In a flash Clare had understood. William’s leaving really did have nothing to do with her. There had been many mistresses in the past, she knew, including a number of his students. She had suspected on one or two occasions that the relationships had resulted in serious complications and entanglements and unforeseen responsibilities. But with this new woman it was all about the possibility of a wholly different kind of life, a new way of living in a country alive to new promise.
That she might not wake in profound darkness, alone in her new house that would always feel too large, too self-directing and sentient, able to reorganize its own architecture into something completely unexpected — a museum or morgue, for instance — the moment its inhabitants lapsed in their vigilance, Clare left the light on in the passage and put herself to bed.
After an hour of turning first left and then right she had nearly fallen asleep when there was a sudden interruption in the light, as if from a momentary power outage — or worse, from the movement of someone passing between her and the door. She lay as still as she could, listening for a noise, remembering she had forgotten to engage the alarm. There was no sound apart from the hum of the ventilation system and the soughing flow of air, but Clare was certain she had registered a change in the light through her closed eyelids. She supposed it might have been a power outage — load shedding was the supplier’s euphemism, as if provision of a basic service were a burden to be borne — but it had not felt like that, and the transition from the public utilities to her own generator should have been seamless. No, there were people in her house, friends or family of her dead brother-in-law, one of his six brothers and sisters or countless cousins, men and women as old as Clare herself, come to remind her once again of the knowledge they possessed about her. The removal and return of the wig was not enough; now they were intent on tormenting her in new and more terrible ways. As with the invasion at the old house on Canigou Avenue, her heart took over, beating in terror and outrage that anyone should dare to enter.
The light was interrupted again, and then remained so, half of what it should have been. Someone was standing in the doorway to Clare’s room. If this is going to be the end of me, let it come, she thought, and opened her eyes.
Clare
I cannot bear it any more, my vision, conjured out of horrible imagination, of you trussed like a lean pig, waiting for your fate in that titanium cage, clicking for your sanity. I try again what I have tried before. I offer you the cup, a song of my own invention, and wish for you to cohere again, my wandering daughter. In the garden I make a fire of dried leaves from the neighbour’s eucalyptus tree and a pile of twigs cut last winter from the branches of the stinkwood. It crackles and smokes and turns itself over into a gentle blaze. I pour honey and milk on the flames, a glass of wine, and water that has run down from the mountain. In the absence of barley, I sprinkle white cornmeal over the fire, grinding the grain between my palms. I do it correctly this time. I pray to you Laura, plead with you to come forth, promise to sacrifice a black sheep in your honour. I prick my finger to summon you, extract a drop of my blood to body you forth. I did not do it properly before: the bloodshed was only in my mind. I drone and squeak. I dance with steps of my own devising, an unbalanced dervish, hair in the wind, a blue crane, a crone. I keen as I should have keened before. The ibises watch me and cry out in chorus.
I wait until the fire burns itself out, knock the coals apart, heap them with ash, see the windows of my neighbour’s house go black as, bored by my theatrics, he finally puts himself to bed. I told Marie I did not wish to be disturbed, but no doubt my neighbour has been watching as neighbour-men do, passing judgement in his way. He will tell the other neighbours, the grandees of the Constantia Club, that Clare Wald practises witchcraft. They will read the new book to see if there are any hints to the nature of my devilry. I predict a spike in local sales. I no longer care if I am seen and thought mad — or worse, sane and an agent of evil.
In the darkness with the moon spitting off the mountain, I sit before my pile of ash, running my fingers through the grey feather-petals. Silence, and breeze that stirs the cinders, but you have not come. Myth is only myth. Perhaps you are too long dead. Perhaps the recipe or incantation had a flaw.
I go inside, locking the doors behind me, engaging the alarm that makes Marie and me feel secure until morning. With the disappointment at your failure to appear, there is also comfort. If you do not rise, there is still a chance you are not dead. But if not dead, then where are you, Laura? Where have you taken yourself? It does not seem possible that you would wander the world without contacting one of us — and if not your father or me, then at least your brother. You cannot still be in captivity; that is only a discomforting fantasy. No, you can only be dead, and I am no believer in the supernatural. It was foolish to pretend I was.
I shower and roll myself into bed, crack my back straight, turn on my side, and bury my head half in the pillow. In sleep I drift through dreams of you, always dreams of you abandoning me, and if not abandoning, then caged, your body exposed, waiting to be consumed by sharks, the bones picked by palm-nut vultures when the tide goes out, bones sinking into the estuary silt, waiting for the next age to discover you, this country’s own bog woman, victim of the gladiatorial ring with victims of your own.
My scream pulls me out of sleep and I sit erect in bed, blankets swirling around me, because I felt your breath and the coldness of your hand, and now, out of sleep, you come screaming back at me on black rag wings burned with blood, chanting a haunting cry into my eyes. You worm yourself between my toes and infect my bowels, a tapeworm foetus angry for rebirth.
I wake up screaming, and Marie comes to my door. She is the keeper of my secrets. I could never let her go. ‘Nothing is wrong,’ I say, ‘only a bad dream.’
But it was no dream, and you have not come alone.
As quickly as you arrive you disappear into the shadows, leaving only Nora, who flies on currents of white noise, the sound of wind coming down the mountain or the air of this house being stirred by its hidden rotors.
She arrives with the murmur of two cushions compressing, air being forced out by her weight, the ripping sound of two pieces of fabric rubbing warp against weft. She sits on the chair nearest my bedroom door. I know immediately it is Nora, and her presence is so real that my brain, lesioned by trauma, tells my hand to reach for the panic button until I hear Nora’s voice in my head, warning me that she will be long gone by the time the security guards have arrived and I will be made to look like a mad old woman, asked if I have been sleeping well, if I have spoken to my doctor about the things I think I’ve seen, if I am taking all my medication. I take no medication.
‘Then perhaps you should,’ she says.
Nora’s voice, the sing-song amusement of young womanhood, consumes me in an acid bath. I know it as well as the voice of my parents and your own lost voice, Laura. I can summon you all to ring in my mind, you and your brother, your father, my dead and my living. I can speak all of you aloud in my own feminine way. And now I learn I can summon you all too well. I want to send you back. I have made a mistake! This is all the proof I need. I accept you are dead, now leave the living in peace.
My sister, the Nora I have unwittingly conjured, has a sense of humour that she lacked in life. She sits with me for hours through this night, passing comment on my works, all the books she never had the chance to read, speculating on their meaning. She has turned herself into an eternal reader, benefitting from the underworld’s great lending library. Rightly, she finds herself in each of my books, appearing in one form or another, sometimes young, more often old, male and female, human or lesser animal. Once I cast her as a hurricane, a storm of such unpredictable ferocity that it defeated the meteorologists and destroyed an unprepared swath of American shoreline. Another time she was a drought of long duration, teasing the suffering heroine with storm clouds that never broke into rain. She is an admirably flexible talent, bending to suit my purpose.