Something outside the valley grabbed my tongue and I could not stop. ‘My mother lives in Madrid.’ Wind, followed by rain, rattled the front window. ‘I’m off to Spain shortly.’
The postmistress glanced from the sleeping baby to the girls holding their lollipops. I’d outgrown the hidden cottage, the tangle of bush and the weather that swept over us like convulsions. Through the fog, I saw a sun-drenched city. There were tree-lined streets and women with pencilled eyebrows in busy cafés. We walked home in the driving rain and I knew it was not my mother I must conjure up. It was me.
2
Cold enough to cut your hair
Was there another phone call? Or did I dream my mother’s voice? Did I make it up to soothe the loss? I have lived in two worlds for so long I’m not sure of my own truth.
If you catch me off guard with a question such as: Did you ever speak to your mother? I’ll sometimes say … Just once. Now, thirty-seven years later, I’m not so sure. Did she call? All the way from Madrid, our lives antipodal, her accent hard to place.
I would have been in the kitchen in our house in Runanga. The scrubbed wooden bench, a coal range and a single gas burner. The peep of sea view sold us on the place. As if that patch of distant blue was enough to banish the isolation. There were chickens, of course, and a goat called Bounce that needed milking at 5 a.m. His idea, my responsibility. Submerged in tiredness. Twenty-three years old and three babies under three.
If she had called, I could have been heating milk to make yoghurt. Or soaking lentils for a nut loaf. Or doing the laundry. The wringer part of the machine had broken. I would twist the nappies around a broom handle and heft the basket outside. On a good drying day the wind would whip the sodden wings into my face while the children watched from the porch. Did I miss her call? My desire was so encompassing I would have believed anything, even my own fantasies.
I’d heard her voice for nine months, her heartbeat, the rush of her blood and the click of her bones. A mother possesses you within herself. And you are secure there. You make a snug cavern of her body, a nest, or a burrow, and it is all yours. She shares everything with you. Her nutrition and discomfort, her anguish and joy, even her temperature. A scientist has described the connection between mother and utero child as like the roots of a tree. Soft villi whiskers sprout from the placenta and delve into the fertile lining of the womb. Branches of the umbilical arteries then carry embryonic blood to the villi. An endless cycle of nourishment.
And we hear voices. In one study pregnant women read a poem out loud. At the sound of the mother’s voice, each baby’s heart rate quickened. When the recorded voice of a stranger read the poem, their heart rates decelerated. The researcher, Professor Barbara Kisilevsky, said it was not the poem; it was sound. ‘They could have read the phone book. We all have our own way of talking,’ she said. ‘We stop at different times, we take breaths at different times, and that’s what the baby recognises.’1 Would I have recognised my mother on the phone? Voices remain in our sensory memory. After a loved one dies, unless you hear them again through a recording, the memory of their voice will be the first to go.
I have no sensory memory of her. How is it, then, that I am sure of her accent? Her childhood in Manchester and the rush to escape. A handful of years in New Zealand, her life in London and Spain. Her tone and cadence created in those far-flung places.
It does seem plausible that my mother called. Only she didn’t.
It was Jeannie who phoned a few weeks after I’d sent the letter. ‘She’s coming,’ Jeannie said, her voice full of cigarettes. ‘Your mother is coming. She’s leaving soon. I’ll call in a few days with the details.’
The next morning I went to the library. I needed to know about the weather in Spain. To picture her there would make it real. In an endless wet summer in Runanga, I wanted to believe in the anointing of sun. The British newspaper made it clear. Unseasonal fog over Madrid. A kata cold front favouring the development of low stratus clouds. Persisting until dawn.
I lingered over those words. Our shared weather. I knew fog. Before Runanga, we lived on a side road beside the Grey River. We’d been there a week when the first fog rolled in. Worst in New Zealand, a neighbour said with pride. The landlord had failed to mention ‘the barber’. A katabatic wind, cold enough to ‘cut your hair’, that invades the Grey Valley most winter mornings.
The night after Jeannie called I went to bed early. For almost a year we had alternated who climbed into the waterbed first. Bruce had insisted on buying it at a garage sale. A singular flourish. In our world such a bed was unknown. Bruce assembled the frame and left me to drag the hose through the window. I’d sat on the floor and watched the water inflate the void with growing dread. The bed was ridiculous, a sign of the desperation that had crept over our lives, specious as neon.
A squall blew in, branches clawing at the side of the house. Jeannie’s words played over as the bed settled and the possibility of a real mother filled me.
One of the girls called out, her voice cutting across the ether of longing. Bruce went to her. And I remember thinking I had spent my life hovering between sleep and waking. Fogbound.
