Virtue (50 page)

Then she bends, sinks her hand into my hair and, pain ripping through my scalp, begins to drag me across the room towards the open window. The only way out, over the balcony. Oh, God. That long, long drop to concrete, bricks rushing past my face. Please don’t. Please.

I realise that I’m actually saying the words. They spray from my mouth and she’s deaf to them. Hands up above my head trying to claw her away, but she has talons of iron and I can’t break free. Oh, God, I don’t want to die, don’t want to die, save me, please, God, I don’t want to die.

And then a voice. Calm, firm, strong.

‘Grace, stop it.’

I feel my mother’s body shift, then she continues with her dragging.

The voice again.

‘Grace. Stop.’

The grip loosens slightly, my mother standing over me like Herod Antipas, panting, bloodied. I twist, strain round, and Harriet is standing in the middle of the room, bizarrely festive in red and gold, white hair piled on a head held high, holding Grace’s gaze with her own. And in this moment, she looks more like Godiva – beautiful, fierce, unstoppable – than I have ever seen her.

‘Let her go, Grace.’ Harriet’s voice betrays no fear, no hesitation.

My mother’s breath, heavy, a tightening of the hand that wrings a shriek from my lips.

‘It’s enough,’ says Harriet. ‘This is the end.’

‘DON’T give me orders,’ says my mother. She is out of breath. She pants and pulls once more at my hair.

‘You will stop this, now,’ says Harriet. Stock still, back straight, her eyes never flicker. ‘You will stop this, and leave my house.’

Grace hisses, like an angry reptile. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know. None of you know. I own her. She’s not yours. She’s mine.’

‘She’s nobody’s. She belongs to nobody. Leave her, now. She is not yours to judge, she is not yours to pass sentence. Let go, and leave.’

Once again, Grace tightens her grip, and I gasp, but this time the grip is less certain, less determined.

‘I did everything for her.’ She speaks again, but this time there’s something plaintive in her voice. ‘I did everything, and she repays me nothing.’

‘No debts,’ says Harriet. ‘No payment. You will leave now, and you will not come back.’

‘I—’ says my mother. And Harriet suddenly shouts into the salty silence, ‘Grace, you let her go! You let her go now, or I swear I will never let you go as long as you live! I will be at your back and on your shoulder and ready to find you whenever you forget. Let her go, Grace! You don’t know what I can do to you!’

And Grace lets go. She sees the truth in Harriet’s face, and she lets go.

Harriet takes a step to the side, clears a path for Grace, but never once do those eyes lift their gaze from her face.

Grace begins to walk. I slip to the ground and watch as she steps slowly towards the door, and Harriet turns to watch her go. There’s blood from my face on her ankle. Grace keeps her head held high. As she leaves, her step becomes measured again, deliberate, the pace of the Nobel prizewinner leaving the podium.

She turns in the doorway, looks at Harriet. Harriet doesn’t move, doesn’t utter. And my mother speaks, and for the first time, I hear her lost, empty.

‘I am not just,’ she assures my friend, ‘the sum of my genetic inheritance.’

Harriet stands with her back to me watching the doorway as the steps recede down the stairwell. Waits for the sound of the door, stays as it closes. I’m curled in a ball on the carpet. Pain everywhere, blood streaming from my mouth and my nose and pooling beneath my face. And I wrap my arms around myself and, mewling like a kitten, I rock, back and forth, back and forth.

And when she’s certain that Grace has gone, Harriet turns and contemplates me. And then she steps forward, comes to my side, kneels down. With gentle hands, she helps me upright, with the strength of her body, she props me there. And she lifts a hand and strokes the only part of my cheek that isn’t blackening, and looks into my eyes. And she says, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. I’m here.’

From: Waters, Anna

To: Moresby, Harriet

Subject: You *are* kidding?

I bloody hope you are. I know you’ve got luurve on the brain, but do you really think I’m going to settle down with a geography teacher? Even if he *does* have a body from God? Do you know how many bodies from God there are in Fremantle alone? Christ, remind me to wipe this from my sent box.

We’re having a good time, is all. No, we’re having a great time. He’s the kindest, sweetest thing, and he knows where we stand and he’s way cool about it. I shouldn’t have been so nervous about coming. I should have trusted him to be pleased to see me, but I was almost sick at Changi Airport I was so scared.

He almost didn’t recognise me at the airport, though. Walked straight past me, then stopped and said, ‘Strewth, Annie, dig the nose. I didn’t know you had Cherokee blood.’

He brought me down to Margaret River after you rang to tell me about Grace, to chill out and get my head round things because I sort of lost the plot again for a couple of days. His parents have a ‘property’ on Cape Mentelle where he reckons no one will find us until I want to be found. Which may be a while, I think. I don’t know that there’s much I can do, after all; it’s all out of my hands now. It’s not like I’m going to be called as a character witness.

Thank M for keeping stumm against his better judgement. And I’m sorry that it had to be your mother’s mausoleum that got the brunt of things when she finally turned up. I’m sorry I was in too much of a state to tell you so at the time. But at least, thank God, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that someone who could turn up at a public monument with a batch of Semtex has to be pretty barking. And at least I’m in the clear now. I hope. I don’t know what you feel about it. I know I’d feel weird if I were you, especially as it was obviously you she was trying to affect when she did it. Please tell me. Maybe it’s a relief, in a way. At least the fan club won’t have a focus for their obsession any more.

We got here three days ago and visited eight vineyards in the first 48 hours. Now sitting on the porch consuming the by-product and looking at the sea. Funnily enough, the view from a distance looks almost exactly like the parkland at Belhaven. Just think: all that money on landscapers, and all they could think of to do was replicate the look of a country they only thought fit for convicts. I almost screamed when I first saw this place: it’s one of those things made of corrugated iron like you see in the movies, with a wood-floored verandah running all the way round to sit and swat flies on, and there was a kangaroo on the porch when we pulled up. N hoicked a rock at it and called it a bloody little menace, but now I really know I’m in Australia.

Listen: I love you more than I’ve ever said, old darling, old friend, and I can’t wait to see you. Kiss my noble gentleman for me and tell him I love him too. I’ll be back in a few weeks. N’s job starts in the New Year, but he’s going to come with me part of the way back so we can go and contribute to the destruction of the ecosystem of Lombok and say our goodbyes in style. And a jacuzzi, har har.

And yeah, I’m feeling a lot better, thanks. Ribs still get a bit antsy if I laugh too hard, which you’ll be glad to know seems to be happening several times a day now. But, you know. It’s going to take a while. A couple of times I’ve been talking quite normally and I suddenly find myself in tears. But he’s brilliant about it. Just shuts up and waits until I’ve stopped and then cracks me open a drink.

Yesterday, he shoved a huge glass of Leeuwin Noble Riesling into my hand on the verandah, ruffled my hair, and said, ‘I reckon you’re all right, Kimosabe,’ and you know what? I think I probably am.

Love for ever,

A

xx

Harriet has footage of the day her mother became a saint, because Godiva died as she had lived, in the middle of the circus, with a dozen cameras gathered as witness. She doesn’t play it, but she keeps it in her box of secrets because it’s the last she has of her. I don’t suppose she has to play it to remember; the footage was aired so often and with such glee that Godiva’s death is as familiar to anyone who was around at the time as is the first moonwalk, or Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ to theirs.

You may well remember it. Godiva, figurehead president of the International Earthquake Relief Fund, has been flown out, once again, to lend her voice to the appeal for the victims of the Balanistan disaster. The ten-minute film is intended for transmission just before the early evening news. Nobody setting up the flattering lights, the perfect angles, brushing at Godiva’s cheeks with Rose Blush and smoothing her lips with Pearl Crush thinks that they are making a segment that will earn royalties that the Kennedy Foundation could only dream of.

It begins in much the same vein as countless appearances before: Our Lady of the Helpless in a disaster zone, dressed down in made-to-measure, the subtlest glint of gold at her ears, the lightest dab of silver below the eyes, the most modest splash of tan at the lips. To her side she clutches the sweetest orphan in town, and, hey, even if she’s not an orphan, but has been picked for her looks from the local compound, people give more money to pretty orphans, it’s the way of the world, and needs must when the devil drives. Godiva, in her handmade, kid-lined combat boots, strokes the orphaned head and, her eyes heavy with the weight of the sorrows she has witnessed, addresses the camera, scatters about her homilies on caring, sharing, generosity and love.

You can almost hear the crew yawning: it’s a hot day, they’ve been up since dawn scouting locations and, though they know better than to blow their repeat fees by saying it, they’ve heard it all too many times before. For though people may have fallen for this stuff in the spangled seventies, it’s now the hard-nosed eighties, and we’re all too sophisticated to be taken in by this guff these days.

Compassion fatigue may be a real problem in the world of charity, but it’s something of a necessity among those who have to find a grisly cadaver to emphasise their point. And even in the world of compassion, fashion is a driving force. And in the world of compassion, everyone knows that Godiva Fawcett is a force of the past: that the people want someone younger, less tarnished, more virginal, less – well, familiar. Godiva is sliding down the fashion scale; will probably lose her sinecure in the next year or so, go from Supercarer to B-list fete-opener.

Still. You don’t get to be a cameraman without doing a professional job, even if it’s the same as the job before. The focus pans in and out: from the golden strands of Godiva’s sleek slicked helmet to the lone baby crying in a dust bath a little further up the road. Later, Godiva is to drop her speech halfway through a sentence and go to comfort the little creature; for now, she is under orders to merely look as though keeping herself away is the emotional equivalent of tooth-pulling.

So there we have it: disaster lite. A world where leprosy heals with empathy, where shattered lives can be put back together with a PR campaign, where a hug makes up for a lifetime’s neglect and the problems of the Third World can be miraculously cured by a famous beauty from the first. Even at thirteen I was beginning to know that it didn’t work like that. Even at thirteen, Harriet used to cover her face from shame when Godiva peddled her snake oil.

But today is to be different, for today, instead of the usual job of coming in as witnesses to someone else’s catastrophe, these people find themselves participants in one of their own.

So to begin with, this priceless footage is as countless reels before it: the vultures descending to pick apart the bones of tragedy. Godiva is in grey today, a loose gauze
dupata
draped decoratively over her hair in deference to the religious scruples of those around them. And she looks deeply, lovingly into the camera, intones, ‘For us, in our cosy homes, it is hard to imagine the scenes we see today. Hard to imagine what it must be like to live through them. And I know that it seems as though these disasters are ceaseless, that we can never do enough to help these people back onto their feet, that the hand of friendship can only …’

And then she trails off, and the look of a startled deer passes across her face. And the viewer becomes aware of a low rumble that builds as Godiva casts lamely about her, begins to totter, then stagger. And the camera begins to shake, drops down to film, juddering, the rubble on the side of the road. Then, jerking as though it’s being thrown about by the hands of a careless giant, it comes back onto its operator’s shoulder and we see buildings crack, piles of masonry that had seemed irrevocably fixed in mangled heaps begin to shift and tumble. And we hear screams of fear, warning shouts, yells of alarm as rock-pickers bolt for the safety of the open road. The roof of the orphanage cracks, caves, comes to rest on the floor below. And then, silence. Dead, trickling silence for one second, two, before the voices start again, the creak and groan of houses stressed beyond bearing as they try, and fail to find their shape.

And then there’s Godiva. Visibly shaken, her mouth works and her hands begin to move. She looks at the camera, looks at the crew members who have staggered into shot as the earth heaved beneath them, stares at the sky. And then she sees what remains of the orphanage, and the voice that finally comes is shocked, and doubtful. ‘Did they get out?’

No one responds.

She points at the orphanage, the beams that support the roof already screaming in protest.

‘Did they get out?’ she repeats. ‘Did anybody see them get out?’

A flurry of questions, denials.

‘
Are they still in there?
’

And then, with barely a glance to check that the camera is still running, Godiva Fawcett is bolting across the road in her designer grey, skirting piles of fallen stone, leaping the gaping crack that has opened in the ground.