The Elusive Language of Ducks (8 page)

Simon was idly scratching her head as she lay in the crook of his arm. This time she had brought her own pillow. She could smell the sexy warmth rising from his body under the tent of blankets. They hadn't spoken for a while, but she was thinking of the statement he had made on that first night, about his having something to tell her. She was no longer curious about this. Whenever it came to mind, an irrational twinge of fear shot through her stomach. This morning it was hovering above them, and she could feel it was about to swoop. She moved from her back towards him, pressing her naked self against the length of his wiry body. Tugging the eiderdown over her head, she thought, This is where I live. I can go no deeper than this. I am never going to move from here. This is where I will live and where I will die. I will never eat or drink
again, because everything I have in the way of nourishment is here in this moment. If I lift my head above the covers, I will be eaten.

Simon gently pulled the covers aside. He turned and kissed her forehead.

Hannah, he said, and she waited.

And then he said, Hannah, Hannah sweetheart, why are you crying?

From time to time Hannah would pick up her mother from Primrose Hill and take her for a drive. On this occasion she parked the car on a boat ramp facing out to the sea. She threw stale bread out the window to seagulls squawking around them. Next time she would bring a cushion to allow her mother to see from the car more comfortably. Without the energy to haul the collapsing infrastructure of her body upright, her mother was only just able to peer over the window sill towards the empty expanse of sand. She seemed oblivious to the birds.

After a while she muttered, almost inaudibly, It was dreadful, just dreadful about the baby.

When Hannah questioned her, she turned her head, a look of horror clamped on her face.

You don't
know
about the baby?

No, what are you talking about, Mum?

Your baby is dead.

I don't have a baby, Mum, she said, but even so a lump of ice melted in her chest. Seagulls fought and scratched the bonnet of the car, all feathers and wings and gaping gullets.

No, you don't, not anymore. It's dead now.

Mum, what are you talking about?

Before I saw it yesterday, this happened last night. She was drowned and it was my fault. You need to know this. My fault.

No, Mum, it was one of your dreams. This is nonsense. Stop it.

Look. You are Hannah. Your husband is Simon. I live in the Primrose Hotel with the Queen Mother. I have Parkinson's.

Well, yes, that's mainly true. Very good, Mum. But the other isn't.

But that proves it. If that is true, the other
is.
Your baby
is
dead and it's my fault.

Mum. Mum, ssssh. It's not true, I know.

Hannah was stroking her mother's hair, her temples, her forehead, trying to ease the enormity of her troubled thoughts, the ghastly confusion.

I heard them. Last night. They were all standing around my bed,
discussing whether to shoot me or not, and in front of my very eyes, each one made their decision and said I should be shot. And then I went to sleep, while I was still alive.

But, Mum, you are still alive now.

Her mother looked at her, exasperated, her skin puce with anxiety. She shifted her gaze back out the window.

There's madness in this family. I think you should know that. I've been meaning to tell you for some time, she said.

And then she added, Just look at those seagulls.

Her mother crying. Flumped over the sink, sobbing. The sink was filled with her tears, bracelets of froth around her arms, with teacups and saucers floating around like flotsam after a wreck. Hannah, just home from school, burst in upon her, causing her to jump upright, sucking all her strength from the day to pull herself together. Hannah wrapped her arm around the thick gatherings of her skirt.

Mum. What's the matter?

Nothing, said her mother. She'd sniffed, wiping her face with her arm, leaving a trail of lather across her cheek.

I'm sorry. She gulped the fortifying air. I'm fine.

Years later, Hannah had reminded her mother of the incident, and cautiously asked what had made her so unhappy. Her mother pretended to have no recollection of it. Hannah didn't believe her. She wondered about people and the secrets they harboured or endured, wrapped up and placed in darkened compartments of their memory in the name of privacy, or suffering, or protection from the consequences that might ripple from revelation or the breaking of a confidence, the releasing of its energy into a judging world.

As each of her mother's friends, associates and family died, so did branches of collective knowledge that contributed to her history snap away and fall to the debris of the past.

In the end, Hannah was the person who knew her mother and her history more intimately than anyone else alive on the planet. And this knowledge was selective, limited to her own bias. Her perception of her mother was relegated to her own increasingly questionable memory.

And so, even now, a whole lifetime of even the residue of her mother's
being
was eroding. The occasional memento or photo could be seen as markers, but without reference they would become meaningless. Soon she'd be nothing. Her biography, her personal information and data stuffed into the side-packs on a horse whose rump had been slapped, sending it careening through a desert until it was out of sight. Even the dust that marked the disappearance would settle.

Her grandchildren, Maggie's children, now in London, still had the
opportunity to carry her genes forward. Otherwise, only her paintings, her vision captured in colour, would exist of her.

As Simon had mentioned not so long ago, there had been over three billion years of life on Earth.

About two hundred thousand years of modern man in the form of
Homo sapiens.

The duration of any one particular human from their birth to death would not even qualify as a dot on a time-line. A mysterious bursting into tears one afternoon was as significant as a sparrow's tweet.

In the beginning she would know.

For example, a day's tally could be: one dandelion leaf, one worm, a small beetle and some hand-rearing mash. She was impressed the first time he finished the first full leaf, albeit broken into pieces. Gradually more things were added to his diet while they were foraging.

And now, today, she'd thrown him twelve to fifteen large snails. He waddled after them, a clown in sheep's clothing. Just
whoomph
down the hatch, the large lump of each snail sliding along his neck, like an elevator descending a high-rise building. He wolfed up his pellets and mash. Not to mention whatever he found as he wandered behind her, and all the leaves he munched along the way. And there it was, a few hours later, the evidence, the mush of it all dolloped behind him.

She had a whole day out of the house. A work meeting, other chores, then taking a wheelchair-bound friend of her mother, visiting from Hawke's Bay, to the aquarium at Kelly Tarlton's, where they dawdled past tanks of fish, sharks, crayfish, penguins.

When she finally arrived home, Hannah decided not to go down to the bottom of the garden to say hello to the duck. It would mean that she'd be engaged with him for the rest of the evening or, if not, giving him false hope before having to leave again to cook and write a report about the meeting. The thought of his slap slap slapping around her feet as she tried to cook dinner, leaving his little plops of the day's feeding on the floor, and his panicking squeaks whenever she disappeared around the island in the kitchen, was too much. She would be forever having to clean up after him. So she left him in his hutch while she prepared dinner for Simon and herself.

She thought she might make up for it by allowing the duckling on her knee as they ate, but when it came to it she couldn't be bothered. Even though Simon might not voice his displeasure, he would let it be known. And the crows had managed to find their way in again and were sitting around the place, shifting from one leg to the other. She was only just aware of them, but they were there. Deadlines lurking.

Finally, just before dark, she went down to the hutch, where the duck cheeped urgently as he sensed the vibration of her footsteps approaching. He'd tucked himself way back into the covered area. He had no food but plenty of water. She slipped her hand under his belly and lifted him out. He paddled uselessly mid-air until she adjusted his position to give his feet a landing on her hand. She went to the secret store she'd discovered amongst the agapanthus and pulled a few snails from the wall. He was starving.

Where've you been? he growled. All afternoon.

She told him about her visit to Kelly Tarlton's, where she'd seen the grey downy penguins packed between their parents' legs, as if the stuffing was falling out of them. She described the older penguins whose feathers were moulting and how they held themselves with such haughty dignity
as their sleek sheen erupted into feathery ruffle, and how they too looked like soft toys that the moths had found their way into. She talked about some of the penguins lying on the snow with their flippers held out as if they were waiting for the next wave to take them back to Antarctica. And how she had watched through the glass wall of the tank as the penguins torpedoed backwards and forwards through the water.

The duck turned his head away from her, and she finally noticed that he was curiously silent.

Something wrong? she asked.

No, he squeaked.

Is something upsetting you?

I'm practising haughty dignity, he replied archly.

What do you mean?

You wander down as if nothing is amiss after ignoring me all day and I discover that you've been out admiring other birds and you expect me to be impressed.

Chapter 6

Hannah and the duckling were sitting on the steps at the bottom of the deck soaking in weak sunshine while Hannah had a break from her work. Suddenly there was an eruption of leaves in the hedge nearby. First a shaggy blond head, then a tangled mess of ponytail, and two pink smiling faces forced branches apart, and there they were. Eric's grandchildren. She hadn't seen them for six months.

Eric lived next door. They'd lived in the area for so long, and yet Eric was the only person they really knew. There used to be an easy camaraderie with him, but for months now he had just grunted at them, and then only if he had to. It was awkward living next door to someone who clearly harboured animosity towards them. About two months before her mother died, he'd pulled away. He wouldn't answer the door when she knocked, even though she knew he was inside. He made sure he wasn't out in the garden when she was, or, if he was already there, would saunter back inside. The questioning note she poked under his doormat was returned to her letterbox with
Return to Sender
scrawled on the folded paper. Whatever the rift was about, Hannah did not know, but she suspected Simon might have had words with him about her spending too much time over there, helping with new curtains in his fading sitting room. He'd been long divorced, but his daughter, Sheila, would often visit, sometimes leaving him to babysit her two children who were used to having easy access through the hedge with their grandfather.

We came to see you, said Max triumphantly. He was clutching a red plastic car.

Hello, my little monsters, she said. Look how you've grown!

She picked leaves out of Max's hair. It doesn't take long, she thought. For hedges to grow over, for memories to disappear, for friendships to fade to nothing.

Yes, we did, said Rosemary. We comed, and I had an ice-cream.

Where's your grandfather? said Hannah.

He's over there, said Max, pointing back through the fence.

Does he know you're here?

But the children spied the duckling nestled on her lap, and moved in close.