All the Voices Cry (9 page)

Clifton Smith, who owned the restaurant, was the son of a former mayor of Stonehaven. He was built like a pyramid with a good solid base. In the winter he wore big mittens and a thick charcoal peacoat zipped against the cold. He paid attention to the quality of the vinaigrette and he disliked salt stains on the carpet at the door.

“I'll leave it to you girls to divvy up the tasks,” he would say if there was a special event to cater for.
Divvy, savvy, nifty;
these were Clifton's words. Robyn had been seeing Clifton for two years now. Their most recent date had been to the outlook at the meteor crater. He had brought leftover stuffed vine leaves and a thermos of coffee. Together they looked out at the trees, which was all that could be seen of the remnants of the cosmic event, unless you went up in a plane. Clifton had his hand high up on her thigh and Robyn was holding her travel mug up to her aching wisdom teeth.
Perhaps I could make a nifty wife after all,
she had thought, looking out the window.

 

Last night, after Carl had rolled himself up, grub-like, in his sleeping bag with a book and a flashlight, Sandrine washed the dishes while Robyn dried them, trying to make a stack without having them all topple over in the dust.

“How's Cliff?” asked Sandrine.

“He's fine,” Robyn spoke without looking up. “Business is good.”

Sandrine said nothing for a moment.

“Look at me,” she said finally.

“What?” said Robyn. “There's nothing with Cliff.”

“Oh I know there's nothing really wrong with Cliff. We all know Cliff.”

 

Robyn thought of the former mayor's son moving through his restaurant, resting his large hands on the shoulders of men who as primary-school boys had dropped his raincoat in the urinal and pissed on it. There was nothing wrong with Clifton,
but Sandrine had a knack for making everything that Robyn did seem wrong.

When Sandrine wasn't in town, Robyn was content with her life in Stonehaven. Only the shape of the main street bothered her. Whenever she left the restaurant, she could not suppress a rise in her spirits in response to the uphill turn in the road. Over the bridge the road went, before curving to the right and starting upwards, past city hall with its silver pepper shaker top, then onwards, and out of sight. The road promised so much, and yet by the time Robyn had crossed the bridge and glanced at the discarded white ware dumped under the willows, she could see as well as know that there was nothing beyond city hall except Zeebe's Auto Parts, Lula's XXX Videos and a handful of drafty brick houses with short concrete paths. She was annoyed that she still fell for the lure of the road.

If you got lost in a national park in August you would have to be disciplined to catch and dry enough frogs, berries and snails for the winter months. Carl and Robyn had discussed eating frogs earlier in the day. A frog might be best served marinated and wrapped in a leaf, or swimming in butter like the snails on the menu at the restaurant. Robyn suggested that Carl ask Clifton when he came to dinner on Wednesday. Carl said nothing. He tended to slide off to his room when Clifton was around.

 

The river narrowed into a high rocky gulley where the sides had been hollowed out by spring floods. Robyn was glad that it was late summer and the water level was low. The sound of
voices drifted down through the foliage high over her head. Two people were singing the chorus to the Gypsy Rover.
He whistled and he sang and the green woods rang, for he won the heart of a lady.
She recognized Carl's voice. He would be a musician like his father. Robyn had avoided telling him about The Chokers. She had never wanted Carl to think of his father as an itinerant player.

So her sister had been right, the trail was just through the woods and at that point it did run parallel with the river. Perhaps Robyn ought to have followed them along the portage trail after all. It would be easier going than the river. Portage was a comforting word, close to potage, the thick vegetable soup that Clifton served at the restaurant in the winter months. She wondered if she would ever find herself following Clifton along a portage trail, Coleman lamp in one hand, cooler in the other, two paddles under her arms, with her husband turned toucan under the fibreglass hull of a canoe.

Ahead there was a bridge. Robyn slipped into the ferny shadows beneath it. She had thought she might call out to surprise them, but she found herself unwilling to give up her temporary camouflage. She wondered why they could not see her. Perhaps they did not expect to see her. Once confirmed in her hunch, Sandrine would have forgotten Robyn's reluctance to leave the river. They had not even thought to look back.

Sandrine and Carl crossed over the bridge. Through the slats and the chicken wire Robyn could see the soles of Sandrine's boots and beside them Carl's sandals. They were walking side by side.
Sandrine wants a child.
The thought had not
occurred to Robyn before. Their song faded into the woods. If Robyn did not come back, Sandrine would make sure that Carl got his practice done. She would see to the gym gear.

Beyond the narrow straits, the river bed fanned out into a sunlit marsh of reeds and nests, of sedge and low growing myrtle. Robyn stepped from one clump of cotton bushes and pitcher plants to another, trying to avoid the down-sucking mud between. Mosquitoes swarmed about her face and arms. She crouched low, moving crabwise, grabbing at the rotten logs that lay on mossy mats of raspberry and green stars. Robyn felt like an escapee. She half-expected to hear dogs baying in pursuit.

Robyn had also been right. The portage trail and the river diverged tracks at the marsh. Sandrine and Carl stood on the shore almost three hundred metres further along the water's edge. They had their hands on their hips and were looking around. To get back to them Robyn would have to cross a cove of water lilies and pickerel weed.

She'd had enough of the marsh and she moved out into the shallow water eagerly, wading until she tripped on a submerged log and found herself lying in the water. After that she crawled along on her hands through the water lilies, surprised by how quickly she got used to the casual slimy brush of the underwater stems and the sharp pricking of submerged branches. Among the water lilies she stopped and looked around. The water was sun-warmed and clear, the bottom silted and silky. Some lily pads had flipped over, showing their scarlet undersides. Right side up, their tops were a hardened
waxy green touched not just by dragonflies but also by a host of smaller insects. Every now and then she encountered the upraised golden fist of a water lily yet to flower.

Robyn kicked her legs out behind her and thought of the golden rims of the frog's eyes.
Amphibian;
that was the word she could not remember, that was the word that she wanted to describe the way a person without children moves through the world.
I am an amphibian.
Her jaws opened and closed over the words like a frog's. She could see her sister standing on the sandy beach ahead of her. Carl was bending over his empty collecting jar. Soon she would have to stand up and make herself visible once more. She did not want to, but she would.

L
IKE A PLAYING CARD with twelve diamonds on it, Mrs Viebert possessed all the normal parts of ladies, but in greater quantities. From his hiding place behind the purple clematis, his pockets full of sandwich crusts, nine-year-old Norman spied her approaching his house on her piggy trotter heels, patting the back of her hair as she came, calling to her daughter, Baby Viebert, to come along. Mrs Viebert was as magnificent as the figurehead on the prow of a ship, and the rose-scented air of Palmerston North parted graciously before her.

While their mothers played canasta in the company of Mr and Mrs Goring from next door, Norman and Baby Viebert filled the birdbath with puddings made of bark and petals and leaves. After they had eaten their fill, they used their spittle to attach rose pricks to their noses. Thus transformed, the two rhinoceroses stalked the shrubbery looking for Germans. Usually they rescued Baby's big brother Cyril from a snake-filled pit on the compost heap of North Africa, where the second New Zealand Division under General Freyberg had been holding out against Rommel for a week on a diet of grapefruit rinds and potato peelings.

Carrying wounded Cyril and weakened General Freyberg on their backs, the wild animals circled the house, occasionally pausing to listen at the open window. The murmuring voices of the card players did not concern them; the sound they anticipated was the squeaking wheel on the tea trolley as Norman's mother pushed it towards the rosewood table in the front room. As Norman no longer had a father, there was no one to come with a can of oil to squirt away the squeak. Of course there was Uncle Stewart, but he was not to be trusted, being naturally the kind of man who drips oil on the carpet.

On the trolley were cups and saucers with a pattern of rosebuds, a silver teapot, and a plate of squashed pea and black pepper sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the line of filling bright as lawn clippings. The lower shelf carried the double-tiered cake stand bearing a nutmeg and apple cake barely dusted with icing sugar. Rhinoceroses no longer, Norman and Baby hurried to wash their hands in the birdbath. There might be cake for good children with clean fingers.

The combined stimuli of canasta and nutmeg brought on the fleeting visions that Mrs Viebert called her prognostications. Not for Mrs Viebert the watery ways of the teacup or the drama of tarot. Her visions came with the satisfactory click of a well-sanded drawer shutting. At any rate, some time during 1941, Mrs Viebert looked out the window at the children lurking in the undergrowth, dabbed her fingertips on a napkin embroidered with flowers and wrote something on a card that she found in her handbag, together with Norman's name.

Widowed in the early months of the war, Norman's mother was no longer the woman to hold fate back from her son. She tucked the card inside an envelope and gave it to him at bedtime.

“This is yours,” she said, “from Mrs Viebert. Mind it, and keep it safe.”

Norman held the envelope close to his chest and stared up at the ceiling.

 

“I have to fly to New Zealand,” Norman announced to the assembled staff at the Montreal eye clinic where he worked. “My Uncle Stewart is on his last legs.”

In truth, Uncle Stewart had not only lost both legs to diabetes, he had also died in 1979. There was not much reason to lie about it; Norman was quite entitled to take a holiday. Furthermore, Norman's New Zealand relations, both the quick and the dead, were as distant to his Canadian colleagues' thinking as fruit flies. However, Norman felt that a degree of preparation was in order for the only act of mythic proportions that he would ever perform. Telling a lie seemed a reasonable start.

Norman flew out of Vancouver on Sunday, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen that showed a digital plane inching its way out over the Pacific Ocean. Once again he pulled the envelope out of his pocket and looked at it. Time had mottled the paper until it resembled the backs of Norman's hands, but the words written on it remained unchanged: Mrs Viebert's Prognostication. For the hundredth, perhaps the two-hundredth
time in his life he opened the envelope and pulled out the playing card inside it. As he always did, he looked first at the picture on the back of the card: a swooning gypsy-wild, sky-tumbled Icarus, succoured by lonely mermaids whose dark auburn hair, so tastefully arranged, had stimulated his earliest adolescent fantasies. Now Norman wondered how any artist could make falling out of the sky seem an attractive option. He turned the card over and looked at the other side. It was a two of diamonds, a wild card, the kind that froze the canasta pack, calling a temporary halt to the ordinary life of the game. The card no longer smelled of the fruitcakey darkness of Mrs Viebert's handbag but the message on it was still legible:
Norman: look sharp. Monday, August 27th, 2001.

In the 1940s, August 27th, 2001 had been as unimaginable as a Monday on the moon, but the date had loomed over Norman, squashing the more ridiculous of his adolescent impulses, keeping him safe in case he was bound for glory. A career in optometry had not left much room for mortal accident. He spent his days in a brown-walled windowless room posing questions about floating specks and numbers hidden in patterns. He had been meticulous about oil changes and snow tires, and while his marriage lasted, Aspen had proved to be a wife who was careful with her hair and not prone to credit-card debt. Indeed, the greatest risk that Norman had taken was to leave his mother and New Zealand far behind and emigrate to Canada.

Once, there had been a before and an after this date, but as middle-age came and went, Norman began to realize that it
was far more likely to be the date for a cardiac arrest or being squashed by a butter truck than a date marked by Olympian achievement. Indeed, Norman had come to fear that time's form was not equally divided like an hourglass, but bottomless, like a funnel with no end. Norman could see himself arriving at Monday, August 27th, 2001, but after that he could not see very much.

An air stewardess had given him the idea that the day might be avoided altogether. Not long after his divorce, Norman found himself seated on a plane beside a man in an open-necked golf shirt. The air stewardess was very pretty and the open-necked man had asked her how she kept her looks. She replied that on every long-haul flight she missed a day in crossing the dateline, and it all added up. With a practised wink and a startling mewing sound she passed on to Norman, asking him if he would like coffee or tea. Tea, please, he had said, looking up at her smooth skin and wondering.

After Norman decided to skip the day that fate had appointed him, he organized the slow demise of Uncle Stewart through a series of postcards addressed to himself, followed by a message from a payphone, in which he regretfully informed himself, using a fake Scottish accent, that Uncle Stewart was in his final days of decline. He enjoyed these preparations and over the course of a year read each postcard aloud to the receptionist at the eye clinic, receiving her waves of sympathy with dutiful gravity.