And so they continue, in a straight line that takes them over the Atlantic and past the curvature of the earth, out through the moon’s orbit and into the dark reaches beyond.
I smile a forgiving smile. The real truth is that I was sneakier than my brother, and got caught less often. No front-line charges into enemy machine-gun nests for me, if they could be at all avoided. My own solitary acts of wickedness were devious and well concealed; it was only in partnership with my brother that I would throw caution to the winds.
There’s a classic iceberg on the port side, with a centre so blue it looks dyed, and ahead of them is a mirage – a fata morgana, towering like an ice castle on the horizon, completely real except for the faint shimmering of its edges. Sailors have been lured to their death by those; they’ve drawn mountains on maps where no mountains were.
Were my kindliness and essential femininity being trotted out for their inspection? Were they being told in a round-about way that I was harmless, that they could expect to be talked to by me, but not devoured?
Cheap, Donny’s mother would say. It’s an enticing word. Most of the things in his life are expensive, and not very interesting.
After lunch, there’s a lecture on walruses. There are rumours of rogue walruses that prey on seals, puncturing them with their tusks, then sucking out the fat with their powerful mouths. The women on either side are knitting. One of them says, “Liposuction.” The other laughs.
I long for periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythyms of transience as if into bed.
We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote. I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs, those were called. I would like to put them into my mouth. They would taste also of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious. I.
What she wants is what Ronette has: the power to give herself up, without reservation and without commentary. It’s that languor, that leaning back. Voluptuous mindlessness. Everything Joanne herself does is surrounded by quotation marks.
Sometimes he gets high, on the pot that circulates as freely as cigarettes did once. He thinks he should be enjoying this experience more than he actually does.
Greetings, Antinous,’ I said to him. ‘I wish you’d take that arrow out of your neck.’ ‘It is the arrow of my love, Penelope of the divine form, fairest and most sagacious of all women,’ he replied. ‘Although it came from the renowned bow of Odysseus, in reality the cruel archer was Cupid himself. I wear it in remembrance of the great passion I bore for you, and carried to my grave.’ He goes on in this spurious way quite a lot, having had a good deal of practice at it while he was alive.
He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it.
His face is long and mournful, like a sheep’s, but with the large full eyes of a dog, spaniel not terrier. His skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.
What virtue was once attached to this notion – of going beyond your strength, of not sparing yourself, of ruining your health! Nobody is born with that kind of selflessness: it can be acquired only by the most relentless discipline, a crushing-out of natural inclination, and by my time the knack or secret of it must have been lost. Or perhaps I didn’t try, having suffered from the effects it had on my mother.
Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.
She’d given up the idea of dying young, however. By this time it seemed overly romantic.
Watching the many faces watching their own faces as they pretended to be someone else – Felix found that strangely moving. For once in their lives, they loved themselves.
There were marches, of course, a lot of women and some men. But they were smaller than you might have thought. I guess people were scared. And when it was known that the police, or the army, or whoever they were, would open fire almost as soon as any of the marches even started, the marches stopped.
The difficulty is that I have no mouth through which I can speak. I can’t make myself understood, not in your world, the world of bodies, of tongues and fingers; and most of the time I have no listeners, not on your side of the river. Those of you who may catch the odd whisper, the odd squeak, so easily mistake my words for breezes rustling the dry reeds, for bats at twilight, for bad dreams.
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sad, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.