The Vanishing Act Page 7

  One night during Uncle’s visit I overheard Papa and him talking in the kitchen. They talked about Mama. I was drawing in the study and their voices travelled through the house. I could hear glasses being put on the table, and a match being lit, and I could smell Uncle’s pipe tobacco.

  Papa cleared his throat. ‘One morning she liked toast, the next she wanted eggs. And, if there were no eggs, she got sad. It was the same with everything.’ Papa cleared his throat. ‘Maybe I should get a chicken. Should I get a chicken?’

  ‘Chickens are useful,’ said Uncle.

  ‘I never understood what she wanted and why she had to change all the time.’

  ‘Some things are hard to explain,’ said Uncle. ‘I see that every day in my work.’

  ‘She would say, “We could build a boat, you and I, and sail to the moon and back.” And then she would look at me, waiting for me to do something. But what she said wasn’t real. We couldn’t build a boat just like that.’

  Listening in the study I knew straight away what Mama had wanted from Papa. She wanted him to say what Boxman did with ease. ‘Let’s go then,’ he would declare, offering her his arm. ‘What will we do on the moon, lovely lady?’

  ‘We will sing,’ she would say and smile.

  ‘Well then, let me escort you to the boat. It’s here, are you ready?’

  It was late when I left Boxman. It was still snowing as I walked along the forest path. We had finished the lid, and I had paint on my fingers and a bit of honey in my hair. Boxman tried to get the honey out, but by rubbing it he made it worse. He ended up declaring that getting messy is the necessary plight of an artist.

  I could see our house through the trees in the growing darkness. Smoke rose like a fishbone ladder from our chimney and the windows shone with warmth. Then I noticed the ravens. Undeterred by the falling snow they had settled on our rooftop. Thirty-three of them, sitting in a row. It was strange. The ravens mostly spent their time in the church tower and didn’t usually come near our house.

  As I reached the front door I realised that I still hadn’t told Boxman about the dead boy. I seemed to keep forgetting. I wasn’t quite sure why.

  Papa was frying fish at the stove, and the scent of oranges mixed pleasantly with that of fish and onion. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said, before I had time to close the door behind me, ‘when someone listens to you, Minou. There are so few people who care about philosophy.’

  ‘Have you found the beginning yet, Papa?’ I pulled off one of my scarves and put it on the table.

  ‘Not quite yet, my girl. It feels as if the boy wants to hear everything I know about Descartes first. There is so much to tell him, Minou. But I have plenty of time. He will be here for another whole day.’

  Everything was different the following morning. The

  Everything was different the following morning. The house was cold. Papa hadn’t lit the fire, and he seemed to have forgotten about breakfast. He had stayed up with the dead boy for the second night in a row, but he no longer looked young and invigorated. He gazed absentmindedly into the coffee pot, and didn’t even notice when I put Mama’s cup on the table. The coffee boiled over, and he took a long time cleaning it up. After he left for the fishing spot he had to come back twice, first for his bucket, then for his scarf.

  I felt sorry for Papa. It didn’t seem fair that philosophers had to go through so much trouble searching for the absolute truth. Poor Descartes was summoned by a Swedish queen, who wanted to talk about truth at five in the morning in her very cold castle. And Descartes, who wasn’t used to cold castles or getting up early, caught a chill and died.

  I got three biscuits out of the jar after Papa had gone, and poured myself a bit of leftover coffee from the pot. I thought that I might have coped better than Descartes with a cold castle and imagined myself, an enormous quill tucked behind my ear, talking to a fair blonde queen who was hanging on my every word.

  The blue room had changed overnight. Grainy frost had settled on every surface: on Mama’s mural, the cookie tin filled with her flowers and on the dead boy. The lamplight made little snowflake stars on everything it touched. Another raven had joined the first on the sill, and I thought of the many ravens on the roof the night before, and whether they were still there. The snow kept building up inside the window. Papa had moved the chair back next to the dead boy, but I didn’t mind. I sat down and pulled the blanket over me.

  I noticed a bit of sand on the dead boy’s cheek and leaned close to brush it off, but it stuck to his skin. I leaned a little closer and tried to lift one of his eyelids. ‘Don’t worry, dead boy,’ I said. ‘It’s for Mama. I need to know what colour your eyes are.’ But his lids were frozen and it was impossible to move them even the slightest.

  I sat back in the chair, opened my notebook, and repeated the title just in case the dead boy had forgotten: ‘The curious and interesting story about a boy’. Then I read out loud what I had written the night before in the light of my torch.

  The boy’s father was a weaver of Persian carpets. One day, a long time ago, one of his carpets flew high up into the air. Everyone was surprised. His father laughed and laughed.

  You might think that this house was a fun place to live, but it wasn’t. The boy’s father only liked weaving at night, and he wanted it to be night all the time. He pulled down the blinds, drew the curtains and lay a doorstopper along the front door. He was not a nice man.

  The boy didn’t like that it was dark all the time. It was very difficult to read and his torch kept running out of batteries. But the boy’s mother didn’t mind the dark. She had large hands and loved eating cakes. Every day she would call out, ‘I am hungry, hungry, hungry—be quick, be quick,’ and every day the boy ran to the baker’s shop to buy seven cream cakes.

  The streets were loud and bright compared to the house, and the boy tried to see as much as possible on his way there and back. He saw shiny black ravens pecking for crumbs in the snow outside the baker’s shop and every day he stopped to pat the butcher’s dog that wore a knitted scarf on cold days.

  I stopped reading and looked at the dead boy. It looked like he was smiling just a little under the layer of frost. I was proud of the story, it had taken a long time to write. And I especially liked the butcher’s dog.

  My Mama liked cakes too, and I enjoyed sitting on the wooden bench watching her while she was baking. Sometimes she baked in the morning when it was just getting light, in bare feet and a silk slip. She would pin up her hair with practised movements and open the windows if it wasn’t too cold outside.

  ‘We need to breathe, Minou,’ she would say.

  And I sat on the bench with folded hands and dangling legs, next to cartons of eggs and her black recipe book.

  She made up songs about the island as she lined up the flour, baking powder, orange peel and butter.

  ‘This is a song,’ she would sing and smile at me, ‘about an island, faaar away, and a girl who caaame to stay.’

  ‘Is the song about you, Mama?’ I asked in the brief pause that followed before Mama continued.

  ‘And she had a tiiiny girl, in a tiiiny world.’

  Papa would appear, reading glasses on, almost like a cloud of thought in the middle of all the light and air and singing.

  ‘You are baking,’ he would inform Mama, looking worried.

  ‘Indeed I am,’ she would laugh, flour on her cheek.

  Mama’s long red hair always escaped the pins. It would sway over cracked eggshells and orange juice, and sooner or later dip into the dough.

  Papa said that Mama’s hair was like reading Kant: there was always something new and illuminating to be found. But Mama liked it more when Boxman said her hair was like Aladdin’s cave. Once he pulled a fishbone from her hair, followed by a green feather. ‘You make magic,’ he exclaimed, ‘without even trying.’

  ‘I could knit you a hairnet,’ I said one day when Mama was baking, but she only smiled and kept stirring.

  ‘It’s good to do somethi
ng that makes you feel alive,’ she said as she poured batter into a cake tin and handed me the bowl to lick. ‘Never forget that, Minou. This cake will come out right, I can feel it.’

  Smells stayed on the island. Sometimes I could smell Mama’s orange cake under the apple tree, and then again in the corner of Boxman’s barn. Priest baked on Sundays, and the scent of his pretzels lingered on the island throughout the week. Once I caught a whiff of them near Theodora’s Plateau.

  Papa would say with a rare chuckle, ‘There is more baking done on this island than philosophical equations.’

  But Mama didn’t think that it was funny. She didn’t like pretzels. ‘Salty things,’ she said, ‘good for nothing.’ Every time I left for church she would instruct me, ‘Don’t bring home any pretzels, Minou, I cannot bear to see any more in your Papa’s study.’

  But when Priest shook my hand after the sermon, he would reach into his deep pockets and give me three warm pretzels.

  ‘One for each of you,’ he said, sounding so pleased that I couldn’t refuse him.

  I would take them to Papa, tucked under my jumper where they lay warm against my belly, out of Mama’s sight. He would hang them in his study, using the purple ribbons from Mama’s chocolate boxes, and admire their shadows at night as they flicked across the books stacked crookedly on the shelves.

  When the pretzels began to look a bit old Papa opened the window and threw them towards the forest. ‘The rabbits will eat them,’ he said. But the rabbits only liked Boxman’s cabbages and weren’t at all interested in pretzels. I buried the pretzels under the snow every time I found some scattered amongst the trees, worried that Priest would see them.

  No Name would come and sit outside when Mama was baking. He would forget to bark at Peacock and just sit there sniffing the lovely smell, waiting with great patience as the kitchen became scattered with orange peel, butter, greased paper and drips of batter.

  But the baking always went wrong, even though Mama did everything right from start to finish. She used twelve oranges as the recipe said, and she whisked the egg whites with sugar until her arm was sore. But the cakes collapsed or didn’t taste right, and Mama would cry and say, ‘I just want it to be the way it used to be.’

  I would sit very still, hoping she would say more about how things used to be, before the island and before she met Papa. But she never did. Instead she would throw large bits of cake to No Name and keep crying.

  ‘See,’ she would weep, ‘it’s only fit for a dog.’

  ‘But No Name has really good taste,’ I once protested. And I wanted to tell her that No Name never touched a dead raven and that Boxman said he had a sophisticated palate. But Mama left the kitchen and sobbed behind the bedroom door.

  Papa lifted me down from the bench, broke off a piece of cake and tasted it with the look of someone who knew about cakes. Then he gave me a piece and together we would stand in silence, tasting the cake while No Name munched noisily outside.

  ‘It’s not bad,’ Papa said, ‘not bad at all,’ and, perhaps because she could hear him, Mama’s crying grew louder.

  No Name wobbled back through the forest, drunk on cake, and for several days he wouldn’t want to play. He just lay, staring into space as if he could see things we couldn’t. I thought that maybe he could see where Mama grew up, and all the magnificent cakes that her family used to bake. Maybe he could see what had happened to Mama in the war, before she came to the island, before Papa, with his patient hands, untangled her hair.

  There was frost in the dead boy’s hair, on his forehead and around his mouth. He looked impatient, and I could almost hear him say, ‘More, Minou. Keep reading. It’s been a long time since I have heard a good story.’

  ‘Okay, dead boy,’ I said. And went on:

  Magicians, men of the world, and, of course, Pirate and his Monkey, travelled far to see the carpets. They all hoped to find one that could fly. Cold winds would sweep through the house whenever the boy opened the door. For a moment everything would go bright, but then darkness

  fell on the corridor once more and the visitors would stumble their way through the house.

  The boy made coffee for the visitors. He was the only one who got to see the peacocks, delicately painted in blues and greens on the sides of the coffee cups. Their feathers lit up when he placed them next to the stove.

  The boy listened to the conversations of the visitors. He didn’t think they noticed him in the darkness. They were mostly busy talking about carpets, but sometimes they would tell stories about the sea. Pirate loved travelling, and had been everywhere. Travelling was his favourite thing. No one, he said, is destined to stay on one island forever. And the boy longed to go with him.

  ‘That’s all I have, dead boy. But I will write more later,’ I promised.

  I wondered if my story might be true. Perhaps the dead boy really had longed to travel, and that’s how he ended up on a ship. Was it possible that he, like Uncle, had visited every corner of the world? I thought of Uncle and how he had said that out of the many places he had been, some large, some small, our island was by far the most wonderful.

  Uncle arrived the morning after the shoe funeral. Papa and I had just gotten up when the boat horn sounded the first time. Dirty plates and glasses still littered the kitchen table from the night before. Papa rolled up his sleeves and began to wash the dishes while I swept. I found five of Priest’s paper napkin buffaloes next to the stove where No Name had slept. They were all chewed up, wet and out of shape, and looked more like little balls than buffaloes.

  I had watched the funeral from the lighthouse, seeing them all stand in front of the church, dark clothed and stiff from the icy cold. Papa tried to talk me into coming, but I told him that there was no point: Mama wasn’t dead.

  I could see Boxman weep, while Papa hammered the wooden cross into the hard ground. The cross itself was quite crooked; Boxman had offered to help, but Papa had insisted on doing it himself. He worked on the kitchen table for a whole day and made lots of noise. The first two attempts didn’t turn out so well, and we ended up using them to separate the fishing nets when they hung to dry against the wall.

  Uncle had never met Mama, and Papa said it was therefore important that the house looked exactly the way she would have wanted it.

  ‘We need to give your Uncle a good impression,’ he said, handing me a bucket with clean soapy water, ‘of who your mama was.’

  Personally I didn’t think Uncle would mind a bit of dust. He had been to every continent, travelled up mountains, down valleys and walked along muddy tracks. He had ridden horses, donkeys and even a cow once, and had definitely seen more than most people. He often sent us long letters about ghost hunting and paranormal phenomena, which is, Papa explained, when you see something that doesn’t make sense.

  Papa read the letters out loud over dinner. Sometimes he would pause in the middle of an important sentence and say proudly, ‘More people should hear about this.’ Then he would look at me. ‘It is significant research, Minou.’

  Mama would make tea while Papa read. One day, while handing Papa a steaming cup, she said, ‘I thought you were a man of reason. How can you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘It’s a university study,’ said Papa. ‘They do research.’

  Mama shook her head.

  ‘And he teaches,’ insisted Papa.

  Every letter we received from Uncle started the same way, ‘Oh, mon dieu, mon dieu, it’s been too long!’

  ‘What language is that?’ I asked Mama.

  ‘French.’

  ‘Is he French like Descartes?’

  ‘He likes to think he is.’

  When Uncle discovered we were related to Descartes he wanted to change his surname. Papa thought it was a wonderful idea, and for days he exclaimed, ‘Minou Descartes, Minou Descartes. You can’t go wrong with a name like that, my girl.’

  But the name change never happened. Uncle couldn’t convince anyone that our family tree was genuine. ‘The common man,’
he wrote to Papa, ‘is quick to scoff at perfectly researched fact just because it might be a bit unusual.’

  I had almost finished cleaning the floor when the boat horn sounded again, much closer this time.

  I handed Papa the bucket, and asked him if Uncle also believed in staying up at night, even though he wasn’t a philosopher. But Papa wasn’t sure whether Uncle liked late nights. ‘You have to remember,’ he said, pouring the brown water into the sink, ‘that I haven’t seen your uncle since the end of the war. However, his letters tell me that he is a man of reason, so it’s entirely possible that he likes late nights. He has worked very hard in his field of expertise ever since. I am looking forward to seeing him again and hearing all about it.’

  Papa had worked hard too. But, of course, he was searching for Descartes’ absolute truth, the start of everything, the key, the explanation of it all.

  I didn’t hear Papa come back from fishing until he opened the door to the blue room.

  ‘Papa,’ I said, surprised, closing my notebook.

  ‘How is he, Minou?’ Papa looked grey and tired under his fur hat.

  ‘You have to close the door, Papa. We need to keep him cold.’

  ‘You are right, Minou. You are right.’ Papa closed the door behind him. Then he walked slowly to check the temperature on the wall. He looked tired, as if all his energy had escaped him.

  He had reached the beach and only caught a couple of fish before realising that he didn’t want to be fishing at all.

  ‘The delivery boat is coming tomorrow morning, my girl. I need to work on the truth while the dead boy is still here. We have got enough fish to get by.’ Papa stood back from the thermometer. ‘Everything seems fine.’ He stifled a yawn. ‘I will fix the nets, and make some coffee. Then I will come and sit with him.’ And with that Papa left the room.

  That was when I found it.

  I went to my room to fetch a pair of red woollen socks that Uncle had left behind. The socks were too big for me and too colourful for Papa. The dead boy’s bare foot looked very cold under the frost, and I thought that he might like to wear a sock.