Title: Pieces

Author: Rose Collins

In: Sport 39: 2011

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2013, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Prose Literature

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Sport 39: 2011

Pieces

page 202

Pieces

Maggie remembers that in 1981 she spent most of a summer wearing the same orange towelling shorts, a yellow T-shirt and red roman sandals; inscribing the landmarks of her brown bird body. Her father was building a canoe in his dusty shed at the back of the garden and for many long evenings he was out there after work, planing, sanding and whistling—his tumbling, woolly head bent low over the bench vice. Every now and then he would reach for the gin and tonic balanced next to him that Maggie had carefully carried across the lawn, measuring the distance between her mother and father in clover-studded bee territory.

The canoe was vast—to Maggie it seemed the span of an aeroplane. Its canvas exterior was smeared with knobbly white paint and beneath that skin the ribs arced like the bars on a tiger. She would run her hands along the sides of the canoe and sigh to herself, and sometimes she murmured a little song to it, which she fancied was a sea shanty.

Maggie understood that the canoe would be launched and that they would all soon see if it was ‘sea worthy’. Rachel told her that phrase, enunciating it for her in a long slow drawl. Maggie was the baby and her sister had so much to teach her.

At five years old Maggie was unusually mouthy, her head swimming with questions, many of which were designed to trip up the adults who took the time to engage with her. She often tested the waters. Once when her young uncle and his sweetheart—fresh-faced medical students—babysat her for an evening she had perched herself between them on the couch and asked in a low, grave voice if they could explain where babies came from. Between them they had stuttered out an elaborately technical explanation, blushing as though in pain. She had heard it all before, though not quite so anatomically, and the purpose of the question had been to double check. To search for anypage 203 inconsistencies in the language, to possibly catch out her parents for any critical elements they may have left out. Her mother told her years later, ‘That’s when your father said, “She should be a lawyer.”’

By the time she started school Maggie already had a handful of words that she had learned to print in a heavy-pressing hand on the blackboard in the playroom: Maggie, Rachel, dog, cool, a, I, you, is, apple. She once spent an afternoon in silent concentration blocking out the blackboard with repetitions of her first sentence: ‘rachel is a pig’. She felt a shadowy guilt about that and many other things years later.

In her twenties Maggie had a friend who she called Toro. He was of no fixed abode and liked to practice a certain level of detachment from material things. Once when he was on a bus at night in a remote part of Alaska the bus driver had stopped on the highway because a pack of wolves was ahead of them on the road, passing through the dark snow in a silent line. Toro had begged the driver to open the door so he could get off the bus and go to the wolves. The bus driver refused and then got irritated with Toro and barked at him, ‘Sir, take your seat. No one is getting off the bus.’

They arrived at a pit stop in a small town. Knowing that it would take time for each passenger to empty his or her bladder and order a burger and an oily black coffee, Toro skirted round the back of the bus and ran back through the snow in the direction they had come. He was a fast runner. He was the sort of person who could perform a head stand on asphalt, scale a coconut palm, or ride the New York subway without shoes. Maggie had often told him that he would do well to audition for Survivor. On this night Toro ran until he recognized a dip in the road and a black string of pine trees. He told this story with a great deal of dramatic tension and many pauses for effect. He stopped in the dip and let out a low keening howl. There was a break, during which he decided the wolves had moved on, and then an astonishing echo; an answering howl.

Maggie isn’t sure how long Toro communed with the wolves but it’s true that it happened—that he called out to them and they answered.

*

page 204

When Maggie was at university she scaled back her personal possessions so that everything she owned fitted into two army kit bags. Then afterwards, when she went travelling, she reduced her things again so that all she needed could be jammed into a thirty-five-litre day pack. One night she was sleeping on a bunk bed in the Finger Lakes and she woke up with an urge to catalogue her possessions. She emptied the pack out on to the pine floor boards and sorted through its contents, folding her few clothes in piles and lining up her pencils, toothbrush, medicines and books in neat rows. Then she made a tidy list of everything she owned. It started out:

  • 4 black pens (ink and ballpoint)
  • 1 bottle of twink
  • 1 Swiss Army Fisherman pocket knife (91mm)
  • 1 train ticket—Chicago, IL to New York Penn Station
  • 1 A4 sketchbook
  • 6 graphite pencils (various densities)
  • 3 rubbers (small, medium and large)
  • 1 small brass lock (and key)
  • 1 bottle of eucalyptus oil
  • 1 Ventolin inhaler
  • 1 tube of spearmint toothpaste (Tom’s of Maine)
  • 1 multi plug adapter
  • 1 black plastic bull figurine (from Mexico) …

She then went on to the number of balled up pairs of socks she had, her T-shirts, underwear, jeans, her togs and travel towel and small collection of books. She laid everything out on the floor, exquisitely neatly, and took a series of photos of the items—‘pieces of me’ she labelled them later in a group email she sent out with her holiday snaps attached. She knew this seemed a bit forced and that her friends back home would probably judge it as an attempt to prove something to them. Still, to her the careful stacks said something quietly important.

A few years later an American pop star released a fluffy love song with the same title, and that quickly killed the appeal of the ‘pieces’ photos for Maggie.

*

page 205

Maggie’s father was an artist of sorts—he worked as a draftsman in an architecture firm but his heart was always wrapped up in his projects outside of work. He painted murals on his daughters’ bedroom walls and constructed tree houses and built the long white canvas canoe in the back garden. He was a deeply honest person. She remembers one conversation they had when she was about twenty-seven and had decided it was time to make a grown-up gesture and invest in the property market. She told her father about a shambolic villa she and her friend Paula had set their hearts on. They would buy it together and convert it into two flats.

‘You’re biting off more than you can chew, Mags,’ he had levelled at her, stirring sugar into two mugs.

She was furious. ‘Don’t you think I can do it? I do have some clue about how these things work. We’ve done the maths.’

‘You’ll end up falling out with each other over what kind of tiles will be best for the bathroom, or whether under-floor insulation is a good investment. Then the whole thing turns to custard and what are you left with?’

‘A great big half-renovated asset is what I’m left with.’

‘And a wrecked friendship, and a shared mortgage with someone you can’t get any sense out of, and a fear of ever trying the whole exercise again.’

He was infuriatingly right. They had gone ahead with the house and while things started off well—in a flurry of scrapbooking, scavenging in salvage yards and late evenings out on the sagging verandah, wine glasses in hand, plotting out the house’s triumphant restoration—it had soon turned sour. Paula had very firm ideas about the garden, right down to which variety of French lavender should hedge the front path. She thwarted Maggie’s attempts to have gas heating installed and she would not entertain the possibility of re-surfacing the old claw foot bath—‘I’ve waited all my life to live in a house with a modern bathroom and a decent spa bath and I’m not backing down on that.’

Maggie had a boyfriend at the time—he’s long gone now—called Tim, who felt honour-bound to defend her in every dispute with Paula. One awful Saturday he took Paula on over a disagreement about paving stones and the whole thing escalated into an undignified outdoor screaming match. Maggie watched, trembling in the sun, aspage 206 the two of them squared off in the garden like enraged bears; Paula leaning on her spade, her face white and savage while Tim bellowed obscenities.

The whole co-ownership exercise was, she soon realised, a fiasco and as it spooled on into the inevitable unravelling she felt a sort of grudging admiration for her perceptive father and his unwelcome frankness.

These days Maggie prefers to rent and she prefers to live by herself and make her coffee in the mornings just the way she likes it. She works as a self-employed commercial illustrator. She never did become a lawyer, so her father could be wrong too. At 34 she’s pretty sure she won’t be having children. She enjoys men—her latest, Liam, is writing his zoology thesis on migratory sea birds. He spends many weeks away, hunkering down on off-shore islands observing nesting behaviours, and he comes back to her like a sailor into port, deeply tanned, trailing his laundry, ravenous. Maggie believes she has the best of him.

Earlier this year Maggie’s father died quite suddenly. He had been complaining for a few weeks of an all-consuming exhaustion. Then he took to his bed and lost his appetite. By the time he was seen by a doctor he was barely walking and his bushy head lolled on his chest. There was no more talk of projects or the shed—‘I’ve had it Mags,’ he said, ‘my time is up.’ Scans revealed he had secondaries fingering through his skeleton. Just a matter of weeks. Maggie and her sister railed against his dying. Rachel’s new baby was just five weeks old and she was furious and had nowhere to place her anger. Their mother, grown plump and jolly in her middle age and now living with her partner in a beach house with a vegetable patch, was more philosophical and did her best to encourage the girls into acceptance.

Maggie’s most potent memories of those weeks are not so much of her declining father or her stricken sister, but of the canoe—how it returned to her in dreams and when she was awake at her father’s bedside, laying her cheek on his cold pillow as he slept. She began to remember the day it was launched.

Her parents had decided to float the canoe for the first time in the surf at Okains Bay. Why they hadn’t chosen a tamer beach forpage 207 the canoe’s first outing she has no idea. The day was overcast and an easterly wind stirred up the grey sand. She remembers the grownups, her parents and some of their friends, carrying the canoe down the sand, solemn as pallbearers, and her father lifting her up in the shallows and placing her at the bow. He turned the canoe in the water so that she was facing out to the heads; the white threads of the breakers, each like a frill of snow, and beyond them the dark line of the horizon. Her father had climbed into the back of the canoe and begun to paddle. A smile was on his face now and he let out a whoop and a wave to the beach spectators. Maggie had felt a little icy prod of fear and she leaned down and hooked her thumbs into the heel straps of her sandals, holding tight there and keeping her eyes lower than the waves. Then a breaker had washed over them, side on, and the canoe rolled and she was in the water.

This part is so clear to her now. The feeling she had of tumbling down to the bottom of the sea and the sensation of her toenails scraping into the soft sand of the seabed. Her thoughts came in quick succession: Is that seaweed? Don’t open your eyes. I wonder if the crabs will nip my toes. This is death.

Then finally, in what can only have been half a minute, but felt like an hour and a half, she felt her father’s arms fishing for her beneath the waves and lifting her to the surface.

Those are the pieces she returns to now. Not wolves or bears, snow, the solitude of North American lakes or nesting sea birds but the scrape of wet sand and the possibility of crab claws snipping at her toes. And her father, calm and laughing, lifting her from the sea.