In a Fishbone Church Read online

  The entry for Christina the Astonishing is short – half a page – but Etta reads the words over and over to herself in bed while she’s waiting for it to get light. She wishes there was more, and traces a finger along each line, not wanting to miss anything. Her lips begin to move, air escapes between her teeth, she whispers the story to herself. Finally, she is reading out loud. When the alarm goes off at half past six she stops, suddenly aware of the level of her own voice. She sees the blankets that have slipped over to Gene’s side of the bed, the lines of light framing the curtains, the room around her, and she feels strange inside it, the way people do when they wake themselves with their own sleep-talk. Gene rolls over and looks at her.

  ‘I was dreaming about the new building,’ he says, ‘except it wasn’t the new building, it was huge, it had all these floors that aren’t on the plan.’

  When Gene has left for work and the girls have left for school and the house is quiet, Etta goes to the kitchen. She wants to get dinner ready early, so she can have a lie down in the afternoon.

  ‘It’s the best thing for flu,’ Gene had told her at breakfast.

  ‘I just hate going to bed during the day,’ said Etta. ‘I can never get to sleep. Everything’s round the wrong way.’

  ‘You don’t have to sleep, just rest. You have to look after yourself.’

  This is true. Etta swallows the first dose of antibiotics the doctor has given her and then prepares a herbal inhalation for herself, to clear her head. Her own mother swore by inhalations, but Gene and the girls laugh at Etta’s home remedies. Christina and Bridget want their bright orange Vitamin C pills in the bottle with Mickey Mouse and Goofy on it. They don’t have the patience to sit with their heads under towels for quarter of an hour, inhaling bitter fumes.

  ‘Look at Mummy,’ they say, giggling. ‘She looks like a ghost.’ And they lift up the edges of the towel.

  ‘Careful,’ whispers Gene, ‘or she’ll have your fingers off.’

  Now, though, Etta is alone, and free to indulge in whatever remedies she chooses. Perhaps she will take some garlic later on, or draw herself a lavender bath. She pours boiling water over the herbs – rosemary, thyme, some eucalyptus oil – and holds her face above the bowl. She pulls the towel over her head and breathes.

  The priest then made Christina come down; it was said that she had taken refuge up there because she could not bear the smell of sinful human bodies. She averred that she had actually been dead; that she had gone down to Hell and there recognised many friends, and to Purgatory, where she had seen more friends, and then to Heaven. There she saw her parents, who had been dead for seven years.

  Etta wonders if Christina the Astonishing is still allowed. The edition of Butler’s she has borrowed from the library is old, published before the church made several alterations to its list of saints. Saint Christopher was one of the first to go.

  It was like finding out Father Christmas did not exist, Etta thought at the time. She had always kept a Saint Christopher medal in the cream Viva; she’d got Gene to drill a hole just above Christopher’s head so she could hang him from the rear vision mirror. She’d never had an accident in her life. Then, in 1969, the year they adopted Christina, the Sacred Congregation of Rights announced that Christopher was no longer to be regarded as patron saint of travellers. It was forbidden to pray to him when, say, crossing the Atlantic, or on a bumpy car ride. And he was not the only one to be demoted. Exhaustive academic studies concluded that Saint Philomena, Saint George and Saint Catherine of Alexandria all posed ‘serious historical problems’.

  ‘That means they probably never existed,’ said Gene.

  As the Stiltons drove to the Home of Compassion to collect their new daughter, whom they would call Christina, Saint Christopher swung back and forth between them like a lucky penny. Etta wondered what had kept her safe all these years.

  When her head feels clearer, Etta will lift the towel away and go to the fridge. She will remove the trout (caught by Gene) and she will try to avoid looking at its eyes. It will be placed on the bench while she makes a stuffing from herbs, onions, lemon juice, butter and breadcrumbs. This dish is always an enormous success, and Etta receives many requests for the recipe.

  ‘Oh, it’s very simple,’ she says. ‘Even Gene could make it, if he tried.’

  If anyone examined the Stiltons’ weekly menu, they might notice how often bread appears in one form or another. It is Etta’s favourite food; she has been known to eat entire loaves in one sitting. Gene thinks this is because she was deprived of it when she was a child, growing up on a farm where there was a steady supply of meat and vegetables even through the Depression. He, on the other hand, was fed on bread and dripping for dinner and it hasn’t done him any harm; Gene can take or leave bread. He would no doubt be amazed if he saw the way Etta sometimes demolishes a fresh white loaf, discarding the end crusts and reaching inside, clawing out great puffs of white. She entertains the fantasy of reassembling the hollow loaf and placing it in the bread bin, just to see how long it would take before anyone noticed. She has never actually done this, but she is cunning in her own way. She incorporates bread and butter pudding into the menu with surprising frequency; Gene eats it very fast, licking his lips between each mouthful, and says his mother used to make it as a treat. Chicken is crumbed, soup croutonned, trout stuffed. If she had to, Etta could survive on bread alone.

  Etta’s head is not clearing. In fact, she feels worse. She opens her eyes under the towel and the fumes sting them. The steam is all around her; she can’t see the bowl or the table, or even her own hands. She feels for her face, and touches skin that is hot and moist, like that of a feverish child. When she stands up from the table, with the towel still over her head, she knocks over a stool, sends the telephone spiralling to the floor. She bangs into the bench, trips over a box of toys that are waiting to be collected and donated to the Home of Compassion.

  This sort of clumsiness is not unusual for Etta; at times she feels like a disruptive poltergeist in her own house. (Although at forty-six, as many magazine articles have reminded her, she must start to expect certain changes.) It seems she forgets her own dimensions sometimes; she collides with furniture, catches her toes under carpets. When these things happen, she makes herself look at her gold watch lying curled on the dressing table. That is the measure of my wrist, she thinks. She goes to the laundry and looks at the clothes which are waiting to be folded and worn again; filled out by flesh. She holds up her pair of dress trousers, a best skirt. My legs are this length. That is the span of my hips.

  Gene’s work clothes she keeps completely separate; they are always filthy from the building sites. Before she washes them she gives them a good shake. They are covered in white dust, which floats around her like snow.

  ‘God, Mum,’ Christina has been saying lately, ‘don’t be such a martyr.’

  She’s only ten; Etta doesn’t know where this new sharpness is coming from. When she says those things, Etta feels as if something is growing in her.

  Other parents call Etta a saint. Gene has been known to call her his angel. Lately she’s been thinking about angels and saints, and martyrs. About what they have in common with one another. Christina’s maths class is learning about sets, so Etta has been learning about them too, in case Christina needs some help. She doesn’t, usually; she is a fast learner.

  Etta finds the New Maths quite different from what she learnt at school. It helps to make diagrams, she finds. She draws around fifty-cent pieces, covering sheets of paper with labelled discs. Martyrs are a subset of angels, and angels intersect with saints. Angels intersect with martyrs. All three sets intersect, forming a shaded area of the most holy. Martyrs are a subset of saints, therefore all martyrs are saints, and all martyrs are angels, but not all saints are martyrs, and some angels are neither martyrs nor saints.

  Etta has considered adding virgins to her charts, but decided this would make things far too complicated. Perhaps she should have been a teacher, she
thinks.

  She grasps the smooth stainless steel edge of the bench and removes the towel from her head. The air rushes cold against her face.

  After this, thinks Etta, Christina fled into remote places, climbed trees and towers and rocks, and crawled into ovens, to escape from the smell of humans. She would handle fire with impunity and, in the coldest weather, dash into the river, or into a mill-race and be carried unharmed under the wheel.

  The box of toys sitting on the floor is to be picked up that afternoon by Shirley Davis, the treasurer of the Catholic Women’s League.

  ‘If the girls could just pick out a few things they don’t need any more,’ she had said. ‘Dolls, books, stuffed toys, that sort of thing. Teddy bears are good.’

  Shirley is co-ordinating an inter-parish toy donation to the poor orphans at the Home of Compassion. She adopted a baby, Jodie, at the same time as the Stiltons.

  Etta got Gene to take a photo of the girls with their toys before they packed them up; she hopes Shirley comes before they arrive home from school so the box will already be gone. She tries to remember the toys she had when she was ten, and can’t, and she hopes this means her daughters’ sadness will not be lasting. Bridget agreed to part with a yellow bear and a pink dog, while Christina sacrificed two dolls and a brown rabbit. It was only right they should give, said Shirley; if the Stiltons hadn’t adopted her, Christina would have been a poor Home of Compassion orphan too.

  Etta picks up the yellow bear, which has no eyes. She’ll sew on a couple of buttons, she thinks, smarten him up a bit. The fur is worn smooth, like a peach, and the smell reminds her of old paper money; something that has been handled too much. She would like to keep him, really; tuck him away in her bedside cabinet with all her other relics. She keeps everything. She has a pile of cards people sent when Bridget was born. It’s a girl! they say in pink. Congratulations!

  When Christina was adopted, Social Welfare advised the Stiltons to behave as normally as possible. They put a birth notice in the paper, and Etta knitted and crocheted, and there was a baby shower where she was given rattles, stuffed toys, a range of booties. People did send cards, although they were careful to send neutral ones which did not suggest an actual birth.

  Etta even tried breastfeeding, using a breast pump the Plunket nurse had given her.

  ‘It’s so much better for them,’ said Shirley, who expressed milk regularly. ‘We like to have an extra supply, in case of emergencies.’ She squeezed Etta’s dry hand. ‘It does take a while to get the hang of it. But even men can produce milk, given the right hormones. You just need to relax.’

  Shirley used to be a nurse.

  Etta’s mother Maggie did not send a card. Each year on Christina’s birthday, Etta buys an extra one. For a special Granddaughter, it usually says, and inside Etta writes: To dear Christina, with all my love for a happy birthday, Nana xxx. And she inserts a ten-dollar note, which is the amount that always arrives in Bridget’s cards.

  ‘She’s not stupid, you know,’ says Gene. ‘One of these days she’ll figure it out, and then where will we be?’

  Etta knows he’s right, but he doesn’t offer any better suggestions.

  Etta wonders if Shirley has managed to involve Peter Fitzroy in the toy drive. He is always keen to help out with anything she organises. Etta saw the two of them leaving a restaurant together a few weeks ago.

  ‘So Shirley the Magnificent, Treasurer of Treasurers, really is doing her bit, is she?’ said Gene. ‘No wonder she always manages to sell so many raffle tickets.’

  ‘Don’t you dare mention it to anyone!’

  ‘Did they spot you?’

  ‘I hid. I ran into the French bakery.’

  Gene laughed. ‘Why were you the one hiding?’

  Etta puts the bear back in the box. She has to learn to be more ruthless, she knows. Less sentimental. And she does have other mementoes in her bedside cabinet, after all. Locks of soft baby hair; tiny baby teeth; sugar flowers, saved from the girls’ christening cakes, which have hardened into bone.

  She prayed balancing herself on top of a hurdle, Etta says as she opens the fridge, or curled up on the ground in such a way that she looked like a ball. Not unnaturally, everyone thought she was mad or full of devils, and attempts were made to confine her, but she always broke loose. She lived by begging, dressed in rags, and behaved in a terrifying manner.

  Etta hadn’t liked saying no to Shirley when she asked her to help deliver the toys.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve come down with the flu,’ she said. ‘I am sorry.’

  It’s not that she avoids helping; in fact, she always volunteers to accompany Christina’s and Bridget’s classes on school trips, despite the fact that she finds zoos unspeakably depressing. Etta does not know that one of Bridget’s clearest memories is sitting on the wide warm steps at Wellington Zoo, aged five, eating a sugared doughnut and a bag of chippies for lunch. Not sandwiches.

  The trip Etta herself remembers best was a couple of years ago, when Christina’s class visited the Home of Compassion. After they had sung for the old women in the geriatric ward, they saw how communion wafers were made; how the nun poured a thin layer of flour and water into a hot iron press and then shut the lid so it looked like a giant toasted sandwich maker. When it was opened and the sheet of wafer was removed there was a big patterned host in the middle for the priest, and smaller ones around it for everyone else, orbiting like moons.

  ‘Don’t touch!’ Etta had cried, grabbing Christina’s sleeve as she leaned forward to get a better look. The other children giggled, and Christina glared at her.

  ‘You must have to be very careful,’ Etta said to the nun.

  She’d been horrified when the nun had flipped the hot waste bread on to a tray and said to the children, ‘You can taste some if you like.’

  The nun must have seen Etta’s face because she said, ‘Oh, it’s not been consecrated.’

  Etta watched the children pick up the edges of host and drop them back on the tray until they were cool enough to hold, but even then they burned their tongues. They all agreed that it tasted just like icecream cone, and they seemed to have no recollection of the rows of dribbling old women in stale bed jackets. Or at least, it had been no more or less interesting than the chapel, or the gardens with the tree whose branches grew down to the ground like a bell.

  Etta does not want to go back there. ‘I really should get some rest,’ she told Shirley. ‘I need to look after myself.’

  She removes the trout from the fridge and assembles the ingredients for the stuffing. She likes to have everything ready before she begins. From the wooden spice rack (made by Gene) she takes rosemary and sage and thyme. Above the jars with the green lids that match the green paintwork hangs a verse that Etta knows by heart. Shirley gave it to her when Christina was adopted.

  ‘I thought they’d put it very well,’ said Shirley. ‘And it might help Christina feel more like she belongs.’

  Etta agreed that this was indeed important, and hung the verse where everyone could see it, right at eye level. She usually ends up reading it to herself when she’s cooking.

  ‘Not flesh of my flesh,’ she says now, sprinkling the herbs into a bowl.

  ‘Nor bone of my bone.’

  She melts the butter.

  ‘But still completely mine alone.’

  She pours the butter on to the herbs.

  ‘Never forget for a single minute.’

  She adds the breadcrumbs and stirs.

  ‘You didn’t grow under my heart but in it.’

  Christina finds the verse inaccurate. At ten, she has learned enough about human anatomy to know that the situation described is impossible. She tolerates nothing but fact; she has never had any patience for fairy tales, or Father Christmas, or talking animals.

  Bridget doesn’t like the verse, and wonders why her mother keeps it in the kitchen. When she reads it she thinks of a creature actually growing in someone’s heart – fists and feet and a huge h
ead pushing through muscle, displacing organs; elbows and knees stretching tissue into points.

  It does worry Etta sometimes, how competitive the girls are. They fight a lot, about anything. They are always coming to her with pictures they have drawn, or things they have made, and clutching them up to her face. They ask her which one she likes best. She likes them both the same, she answers, which satisfies neither child.

  When they brought Christina home and Etta announced her final choice of name, Gene said, ‘But we don’t have any relatives called Christina. Except Great Uncle Norm’s second wife, and I hardly know her.’

  ‘Well we’re not calling her Tracey,’ said Etta. The birth mother had called her that, and as far as Etta knew there had never been any Saint Traceys. ‘Anyway, she just looks like a Christina.’

  And Gene said, ‘She doesn’t look like anyone.’

  Etta knows he didn’t mean this in a nasty way; Christina really doesn’t look like anyone. This, however, has never stopped new or vague acquaintances from spotting resemblances which do not exist.

  ‘Hasn’t she got Gene’s eyes?’ they say. ‘Isn’t she a real little Stilton?’

  ‘Christina’s adopted,’ Bridget always informs them.

  And Etta tries to soothe Christina’s awkwardness and the acquaintance’s embarrassment by saying, ‘We were very lucky. Not many parents get to choose their babies.’

  And Bridget frowns, wrinkling her Stilton forehead.