The Glass Ocean(109)
But nor does she ask him, to remain.
Instead she and I remain together, in the cold and empty house, while they head off to the Scaur, to examine the shales.
I have a new unease with her, it is like being left behind with a stranger who both is and is not my mother. Doppelgänger. Simulacrum. She: present and absent both at once; I: wishing only to be absent, free of the Birdcage and its accumulation of secrets, dead bodies, its low, uneven ceilings and canted walls and doors jammed shut, the sooty sparking closeness of the fire.
This is easy. She will not object.
• • •
But once free and out in the street I find myself overwhelmed by the conviction or fear that she has gone already, ceased to exist, perhaps, absent the gaze of my formative eye, as if it is I who create and uncreate her; I want to run back and check, then, just to make sure she hasn’t left us, to make sure she still exists, but I remember Hip, She’s golden, ain’t she, your Ma? She’s golden, that furtive, half-shy grin, and there is a click, something changes, it’s like the closing of a door I won’t let myself go back and open, no matter what.
• • •
Hey, Red! Over here! Walk my way, why don’cha?
• • •
I am used to it by now, early, the cold out in the street. Even the market is not yet thriving, the Emerald Isle, down below in the harbor, drowsing on her tether, is unaware as yet of having a role in our small drama; all is cold, silent, still. I look for Hip but I cannot find him, not in any of the usual places or even the unusual, not around the market stalls or the Punch and Judy in Grope Street or the burned-out house at the top of the hill or the stables in Highgate; Whitby is empty of him; he has gone off, perhaps, to please his master, fetch and carry, or some other impossibility. And so I idle about, observing for a while the steaming breath of ponies, then peering in shopwindows at goods I will never have sufficient funds to buy.
• • •
Ain’t you cold, girlie? Want to warm yerself, don’cha?
• • •
This the hawker of chestnuts, gloved hands splayed over hot brazier.
There is none of this in the new world; it is an altogether warmer place, though I don’t know yet that this is in my future, cannot possibly imagine the skitter of lizards around my skirts, or the ancient black sickle of the man-o’-war bird, drifting aloft on high, blue currents of air, or even my raven companion, she who enters at the screen door and tells me it is time to go; all this is yet to come; what I have now is my forehead pressed painfully against cold plate glass, fog of my own breath blinding me like angel’s wings, and the bubble of foreboding lodged beneath my sternum. I can neither belch it up nor swallow: feel myself choking. Drowning in it.
• • •
Ain’chew cold, girlie? Wants to warm y’self?
• • •
In the end it becomes too bitter, I have to return home. All the way across the bridge I imagine the empty house, the vacancy where my mother used to be, this is pain and pleasure both and so compelling that I do not linger as I would, usually, to look at the dark, indistinct things looming beneath the surface of the Esk, too turbulent ever to freeze, but hurry instead in dread and anticipation, undignified as ever on my long legs, imagining the abandoned spinet, the empty chair, the vacant mirror, she gone, self and shadow both. Yet when I arrive she is as always in the parlor before the fire, and though I look for it her transparency is no longer evident, she has disguised it, pulled close her veils, except there is a slight blurring around the edges of her, a softness, which may be smoke or the frost on my eyelashes or something else—I don’t know what. I was so convinced she would be gone I can’t believe she is there, it takes me a moment to realize it, and then I am either disappointed or relieved, it is unclear which. In this way I am a mystery to myself.