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PIDGE: 2006

MY MUM TOLD STORIES WHENEVER WE TRAVELLED. We’d be hitchhiking out from the camp in the cab of some truck, headed to Ottawa, or Montreal, and I’d sit up on Felicity’s blue-jeaned knees, her long hair tickling my face as I leaned back into her skinny chest and all the way she’d make the driver laugh with her tall tales and stories, her toothy laughing smile. Sandy Gibb the Glass Man, astronauts at Expo and swimming pregnant in a moonlit lake. She could make a story of anything. Maybe I should have told her about this trip. I told the gallery that I needed time away to sort through my grandmother’s things. They filed that under ‘personal reasons’ and then reasonably told me to take as much time as I needed. I told Mateo that I would need to organize the details of her estate, and he said that he understood. I told myself I’d be cleaning the bungalow. Before I left Ottawa, I’d imagined lots of cleaning. All those large windows and the wooden floors, too. Linoleum tiles in the kitchen. Then the bath to scour, old pots to scrub, and Persian carpets to shake out in the sunshine. It seemed like therapeutic work. Cleansing. Solitary.

Mateo said once that it was my aloneness that first caught him. I wondered if he meant loneliness, if he was mistranslating, but he said no, he meant aloneness. He said it was intriguing.

Maybe it was living at the camp with Felicity. There was lots of time then to be alone. In the night when she was at the birthing house. Or in the afternoon, when she opened her books and settled down to work at the small table in our cabin and she liked to have the space to herself, so she sent me outside. In the summer, there were always lots of children to play with, but as soon as the nights got too cold for tents, the field would empty and I’d be alone again.

When I was a little older, around nine or ten, Felicity started to take me with her to births, particularly when there were small children. She had me tell them stories and invent games to keep them entertained and distracted. Rika thought it best for children to keep away from a birth, but she never made rules, only suggestions. I’d heard Rika talking about this with Felicity one afternoon, and because they were talking about children, I listened.

‘What about when a mum wants them there?’ Felicity asked. ‘Should we come up with some pretence to get them outside anyway?’

‘No. Always only tell the truth. She needs to go so far into herself to open for the baby, and lies aren’t going to help that.’

‘And neither are kids in the room?’

Rika laughed. ‘You got it, babe. It can be hard to open for one baby when you are listening to another one prattle.’

I lay above them on the top bunk with my National Geographic. They probably forgot I was there, but it didn’t matter. They never kept anything from me. I’d heard everything, all the complications and contradictions. I learned how things can be difficult when babies come and how sometimes they don’t. How it’s possible to hope for two things at once. Release. Safety. Or time and space. I looked up from my magazine and let my eyes trace the lines on the river maps pinned to the wall. Blue ink meant water, and in this neck of the woods, the names were beautiful. The Ottawa, the Picanoc, the Gatineau, La Pêche.

‘If she really wants them close, then make space by all means. But often she only thinks she wants them so that she can keep an eye on them. So, we give the kids a safe, cared-for space away from her, and likely she’ll choose to be quiet and alone.’ Rika was always teaching like this and Felicity wanted to learn. She’d come to the camp pregnant, and after I was born, she decided to stay and help out.

I tried to explain all this – the work, the help, the study, and Rika – to Mateo in our early days, but he was more interested in my stories of long days spent alone in the woods, of climbing trees and swimming naked and summer nights and winter afternoons spent in snowshoes out on the ice. I told him how I lay down flat on my back on the snowy lake and imagined the cold depth of the water hidden beneath me, the hollow sky above me. I told him that lying there alone, I felt contained like a coin in my own pocket and perfectly happy.

On my own, the travel felt long. I arrived in Edinburgh late in the evening and found the hotel, just as Mateo had suggested. In the morning, the streets were wet, and through the window in the hotel’s breakfast room, I watched tourists with umbrellas, golf bags and suitcases pass by on their way to the trains. Pigeons huddled on the damp rooftops, and I drank strong tea, thinking about the house.

It sits away from the village and you can see the sea from the house, but not the sands. For the sands, you need to cross a footbridge and walk out past the flat lands, the marshlands and scrub trees. You pass through places where the way is lined by barbed-wire fencing, keeping the sheep in and the dogs out, and then places where the path is only a trace through open landscape. It is a bit of a walk to get to the beach, but a good walk.

Closer to the house, the shore is thick with black silt washed down from farmland nearby. A small stream cuts through the mud, a snaking path for the running tide. The bay is wide, open like a bowl, but the sea here is narrow, a silver band between East Lothian and Fife leading into the North Sea. When the tide fills the bay, it comes in quick and strange, leaving a wide sandbar dry across the mouth. That’s where the geese gather at night and where the shipwrecks sit. Felicity never let me walk out that far. She said they were just rusty submarines left over from the war and not particularly interesting.

The house was a place we visited in winter because in the winter Felicity got homesick. Gran kept the back bedroom ready for us, just in case. She knew that Felicity found the white winters at the camp hard. The days were quiet and short, the trees were bare, the path deep with snow and she had to tuck my trousers into the tops of my knitted socks to keep me warm.

When it got too quiet, too cold, and too bright, she pulled down the army surplus backpacks from the rafters and filled them with sweaters, skirts, books and warm scarves. We’d leave behind the textbooks, their precise illustrations, and the river maps. Then Felicity would bundle me into my thick winter coat, rub my face with Vaseline to keep the wind away, and we hitchhiked off to the city to find the airport bus. We never had enough pennies to commit to an annual flight, but whenever we needed to, we managed to fly. Felicity said that this was yet one more advantage of staying away from the public schools: flight was always possible. She also said that there were ample books at the camp to fill anyone’s brain usefully, and that if there was anything extra that I wanted to know, I could always ask Bas.

I could ask Bas anything and he gave me answers like small prizes slipped into my waiting hands. He was the one who told me pine needles keep you healthy like oranges do. He showed me how to hold hens’ eggs up to a candle to see the chick growing inside, and taught me that adult loons leave the lake a whole month before their children every autumn. The next generation migrates alone, relying on instinct, and he said instinct was a feeling and feelings matter. In return, I told him all the things I knew. That some grown-ups kept their eyes open at the table when we said the blessing. That all my mother’s hair was fair and curly – under her arms, too, and even under her skirt – while mine was dark and flat. That some spider-webs could outlast thunderstorms. That pennies smell like blood and blood smells like fish and that you couldn’t smell bruises at all.

I suspect my gran had something to do with the enough pennies when it came to airplanes. We never had much. We didn’t need much, really. Life in the woods wasn’t about pennies, and mainly the camp was self-sufficient anyway. We grew plenty of food in the fields across the lake and sold what we wouldn’t eat at the road-end all through the summer. Pies, tarts and deep baskets of strawberries and raspberries from the gardens, and wild blueberries from the rocky places along the lakeshore. What we couldn’t eat or sell, we saved. Bas made berry schnapps and wine coolers, and throughout the summer and into the fall, the canning kettle boiled on the woodstove and the air in the farmhouse kitchen was thick with sugar, vinegar and cloves. Felicity said she came by canning honestly, and told me about Gran’s preserves: rosehips, apple chutney, gorse wine and bramble jam. Saving things up must be in her blood and she crinkled her forehead a little fiercely when she said it, though no one would ever say she wasn’t authentic. A good camp word, authentic. Rika used it like a compliment, as though some folk weren’t and might only be acting. Did adults do that? I wasn’t sure. When I asked Bas, he shrugged and pulled the dressing-up box from the cupboard, asking who I was going to be that afternoon. I acted out every story my mother told me. A pirate tree-nymph. A mountaineering beaver. Or my favourite role of all: the Blessed Virgin herself. Bas always made time for stories, layering me with blankets, helping me to belt a pillow to my middle that I might stagger my way towards Bethlehem. He played every innkeeper with arms open wide, and with a straight face and a shining eye, found a footstool for my swollen virgin ankles and wondered if I might like a mug of tea.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Did they have tea then?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe that comes later. It’ll be the wise men who leave some with you, but I don’t think you’ve met them yet, have you?’

‘Are you foolish, Bas? Or wise?’

‘Probably foolish, your holiness. Most probably.’

‘I think you’re wise. You know how to make bread. That’s wise, isn’t it?’

‘Wise enough for this world. Would you like some jam, too, m’lady?’ He spread it thick and I ate it stickily with fingers and lips jelly red.

Bas always knew what to offer, how much to ask, when to be silent or serious or good. He was good at keeping a story going. Much later, I realized the gentleness that took, and the strength.

Stories are fragile things, eggshell thin and porous.

After breakfast, I picked up a few groceries in a small convenience store near the hotel. Enough to live on for a little while, I thought, and there would be shops to explore in Aberlady once I’d settled in.

Then I turned in the car at the rental agency and found the bus. It shuddered out of the city, through suburbs, past rows of stucco houses with gravel yards or small lawns and the occasional incongruous palm tree. Most of the people on the bus were old, chatting with their neighbours, holding shopping bags. A pile of free newspapers at the front of the bus sat untouched, and I thought about leaving my seat to collect one but looked out the window instead.

The road passed on through small towns and smaller towns until at last the way opened up and I could see the colour of the fields and the line of the coast. The clouds had lifted, or maybe the wind had blown them back out to sea. It was a windy landscape, with small, crooked trees and hawthorn hedges along the roadside, and white birds hovered high above the waves, holding the wind in their wings. Then a wooded stretch, denser now, and in between the trees, old cement blocks sat heavily – anti-tank defences left over from the war. I remembered Felicity telling me about them, and about the railings set in the churchyard’s stone wall. They had been sawn off when the country needed more metal for airplanes, leaving iron coins set into the stone. She showed me how to press my thumb in each one – one a penny two a penny – and how to climb up the loupin-on stanes, that long-abandoned set of steps that Victorian ladies used to climb up to their high horses.

Just past the church, the bus stopped and I collected my bags. I hadn’t packed much because I wanted space to bring things home again. I wasn’t sure what, but maybe Gran had left something specific for me to find. Heirlooms or papers or photographs. I’d search the house as if for clues and maybe find why Gran had left it to me. Felicity had trained me to look for stories, hadn’t she?

I crossed the street to the hotel – a big whitewashed building with picnic tables and plant pots out front, trellises against the wall, and ivy. The door was open and no one sat at the desk in the front hall. I wasn’t sure about ringing the bell. It looked as if it would make a great deal of noise. I stood there for a moment, examining the map laid out on the wooden counter, the coastline curved like the back of a fish, or like a belly facing the sea. Then, an old woman came through a door behind me and cleared her throat.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for a meal?’

‘No. Well … I’m really here to collect keys,’ I said. ‘For my grandmother’s house. Jane Hambleton. I was sent a letter that mentioned there would be a set of keys here. With Muriel?’ I opened up my shoulder bag and pulled out the letter for the woman to read, but she just looked into my face with a soft smile.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘That’s me. And you are Jane’s little Pidge. Felicity’s, I mean. You and I met when you were small. You won’t remember me, but your mother brought you here. And you look just like her. Except for the hair, maybe. The colour suits you.’ She coughed a little laugh and asked about my mother. ‘Is she keeping well? She’s here with you too, then?’

‘No, it’s just me. She’s back in Quebec. She’s well. Happy.’

‘Ah, yes. Settled there, I suppose. Such a shame that she couldn’t make it home in time for her mum’s funeral, but I suppose it was unexpected, wasn’t it? And so quick. But such a shame. And just before your own arrival. She was so looking forward to seeing you. She told me so many times that you were coming and that you might pop in here first, and that’s when she left the keys here. I think she was worried you might arrive when she was out for a walk or even down in the garden and that she wouldn’t hear you. But I’m sure all that’s in the letter, isn’t it? Ah well, things come out as they will, won’t they? Are you planning to stay long?’

‘I don’t quite know. There’s the house …’

‘Yes, I suppose it will need sorting through. All Jane’s lovely things. And Stanley’s books and papers, too. I don’t think she let go of much after his death.’

‘She left it to me. The house, I mean.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s a good house, a cracking garden. So, you think you might stay?’

‘I live in Ottawa. My partner is there, and my work.’

‘Of course, of course. Yes, you’ll just be wanting to see it and sort, won’t you? Well, while you’re here, do pop in again. The kitchen does a lovely bit of lunch, if you ever need a meal. Cooking for one can be awkward, can’t it?’ Muriel reached over and straightened a messy pile of golf brochures beside the bell on the desk. ‘But you need the keys and you must be tired. Just arrived, and all that way, too. Ah yes, here they are.’

She found a small brown envelope under the counter and slid it across the map towards me. It looked as if there might be anything inside. A wedding ring. Ashes. Dragons’ teeth. I slipped it away into my pocket. ‘Thank you.’

‘Would a cup of tea help? You must be absolutely shattered. You’ve only just arrived, haven’t you? You have the aeroplane look about you.’

‘I’m just off the bus. I stayed in Edinburgh last night.’

‘Well, you come along through here and I’ll see about some tea. Unless you’d prefer a coffee?’

‘No, tea’s fine. Thanks.’

I followed her through the door at the end of the hallway, past a bar and a lounge with sofas and chairs and then into a larger room with tables set for lunch. White napkins and slate coasters.

‘Sit anywhere you like. Do you fancy something to eat?’

‘No. I’m not sure. I can’t quite fathom what time of day it is.’

‘Travel will do that. You sit down now. You’ll feel better with the tea in you. Sugar, too. It does wonders. And I’ll bring you a scone as well. You look like some bulking up might do you good.’

‘Thank you. That sounds wonderful.’

I chose a small table by the window. My fingers picked at the flap on the back of the envelope and then ripped the paper and shook out the contents into my hand. A heavy mortice key fell into my palm and sat there like a finger bone. No wonder Felicity thought in fairy tales, if this was the key to her childhood home.

My mother’s third birth came in bits and pieces. There were always sliced apples and something about the grass growing outside the cabin. She tried out new versions on me, changing the weather or time of day, approaching everything from a different angle. I liked it best when she began it in the afternoon. The morning story often featured rain and sometimes books left on the lawn. Once, she told me a fox ran across the grass with a vole in its mouth, and a crow shouted down from the trees, startling the fox so she dropped her prize as Felicity sat with me on the porch, watching. I didn’t like that telling at all. But the afternoon story went like this: we were together on the porch, Felicity on a stump stool and me sleeping swaddled in a blanket that Rika had knit, lying in a cradle Bas had carved. The rain was over, and the weather would be dry now, so she sat slicing the apples into rings, then threading them onto garden twine to dry in the wind. I could see her hands doing all this; she did it every autumn. Out on the lake, a loon surfaced and called, and I woke gently, my eyes bright as water. I didn’t cry or make a fuss and all afternoon, the loon sat there on the lake, calling and calling, and Felicity sliced all the apples and not one was wasted. Later, she’d hook the twine over a peg high up on our cabin wall, where the apple rings would grow dark and leathery. Felicity liked saving things to use later, saving up the seasons. I don’t know why this story counted as a birth, but she said it did.

My own birth was a tale she told lightly. When I asked questions, she smiled and said I already knew what I needed to – I had seen Rika working, helping, and I knew what needed to happen. It was like that, Felicity said. Like every other birth. Every mother is strong like that.

But all her counted stories made me wonder how many births I might have. Do you get to decide? Can you make them happen?