In a Fishbone Church Read online

  ‘I wished something bad would happen to Christina.’ Also untrue. ‘And I pretended I was sick last week so I wouldn’t have to go to church.’ Another lie.

  Father Croft seems satisfied. ‘Well Bridget – ’ he says.

  ‘And I told some lies.’

  ‘Yes. Well Bridget, those are all things you can try to fix, and just telling them to God now is such a good start.’

  Bridget smiles, relieved she has managed to come up with a decent lot of sins. She wonders if really bad people, like murderers or kidnappers, commit those crimes just to have something to say.

  ‘So perhaps you can try really hard to be patient with your family, and help out at home even when it’s not your turn. And just remember that your Dad works very hard on his buildings all day, and when he comes home he might just want to sit and watch the news.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Bridget. ‘I will try.’

  ‘All right then. Now, before you go, let’s say a prayer for your father.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Bridget, wondering what Gene has done. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Lord,’ says Father Croft, closing his eyes, ‘look after Bridget’s father Gene, who has helped us so much with the building of the new classrooms. We pray you will reward him for his service to our parish, and guide him towards the church.’

  Bridget opens her eyes, about to point out that Gene already knows where the church is, because her mother makes him come to Mass every Easter, but Father Croft continues.

  ‘Open his eyes to your love, Lord, that he may one day join us as a member of your joyful community.’ Then he places his hand on Bridget’s head. ‘Go in peace,’ he says.

  Bridget switches the television on just as Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World is starting.

  ‘Shh,’ she says, glaring at Gene’s rustling newspaper.

  ‘Oh, no,’ groans Christina, ‘do we have to watch this?’

  ‘Shh! It’s starting!’

  ‘Mum? Do we have to watch this?’

  ‘Now, Christina,’ says Etta. ‘You know it’s Bridget’s favourite programme. You get your turn to choose too.’

  Bridget flashes a smug grin at her sister, then turns back to the television. A gleaming crystal skull fills the whole screen, rotating against an inky background. The words Monsters of the Deep appear along the bottom.

  ‘It better not be frogs raining from the sky again,’ says Christina.

  ‘Shh.’

  ‘“I couldn’t believe my eyes,”’ says Christina in a Yorkshire accent. ‘“I called out to Bob to come and look, and he saw it too. We put up our umbrellas and went outside and would you believe it? Frogs were plopping down just like very big hailstones.”’

  ‘Shh!’

  ‘What was the sea monster that attacked and mauled this American warship?’ says a voiceover.

  ‘A frog.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Did a giant octopus, as big as Piccadilly Circus, come ashore on this beach?’

  ‘Are you on this one, Bridget?’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Maybe you could do some homework while Bridget watches her programme,’ says Etta. ‘It is her favourite.’

  ‘Did the legendary serpent of the sea appear to this Cornish fisherman?’

  Gene lowers his paper and watches the screen.

  ‘This family is pathetic,’ says Christina. ‘I’m going to ring Janine.’

  ‘Mysteries from the files of Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communication satellite. Now in retreat in Sri Lanka after a lifetime of science, space and writing, he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.’

  Arthur C Clarke appears on screen in a mustard T-shirt and schoolboyish grey shorts.

  ‘Nice bifocals,’ says Christina.

  ‘You’re in the way!’ Bridget peers around her.

  Arthur C Clarke is strolling along a beach. ‘When one considers the enormous amount of unexplored ocean – there are 6000 miles of empty sea from here to the icy walls of Antarctica – one can believe that out there lurk unknown and perhaps gigantic monsters,’ he says.

  A black and white photo of a man in uniform is shown, and the voiceover begins again.

  ‘The late Lieutenant Jeremy Cox was returning home to England in 1942 when he encountered one of the Second World War’s most nightmarish sea stories. His troop ship was sunk by a German raider in the South Atlantic.’

  Gene takes his reading glasses off and places the newspaper on the coffee table.

  ‘Cox found himself on a flimsy raft beset by sharks. After five days came a sinister assault.’

  An elderly gentleman sitting with two elderly ladies at a luncheon table appears on the screen.

  ‘Well when I looked at his leg – he pulled up his trousers – I could see scars the size of a penny were dotted at intervals all the way up.’

  ‘Before he died in 1971,’ says the voiceover, ‘Cox told the story to his sisters as well as to his friend, a biologist, Professor Cloudley-Thompson.’

  The sisters sip their tea at the table with Professor Cloudley-Thompson. They are both wearing plain jumpers with pearls and have fuzzy, curly hair permed in the same style.

  ‘All round his buttocks,’ one of them is saying.

  ‘He didn’t show me that,’ says Professor Cloudley-Thompson.

  ‘He did us.’

  ‘Yes, well you’re his sisters … this was in the Mess.’

  Gene laughs.

  ‘An enormous shape appeared beside the raft,’ says the professor, ‘and a huge arm came over and snatched one of the men, and presumably he was eaten. And they were still barely recovering from the shock of this when another arm came over the side of the raft.’

  Bridget is sitting completely still, staring at the television.

  ‘He saw it silhouetted against the starlit sky and it fastened itself on him, round his leg and round his body. Fortunately by that time people were alert, and so they grabbed on and held him, and instead of him being pulled over the side the suckers pulled lumps of skin off him.’

  Etta grimaces. ‘I think I might do the dishes.’

  ‘I cannot help but speculate,’ says Professor Cloudley-Thompson. ‘What we know about giant squid and its attraction to red – I just wonder if the red life jacket might not have contributed to the deaths of those seamen.’

  Arthur C Clarke is still walking along the beach in his mustard T-shirt and grey shorts. He is now holding a pair of flippers in one hand. ‘I’m making sure my equipment is the appropriate colour,’ he says, brandishing a yellow life jacket.

  He stops against a backdrop of crashing waves. His arms are flabby in his T-shirt, his shoulders rounded. There are liver spots on his skin. His glasses are blackly prominent against the pale English face.

  ‘The evidence for still unknown sea monsters is overwhelming,’ he says. There is a close-up of waves washing over spidery crabs on the sand. ‘The solution to this old mystery may come quite soon. At the moment the two greatest powers on earth are trying to develop sonar systems which will make the seas transparent, so they can track each other’s nuclear submarines. Those systems will locate the sea serpent, if it exists. Indeed at this moment the evidence for its existence may be somewhere within the Pentagon or the Kremlin.’

  ‘Wow,’ says Bridget.

  ‘Hold this,’ says Gene, handing Christina the end of some transparent nylon fishing line. ‘And this.’ A reel of thick green. Then he begins unwinding the nylon, pacing away from Christina, looping it around the trunks of the silver birches. He runs it through his fingers, checking for inconsistencies, weak spots. His cracking shoes (‘they’ll do for holidays, Etta’) leave footprints in the damp motel lawn. When he is back to where he started, he places the empty reel on a plastic bag at Christina’s feet.

  ‘Now. Hold them together, very steady.’ He overlaps the thick green line with the thin nylon one by a few centimetres and begins painting them with glue. The fumes catch in Christina’s nostrils.

 
‘Lovely morning,’ calls Mrs van der Wyst, the owner of the motel. Gene does not answer her. He is carefully winding green cotton around the join, leaving no gaps. Then he seals the cotton with clear nail polish and blows softly on it, instructing Christina to turn it, to roll it slowly between her fingertips.

  ‘Breakfast!’ Etta steps on to the lawn.

  ‘Careful!’ yell Gene and Christina, and then Etta sees the clear fishing line strung from tree to tree like some elaborate game of cat’s cradle. She ducks under it again and again until she reaches Gene and Christina.

  ‘Breakfast,’ she says.

  ‘If you fell in there your flesh’d be boiled right off your bones,’ says Gene.

  Etta says, ‘Don’t scare them,’ and she shivers, stepping back from the edge of the platform.

  ‘Really?’ says Christina, watching the steam swirl on the surface of the water. Through the clear patches she can see right down to the white floor. There are a few icecream wrappers and chip packets drifting along the bottom, their colour leached away by the boiling water. Christina holds the metal railing, and it is hot from the sun or the water, she doesn’t know which, and she can feel the initials and obscenities and shaky hearts scratched into the paint beneath her palm.

  ‘Dad,’ says Bridget, ‘can we have an icecream?’

  On the bridge they look into the river for fish.

  ‘There’s one,’ says Gene, pointing to a spot almost directly beneath them.

  ‘He must be a grandad!’ says Bridget.

  Christina squints.

  ‘See him? Down there, just moving in and out of those weeds.’ Gene takes Christina’s finger and points it towards the river. ‘He’s a rainbow. You can see his pink markings.’

  Christina stares. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, but all she sees are the weeds moving with the current of the river.

  Gene unlocks the door to pool number six. There is a sign nailed to it warning bathers not to put their heads under the water, and a picture of a bug. The bug is much larger than the writing. Christina tickles the back of her mother’s knee with her beach towel and Etta jumps, letting out a small scream.

  The pool is open to the sky and has wide concrete steps leading into it. Etta heads straight for the changing cubicle. The girls and Gene have their togs on underneath their clothes. They undress by the side of the pool, then ease themselves into the warm water.

  ‘Mum, we’re in,’ they call. ‘Mum! Are you coming?’

  After a while Etta emerges wrapped in a towel, which she whisks off only at the very edge of the pool. She has a bathing suit on underneath; a thick, lined construction that feels rough to the touch when it is dry, and seems to be all points and edges: wide straps, thick seams, two floral cones jutting from her chest that can be dented with a finger. Around the hips is a stiff frill, a vestigial skirt that floats up in the water. She has a rubber bathing cap on her head – the floppy flowers move as she walks – and plastic sandals on her feet, which she leaves on as she inches her way down the steps. The girls giggle as the skirt rises and spreads in the water.

  Bridget and Gene dog-paddle from one end to the other, racing one another. Etta sits on the second-to-last step, calling encouragement, her knees white islands above the water. Christina rests her elbows on the rim of the pool and moves her feet slowly, letting her body float. Above the walls the sky is a perfect square. Clouds end abruptly, tailored to the corners the Stiltons have rented for an afternoon.

  ‘Best of five,’ says Bridget, leaning on Gene’s shoulder and jumping into the air. ‘Go on.’

  Christina observes her sister’s thick body, her unformed waist, her convex stomach. Her flat chest.

  ‘In a little while,’ says Gene. ‘I have to conserve my strength for tomorrow morning. So do you.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ says Etta. ‘There’ll still be fish in the lake at a more civilised hour.’

  ‘She doesn’t get it,’ says Gene, and Bridget says, ‘She never gets it.’

  ‘The early start’s the whole point. The quiet, when no-one else is around. No screaming family groups scaring the trout away. The solitude. Man and fish.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She still doesn’t get it.’

  ‘I’m not coming,’ says Christina.

  The other three turn to look at her. She kicks with her feet, keeping herself afloat.

  ‘You always come.’

  ‘I don’t want to any more.’

  ‘Well,’ says Etta, ‘maybe we can do something together instead. Go for a walk.’

  ‘I’m going to sunbathe. And Mrs Styles said I could look at her new paintings.’

  ‘Oh. Good, yes.’

  ‘But you always come! Dad, she’s not coming.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to,’ says Gene. ‘We are on holiday.’

  Christina grips the edge of the pool with her elbows. She can feel the warm, rough concrete pressing against her skin, making craters. She watches Gene and Bridget moving around the pool, swimming, jumping, chasing one another, trying to run in water, and Etta, perched on the second-to-last step, checking her shoulders every so often for sunburn. Christina finds them ugly, her family, foreshortened by the water. They are whiter than ever. She observes her own tanned legs, her small ankles, her long arms. Gene, Bridget and Etta are white as pumice.

  ‘Don’t splash, don’t splash!’ Etta cries every so often.

  Christina does not splash. She hardly moves at all.

  Sydney

  is pretty

  exciting

  On a Tuesday afternoon, in the middle of summer, the sky is blue and Christina goes back to the lake. She is surrounded by sun, clear water, even a wheat field. There is a perverse feeling of fertility in the air, as if you could fall pregnant just by stretching your limbs in the sun and breathing in.

  She can’t believe she’s here again.

  Things have changed, of course, shrunk to fit her adult perspective. The owners’ house looks tiny to her now when she knocks at the front door, and when Mrs van der Wyst answers Christina finds herself staring down at an old woman who seems to be folding in on herself. That is a perfectly natural symptom of old age, Christina thinks. The cartilage between the vertebrae slowly degenerates and the spine shortens, causing the person to shrink. But she feels enormous beside this tiny woman, and she ducks her head as she steps inside.

  ‘Now what was the name?’ says Mrs van der Wyst.

  ‘Oh. Stilton. Christina.’

  ‘And it’s just you, is it?’

  ‘Just me.’

  ‘Right, we’ll pop you in Unit 5 then. Towels are over there already, and I bring fresh ones round every morning at nine.’

  Christina wants to say, I know that. And I can ask you if I want extra ones, and the sheets are changed every third day at one o’clock. I can borrow an iron if I need one and the dairy down the road closes at seven.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I’ll be staying until Saturday.’

  Every time she comes back to New Zealand from Sydney something seems smaller. The railway station, Lambton Quay, the Hutt River. Her circle of friends. Etta always says, ‘It must seem pretty slow to you now,’ or, ‘Wellington must be a bit sleepy for you now.’ Christina knows Etta wants her to deny this, to reassure her that she will come back, that she will not be living overseas forever.

  ‘Sydney is pretty exciting,’ she tells her mother. ‘I do enjoy the faster pace in Sydney,’ or, ‘There’s so much going on in Sydney.’

  Unit 5 has only one room; two single beds with brown candle-wick covers, a formica table and two chairs, a television. At one end there is a kitchenette with a squat fridge (no freezer compartment), a sink and two electric rings. There are thick white plates and cups in the cupboard and white lino tiles on the floor. They are speckled with gold. The bathroom is so small Christina has to squeeze against the toilet to get out. Of course, she reminds herself, this unit is designed for a couple at most, not a family of four. She pulls on her swim
ming togs – high-cut, to show off her legs. Thorsten chose them.

  The sand dunes have eroded to gentle swells, and crossing them requires no particular effort. The tussock only reaches to her ankles. It brushes her bare skin, teasing her, trying to make her smile as she heads for the lake. That’s still there – what was she expecting? – and is just as cold as she wades in. Her hair furls around her in the water like a slow secret. She lies on her back, only her face breaking the surface, moving her arms as if in flight. All she can hear is her own breathing, amplified to that level where you remember how easy it would be to stop. Or, another possibility: to just walk to that part of the lake where the velvet mud drops away – this is always closer than you imagine – and sink.

  Eileen could appear at any moment.

  She was there every year when the Stiltons came to the lake at Christmas. Bridget and Christina could see her house as their car, hot and smelling of strawberries and sun-softened vinyl, pulled into the motel driveway. There would be that familiar crunch of pumice gravel, that particular summer sound, slow and crackling like an unwrapping present. They would see her on the second or third day; as if by chance she would be walking in the evening about the same time they were. Then she would ask them did they want to come in for a piece of Christmas cake – at least one month of luck, at least – and they would ask how her painting was going. Don’t traipse sand all through the place, their mother always warned at the door. Mrs Styles doesn’t want sand all through the place.

  Call me Eileen, she reminded the girls every year. Christina sometimes caught herself imagining she was her natural mother, whom she always pictured living by a lake or a mountain or in a lush valley, but this possibility was disproved whenever Christina compared Eileen’s features with her own. Eileen was short, with wide hips and a fleshy nose, small eyes, plump hands.

  Her hair was crinkly, sometimes frizzy, depending on the weather. Up close, tiny red lines scrawled their way across her face, making her cheeks look evenly rosy from a more polite distance. She could have been a Stilton. Say thank you to Mrs Styles for the cake, Etta told them each time they visited. Actually the girls hated almond icing and those chunks of bitter peel, but they thanked her anyway.