Trading Rosemary Read online

  The morning after the season ended, and the last week of her school holidays, Rosemary scraped the congealed remnants of a jar of feijoa jam onto her toast. It had the consistency of a rubber band, sticky and stringy, but at least she had managed to finish the pot this time. As a small child, she had made the mistake of being a little too polite about her grandmother’s jam, and ever since a new jar had been waiting for her every time she visited. The previous one had fallen prey to mold and rubbish bin in less than quick succession, for Rosemary’s grandmother was a better musician than housekeeper, and as she aged Rosemary grew better at finding excuses not to eat the stuff.

  (It’s full of sugar, Nana, don’t you know what it does to your teeth?)

  (I’m on a diet. There’s a dance next week and I’ve got a new dress I need to fit into.)

  (Look, I’ve made us scrambled eggs for breakfast. Could you please pass the salt?)

  When her grandmother came down, she had up-ended the jar and shaken out the last few gobbets. Lately, as the reality of weeks without early morning practice started to sink in, the older woman had begun to feel wistful for feijoa jam. Rosemary expected this; it happened every year. The problem was that the more she ate it, the less impressed she was with it.

  “I’ve bought the same jam from the same shop for years, and you know what, darling? I don’t like it much at all. It’s very distressing. I think nostalgia has blunted my taste buds. To think of all the years I’ve shoveled it down! It’s criminal! You would never know that it had fruit in it—at least not the real, live fruit I used to steal out of the garden when I was your age.” She shot her granddaughter an arch look. “Don’t ever get old, Rose. Nothing’s what it used to be. You become such a terrible cynic when you get old, and everything tastes wrong. This jam used to taste of summer when I was your age. Now it’s a little jellied graveyard.”

  Rosemary rolled her eyes. “It’s just jam, Nana.”

  “Nothing’s just anything,” said her grandmother. “There’s no reason to settle for just. No, I’ve decided. We’re at a fairly loose end now, and our time is our own. If we’re going to have Jam, it might as well be Good Jam.”

  “Oh,” said Rosemary. “Goody.” But she said it under her breath, knowing that her grandmother was trying to share something with her beyond the music that Rosemary had no true feeling for.

  Desperation drove them to the local health food store, Rosemary reasoning that they were least likely to add anything to jam that a fussy old person might object to. The two of them skirted the door distrustfully, trying to slide in without being noticed, as if they were after pornographic coins rather than breakfast. The shop was filled with tubs of what smelled distressingly like rabbit pellets but it also had jars of what looked like homemade jam. They were in little glass pots with handwritten labels and a checked blue and white hat, and some were feijoa. Rosemary held one up to the light and the warm golden glow got her grandmother’s happy approval, but she had to cringe in teenaged embarrassment when the woman asked for some rashers of fatty bacon to go with it.

  “We don’t sell meat here,” said the young man at the counter, his face alight with the enthusiasm of a zealot. “Pigs have feelings too, you know!”

  “Not when they’re dead they don’t, dear. And besides, they ought to be glad that they’re giving such enjoyment after they’re gone.” She grinned at him, retreating into a little old lady innocence that would have fooled no one at the conservatory. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  The jam proved to be runny and sour. There was hardly any sweetness to it—unsurprising, considering where it came from. Sugar made life a lot sweeter, so naturally it and the happiness it gave were out. Surprisingly, Rosemary had actually enjoyed it, dragging bread soldiers through the sticky surface and leaving them to crumble on her plate. She was deliberately untidy, as she had been as a child, knowing that her grandmother approved of her making a mess because she felt it was good for her.

  “It reminds me a bit of marmalade,” Rosemary had said, and her grandmother sighed. “I like marmalade,” she said, defensively.

  “You would. In my opinion, darling, you’re too drawn to the bitter. I remember when you were a very little girl, I tried tempting you with raspberry jam, with blackberry preserves, but watching you try to pick pips off your toast with a needle before eating it was far too depressing. Red streaks everywhere! Not that I minded, but it was like you were trying to disembowel your breakfast. Most disconcerting.”

  When she dragged Rosemary back to the shop to complain about the lack of sugar, the assistant had offered her some organic honey instead. They had politely refused, and stood poking through the kelp extracts, cheerily snacking on bacon rolls. Rosemary’s cheeks were red as apples throughout, but her grandmother thoroughly enjoyed herself. The rolls were a trifle squashed from being in her handbag, but she enjoyed making the point.

  They kept the jam. What else to do? Rosemary’s only consolation was that it would never thicken enough to go rubbery. Even the cat wouldn’t touch it, and considering the animal was a waddling garbage disposal unit, that was something. Her grandmother had always kept cats, always fed them tidbits from her table. It kept them from going after the birds, she said, and what was a little fur in her food now and then? Better that than feathers, lonely and curled up at the edges, or clumped in the corner connected by smears of hard dried blood, and the cat sitting smugly with red tinted claws.

  In the end, they resigned themselves to making their own, spending an entire day in the carriage, roaming the orchards of Golden Bay, where dusty leaves of the fruit trees devoured the sunshine, leaving only patches to fall to ground like crumbs. The faintly furry feijoas fit snugly into Rosemary’s palm, their bright skin taut almost to bursting. She ate some of them immediately, tearing the skins open with her fingers and sucking the flesh from them, juice dripping down her chin and disinterring memories of her childhood.

  She had been three years old. Her parents had been viewing a house—one they would eventually buy—and at the bottom of the garden were three feijoa trees, dusty sentinels in a line of cool green shadows, slouched in the warm sunlight. With her younger sister waddling beside her, Rosemary had pressed into the trunk of the first tree. The fruit hung down temptingly, squat and bulbous. Careful to keep the thick foliage between herself and her parents, she had squeezed and squelched at one fruit after another. Poached as they were in the afternoon air, the taste had struck her, acrid and furry, the taste of possums fighting on a corrugated iron roof at night. The taste was as vivid as sound; she could almost hear the scratching.

  Her sister stood blinking in the sun, rounded eyes watching, strangely greedless. Standing in the sun and watching Rosemary like a dazed owl in daylight, drawing attention to them both, to Rosemary’s petty thievery. She wouldn’t hide behind the trunk of the tree, wouldn’t blend into the shade and lick the sweet fruit. It was beyond her to be unobtrusive. Rosemary had wanted to hit her.

  Since then, feijoas had been a touchstone, present if not acknowledged. A half-eaten pot of jam was always in the pantry, a reminder more than anything else, a possibility that didn’t come in a case. Coins were all very well but you couldn’t eat them, and the smell alone was accurate enough to drive her wild and slavering, even if the taste almost always ended up being a disappointment. Rosemary didn’t eat the jam often (it was usually reserved for the mornings when she needed to go shopping) but she found comfort in knowing that it was there, in the reminder of the summer holidays spent at her grandmother’s.

  Her grandmother didn’t buy feijoas anymore; bought fruit trees instead and planted them in wet earth that clung to her fingers like pulp and pectin, planted them and waited.

  It was a long wait but she was patient; it was what made her a good musician. Years passed before she tried to make jam again. Years before the seedlings in her garden were mature enough to bear fruit, but while the trees grew strong her grandmother’s body was fading. Her gait became hitched and halting; it was hard
er for her hands to grip the instruments and Rosemary had to help her on the stairs and with the music shelves in the library. When once it had taken ten paces to walk from her back door to the nearest tree, it now took twenty. It rained enough so that when she forgot to water them, the trees would survive until her knees remembered to make the trip, until the sun stopped the rain-ache in her joints long enough to make the effort. Or until her granddaughter visited, to be chivvied into the garden to do it for her.

  “You should let me hire you a gardener,” said Rosemary, but her grandmother refused.

  “Those will be your trees when I’m gone,” she said. “You can look after them. Better yet, hollow one out and bury me in it, or float it out to sea burning, like they did with the Vikings.”

  “That hardly makes me want to cooperate,” said Rosemary.

  “Tough,” said her grandmother. “Besides, the fresh air will do you good. You’re spending too much time in that library. It’s turning you pale.”

  The trees were overburdened with fruit when her grandmother died, and Rosemary carefully stripped them off the trees and gave them away; had cut down the trees and used their wood for funeral burning, for coffins and cremation. The funeral had had to be delayed while the wood dried, but Rosemary was firm. She had her instructions. Her grandmother had left her strings of scented wood along with those instructions, strings reminiscent of bubbling pots and pectin-fingers, and Rosemary hung them over her kitchen window, wove her fingers through them at night when she couldn’t sleep and breathed in the smell of warm fruit on toast.

  She kept some rough discs from the wooden off-cuts, carved them into coins, and used them to the hold memories of music. The crumbs and the bright red needles and bacon she kept to herself—for a while.

  Rosemary traded her memories to a sweet-toothed vintner with no space for anything but grapes. Afterwards, on a whim, she visited the nearest feijoa orchard. It took her four hours to drive there and then back home, When she returned to her own kitchen, her clarity of purpose had faded almost as much as the feijoas. They fitted into her palm, plump and unblemished. Their color was as it should be, but Rosemary could not escape the feeling the feijoas had somehow paled, and that their bodies, once quick with golden glow, had faded in upon themselves. They seemed dusty, and try as she might, Rosemary could resurrect no life or memory from their taste.

  She didn’t try to preserve them, but threw them away, and took down the strings cluttering her window. Some memories were better left undisturbed, and some were better off not being made. She felt more peaceful with them gone.

  The scent of the fruit lingered in the kitchen, a sweet green-yellow. Rosemary scrubbed out her cupboards with sugar soap, and when she had finished her hands were wrinkled and clean and she couldn’t smell fruit in her house anymore.

  Cargill

  The fifth coin had gone to a jewelry collector who lived in the far south of the archipelago, one who specialized in coins that were slightly warped and just round enough to give the illusion of beads. Rosemary paid for its return with a necklace of shimmery coins she made herself, aboard a private sailboat she had hired to quicken the journey to Dunedin. She spent several days wearing her own necklace, feeling the flashes of pleasure, of fragmented memory and flickering emotion, feeling the way they intertwined when brushing against her skin. It was a highly sensuous experience, lying on deck, playing with her necklace and smiling at the crew—especially the cook, who cooked her gurnard he caught fresh, and told her stories of the places he had visited.

  Why not? she thought, when he came back early from shore leave. Rosemary had not wanted to leave the boat, had come back as soon as she was able, once the arrangements for the following day’s trade had been completed. The necklace hung prettily around her neck, coins twisting against her skin, brief contacts flashing through her consciousness, the smell and feel of the coast.

  She helped him stow the supplies, unsurprised when one of his hands brushed against hers in the galley, and again on the deck. She had spread blankets there to sunbathe, and the wool caught against her bared skin. Why not? There were no responsibilities here, no child or library or household to consider, just the warmth of the wind on her bare skin, the gentle rocking of the boat, the smell of the sea around her, and the shadows of gulls passing over the boat.

  Always strong-stomached, she enjoyed the sunlit rocking, tempered as it was in harbor. The heat of the sun left her dizzy, closing her eyes against the brightness.

  Above her, he smelled of cockles and fresh thyme, the faint astringency of lemon. Her breath seemed magnified in her ears; the slap of water loud against the side of the boat. She moved with him and the boat, and the memories jostled against naked skin, changing positions as she rocked, bright flashes before closed eyes.

  Jam jar gleams green in the sun, a plastic roof tied taut, tight with rubber. Many hands pass it along, octopus-like, but unlike the octopus no one opens the jar—although why they don’t is beyond her. Probably no one would let them do it, for fear it would upset the parents. But then, passing a poisonous spider around in a jam jar was okay, especially when the one who was poisoned was doing the passing. Got bit several times, he said. Felt like being pinched with pliers, he said. She peers closely through the jar, at the multifaceted eyes within, but the katipo is small, inoffensive, and when it waves its legs it is impossible to see where its mouth is, when it would bite.

  They live in driftwood, he said, the dry salt scent of driftwood. The afternoon sun fell golden around, golden outside and greenly within the jar. If you’re going to sit on driftwood at the beach, be careful, he said. These would sting more than the hot sand, be more cutting than the spiny dune plants on the tender feet of a new summer.

  There’s driftwood on the beach at Brighton, but it doesn’t glow, or show what lives within. It’s bleached bone white, with tints like it has leached the color of sand. There is no red stripe down its back, and there is not even the warning of a plastic cover, or the hovering poisoned man grown to love his poisoner, showing her off to gaping children.

  This is where she bit me, he said.

  The intertidal zone breathes around her, a damp and lisping littoral lung. When the sea inhales, the coast is exposed, and the beach is ripe for shaping into crumbling buildings and sand-shedding beasts. Rosemary builds alligators with shells for teeth and women with algae for hair. Then the deep watery exhale . . . the muddy scent of wet sand, and the sculptures are eroded, their temporary solidity denied.

  A steep shoreline, it’s a precarious perch for building, but one that is tolerated because of the view. The shining plain of the Pacific, which defines the horizon and reflects around it, is a match for the sky. It is blue when the sky is blue, but more often, when the clouds have come over the coast it darkens into choppy roughness, into restless waves that can be seen from far above: the view of seabirds with salty feet. It remains their view first, as over the decades the water level rises, waiting for the dunes, hungry for them, a menacing patience that bites into the beach. There are museums on the coast that show a different shoreline, and her mother tells of beaches that have shifted inland, and higher, as the water rises. The ocean’s breath deepens, and there is less room for the children’s castles, the strange and wonderful beasts, the mermaids that guard them, the architectural, cockle-studded bestiary of the tidal zone, the sand castles that Rosemary builds and gleefully knocks down again. The sandy bodies drown in the tide, and remain as ghosts, disembodied on the sea floor, when one day their small sculptors will evacuate, full grown, to higher ground, leaving their childhood behind.

  She always looks for it last, it’s so hard to find. Looks with specimen bags and neatly written labels, with alcohol to leach out the amino acids and a guidebook to aid identification. One-thousandth the size of kelp, and not as bright as the green sea lettuce, for all that they’re part of the same class, both Chlorophyta—a strange kinship on a far-from-Latin coast. It’s feathery, is plumosa, but only when it sways in th
e water and the barbs curl in the current. Otherwise not. Green feathers, like a fern with all the starch taken out, hiding in shallow crevices where the sun doesn’t reach, a green and secret smell, salt rotten and tinged with traces of methanol. Feathery like the rock wren, tiny and shy, that flirts with the wind and still stays close to shelter, bright eyes gleaming out from shadow. Bryopsis has no eyes, but it flutters like the wren, and its feathers plume from the rock. Brightly, knightly, like a coat of arms, like a flag, or the decoration of an unseen helmet. Perhaps it dreams of dragons, but when she attacks from above the brave feather dies, lies limply over one finger, a soggy mass with all the barbicels laid low, and the green darkened to death.

  This is what the rock wren leaves behind in summer storms, what remains of the helmet when it leaves the safety of the crevice and returns headless, shorn. It is what the fern loses when it stays in shadow.

  It lies on the beach, washed up, the limbs heavy and spread. It is stripped of bark, and only a few tatters remain, but underneath the smooth white wood is hooked with spines—they are irregular enough to surprise fingers, and it is hard not to touch it, to feel the catch on smooth skin. Rosemary is not the only one who does—people are drawn to it, the carcass on the beach, and a girl with dark hair leaves her rock pools and her hunt for the glistening paua to stroke the bare branches. Its limbs are as naked as hers, damp wood mixed with sweat and perfume and the hard brine of rock pools.

  Standing on the rocks, from the perspective of height, the branches reach like fingers; like tentacles. From an angle, it is hard to tell if they are branches or roots, but the confusion doesn’t matter as they no longer strain towards sky or earth, but lie, out-flung, to the surrounding stone. They are as long as the trunk, or longer, and stretch like a giant squid in rigor mortis, its tentacles straining for water as the roots once reached for moisture in the soil, or the leaved branches stretched under the wet sky. There is no water here, among the tide pools, just the thin crust of evaporated salt, and the drowning on dry land.