cockles under cold water and then throwing them in a saucepan to boil, one that had to be borrowed off the neighbors to fit all the shells. Steaming them with garlic and butter, tossing in overcooked spaghetti, to be eaten with cheap wine off shared plates.

Sand in her shoes and her shirt and her teeth, the cockles not fully cleaned but no one had cooked them before, it was all a guessing game, and even with the crunch they tasted of the tides.

The sex was pleasant but unremarkable, and Rosemary did not transfer the memory of it immediately, preferring to laze in the sun and play with the shells about her neck. She had no immediate need of currency, and the experience was common enough. When, at dinner, she saw the polite and friendly eyes of the cook, ladling pasta with shellfish and white wine onto her plate, she saw in his face that he had not waited as she had. The slight reserve, the tinge of curiosity gave it away. He remembered, of course, how they had spent the afternoon, but the details were removed from him, locked into whatever coin he had chosen. Rosemary wondered what it was (driftwood? mussel shell? a polished disk cut from the glass of a bottle of sauvignon blanc?) and smiled to herself through dinner. She felt as if she had a secret. Smiled more to know that he would soon take up that coin and revisit the memory—curiosity was always a giveaway. She had done it often enough herself.

Of course it would be passed on soon enough, but Rosemary was no prude. Sex was a commodity, and she had benefited enough from others. Had she thought ahead, she could have brought one or two favorite coins with her for afternoons such as this had been, but perhaps it was best that she hadn’t. Narrowness of experience was to be discouraged.

Later that night, soft noises in the cabin next to hers suggested that the cook was reliving the memory of their lovemaking. At the same time, Rosemary was divesting herself of it. There was no need to put it off. The sun had gone down; the decks were stripped of warmth, and the day was over.

When Rosemary took her bird-memories and handed them over for the sixth coin, handed them over to a lumpen, earthbound merchant too seasick for travelling and boats, she lost her liking for more than feathers.

Warm shuffles like mice in the cupboard, the soft sounds of an unbalanced body. She knew she should leave it, let the darkness soothe feathers and fear until she could take it in her hand calmly, stroke the soft walnut head, strangely solid under the spare down covering. Rescued from the jaws of her horrible, over-fed cat, and the nest too high to return to, too far out on the sea cliff, and Rosemary with no way of getting it back.

So it was in the hot water cupboard, wrapped in a tea towel in an old ice-cream container. And Rosemary, sadistic with childish curiosity, a pendulum between her books and the cupboard, unable to leave it for ten minutes at a time, knowing her jack-in-the-box appearance was frightening it but unable to stay away. Was it thirsty, was it starving?

Would it eat cat food and thrive, like a previous refugee had done, oblivious to the irony if not the cat, which shared its food and watched with gleaming eyes, ready for canapé, for vol-au-vent, for stuffed-plump gull dumpling. Would it eat, would it refuse? Would it die? Could she keep it alive and for herself, to sit on her shoulders and pick fish-bones from her hand?

It would be wrong to let it go hungry, this gaping greedy baby fallen from the nest.

Soft in her hands, the ridge of spine tender against her palm, head tilted backwards as she tried to prise open the tiny bill, hovering tweezers clogged with food, food smeared against the smile lines of the beak. The bird was rigid in her hands, staring, too scared to turn its head away, but Rosemary did not return it to the warm safety of the cupboard.

Was it thirsty, was it starving?
Eat this, little birdie, it’s good for you. Yum, yum.

The pleasure and relief when she was able to force lumps down its throat.
You’ll feel better with something in your stomach, birdie.
The horror at its choking, the harsh breaths, the panic in the small feathered face, in the small black eyes. Open up, down go the silver tweezers! Quick, pull it out—before it dies in her hands, terrified, stuffed from one end to another and wondering what it had done to deserve this death, too petrified to move as more food was stuffed down its throat. Too petrified to turn its head away, to live.

The shame of it stiff in her hands, suffocated by fear and love and sardines. Why did it not swallow, stupid thing? Why did it not turn its head?

Why could she have not left it safe in the cupboard, to recover in its own time? Rosemary wept guilty tears, threw it in the marram grass where no one would see the corpse. Threw it where even the cat couldn’t find it, the bloody beastly cat who she loved better than birds. The cat who
plop-sucked
his way across the damp sands, shaking miserable feet, shaking wind-shuffled fur and glaring.