That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (29 page)

‘
I do like you. Sooner or later you’ll get tired of make-believe and won’t want to come back; but that’s all right. It would be sad if that didn’t happen to you.’

We lay silently for a while. The muezzins had finished their song. Melusine opened her eyes and rolled away from me to look through the rails of the balcony
.

‘
Zack, I’ve been living up high for so long. Would you believe that when I was a young woman I lived in a tower? After Zanzibar I went to university in France. I went down to Marseilles on holiday and met a man who lived in an old lighthouse. He was a lazy fellow and always poor, but I fell in love with him enough to marry him.

‘
I was married for thirty years, until my husband left me. He heard mermaids singing on a spring night and went down to the beach and waded towards their voices until the waves closed over his head. On nights after that I sometimes glimpsed their long cold tails flashing in the water, but I never saw my husband again. I saw so many strange things. I saw ghost ships, and even Leviathan. The top of his back, turning through the water. Those black ridges rolled for half a night.

‘
A woman from the sea took my son, too. A year after my husband died there was a terrible wreck. A big cruise liner. My son and I watched it happen. Somehow we couldn’t make ourselves turn away. Perhaps the world asked us to witness. No survivors were found that night, but in the morning he found her lying there with the kelp. She was from Athens. He went back there to live with her.

‘
So then I was alone. A lot of people tried to persuade me that I should move down into a cottage, or an apartment in the city. They couldn’t see why I’d want to stay in the lighthouse. But I liked it. Over the years I had come to need the sea and the sky around me. I was halfway to being a bird, and the lighthouse was my eyrie.’

As she wasn
’t looking at me I didn’t have to worry what my face was doing. But then I just shrugged to myself. If she was a little mad, what did it matter, really?

‘
You know, when I had a body and lived in my lighthouse, there was nothing between me and the rim of the universe but vanishing waves. I never grew tired of that enormous sea.’

Instead of pointing out that the Mediterranean wasn
’t enormous, I said, ‘You didn’t think of it as your enemy?’

‘
Oh yes!’ she answered, speaking so fiercely that I almost flinched. ‘It was my adversary. I never forgave it. But still I had to accept what it gave me. I couldn’t deny the beauty of it. I had become very stubborn. For the rest of my life I would insist on existing as though I stood naked in a gale, feeling everything. Every day was a sequence of overwhelming impressions. Once I saw albatrosses migrating. There were millions of them. I thought the whole sky was clouded, until I realised it was afoam with white birds… The sky gave me that, and in a way the sea gave me even more. If you ask most people, they’ll say, if they’re honest, that they dislike images of things that live in the deep fathoms of the ocean. They want alien life to be on other planets, not their own. But I love the idea of there being things that will never be revealed to anyone. Don’t you think there’s enormous power in a secret that will never be told?’

‘
I do,’ I said. I felt caught up in her words, to a degree that surprised me.

‘
Listen,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t really expecting you to believe me, and you don’t have to believe me now, but when I lived in the world I spoke with old fishermen who told me of things they threw back into the sea with a curse and an invocation to the Virgin. Things the water brought, that made no sense to them. I believed them. The sea is the great alchemist. I still sometimes wonder what it changed my husband into. Does his eye roll around like a golden wheel in front of a vast barnacled fin? For a long time I felt like a child. Many things bemused me. I felt I could believe anything.’

I decided to make her a present. I was no artist, but that wasn’t going to matter, since I only had to give two objects some basic properties and put one within the other. Since there was no way to make it end up in her quota from the gallery if I uploaded it there, I slipped it into the seaweed while she was looking at something else and waited for her to notice it.

She had already chosen a couple of pieces before she picked up mine. It was a blue glass bottle with something inside it which couldn
’t clearly be seen.

I watched her try to work out what it was. First she held the bottle up to the sun, but the glass became more opaque in the brighter light. She tried to remove the stopper, but it was fixed and wouldn
’t come out. She shook the bottle a few times. It made a windy sound, then a sound like a crackling fire, then one like wheels rolling down a wooden corridor. She took the bottle over to some rocks and tried to break it. It was unbreakable.

She
kept it. She made no comment about it at all, which disappointed me a little. If she had seen me planting it she didn’t drop a hint.

The last time I saw her we’d been flying low over the beach and town and were sitting on the sand, watching the sky turn from blue to hibiscus-orange and pink as the sun went down. She was gripping the tiger-head cane and her hair was flying around in the evening breeze off the sea.

‘
As far as I know, I’m the oldest person in the world.’

I tried to work out how long we had been seeing each other. It came as a shock to realise it was over a year. I hadn
’t told her I loved her, because I couldn’t imagine what my childish love would have meant to her.

‘
Will you do me a favour?’ she asked. ‘Will you keep on accepting the world, and not turn into one of those deplorable young people who are too arrogant to really receive anything except filthy lucre? Will you promise?’

‘
I’ll give you a definite maybe,’ I said, obscurely pleased with my flippancy.

‘
I get a sense of vertigo, sometimes,’ she said. ‘When one is standing on a cliff, one can only look back so many times. That which is below pulls.’

I switched on, at last, to what she was trying to tell me.

There was no way my emotions could have registered properly on my face. And I couldn’t find anything right to say.

Finally, fumbling, I said,
‘Are you thinking of… going away? Because–’

She put her finger on my lips.
‘I’m afraid I am. No, I put that wrongly. I’m not afraid at all.’

I looked away. L
ooked at her world. The holiday-brochure beach. The sky, dimming, popping out stars.

I suddenly, selfishly, wanted her respect, and I hoped that the profile I
’d turned to her was somehow looking tough and untouchable, as if I were deigning to show her for the first time that I had secrets of my own, to which she could not expect to be made privy.

‘
I thought we could fly back to the tower,’ she said. ‘Unless you’d rather fade away now, with my last perfect day?

I looked back at her, shaking my head.
‘I’d rather fly.’

I received a letter through the Barclays remailer from a firm of attorneys in Lausanne, informing me that a recently deceased person of undisclosed identity had left me a small sum of money and a V property account, fees paid for the next century.

There was also a personal message, on gilt
-edged vaper in sloping script that I liked to think was her real writing. The note proved to be infused with her chypre perfume when I read it again in the tower:

My dear Zachary,

Life is not one thin story, but as many as you wish to tell. We walk the plank, and dare the ocean. Aren’t we funny creatures?

I shall remember you with love, if memory remains with me, if I remain.

Melusine

There are mysterious bottles floating in the oceans, jostling with the spam
.

I haven
’t decided what to do with Melusine’s world yet. I’ve been going through all the stuff in the Lost and Found, looking at the things she chose to keep, discovering something like the shape of a hollow where she had lain in the sand of other people’s minds.

I
’ve been making copies of the blue bottle and uploading them to the gallery. I’ve spent a lot of time on this gesture, because although the bottles all make the sounds of the sea and a murmuring town, the secret, inaccessible content of each one is unique, and made with care and all the skill I have.

The plump egglet, white as Galatea, on the birdroom shelf dreamed that it was, for instance, not a peacock but a great clash, as would produce a sound like a huge chandelier falling in a butcher’s shop, of viridian and turquoise armies. As to who would pay the bill, it was certain that she collected car headlamps and tail lights to hang on anyone’s Christmas tree but her own, which was mortgaged to a disagreeable lion with a wooden head. He was disagreeable because his head made him boring and therefore easily omitable, indeed vomitable, from most people’s thoughts.

He was, however, devoted to his mother, who lived in the walls and communicated to him in melodic and dramatic sighs that became particularly expressive when she reminisced (and she did little else) about her youthful desire to live in a terrarium with a china pagoda that was to have housed a thimbleful of the ashes of her entirely wooden lover, who died after catching fire staring at the sun in a set of commemorative spoons
.

If a combustible creature wishes to take leave of the world thus, it is best to do so in a blue room, facing south, without clothes on, though gloves may be worn.

It is also very elegant to wear gloves in the bath; then one’s hands easily become amorous starfish that attach themselves to one’s face and breasts in good-natured, pentacular, leathery concubinage. To watch the sun rise between the rays of a starfish is to remember something blunt like a bull, but diaphanous, without weight, that danced before your eyes once in a fever, when others of your own race were still mute hieroglyphs, sand and surf not even dreams in the driveway. It rightly belongs in the cupboard with the saved jars – but how it resists! Like a Ferris wheel it is unexpectedly strong. It will probably break away and get up to who knows what stormy feast of narcissus…

I.
Strathgower, central Victoria, 1953

‘They must have been pigeons,’ said Lillian Heap, one of the older girls, affirming the logical explanation. The careless set of her body – a well-furnished, freckled woman’s body in the fawn school uniform – declared against other possibilities.

To the short and stocky girl with recently
-cut black hair who stood, equally fawn, on the dry grass bordering the tennis court she said, ‘Are you coming, Joan? Or are you going to stay and wait for the flying saucers to land?’

It was a generous invitation to be the sort of person who had friends. It would have taken great courage of conviction to explain why it had to be refused.

Joan Walker, who had been the only one to see them, hid a frown under the covered racquet she shaded her eyes with as she continued to look searchingly overhead, willing their return.

It was the third week of March and still hot. The sky had reached the stage where it looked sick and tired of its glorious state; the blue was very thin around the edges. Only the sun was keen, pressing light down with a fierce will upon the asphalt courts and the dead grass

It couldn’t be supposed that a nylonish wisp of cloud in the pale lower register of the sky was hiding anything. ‘They weren’t saucers,’ Joan said pedantically, without thinking. There was in her manner the signature of emplaced, heavy and longstanding defence.

Someone shot back:
‘No – they were pigeons!’