All the Voices Cry (10 page)

Uncle Stewart would not have liked Norman's making use of him in this way. If he'd been alive, he might have reminded
Norman of a certain wartime evening at the kitchen table, playing Smash the Nazi Navy. Norman was watching Uncle Stewart pencil in the position of his fleet. By lining up the checks on his uncle's shirt cuff with the lines on the grid of the Smash the Nazi Navy notepad, Norman could guess where Uncle Stewart had placed his battle ships.

“You're a clever wee chap, Norm,” said Uncle Stewart, after Norman sank three submarines in Uncle Stewart's North Sea. Then he clipped Norman over the ear. “But no one likes a cheat.”

In the case of Mrs Viebert's prognostication, Norman did not think he was cheating. He considered himself to be reducing the odds, just in case Mrs Viebert was right. After they took her away it turned out that she had almost predicted the Tangiwai rail disaster of 1953.

It was getting late. The remains of Norman's in-flight peppered steak and his neighbour's leafy vegetarian option had been removed, the steward had passed by with tea and coffee, the stewardess had prepared the cabin for night-time. Norman rotated his ankles. He made his way to the bathroom where he felt a touch of regret that his life might soon be over and he had not smoked and he had not followed carnal impulses in aeroplane bathrooms. All he had done was dispose of his bodily refuse with a blue frozen sucking snort, and then wash up, wiping the hand basin for the convenience of the next traveller. He had made sure his will was in order; he had left a letter for Aspen in the fruit bowl. He thought she should know, in case his act of evasion should fail. She had always accused him of
being secretive. Well, if he never returned, she could at least feel satisfied that she had been right.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Norman had failed to calculate that at 11:30 PM on Sunday August 26th, 2001, the plane would come down to refuel in Tahiti. With the rest of the passengers he was forced to file off into the amniotic warmth of the night, shuddering at the thought of what might lie ahead. Beside a lighted doorway, three coral-clad ukulele players set up a swaying tinkling thread of sound that followed him into the linoleum limbo of the airport lounge.

Norman surveyed the available seats and chose one equidistant from a podgy woman in ripped shorts cowering behind a bank of tropical plants, and a woman knitting. The knitter was wearing sunglasses perched on top of her head. Norman took a second look at her, wondering what she wanted with sunglasses at midnight. He felt a strong urge to lean forward and murmur to her that wearing them on her head like that would stretch the hinges.

Around him the air was full of the rustle of people waiting, anticipating arrival, or regretful of all that had been left behind. Tapping at their cell phones, they called out of the darkness into other time zones, chewing and twitching, crossing and re-crossing their legs. If Norman sat quite still, kept his eyes on the floor and made no contact with anyone, perhaps, just perhaps, he would be safe.

The alarm on Norman's watch began beeping. Monday, August 27th, 2001 had arrived. Heart beating against his plaid shirt, he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief
and looked up at the scene around him. A couple beside the bank machine were necking like gannets, their camera straps clattering against each other, the flowers on their leis crumpling under the pressure. The hot perfume of crushed flowers reminded him of the yellow roses that once threatened to bring down the fence in his mother's garden. His mind was filled with a vision of himself as nine-year-old Norman fighting off the storm troopers hidden in the flax bush. He was wearing new shorts, Stand Fast Gentleman Drill, with silver buckles at the waist.

“Bombs away!” he had shouted, leaping off the front step, dropping and rolling past Baby Viebert towards the ngaio tree beside the gate. A wood pigeon, startled into evacuation by the attack, moved off, carving musical swoops in the air. While Norman stalked around the flax bush, Baby Viebert frowned over some rose petals that she was arranging in regiments on the path. Could that have been the day on which he had received the playing card from Mrs Viebert?

As an optometrist, Norman had spent decades studying weak vision, asking clients about relative lens strengths, measuring, correcting, and getting it right. Likewise he had often peered at his own past, trying to recall just when he had received Mrs Viebert's prognostication, for that could make all the difference to the outcome. Try as he might, Norman could not remember whether it was triumphant twelve-diamond Mrs Viebert who had foreseen his future, or her later and much longer lasting incarnation, Poor Gladys. He felt like his more dithery clients, who could not tell which lens was
stronger, who talked themselves out of what they knew they once saw, and whom he secretly despised.

Cyril Viebert died of dysentery in May 1941, in a camp twelve miles south of Cairo. He had recently turned nineteen. Norman remembered standing in the backyard looking at a pot with a burned-out bottom just after the news came through. His mother was off comforting Poor Gladys and Uncle Stewart had been trying to be useful in the kitchen. Norman was still wearing drill shorts and his knees were cold. In similar weather Cyril Viebert's blond rugby thighs used to redden like sausages. After Norman sniffed the burned-out pot he trotted off to the front of the house. The yellow roses were all gone, but the purplish green feijoas were ripe upon the vine and Norman lobbed several at Rommel's Afrikakorps on behalf of Cyril Viebert.

Mrs Viebert stopped coming to canasta parties. She became Poor Gladys, answering her front door with her hair in disarray and her eyes red and puffed out. While his mother visited Poor Gladys, Norman waited in the garden. He made Baby Viebert eat leaves off the pepper bush hedge, and the heat on her tongue made Baby's eyes water, which was good, because she was Norman's prisoner, and it was right that she should know it. Above them the cabbage tree leaves cut slots in the sky with their cold dense blades.

Not long after space men began to speak to Poor Gladys through the radiogram they came and took her away. Then Uncle Stewart began to say
feeding flies for Tiny Freyberg.
He said it with a pretend Texan accent that he had heard on the
radio.
Feedin' flahs fer Tahny Frahberg.
Sometimes Uncle Stewart could not stop saying things.

In 1951 General Freyberg became Baron Freyberg of Wellington and of Munstead in the County of Surrey. Nobody knew what became of Baby Viebert.

Norman found himself staring at the woman knitting. Orange and yellow, purple and flamingo, she had a hundred colours. One side of her knitting bristled with strands that looped and twisted and hung untrimmed. She dropped one strand, picked up another, twisted it in, and knitted on, frowning over her work. Her silver bird's nest of hair was held up by the sunglasses and a crab-like pincer high up at the back of her head. In her orange shirt, loose green trousers, sandals and a long loop of shells she looked at home in the tropical night.

A flame-coloured ball of wool dropped from her lap, rolling out over the linoleum towards Norman's foot. Without thinking he picked it up and wound it back towards her. The woman took the ball from him with a nod; her dense brown eyes studied him, without smiling. The humidity had made her hair start out in tendrils at her forehead. She finished her row and turned the knitting. Now he could see the hourglass pattern of inverted triangles forming and the diamonds in between.

They were paging Norman. This is what you get if you pay extra to fly first class to the other side of the world. They care that you are aboard, in your seat, reducing the odds. The knitting woman looked up at him again and there was energy in her glance. She made a movement with her mouth as if
she were about to speak. Norman grimaced and looked away. He had made long preparations to escape this day. It was not a time for new acquaintances. He hurried away towards the gate, away from Monday, August 27th, towards Tuesday, August 28th. His shoes squeaked, resisting the linoleum.

About the time that the plane crossed the dateline, a sudden jolt of turbulence shook Norman out of his half-sleep. Norman sat up and looked at the digital plane on the screen in front of him. He had done it. He had managed to evade all but three hours of Monday, August 27th, 2001. He was not
feedin' flies.
All he had seen was a couple kissing in a tropical crush, all he had done was wind up a woman's ball of wool.

The lovers. The knitter. The figures collided in his head. All these years of waiting and he had failed to see what had been clear to Mrs Viebert both in her prime and in her grief. Now Norman struggled to reach Baby Viebert across the gap of sixty years, with her eyes so dark that the pupils were almost invisible, her hair long since turned to a mass of silvery tendrils like the pollen bearing innards of the roses that she used to pull apart. Had she not looked up when his name was paged? Baby Viebert had recognized him. No one forgets the person who first makes you eat the leaves of the pepper bush.

Norman thought of the hourglass of time that had funnelled him towards Baby Viebert, and the empty years fanning out ahead of him, away from her. Ignoring the illuminated seatbelt sign, he began his search in the sky at once, stumbling over the folk slumbering under their fleecy shrouds, pushing past their sleeping knees; he would seek her forever
now. Headlong he rushed in his aeroplane through the freezing dark air, pulled onwards by the bright thread of the Pacific dawn. Surely fate could not be so easily evaded? Norman had only to live long enough to reach the second date. Surely there was one? Surely.

T
HE WIND BLEW the palm fronds upwards and turned them into giant combs raking the mist. Penelope's hair stuck to her forehead. She clutched at her shoulder bag while the water braided and swirled around her thighs. A walk along a Tahitian beach in search of a sea cave was one thing, but wading through the streams that poured off the land into the ocean was enough to challenge even the strongest determination to be a good sport. Close by, chestnut-coloured hermit crabs crept in and out of the piles of coconut shells banked up against the trees.

“Em. Dickinson appreciated Melville's novels,” said Charles. “Lots of coconuts and breadfruit in
Typee.
Em. made a mean gingerbread. Maybe she liked coconuts too.”

“Did they cook much with coconut in the nineteenth century?”

“No idea.” Charles was off again. He hated a question that he could not answer. Back behind the palms, a pointed peak rose up with shrubs growing out of it at right angles. White birds fluttered in front of the greenery like handkerchiefs dropped from a great height. Penelope wanted to pull herself up the peak, clinging onto the stubby trees until,
triumphant and alone, she could stand looking out at the wide grey Pacific.

“And when they were up they were up, and when they were down they were down, and when they were only halfway up they were neither up nor down,” she chanted.

“What?”

“Doesn't matter,” said Penelope. Nothing she thought mattered. Thirty-five years ago they had been newly-weds touring Ireland with a rug and a volume of Yeats in the back seat of the car. Now, he was an irritating know-it-all, and she, she was a pudding.

Of course what Penelope thought did matter. Her former supervisor in food science, Howard McMurray, a mild man in a homespun sweater, had believed that Penelope's research was of key importance to fried chicken manufacturers everywhere. He had complimented her on her careful approach. Penelope had met Charles at Howard McMurray's annual Snowflake Do. Penelope had been charmed by the young professor with his careful way of dressing and his whimsical habit of embroidering the view with a sparkling quotation. Can you fall in love with a purple smoking jacket and a signet ring? Penelope had.

After his fourth gin and tonic Charles had pulled down some snowflake tinsel and draped it around Penelope's neck, stroking her hair. After his fifth gin and tonic he leaned heavily against the door frame and revealed that as a little boy he liked to balance on one foot. He had been practising this very skill when his sisters came to tell him that their mother had hanged herself in the pear tree at the bottom of the garden.
For many years he believed that if he could succeed in standing on one foot for a day and night, his mother might come back. As it happened, she had not died, but she had lingered, and that was worse. Charles did not like shadows in trees; he did not like to be alone. If Penelope did not already love him, she told herself that with time, she would. Upon finishing his sixth gin and tonic, Charles became rather ill, and Penelope took him home to her bed.

After their wedding, Penelope had concentrated on being a faculty wife because she imagined it was what she ought to do. In retrospect, her life had been governed by the sign of
ought:
I
ought
to be a better, thinner cook; I
ought
to have had more children; I
ought
to have found a job teaching adolescent girls how to roast chickens. Every Christmas she made plates of sugar cookies for Charles to take to the department party, she dropped off his late library books and searched for lost coffee mugs in his study. She had raised their son, a bookish child called Colin who had recently been granted tenure in the English department at Rook University. Colin claimed to be misunderstood, but in fact she knew him very well. He was a good boy, but in danger of becoming like his father. And what else did she do? When it came down to it she couldn't think what she had been doing.

In the meantime, Charles turned the way they met into a dinner-party joke.
It was her supervisor in food science who introduced us. You're studying the Browning Reaction? I said. Yes, she said, you know, to heat. Oh, I said, Brownings in Italy. No, she said, browning in turkeys.
She could see Charles now, snorting
at his joke, tugging at his turtleneck. She should have stopped right there, at the Snowflake Do. But she had gone on with it, and the path had led here, to Tahiti, and this groping along the beach, looking for a sea cave where a long-dead writer might have had a rendezvous with a woman not his wife.