The Bradshaw Variations (21 page)

‘Who does that remind you of?’ Tonie says, pointing at the porcupine, with its fussy little face and extravagant rigid plumage of quills.

Alexa doesn’t know who it reminds her of. She wonders if Tonie is saying that it reminds her of Alexa.

‘Daddy?’ she says.

Tonie laughs. ‘Not Daddy. Grandma.’

‘Why is it like Grandma?’

Tonie laughs again. It seems she doesn’t feel sorry for the animals after all. They remind her of things that are alive. Alexa thinks it is dangerous, to connect the living with the dead. She worries that her mother is endangering people.

‘Oh, no reason really,’ Tonie says.

‘Can we go and see Grandma?’

‘Not right now we can’t.’

‘When can we see her?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tonie says. ‘I don’t know the answer to that.’

She stares into the glass case with the porcupine.

‘Can we go to the shell room now?’ Alexa says.

‘If you want. Don’t you like the animals?’

‘I don’t like their eyes,’ she says, reluctantly. She thinks her mother ought to know about their eyes. She thinks she should know, to be more careful.

They go back out into the main hall, with its dim commotion, its underwater light and strange echoing sounds. Alexa can’t remember where the shell room is. They look around, peering into rooms full of old pots and china plates, rooms bristling with swords and lances, rooms with plaster people in old-fashioned clothes. Today Alexa doesn’t want to look at human things. They seem dowdy and sad, compared with the spangled eternal crystals, the miniature perfection of shells. But she cannot remember how to find the shells.

‘Maybe there isn’t a shell room,’ her mother says.

‘There is. I remember it.’

‘Are you sure? Maybe you remember it from a different museum.’

‘I remember the one
here
,’ Alexa says, though her mother’s words have unnerved her. This can happen, she knows it can. You can remember something, and you can fail to ever find it again, no matter how hard you look. The perfect shells, so pink and miraculous, so blank and yet so intricate, might never again be found.

‘Well,’ Tonie says, ‘I’m pretty sure it isn’t here now.’

‘It is!’ Alexa cries. ‘It is here!’

Her mother stops, looks at her. Then she says,

‘I’ll go and ask at the information desk.’

She leaves Alexa on a bench in the hall. When she returns her face is different. She holds out her hand.

‘They’ve moved them,’ she says. ‘They’re in Coasts and Rivers. It’s all changed since the last time I was here.’

‘So I
wasn’t
wrong,’ Alexa says.

‘You weren’t wrong. You were right. We were both right.’

Coasts and Rivers is new. It is dark and glamorous around the lit-up displays. There are recorded voices speaking, and buttons you can push that turn on little chains of lights. Alexa finds the shells, but they are not as she remembered them. They are different. The display is full of sand, and there are dirty-looking nets with plastic starfish in the tangles. The shells lie on the sand carelessly, as though someone just dropped them there. Somehow, they have become ordinary. She turns away, goes to find her mother. She walks through the darkness and the voices, through the unfamiliar carpeted spaces. At last she sees her, at the far end of the room. She is standing in a labyrinth of shadows. She is looking through glass, a greenish light on her face. Alexa approaches and stands beside her. In front of her is a river scene, with jewelled dragonflies in the reeds and a plaster swan sitting on the painted blue water. This is what her mother is looking at. The river twists and turns between its green banks, meanders away amid trees into painted distances. There is a kingfisher, and little animals on the banks, and a duck with her ducklings. There are flowers, and a bird’s nest full of tiny eggs. But it is the swan that is beautiful, central, in its splendour of white. Alexa stands beside her mother at the glass. She has never seen something so lovely as this place. She wishes she could walk into it, sit on the enchanted banks beside the river and feed the swan, walk and walk among the trees until she was out of sight. She aches to enter its reality. She feels it, the ecstasy of the imaginary becoming real.

‘Look at the ducklings,’ she says to her mother. ‘Look at the little eggs in the nest.’

Her mother is silent. She is staring at the river, at the swan. She stares and stares.

‘Look at the dragonfly,’ Alexa says.

The dragonfly hovers, blue and glinting. The bulrushes are tall and straight, perfectly brown and rounded at their ends. The kingfisher plunges. The swan curves her white neck like a ballerina. The painted river sparkles.

XXVII

Olga has met a man. He is a porter at the hospital. His name is Stefan. One day, in the tearoom, he asked her where she came from and when she told him the name of her home town he leaped in the air and shouted, ‘My God!’, so that she thought he must come from there too. But he is only Lithuanian. She still doesn’t know why he got so excited. He is six-and-a-half feet tall. It is important, when a man that tall throws himself in the air.

The supervisor has moved Olga to the place where women come to have their babies. Before, she cleaned in the old people’s wards, the big quiet rooms far inside the maze of the building where the windows don’t look out at anything, just brick walls or stairwells or the vents and pipes of the hospital heating system, as though someone decided that these old people didn’t need to see the world any more because they were about to leave it anyway. The old ladies would lie in their beds, all white and tiny and soft, like wrinkled little fairies. They were no trouble to anyone. They lay there like babies in their cots under the bright overhead lights, with just a few trinkets beside them: a photograph in a frame, a card, a magazine. They had so little, less than people take with them in their handbags when they go out to the shops. The white lights interrogated them, clarified them in their poverty, rinsing and rinsing each object of its significance until the photograph and the card seemed to have hardly any right to be there, impeding the encroaching whiteness. Olga would dust their trinkets for them, set them square and triumphant on the bedside tables again, smooth the covers of the magazines.

The maternity place isn’t like that at all. The women here have giant, lurid bunches of flowers and bowls of exotic fruit, and presents, always more presents, new items the mothers carelessly husk of their packaging, discarding it for Olga to pick up. She picks up the torn shapes of brightly coloured paper, the gold ribbons, the tags and labels, the rustling plastic shrouds in which the new things came encased. She takes these things, so recent and yet so superfluous, and she crams them into her black rubbish sack. Next to the beds the babies writhe like naked grubs in their perspex boxes. At the end of her shift the rubbish sack is full, full of weightless crackling wastage, chemical-fresh and nameless. There are no words for the kinds of rubbish Olga picks up. It is strange, that new life should come into the world garlanded in nameless rubbish.

The corridors outside the labour rooms echo with terrible screams. Olga pushes her mop there, at the closed doors. Inside, the women bellow like animals. Stefan works in these corridors: he wheels the patients on trolleys in and out. This is how she sees him, pushing the suffering ladies towards their destiny, their release; and then retrieving them, limp and tangled and silent, the baby clamped like a grub to their breast. His tall, upright form seems to preside over their suffering, almost to describe it, as the artist’s brush describes the image it is painting: impassive in himself, he nonetheless finds himself there, at the fulcrum of creation, guided by an unseen hand. He distributes its shapes and properties; he passes in and out of the birthing chamber, besmirched by creation.

But in the pub, showered and changed out of his hospital uniform, his functionality clears like mist; his authority is restored, the clean authority of the brush, the tool. He says,

‘This is a bad country.’

Over the weeks Olga has unravelled her woes to Stefan, her loneliness and bewilderment, her exhaustion and superstition, the feeling she has that in this place she is drawing evil towards herself, attracting it as blindly as a magnet attracts steel; the whole tale lies at his feet, undone.

‘Why should it be worse than other countries?’ she says.

He nods, raises his hand: he has already considered this.

‘It is our position here that brings out the bad. Like the mouse brings out the bad in the cat.’

Olga is frightened. She wants to hear that her problems will disappear. She does not want to think of them as inalienable, like the mouse and the cat. And she dislikes mice: at home she has a beautiful cat, Mino, who catches mice and eats them whole. She has watched, disgusted and fascinated, the toothpick legs and tail wriggling madly at Mino’s lips even as the head was already down his throat. Afterwards he would wind himself around her legs, purring; he would gaze at her with his clear, calm, staring eyes. He was referring his superiority to her; he was claiming kinship, the kinship of superior beings.

‘It takes time,’ Olga says. ‘Maybe a long time.’

Stefan is shaking his head. ‘We can be here a hundred years and we still won’t belong,’ he says.

‘Maybe we don’t need to belong. Maybe we just want to live.’

All at once he has reminded her: of the limited town, the grey colours that seeped into her brain and stained it, the feeling everywhere of defacement, of everything being known and defaced, herself spoilt and defaced by others’ knowledge of her. And the terrible certainty of repetition, her grandmother and mother and sister, replicas of one another, using and reusing the same grey rag of life. Lately, a feeling of yearning has stolen over her, for her home town and her family. It has been stealthily painting out the greyness, this feeling; it has been going over her memories and painting them in rainbow colours. In Poland, she used to imagine in these same rainbow colours what her life would be like elsewhere. Now she is here, imagining again.

‘As servants,’ Stefan says. ‘As outsiders. But as equals, never.’ He points at her with his long, strong finger. ‘You, a qualified teacher in Poland, a university degree, high social status, and what do they let you do here? They let you wash the floors.’

‘I earn more here in one week than in one month at home,’ Olga says. ‘And anyway, they treated me like a servant before. In Poland, a teacher is less than a cleaner. Less!’

On this point Olga retains a foothold in reality, when all the rest has become bodiless, rainbow-coloured myth. She does not want Stefan to succumb here, where the danger is greatest. She does not want him to slip away into illusion and leave her all alone with her one bitter certainty.

‘But as a teacher you have dignity,’ he says. ‘You have self-respect.’

‘I had no respect. The parents did not respect me and neither did their children. I hated them!’

He raises his eyebrows, purses his lips.

‘Even if I go back to Poland, I will never again be a teacher,’ she says.

And as she says it, her foothold crumbles imperceptibly away. She is released, into the memory of crisp snow on winter streets, of her grandmother’s warm kitchen, of the hot flat days of summer, of familiar sounds and smells; of herself moving, acknowledged, through the landscape, being seen and known, her friends and family crowding round her at every turn, calling her name. Olga! Olga! Suddenly it seems clear what the problem was, the blockage. If she goes back to Poland she will get a job in a bank, and everything will be different. She sees herself sitting behind the cashier’s window, in a tailored suit and high-heeled shoes. She sees herself smiling, showing her straightened teeth.

Stefan reaches out and takes her hand between his own. They are large and white, peaked with knuckles like mountains.

‘Here we have the intimacy of outsiders,’ he says. ‘It is us against them. We are a little nation, fighting the world.’

‘It’s true,’ she says, smiling wearily. She is tired. The effort of resisting illusion has exhausted her. And still it pricks her, through her sleepy surrender: the feeling of panic, the terrible feeling that drove her out of her home, that drove her here. It was the feeling you have when you break something. You break it, and there is nothing for you to do but run away.

‘I want to have the normal life of a man and a woman,’ he says. ‘I don’t want us to have the false intimacy of people on a little island. I want us to belong somewhere, to be a normal man and woman.’

She thinks of the women in the maternity ward, steeped in refuse; the fruit rotting in its bowls, the flowers drooping and browning. She hears the bellows and screams, sees the baby clamped grub-like to the breast. Really, she preferred the old ladies. She preferred their daintiness, their dispossession.

‘But in Poland you don’t belong either,’ she says.

‘I belong more. I belong enough.’

She strokes his fingers, her eyes grazing her surroundings, unseeing.

‘My mother will be happy to see me fail,’ she says. ‘And my sister even more. She will be happy for the rest of her life if I come home, because it means I have failed.’

‘Let them be happy,’ he says gently. ‘Give them their happiness.’

She ponders it. In the evenings when her shift is over she often goes to Stefan’s flat, a small flat on a busy street near the hospital. She sleeps in his bed, beside his body that is like a long white root, firm and forked. He sucks her large breasts in the darkness, while cars roar along the road outside. Is it normality they lack? For her these nights are abstract and solitary, tiny, like a seed from which something great and branching might grow. The seed gives no sign of what that thing will be. It is silent in itself. It has no connection to anything else, just the silent mystery of its future locked inside it.

But Stefan is right, in a way. It is hard to be sure that it is each other they really want.

‘The people I live with look perfectly normal. But they are not normal,’ she says. ‘They are not a normal family. Maybe it isn’t so easy to be normal.’