Trace

This is how I tell them the story. Picture this, I say. Big ships, timbers creaking, across the sea and far from home. A lone sailor in the crow's nest, up in the sky, tossing around, hair in the wind. He would've seen it first.

'Land!' he would've shouted. And again and again. 'Land!' Until his throat was hoarse from having to shout above the sea.

The crew would've all lined up at the railing to see the first land they'd seen in six months. Just imagine that, I tell the children. Imagine not seeing land for six months. I know they don’t really imagine. Maybe they don’t want to, maybe they can’t. They just keep looking out the windows or at the shampooed backs of other children’s heads. Some of those sailors would’ve been your age, I say, trying to hold their interest for a moment, a millilitre of their concentration, as it drip-drips away. Do you think you would’ve been a good sailor?

Then the sailor in the crow’s nest would’ve seen the trees. As straight as chopsticks. Not that he would’ve ever seen a chopstick.

‘Such bounteous timber,’ the Captain would’ve exclaimed. ‘Thank the Good Lord,’ or something like that. Sometimes I do that bit in a silly, pompous voice, and the more dutiful children smile.

And that’s why all our ancestors came here, I brightly tell the class. Straight timber for ships’ masts. Then, if it’s a particularly sleepy class, I’ll cry TIMBEEEERRRR! And make my forearm the falling tree.

Some of those pine trees are still standing, down near the beach. Not many.

It’s hard to get the children excited about wood.

I live with my brother. Some of my friends on the mainland make jokes about this being symptomatic of the general incestuousness of the island. They use those words, symptomatic and incestuous. At least I have friends on the mainland. Sometimes they come and

visit. More often I go and visit them. I stay at Alice’s or Tina’s or Bridget’s, on a couch or in a spare bed in a study or, more recently, in a kid’s room, staring at glow-in-the-dark stars in the night. I only ever stay a couple of days. I bring home shopping in crackling paper bags.

My brother’s name is Adrian. He’s not very big, but he is very good-looking. I guess I’m not supposed to notice that, but how could I not? The other girls always asked me about him back when we were in high school. What’s he like? they’d want to know. I dunno, I’d answer. I didn’t. I still don’t. I don’t think even Mum knew what he was like. He’d do things, he wouldn’t do things, who could tell.

One day, when he was eleven, he walked into the living room and announced he was going to burn down the house. We ignored him. Alright Adrian, whatever you say, Mum said, knit purl knit. Smoke started pouring out from under his door a couple of minutes later.

His hair is black like Dad’s. Dad kept his short though, Mum with the clippers every Sunday night, clumps of it on the floor like caterpillars.

Mum always said Adrian took after her father, his grandfather. A handsome man. Showing us the photograph. It’s true. The same slim jaw, the same slash of cheekbone, the same profile nose. Even the eyes the same, Mum claimed, though in the photograph grandpa’s are tinted a Wedgwood blue. Dead, Mum would say and put the photo back in the big white album that I suppose I still have. Somewhere.

Adrian’s eyes are a clear blue. Like water, I suppose. Not that I’ve ever seen any water that was so blue. Except inside the school’s toilets. The cleaners use Blue Loo.

He doesn’t have much hair on his chest, and he is quite white, although he lies outside a lot of the time now. For the Vitamin D. The naturopath told him it’s supposed to help.

The police are using one of the classrooms at school. They claim the police station isn’t big enough. We’re all being interviewed. They’re nothing if not thorough. The janitor’s put plastic chairs in the hall. People sit there like they’re waiting to be called into the principal’s office. A couple of my classes are in the adjacent room. I’ve encouraged the children to get into the room quickly, to not stare at the people waiting to be interviewed. I encourage you to get into the room quickly, I said. Stop staring at the people waiting to be interviewed. How would you like it? And, when the children kept staring, I told them, The police have requested that there be no loitering in the hall.

The first recorded murder in one hundred and fifty years. If I hear that phrase one more time, I’ll scream. That’s what I said to Lou in the staff room. She laughed. She said she’s noticed that different journalists emphasise different words. The first recorded murder. The first recorded murder. We tried out a few variations. She liked murder, I liked one hundred.

Lou notices things like that, the different emphases. She teaches English. She seems to watch a lot of television for someone who teaches books. We have a meal together every Thursday, I cook or we have fish and chips on the benches by the beach under the pine trees. We listen to the sea and I tell her the local history.

We were down the beach last Thursday. Streetlights like yellow moons, sticky sea-breeze. There were other lights on the beach, far-away stabs, and Lou said it was a police search party.

‘Searching for what?’ I asked, and that’s how I found out. I was probably the last person on the whole island to know.

Soon after, a carload of older students came and parked nearby to smoke and drink, so we went home.

I’m not well-liked here. Lou has told me this, not in so many words. She says that people say that I act more like an outsider rather than someone whose family has been here since way back. People probably think that I think I’m better than them. But I don’t have to think about it at all.

They are still here occasionally, bumps in the night, noises where the night is supposed to be dark with silence. I mostly only glimpse them. Hear the odd squeak or squeal. But some are braver. They’re in the kitchen in the morning, making a cup of tea, wearing Adrian’s dressing-gown.

I’m making a cup of tea. Would you like one? they’ll ask me.

Hello Lindy, I reply. Or Alice, or Alexandra, or Emma. No, thank you very much. I’m a coffee person.

They smile and wrap the dressing-gown tighter around them and disappear back into Adrian’s room, with two steaming mugs.

I have my own espresso machine. My friend on the mainland, June, said that means I’m officially a wanker. But it’s the only way I can get proper coffee here. I have the beans shipped from Melbourne. I make my own blend. It’s mainly Papua New Guinea Organic. Fair Trade. Mixed with a few other less virtuous beans for depth of flavour.

I froth my own milk. It’s quite wasteful to froth a whole jug for just one person, but I do. Otherwise you burn the milk. The milk here is very good. The cows are short and black and strong. I get milk straight from the farmer, Des. He brings it round once a week and I make him what he keeps calling a cuppacino.

She used to come around for a while. The one who was killed. Tracey. Trace. I remember her hair, thick and gold blonde. The way paler hairs clustered around her hairline. She was one of the ones who’d stay all day, still wrapped in the dressing-gown when I’d walk up the path from the car after work.

Hello, Trace, I’d say. How’s the newsagency treating you?

Oh, I’ve got the day off. Adrian’s inside.

I keep a clear pyrex glass and a white saucer for my coffee. I make a latte´ every morning and drink it standing up at the kitchen counter, like in Italy. I can see the sea from the kitchen-window, grey waves behind straight pine trees.

I remember warning her about the mouse-traps. That was when the whole island had the plague. At night, when you’d be sitting, reading under the lamp, they’d scuttle around the walls, play squeaking games, and tumble and jump. Once, I opened up a box of my winter clothes and found a nest of little white, squirming creatures. The nest was made out of my black Kate Sylvester pants. I flushed everything down the toilet.

We couldn’t use poison. The cat owners wouldn’t hear of it. So, every morning, if he could, it was Adrian’s job to empty the mouse-traps. He’d put them in the compost heap. If he didn’t bury them well enough, the neighbourhood cats would come and dig them out.

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At lunch-time today, Lou and I escaped from the staff-room and ate lunch in the Memorial Park. It was sunny and we sat on Lou's newspaper on the ground, facing the sea. The air was still cold and Lou and I sat close. I got a really good look at her pants. Royal blue, covered in balls and lint and stains. Polyester for sure.

We should go shopping together on the mainland, I said.

Lou sighed. She knows what I think about her dress sense. Then she told me that on the news last night, the police said they had the name of the killer.

Who? I said. Who?

Lou laughed. You sound like an owl, she said. It was just a beat-up. Because of immigration, they know the name of everyone on the island at the time of the murder.

Oh, I said. Typical.

It wasn’t always this way. The bureaucracy. When the colony was first set up, people could come and go as they pleased. The governors tried to keep tabs, but there was so much drunkenness and corruption that this place became home for all sorts, for the first fifty or so years. And after all that had been cleaned up, straightened out, and there were birth and death certificates and passports and papers, they found another, secret port. It’d been operating for years. Who knows what or who came in that way.

Adrian and I know where our family comes from, though. I’ve researched. Both our mother’s and father’s side date back to the same maid-of-all-service who came out with one of the minor government officials.

This whole island is littered with our relations. They have big gettogethers, barbeques and weddings. Adrian, if he feels up to it, sometimes goes to these occasions and comes back with a second cousin. I’ve never gone. I wouldn’t know what to wear.

I got an email, I told Lou, from a friend of mine who works for a movie director in Hollywood. She says they're thinking of making a movie here.

About the island? About all this?

No, about Nova Scotia. They think that it’ll be cheaper to film here. They don’t know what to do about the trees though. There aren’t any pines on Nova Scotia.

Surely that’s for the costume department to work out, Lou said and we laughed. She can be funny.

That reminds me, Lou said, I caught one of those little arseholes plagiarising.

Who?

Brian McAlastair.

Lou stood up and stretched. As she lifted her arms above her head I could see her not-quite-white spencer sticking out from under her jumper.

That’d be right. What did he plagiarise?

A poem. A whole fucking poem. By Blake. He got it off the internet.

I got up too and dusted myself down.

Which one?

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I came back here for Mum's funeral. I hadn't come back for Dad's. I was in Turkey then. Mum told me over the phone. I worked out the equivalent time of the funeral and I went and sat in the Blue Mosque, which I

wanted to see anyway. I took off my shoes and put them on the pile. I sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at the domed ceiling and tried to think about Dad. It’s like being inside heaven, I thought. Dad wouldn’t approve of this at all.

We held Mum's wake at Mum and Dad's house. Our house now. And that's when I found out about Adrian. I’m sorry for your loss, someone in a hat said. It must be hard, with Adrian’s condition too.

Yes, I said. Yes it is.

After a while, some of the hats started crying. She was such a good friend to me. I went and got the box of tissues from beside Adrian’s bed, but no-one used them. They’d all brought their own hankies, white with lace edges. They blew their noses and tucked the hankies back into their bra straps.

It took hours for them to clear out. I stood on the verandah with Adrian beside me and watched the last of the polyester dresses wandering down the hill.

What’s wrong with you? I hissed at him.

He put him arm around my shoulders and I could smell him, hear the breath and rustle of his suit.

I have MS, he said. Multiple Sclerosis. It might not be as bad as it sounds.

Oh, I said.

I’m going to have episodes. I’ve already had a couple while you were away. I get pain and paralysed. I can’t walk.

I stuck my head into his armpit. If the polyester dresses were still looking, they’d just think I was sad about Mum.

But I get better, he said. Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis.

Are you scared? I asked.

Yes, no. I don’t really know. I’ll probably end up shitting myself in some residential care facility.

He pressed his lips into my hair.

You’ll never have to go into a place like that, I told him.

The next week I applied for a job at the high school. I was to teach history as well as science and the headmaster, Call-me-John, was sure I was up to the job.

Good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks, Adrian stumbling in the street, needle disposal units, Adrian dropping plate after plate after plate, flying out to see the neurologist, on-line searches, on-line support groups, buying Adrian jeans with zippers instead of buttons, buying Adrian pull on shoes instead of lace-up boots, naturopaths, vitamins, Adrian lying in the backyard for the Vitamin D, books on meditation and yoga, Adrian in bed again, Adrian up and about, smash goes my glass vase from Italy, smash goes my hand-painted serving platter from Turkey, smash go my chocolate drinking bowls from Paris, pulling Adrian up from the floor, Adrian shouting Fuckit fuckit fuckit, rolling up the rug that he keeps tripping on, giving Mum’s glass figurines away before they all get smashed, dings in the car, he’ll call you back, he’ll call you back.

And the good weeks. The women coming over again. Adrian poaching himself eggs for breakfast. Adrian chopping wood. Adrian carrying shopping. Adrian drinking and smoking joints in the back yard. Laughter from his room. Squeals. Screams.

Miss. Miss. Your brother’s in the hall.

It was Vicki, stomach straining against her too-short school uniform.

You’re late, Vicki. Sit down and be quiet.

I was teaching them about geology, about the different types of rocks. About how some rocks are made from great pressure and great heat in the molten layer inside the Earth. How some are made from the weight that builds up as sand and silt is slowly compressed. And some, the ones who have it easy, are simply made when liquid rock’s thrown out of a volcano.

Metamorphic, I write on the board. Sedimentary. Igneous.

I turn back to the class, all quiet in neat rows.

There are different pressures at work, I say. The different pressures have different results. They make different kinds of rock. What kind of rock do you think you are? I think of asking them, but don’t. They look interested. Their eyes are shiny, their coats glossy. Now go and find me one of each, I say. They sit there, screwing up their faces in puzzlement. Go out, I say more slowly. Outside. And find me a metamorphic, a sedimentary and an igneous rock.

They still sit there.

Now.

They can't believe their luck. Chairs scrape back and little conversations run around the classroom like mice. The room empties out fast and I stand at the window until I see the last of them scurrying off down the hill.

The wall between the two rooms used to have a door in it. At some stage, they nailed it shut and painted over it, even the glass. I walk up to the ex-door and put my ear against the glass pane.

... for a couple of months, Adrian is saying.

And why did you stop seeing her? the policeman rumbles.

My condition, the MS stuff, sex is much more difficult now...

Oh right. Yep.

There is a long pause. I can even hear them breathing.

Her body was in a bad way. Multiple stab wounds, and injuries consistent with stomping.

Again the breathing.

Your condition weakens you physically then?

Very much. I can’t do a lot for myself anymore. I can’t walk long distances, or lift things. Ask my sister.

But if you ask his sister she won’t ever tell you that Adrian chopped wood that very morning. And did a load of washing and hung it out to dry for the first time in years. That the night before the noises from his bedroom had woken her up. That she still can’t find her Japanese carbon steel chef’s knife.

My ear against the wall is as hard as rock.

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