Jigsaw Part Three

Alice, of course, fiddled with the lock on the pocket, pulled it this way and that, attacked it with pliers, with a fork, and with a frustrated yelp, her teeth.

  Nothing would budge it.

  She banged on the shed door until her knuckles were sore. She pressed her nose against each of the windows, but her father hid from her each time. Every time he tried to emerge from the shed, Alice assailed him with the bag. He said he wasn’t going to come out until she stopped annoying him about the locked pocket. She said she wasn’t going to stop annoying him about the locked pocket until he unlocked it.

 

  The hours and days ticked by. He managed to get out for a leak and a meal when she was asleep, because, even though she tried to keep her eyes open for as long as she could by drinking fifteen cups of coffee and nearly being sick, she couldn’t stay awake.

 

  On the fifth day, Alice went out. She took her new black bag with her and didn’t tell her father where she was going.

Jigsaw Part Two

So making a bag out of a piece of vinyl was a cinch. But he wouldn’t let Alice watch while he did it, which was unusual, as he normally taught her how to make things as he went. No matter how much she pleaded with him, he would not give in.

  “No, Alice. Just this once, I want to keep my methods a secret.”

So her father went into his shed and didn’t emerge until he had finished.

  Alice loved her new bag anyway. It was shiny and black and had lots of room for all her books, her purse, hairbrush, sanitary pads and period painkillers, a notebook and pens, and lip balm. Then there was still room enough for lunch and a drink bottle.

  One thing puzzled her and that was the pocket inside. There was a tiny lock on it.

  “What is this for, Dad?”

  “Never you mind.”

  She frowned at him.

  “What do you mean? It’s my bag, and I can’t know what this pocket is for? That’s silly.”

  “One day you’ll know. Not yet.”

  “Come on, Dad. Tell me what it’s for. Come on.”

She proceeded to tickle him. But he gave her the slip and ran into the garden, round the vege patch, skipped over Rufus the Papa Great Dane, and shut himself in the shed.

Jigsaw

A long time ago, Alice’s father was a man who made things. He could make anything at all. Give him wool and he knitted a jumper or crocheted a rug. Give him fabric and he sewed you a pair of trousers or a dress. Food he could weave magic spells with, and create luscious fantasies, even with brussel sprouts and broad beans, which Alice spat out when she was young enough to know better. He made tiny cupboards with old bits of wood, huge bookcases with fallen tree trunks, grew vegetables of every type and raised Great Danes.

The wave

The wave reared over me silently, and broke over my head in slow motion. I didn't notice it at first, until I realised I was grief-washed, the sideways feelings suddenly making their presence felt. I am trying to describe this feeling in my body, my skin, the other organs, because I know that it affects you, too, but you ignore it, out of fear or something else that I don't understand. I understand fear. I have sat with it, endured it, watched it eke away. C S Lewis said grief felt like fear, and perhaps it does.

Origin

Where does this story begin? Does every story have a beginning, or do some just emerge out of a continuous running narrative? Or should that be narratives? Are we constantly making stories every minute of every day, or is there only the one grand narrative of the human condition, to which we all contribute? Did this particular story that I am about to tell begin when I was born, or did it begin much earlier, when my birthparents met, or when my birthmother left home to travel, or even when she was born? Or did it begin when my adoptive parents married, and no children came?

Or perhaps the story begins when I was told of my adoption, when the story that had been forming behind me, of a life written by others not myself, suddenly stopped, caught in the transition from secret to revelation?

Did the story begin when I started writing it myself?

This pain

This pain begins like a small movement in my belly. I barely notice. Then the feeling grows, and bits of it get stuck around a bone, pull insistently, make me notice. Grows some more, and then I have a hard time concentrating on what I'm doing, have to stop and take a breath. Then it grows again, and I know that I'm in for a bad couple of hours or so. It makes a run for it, enlarges into a wall, until I have to get up from my chair and take the pain and the body it inhabits for an endless walk. There is no sitting or lying down with this beast, this Thing, this mountain of lava. It will eat me unless I go inside myself and ride with it until it's seen the light of day. I must endure it, as the drug has failed. I have only myself to use against the biting, rasping saw of it.

Gadgets

You are not a gadget, he said to me as his hand hovered over mine.

I feel like one. Sometimes.

The café was noisy, as usual. But his eyes on my face were intent, which was not usual. He didn't look away.

We'd seen a lot of each other lately, but I'd not thought anything of it. All the other men I'd drunk coffee with had drifted away, so why should this one be any different. Except, his hand lowered on to mine and stayed there.

Were we in a romantic movie? I felt any moment that someone would yell cut and we'd sit back and then start again. Over and over until it was right.

But there was no yelling, it wasn't a movie, it was the noisy café, and he was grasping my other hand too.

Silence

There was no response when she banged the tin. For five minutes she hit it with a spoon, as she always did, but no Spooky. She shrugged, thinking she'd wait five minutes and try again. It was a bright blue day, and quiet. She listened for the usual sounds of the noisy miners, aptly named, and the currawongs. The air seemed awfully still. She lived far from any main roads, so no traffic noises, which she loved. But this morning there were no other noises either. 

Chaos! Destruction! Superwoman!

There are wisps of dead wattle tree leaves on the floor. A pile of clean but unironed laundry in a basket. Crumbs on the kitchen bench. The glass-topped table is covered with papers, paper clips, receipts that I go to throw out and then think I'd better keep for a while longer, keys, mobile phones, bananas. Books on shelves are dusty, silverfish wait in the folds. Venetian blinds turn darker with the dust of time. I don't turn my head to look at the garden because I know I will see weeds blooming with unrelenting force, creeping into vegetable beds to throttle the struggling bean and the valiant tomato. I close my eyes to banish it all, only, of course, to see the real chaos booming within.

Still digging

I kept digging. Apart from the photographs, tiny vases came up with the shovel, of all different colours. One had 'Portugal' painted on it, with flowers and squiggles. There was something that looked like a collection of four leaf clovers in a plastic wallet, and I stopped to remember how my father used to spend an hour every Sunday looking for those himself. Never did find any but had a good life anyway. I wonder if the person who belonged to these had been lucky? Ah, here's a bone, a grey yellow little thing, like out of a leg. Now that looks like a booklet coming up this time. What's it got on the cover ... Diary ... 1947 ...

Tuesday

Tuesday was a strange day. For the first time in weeks I felt as if my whole life was a mistake. A wreck. I was a wreck upon a vast and lonely beach that saw no other life. I moved around the house dragging the seaweed behind me, plucking barnacles from my side. The wood from the old boat of my skeleton was still strong, though, despite its weathered, darkened looks, its splintered touch. And then I turned the page in my diary and saw the remembrance. You had died before seeing me again, just like with your own parents. You were old, yes, but no amount of time and years would have improved our understanding of each other. 

Traffic lights

The man on the bike thought we were laughing at him. He rode on ahead, looking back at us every now and then, talking. We walked on, not sure whether he was talking to himself, or to us, or to his bike, or to an imaginary friend. I am not being facetious, some of us have imaginary friends and have good conversations with them. It's just that some of us also restrict those conversations to private places rather than public ones. Turns out he was talking to himself, but about us. We had simply looked at him before crossing the road, because we didn't know if he was going to turn into that road or not. He took it as an insult. He waited for us at the traffic lights. 

When the light came back

When the light came back, every living thing was gone, except for his workmates. The waiting beasts were no longer waiting. But the dead ones had disappeared as well; even the blood and intestines were gone. He turned to look at the man beside him, whose stupefied expression was directed towards his knife. It was clean and shining as if it had never been used. One came in from outside, shouting, but saw the emptiness and his voice drained away. 'My dogs just disappeared', he said. 'On the back of the ute a second ago.'

When

When I went to the fridge to get the milk, the bottle was empty. Okay, I yelled, who's drunk all the milk? No answer, of course, because they're all asleep. Or pretending to be asleep so they don't have to be the first to get the tea ready. Then I noticed there was no butter in the butter dish, and the sausages that were leftovers from yesterday were gone too. Right, who's swiping food from the fridge? I yelled again. I opened the freezer door, and the chicken was gone, along with the chops. The polysterene tray was there, as was the plastic from the chook, but otherwise, gone. Jesus, someone would have to be bloody hungry to eat all that. 

Memory

The butcher bird flew on to the fence, and watched us as we pulled out weeds. The roses didn't seem to care much about the riff-raff that surrounded them, the cobbler's pegs and sticky milk plants and thistley things. A moth appeared, fluttering on the surface of some newly exposed soil, and the butcher bird swooped for the morsel. Our friend Cameron also watched us, commenting regularly on how he must get down into the garden sometime, but not right now. His memory is unravelling, leaving sentences all over the earth in front of us, released again and again because Cameron can no longer remember what he's just said. We all sigh. The butcher bird cocks his head.

The dream

The dream involved someone wrapping their arms around me from behind. I did not know who the person was, or why they were hugging me, or if their intent was good or evil. Usually this sort of dream would involve me never finding out the identity of the person. But then usually the dream, which I refer to as an anxiety dream, features a wall and I would be walking along beside the wall until I reached the corner. Around the corner was something foreboding, something bad, but I never knew exactly what, and I could never see it. No matter how far around the corner I looked, the fearful thing remained just out of sight. This time, I looked around and saw the person who had grabbed my torso, and it was a female, with her eyes closed, but she was no one I knew. What was different was the fact that I could see her face, and she was unthreatening. There was no fear.

The cello

The cello was 274 years old. I had never held anything that had lived that long. The sound that came when its guardian played was robust, but I couldn't help thinking how easily the object could be damaged. If it was damaged, though, the music itself would not be, for it could be played, and made to live again, from another instrument. Maybe it would not be so venerable, but the music would still come. It's not the same for humans. When the body is done and gone, the music of that person is gone also; children and work may be left behind as memories, but no new tunes are created ever again.

For really big mistakes

He gave me a hot pink eraser, a giant one, with the words 'for really big mistakes' printed on it. Good, I thought, this is appropriate. Now I can go back and rub out all of those ridiculous things I said to various people over the last four decades, and say what I should have said. All those embarrassing goofs in public, all the insensitive comments, and even the bad fashion days, bad hair days, and bad days. The whole lot, gone! One big pink eraser applied; badness gone! Could I do it with bigger things? Parents? Lovers? Friends? Lend me your past, I shall erase it!

When he read

When he read a book, the words swam. He'd read and re-read a paragraph, but the meaning would elude him. He'd read each word, examining it and not moving to the next one before he'd thought yes, I understand what that word means. But by the end of the sentence, the combination of word-meanings had slid away, and there was no sentence-meaning in its place. It was a blur, a blank, a smear of text without hope of comprehension. He went on, saying to himself that the meaning would come, he just had to swim through the words to find it.

The photographs

The photographs I dug up that time were old, black and white, small size, eaten at the edges some of them, blurred or faded, and had writing on the back. But not all of them had writing on the back, and that was frustrating. There were no names, but some people were identified as 'mother', 'father', 'uncle', and so forth. Places were always identified, which was helpful, except for the fact that I had no idea where these places were. St Michael's Mount? I made a note to look it up, as well as all the other names.