The Vanishing Act Read online

  Everyone believes that you are dead, Mama. But I don’t think so.

  Papa says that the wind swept you over Theodora’s Plateau.

  Priest found one of your shoes today. I hope that you can buy another pair where you are now.

  We all miss you.

  I asked Papa to help me look in Mama’s old atlas, so we could work out where she had gone. But Papa said that her red suitcase was still in her room and if she had gone anywhere she would have taken it with her. And when I tried to convince Papa that maybe she just wanted a new suitcase he said that it wasn’t logical. She already had one that was perfectly good and sturdy.

  But I thought of all the peculiar things I had read about, things that didn’t make sense. I told Papa of whole cities under water, streets filled with drifting seaweed and glittering fish, and I told him of the enormous overweight octopus they caught in the ocean, that had jumped straight from the ship’s scales back to the water, just after registering two-and-a-half tonnes. When all that was possible then surely it was also possible that Mama had left without her suitcase and would be coming back soon. But Papa didn’t listen.

  I was disappointed in Papa. It was as if he had forgotten everything he had taught me about finding the truth in the darkness of your mind. I could almost hear Descartes exclaim, ‘As if a shoe is prrroooff of anything!’

  I stood in the doorway as Papa

  I stood in the doorway as Papa left for his fishing spot. It was the morning after I found the dead boy. The island was hazily lit by the grey morning light. Frost stung my face as I watched him walk down the path with a spring in his step.

  By the time Papa reached the gates I regretted not going with him. The blue room was cold and I didn’t feel like drawing the dead boy. But Papa had always told me that logic never changes, never bends, and that it can be held like a shield against anything daunting: snowstorms, bad weather and years without apples on the apple tree.

  I went back to the kitchen table, opened my notebook, and turned to my argument for Mama being alive. I had written the argument on the day of the shoe funeral, the day before Uncle came to visit. I was proud of it. It was logically sound and written in my neatest handwriting. Papa always said that order is a philosopher’s best friend. Without order, he said, you cannot convince anyone of anything. And I wanted to prove to Uncle that Mama was still alive. Being an academic and therefore a rational thinking man, I needed him to help me persuade everyone that Mama was coming back.

  I poured myself another coffee and read the argument out loud, as I had done many times before.

  Argument for Mama being alive:

  1) Things that disappear on an island are always found. For example:

  Mama’s shopping list—found

  Tin of dog food—found

  Tobacco—found

  A blue enamel jug for milk—found, minus the milk

  My yellow soft socks—found (very dirty)

  Papa’s matches—found

  No Name—found, hurt

  I often reminded No Name of the day he disappeared. He looked at me as if he remembered clearly how the delivery ship had come and gone and how it had taken a long time to load one of Boxman’s boxes. Papa had thought that No Name might have jumped into the dinghy and left the island the same way he had come. Boxman looked at the ship, a tiny dot on the horizon, and did a half wave.

  But Mama got that unseeing look in her eyes and said, ‘He hasn’t gone. He is here, I can feel it.’

  Later we found him on the beach, shivering behind a large rock, a shard of sea glass stuck in his paw.

  2) Things lost to the ocean always return.

  Things lost to the ocean returned without fail, getting caught in the arms of rocks and whitened pine branches. Although odd things sometimes washed up on the beach, such as the violin and the bike with the bent rusty wheels, it didn’t change the fact that when things left the island they always came back.

  Papa had told me it was to do with the reef. Once he forgot to take off his reading glasses before he went fishing and dropped them into the sea. Before he knew it they were washed out. I found them on the other side of the island two days later with one lens broken. Another time Mama put a letter in a bottle, sealed it with a cork and, standing on Theodora’s Plateau, wind pulling at her dress, she threw it out as far as she could. After five weeks it returned near the fishing spot. The letter said: ‘Help me, I am trapped on an island in the middle of the sea.’

  ‘Poor woman,’ laughed Mama, and put the note back in the bottle.

  It was clear to me that Mama was neither on the island, nor in the sea, and, although Descartes might not have liked it, I included Turtle and Cosmina in my list of evidence. If Mama had decided to walk into the ocean the way Boxman said, she would never have taken Turtle with her. And if the vanishing act had made Cosmina want to travel, then it might have done the same to Mama. Finally I added her purple shoes as extra evidence. Normally she didn’t wear her actress shoes to the beach, but in that area Mama was a bit unpredictable.

  The more I thought about it the more I knew it to be true. Mama was still alive. And I wished that everyone would stop looking so sad when I mentioned her. But one night, sitting in the tower, watching a storm, I thought I heard singing. First I thought it was the silverfin tuna or maybe the cries of whales. The voice was mournful. As if it had been locked in a bottle for hundreds of years and suddenly escaped; a genie calling out, mourning all that she didn’t get to do, all the beautiful things she didn’t get to see.

  But the song had words, lines that were repeated again and again: ‘There is a song, there is a sea, goodbye to the man who waits for me.’

  I sat still. At every lightning bolt I looked out, searching the island for any sign of where the voice might be coming from. And there, in a bright flash, I saw Mama’s black umbrella, pulled and pushed by rain and wind along the beach and into the water.

  Suddenly it was the loneliest night, and it was Mama’s voice, and it was the saddest song I had ever heard. It sounded as if she was singing from the depths of the frozen sea. My breath was not my own and everything felt wrong. The island felt as if it was going to tip at any time and rush us all into the sea.

  Scared that Papa might hear it too, I got up from my blankets and ran downstairs. But Papa looked up from his book and smiled when I found him in the study, and everything was quiet. I didn’t tell him about the voice. Instead I sat down and drew the umbrella for Mama. I drew it upside down, illuminated by a flash of lightning, as Papa read to me from Descartes’ Meditations.

  ‘You have to start,’ he read, ‘with the simplest truth, the fundamental truth of which there can be no doubt, followed by the truths deduced from them, going from simple to more complex.’ With Descartes’ words the island became solid again and I realised how easily logic gets lost in the night.

  I reread my truths again and again and couldn’t find anything wrong with them and I didn’t think that Descartes would have either.

  My next step was to work out where Mama might have gone. But it was difficult. Mama liked things to do with the imagination, while Papa and I were philosophers. Papa often said that it was difficult for a philosopher to know what Mama liked and what she wanted. When we saw her walk along the beach, singing loudly, her hair pulled by wind and sea salt, Papa would look at me and say, ‘When there is something you don’t understand, Minou, then you have to research the problem, approach it with logic.’ Papa had been gone for a while. It was time to see the dead boy. I put my plate in the sink, got my notebook and an extra scarf and went to the blue room.

  The raven sat in the open window, unblinking in the bleak morning light. I could just make out Mama on the wall, smiling and waving.

  Papa had placed an armchair right next to the bed. Beside it stood the wobbly lamp we normally used in the kitchen. There was a blanket on the chair and Papa’s empty cup sat nearby. More snow had collected on the floor overnight and the dead boy looked very cold. I pulled the
chair back, sat down and tried to do what Mama had taught me. ‘Rule number one,’ she used to say, ‘lift your pencil only after observing.’

  His jacket bulked around his chest; it was frozen and salt-stained. Studying him I wondered if anyone had heard his last words and if they had been important. There was sand in his hair and on the bed, but I was sure that Mama wouldn’t mind. She only used the bed when she was daydreaming. Then she would lie with closed eyes, her shoes pointing to the ceiling like little boats.

  ‘It’s important to daydream, Minou,’ she would say, her hair spilling over the pillow. ‘It’s important to let your mind travel, and not hold it tight like a dog on a leash.’

  ‘A dog of war, Mama?’

  ‘Any kind of dog, Minou.’

  I chose a coloured pencil and tried to think in curious ways. I drew the salt pattern on his jacket and wrote, ‘The salt looks like flowers.’

  ‘What kind of flowers?’ Mama would ask, sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Papa to make her a coffee with lots of cream and sugar. ‘What did they look like, Minou?’

  ‘Sea lilies.’

  ‘Really?’ she would say. ‘What else?’

  ‘Oranges,’ I would add.

  ‘Oranges?’

  And Papa would look up from the kitchen bench and say, in a very interesting manner, ‘He smelled of oranges.’

  ‘How peculiar,’ Mama would reply. ‘A dead boy smelling of oranges.’

  Papa would forget about philosophy and say, ‘I talked to him all night, didn’t sleep a wink.’

  And Mama would arrange her long hair in a loose bun, and look thoughtful and happy.

  I drew the dead boy’s bare foot. I took my time, and paid extra attention to his black toenails. Then I drew the shoe on the floor, the flimsy pale-blue scarf around his neck and noticed that one of the buttons on his jacket was gold, while the rest were brown. I tried to draw the gold button too, but it was hard to copy the way it sparkled in the light of the lamp.

  I could see the dead boy’s ear through matted hair. It was dark grey, almost like the smoke from our chimney.

  It felt like he was listening.

  I waited for a moment, then whispered, ‘I have a secret, dead boy.’

  And it wasn’t just that his ear was grey, it was something else. I was certain that he wanted to hear my secret.

  ‘What was it like sitting next to the dead boy?’ Mama would ask.

  ‘As if he could hear me.’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘The pencils, my drawing. As if he was listening,’ I said.

  ‘Listening?’

  ‘Like Priest in the confession box.’

  Mama didn’t like religion. ‘All those rules and regulations,’ she would say when I got ready for church on Sundays. ‘They got it all wrong,’ she would shout as I ran out the door to pick up No Name before the bell rang across the island. But, even though Mama didn’t like religion, she still enjoyed visiting Priest. She admired the church paintings and sometimes she even liked a story from the Bible. She had planned to paint all the animals from Noah’s ark, starting from the back of the house running along every wall until she reached the front door.

  ‘It’s going to look as if they have just arrived at Mount Ararat, and are filing out, two by two, to look at the sun,’ she said.

  Papa didn’t mind that I was going to church. The Bible, he said, is an historical document and useful to know.

  ‘Just remember, Minou,’ he said, ‘most people do not separate God from expectation.’ He peered at me over his reading glasses. ‘It’s important that you understand this. Expectation has no place in thought. People want something for their faith; they want something for their prayers. They are bargaining with God. But philosophy is a pursuit of truth, and that is,’ he emphasised, ‘truth without expectation.’

  After Mama disappeared I started bringing my notebook to church. Every Sunday Priest would speak from the pulpit with conviction and address, not just No Name and me, but the whole church with all its empty pews. He would fold origami while he talked about the creation of the world, sending swans, cats, flowers, cranes and buffaloes, his specialty, down the nave. Some of them, often the ones with wings, would glide gracefully to the floor.

  No Name loved origami and howled every time a piece left the pulpit. I liked origami too, and I liked Genesis, except for one bit. Every time Priest got to the part about darkness covering the surface of the deep I got scared. And ever since Mama disappeared I thought it was the scariest thing of all; the deep with only a layer of darkness to prevent anyone from falling in. It reminded me of ocean graves hiding ships of moaning wood, hiding things long forgotten, and, against all logic, I kept seeing Mama’s red hair fanning out, pulling down, deeper and deeper.

  The dark-panelled confession box sat at the back of the church beside the stairs that led to the tower. It had plum-coloured curtains that dragged, tired and dusty, on the floor. Once, when Priest asked me if I wanted to do confession, I stepped inside and sat down with No Name on my lap. I could hear Priest behind the flower-carved partition.

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell me whatever sins you have committed; entrust me with them,’ he answered. ‘It’s quite straightforward.’

  I moved uncertainly on the velvet-covered bench. ‘I don’t really know what a sin is,’ I said, feeling that this was a serious flaw after all the philosophy I had been reading.

  ‘Things you might have done wrong, secrets you haven’t told another soul,’ said Priest.

  And right then I almost told Priest what had happened the night of the circus. But I stopped myself and told him instead that I very much wanted a horse. It wasn’t really a secret and I didn’t think it was a sin either, but Priest listened as I told him all I knew about horses while stroking the coarse hair on No Name’s back.

  I told Priest that getting a horse to the island wouldn’t be easy. A horse would have to withstand the sea journey. It would have to be lowered with leather straps from the ship into the water and then swim behind the dinghy until it reached the shore.

  The boatmen wouldn’t be happy and the whole thing was enough to scare any horse out of its wits, said Papa. In fact, it might not have any wits left by the time it reached the island.

  ‘Horses are sensitive creatures,’ nodded Priest.

  I thought both Priest and Papa underestimated horses, and it was a small strong horse I wanted anyway, with a mind of its own.

  I imagined bringing Mama to the tower on her first day home, saying, ‘Look Mama, try and find something new.’ She would gaze, first in one direction, then in another, and suddenly spot the horse behind the forest, running wherever it pleased.

  ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’ Priest asked in a kind voice.

  Again I almost told him about standing in Boxman’s yard after the circus, about how it had rained softly, and about the strange sound I had heard. But this time I pulled the curtain open and swung my legs around so I sat sideways. No Name jumped to the floor and Priest appeared next to me. We sat there side by side as if in a little boat, blinded for a moment by the many coloured lights that fell from Theodora’s window. Priest had been preaching in his chef’s outfit and the smell of pretzels spread through the church like a salty wave. Just that morning he had received twenty bags of flour from the boatmen and ten new baking trays that shone like silver. It had taken three trips with the wheelbarrow to deliver it all to his kitchen.

  ‘Who pays you to be a priest?’ I asked.

  ‘My parents had lots of money,’ he said. ‘They died and left it all to me.’ He pulled out a piece of origami paper from his apron and started folding it. ‘They weren’t nice people; they didn’t believe in God.’

  I thought of Papa who didn’t believe in God either, but was kind and had invited Mama for tea when she was just a stranger with tangled hair.

  ‘Maybe they believed in something else,’ I suggested, thinking they might have s
earched for truth without expectation just like Papa.

  ‘Pigs,’ he said, ‘they believed in pigs. They had a barn with hundreds and hundreds of them.’

  ‘Pigs are lovely,’ I said politely. ‘They have soft ears.’

  Priest didn’t look like he cared for soft ears. ‘They slept in the barn. Under a big tartan blanket.’

  ‘The pigs?’

  ‘No, my parents.’ Priest looked unhappy.

  ‘But where did you sleep?’

  ‘In the house, Minou. But talking about this brings up bad memories. It was so quiet at night, not a sound, and it was always dark. Pigs don’t like light, you see. Not even when it comes from across the yard.’ He looked at me. ‘Promise me, Minou, that you will never get a pig.’

  ‘I don’t think I will,’ I said. ‘I really want a horse.’

  ‘Horses are nice,’ said Priest.

  I still hadn’t convinced Papa that I needed a horse. Every time I asked he said, ‘You have two feet and can run very fast. Probably faster, Minou, than a horse.’

  I picked up the dead boy’s shoe from the floor of the blue room. I didn’t tell him my secret. Instead I wondered what had happened to him. The shoe was cold and greasy with salt. I looked down at my own boots. They were getting too small, squeezing against my toes when I ran. Mama had ordered them from the boatmen, but first she made me stand on a piece of paper in the kitchen so she could trace the shape of my feet. Before handing the sheet to the boatmen she decorated her drawing of my feet with palm trees, roses and a pelican busy swallowing a large and frightened fish.

  We called for Papa to come and see her drawing. After studying it intently he told Mama that he liked it very much, especially the fish.