Anticipation Read Online Free PDF Page A

my grandfather, I don’t sleep well at night. Perhaps it’s the milky smell of Maggie, a taunting blur, a presence guessed at but out of reach.

    In time, pharmacology prevails, and I’m reunited with my mother. She takes me to the park. We sit silent beside the duck pond, watching. From their sanctuary in the centre, the half-grown mallards come and go. Maggie stares at the water. Other mothers throw bread.
    Of course I can’t really see anything yet, especially not from this pram. The light on the water, at best. Maggie’s face, and the grey summer sky. Still, I like to think it’s here I catch my first glimpse of an island.
    The importance of going out at least once a day has been impressed upon Maggie. We walk, diligent, down Bradbury Street in the middle of every morning, hot or cold, squinting into sun or wind or stinging drizzle.
    When it’s really raining, we go to the library. Up the stone stairs there are puppet shows and stories. Downstairs there is quiet.
    We sit at a big wooden table with books other people have taken down and neglected to return. Occasionally Maggie looks through them. Mostly, as in the park, she seems to do nothing, but I could swear, here and there, there’s a kind of a hum, something rattling around, like a modem searching for connection.
    Finding Family
, she reads one day, sticking out between a guide to the British Isles and one on making jam.
A Beginner’s Guide to Discovering Your Roots
.
    In retrospect, I blame myself. I could scream now, but I don’t. I just focus on her face, its sharp lines vanishing behind the shiny orange cover. She gives me her finger to hold. It appears a harmless enough game.

FOUR
    I slands, you might say, are in my blood — if my great-grandmother-many-times-removed had only stayed on hers, kept her chromosomes to herself, she might have saved us all a lot of trouble.
    True, the shallows of the Waitemata, sheltered among mangroves and hills and the unconfronting histories of strangers, are about as far away as you can get from a windswept slavers’ port in the middle of the North Atlantic. But they don’t look so very different, Marialuisa’s old volcano and mine, and the principle of all islands is the same. They have limits. There’s only so far you can go.
    Of course, I do leave. Sometimes things have to be done. And despite my best efforts to prove otherwise, Gillian still believes our sales team’s success depends on a glimpse of my face every once in a while. But each time, I’m forced to think twice — re-evaluate potential gratification and risk — before I decide to cross the water.
    It’s not that I’m frightened. Oddly, the sea doesn’t bother me much. Not this subtropical sea, anyway, which is, for the most part, warm and thick and flat. On hot days, I’m happy to dabble my toes. Even wade up to my knees, when I need to — if I have to launch the dinghy on a mid-tide. And for some reason, I’m quite at ease in a boat, skimming along on top of it all, knifing straight across the surface.
    It’s just that, having thought twice, I usually find I prefer to stay where I am. I don’t have to watch out for anything, here. To look over my shoulder. The undergrowth hides only small terrors, huhu beetles and wetas and tree spiders, scurrying brown geckos and skinks. Nothing I need to worry about. Or for. Those days are gone. My phone will not ring in the small hours of the night, and, evenif the tide is right, there can be no doorbell to dread. I’m nobody’s next of kin.
    And yet I woke up this morning with a sense of calamity, the snaking coat-tails of some unremembered dream.
    I pulled the curtains back on a sky lightening around soft rain, the sea greying, the lights of the traffic on the causeway. Bleary lovers and shift-workers and red-eye fliers, the early, the late and the desperate. An ambulance, slow and silent. A popular hour for dying.
    It’s too late to go back to sleep, too early to go downstairs. I sit and watch