The Elusive Language of Ducks (18 page)

Christmas Day. Before lunch, Rosemary and Max arrived through the hedge with a box of snails. Rosemary was wearing a pink dress and a pink bow in her hair. Her bare arms were fat and downy. Max looked the real little man in clean shorts and a checked shirt with sleeves folded up his arms and secured by a button. His hair had been slicked from his forehead with water. She wondered whether Eric had done this before they came over. Normally, Eric would be over here himself. She squatted with each child balanced against a knee on the lawn as the duck devoured their offering.

Now we have to go, said Max.

We're going to have ice-cream, said Rosemary. Hannah placed her nose in their hair, first this one's head and then the other.

You smell delicious, she said.

But you can't eat me, said Max, wriggling to escape.

And you can't eat
me,
said Rosemary the parrot.

When they left to go back to Eric, she gave them a box of chocolates. To share, she told them. She also gave them a large walnut.

This is for Poppa, she said. Make sure you give it to him, otherwise there'll be no chocolates for you. She had already prised open the shell and replaced the nut with a note. She'd read a short story once of a mother who had done something similar with a walnut at her daughter's birthday party — made the walnut with something inside as the prize in Pass the Parcel. She'd liked the idea and had always wanted to use it herself but, as she had no children, she'd never had the opportunity.

In this case, she'd made several attempts at the choice of words for Eric. Some were meaningful, some cheeky, some bitter, some profound and obscure. In the end she wrote:
Is that our friendship, in a nutshell? Happy Christmas, Eric, from Hannah.
Then she resealed it with glue.

Claire and Bob from Te Awamutu arrived with a tray of asparagus rolls and savoury eggs. Bob with his fitting red shirt and his healthy head of hair, an electrified mop sliced in two with a straight parting. Hannah's cousin and husband from Titirangi came with a chick pea salad and their
ruddy-faced teenage twin boys, who slouched into the house resentfully, and she knew they'd barely bring themselves to speak or look up from their cell phones the whole day. A younger cousin and her new boyfriend came, late and radiant with their hair still wet from showering. Simon's brother from Australia, Dennis, had arrived the night before. And Maggie and Toby came direct from the airport, dragging into the guest room the two bulging suitcases for the week that they were to stay. Maggie brought with her a burst of energy, greeting everyone loudly, laughing and joking, yanking the cheeks of both twins to induce a sneery smile from each. Well, that was something. Toby was nervy, thin, his elegant jacket hanging from the bones in his back, and when Hannah tiptoed to kiss his freckled cheek, he reeked of smoke.

Sorry about your mother, he said, his body jiggling uneasily. I liked her. We got along well.

This was the first she had heard from him since her mother died.

Thanks, she replied. That's OK.

Maggie told me that she had a great farewell.

Oh, did she? Yes, I think Mum would have liked it.

So, this was the Christmas package. This was the blast-off that the countdown of the past few weeks had been leading up to.

And all anyone wanted to do was to see the duck.

First of all Claire and Bob trudged down the deck stairs to the lawn, where they gathered around him in the sunshine. He stood, legs splayed, looking beseechingly at Hannah.

Oh, he's big, they said.

But he's gentle and he doesn't have a drake's tail.

And he doesn't have a mohawk. And not much of a caruncle. But he does have some. You might find, they said, that he'll lay eggs.

But then again, he's very big so he might not.

Then the rest of the party trundled down the steps, glasses of bubbly in hands. Even the twins bumbled along, bumping into each other as they went. Hannah picked up the duck as she normally would, cupping her hands behind his wings and swivelling him around so that he was upright against her chest. It was a practised motion that, as long as they prepared themselves calmly, they manoeuvred with grace. As he usually did, the
duck touched his beak under her chin, at this cheek and the other. This time he was bashful, hiding for longer under her chin.

Suddenly she realised she was surrounded by shiny black eyes, duck eyes, single dark eyes blinking. Everybody had a camera trained on her and the duck.

She was aware of Simon standing back from it all, his arms folded tightly, muttering to Maggie.

I might be married to her, but
I'm
not a blood relative. And there's some consolation in that.

Hannah couldn't hear Maggie's actual reply, but she didn't like the way her sister laughed so conspiratorially at her expense.

One day after Christmas Day. The duck had avoided the roasting dish, the fantasies around the ideal Christmas dinner when ham had become passé, the envy of those bored with thoughts of one more year of pig. No one had snuck through the fence and stolen him.

It was the first Christmas without her mother having to endure her decrepit body — the cracked old vessel that, over the last few years, had only just managed to contain her soul.

And there was another earthquake in Christchurch, a 4.9 aftershock. Maggie and Toby rang neighbours, ascertained that once again their house had escaped practically unscathed. A few things on the floor, some broken crockery.

Thank bloody goodness for that, said Maggie.

Toby brushed his hand over her shoulder.

I'm going for a walk, he said. His normally pale face was ashen. His freckles scattered under the surface like tiny autumn leaves trapped in ice.

Hannah didn't know Toby well, even though he had been married to her sister for ten years. He and Maggie both worked hard, drank a lot, partied hard. They each had children from first marriages, all now living overseas. He worked into the small hours as a chef in an upmarket restaurant in Christchurch. Hannah's infrequent conversations with him over the years made her think of twin water-skiers skimming and bouncing along the surface of a choppy lake, hauled behind the master controller at the wheel — Maggie.

Chapter 15

And now all the long days travelling from Christmas towards New Year.

A year or so before she met Simon, Hannah and a friend had travelled to Sydney on the cruise ship
Achille Lauro.
As it pulled out from the terminal in Auckland, passengers were throwing streamers and unravelling toilet paper as a link to those waving from the wharf. She'd been able to distinguish the face of her mother amongst the pixelated sea of the crowd far below, but what astonished her more than anything was that she could determine whether her mother was looking at her or whether her gaze, rather than her head, was turned askance. Amongst those dotted faces below, the link between her mother's eyes and hers was discernible. It wasn't that she could see her eyes, but she knew when her mother was looking at her.

For at least two days she'd been encapsulated on the ship with hundreds of passengers as they moved from one destination to the other. There was no escape. The ocean and the sky surrounded them. Internally, they were entertained with drink and food and music and dancing and pursuing men. They were on an island, a spaceship, a floating seed capsule. They were parasites living in the gut of a floating duck. Some passengers were continuing to South Africa, some to England, back home or to start new lives. Everyone was in the same boat. If it had sunk mid-ocean they would have all gone into the soup together.

In many ways, the time between Christmas and New Year was like this. They were passengers on a boat moving through time between Christmas and New Year. At the other end, they would disembark and continue with their lives. Hannah only had to hope that there'd be no storms. Even more worryingly, that they wouldn't sink. She was aware that there were rocks lurking just beneath the surface.

They were immersed in a heat wave. Their ship had slipped its mooring, was drifting from shore. Every morning Simon would dive into the sea for a swim but could never persuade anyone else to join him.

And now Toby was asleep on the couch in his beanpole jeans and black T-shirt, his lean white feet twitching spasmodically, his gingery hair wilting over his forehead as if it, too, was affected by the heat. Everyone else, muttering that they had overeaten, took themselves into the garden, searching for respite from the cloying humidity.

Simon's brother, Dennis, perched miserably on the wooden bridge with his feet on either side, cooling in the pond. Two divorces, and he'd just been made redundant. His whole demeanour was heavy, as if he had grown too round for himself and was sagging, only just supporting himself, his chin in his palms, his forearms resting on his thighs. His back was curved and his stomach drooped wearily over his belt. A goldfish, enticed by his motionless body, investigated the hairs on his leg.

Maggie, on the other hand, had filled a plastic bucket with Belgian beer packed in ice and was sitting on a rug in the shade alongside Simon, their backs against a cabbage tree. Even the duck was droopy, seeking refuge in leafy shade. Flies buzzed and darted in the sun. Birds hung around on the lawn with their beaks hanging open, their wings spread out from their bodies as if broken.

It was only when Hannah brought out the hose to wash away his droppings from under the deck that the duck sprang to life. When she shot the jet at his feet, he parked his legs apart on the tiles, like a dazed old man who had just wet himself. However, when she lifted the spray into the air above him, he was gone, crashing across the lawn around the pond. She couldn't resist giving his tail a sprong — he ran like the same old man rushing for a bus. She laughed. Whoever heard of a duck scared of water?

The others were lazily watching her. She was their entertainment, and it wasn't because they were sharing her delight. Instead, they were united in their disdain. Simon was pleased to have an ally; he had seen it before, after all. But Maggie was a keen spectator, her chin propped on her bare
knees, swigging from a bottle. Hannah had an urge to give her tail a sprong as well.

The duck was watching her from behind a bush. She turned the hose off at the nozzle and dropped it by the pond.

Dennis, still on the bridge, lifted his head from his murky gaze and gave her a forced, embarrassed grin.

Are you OK? she asked.

Yep, yep. Yep. Thanks, he said, stepping up onto the bridge, shaking water from his legs before moving over to dump himself beside Simon and Maggie on the rug. He, too, was now drinking the beer that Maggie had handed him.

Hannah joined them, sat down on the edge of the rug, her toes in the cool grass. The duck placed himself beside her feet. There was an awkward silence. Maggie offered her a beer. She opened it herself and took a swig. No one said anything as the heat shimmered around them and the boat floated further and further from shore.

Four days later and they were still afloat. Each morning Hannah stealthily mixed up the special mash for her duck and watched as he gobbled it up, along with a few members of an extended family of snails she'd found stuck to the concrete wall behind the agapanthus.

It had been a languid sloppy day with their destination only two days ahead. The sun belted upon them. If they'd been passengers in a yacht, its sails would have been drooping flaccidly. Toby took himself to his room to sleep, after promising to prepare the evening meal. The others left the house for a walk, ambling down the street and over the rolling buttocks of grass to the point.

Hannah could hear a skylark, a tiny bell jingling in the blue. She stopped, shielding her eyes as they followed the wavering dot climbing to the heavens. She imagined her duck one day accompanying the lark, his enormous wings batting against the air to swing from one end of the sky to the other, as if a pendulum suspended from the small bird, pinned to the sky.