Each summer, we invite some of Aotearoa’s finest writers to tell us a short tale. Today’s is the final story on year’s theme, ‘second acts’.
All morning Magnus Swanson has been restless. For the last two days the wind has raged over the island like a tantrum. And as if each small hollow of white and purple foxglove were a bell chiming alarm, its sound echoes in the sweet pea and fuchsia nearby, their delicate petals wilting in the salt air.
But it is not the wind that troubles Magnus. No true Orcadian minds the wind, for even on a summer’s day it is a constant companion, scuttling through clouds and sunlight, sweeping through sandy beaches, rattling the rigging of ships in the harbour.
It is something else. Something Magnus cannot put his finger on. It is as though he were expecting someone, or he had forgotten an appointment; possibilities that are both unlikely.
His closest friends had either died in the Great War years before or moved to the mainland. A neighbour visited him twice a week; to see if he were alive, he supposed, and the local shop owner’s son left his box of weekly supplies at his front door. Magnus would like to have talked to him before he set off again on his motorcycle.
He’d owned several Nortons over the years, only relinquishing it in his seventies after a bad accident left his leg and arm in a cast for several months. He still missed the hum of the engine, speeding around the coil of narrow roads, the grey-green fields and sky a blur.
Magnus turns from the kitchen window. He looks at the table, where the evening before he’d gathered and washed several basins of blackcurrants to make jam for the coming months. Their sweet, piquant aroma fills the small kitchen.
“Let’s take a wee walk to the loch, Tess,” he says. The dog raises her head excitedly, her paws tapping briskly as she crosses the linoleum to the back door.
A memory drifts through the blustery summer air. Magnus shudders. A glut of black-purple blackcurrants, long, stained fingers. A woman’s mouth opening as she licks her lips and chin. Her smile a flourish of white and blackcurrant. The smell of fruit in his nostrils lingers for a moment as he sets out.
Why should she come today? he wonders.
Tess is up ahead, waiting for him to unlatch the gate. A short distance from his house, sheltered on four sides by his grandfather’s alders, the road and pastures are largely treeless, the grasslands flat and lush. He walks the wind-swept lane towards the loch, past his beehives which he will check upon his return. The land here stretches to the grey-blue waters of the sea, past the lake, and as far as the eye can see. Clouds to the west are a bruised lavender.
Magnus adjusts the scarf around his neck. Aware now why the scar there burns. Most days he doesn’t notice it; this missive from memory.
He walks slowly. Inhaling the wind into his lungs, he thrusts his hands into his coat pocket. He recalls the day when a folded sheet of paper lay inside another coat pocket, crumpled there like a bird’s broken wing. He’d left the house that evening too and walked this same road.
Autumn then. The alders flecked with burgundy and gold, a bounty of apples and pears that would remain unpicked in the weeks after.
That night a haar had approached like a thick white sheet and hovered over the fields, obscuring the loch. He’d sat there for hours staring into its dim whiteness, remembering a summer afternoon the year before when they’d picnicked under a sycamore there. Spreading out a blanket in the wind, her hair had bloomed like a flower. From a basket she’d taken out sandwiches, a flask of tea, and a selection of fruit – blackcurrants and gooseberries. Blackcurrants were her favourite.
She’d talked of leaving, how she didn’t want to be like her mother who’d lived her whole life in one place, who could recount the intimate lives of her neighbours 10 doors on either side. How rumours travelled between them like salesmen with their cases of samples, bartering their wares without invitation. She’d wanted to be a nurse. Her parents wanted her to work in a factory like two generations of her family before her. She’d come to the island that summer to work in her grand-uncle’s pub, to save money to run away, she’d said. Magnus had never considered leaving the island.
As Magnus approaches the lake now, he feels her touch as palpable as it was over half a century ago. He sees her head curved downwards, her wet fingertips on his forearm. The air brisk then too. The smell of blackcurrants on her breath. Could memory slip its skin like a selkie? Emerge as a different creature? By standing at the lake that day, and every other day on her anniversary, did he think he could vanquish death like he himself had so far averted it? An irregular murmur in his heart like an ancient timepiece stuttered and erratic; and yet, a rhythm that had kept him alive. All the times since when he’d confronted the shadow of loss head on, riding the island’s black roads on his motorcycle, pushing hard on the accelerator, trying to forget.
Magnus liked to think she’d been holding someone’s hand when the sound that would envelop her descended. A young soldier perhaps, the gentle pressure of her fingers on his pulse, a balm to fear and pain.
The grass is damp when Magnus sits down. He unties his shoes slowly, pulls his trouser legs up to his knees. He can feel the cold even before he enters the water, sharp and biting. He wades in, the lake’s silty floor sifting through his toes and feet. Tess barks behind him.
Just as the haar had settled around him that night, the lake’s water murmurs in and out. A few paces from him a sycamore tree, at the base of which they’d carved their initials.
Magnus imagines her hand release the soldier’s wrist, his pulse of breaths numbered and recorded. He watches her walk past the tight cluster of beds and gurneys to the doorway, where she folds back the flap of tarpaulin and leaves. It is not the North African sun she sees then as she raises her arm against the light, squinting, but Magnus’s face, his hair wet, his body glistening in the lake water. The taste of blackcurrants in their mouths.
Majella Cullinane writes fiction, poetry and essays. She has published two poetry collections and a novel. Her first short story collection will be published by Quentin Wilson Publishing next year. Cullinane lives with her family in Kōpūtai/ Port Chalmers.
