All four of us jumped, pointed and shouted with staggered fingers outstretched. Samuel gripped me by my waist and lifted my whole body above his shoulders so that my legs hung down on either side of his head. I held onto the underside of his chin with both hands and felt the rough comfort of his stubbled skin. ‘You see them, Monkey? Look, look, do you see the dorsal fin? And there’s another one!’
We counted and there were three altogether. Again and again we marked the rises and the breaths, the sprays and the flippers and the surfacing. I was breathless above the whole world with the whales and the water, raised to such heights by Samuel. I saw the water giants, convinced myself that they saw me too. I could count the row of bright-painted houses that edged the beach from where we’d just walked. I saw the top of the mountain, the range across the bay and the creatures lolling in the shallows, resting now after a season of covering excessive distances at sea. But more than this, I felt my father beneath me, solid as stone and holding me up to give me a better view of the world, and the world a better view of me. There could be nothing amiss up here on the shoulders of this giant, even when it began to rain. Soft slow drops pockmarked the face of the water below us. The elder couple hurried onwards and shielded themselves with their clothing stretched over the tops of their heads. My father put me down and pulled the hood of my jacket up, tugged at the strings and tied them. His fingers beneath my chin smelled musty with spent tobacco. He started to run and I was beside him, certain the whales watched us as we went. I shouted and waved to them and one rolled onto its side and raised another flipper. My jacket kept the sheet of silver droplets, heavy now, from wetting my upper torso, but by the time we got to the front of the house my jeans were soaked through.
Samuel stood at the low wall and pushed me into the small front garden, but he remained outside the property. ‘Come on,’ I shouted, already halfway up the path, but he waved me on towards the front door.
‘Go, go inside, Monkey!’
‘Aren’t you coming?’
He shook his head and backed away, the rain beating down harder now and plastering his hair to the side of his face. He looked comical and I wanted to laugh.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he called. ‘I’m going up the road for a bit. Tell your mom I’ll be back tonight.’
‘But you’ve already been out!’ I was too young to realise how closely I already echoed my mother.
He waved and jogged on, paying no attention to the damp state of his torso, his youngest daughter, or the heavy downpour.
Safe beneath the shelter of the eaves, I wiped my feet on the mat and pushed back the hood of my jacket. I opened the door and thought that if the rain eventually stopped later in the day, I would wait for Samuel’s whistle on the roof in the dark. I would stay awake forever, if that was how long it took for him to come home.
Seven
If there’s such a thing as happiness, then I know when it ended. On a day that was windy and grey and peppered with rain. I was home from school, drinking a home-made milkshake through a blue straw on the front steps of the veranda.
Through the buildings across the street I could see small sections of turbulent sea. A truck pulled up, big and belching and too wide for our narrow road; other cars would have to manoeuvre around it on the wrong side of the road to get by. Devin had stayed for sport after school and my mother was busy with housework somewhere inside. Five men in overalls emerged from the belly of the truck and another in a suit from the cab at the front. His sideburns stopped before the corners of a mouth that turned upwards when he saw me sitting there.
‘That milkshake looks good.’ He wiped at his forehead with the back of one hand while the other clutched a clipboard to his chest. He had the kind of face that was pliable and made an easy smile, not the visage of one who had come to take my world away. I looked at him, took the straw from the glass and sucked at it from the other end. I said nothing.
‘Is your dad here?’ His face glistened.
‘No.’
‘You by yourself?’
I calculated how many steps would take me inside. I shook my head.
‘Your mother?’
She was through the front door and beside me before I could put the glass down and raise myself to call her. She wiped her hands and her whole life off on the flowered apron around her waist and a knot of anxiety tied her eyebrows together. As their eyes met, I saw the man’s face change. I knew that, just as there was another side to everyone, there was another side to him, different from the one who had a smile for small girls.
‘You Mrs Landsberg?’ he asked my mother, and I understood my own sudden irrelevancy.
‘Yes.’
‘Mr Landsberg around today?’
‘He’s working. Can I help you?’ She was still dragging her hands through her apron, even though they must have been long dry.
‘Well,’ the man looked at his board, as though a script was written there. ‘He has a few debts incurred that need settling. More than a few, actually.’
‘Catherine, go to your room.’ My mother didn’t look at me or touch me as she spoke. Her eyes were on the men and the truck behind them in the road, but the tone of her voice took me by the wispy ends of my spiky hair and dragged me backwards into the house and through to my room.
Behind the closed door, I took a comic book from the shelf and lay on the bed. I skipped the stories and colourful pictures and turned to the back page of advertisements. I can still see those cute cartoon sea creatures staring back at me, the wide innocent eyes that could come from nothing but an American packet of shrimp eggs from across the sea. I willed my father to come home as I gazed at the comic. My heart summoned him and imagined his immediate return; on the other side of the door were heavy thuds and the sudden sound of glass breaking and footsteps on the floorboards and my mother’s voice, pleading.
I threw the comic on the floor and banged clenched fists against my ears. I listened to the sound of the crashing sea, my hands cupped like giant shells against my head. The door opened and framed the figure of my mother, heavy boots pounded against the floor just behind her. ‘Please, please, not the children’s things!’ She spoke in a voice I’d never heard before. The man with two faces entered my room and his eyes took everything in. He listed it all out loud as he ticked it off on a clipboard. He left me out of it, not counting me at all in what he’d come to collect. I was at the door when the other men came in. They left the mattress on the bed but systematically shifted everything else out, as though they were part of a clumsy dance played over and over on the stage of other people’s houses.
I was out of the house and at the top of the tree when the last item was packed into the truck and the doors closed. The man with the damp face climbed into the cab. He didn’t look back before he drove that truck away, taking most of our life along with him.
Perhaps I have made too many movies. I see our life in my head, frame by frame, floating on the sea, surrounded by the curls of Devin’s hair, caught in her bright wide-easy smile. Shells catch our toes, crabs carry the sands of our time away grain by grain and I, caught by these pictures, am sometimes moved to laugh our childhood back to us again.
The harbour was calm that evening. The steel-grey water stretched flat and further out merged with the blue of the mellowing sky. The sun was low and driven further away by an encroaching wind. A long blue boat sliced the water’s surface and gulls flapped above the grey as they caught the last of the sun on their wings. Then it was cold. A tug churned like a terrier, out into the open sea. I saw the tiny figure of a man like a toy at the bow and I wondered who he was, what dreams lay down on him when he closed his eyes at night. There was no stopping the evening, and the world changed from a place of deep hues to a pale wash of pinks and greys in the light that touched the last of the day’s solid structures.
If I looked out to sea at a certain angle, I could blinker all signs of human living from my vision. It was just me, and the sea.
Later the lights cam
e on and I looked across the bay at the villages that hung at the ocean’s edge beneath the purple mountains. Time stretched forever across the flat water, infinite. I stood in a place that had existed long before I had been dreamed alive. The breeze on my back was ancient and carried with it the scent of plants and living things that had always clung to the mountain. We’d lost the nose for these things; all that we could smell when we closed our eyes was the sea.
Samuel walked into the house when it was already dark. He stood and rubbed the back of his head with one hand as my mother rose up from the only chair left in the house.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. It was a whisper.
She held her arms at her sides, a wide sea of space between them.
‘I gave you everything,’ she said without caring that we were there to hear it. ‘I gave you everything that I was and you’ve taken it all. Destroyed it. Us.’
His eyes were ashen like the shade of the evening before dark. ‘I didn’t mean for this to happen. I couldn’t help it.’ He said it softly.
‘You didn’t mean to take my money and waste it away,’ she replied. Her words were the only vessels that could traverse that wide water. ‘You didn’t mean to take my youth and the life I had and make it all for nothing. You didn’t mean to take the food from your own children’s mouths and the furniture from my house. You didn’t mean to take away the girls’ father, night after night, when you were at the pub or the club or the drinking hole or the gambling den; you didn’t mean to destroy their future at the same time. What have you done with my husband, you stupid fool? What?’ Her mouth curled in a pucker of lips and indrawn breath, and a small bubble of saliva broke from her mouth and arced and then landed in the immense space of that invisible ocean between them.
Devin gasped behind me, but I didn’t turn around. My feet stayed still; I couldn’t lift them to cross the great divide. My father stood alone and I watched him, my eyes joined with the eyes of his accusers, and separate and apart he remained on the other side of us. I watched his face. His eyes dropped, and at the same time something about him died. He became less of himself that night, and so did I.
Eight
I phone Samuel on his recently installed telephone after I drop my daughter at school. He answers on the eighth ring although his room is only eight feet across and six feet wide.
‘Were you in the bathroom?’ I ask him.
‘No. I was doing the crossword.’
‘Do you need anything? I thought I’d come and see you today.’
‘Good. How the hell did I end up in this place anyway? Your mother must be doing her nut.’
I listen to these words and I think about his life. What about all those nights she sat up alone in the dark, waiting for him to come home? Did he worry about her then? ‘Mom died,’ I say at last.
‘Did she?’
‘I’ll come and see you later,’ I say. ‘I must get some work done first.’
‘Good. I look forward to that, Monkey. I’m sick of this place. All these people.’
Our conversations go like this, around and around in repetitive circles until I start to think that I’m the one who is going slowly mad. But between the endless cycles of brain function and disintegration and trying to jolt his memory, trying to explain, are moments of dumbfounding clarity, like bolts of blue sky that suddenly appear through a blanket of mist.
I don’t manage to work before I see him. I drive above the city on a road that takes me around the side of the mountain, and further on I park the car and walk on a lonely beach. I walk and I weep against the sound of heavenly water for the man who might have carried us both on his shoulders: my sister Devin, and me.
I enter his room with yellow flowers in one hand and a weekly television guide in the other, but my father is gone. A newspaper is open on the small desk at the crossword page and the date at the top is the day I first brought him here. None of the answers to the crossword are filled in. Two old women shuffle past the room and I accost them in the doorway. ‘Have you seen my dad?’
‘Not since breakfast,’ one says. ‘It was garden club this morning, but he won’t join in. Pity. Male company is scarce around here.’ She winks at me and chuckles. They hold onto each other for support like two affectionate schoolgirls as they shuffle off, but their backs are bent and their hands clawed and I cannot picture the women they might once have been, upright, with smooth skin and shiny hair. Life has sucked them dry, placed them on the furthest edge of the world. Now they are just waiting to fall off.
I check the bathrooms and the communal lounge, but my father is not there. Old folk are sunk into chairs with their arms folded, chins moving like they’re savouring the last remnants of an invisible meal as they gaze at the blaring television set. At the front desk is a nurse I don’t recognise. ‘I can’t find my father,’ I say, and panic rises in my voice. I tell her that the security in the place concerns me while she remains calm and comes round to the front of the desk and takes my elbow gently with one hand as though I too am old and in need of support. She speaks in an ever-patient tone, studied and calm and removed from any current situation that might arise.
‘I tried to phone you, but your mobile was off,’ she tells me.
What? What? My face is frozen and my mouth unable to move. We’re walking together down a long corridor and she’s still guiding me to walk along with her; her hand has not left my arm. ‘Don’t panic,’ she says as though she can read my state of mind by osmosis. ‘We found him. Everything will be just fine.’
We go through the huge wooden doors of the dining room and at the far end I see a figure in a brown cardigan hunched over a cup of brown tea. The room is empty of people apart from Samuel, and even when I sit beside him, he doesn’t look up. His hands clutch at the cup and I know it’s not for warmth or to bring it to his lips. He’s holding on for dear life and to keep his fingers steady.
‘He’s fine. A little shaken up,’ the nurse says and there is kindness in her tone.
‘Samuel!’ I move beside him, bend towards him. ‘Are you all right?’
Slowly his eyes find my face. There is fear there, like a spring tide rising.
‘Your dad’s had a bit of a fright.’ She speaks about him like he’s a child, enunciating slowly. ‘Poor thing. He thought he’d go for a walk. He got lost and couldn’t find his way home. Someone saw him sitting on the pavement along the seaboard, halfway to the next village. He couldn’t remember where he lived, and they brought him here. But he’ll be all right.’
‘Thank you. I’ll sit with him for a bit, if that’s okay.’
The nurse smiles and puts a hand on his shoulder briefly before she leaves, but not without an accompanying movement, an efficient straightening of the tray on the table that’s meant to show me all is in order again. ‘Call if you need anything,’ she says before she goes.
He sits in his shorts with one bony knee crossed over the other. The toes of his sandalled feet also cross over each other like the roots of an old tree, and he stares as though there’s something on the table that I can’t see.
I watch my father’s face. He concentrates his eyes on that spot on the table and he raises the cup to his lips, takes a sip, and another, and then he loses control. An uncontrollable tremor and his hands fail him and there is a waterfall of tea on the table, in the saucer, on his trousers. I put my hand over his and steady the cup, lower it until it rests in the saucer.
‘Oh dear,’ he mumbles, ‘I made a mess.’
‘It’s okay, Samuel. We’ll clean it up.’
His eyes water. I tell myself he must have caught grit in them from the wind outside. He’s wearing a cardigan that is eons old and stretched and full of holes. Inside it his body is smaller and old and doesn’t fit it any more. I know his clothing as well as I know him, but I haven’t seen him wear this in years. I didn’t even know he still had it.
‘I brought you flowers,’ I say.
‘Nobody’s brought me flowers before in my whole life.’
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‘It’s because you’re a man. But they’ll brighten up your room.’
‘The rules change when you get old, Monkey. Suddenly a man can get flowers, and anybody has the right to wash his ass.’
He’s looking around, his eyes searching for a solution. We sit for a long time and I study the tiles on the floor and the tea gets cold and I wait for him to move, to speak, but he does nothing. He stares into space, at the spot on the table, and I have no idea what’s happening inside his head. His hands cease their trembling, his shoulders soften, relax and sink downwards.
‘Do you feel better?’ I touch his arm.
His eyes find me, blank as slate. ‘Better than what?’
‘Where were you trying to get to this morning? Where did you want to go?’
‘It’s not there any more, is it, Monkey?’
‘What?’ I ask, but I already know. I ask to keep the conversation moving, because I’m afraid that one day he’ll stop replying. That he won’t know my name, or he’ll stop hearing my voice at all.
‘I think they’ve taken my house away.’
I know the one he’s talking of. It’s not the small home he shared with my mother in the later years, after we had left for adulthood, the one that was sold when he finally came to live with Auster and me. It’s not Marshall’s house, where we lived all those years after he lost everything. He’s living in a place further back than that, and he looks at me now, his eyes wild, searching my face to find out who I really am.