Читать книгу When in Broad Daylight I Open My Eyes - Greg Lazarus - Страница 5

Three

Morning sickness does not only happen in the mornings. After lunch Maria bends, hands on knees, vomiting – a force beyond her control – onto the paving stones outside the house. Her nausea has only escalated since her meal of salty crackers and ginger tea – supposedly a palliative. When she came out earlier to fetch the post, moving from the comforting gloom of her therapy room into a sunny winter’s morning, her sickness peaked.

The paving stones are wet with vomit. This sight, plus the acrid smell, brings the nausea swimmingly round again. Frustratingly, her morning sickness does not recede after a good vomit. It persists.

She goes inside to boil water for pouring over the paving stones. While the kettle is on, she heads to the bathroom to rinse and brush her teeth. The room remains as her mother left it on the day of the accident: New Age magazines in a wicker basket and Claudia’s collection of green frogs, plastic and ceramic, on the windowsill, the front frog coquettishly lounging on its side in a pink petticoat. I should chuck out all this junk, she thinks as she brushes her teeth, but even the thought is wearisome.

Maria picks up one of the frogs and stares out the open window at the ivy-coated wall of the neighbour a few metres in front of her. She can hear the drain pipe trickling water, and wonders idly when last Claudia’s gutters – now, strangely, her own – were checked. It’s been nine months since the event in the forest, and she doubts her mother paid the gutters much attention before then, knowing her attitude towards household maintenance. The phone rings, and she rushes to get there in time.

“Maria? Kristof here. So pleased I caught you. Do you have a moment?”

“Of course.” How strange it was bumping into him on the weekend, and now a further call from this man, just five days later.

“I phoned to thank you for last week’s session. I forgot to mention it when I ran into you. A group of philosophers isn’t an ideal set of clients, I imagine.”

His voice is light on the phone, making her feel that he’s smiling as he speaks. “There’s no need to thank me,” she says. She’s wary – few of her clients ever show any kind of appreciation.

He carries on: “I know it was only one session and not quite therapy, but I feel that you’ve really made a difference to us,” he pauses, “to all of us, even those who were sceptical. I thought you managed to – shift something, maybe.” A pause: “Perhaps Rothko Chapel helped –?”

Maria senses his tentativeness, and knows that she is meant to say something about the music. Mostly she remembers the length of the piece. “It was a very” – she casts around for the correct word, favouring a policy of honesty, for the most part, towards her clients – “insistent piece of music, demanding one’s attention for its duration. I’m pleased to hear that the session had some effect. An event like the one you’ve all experienced is bound to be very traumatic for everyone.”

There’s a short silence on the phone. “Though of course people experience trauma in different ways,” she adds lamely. There has been no mention of a further session. Truthfully, she would feel fine about not seeing Joan and Cyrus again: their particular brands of dissatisfaction, Cyrus’s hyper-vigilance and Joan’s open hostility, were unpleasant. She feels differently about Luke, who appeared flustered and anxious – mental states she is more comfortable with – and Kristof, who would make a fine patient, with his capacity to access and reflect on his feelings.

“Unfortunately,” Kristof says, as if reading her mind, “I’m not sure if there are any plans to schedule another appointment. I would definitely be in favour. In any event, I hope we get to meet again.”

Maria says nothing; she is not quite sure what he is proposing. Does he want his own separate session, or is he making a more personal comment? He was a patient, after all. Still, the debriefing session was hardly long-term therapy. She’s run similar kinds of sessions at companies, for employees dealing with trauma of some kind, and some of those “patients” she wouldn’t even recognise if she met them on the street.

“Perhaps we will,” she says finally.

As she goes to the kitchen to fetch the boiled water, she remembers the disappearance of the pottery gecko after last week’s hour with the philosophers. At least, she thinks it happened after that session. Maria keeps a careful check on her therapy room, really her mother’s old study, so she is unlikely to be mistaken. Patients often leave their belongings behind – a desire to keep part of themselves with her between sessions – but no one has ever removed one of her possessions. Since she has half an hour before her next patient, she goes to the study to search for the missing gecko.

That lizard, its blue tail curled tightly around a rock, is very familiar; her mother used it as a paperweight when writing letters. Since Maria has lived in the house, the gecko has presided over her most academic bookshelf, the one containing her complete edition of Freud as well as Bowlby’s Separation: Anxiety and Anger – and none of her mother’s books. She checks the room thoroughly, including the bookshelves, the mantelpiece above the fireplace, and her desk in the corner next to the bay window. Then she looks behind the cushions of the two armchairs, and the two-seater couch. Nothing.

Perhaps it has slipped behind the bookcase. Maria edges the case away from the wall, not wanting the books to tumble out. She has developed the notion, irrational and exaggerated, that her pregnant belly is fragile, and larger than it really is. Though her stomach hardly looks different from the way it’s always been, a slightly rounded firmness the only discernible change, she’s nervous of anything knocking against it. Whatever cells are replicating within are entirely safe from external harm – of course she knows that! – yet she can’t stop feeling that the foetus is breakable and under threat. She crouches down and reaches behind the bookcase. Something brushes the tip of her fingers and she leans further inwards to get a better grip, placing a protective hand in front of her belly. No, not the gecko, only the sharp corner of the edge of a book. Pincerlike, with thumb and forefinger, she extracts it.

Maria sits on the floor and traces her fingers over the cover, the only part of this book she has ever liked: black, with a red star, sun and moon, all heavily embossed. The title: Seeking the Stars. She wonders how it came to be there, and imagines that her mother must have read it in this room.

She flips through the pages, a series of interviews with local spiritualists written, surprisingly, by a respected journalist. It was published a week before the accident; the day of publication was the last time Maria saw Claudia alive. Her mother was a popular astrologer, composing birth charts for her many clients, delivering predictions, even appearing annually on television around New Year. One year, Maria remembers, a Cabinet minister consulted Claudia before a major diplomatic trip to China, paying for his appointment out of government funds. Somehow the newspapers got wind of the visit, and the resulting scandal brought Claudia many new clients. Maria had wondered whether her mother was the source of the leak.

It hasn’t skipped Maria’s attention that her mother’s work focused on the future, whereas Maria’s own profession, at least the way she practises it, deals primarily with the past. She well remembers the day of the book’s release, not because of the chapter – “The Abyss and Beyond” – devoted to Claudia’s mystical powers, but because Maria left Lionel that day. Nearly two years after they had first met, she managed to claw her way out of his life, packing all her belongings into a compact blue suitcase, which she hoisted under her arm before attacking the stairs, two at a time, from his front door to the driveway. She was drunk. Getting through a bottle of white wine before Lionel had arrived home that afternoon made the packing more manageable, though less systematic. Every few minutes she took a break to lie on the bed, closing her eyes, the room tilting in sympathy. With the miserable hours of the afternoon looming, she had gone over to her mother’s house to see the new book.

“Don’t you just love the cover?” Claudia stroked it, leaning forward in her chair, her thumb rubbing the embossed design. The curtains were open and the sun cast a broad beam of light into the room, making the dust motes whirl. Her mother was in her mid-fifties. People often expressed their amazement to learn that Maria, seventeen years her junior, was her daughter. That afternoon Claudia’s hair gleamed in the sunlight, creating the effect of an aura. A striking face, her eyes dramatically outlined in black, her mouth bare.

When Maria was four years old, she remembers, her mother returned late from a party and came into the bedroom to check on her. Claudia was dressed in black, carrying a long gnarled stick, wearing a pointy hat. Maria was startled awake, crying, convinced that a witch had flown in through her window on a broomstick. The night was spent running to her mother’s bed in tears, seeking comfort. Each time Claudia steered the little girl purposefully back to her own bedroom. I’m not a witch, she told her. I’ve just been to a dress-up party.

“I particularly liked your chapter,” Maria said to her mother on the day the book was published, promising herself she’d be pleased for Claudia, no fighting allowed when her mother was so proud of herself. Also, this served to distract and prevent her from asking Claudia whether she’d followed up with the psychiatrist she’d recommended. It would only provoke a fight. Her mother had been hospitalised once, when Maria was still a child, for a major depressive episode. After two weeks Claudia had checked herself out, her mood more stable, but her resolve even stronger: never again would she stay in a mental institution, she’d said. No more psychiatrists. Through the years she’d tried to explain to her daughter that her life was meant to be lived unmediated by medical intervention, and her condition, if that’s what Maria wanted to call it, was spiritual. If Maria didn’t understand, then that was her deficiency.

“Tell you what,” said Claudia, “I’ll do a tarot reading for you today. I haven’t done you one for ages.”

“I just don’t feel up to it. Do you mind?”

“Okay.” Her lips pressed together, a negligible gesture, but enough for Maria to intuit she was angry. “Are you tipsy?” her mother asked. “Is that it?” Claudia regarded drunkenness as weakness, an attempt to close one’s eyes to the world.

“No, I’m not. Bring out the cards. It’s fine – do your reading.” Already Maria could feel the buzz of the alcohol dissipating. “Come on!” She forced a cheerful note into her voice.

Claudia stood up. She was shorter than Maria, yet she carried herself proudly, head lifted, shoulders back, and often appeared taller. Maria could hear the slamming of cupboard doors in the dining room; usually Claudia kept the cards close by, always at the ready for dealing with a wide variety of mishaps, personal or practical. Perhaps something was distracting her mother.

A few minutes passed. “Got them,” she called from the kitchen. She came back to the lounge and placed the deck down on a small glass table. Then she sat, palms against the glass, closing her eyes and breathing deeply, while Maria felt a rising prickle of irritation. “Think of a question for the cards.”

“Like, what should I eat for supper?” It hit her then that she’d left Lionel, and she wanted to weep with the loss of him; instead, she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, her teeth pressing into the flesh.

“Don’t be silly, Maria – a real question. You don’t fool around with the cards.”

Alright, then, a question: would she return to Lionel? And what about a child – would she remain childless for the rest of her life? More than one question. Claudia dealt and shuffled, lining up the images in neat rows. Maria observed the force of Claudia’s belief in her magic tricks, the way the cards energised and interested her in a way Maria never had, either as a child or now. Bizarrely, it was the only time that her mother seemed ordered and reasonable. At intervals, upon command, Maria selected a card at random, closing her eyes in a pretence of concentration to please Claudia.

Maria doesn’t recall much of the tarot reading. Her mind was too much with Lionel, and the physical ache of missing him. She remembers the brightness of the cards, the archaic images of devils and magicians. Near the conclusion of what felt like an endless reading, Maria’s eyelids growing heavy from the drink, she definitely drew the Tower: lightning smashing into a high stone turret, two figures hurtling headfirst towards the ground. Claudia must have noticed how the card resonated with her daughter, because she leaned across the table and gripped her hand, her fingers dry and foreign, embarrassing Maria. It was the part of the afternoon she remembered most strongly, her last vivid memory of her mother: not the card itself, but Claudia’s uncharacteristic behaviour. It had been rare for her to show her daughter any kind of physical affection, and Maria had always craved more. When the intimacy of her mother’s fingers became unbearable, Maria pulled her fingers free as Claudia leaned in and said: “This time, I promise, I’ll be here for you.”