the day spread over the water. It offers a good view, my turret window, of whatever’s coming. Two hundred and seventy degrees, at least, of sea. I settle back in my chair, tuck my feet up. Wait.
A beautiful thing, this chair. Leather, French, not quite antique — sourced by Andy from some Parisian club, buffed and distressed by the passage of time and newspaper ink, of gabardine and brandy. I run my fingers over the arms. It might rub off on me, this old skin. This foreign DNA might stick. A camouflage of hide and hair, the stains of somebody else’s dead. If I sit very still, I might be overlooked. You never know.
Across the water, the morning gathers.
It still seems strange to me, this city seeping up from the dark. Its ardent jungle growth. Its little wild-haired hills and bright white motorways. The calmness of its water. It isn’t home. That’s what I love about it.
How many years has it been since I came north? Nine, ten? Long enough to have stopped counting. My for sale signs are all over town. And yet palm trees, a curving yellow beach, the gentle lap of waves are still exotic. It remains an odd place to find myself, like waking up in a stranger’s bed. The shiver of a sin now licensed to be compounded.
(Not that I do that any more. Wake up in strangers’ beds. These days I just take a room at Quadro, where I’m guaranteed clean sheets and a decent shower. Not to mention a good excuse to be out before nine o’clock.)
But there’s something about this morning, something quiet and thin-skinned. There’s a rare chill in the air, a ghost of the south toraise my arm-hair. A bare-hilled, open-ocean cold. It reminds me of old times. Tulip beds. The walk into the wide grey flooding calm the day that Maggie died.
No. I don’t want to think about her now. Or William, either.
Now, before the day is quite here, before some Atlantic gale sweeps in to blow the spiders out of the trees, while I still can, I want to think about my father.
Will you think me too cruel if I cut straight to his death? If I lay it down in black and white as his defining moment? Maggie had it set in stone long ago, a succinct summation rising from the grass of the Greenpoint Cemetery.
Roger John Galbraith, 29 June 1945 – 17 August 1976
. No doubt in the space of that dash — lost now under yellow lichen — he was all manner of things. Rotary Club treasurer. Salesman of the month. Loving husband. Father.
(I imagine sheep graze around his plot. Their big flat teeth cropping the concrete edge, their warm busy breath misting the stone. But perhaps this isn’t true.)
For the first seven years of my life my father must be solid and real. He must do things I can’t remember. Then, on a bright winter day in ’76, he stops being there, and my mother doesn’t seem to notice.
It’s the job that kills him, of course. One cold call too many. That August morning, speeding on an empty road through the stubborn southern dark, Roger hits three things in close succession: black ice, white rails, the Mataura River. All the swimming lessons in the world are no use inside a ’72 Kingswood. He drowns about seven-thirty.
Maggie tells me little of this. On the day of the funeral, I read the police report in Mrs Cousins’ paper. Page five. She’s left it open on our table. It calls my father ‘dead man’. Mrs Cousins looks a bit guilty when she comes back to find me reading it, and makes me eat another piece of rocky road.
We’re alone, Mrs Cousins and I. The house is silent and cold and might belong to strangers. I’m not familiar with tombs, so I think of the library. I sit and read
Five on a Treasure Island
quietly.Outside it’s grey. Inside, there’s the tight little tick of the clock on the range, like a spring unwinding.
Maggie comes home just after two. She’s wearing black nylons and muddy high heels and she smells of hair spray. She sits neatly on the edge of her chair, knees together, ankles crossed, just so, in front of the
A beautiful thing, this chair. Leather, French, not quite antique — sourced by Andy from some Parisian club, buffed and distressed by the passage of time and newspaper ink, of gabardine and brandy. I run my fingers over the arms. It might rub off on me, this old skin. This foreign DNA might stick. A camouflage of hide and hair, the stains of somebody else’s dead. If I sit very still, I might be overlooked. You never know.
Across the water, the morning gathers.
It still seems strange to me, this city seeping up from the dark. Its ardent jungle growth. Its little wild-haired hills and bright white motorways. The calmness of its water. It isn’t home. That’s what I love about it.
How many years has it been since I came north? Nine, ten? Long enough to have stopped counting. My for sale signs are all over town. And yet palm trees, a curving yellow beach, the gentle lap of waves are still exotic. It remains an odd place to find myself, like waking up in a stranger’s bed. The shiver of a sin now licensed to be compounded.
(Not that I do that any more. Wake up in strangers’ beds. These days I just take a room at Quadro, where I’m guaranteed clean sheets and a decent shower. Not to mention a good excuse to be out before nine o’clock.)
But there’s something about this morning, something quiet and thin-skinned. There’s a rare chill in the air, a ghost of the south toraise my arm-hair. A bare-hilled, open-ocean cold. It reminds me of old times. Tulip beds. The walk into the wide grey flooding calm the day that Maggie died.
No. I don’t want to think about her now. Or William, either.
Now, before the day is quite here, before some Atlantic gale sweeps in to blow the spiders out of the trees, while I still can, I want to think about my father.
Will you think me too cruel if I cut straight to his death? If I lay it down in black and white as his defining moment? Maggie had it set in stone long ago, a succinct summation rising from the grass of the Greenpoint Cemetery.
Roger John Galbraith, 29 June 1945 – 17 August 1976
. No doubt in the space of that dash — lost now under yellow lichen — he was all manner of things. Rotary Club treasurer. Salesman of the month. Loving husband. Father.
(I imagine sheep graze around his plot. Their big flat teeth cropping the concrete edge, their warm busy breath misting the stone. But perhaps this isn’t true.)
For the first seven years of my life my father must be solid and real. He must do things I can’t remember. Then, on a bright winter day in ’76, he stops being there, and my mother doesn’t seem to notice.
It’s the job that kills him, of course. One cold call too many. That August morning, speeding on an empty road through the stubborn southern dark, Roger hits three things in close succession: black ice, white rails, the Mataura River. All the swimming lessons in the world are no use inside a ’72 Kingswood. He drowns about seven-thirty.
Maggie tells me little of this. On the day of the funeral, I read the police report in Mrs Cousins’ paper. Page five. She’s left it open on our table. It calls my father ‘dead man’. Mrs Cousins looks a bit guilty when she comes back to find me reading it, and makes me eat another piece of rocky road.
We’re alone, Mrs Cousins and I. The house is silent and cold and might belong to strangers. I’m not familiar with tombs, so I think of the library. I sit and read
Five on a Treasure Island
quietly.Outside it’s grey. Inside, there’s the tight little tick of the clock on the range, like a spring unwinding.
Maggie comes home just after two. She’s wearing black nylons and muddy high heels and she smells of hair spray. She sits neatly on the edge of her chair, knees together, ankles crossed, just so, in front of the
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