False River
Author: Paula Morris
Date: 2017-10-30 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories; Essays; Non Fiction
Description: Riffing on truth, lies and secrets, this collection uses fiction to explore fact, and fact to explore fiction. Fictional characters muse upon the truth behind real people, non-fiction pieces contain short interludes of fiction, fiction is written to read like an essay, made-up elements slip into true accounts. These pieces range the world - from America, to Antwerp to Aotearoa - and talk about writers and writing, famous figures, family members, witch-burning in Denmark, cyclones and numerous pertinent and stimulating topics. All brilliantly written, each will leave you thinking and desperate
Publisher: Penguin eBooks (NZ Adult)

Riffing on truth, lies and secrets, this collection uses fiction to explore fact, and fact to explore fiction.

Fictional characters muse upon the truth behind real people, non-fiction pieces contain short interludes of fiction, fiction is written to read like an essay, made-up elements slip into true accounts. These pieces range the world — from America, to Antwerp to Aotearoa — and talk about writers and writing, famous figures, family members, witch-burning in Denmark, cyclones and numerous pertinent and stimulating topics. All brilliantly written, each will leave you thinking and desperate to jump back in for more.

Contents

1. False River

2. Premises

3. Three Princesses

4. La Rondine

5. The Third Snow

6. Isn’t It

7. Great Long Story

8. In Antwerp

9. Billy the Kid

10. Women, Still Talking

11. Rocky Ridge

12. Inheritance

13. Sick Notes

14. City to be Abandoned

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin Random House

For my sister, Lynn-Elisabeth Hill, and my brother, Stephen John Kiri Morris

Author’s note

The first six stories in this collection — ‘False River’, ‘Premises’, ‘Three Princesses’, ‘La Rondine’, ‘The Third Snow’ and ‘Isn’t It’ — are fiction.

‘Great Long Story’ and ‘In Antwerp’ are essays but have also been published in the past as fiction. The original version of ‘Women, Still Talking’ (called ‘Women, Talking’) was published as fiction, but is now an essay.

‘Billy the Kid’, ‘Rocky Ridge’, ‘Inheritance’, ‘Sick Notes’ and ‘City to be Abandoned’ are nonfiction.

False River
for Sarah Doerries

The day my father-in-law died, I was back in New Orleans, pretending to be there on business. Really I was there to attend a funeral — not my father-in-law’s funeral, someone else’s. I couldn’t tell my wife about this funeral because she would have said things or — far worse — said nothing. Either way, when I got back to Houston the house would feel even colder and emptier than usual, and she’d have her back to me all the time, shoulders tight with disapproval.

The house in Houston was too cold and airtight anyway. Our old house in New Orleans was porous, cockroaches popping up between the floorboards, flying termites slipping in where the cracked wood of the window frame didn’t quite meet the peeling sill. Dirt from the schoolyard across the road washed up underneath the front door and gritted up the Turkish rug. Even with the side shutters permanently closed, lines of light, cloudy with dust, pointed spindly, accusing fingers at the living-room floor.

Once we found a tiny green lizard dozing on the Venetian blinds in the bedroom; another time my older daughter saw one scuttling down the hallway, and chased it with a Tupperware sandwich box, planning on capturing it and releasing it to the wild. But the wild was inside our house, and under it, and all around us. We could never shut it out.

After Katrina, my company moved to Houston and decided not to come back. That happened to lots of people; that was why they left New Orleans. And Greta, my wife, liked Houston, because there the wilderness was contained: stop lights worked and potholes were filled in, and nobody drove the wrong way down one-way streets. We didn’t have to park the car on the neutral ground on Claiborne when there was an especially heavy rain and our street looked sure to flood. Also, Houston had a really big mall, maybe the biggest mall anywhere, and my wife and daughters liked that a lot. They were tired of living in a northern port in the Caribbean, Greta told people. They wanted to live in America.

At first we came back for parades, and sometimes for Jazz Fest, staying in the house on Napoleon that Bertie, my father-in-law, bought when he moved to the city from Hammond, and kept even after he retired to Florida. But after six years, seven years, the girls had other things to do during parade season; in Houston they didn’t get two days off school for Mardi Gras. In the summer they would rather go to Sarasota where their grandfather had a condo on the beach.

When Greta rang with the news about Bertie dying, I said I was in the lobby of my hotel, but really I’d just walked into the reception area at Lake Lawn Cemetery. I was looking for signs for the Fortier funeral.

Bertie had been felled by a heart attack, she said, when he was out buying a morning paper, shuffling along in his Adidas slip-ons. It wasn’t his first heart attack, so no one was surprised. Greta’s brother was already on his way out there, she told me, to take care of everything. But there was one problem. Bertie died in Florida, but his wine collection was in New Orleans.

‘You need the wine for the funeral?’ I asked, turning my face to an alcove decorated with an urn spouting fake flowers. I didn’t want anyone to recognise me and start shouting out my name.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We need to take it before LB gets back and grabs it all.’

LB was Little Bertie, Greta’s brother. I called him Al, and his work colleagues and old college buddies did as well, but people from Hammond, people who knew him when he was a child, called him LB.

‘I don’t understand what you want me to do,’ I said, and Greta made a clicking noise with her tongue, the way she always did when she thought I was being slow or obstructive.

She wanted, she said, for me to go to the house on Napoleon and find some of the wine — the most expensive bottles, the ones he’d brought back from France and was keeping for some important occasion that never came.

‘You know the ones,’ she said. ‘He was always showing them off to you. He thought you were the only one who would appreciate them, and he was right. LB’s happy with beer.’

‘So why do we have to do this now? Can’t it wait until the will is read, or whatever?’ I’d seen this in movies, the reading of the will in some mahogany-panelled lawyer’s office. I imagined Greta in a black veil and gloves, sobbing — ostentatiously, ferociously — into a scented handkerchief, though Greta was not really the sobbing kind.

‘Are you kidding? LB and Christa will have stripped the house by then. The last time I went, I swear to you that half Mama’s crystal was gone, and even some of the paintings. No way Daddy took them to that little box of his in Sarasota. You have to get in there now, while LB’s gone. I didn’t tell him that you were in town, otherwise he would have sent Christa to the house for a pre-emptive strike.’

As ever, I admired Greta’s presence of mind. Her father dies, and her first thought was to keep my visit to New Orleans a secret, just in case she could talk me into lifting some wine.

‘How am I going to get into that house?’ I asked. ‘You and LB have the keys.’

‘Break in,’ she said. ‘Wait until it gets dark and then break in.’

‘I don’t know anything about breaking into houses,’ I told her.

‘Use your imagination.’

‘What if someone sees me breaking in and calls the police?’

‘People break into houses in New Orleans all the time. Nobody ever sees anything. And if they do, they never tell the po-lis.’

She always pronounced ‘police’ that way when we talked about New Orleans.

I got a few more orders — only pick five or six of the most valuable bottles; make sure I covered my tracks — but then I told Greta I had to go. My meeting, I said, meaning the funeral, was about to begin.

I guess it wasn’t really a funeral, as such: Rich Fortier had already been cremated, and the family had summoned us all to Lake Lawn’s visitation room, which looked like a hotel conference room with an altar wheeled in. Rich gave me my first real job in the oil business, and was generous about helping other people move up and out, so there were at least a hundred mourners eddying in and out, doing a bad job of keeping their voices down.

Rich was a big guy whose mouth always seemed full of fried oysters or hot dogs drowning in chilli. It’s a miracle he made it to sixty. The carved wooden jewel-box of his ashes looked all wrong, mean and fancy at the same time, the opposite of Rich.

It was even worse once we were ushered to the mausoleum area, to stand around a shiny slab on the wall. This slab was the door to a tiny vault where the box of ashes would be hidden away. The gleaming wall with all its hidden doors reminded me of a fitted kitchen. Rich’s grandchildren lolled on one of the polished wooden benches and his wife, Betty, wore the distracted, anxious expression I remembered from crawfish boils on their driveway. The giant flower arrangement on a stand wore a beauty-contestant sash that read PAW-PAW in royal-blue letters. We were waiting around, I heard, for some judge, a friend of the family’s, to say a few words.

Jimmy Clark wriggled up out of nowhere and grappled me into an awkward hug.

‘John!’ he said. ‘Look at you, old man. In a suit and all.’

Jimmy was Rich’s nephew, and we’d grown up on the same street in Marksville. He was still as spidery as a skinny kid, even though he had to be thirty-two, maybe thirty-three. But these days his hair was sparse and fluffy at the front, and though his arms were matchsticks, a little belly stuck out over his belt. In his food-stained white shirt and black pants, he looked like an off-duty waiter.

Last time I heard, Jimmy was living in Alexandria, for no particular reason, selling coffee at the concession in Books-A-Million. Before that he’d sold coffee at Albertsons, further along the same stretch of highway, but he’d left under some kind of cloud. Jimmy carried clouds around with him, his brother once told me, the way kids carry balloons. Michael, Jimmy’s brother, was a lawyer now, but still lived in Marksville, representing the aggrieved of Avoyelles Parish at the old courthouse in the square.

‘Is Michael here?’ I asked. Michael was my age, and we used to share a ride to Menard, our high school in Alexandria. I looked around for him but it was hard to see much but the backs of people’s heads; Jimmy and I were crushed into a corner, the afternoon light sickly through the window’s checkerboard of stained glass.

‘He couldn’t get away. Big case, something to do with the prison. Or the hospital, maybe. I’m staying at his place right now, so we’ll drive back up tonight.’

I didn’t ask who he meant by ‘we’, though I had a pretty good idea. Anyway, Jimmy was already on another topic. He was in the city to do some research, he said. This was Jimmy all over. He was always doing some kind of research, but nobody ever knew why, and nothing seemed to come of it. Obsessions took hold of him, and he had to pursue them, and to talk about them until everybody was sick of hearing it. His latest passion, he told me, was Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer.

‘He was born in Wales. Illegitimate. Ran away to sea when he was seventeen.’

‘People were always running away to sea in those days,’ I said. ‘Does anybody do that anymore?’

‘Some time in the 1850s he found work on a ship out of Liverpool and ended up in New Orleans.’ The judge, tall and black-robed, had materialised near the flower stand, and people were shushing each other, but Jimmy didn’t seem to notice. ‘His real name was John Rowland, but in New Orleans he got himself adopted by a rich man, name of Henry Stanley. So he changed his name.’

‘Really,’ I said, though I wanted Jimmy to stop talking. At least he’d lowered his voice.

‘Lots of people changed their names in New Orleans,’ he told me, leaning in. A tattoo I didn’t remember peeped out from under his shirt collar — maybe a bird’s claw, or the spikes of a star. ‘Tennessee Williams and O. Henry, for example. Did you know that Stanley fought for both sides during the Civil War?’

‘Family and friends!’ said the judge, in a molasses-thick voice. ‘Let me say a few words.’

Some strung-together scripture followed, and a Lord’s Prayer with the added lines for any Protestants in the crowd. I wondered why Stanley, the name-changing explorer, had chosen to fight for both sides. Not at the same time, I assumed, unless he was the Mata Hari of the Civil War.

The judge stepped away from the flowers, and an official-looking woman dressed in navy blue took over, pointing to the exits.

‘That ends our proceedings today,’ she said, her face blank of any emotion. ‘You are dismissed.’

A murmur of disapproval echoed off the marble cupboard doors.

‘That’s just rude,’ said a loud voice, and I almost laughed out loud. Thea.

I strained to see her, and she was easy to spot in the crowd, even with her back turned towards us, even though half the other women there were blonde, and even though she was wearing some kind of fur shrug, black streaked with grey, that wasn’t her usual style at all. I knew the particular sway of Thea’s hair, the pert way she held her head, the slope of her shoulders.

‘Thea’s supposed to drive me back to Marksville tonight,’ Jimmy told me. ‘But her car stopped running this afternoon, so I don’t know what we’ll do. I have to be home first thing in the morning.’

‘You’re working in Marksville now?’ I asked. Jimmy shook his head, squinting up at the stained-glass window as though the weak show of sunlight annoyed him.

‘Got to show my face there tomorrow. I’m kind of out on bond right now. And Thea needs to be there as well, because …’ He glanced at me, then looked away again. ‘It’s a long story.’

It was always a long story with Jimmy.

‘I could drive you,’ I said, without thinking. I didn’t need to stay the night in New Orleans, I told myself. Tomorrow I had a meeting in Lake Charles — a real meeting, and the reason I was driving on this trip rather than flying. Tonight I could drive to Marksville and surprise my mother. She wouldn’t say a word about it to Greta, not if I asked her to keep it quiet. My mother never told Greta anything anymore.

‘Man, that would save my life,’ said Jimmy. People around us were walking away, complaining about being dismissed. ‘Thea!’

She turned to look in our direction, not smiling, not surprised, imperious as ever, as though she knew I’d be standing there by the picnic-tablecloth of a window, waiting for her to notice me.

We parked outside Bertie’s house, waiting for dusk and discussing possible plans of action.

‘The neighbours may get suspicious,’ Jimmy warned me.

‘Please,’ said Thea. ‘Three white people in a Lexus?’

She had rolled her eyes when she saw I drove a Lexus, but it hadn’t stopped her sliding into the front seat and obscuring the handbrake with her snake-skin purse. She kept the fur shrug on, even though the day was humid and not even slightly autumnal.

‘For the record,’ she continued, looking at me, ‘I think this is a bad idea. If you’re going to break in, at least take something of value. Make it worth the effort.’

‘Some of that wine is worth a lot,’ I told her, speaking loud to drown out Jimmy in the back seat, humming the Monday Night Football theme music. When we were young, I used to tell him to quit making his strange noises, but now we were all peers, more or less.

‘I was thinking sentimental value, but hey, it’s your family.’

‘It’s Greta’s family,’ I said, and got out of the car. In the trunk I dug out the flashlight and the jack. Jimmy cracked open his door.

‘Want some help?’ he asked.

‘No!’ shrieked an unseen Thea. ‘You’re in enough trouble.’

I didn’t need Jimmy’s help, though the last time I broke into anywhere, Thea and I were teenagers looking for somewhere to get high on a wet Sunday afternoon: we kicked in the door of Bob Ritchie’s tool shed and sat in there on deflated pool floats, each of us cradling one of the garden gnomes Bob liked to refurbish, giggling like fools. But I had a notion of how to get into Bertie’s house, through the screen door around the back where rain had warped the wood. I wasn’t worried about the neighbours, even though their house was close enough to touch, because I was family, kind of, with every right to be trudging through the side gate armed with a car jack, intent on breaking in through the back door.

To get there I had to navigate an obstacle course of upside-down plastic lawn furniture, rotten with mould spots, and a mountain range of tree roots that had forced its way up through the cracked paving stones. I hadn’t been back here in years, and neither had anyone else, by the looks of it. But all it took to prise open the screen door was my penknife; the lever on the car jack got me through the back door and into what passed for a basement in New Orleans, a concreted floor spotted with roach carcasses, and the skeleton of framed internal walls that Al had stripped bare after Katrina. The washer and dryer were down here, and dusty plastic tubs jammed with bags of beads, relics from the days when Bertie rode with Thoth: he never threw it all, and everyone always nagged him about buying so much every year.

Any wine left in the house was upstairs, I knew, where floodwaters couldn’t reach it. Up there the house smelled stale and a little off, like garbage had been sitting around for too long, though that’s the way it smelled when Bertie lived here full-time. He never had the air turned up high enough.

On my way in, I made a mess of the door at the top of the stairs, smashing and splintering a hole so I could turn the handle. This meant the police might be called at some point, when Al next came around and saw the damage, but I doubted they’d do anything, especially if nothing much was stolen.

There wasn’t much in there to steal. The dining table and chairs were gone, something that would enrage Greta, and the wall of the front parlour was a blank of sallow rectangles, where paintings of doughy, dark-eyed Creoles used to hang. The silver-plate was missing from the credenza. When I investigated Bertie’s usual hiding places for his wine — a box in the linen closet, the nest of beach towels under the bed — I found nothing. Either Al and Christa had been pillaging, or Bertie had transported his stash to Florida. The former, I decided, when I checked in the final place, the old laundry chute in the bathroom. Al would never think to look here for wine; he was devious, but not as devious as his father or sister. So there were still four bottles in there, something to brandish, like spoils of war, on my return to Houston.

They weren’t bad bottles either, I realised, doubling up Rouses bags from the pantry to carry my stash. Romanée-Conti from 1988; Pétrus from 2001. A 1993 Pichon Lalande that I half-remembered Bertie showing me once. The oldest was a 1978 La Mission Haut-Brion. They might have been worth a few hundred each, or maybe a lot more. Greta could have the fun of researching and tallying, of relishing the secret triumph over her brother and his wife. She would never drink the bottles of wine, and I doubted she would even sell them. The secret triumph would be enough.

I grabbed a six-pack of beer from the fridge as well, mainly to annoy Al, and let myself out through the front door. Back at the car, I slid the bagged wine into the back seat, next to Jimmy and my folded suit jacket, and offered him a beer. I threw another can into Thea’s lap.

‘I am surrounded by the criminal element,’ said Thea. Her window was down and she was smoking, something I thought she’d given up years ago.

‘Your wife doesn’t have a key to her own daddy’s house?’ Jimmy asked. I told him that she did, in Houston, but all of this — the death, the demand — had gone down today, when I was already here. ‘She couldn’t come to Uncle Rich’s funeral?’

I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t feel like lying on Greta’s behalf: stealing was plenty for one day. We were driving between stop signs on Napoleon at high speed, because all I wanted now was to get out of town.

‘What’s her deal,’ Thea said, not looking at me. It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway.

‘She doesn’t like New Orleans anymore.’

‘Tell her New Orleans doesn’t care.’

‘I can’t tell her anything these days,’ I said.

‘Not a single thing she likes about the city?’ Jimmy asked. In the rearview mirror I spied him squirming and flinching in the back seat as though some bug was dive-bombing his face. ‘That’s crazy.’

‘She still likes her daddy’s wine, apparently,’ said Thea, raising her stockinged feet so they rested on the dashboard. She always pushed her seat right back and took her shoes off when she got in my car. That much hadn’t changed.

Thea was the reason I couldn’t tell my wife about the funeral. Just the mention of Thea’s name could turn a day sour. Greta thought that Thea and I still had too much going on, too many stories and secrets and allegiances, even though I hadn’t seen Thea or spoken to her since we left New Orleans. Anything I heard about her these days was through Michael. She had boyfriends rather than husbands; she lived downtown. When she started working at the Historic New Orleans Collection, office rules dictated that women wore skirts and pantyhose, but Thea insisted that the rules be changed.

‘We could go see Henry Stanley’s house right now,’ said Jimmy. ‘I know where it is. They moved it to Coliseum Street.’

‘They’re always moving things around,’ Thea complained. She opened the beer and placed it in my cup-holder, twisting the can so I could pick it up and drink. ‘Everything they can’t tear down.’

When I told Jimmy that we didn’t have time to look at Stanley’s house, wherever it was, he sat in a sulk until we were halfway to Baton Rouge. He sat clutching the bag of wine the way he used to hold onto a cushion when he sat watching TV. The only sound that came from the back seat was the clank of the beer can hitting his teeth.

This was a drive I’d made many times before, of course, but not one I liked making, not since the storm. On I-10 across the Bonnet Carré Spillway with its stunted cypresses, past the refinery that sparkled like a spot-lit city, all the way to Baton Rouge, and then across the Mississippi. At False River there was the turn before New Roads, then Morganza, Simmesport, and another river to cross, the Atchafalaya, with Avoyelles Parish waiting, poor and hot and dozy, on the other side. In the old days, whenever I passed Baton Rouge it always seemed to me I was back in Louisiana proper, where there was more time and more space, and hunting squirrels was a family activity.

By the time we turned off the Interstate, Jimmy was talking again. Two cans of beer and he wouldn’t shut up.

‘The thing is,’ he said, as though one of us had asked him a question, ‘Dr Livingstone wasn’t lost.’

‘Why are you still talking about this?’ Thea asked. She’d made him pass her another can, and she was keeping me supplied.

‘It’s history. You know that’s my thing. What else I’m’a talk about?’

‘Maybe you could discuss why you’ve started saying “I’m’a”,’ she said. ‘And earlier today, I swear I heard you say “bu’on”.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked. We were passing False River now, and I was trying to distract myself, glad that someone was talking.

‘Button,’ she told me. ‘I don’t recall the context. I was too appalled to continue listening.’

‘Dr Livingstone wasn’t lost,’ Jimmy said. ‘He didn’t need to be found. The whole thing was a publicity stunt. It was just Stanley trying to get famous. That’s why people know him today — because of the whole “Dr Livingstone, I presume” thing.’

‘So what you’re saying is, it worked,’ said Thea.

‘He probably made that up as well. He probably never said “Dr Livingstone, I presume.” But he did lots of big things in Africa, like navigate the Congo River. No white man had ever done that before.’

‘Maybe the Africans didn’t want white men there, navigating their rivers. Maybe they could navigate their rivers themselves.’

‘Nobody remembers things like that about Stanley. All they remember is this one thing that may not even be true.’

‘Maybe he didn’t navigate the Congo River either,’ Thea said, giving me a sidelong look. She always knew what I was thinking. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t believe a word this man said. Stanley wasn’t even his real name. He just picked it up in New Orleans the way John picked up that wine.’

‘Hey!’ said Jimmy. ‘Look at the Legoniers’ old house. Slow down!’

I slowed the car so we could take a long look at the house, lit up by fake gas lamps. It was a sherbet orange, its storm shutters painted a watered-down purple. A fat Chevy Tahoe sat in the driveway like a giant toad. Beyond it, the water lay dark and unruffled, a gully of black between the houses lining the shores on either side.

‘They painted it,’ said Thea.

‘Looks like Key Largo,’ said Jimmy. ‘It doesn’t look like here.’

‘What does “here” look like?’ Thea asked him.

‘Not like that.’

‘That place used to be a fish camp,’ I said. ‘Now it looks like — well, Florida. Jimmy’s right.’

Against my better judgement, I kept the car at a crawl. Once, everything along the water here was brown boards; only a few houses were whitewashed, and most places were as dark and plain as the fish that people came here to catch. Twenty, thirty years ago, most of the houses were smaller than boat sheds, sprinkled close to the water line. Now the old houses were going, sold for stupid prices to people with money in Baton Rouge, and pulled down. In their place the new owners built stucco bunkers or South Beach villas like this one, spreading to the boundary lines so the homes were practically touching. After Katrina, Greta and the girls stayed in a house along here, and that was a fortress. It even had electric gates.

‘Not worth thinking about,’ Thea said to me in a low voice. ‘We should get going.’

‘This used to be part of the real river,’ Jimmy said. ‘It got cut off after a spring flood, sometime in the 1700s.’

‘You know I hate it when people say things like “1700s”,’ Thea said, her voice loud. ‘What are we, Italians? In English we call it the eighteenth century. When someone says “1700s” to me, it’s as though they don’t trust me to work it out.’

‘Everything I say, you complain.’ Jimmy sounded sulky again, the way he used to when he was little and someone had rubbed love bugs into his hair. ‘And you call me Jimmy, when you know I don’t like it. People call me Jim now. Even MéMé remembers to call me Jim.’

‘Well, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.’

‘Just be sorry because you’re sorry. Don’t qualify it.’

‘I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just hard for me to remember to say Jim.’

‘Even MéMé remembers,’ Jimmy muttered. ‘And she’s eighty-three.’

I was sorry, too, because I’d been calling him Jimmy all day. The three of us weren’t used to spending time together anymore: we didn’t know how to behave around each other. Jimmy was sulking, Thea was smoking, and I was driving around drinking beer. It was twenty years ago, except now I was driving a Lexus and Thea was wearing a fur shrug, and none of us lived in Marksville anymore.

Thea must have felt guilty, or maybe she just wanted him to talk, to keep my mind off things. Either way, she nagged Jimmy all the way to the Morganza Spillway to tell us more about Stanley, and promised not to interrupt or complain or criticise.

‘He wanted to be buried in Westminster Abbey,’ Jimmy said. He nudged Thea’s shoulder until she passed back another beer. ‘Right next to Dr Livingstone. But the bishops and such said no.’

Before the storm, Thea had an old sailboat that she docked up on the lake. Once, long ago, I asked her about how far we could sail in a boat that size. Mexico, she reckoned. We’d head for the coast, where the brackish lakewater turned the sea into sludge, and then out into the blue waters of the Gulf. Eventually we’d hit the Yucatan. We could live in Merida, she said, in a painted house with a string hammock hanging in the courtyard.

The lake swallowed up Thea’s boat, Michael told me. I thought of it now but didn’t mention it, just as she wasn’t mentioning the house on False River, where my wife hid for six weeks after the storm, refusing to tell me where she and my daughters were living. It was better just to let Jimmy talk, to tell us about the bishops denying Stanley his place in history. Stanley was a nobody from nowhere, Jimmy said. To a lot of people, snobby people, he was just a guy who ran away to sea and made up a lot of stories.

We pulled on to the shoulder in Simmesport, just before the bridge, so Jimmy could take a piss in the trees along the levee. He said it was the beer, plus the proximity of Avoyelles Parish made him nervous. After he disappeared into the shadows, I asked Thea to give me a short version of the long story.

‘I can tell you what happened,’ she said, peering out the window at the straggly line of trees. ‘He got drunk, rode off in Robbie DuBea’s lawnmower, and crashed it into a tree. It’s unauthorised use of a moveable, and a felony. Unless we can talk Robbie into dropping the charges, Jimmy’s going to jail. Maybe hard labour in Angola, depending on the judge.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘The trial’s tomorrow?’

‘Not a trial. We’re meeting with Robbie as a family, begging for mercy. We’ll buy him one of those big fancy lawn tractor things, and Jimmy will cut his grass for a year. Or we’ll pay someone more responsible. Whatever it takes.’

‘Hopefully he’ll be reasonable.’

‘Robbie’s just annoyed with Jimmy about what happened last year, that whole thing with burning down the tree house.’ Thea waved away the question I was about to ask. ‘I just wish Jimmy would stop turning up in Marksville and going crazy. He needs to run away to sea. Do people still do that?’

‘He might be doing that now.’ Jimmy hadn’t re-emerged from the stand of trees along the river. Thea glanced at the back seat.

‘He’s taken the wine with him,’ she said, and started pulling on her shoes. I opened my door. We were both thinking the same thing, I knew. Nothing good could come of Jimmy Clark and four bottles of wine, out in the darkness alone, on the banks of the Atchafalaya River.

I didn’t even stop to grab the flashlight. The ground was soft, the grass long and damp around my shins. Thea stalked ahead and then clambered up the bank on all fours, the moonlight picking out the silver streaks in her pelt.

‘Jimmy!’ she called, looking for a way through the trees. ‘Jimmy!’

We found him on the far side of the tree line, facing down the river. He was wearing my suit jacket, a bottle of wine bulging out of each of the front pockets. He’d managed to slip the bag handles over his head, so the bag still holding the other two bottles hung in front, like a bib. He wasn’t planning to drink the wine, I realised. He was using it to weigh himself down.

Thea was calm again. She stood next to her brother on the levee, looking out at the river. From the bridge it always looked milky and benign, but this close to it you could hear it moving, dragging itself towards the sea.

‘Some people,’ said Jimmy, ‘say that the Atchafalaya is so deep, you can’t touch the bottom.’

‘I’ve heard that,’ I said, ‘but no one really believes that, do they?’

‘Up here it’s a ditch,’ said Thea, though this wasn’t true either. ‘People in Simmesport believe anything.’

‘The Congo is the world’s deepest river.’ Jimmy turned to face Thea, and the bottles around his neck clanked. ‘Not many people know that.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Thea admitted.

‘I’m sorry I made you slow down,’ Jimmy said to me. ‘You know, back at False River. I wasn’t thinking straight. All of this talk about Angola is making me crazy. I can’t go to Angola.’

‘You’re not going to Angola,’ Thea told him. ‘I promise you. We’ll fix everything tomorrow. All of this will blow over.’

Even Jimmy knew my business, I realised. Of course he did: half of Marksville knew my business. They knew that I was in Houston when Katrina hit, and that Greta decided to turn evacuation into a separation. At first I couldn’t reach her and the girls because none of the 504 cellphones were working, then finally Al told me that Greta didn’t want me to find her. She was leaving me, he said. When the waters receded, and the city opened up again, he said, Greta wanted to sell the house and get a divorce.

I hung around Marksville, staying with my mother and getting legal advice from Michael: there was no point in hiring a private detective, he told me, because the whole state was an uproar of displaced persons. Marksville alone had thousands of extra residents, sleeping in churches and on porches and in people’s RVs. The casino parking lot was jammed with cars, people who had nowhere else to go. The sheriff turned a disused factory on the highway into a shelter and put inmates from the women’s prison to work, unloading donations of food and bedding. Nobody knew anything. Everyone was lost.

Greta wasn’t lost: she was hiding. But because this was Louisiana, I didn’t need a private detective. One of Thea’s friends spotted Greta at the Langlois’ Grocery in New Roads, and after two days sleeping in my car on False River Road, I saw my youngest daughter skipping along the driveway of the house with the electronic gates.

We didn’t get divorced, but we did sell the house in New Orleans. That was the deal. Thea and I argued; she told me I was getting rid of the wrong thing, and I hung up on her. That was the last time we’d spoken.

‘Hey, Jim,’ I said. ‘Can I have one of those bottles of wine?’

Jimmy leaned forward to look at me, the breeze puffing up his dandelion hair.

‘I guess,’ he said. ‘It’s your wine.’

‘No, it’s not mine.’ Jimmy pulled a bottle out of one of the pockets and handed it to Thea, who handed it to me. It was too dark to read the label, but that didn’t matter. I held it by the neck, and hurled it as hard as I could into the river. The splash sounded small and distant. Jimmy hooted — delight, disbelief — and Thea grabbed my sleeve.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her voice crackling to life, and I said it was Jimmy’s turn next. He tossed in another bottle, almost tipping forward from the weight of the bag around his neck. When we heard it plop into the water, all three of us cheered.

‘Now Thea,’ I said, and we waited while Jimmy untangled himself from the plastic noose and pulled out a bottle.

‘Pichon Lalande,’ she said, squinting at the label. ‘I hope it la-lands somewhere interesting.’

She threw it high in the air; we watched it arc into the darkness. The river gulped, and flushed it away.

There was one bottle left, and Jimmy presented it to me. I aimed for the bridge, trying to break the bottle, but either the bridge was too far or too high, or my arms were weak these days. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thrown a ball. The splash sounded tiny after so much effort.

‘You are dismissed,’ said Jimmy, jabbing an accusing finger at the river, and I started laughing. Thea was laughing as well, her head thrown back. Jimmy howled at the moon and raised his arms in triumph, and we laughed even more. I felt unsteady on my feet, giddy, as though we’d drunk the wine rather than thrown it all away into the river.

Back in Houston, I told Greta that the wine was already gone. All I’d been able to find in the house on Napoleon, I told her, was a six-pack of beer in the fridge. She spent the rest of the day making threats about contesting the will or having her brother arrested, though I doubted she’d do much of anything other than rant, especially once she got her hands on that condo in Sarasota.

I was hoping that Thea would call me with some news about Jimmy. In the end Michael was the one who called, days later. Jimmy was off the hook this time, but they were sending him to some cousin’s place near Gulf Shores to stay out of trouble, or at least to get into trouble in another state. Thea, he said, was back at work at the Historic New Orleans Collection.

‘She says to tell you she’s planning a book about collectors of fine wine in Louisiana,’ Michael told me. ‘That’ll be a short book, right?’

The day after we threw the wine in the river, I drove from Marksville to Lake Charles for my meeting. Somewhere along the Cajun Prairie, the sun hit the dashboard, and I saw the incriminating smudge of Thea’s footprints up there. I decided to wait until I was almost home in Houston to clean them away, glancing over at them now and then to fix the shape of them in my mind. They were like a wild animal’s print, a reminder of something dangerous close by, usually hidden from sight.

But when I stopped for gas and opened the passenger door to clean them away, I couldn’t see anything there, not a trace of sweat or riverbank dirt. There wasn’t a thing to see or smell or touch. The footprints had evaporated, if they’d ever been there at all.

Premises

They call you from New York and Los Angeles: it is a conference call. They have an idea they want to run by you. How would you like to make a million dollars?

You would like to make a million dollars. What do you have to do?

They’ve come up with a premise for a novel, which could be made into a movie. This way, everyone wins. Everyone in New York and everyone in Los Angeles. And you, of course. It’s your lucky day.

Here’s the premise. A beautiful girl, a grand old house, a love triangle. It’s simple, but it’s perfect. They’ve come up with this killer premise, and you have been selected to spin it into gold. At first, they want a short synopsis, and then, if they like it, you’ll be paid to write the whole thing. Up front. Before it even sells! That’s how generous they are.

Of course, they will own the copyright, because it is their original idea. But you will get your up-front payment, as discussed, plus a cut when it sells. And even a small cut of a million dollars is a lot of money. A lot more money than most writers earn.

Make it historical, they say, because historical is hot right now. With the right synopsis, they really believe they could get a million dollars. You could get a part of that million dollars. Everyone wins! Mainly them, because it is their idea. All you have to do is pad the premise out. But get it done within the next two days, because the market keeps moving.

You decide to get it done.

A beautiful young girl, who lives in a small, crowded house in the country, is taken on a visit to a strange city. There she is torn between two lovers. One is an enigmatic, handsome young man, the son of a retired military man, a general. But her brother and his new fiancée want her to marry another young man — the fiancée’s pushy brother — and everyone conspires to keep the girl and the general’s son apart.

Luckily for the girl and the suitor she prefers, the crusty old general invites her to their vast country estate, where the family lives in a grand old house that used to be an abbey. Our heroine suspects the house holds a very dark secret: the secret imprisonment, or maybe even murder, of the general’s wife.

Her young lover refuses to believe this. Our young heroine befriends his sister, and tries to forget her suspicions. But one night the general returns abruptly from a trip to the capital and sends her packing. She’s no longer welcome at the abbey. What has she done?

Back at home in the country, everything goes wrong. Her brother has dumped his fiancée, because he discovered she was trying to seduce a richer man — the elder son of the general, a playboy who will one day inherit the abbey. And the fiancée’s brother, jealous that our heroine has rejected him for the general’s son, is doing all he can to sabotage that relationship. He has led the general to believe she’s a rich heiress, and now whispers to him that she’s a fraud — nothing but a social-climbing destitute country mouse. That’s why the general threw her out.

Despite everything, the general’s son still loves her. He doesn’t care if she’s rich or poor, or if she once suspected his father of murdering/secretly imprisoning his mother. He is prepared to renounce his family to be with her. But his sister has secured a rich husband, so the general calms down. They marry and live happily ever after.

You email this synopsis, and wait three days. There is another conference call. The murder thing is too much. Too much darkness. This is supposed to be a rom-com, not Bluebeard. Nobody knows what an abbey is. They like the sister thing, and the going-to-the-strange-city thing. They want you to return to their original premise, which was brilliant in its purity, its focus, its ability to make a million dollars. They want you to try again, and to do it in a hurry: there is no time to waste. If you can’t do it, they’ll do it themselves.

No, you tell them: you can do it. Of course you can. You want to be paid up front. You want your share of the million dollars. You know what you have to do.

Two sisters, young and beautiful, live in a grand old house. But when their father dies, they and their mother and their much younger little sister are thrown out by an unfeeling older half-brother and his social-climbing wife. They must live like destitute country mice in a cottage on someone else’s vast estate.

The older girl falls in love with the brother of her social-climbing sister-in-law, but she’s informed that the brother can only marry a rich girl. If he doesn’t, his rich mother will cut him out of her will. The younger girl is torn between two lovers — someone older and wiser, who dotes on her, and a handsome young playboy, whom she really prefers. He rescues her when she has an accident while out walking in the rain.

The sisters are taken on a visit to a strange city. Everything goes wrong. The older sister’s dreams are dashed: the man she loves is secretly engaged to an idiot. The younger sister’s dreams are dashed: the man she loves is newly engaged to a rich girl. The idiot blabs to the social-climbing sister-in-law about her secret engagement, and there is an uproar. The brother is disinherited, which is almost a relief, but his dreams are dashed, too: because he is a young man of honour, he can’t break his engagement to the idiot, and marry the older of our two beautiful heroines, whom he really prefers.

Meanwhile, the younger sister goes mad with grief. On a visit to someone else’s country estate, she goes out walking in the rain again, even though she knows this brings nothing but trouble. She falls dangerously ill. In the middle of the night, during a dramatic thunderstorm, the playboy turns up and explains to the older sister that he can only marry a rich girl. If he doesn’t, his rich aunt will cut him out of her will.

The playboy suitor is a cad: he’s already seduced and abandoned another country-mouse girl, who happens to be the ward of the younger sister’s older suitor. The older sister discovers this villainy, and tells her younger sister, who recovers from her illness, sees the error of her ways, and marries the older, wiser man. The idiot dumps the older sister’s beau, because his brother now has all the money. So he’s free, at last, to marry the older sister. They move into the parsonage on the grand estate of the younger sister and her new husband. They all marry and live happily ever after.

This time they take more than a week to get back to you. They’re in meetings. Important meetings. This time there’s no conference call, just one person passing on notes. They still like the sister thing, though the little sister is too young. Only include sisters old enough for parties. They like the cad thing, too, especially the seduction of a young woman. They’re not so sure about the older, wiser suitor. How old is old? And a parsonage is almost as bad as an abbey. Nothing exciting can happen in a parsonage. They need more scenes in a grand old house. The grand old house was an essential part of the original premise. You are straying from the million-dollar idea. You only have the weekend to fix it, because they need this first thing Monday morning.

You’re not sure if this is first thing in New York or Los Angeles, but you don’t ask. There is no time to lose.

Five sisters live in a small, crowded house in the country. The girls are worried, because when their father dies they and their mother will be thrown out by an unfeeling cousin, and they will have to live like destitute country mice. The oldest sister, who is the most beautiful, is in love with a rich young man who’s renting a grand old house in the neighbourhood. He lives there with his social-climbing sisters and his richer, older, proud friend.

The second sister, who is the most clever, is not in love with anyone — especially not with the young man’s richer, older, proud friend, who snubs her, or with the unfeeling cousin, who wants to marry her and make her live in a country parsonage. He will inherit the house where our heroine grew up, so long as her father does not remarry and have sons. He proposes to her, and she says no. He storms off in outrage and marries someone plain.

When the oldest sister goes walking in the rain, she falls dangerously ill at the rented grand old house. She recovers, and her engagement to the rich young man seems imminent, despite the interference of his social-climbing sisters.

Military men come to the village, and two of the heroine’s youngest sisters flirt with them. One is a handsome playboy, and the second sister falls for him. He hates the richer, older, proud man, and so does she.

The oldest sister is taken on a visit to a strange city. Everything goes wrong. The oldest sister’s dreams are dashed: she hears that the man she loves is engaged to the rich, older, proud man’s sweet younger sister. The second sister is taken on a visit to the unfeeling cousin, who is a social climber, and his plain wife. Nearby is a grand old house, owned by the richer, older, proud man’s rich aunt. He doesn’t snub the second sister anymore. He proposes to her, and she says no. He storms off in outrage.

The second sister is taken on a visit to a strange county. She sees the very, very grand old house owned by the richer, older, proud man. He turns up and is charming. He introduces her to his sweet younger sister. But everything goes wrong. She receives a fateful letter. The playboy military man is a cad: he’s already seduced and abandoned another girl, who happens to be the sweet younger sister of the richer, older, proud man. The second sister has already discovered this villainy, and told her older sister, but they did nothing. And now her youngest sister elopes with the playboy military man. Everyone has to go home. Everyone is ruined. Nobody will marry the older sister or the second sister now.

In secret, the richer, older, proud man bribes the playboy military man to marry the youngest sister. He allows the rich young man to propose to the oldest sister, despite the objections of the social-climbing sisters. His rich aunt turns up to threaten the second sister, but it’s too late. When the richer, older, proud man proposes for a second time, the second sister sees the error of her ways and accepts him. They all marry and live happily ever after in their respective grand old houses.

A week and a half drifts by. Finally, you get an email. This isn’t bad, they say. They’re glad you kept the rich aunt and the sisters. They don’t mind the parson, especially when he gets rejected. But nobody seems torn between two lovers. And maybe there are too many sisters and too many houses and too many counties. Two sisters and one house and one county are preferable. Everything should happen at this one grand old house, with maybe an excursion to one other house. Try again. You can have the weekend, they say. It’s a holiday weekend, so you’re getting three whole days.

You’re beginning to get irritable. Weeks have passed, and you still haven’t been paid a penny. You’ve already done the two sisters and one house. There was only one grand old house in the very first synopsis. You feel as though you’re going in circles. You decide to give them exactly what they ask for, with a twist.

A shy, poor young girl, who lives in a small, crowded house at the seaside, is taken to a grand old house in the country. There she is brought up by her rich uncle and two rich aunts. One, who is the lady of the manor, is kind to her. The other aunt, who is married to the local parson, is not. Our shy heroine has four cousins — two sisters and two brothers. Everyone but the younger boy-cousin treats her like a poor relation.

They all grow up. Our heroine is still shy, and quite plain. The older boy-cousin is a playboy. She falls in love with the younger boy-cousin. The older girl-cousin gets engaged to a rich idiot who owns a grand house nearby.

Two visitors from the capital arrive: they are glamorous and popular. The sexy lady-visitor plays the harp, which everyone loves — except the heroine.

Everyone goes on a day trip to the countryside. Our shy heroine realises that the younger boy-cousin is in love with the sexy lady-visitor, and that both girl-cousins are in love with the sexy man-visitor. Our heroine is facing a life of quiet desperation as a spinster. She is very unhappy about all this.

The rich uncle sets off on a visit to a strange country. In his absence, everyone runs amok. They decide to stage a saucy play at the house. Our shy heroine disapproves, and refuses to take part. She thinks it lowers the tone of the grand old house. She watches in dismay while the younger boy-cousin courts the sexy lady-visitor, and the older girl-cousin flirts with the sexy man-visitor.

But one night the rich uncle returns abruptly from his trip and sends the players packing. The older girl-cousin gets married to the rich idiot. Now the sexy man-visitor starts courting our shy heroine. He wants to marry her, but she says no. The rich uncle and aunts are angry with her, and send her home to her destitute seaside-mouse family. Finally she is allowed to return, but the sexy man-visitor has tired of waiting for her. He has eloped with the older girl-cousin, and now everyone is ruined. Nobody will marry the younger girl-cousin now.

The older boy-cousin, who has been dangerously ill, recovers and sees the error of his ways. The sexy lady-visitor says scandalous things, implying the affair is no big deal, and hoping that the older boy-cousin will die so the younger boy-cousin, whom she prefers, can inherit the grand old house. Everyone turns on her and realises that our shy heroine was right all along about everything. The sexy man-visitor dumps the older girl-cousin, and she is forced to face a life of quiet desperation as a fallen woman. The younger boy-cousin, seeing the sexy lady-visitor is morally corrupt and a social climber, proposes to our shy, plain heroine. They marry and live happily ever after in a nearby country parsonage.

They do not like this. They do not like it at all. You wait nine whole days to hear the inevitable: you have gone off the rails. This is supposed to be rom-com, not a moral tale. You may still have the grand old house, but the heroine is plain. There’s no excitement in a love triangle if the one you’re supposed to be rooting for is dowdy, passive and prim. And, as discussed, the parsonage is a comic byway, not a romantic destination. You can’t just add in a second rich aunt and hope for the best. They want beauty and secrecy and proactivity and a rich aunt and a fateful letter.

Keep it light. Keep it happy. Keep the house. Maybe add another grand old house: you can never have too many. But why did you get rid of the secret engagement thing they liked so much? And does the heroine need to be a pauper? That was never in the original premise.

The original premise that could sell for a million dollars, if only you would get the synopsis done. It’s a no-brainer. If you can’t do it, they’ll do it themselves.

Historical is hot right now, but it may not be hot next week. The market is moving. They need something new ASAP. You have tonight, and that’s it. They urge you to use the time wisely.

A beautiful, rich young woman lives in a grand old house with her old, benign father. After she engineers a good marriage between her ex-governess and a local squire, our heroine decides to make a habit of it. She tries to set up her sweet orphaned protégée with the parson, even though the girl already has an understanding with a sweet local farmer. Everything goes wrong. The parson prefers the heroine. He proposes to her, and she says no. He storms off in outrage and marries someone plain and social-climbing.

Two visitors from elsewhere arrive: they are glamorous and popular. One is a cultured girl who must live with her poor aunt and face a life of quiet desperation as a governess. The cultured girl plays the piano, which everyone loves — except the heroine.

The other arrival is a handsome young playboy, the son of the local squire, who cannot do anything without his rich aunt’s permission. Soon our beautiful, rich heroine is torn between two lovers — someone older and wiser, who dotes on her, and the handsome young playboy, whom she really prefers. He has no money yet, unlike the older, wiser suitor, who has a house almost as grand as hers.

Everyone goes on a day trip to the countryside. Our heroine idly flirts with the young playboy, gets picked on by the mean wife of the social-climbing parson, and humiliates the poor aunt. The older, wiser suitor tells her off. She is very unhappy about all this.

She realises that she’s not really in love with the young playboy, and that he would be the ideal husband for her sweet orphaned protégée — not just because he rescues her when she’s out walking. But the protégée’s dreams are dashed once again: the young playboy is secretly engaged to the cultured girl.

The protégée decides she’s now in love with the older, wiser suitor. This forces our heroine to see the error of her ways, and realise that she should marry the older, wiser man. The young playboy’s rich aunt dies, freeing him to make his engagement public, and the orphaned protégée is reunited with her sweet farmer. They all marry and live happily ever after.

You get a call right away. They are annoyed with you. Where is the conflict? What is the inciting incident? The father is too rich and too benign. The grand old house just sits there, when it could be in some kind of jeopardy. There’s no fateful letter of any kind. The heroine isn’t really torn between two lovers, because she doesn’t seem to care much about either of them. She’s too young, perhaps. The age difference between her and the older man is too great. Audiences will think it’s sleazy.

Why did you get rid of the seaside thing they liked so much? And the military men? And the sisters — five were too many, but two are not enough. Three is a much better number.

Your job is to find the twist, and to do it overnight, because the market is marching on, and any delay costs. You do want a million dollars, don’t you?

You do.

Three sisters grow up in a grand old house. Years earlier, the second sister, who is the clever one, is courted by a military man, a dashing captain who is only slightly older than her. Her father does not like him because he is poor, and an interfering aunt-like friend thinks our heroine could do better. He proposes to her, and she says no. He storms off in outrage.

Now she has lost her bloom. Her social-climbing younger sister, who is an idiot, has married. Her social-climbing older sister, who is an idiot, is going on a visit to a strange city, because they have to rent out the grand old house. Their father has spent all the money. She is worried, because when her father dies, she will be thrown out by an unfeeling cousin, and she will have to live like a destitute country mouse.

The second sister goes on a visit to her younger sister’s country cottage. The captain returns to the neighbourhood. He is older and wiser and richer these days. He no longer seems interested in our heroine, preferring the charming-but-frivolous girl-neighbours. The older girl-neighbour is engaged to a sweet local parson, but the younger girl-neighbour is available for marriage.

Everyone goes on a day trip to the seaside. Our heroine realises that both girl-neighbours are in love with the dashing captain, and that he is flirting with them. Our heroine is facing a life of quiet desperation as a spinster. She is very unhappy about all this.

Everything goes wrong. The younger girl-neighbour has an accident while out walking. Our heroine nurses her, winning approval from the dashing captain, who is older and wiser these days. But then she is sent to the strange city, which she does not like, and must spend her time with the interfering aunt-like friend and the unfeeling cousin.

Soon our heroine is torn between two lovers — someone dashing and slightly older and wiser, whom she prefers, and the unfeeling cousin, who turns out to be handsome and charming and apparently filled with feeling. He has some money, though not as much as the dashing captain. But he will inherit the grand old house where our heroine grew up, so long as her father does not remarry and have sons.

The younger girl-neighbour, who has been dangerously ill, recovers and sees the error of her ways. She decides to marry another captain. Our heroine receives a fateful letter from a plain friend. The charming cousin is a cad: he’s already married for money, and is only courting the heroine to secure the grand old house. When she discovers this villainy, she doesn’t tell either of her sisters, because they are idiots.

She receives another fateful letter, this time from the dashing captain himself. Despite everything, the captain still loves her. She is prepared to renounce her family to be with him. But now he is a rich man, so her father calms down. They marry and live happily ever after.

You’re a little worried about this. It’s not really finished, you know. And maybe you are overdoing it with the two fateful letters. Maybe one fateful letter is enough.

After you send this off, there’s a long, ominous silence. You get no emails. When you call, assistants will not put you through. Everyone you’re calling is out of the office, or on another line, or in a meeting.

It’s over, you realise. They have lost faith in you. They have lost patience. You will not be getting any part of the million dollars. You will not be getting paid at all.

A week later, you get a call. They call you from New York and Los Angeles: it is a conference call. They have an idea they want to run by you.

Someone else has been working on this very same project. Another writer in another city. This other writer, who you do not know but — instinctively — do not like at all, has come up with a synopsis based on one element of your first synopsis. It is the part about the secret imprisonment of the wife.

There are other things they like about this rival writer’s work. There’s a sadistic school, the poignant death of a young girl, and a dramatic interrupted wedding. The insane wife burns the grand old house down; the rich older man goes blind. In other words, there’s more passion, and fewer sisters. You have too many sisters: that is your problem. This idea gets rid of all the sisters and parents. It keeps the rich aunt and the big house. Something is at stake. Something big and dangerous. Your problem is: you’ve gone too rom-com when this other writer has revealed the story could be Bluebeard, except with a twist, and a moral dimension.

But still, there’s work to be done on this idea, and they think you are the person to do it. True, there’s passion, and something at stake. But after the grand old house burns down, where are the star-crossed lovers supposed to live — in a parsonage? The heroine is plain, when she is supposed to be beautiful. (See: original premise.) And audiences aren’t going to want their hero going blind, and being cared for by a plain little nurse-like wife. He could go mad, maybe, because insanity is romantic, but blindness is just a disability, and not a fashionable one like Asperger’s syndrome or ADHD. And as for the mad first wife — she needs to be beautiful. All the women need to be beautiful. Movie stars don’t want to play ugly women.

Do you think you could do something to fix this? It could be a great novel, and an even greater movie. Everyone will win. Everyone in New York and everyone in Los Angeles. And you, of course. It’s your lucky day.

Set it in a grand old house, they suggest, with another grand house nearby, perhaps. Make it about a doomed love affair, and a passion that never dies. Somewhere wild and windswept, maybe? All while staying true to the original premise, which is the genius idea they came up with, the one that is guaranteed to make a million dollars.

You would like to make a million dollars. What do you have to do?

Three Princesses

The picture hanging near the glass door looked familiar. Fraser wondered if he’d seen the real thing in a museum somewhere else in Europe.

‘It’s not Estonian,’ the elfin hotel receptionist told him. ‘But I don’t know who. It is a painting of three sisters. I can find out the artist name for you.’

She frowned at her computer screen, as though such information might be listed on the hotel’s website.

It wasn’t a real painting; it was a print in a gilt frame. Fraser supposed it was like the other pictures in the public areas of the hotel, chosen to make guests feel cosy and Baltic and medieval, despite the No Smoking signs and the shiny, spitting coffee machine. Tallinn had been a rich city once, the picture said, with merchants in fur robes and heavy gold chains who might have had blonde, smiling daughters like these ones. This part of the building would have been his warehouse, piled with amber and pelts, with sacks of flour or barrels of weapons. The merchant and his daughters would have lived upstairs, their windows looking out into the mist and the chimney smoke, gulls cawing from roof tops, snow flecking the thick glass.

This was how Fraser imagined Europe looked, once upon a time.

The women in the picture had bread for hair: burnished yellow strands braided, twisted and woven into rolls and pretzels. Fraser stepped closer. Their hair must have been very long; they must have had maids to help them plait and pile. Their scalps must have been pin-cushions.

His own wife had short hair, which she described as low-maintenance, though it seemed to require an expensive cut and ‘re-touching’, whatever that was, every six weeks. She went to a salon, a word that Fraser thought affected and old-fashioned, on Jervois Road. He’d met her there once, when her car was being fixed, and he’d arrived too early. The place reeked of chemicals; his wife looked like a tin-foil hedgehog. The waiting-area chairs were fake leather, sticky with sweat when he tried to stand up. He’d been offered a coffee, and it arrived with a Hershey’s chocolate kiss half-melted on the saucer. The stunted chocolate in its fussy packaging bothered him most of all, because it was American and too sweet, and not even the colour of chocolate. In a salon, surely they should serve bonbons?

The hotel receptionist handed him his key, which was an actual key and not a plastic card, attached to a pale wooden doorstop.

‘You should not take this out with you,’ she told him. Her hair was blonde but pale and wispy, unsuitable for competitive plaiting and weaving. ‘Leave it here at the desk whenever you go. Anyway, it is too heavy.’

‘Yes, it is,’ he said, feeling pleased at the sight of a real key, and the weight of it in his hand. He was pleased, too, to have to walk into an exposed cobbled courtyard to reach his room, and to step down two stone stairs, slick with rain, to unlock the door. The door stuck, and had to be rattled open; this pleased him as well. There was no point to Europe unless it was old and strange, creaky and quaint. Here it was fine for shops to be called salons. Here, men could wear pink jeans. Cars could be tiny enough to park sideways. Coffee could be served in tiny doll-cups. At the Christmas market down the road from his hotel, on a slanted square in the middle of the Old Town, people buying mulled wine could help themselves to a sprinkling of raisins, and take a sliver of biscuit to dunk.

In New Zealand all the biscuits would be gone in the first ten minutes. People would grab greedy handfuls of them as soon as they realised the biscuits were free. Larrikins would throw the raisins at loitering pigeons, and drink so much mulled wine they’d puke it up in the gutter. The streets around the Christmas market would be spiky with the fragments of smashed souvenir mugs, not handed back to the vendor as agreed, even though a deposit for their return had been paid.

The Three Princesses of Saxony. That was the name of the picture in the hotel lobby; the receptionist had told him when he was handing in his key en route to the Christmas market. Fraser was sure he had seen those princesses somewhere before, in some painting, in some museum, in some European city. There were so many museums in Europe, columned and echoing, built to resemble Greek temples. Castles would be better, he thought, swigging his mulled wine. Somewhere the three princesses might have lived.

The stench of the nearby pen, housing bales of hay and actual live reindeer — pale and indolent, lolling against the hay — was too much for him. In this oldest of old towns, he was a visiting merchant, and it was time to go shopping.

Once upon a time there were three princesses, beautiful and fair-haired. They were beautiful for a number of reasons. First of all, the rampant in-breeding among ruling European families was still far into the future, and afflictions like the Habsburg jaw were unknown horrors. Second, the general standards of beauty were more expansive and forgiving. If you didn’t have bad teeth or a lazy eye, you could be considered a beauty. At various points in European history different notions of what was beauty surged and ebbed — sloping shoulders, long necks, small breasts, high foreheads, rosy cheeks. And if a girl was born into a wealthy family, then the sycophants, underlings, social climbers and alliance seekers within her family’s sphere of influence would all describe her as beautiful anyway.

These particular princesses were beautiful because they were young and well-fed and spent most of their time indoors, and because sugar cane was still growing in secret across the ocean, unknown to Europeans. So their complexions were soft and unlined, their teeth and gums were healthy, and they had a lot of time for preening, grooming and hair-brushing. Their skin wasn’t scorched by the sun or lashed by the wind; they didn’t have to subsist on boiled potatoes. Their faces weren’t gaunt with malnutrition. Their hands weren’t calloused or cut from work outside. Their backs weren’t twisted from hauling pails of water or digging in a field. In winter they never risked frostbite or chilblains on their feet. They were never kicked in the face by a cow. It was much easier to be beautiful if you were rich.

The three princesses were fair-haired because they were born in northern Europe, surrounded by other fair-haired people and descended from other fair-haired people. The Mongols had yet to ride west; the Moors still lurked far to the south. Sometimes a person with brown hair would wander into their baronial hall or through their castle gates, but it’s quite possible our princesses would live their entire lives without seeing someone with dark skin or black hair. They might have encounters with dwarves or witches, trolls or giants, but not with someone with brown skin and hair the colour of coal.

In any fairy tale with multiple princesses, one princess is the most beautiful of all. Sometimes it’s the oldest; sometimes it’s the youngest. Declaring the fifth of twelve, say, the most beautiful is too confusing for the reader or listener. Sometimes, even though the youngest princess is the most beautiful, the knight or poor guy or old soldier or whoever the heroic challenger may be in that particular fairy tale chooses the oldest sister to marry. She is the top sister, whether she’s the most beautiful or not. Or perhaps she would be offended if a more junior sister was chosen. Daughters should be married off in order, especially if they are all beautiful and fair-haired, and the oldest is not over forty.

Beautiful princesses are never over forty. By that stage in their lives, they should be queens, or dowagers, or dead. If their husbands happen to die first, the women must remarry and become stepmothers, seething with jealousy because they’re forced to live with their new husband’s beautiful daughters. To be over forty and no longer beautiful is a terrible thing; revenge must be taken. Nothing good comes from outlasting a husband, or outlasting your own beauty.

Our three princesses don’t know this yet. They’ve never thought much beyond the happy-ever-after.

Fraser needed to find a present for his wife. He’d already bought her amber earrings and a scarf, but these weren’t enough. She would suspect him of buying these items at the airport: he’d been rumbled before, betrayed by a duty-free receipt. Apparently this suggested neglect and panic-buying. It suggested a generic tourist-shop approach, a sense of obligation, the dwindling of passion and respect.

His wife was, overall, an intelligent and reasonable woman, but buying presents for her was fraught with peril. There was too much implicit symbolism, symbolism Fraser never grasped until the present was handed over and the damage done. The various gift-giving days each year — Valentine’s Day, their wedding anniversary, Easter Sunday, Mother’s Day, her birthday, Christmas, and the return from a big business trip like this one — were his Stations of the Cross.

He’d mentioned this to her once, and it seemed to make her happy rather than penitent.

‘Feeling scourged, are you?’ she asked him. Then she walked down the long passageway of their house, her head thrown back, cackling.

In the Christmas market he paced the narrow aisles of stalls, looking for something that would be symbolic in the right way. Too many of the stalls were selling things that would be useless in Auckland. Fraser couldn’t go home with a furry hat or a giant pair of knitted mittens: these were not things his wife would wear down Jervois Road, not only because it was never cold enough. He couldn’t buy her shot glasses featuring the Estonian flag — or, in fact, anything featuring the Estonian flag, though he thought she’d approve of the colours. She might refer to them as a colourway, which would annoy him, or a colour palette, which was almost as intolerable. When they were redecorating their bedroom, and Fraser was forced to show interest in swatches of fabric and paint shades with silly names like Mouse and Mushroom and Mist, his wife kept saying ‘colourway’ as though it were an actual thing, like the underpass at O’Hare airport with the rainbow-light installation.

He couldn’t buy her anything made of beeswax, like candles or soap, because these would be confiscated at Auckland Airport as a biosecurity threat, and he would end up appearing on Border Patrol, entrapped by a sniffer dog and denounced, on national television, by uniform-wearing functionaries and a satirical voiceover. The same applied to anything resembling Christmas wreaths, or reliant on dried flowers, sea shells and feathers. His wife had no idea how stressful it was to buy her a present overseas, even before the dark cloud of symbolism descended, obscuring all his good intentions.

One stall sold Christmas decorations, and Fraser spent some time there, staring so long at all the little faces looking back at him that the stallholder began handing him things, encouraging him to inspect the goods. Most of the decorations were small carved figures — trolls with dangling knitted legs, Vikings with axes, fair-haired girls in bright skirts and fabric floral wreaths. There were three different skirt patterns, three different ‘colourways’. He could buy one of each — one for his wife, one each for his two daughters, although the decorations were fair-haired and his wife and daughters were dark. Fraser would tell them the tiny girls dangling from a shiny loop of thread reminded him of the girls in the hotel-lobby picture, The Three Princesses of Saxony.

Once upon a time there were three princesses, so beautiful and sensitive that their parents could not bear to part with them. No man in their kingdom was intelligent, handsome, brave, rich and/or important enough for them. No man was their equal. This is the fairy-tale part of this story, because in reality royal parents were unsentimental about daughters: daughters were expensive to clothe and house and tend, and their vocation was a strategic marriage followed by strategic children and then, hopefully, an earlyish death before they withered into harridans, shrews, witches, stepmothers, domineering dowagers or poison-savvy widows. Daughters were the pedigree puppies of the old world; their value lay in their sales potential.

The princesses were unhappy, because their doting parents kept them locked in a room high in the castle, hidden from the impertinences of inferior suitors. There they moped and muttered, and over-brushed each other’s hair. They spent long hours devising elaborate hairstyles, braiding and pinning, twisting and piling, admiring each other’s efforts. These were the pre-printing-press days, so there were no books. Pianos were yet to be invented. There was only so much hand-sewing you could do, especially in winter when night drew in sometime in the middle of the afternoon, and the only illumination was the flicker of a candle and a smoke-spewing fireplace. The princesses wanted husbands and households of their own. Even the lowliest milkmaid in the realm had the chance to be seen and admired and kissed.

Their maid, who was brassy and over-familiar, kept them informed about social events at the castle, which mainly involved rowdy banquets in the big hall, but the princesses were never allowed to attend these. Lesser men might try to catch their eye, to make advances or proposals. The sight of these beautiful princesses might incite men to attempt a kidnap or start a war. Because they’d been hidden away so long, the princesses were more like mythical creatures; some people didn’t believe they existed.

One winter morning the maid had breathless news to convey: a strange visitor had arrived at the castle late the night before, not long after a heavy snow had begun to fall. He was tall and broad, with brown skin as warm as a piece of amber. Deep grooves were chiselled into his face — swirls and stripes and curls, somewhere between wound and pattern. He wore his long dark hair in a high bundle, pierced with a bone comb. Into his belt he’d tucked a white-tipped black feather, plucked from a bird no one at the castle had ever seen. He was a soldier and a traveller, born in a place far beyond the forest and the mountains, across many seas. He was on his way north, to look for a ship, and needed to rest his horse until the snow settled.

The three princesses were in an uproar. They wanted to see this dark-skinned stranger with his grooved face and magic feather, but they knew their parents would never permit it. So one of the princesses wrenched back the tapestry covering the open window, and the other two grabbed the maid. They dragged her to the stone sill and pushed her out so far that she was drowning in falling snow, moments away from plummeting to the slick white cobbles many floors below.

This is how they talked the maid into helping them.

That night, when the great hall was hazy with fire smoke and heaving with people, fresh reeds crunching underfoot, torches lit, drummers pounding, deer carcasses hissing on a long spit of lashed spears, the three princesses crept down the winding stone stairs to the kitchens. Each princess wore clothes the maid had procured for them — plain linen shifts and bright overskirts, kerchiefs tied over their heads to hide their elaborate, twisted piles of hair. The youngest sister wore a skirt patterned with pinks and yellows, the colours of spring; the middle sister wore a skirt patterned with blues and greens, the colours of summer; and the eldest sister wore a skirt patterned with russets and golds, the colours of autumn. The maid’s face was white, the colour of winter, because she was afraid her collusion would be discovered and she would be put to death.

Hustled into a stone recess just beyond the hall, the three princesses waited for their moment. When the crowd fell silent, they stepped forward, though only as far as the threshold. The dark stranger had clambered onto a stool to address the assembly, and although he was standing at the far end of the hall, they could see him. He was taller than the tallest man they’d ever seen, and darker than the darkest man they’d ever seen. The white-tipped feather was tucked into his bundle of hair.

He was speaking in a language they didn’t recognise, gesturing from one side of the great hall to the other. His words sounded like an incantation. The youngest princess wriggled forward, so she could see him better, and the others followed. Nobody noticed them, because everyone was looking at the dark man. His arms swept the room; his eyes swept the room. But he didn’t appear to notice them either. The oldest sister, who was the most status-conscious, decided it was because they appeared too low-born and therefore unworthy of his interest. In the guise of maids, they would never attract his eye. And now she was down here, in the great hall, in the hot, throbbing heart of her father’s fiefdom, she realised that it wasn’t enough to look: she wanted to be seen as well.

Without saying a word to her sisters, the oldest of the princesses untied the kerchief covering her hair, and let it fall to the floor. Her hair was a golden city, woven with cobbled lanes and narrow paths, arched with bridges. In the light of the flaming torch on the wall, it gleamed.

It took just a moment for the dark stranger to fall silent, and look straight at her.

The middle sister wasn’t having any of this. She had the best hair of all, a castle of butter, churned and moulded into turrets and gateways, encircled by a smooth yellow moat. There was no way she could stand cowering and simpering while her older sister got all the attention. She loosened the kerchief and let it fall.

The dark stranger’s mouth fell open.

Privately, the youngest sister thought she had the prettiest hair, because it was the colour of buttercups, and just as soft. She tugged off her own kerchief and flung it onto the rushes underfoot. Her hair was a meadow, a field of undulating yellow, all gentle slopes and furrows. A draft caught the tendrils around her face and they shivered like flowers in a breeze.

Everyone was looking at them now, gazing at the three princesses few had ever seen.

Their father ordered them back to their room, and the dark stranger rode away the next morning. He didn’t ask to marry any of the princesses, because he already had a wife at home, and she was demanding enough. He could have stayed here, he supposed, in this northerly place and never returned home at all, but it was too cold, the food was terrible, and bears, wolves and wild cats prowled the forests. Where he came from, there were only birds and fish, to be eaten rather than fought.

The maid was about to be put to death, so he asked for her instead, as a slave, though really he needed someone to guide him to a port. She rode with him on his horse, covered by the coarse wool of his cloak, whimpering with either fear or relief. Her hair was as fair as a sand dune, fluffy like toetoe. After she led him to the coast, he gave her six pieces of jade and let her go.

Back in the hotel, Fraser lay on his bed, watching ice hockey on TV because he could understand the match, if not the commentary. He admired the speed of it, and the slamming. The players wore bright armour and helmets, like knights built from Lego.

He missed his wife. She would have devised arch things to say about the youthful hotel staff and their cult-member smiles. She would have fed raisins to the reindeer in the market.

He hoped she and the girls liked the Christmas decorations he’d bought for them, the three fair-haired maidens dangling from shiny thread. One wore a skirt patterned with pinks and yellows, the colours of spring; one wore a skirt patterned with blues and greens, the colours of summer; and one wore a skirt patterned with russets and golds, the colours of autumn. They reminded him of the three princesses — not the ones in the picture hanging in the lobby, but a different three princesses he remembered seeing, through a haze of fire smoke, lit by a blazing torch. He’d almost forgotten them, but coming here had brought pieces of it back — just pieces, because it was so long ago, and too hard to reassemble. So long ago, it felt like another life.

La Rondine

When my friend Lisa decided to leave New York, she left her job, slept with my husband, and dragged her most treasured possession, a flea-market, peacock-blue silk sofa, down three flights of stairs and onto the street to be stolen. Then she moved to Los Angeles to live with a man she had met only four months earlier.

Lisa and this man, whose name was Alex, seemed very happy. They had a small Spanish-style apartment with a patio and bougainvillea: I saw the pictures on Facebook. There she posted observations on living in LA — for example, that nobody honked at you at a stop light if you didn’t take off the second it turned green — and announced, after just a month or so on the West Coast, that she and Alex were getting married.

This only happened a couple of years ago, but I can’t quite remember the exact order of events. Maybe Lisa slept with my husband before she met Alex and left her job, or maybe she did it when she was considering giving everything up and moving to LA, to test her commitment. That was the kind of phrase Lisa would use: actions had to be tested and measured and reported. She approached her life as though it were a social science experiment.

‘Let’s talk this thing through,’ she said to me the week she left New York. We were sitting on high stools in the bar of the Gramercy Tavern. Lisa was so tall she could sit with one foot touching the floor, while my soft-toy legs dangled, pale and pantyhosed. She grabbed my arm a lot, her hand moist with condensation from the cocktail glass. It was so noisy in the bar, I had to lean in to hear what she was saying. I leaned in so far my stool rocked and I had to grab the bar to steady myself.

What she was saying was: the past is the past, it can’t be undone, we can only move forwards. Forwards for her was Los Angeles — car, patio, flowers — and for me it was a studio in Park Slope with flat-pack bookshelves, my shoes stacked in clear plastic boxes, and a stairwell that smelled of damp cabbage.

Lisa squeezed my arm and stared at me as though she was checking my eyesight.

‘I know I did a terrible thing. Practically the worst thing I’ve ever done,’ she said, and I wondered what the other worst things might be. ‘But you know I didn’t break up your marriage. It was already broken. You know that.’

I wouldn’t have said it was broken, exactly. Unmoored, perhaps; I wasn’t surprised when it drifted away. Lisa went on to tell me that my husband had devised the one thing that would hurt me the most, so I would have no choice but to end our marriage. He wanted to destroy our friendship. He was the monster.

‘Are you ladies joining us for dinner?’ the bartender asked us. Lisa said nothing. As ever, she was waiting for me to speak.

‘Sure,’ I said to her, which meant two things: that I accepted that my husband was the monster, and that I was willing to pass dinner off on my expenses.

In the course of our friendship in New York — three years and two months — Lisa and I defrauded my employer out of dozens of dinners and probably hundreds of drinks. I listed her on my expense claim as a prospective client, masquerading under various false names. At first I gave her either an Italian or a Jewish last name. Then I started naming her for different opera singers at the Met: A. Netrebko, D. Voigt, M. Poplavskaya. At our most expensive dinner she was R. Fleming — for whom, we agreed, only the best would do.

That last dinner, at the Gramercy Tavern, she was A. Gheorghiu, though the real Angela Gheorghiu had just cancelled all her New York appearances, saying that she was sick. Lisa only started feeling sick the following week, after she arrived in Los Angeles, and before she realised she was pregnant.

The wedding was to take place on a Friday night in Mexico, to save money. Alex came from one of those families, Lisa had told me, where there was a lot of money floating about but nobody could ever really get their hands on it until they were too old to enjoy it. So there was talk of money, and occasionally there was some evidence of it, like a property transaction or a graduation gift. His mother, who lived in Kansas City with her third husband, a plastic surgeon, bought Alex the car. But she disapproved of Alex’s life choices — teaching, Los Angeles, Lisa — and wouldn’t pay for a wedding.

At first, Lisa’s parents refused as well. They’d been sending her money in New York to help cover her rent, and Lisa admitted that they were still recovering financially from her first wedding. Back then, her bridal gown needed its own seat on the plane from Atlanta, where Lisa and her mother bought it, to Louisville, where they all lived. The bridesmaids had worn forest-green velvet evening gowns and white fake-fur muffs, and the photographs alone cost four thousand dollars.

‘My parents still have the photographs all around the living room,’ she told me, maybe at the R. Fleming dinner. ‘Gold and silver frames. My mother says it breaks her heart to think of that money going to waste.’

I didn’t know Lisa back when she was married and living in Louisville, before she read a quote from Coco Chanel and decided to change her life.

‘Coco said a girl should be two things — who and what she wants,’ Lisa said. This was early on in our friendship. My husband and I moved into a floor-through below her studio attic in Williamsburg and she invited us up for drinks and devilled eggs, the only party food she knew how to make. That was the Louisville giveaway — not her accent, which came from nowhere in particular. She was too much, my husband said that night: too tall, too intense, too affected, with her devilled-egg platter and neat stacks of gas and telephone bills piled in the never-used oven. It was all an act, he said, and the flea-market sofa smelled.

Brian: that was Lisa’s husband’s name. The one she left behind in Louisville, and never mentioned. My husband’s name was Chris. At some point he’ll be the one I left behind in Williamsburg — though he lives in White Plains now, with his new girlfriend — and I’ll never mention him.

When we were first friends, Lisa and I would bump into each other on the stairwell and end up sitting there, talking, near the recess where another tenant had stationed a plaster St Teresa of Avila. Lisa’s face reminded me of a saint’s face in a medieval painting — long and serene, watchful. My husband didn’t get why we sat on the dirty stairs; we were like old yentas in a tenement, he said. So we started meeting up after work in Manhattan, and often I would just say that I was out with colleagues or clients. The night I said I was out with Waltraud Meier, he said he knew it was Lisa, because he saw us getting out of the cab together outside our building, and that I needed to be a better liar, because no one in the real world was named Waltraud.

I think I’m a pretty good liar, really, like anyone who sells ad space for a living. Lisa changed her name to Waltraud that week on Facebook, to annoy Chris and to make me laugh. After that, we were careful to never catch a cab home together again, as though we were the ones having the affair.

Lisa asked me to come to the wedding, and after endless pleading emails I relented and agreed. Her parents relented as well, about paying for things. Alex had an older brother, Patrick, who lived in Mexico and he made the arrangements. Lisa, getting her way as usual — that’s what Chris would have said, at some point between disliking her and sleeping with her.

Patrick was an architect who had moved south a year earlier to build a house for a rich family from Boulder. Work was going very slowly on the house, and Lisa said he was tired of living in a rented apartment with ugly furniture, and only ever meeting Mexican girls, who always wanted to get married right away.

For the wedding ceremony, Patrick found a villa high on a hill with a sweeping view of the Pacific, where Lisa and Alex could get married with the sun setting behind them and a swimming pool bubbling with silver balloons and white blossoms and bobbing candles. Lisa described it all to me the afternoon I flew in, at the big hotel on the beach where all the guests were staying.

She was five months pregnant by now, and her hair was longer than she’d ever worn it in New York. She was in the lobby when I arrived, and when she hugged me her bracelets dug into my bare arms. The long hug, the silver jewellery: these were parts of her new, Californian grasshopper guise. When she showed me the something-blue sapphire earrings her parents had given her, Lisa made a face.

Our rooms were in different buildings — mine I called Una Paloma Blanca — so we agreed to meet at the pool. Empty rooms unnerved us, I guess; we were used to talking in bars. I found her on a submerged stool in the wet bar, ordering a virgin piña colada. Her maternity swimsuit was a milky white shade, and with her belly swelling just beneath the surface, she looked like a blooming lily floating in a pond.

‘Are there any Mexican opera singers?’ she asked me.

‘I can only think of men,’ I said.

It was the day before the wedding, and wedding guests — forty relatives, from Louisville and Kansas City, with no one from New York except me and Lisa’s old boss — arrived at the hotel every few hours, blinking in the bright sunlight as though they’d just emerged from underground. Alex was never around.

‘He and Patrick call themselves the wedding planners,’ Lisa said, spinning the stool so her petals swirled. ‘He says I don’t have to do anything but sit here and talk to you. They’re probably diving off rocks or buying religious kitsch somewhere. My mother’s up at the villa, doing all the work. Delia!’

I knew Delia, Lisa’s former boss, only slightly. She ran a photographic agency, where Lisa’s job was to send everything by messenger and order elaborate Japanese flower arrangements for the front desk. Delia usually wore a black pantsuit and lugged around the world’s largest purse, so it was startling to see her wading towards us, flamingo-like in a pink swimsuit, two pairs of sunglasses perched on the crest of her head.

‘One is prescription,’ she explained, air-kissing me, clutching at the pair about to slide into the water. ‘The other is style. Will there be men at this wedding? Is Alex’s father single?’

‘Yes,’ said Lisa, ‘and no.’

‘The brother? The one who’s an architect?’

‘Yeah, but I was kind of thinking about him and Monty.’ Monty was Lisa’s name for me, after Montserrat Caballé.

‘Any cousins?’ Delia turned to the bartender and used sign language to order herself a drink like mine.

‘I’ve got one single cousin coming, but he’s only twenty-three. He just graduated from Brown. He’s very strange and sensitive. You’d eat him alive.’

‘So that’s why you’re here,’ Delia said to me in a low voice, when Lisa was busy greeting some of the Louisville people. ‘To sleep with the brother. I wondered.’

‘I’m here because I’m Lisa’s friend.’

‘And a better person than I am. If I were you, I would never have seen or spoken to her again. Hey, maybe you should sleep with Alex, to even things out? Though the brother has a better job.’

I hadn’t realised that Delia knew all my personal business. I sucked on the straw wedged into the pale sludge of my drink, and said nothing.

‘I’d give this marriage six months,’ said Delia, ‘but with the baby coming, maybe longer. Two years? That’s how long her first marriage was.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, and this was the truth. Lisa and I never talked about her first marriage.

‘What’s the brother like?’

‘I don’t know. I just got here a few hours ago.’ Delia gave me a look that was somewhere between contempt and pity. You don’t know anything, the look seemed to say.

That afternoon I met Patrick three times — introduced by Alex, then by Lisa, then by Alex’s mother, who was on her second muumuu and fifth drink. Her husband wasn’t with her, because his right foot had been crushed by a golf cart the day before. She said that after the glowing way Lisa had described me, she’d expected someone taller and more striking somehow, but now she realised that I was just perfect for Patrick.

Patrick was more tanned and less smiley than Alex — more ordinary, I guess, and without Alex’s bouncy boyish charm. He had fair hair and big teeth, and there were blobs of something that looked like concrete all over his Top-Siders.

‘We have to migrate south, like birds,’ Alex’s mother said, smoothing the sequinned folds of her muumuu, ‘but Pat gets to live here in the sun all year round!’

‘It rains a lot,’ Patrick told me. ‘In the afternoons.’

‘Aren’t you going to take Monty around the house? It’s such a beautiful place.’

‘It’s a big mess,’ he said, but he invited me to take a tour on Saturday, when the wedding craziness was over.

A slew of cousins from Louisville arrived, including the sensitive-and-strange boy who’d just graduated from Brown. His family called him Tommy, but he introduced himself as Thomas. The only strange thing about him that I could make out was the fact that he was wearing a suit instead of shorts and loafers, like all the other men. Also, whenever I turned around, he seemed to be there. His hair was black, darker than Lisa’s, and the only concession he made to the humidity was rolling up his shirt sleeves.

At dinner that night Thomas pulled his chair around from the other side of the table so he could sit next to me. There wasn’t room for him there, so he had to sit a few feet back, getting in the way of the waiters. Lisa tried to send him back to his assigned place, but he ignored her.

‘I’d like to show you around Louisville sometime,’ he told me, leaning forward so I could hear him, his breath prickling my neck.

‘Tommy, she doesn’t want to go to Louisville,’ Lisa said, and took my hand. ‘I’m so sorry about my family. They’re too much. Alex and I should just have eloped.’

‘And maybe in New York we could go to the opera,’ Thomas whispered in my ear.

‘All I know about opera is the names of female singers,’ I told him, not turning around.

‘Please,’ Lisa said, glaring at him. ‘She’s old enough to be your much older sister.’

Thomas stopped whispering to me after that, but he didn’t move his chair away. After dinner he walked me back to Una Paloma Blanca and seemed annoyed when some of the Louisville contingent caught us up at the elevator. When I got out on the eighth floor, and said goodnight to them all, he bowed.

I just remember pieces of the wedding. Lisa cried all through the ceremony so her mascara clogged, and I had to fix her lashes with a Kleenex before the photos were taken. Alex looked all pale pink and nervous and scrubbed, like a shell rubbed clean with sand. He read something by Neruda that nobody could hear, because there was a pool full of balloons and candles between us and the wedding party.

At some point, later on, it started to rain, and some of the men stripped down to their underwear and dived into the pool from the second-storey balcony. At dinner, I was seated next to Alex’s father, who had been continuously drunk since he’d arrived in Mexico. His face and arms were livid with sunburn, which he tried to soothe by rolling a cold bottle of beer over his skin. Whenever I saw Delia, she was smoking by an electric fan, deep in conversation with other smokers.

All the toasts referred to the baby’s imminent arrival, which made Lisa’s father flinch, like he was being hit over and over in the face with a pair of gloves. Lisa’s mother looked really pretty that night, wearing a long lacy dress, swishing around all the tables like a benign ghost. Patrick was the DJ, headphones clasped to one ear, frowning whenever anyone staggered up with a request. Thomas asked me to dance three or four times, but I said no, and he eventually left me alone. He was much in demand, I saw, with the younger women.

‘That Tommy is a big hit with my nieces,’ Alex’s father said to me. Even his breath smelled sunburned: it was like talking to a dragon.

When the reception began to peter out, Delia and I shared a taxi back to the hotel.

‘So, Patrick. Yes or no?’ She was clutching her seatbelt, because it wouldn’t fasten properly.

‘Maybe. He barely spoke a word to me tonight.’

‘He was busy. And that mother of his — well. Probably one look from her and his dick wilts. You’re staying Saturday night? If I were you, I’d sleep with him and never see him again. Really, if I were you, I wouldn’t see Lisa again either. But you’re a nicer person than I am. Too nice.’

‘Not really,’ I told her. I don’t think there was anything wrong with her seatbelt; I think she was too drunk to click it in. ‘Anyway, he’s invited me to see that house he’s building. Late tomorrow afternoon or something.’

‘That’s where it’ll happen!’ Delia smacked the slashed vinyl of the seat. ‘He’ll show off that big house to you, and then he’ll take you in the hot tub.’

‘I don’t think they have bathroom fixtures in yet,’ I said, and Delia howled with laughter, so eerily dog-like that the taxi driver turned around. Then she looked so serious, I was worried that she was about to be sick.

‘This baby,’ she said. ‘We’re sure that it’s Alex’s baby, right?’

I was about to say that I didn’t know, but Delia belched and started laughing again.

The morning after the wedding it started raining in earnest. I lay on a beach chair under a straw umbrella, reading and dozing, and stayed there while the rain dampened the sand around me. When it was time to meet Patrick, to see the house he was building, I walked to the lobby to wait for him. Delia was propped up against the reception desk, disputing every line of her bill.

‘Don’t buy the silver bracelets from those guys on the beach,’ she instructed me. ‘They’ll turn your arms green. And call me when you get back to New York.’

Lisa and Alex were in the lobby as well, engaged in protracted farewells. Lisa was especially weepy with Alex’s family, even though she’d only met most of them that weekend. She shouted plaintive goodbyes as their taxis lurched away, and clung to Alex. I wondered if she’d been like this the first time around, with Brian of Louisville’s family. For a moment, when Patrick arrived and waved me over to his car, Lisa was confused and thought this meant I was leaving.

‘Please promise you’ll come to LA as soon as you can,’ she said, squeezing the breath out of me. ‘This can’t be the last time I see you.’

‘I’ll probably see you tonight at dinner,’ I told her.

It was still raining when we reached the building site on the hill, and the floor of the entranceway was smutted with muddy footsteps. Patrick introduced me to the foreman, who leered and then scuttled away.

‘They have to work on Saturdays,’ he told me, walking me through the shell of the house in a brisk and proprietary way, barking out occasional instructions in Spanish to workmen who scattered whenever we approached. ‘We’re behind schedule. This country drives you insane.’

Even in its damp, dusty, half-built state, the house was impressive. It was fan-shaped, narrow from the road but opening up onto a long pool and a terrace that overlooked the bay. The pool was still a grey concrete shell, its aquamarine tiles stacked on a pallet. Patrick explained that the pool, when filled, would appear to overflow over the edge of the terrace and down the side of the hill.

‘Won’t people feel as though they’re being washed out to sea?’ I asked him, and he said that was exactly how he wanted them to feel.

Patrick was unhappy because the owners had nixed plans for a fajita grill and because they wanted to put a billiard table in the dining room. He grew red and almost cross-eyed just telling me about it. The room with the best view in the house, he said, was going to be wasted on an indoor pursuit. Listening to Patrick, it sounded as though the whole house was going to be wasted on these people, who only planned to come here for weekends during three months of the year. They just wanted somewhere safe to swim, somewhere they could drink cocktails and watch hummingbirds, and whenever they’d had enough of Mexico they could come inside and loll on banquettes and get all the Denver television stations via satellite.

Patrick was most proud of the bathrooms, each tiled in a different colour. I climbed into one of the bathtubs, an emerald green square that seemed to hang suspended over the hillside. Through the glassless window lay the town, curled along the beach as far as the next peninsula. The entire curve of the bay was visible, and beyond it, in the soggy afternoon light, the ocean was the subdued colour of a dirty pearl.

While I lay in the tub, gazing out the hole in the wall, Patrick stood there looking awkward, and he glanced at me in an odd way when I stood up and dusted myself down. It was as though he hadn’t noticed that I was there until that very moment, as if he had just arrived at the house and found, to his astonishment, a woman lying in a bath. I remembered Delia’s prediction — that he would ‘take me’ in the hot tub — and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

Afterwards we went to dinner in town. Because it was out of season, we walked to three different places before finding somewhere open. We ate and Patrick talked about how he couldn’t wait to get out of Mexico, but didn’t know where to go next.

‘Not New York,’ he said, avoiding my eye. ‘I would never want to work there.’

We had drinks at two different places — or rather, I had drinks, and he talked — and then we stopped by his apartment on the way back to the hotel on some pretext, like picking up a magazine he wanted to lend to Alex.

There was nothing especially exciting about Patrick, but I’d pretty much decided to sleep with him that night if the opportunity came up. At our dinner at the Gramercy Tavern, Lisa told me she slept with Chris because she was drunk and lonely — ‘stupid with loneliness,’ she said — and I’d decided that’s what I was, just drunk enough, and stupid with loneliness. First we had to kiss, of course, and once we were inside his apartment, our footsteps echoing on the terracotta tiles, I was waiting for it to happen.

There were a number of places we could have kissed that evening, of course. I would have preferred the bandstand, I think, all upright and colonial, like Patrick himself. There were numerous places along the waterfront, with its wrought-iron benches facing out to sea, or even in the bar where we ended up at a dark corner table. There was his car, low-slung and pine-scented, or the courtyard outside his apartment, the cobbles slick with rain. When the kiss finally came, it was in his apartment and less than half-hearted: I’d say a quarter-hearted, but that would be overselling it. He kissed me like his mother had bribed him with five dollars when he really needed fifty.

Patrick told me that, if I wanted, I could stay the night, but he didn’t sound too enthused.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. As it turned out, I wasn’t that drunk and stupid after all. I just felt shivery, and my insides were cold and concrete. ‘I have a pretty early flight back.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m kind of out of practice with all this. I’ve been living here by myself for too long.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I told him. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’

‘We should have gone straight back to the hotel,’ he said, though that wasn’t what I meant. I meant I shouldn’t have come to Mexico. ‘Let’s go.’

Patrick jingled his car keys, the way you’d alert a dog to an upcoming ride, and I saw he was as eager as I was for the evening to be over.

Back at the hotel, I ducked past a gaggle from Louisville slouched all over the lobby bar, and headed for the path that wended between the beach and the pool. All the chair cushions were stacked under an awning. A security guard patrolling the high-water line nodded to me. The night felt so sticky it was hard to breathe.

I guess I’d been hoping to feel something that night, something like lust or desperation. Anything but the numbness, deep in my gut, that petrified everything I felt. Though I hadn’t admitted it to Delia, I’d hoped she was right, and that Patrick and I would be gripped by some grand passion. We could have driven back up to the half-built house on the hill: I’d have liked to have seen it all skeletal and scuffed and lit up by stars. We could have made love amid the debris on the pool’s dusty floor, or on the bare brick banquettes in the open living room. We could have made love hidden in the emerald-tiled bathtub that stared out over the town and its lights, and the sea and its blackness, and the wet mountains squeezing the city along the sands.

Instead we had a quarter-hearted kiss and a limp proposition, too easy to turn down. And even if we had driven back up the hill, the tiles of the bath would have been uncomfortable, I guess, against my back. Everywhere in that half-built house would have involved concrete and dust, and possibly rats. We would have needed a flashlight, and a lot more to drink.

Rain was falling again, so I quickened my step, aware of footsteps behind me. In the lobby of Una Paloma Blanca, I ran for the elevator, but before the doors could close, Thomas scuttled in. He stood next to me and didn’t press the button for his floor.

‘You’re Caroline, right?’ he asked. The back of his hand brushed mine, but I didn’t pull away. ‘Your real name.’

‘Yes,’ I said, though only my husband ever called me Caroline. My family, and people I worked with, called me Carrie.

‘Do you like being called Monty?’

‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘Not anymore.’

Thomas said nothing. His sleeve brushed my bare arm and my skin prickled, the way it had the other night, when I felt his breath against my neck.

The elevator reached the eighth floor and dinged. The doors opened and we stood there, watching the hallway gape at us, watching the doors close. Thomas hit the button for the eleventh floor.

‘Come to my room,’ he said. ‘For a birthday drink.’

‘It’s your birthday?’

‘Soon,’ he said. He looked at me and smiled. ‘Some day.’

When the doors opened again, he grasped my hand and led me down the corridor. I stumbled a little on my way out of the elevator, maybe so later I could say I was drunk and stupid. Not that anybody would ever find out about this, and even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. I already knew that after I flew back to New York, I would never see any of these people again.

The Third Snow

This was not a holiday, although Martin Liepa had flown to Italy for the weekend to meet up with his wife. He’d arrived late on Friday, Leonora waiting for him in the dark at the top of the Piazza del Popolo metro stairs. He held her tight, inhaling the familiar musk of her hair, and tried to ignore the man demonstrating a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo, and the man trying to tuck a rose stem beneath the shoulder strap of Leonora’s bag. He didn’t want anything but her — not a FaceTime apparition this time, but the real thing.

They walked up the Via del Corso, Martin dragging his bumping wheelie bag and encircling Leonora’s waist with his free arm. She was three long weeks into a month-long gig here, teaching art history at the American University on a course abandoned by its lecturer. Family emergency, they’d been told. Great opportunity. Usually she earned nothing in the summer, and the money was good. The best part of all was the free accommodation, with Craig Thompson, who knew Leonora from Goldsmiths and had offered her the position. He and his wife Terri had a spare room in their splendid place on the Via del Corso. Who said ‘splendid’ these days? Martin wondered.

‘They’re at some do on the coast tonight,’ she told Martin. ‘Terri texted me. They’re too drunk to come home. So we can pretend the place is ours. Sometimes I pretend we live in Rome all the time.’

Martin did not particularly want to live in Rome, or in Brussels, where he’d spent his week in meetings. He would rather be home in their narrow terraced house in High Wycombe, watching the Tour de France highlights, his feet up on the sofa. He’d spent twenty of the last thirty days in Brussels, making or listening to presentations, mumbling the usual about safety levels and pigment purity, wearing a tie every day. He was tired of hotels, of conversation — inane, xenophobic or both — with colleagues over expensive beer at the end of another frustrating day. A weekend at home, with Leonora padding about the place, things to uproot in the garden, a meal he could cook himself, Sunday papers: that’s what he wanted.

They stopped at an imposing entranceway with black doors more than twice Martin’s height. Leonora pressed numbers into a brass keypad, and one of the heavy doors clicked open. The lobby could be called splendid, he supposed — marble floor, arched ceiling, sweeping staircase — though it was impersonal and shadowy, like a Fascist-era bank.

The Thompsons’ apartment, three flights up, was large and cool and white, sparsely furnished. Leonora led him out to the long terrace, fizzy with pleasure at showing him the place. Even at night he could see it was lurid with colour — orange trees in pots, thickets of purple bougainvillea. This is where the Thompsons spent most of their evenings, opening bottle after bottle of rosé.

They didn’t own the place; they hadn’t chosen the misty abstracts on the living-room wall or the Andrea Bocelli CDs in the kitchen bookcase. They rented it every summer when Craig was here to teach summer courses, and Terri, as far as Leonora could make out, was here to do absolutely nothing apart from occasional shoe-shopping. Family money, one of them had told her, and she wasn’t sure if this was ironic. It was hard to tell with the Thompsons, she said. What was ironic, what was true; what was banter and what was bickering.

‘I warn you,’ she said. ‘They can be a little much. Somerset Maugham novella, maybe.’

‘Will they expect to have dinner with us tomorrow?’ he asked, and Leonora said they would.

‘They’re excited about you coming.’

‘Why?’

‘You have a real job.’ She started laughing. ‘And you’re Latvian. They think both things make you super-exotic.’

In the morning they got up early to escape before their hosts staggered back. It was July and Rome shimmered, over-ripe and crumbling in the sun, moussy clouds suspended in a pale sky. By eight-thirty the Trevi Fountain was already encircled, people perched on its bony rim, posing for selfies or tossing coins into the pale green water. Martin and Leonora spent the day wandering the streets, sluggish and overwhelmed by the heat of the city and its volume of sights.

Most of the time he was happy to observe the outside of things, in passing, rather than pay entry fees or scrutinise information panels. He was here to see Leonora, to clasp her sticky hand, to feel her nearby. They spent two hours sheltered behind trellis on a tiny piazza near the Colosseum, ordering too much food. Leonora told him more about the Thompsons. They were older than Martin and Leonora — fifteen years older, maybe twenty. They had a grown son, not in Rome, who sounded like a spoiled wastrel. Craig was Henry VIII and Terri was Zsa Zsa Gabor, sort of.

‘Maybe they’ll decide to stay out at the coast,’ Martin said.

‘Not Craig. He works every Saturday afternoon, so he has to be back. Terri won’t stay away without him.’

The work, she said, involved leading field trips of American ingénues in sundresses and flip-flops around dank Baroque churches. It was an extra-credit outing that Craig offered to students on his course, and Terri didn’t like it. Last week, apparently, she’d threatened to start smoking again, to punish Craig for his neglect.

When they stood up at last, the seat cushions stuck to the backs of their legs. Leonora was wearing a dress that tied on her shoulders, and leather sandals he’d never seen before. She drank sparkling water, and said she preferred it now, that it felt more refreshing in the heat. She looked tanned, pink-cheeked, happy. Martin wondered why he hadn’t visited earlier.

Maybe he’d wanted to test things, to see what living apart felt like — something longer than the two or three nights he spent in Brussels every week. Their longest separation before this had been a week the previous November, when Leonora told him she’d met someone else, that she’d been seeing someone else, a visiting lecturer at work called Anthony. It was all over, she said, and a terrible mistake for which she was really, really sorry. The word ‘affair’ was never mentioned, and that was probably a good thing. ‘Affair’ sounded romantic and important and French, when the truth was tawdry and English.

And now it was July and they were in Rome on a Saturday afternoon, high on exhaust fumes and gelato. The sun was too hot and the city, with its clamour and showy looks, conspired against thoughts of other places or other times. Last November didn’t exist here. He and Leonora never spoke of it and at some point, he thought, the trauma of the incident itself would disappear from their memory, leaving only the faintest of scars.

At the apartment Terri was home.

‘Out here!’ she called, before they’d shuffled off their shoes at the front door. ‘Drinky-drinks?’

‘Please!’ Leonora called, re-twisting her fair hair, wisps sticking to the sweat of her neck. She leaned towards Martin, close enough for him to feel the heat of her cheeks, and bent over to unstrap her sandals.

Terri bustled into the kitchen to fetch wine and glasses, her pushed-up sunglasses like insect eyes bulging above her forehead. She was petite and fair-haired, wearing flowing palazzo pants and a white camisole. Maybe she was forty or fifty or sixty: it was impossible to tell.

‘So thrilled to meet you!’ She kissed Martin three times and clasped his hands as well, staring at him with wide blue eyes. ‘A real Latvian! Not what I expected.’

‘What were you expecting?’ he asked. He wasn’t sure he was a real Latvian anymore. He’d lived in England since he was two.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Terri. Her stare was beginning to feel manic. She was still clinging to his hands. ‘A Viking perhaps. Or a Russian. Really, I have no idea. What do Latvians look like?’

Martin didn’t need to answer because Terri was laughing, and asking Leonora to hand her olives and cheese from the fridge.

‘Bought anything?’ Terri wanted to know, wrinkling her nose when all Leonora could think of was a notebook from the Florentine stationery shop near the Pantheon. ‘You aren’t much of a shopper, are you? Saving for a loft conversion, you two, I expect. Planning a family.’

Martin pincered some water glasses and carried them out to the terrace. Out here you could barely hear the traffic, even though the street and its ranks of shops lay directly below. But he could still hear Terri talking.

‘You have to tell them,’ she was saying to Leonora. ‘When you’re ready, you’re ready. They’ll never realise it themselves. And you — you’re well over thirty now.’

She was thirty-two, Leonora. They’d been married for two years, together for five. Too much to throw away, as her father, Jack, had said when he drove over to broker the peace deal last November. They were about to buy the house in High Wycombe, a house that already had plans approved by Council for a loft conversion.

Martin wondered how Terri could look at him and not see Latvian, or Viking, or Russian: all she could see was loft conversion. Was he so obvious? So dull? So English?

It was after five now, the heat a heavy curtain drooping around the terrace. They sprawled on chairs around the outside table, sipping their drinks. Leonora mixed sparkling water with her rosé and listed the places they’d walked that day.

‘It’s really a good thing, you not buying too much,’ Terri told them, refilling her glass, splashing wine on her stack of shining magazines. ‘I know I buy far too much stuff. I just can’t resist it. Then when I get it home, there’s no room. No room at all. Our place — you should visit us when we’re all back! — our place is near the Portobello Road. Georgian. Belonged to my aunt. Lots of floors, but not what you’d call grand scale. Pocket-sized terrace at the very top. Nothing like this. And where to put everything? That’s my problem.’

Martin’s view was of orange roof-tops and metal fire-escapes, secluded roof-gardens and a jumble of aerials. The trees sprouting from the Villa Borghese ridge were shaped like stalky mushrooms. He remembered them from the Italian paintings in Leonora’s books. They seemed more fake in real life.

Terri was talking about some Japanese tidying system she’d embraced, urging Leonora to adopt it as well.

‘You pick up each thing in your house and ask: Does this bring me joy? If the answer is no, you get rid of it.’

‘What about dishwashing liquid?’ Leonora asked. ‘I don’t think it brings me much joy, but we still need to have it.’

‘So it does bring you joy, really,’ said Terri. ‘It helps you with an essential task. Without it you’d be lost.’

‘Martin has a whole container of rubber bands,’ Leonora said. ‘He says one day they might come in handy. But there are hundreds of them. Why would we ever need so many?’

Martin swigged his drink and said nothing, resisting implication in the conversation. Terri was clucking her tongue. She sloshed more wine into Leonora’s glass, and Leonora didn’t protest.

‘I doubt they bring anyone joy,’ Terri advised. ‘Really, when you go home, look through everything. Pick things up one at a time. Not each rubber band, obviously. That would be ridiculous. The whole container. And ask: Do you bring me joy?’

‘I could do it with my books,’ said Leonora, sounding doubtful, and Martin looked at her: she couldn’t be serious. There weren’t enough hours in the day to interrogate all of her books. And what had the books done to provoke such rejection, such abrupt renunciation? ‘Maybe Martin could look at his records. He has a massive collection of LPs.’

‘So retro! I love it,’ said Terri. ‘But do they bring you joy?’

‘I’ll get us some more wine,’ he said, and made his escape. There were eight bottles in the fridge, one of which he’d bought himself in Brussels airport. In this apartment, wine didn’t have much of a chance, he suspected, to slip in the joyful rankings.

He pulled out the bottle he’d contributed and closed the fridge. A postcard from Magaluf stuck to the door slipped free of its magnet and danced its way to the terracotta tiles. Martin bent down to peel it off the floor, aware that Craig Thompson had just arrived, slamming the front door and shouting his hellos. When Craig strode into the kitchen, Martin was scrambling to re-pin the postcard, his hands slick from the bottle of wine.

Craig was sandy-haired and red-nosed, curling grey chest hairs visible where his shirt was unbuttoned. He looked hearty and confident, the kind of man described as virile, Martin supposed. They shook hands, and Craig nodded at the postcard.

‘Latest missive from the son and heir,’ he said, frowning. He wore a pale shirt, sleeves rolled up, and beige cargo pants, as though he’d been out on safari. ‘Not much to say for himself, as per usual.’

‘It fell on the ground,’ Martin tried to explain.

‘On holiday in Spain, as you can see. On holiday from what? you might ask. He does nothing.’

The postcard slid again. Craig, still casting dark looks, made no attempt to right it. Martin resisted the impulse to clamp a hand on it.

‘Does he stay with you at all?’ Martin couldn’t remember their son’s name.

‘He lives with us. God forbid he move out. You know, get a job and a life.’

‘Here in Rome, I meant.’

Craig shook his head.

‘We won’t have him. It’s bad enough here with one sponger. I don’t need another one.’

Martin’s stomach turned. Is that how Craig saw Leonora — as a sponger? But Craig was the one who’d invited her to stay, in the spare room on the apartment’s road side — noisy, bright — and it was only for a few weeks. Well, a month.

‘I’m talking about Terri!’ said Craig, almost wheezing with laughter. ‘You should have seen your face!’

Martin tried to smile. This was the banter Leonora had mentioned. It had never been Martin’s thing. He could just about manage it with colleagues, but most of them were scientists, and not very skilled at it either.

Craig swooped on the bottle of wine and stomped out to the terrace, brandishing it like a trophy. Harry, that was the son’s name. Prince Harry, Craig was calling him now, denouncing the offending postcard.

‘He spends his days wrapped in a duvet watching children’s television,’ he told the terrace at large. Leonora made sympathetic noises. ‘He’s twenty-two years old and has no ambition. Now, just compare him with the young ladies I was teaching today.’

‘Teaching? Is that what you call it?’ Terri caught Martin’s eye and smiled. More banter, he suspected. He was too tired for it. He and Leonora had walked for hours today.

‘They were alert, inquisitive, diligent.’

‘Braless, you mean.’

‘They don’t have to do this extra seminar on a Saturday …’

‘Seminar!’ Terri snorted.

‘But they choose to, because they want to take the opportunity of being in Rome to acquire more knowledge.’

Carnal knowledge, Martin thought of adding, in the spirit of banter, but Terri wasn’t smiling anymore.

‘Some of the students are really excited to be in the Old World,’ Leonora said, emptying the last of the sparkling water into her glass.

‘Is that what’s exciting them?’ Terri asked. ‘I thought it was my husband’s chest hair, on full display. It looks like someone’s performed open-heart surgery on an old teddy bear. Fuzzy stuffing everywhere.’

Leonora laughed, and Martin joined in, a beat too late.

‘In life, some of us go above and beyond.’ Craig looked solemn, clasping his wine glass with both hands. Martin wondered if this was his teaching face. ‘And some of us, like our darling son, Crown Prince Haroldo, go below and … beneath.’

‘Beneath isn’t the opposite of beyond,’ Terri told him. ‘I’m glad you’re not teaching English to these poor girls.’

‘Maybe he just needs a bit more time, to work out what he really wants to do.’ Leonora grinned like a plucky nurse in wartime, squeezing the hand of a gassed soldier.

‘What were you doing at his age?’ Craig asked Martin.

‘Still studying,’ said Martin. He didn’t want to say it was the first year of a PhD in pharmaceutical science. He didn’t want to make Harry look any worse.

‘There you are,’ Terri said, and Martin nodded.

‘Last year when the Olympics were on,’ said Craig, ‘the ones in Rio that everyone said would be terrible, but they weren’t — they were really quite good.’

‘Yes,’ said Martin.

‘So Harry, our idle son, is watching the bloody thing day and night. Everything — triathlon, discus, beach volleyball, these little Korean women shooting guns and looking like spies, the lot. And do you know what he said?’

‘No,’ said Martin.

‘He said, “Look at all these people my age and what they’ve achieved. And look at me — I can’t do anything. I may as well just give up trying.” That’s what he said! These young athletes, they weren’t an inspiration to him. They were just another excuse.’

‘We were watching the gymnastics,’ Terri said.

‘Gymnastics. Sailing. Hockey. It doesn’t matter. Same story, across the board. Young people out there achieving things. And there’s Harry Dolittle, on the sofa, bleating about—’

‘We watched a lot of the Latvian competitors at the Olympics,’ Leonora said, catching Martin’s eye. ‘Because Martin was born in Latvia. So we were … interested. In it.’

‘I said to him,’ Terri said, talking to Craig, ‘he doesn’t look Latvian.’

‘What does a Latvian look like, you bloody stupid woman?’

‘And he doesn’t speak like a Latvian. He doesn’t have a Latvian name either.’ Terri sounded deflated. Martin knew he’d disappointed her in some way, by not being exotic enough, or eastern, or northern.

‘It is Latvian,’ Leonora reassured her. ‘It’s just pronounced a bit differently, with an S on the end. Like Mar-teens.’

Actually, his real name was an illuminated medieval manuscript, Mārtiņš. It appeared on his birth certificate and in old letters from his grandmother, but he’d abandoned the fussy decorative elements long ago, or his father had on his behalf. His mother died, electrocuted by a microwave, when he was very small; he didn’t remember her. He and his father, Juris, moved from Riga to Milton Keynes, where Juris worked in various factories. His last job before he died — cancer of the pancreas, the week Martin turned twenty-three — was on the canning line for Coca-Cola.

There was nothing of this, Martin’s personal history, that he wanted to share with the Thompsons. Even Leonora only knew the facts of his life second-hand; she’d met no members of his family. His life with her, his career, the places he’d lived in the south of the county: all of these existed after his parents and grandparents, after Latvia. If it weren’t for his last name, these days he could pass for English.

Terri was talking about his last name now.

‘Leonora was explaining just the other day about your surname, how it’s not a real name at all. The Germans foisted it on your ancestors. It’s like your slave name, in a sense — is that right?’

‘Not slaves, no.’

‘Kunta Kinte!’ said Craig, on his way to the kitchen with the empty bottles.

‘Liepa is a linden tree,’ Leonora said. ‘A lot of Latvians are named for elements of nature, like trees or plants. Or birds.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Terri, and held her glass to her mouth, though all the wine was gone.

‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull!’ roared Craig from inside. ‘Shall we go out for din-dins now? Before we’re all plastered?’

‘We don’t want to impose,’ Martin said quickly. ‘I mean, we can go out by ourselves if you and Craig would like some privacy.’

Terri waved him away, mock-grimacing as though he was being absurd. Really, thought Martin, he was being English, trying to get what he wanted by saying the opposite of what he felt.

Dinner was pizza on Via della Croce, and questions about titanium dioxide. This was Martin’s line of work, and usually people had no interest in it. They had no idea it existed, in fact, unless they spent too much time on the internet reading alarmist news items about cancer. This was why Martin was spending so much time in Brussels these days, helping to plead the case to over-zealous regulators prodded into action by the French government.

‘So what you’re saying,’ said Craig, leaning back in his white plastic chair, ‘is that it’s in everything. Absolutely everything.’

‘Like your chair,’ said Martin. ‘The white paint on the walls inside. Our dinner plates. The paper used for the menu.’

‘Absolutely bloody everything. Incredible.’

Their table was on the pavement, jammed close to a table of chain smokers. The fluorescent yo-yo sellers were out in force, and the rose sellers, and the Splat sellers. At least the Slinky sellers weren’t here, because they needed stairs to demonstrate their goods, and the knock-off-bag sellers must have gathered up their black bed sheets and faded into the night.

‘Sun cream,’ said Leonora. She was drinking more than usual — much more. ‘Polyester.’

‘I don’t wear polyester,’ Terri said. She’d moved her chair back far enough to inhale the second-hand smoke. ‘But I do slather myself with the old SPF. And those doughnuts we had in the States, the ones dusted with icing sugar …’

‘That’s right. Not icing sugar, titanium dioxide.’ Martin was tired. The week had been long, and this weekend — was it still only Saturday?

‘Maybe this is why we’re all dying of cancer,’ said Terri with a knowing nod.

‘It’s safe, really. Really, it is.’

‘That’s what they said about atomic power and, you know, asbestos. And that other thing.’

‘Smoking?’ Leonora asked, her tone arch, and Craig burst out laughing.

‘She’s got you there,’ he said, kicking at Terri under the table with such fervour he almost fell out of his chair.

‘Martin knows what he’s doing. He’s a toxicologist.’ Leonora pushed away her plate; it was heaped with uneaten pizza crusts. ‘If he says it’s safe, it’s safe.’

‘See how she supports her husband?’ Craig demanded, not yet entirely upright in his chair. ‘Unlike some wives I could bloody mention.’

‘Just wait until you have children,’ Terri told Leonora. ‘It all changes then. No, no. I’ll say no more. Just remember that. No — no, I’ve said my piece. I’ll say no more.’

‘No one is asking you to say more, you stupid woman!’ Craig waved for the bill, and Martin reached for his own wallet. There was sure to be a stand-off over this, and he knew that Craig would win. But the drawing of weapons was essential, even if Martin had no chance in the duel.

They walked home via a circuitous route, to look at all the people looking at all the other people, and to observe the Slinky sellers in action on the Spanish Steps. Leonora was tipsy, leaning hard against Martin. Terri pointed out plaques high on ice-cream-coloured buildings — places the Shelleys lived, or the Joyces — as though they were personal friends. Outside the Louis Vuitton shop Craig lumbered to a halt.

‘This is what I’m talking about,’ he said and prodded the glass of the shop window. ‘Look. Da Vinci. I ask you. Da Vinci!’

‘What have you got against him?’ Terri asked, rolling her eyes. ‘You made us go to that big show at the National Gallery often enough. It was marvellous, I thought. Did you two see it?’

Martin shook his head. Leonora had gone, he thought, but he’d been too busy.

‘It’s Leonardo, not Da Vinci.’ Craig sounded outraged. ‘Da Vinci isn’t a last name. All that money at Louis Vuitton and they don’t know that!’

‘But look, Craig,’ Leonora said, stepping close to him, touching his arm. ‘This line — it’s something to do with Jeff Koons. I’m sure it’s all supposed to be ironic and kitsch.’

‘She’s very good at making him see sense,’ Terri murmured to Martin. ‘By the way, I was thinking. Couldn’t something natural be used to get the white colour into things? Instead of titanium dioxide?’

‘Titanium is natural,’ Martin explained again, trying to repress the snap in his voice. The day had been too hot and too long, and this evening there’d been too much Terri and Craig, and too much rosé. ‘It creates a very pure white pigment.’

‘As pure white as a seagull?’ asked Terri. She looked pleased with herself. ‘Couldn’t you find a way of extracting white from the feathers? Now, that’s truly natural.’

‘All this does,’ Craig was ranting to Leonora and the offending window display, ‘is contribute to world ignorance. You try to teach things to people and all around you, everyone and everything is un-teaching them. You say to students, don’t say Da Vinci, but then they turn around and look, here’s Dan Brown doing it, and now here’s Louis Vuitton doing it, and they think it’s normal and OK. So what’s wrong becomes right because of ignorance. I can’t stand it.’

‘Didn’t he have an Italian wife?’ Martin asked. He wasn’t sure how he knew that. He wouldn’t be able to point out a work by Jeff Koons, but he could summon up knowledge, if you could call it that, about the irony and the kitsch, and the Italian wife.

Craig turned to him.

‘Leonardo was gay.’

‘Jeff Koons, I mean.’

‘Yes, quite right, quite right. She was a porn star and a politician.’

‘This country,’ groaned Terri, now intent on her phone. ‘So backwards! No wonder their economy’s down the drain.’

‘Haven’t you heard? It’s making a comeback because of you, spending all our money on more things you don’t need.’

‘Still,’ said Terri, as though Craig hadn’t spoken. ‘We’ll be shot of them soon, won’t we? With Brexit. Personally, I can’t wait.’

‘Well, more fool you,’ he snapped. ‘We won’t be able to afford this apartment next year, not with the exchange rates. Didn’t think of that, did you?’

Martin reached for Leonora — pulling her to safety, he felt, away from the spotlight of the window — and tugged her close. He wanted to get back to their bedroom and close the door on the Thompsons, just to get a few hours of peace from their circus. They did not, he decided, bring him joy.

‘This time next week I’ll be home,’ Leonora whispered in his ear. ‘Now you know why I was so desperate for you to come and visit.’

Martin hadn’t realised she was desperate. She’d never complained, not once. She’d made the Thompsons out to be eccentrics and amusing. Perhaps tonight they were on especially bad behaviour. He picked up his pace, and soon Craig and Terri were far behind them, their shrill argument lost in the commotion of the evening crowd.

Something woke Martin in the night, maybe a truck rumbling past. Leonora was asleep, snoring a little, the way dogs did, and small children. He’d been dreaming about his Oma, his father’s mother. He hadn’t seen her since he was a teenager, on a rare visit home for Christmas. The green of his Oma’s wooden house was a colour from an old movie, washed out like the birch logs stacked outside in the woodpile, like the winter sky tense with snow.

By then his Latvian was going, reduced to fragments that felt uncomfortable in his mouth. People in the village where his Oma lived spoke Russian as well, but he didn’t. He spoke English to the kids who were learning it at school — because it was 1998 and Latvia was rid of Russia and Germany at last, of their armies and languages and names.

In his dream a dry snow was falling and his grandmother was in the distance, too far away to hear him. Snow white as seagull feathers, he thought, and wanted to laugh.

Noise surged somewhere close by, a high-pitched sound between shrieking and sobbing, and Martin blinked, wondering if he was still dreaming. Something banged — not a door, but an object, hitting a wall, maybe. Then footsteps, someone running. Someone pounding on the bedroom door.

Leonora stirred, and Martin was out of bed, pulling on his boxer shorts, when the door opened. He blinked again, and then the light was on, a blazing yellow, and there was Terri in a white dressing gown, face livid. Like a seagull, he thought, a giant seagull trapped in the apartment, trying to beat its way out.

‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘Is it Craig?’

He grabbed the t-shirt he’d dropped on the floor hours ago. Leonora was sitting up now, clutching the sheet to her chest.

‘Shall I call an ambulance?’ she asked, reaching for her phone. Terri was still standing there, with her gargoyle’s face and shocked hair.

‘You really don’t know?’ she said to Martin, her voice surprisingly low and calm. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’

‘Know what?’ Spikes of cold needled their way up his arms and legs.

‘About her.’ Terri jabbed a finger at Leonora. ‘And him. My husband. Don’t try to deny it! He’s told me everything.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Martin demanded. He glanced down at Leonora: she sat still, phone like a slab in her left hand, the white sheet tucked into her armpits. Her mouth open, transfixed by Terri the seagull.

‘Him and her. Her and him. They’ve been having it off. He’s told me — he just told me now. You’ve been sleeping together, and making a fool of me. Making a fool of your husband.’

The finger jabbed at him. Another truck rumbled outside, and then another. It was the middle of the night, whatever that meant. Was a military coup taking place? Nothing would surprise Martin. Nothing about tonight would be surprising or surreal. Perhaps they weren’t even in Rome anymore; perhaps they were still asleep.

‘It’s not true,’ said Leonora, her voice squeaky as a child’s. ‘It’s a lie.’

‘Why do you think he wanted her here, eh? He could have had his pick of colleagues back in London for a month in Rome, proper lecturers, but no, he wanted her. And he wanted her right here, in this apartment, to …’

‘Stop talking,’ said Martin. His voice sounded much calmer than he felt. ‘This is complete bullshit. Where’s Craig?’

‘It’s not true,’ Leonora said again. ‘Please, Martin, don’t listen to her.’

‘I said, where’s Craig?’

Terri stepped out of the doorway and gestured like a magician’s assistant.

‘It’s a terrible ugly lie!’ Leonora cried, but Martin charged out of the room without looking at her. It was better to act than to think. He had to do something.

Craig was a shadowy lump on a sofa in the living room.

‘Get up,’ said Martin, groping for the light. Terri got to it before he did, revealing Craig, his shaggy head drooping, also in a white dressing gown. He made no attempt to stand. Leonora arrived, in bare feet and yesterday’s sundress.

‘I’ve told her everything,’ he said, sounding maudlin.

‘Everything what?’ Leonora demanded. ‘You’ve made this up. Go on, tell Terri that you’ve made this up.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Yes,’ said Terri. ‘Why would he make it up?’

‘I don’t know. Because he’s insane? Because you’re both drunk?’

‘Nobody’s drunk here, madam.’ Terri was affronted. ‘Very sobering news, isn’t it, to hear your husband’s screwing the … the lodger!’

‘I’m not a lodger, and I’m not having an affair with your husband. Tell her, please, Craig. Tell everyone.’

Craig said nothing.

‘Why would you do this?’ Leonora asked him again. ‘Why?’

‘Because it’s true,’ he said, petulant, still slumped forward.

‘No it isn’t,’ said Martin. He wanted to grab a handful of Craig’s mangy hair and pull it out of his stupid thick head. ‘You’ve said it to wind Terri up and now you can’t back down. Even though it’s spiteful and stupid, and it’s dragging the two of us into your crap.’

Craig looked up at Leonora.

‘You know it’s true,’ he said, and she shrieked, launching herself at him, pummelling his head.

‘You bloody liar! You bastard! You lying scum!’

‘Get off!’ Terri screamed. Craig ducked and cowered, his arms raised against the onslaught. ‘Get her off my husband!’

Martin was already wrapped around Leonora, pulling her away.

‘Are you lying?’ Terri asked Craig.

‘What does it matter?’ He sat back, arms folded, mouth rolling into a pout. ‘You never believe me. You always accuse me of having an affair. So here you are. I’ve admitted it. Happy now?’

‘You don’t care if I’m happy!’ shrieked Terri, and Martin saw this as their chance to escape. Inside their bedroom he stood with his back against the door, and tried to block out the squawking from the living room.

‘For god’s sake,’ he said. Leonora sat on the side of the bed, sobbing. He wanted to say more — that this was ridiculous and surreal and horrible, and that he was furious with everyone and everything: Rome, art schools, relationships, English people.

Leonora started hyperventilating, bent double and wheezing out her despair.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she managed to say. ‘I know what … you think.’

Last time, after Leonora told him she’d been sleeping with someone else, she’d caught a taxi to her parents’ place in Beaconsfield. A week later, Jack, her father, drove over to see Martin. He brought a brace of craft beer with him, and set the bottles on the kitchen table. He wasn’t there, Jack said, to endorse or excuse his daughter’s behaviour. But he wanted Martin to know she’d spent the week sobbing and repenting. At least she’d been honest and owned up to Martin about the whole sorry business.

Her head had been turned, Jack said. Poor judgement. Rash. Naïve. Foolish. So very, very sorry. This Anthony bloke was clearly a predator — divorced, disastrous, a loser. And Leonora’s job at the Slade was temporary anyway. In a few weeks she’d never have to see the stupid bugger again. If only Martin could forgive her.

Of course he’d forgiven her. He had no one but Leonora. She moved home again, shivering like a beaten dog, sniffing and red-eyed. He’d given her conditions — conditions of surrender in a battle neither of them had won. There would be no more talk about it, he said. And in the future, if something like this ever happened again, Leonora would keep it to herself. No tearful confessions, no admissions, no pleas. If she met someone else and decided to leave Martin, she should leave. If she decided to stay, then she could keep the guilt of it, and the misery, all to herself. He couldn’t go through this again.

Now she was kneeling on the bed, gulping, smearing tears from her face.

‘You’re thinking I’m not telling you the truth,’ she spluttered. ‘Be … because of what I promised.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of anything,’ he lied, though there was some kind of emptiness opening up inside him, a blank that rubbed out any thinking or feeling. ‘Really.’

The apartment was quiet now. Craig and Terri may have fallen asleep or fallen off the terrace — he didn’t care either way. Leonora clasped at her chest, trying to steady her sobs.

‘It’s like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in here,’ he said, and Leonora managed a weak smile.

‘They probably don’t even have a son,’ she said. Martin tried to smile as well.

‘Let’s try to get some sleep,’ he said, and Leonora clambered into the rumpled bed without taking off her sundress, her face red and puffy. ‘In the morning, we can sort something else out for you. Somewhere to stay.’

‘What about you?’ she asked, her voice shaking, as though she was afraid.

‘For both of us, yes. For Sunday night. Then you can stay there until your classes finish.’

He got into bed next to her, following her lead by keeping on his t-shirt and boxer shorts. Maybe they’d have to leap out of bed again. Maybe Terri would set the whole place on fire with one of her contraband cigarettes. Leonora nestled into him, clinging like a child.

Before Leonora flew to Rome, they’d talked about having a baby. She was shy about bringing the subject up, though they’d talked before about having children — when they first met, and before they were married, when everything was theoretical and in the future.

‘We could give the baby a Latvian name, you know,’ she’d said. ‘Would you like that?’

‘No,’ he’d told her. ‘An English name would be better.’

That was as far as they’d got, but the step felt big, both a challenge and a relief. Now they were in Rome, just trying to get through the night. Leonora’s breath steadied, and she seemed to be sleeping, one arm draped over Martin, her body curled like a seahorse. He tried to be still, although he couldn’t sleep anymore and his eyes were chalk-dry, too hard to close. Tomorrow they would leave this place and find a hotel. Somewhere in Trastevere, perhaps, on the other side of the river. He’d fly back to Brussels and she’d teach her final classes. This time next week, they’d both be home.

That final time in Latvia, before his Oma died, it snowed a few days before Christmas, the first snow of the winter. She sent him out into the scrappy yard to bring in an armful of wood, and he’d sung a bit of ‘White Christmas’ to make her smile. He shouldn’t hope too much, she told him. The snow would be gone again in the morning. The third snow, she said; now that was the real snow, the one that stuck around.

Everything was in the past now. It couldn’t be resurrected. Things were lost to him, and people, and places. He wanted Leonora, but he’d never been able to hold on to anything, not even the letters of his name. There might come a time when she met someone else she really loved, more than the last man, more than him. If she decided to leave, he wouldn’t stop her. Perhaps he was a fatalist like his father — a Latvian deep down, after all. The past took things away, and no one could trust the future. The present was all he had. This moment, and this moment, and this moment, with the apartment still, the city quiet at last, and his wife holding him, never letting go.

Isn’t It
after ‘The Garden Party’

At first people thought Uncle Jack had been killed in a hit-and-run, mowed down crossing the road near the May Road dairy. That was what Lorenzo heard in the first delirious phone calls from his mother: Uncle Jack had been mown down, and it was a brutal, heartless and sadistic act, no doubt perpetrated by someone twenty-one and Chinese in a brand-new car with a learner’s licence and no insurance.

In fact, Uncle Jack had just collapsed while crossing the street and died from a heart attack. This was explained in the second wave of phone calls. Cigarettes killed him, and cream on his porridge, and old age. He was eighty-six, and on his way to buy a Lotto ticket.

‘Thinking of us,’ said Lorenzo’s mother, ‘right to the end.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Lorenzo. He imagined murmured last words, overheard by good Samaritans kneeling at the side of his great-uncle’s frail, crumpled body.

‘Well, he didn’t need the money, did he?’ said Lorenzo’s mother. ‘What would he have done with it, if he’d won?’

Gone to Bali, Lorenzo suspected. Last year one of Uncle Jack’s RSA friends had gone to Bali for the first time, aged seventy-eight, and returned with news of a much younger girlfriend. He’d sent her and her family almost ten thousand dollars before his grown-up children got wind of it, and changed his mobile phone number so the girlfriend in Bali had no way of tracking him down.

‘Uncle Jack was always thinking of us,’ said Lorenzo’s mother. She was ringing Lorenzo from the big New World because they would be needing food, huge amounts of it, when the undertakers brought Uncle Jack back to the house. He would lie there in his coffin for three days, and people would need to be fed.

‘Why was he walking all the way to the May Road dairy?’ asked Lorenzo, because part of him still wanted to believe there was something suspicious about all this, something needing investigation and possibly a visit from TV3 news.

‘We’ll never know,’ said his mother. ‘This trolley squeaks. Why do I always get the bad trolleys? They spend all this money on a big new supermarket, and the trolleys are already useless.’

She seemed to be crying, or else holding the phone to the trolley so he could hear it squeaking. Lorenzo did what he always did when his mother — or anyone, really — started to cry during telephone conversations. He’d tell her that her voice was breaking up, or that he was walking or driving through a tunnel. Then, mid-sentence, he’d disconnect the call. That way it would seem as though they’d been cut off. His mother never rang back, as though she knew the truth, that he’d hung up on her. Hung up on himself, really. Lorenzo often hung up on himself.

He’d never hung up on Uncle Jack, or hung up on himself while talking to Uncle Jack, and this was a relief right now. He wouldn’t have to go through life tormented with guilt because he had betrayed Uncle Jack with phone-call deceit. This was mainly because Uncle Jack was too deaf for phone calls. Even if he’d won Lotto and gone to Bali and found himself a much younger girlfriend, she’d never have been able to ring him in New Zealand to arrange a ten-thousand-dollar money transfer.

Lorenzo reported his mother’s side of the conversation to his cousin, May, who was driving him home from the airport. He’d been down in Wellington for two days of meetings and he could have paid for a taxi home on expenses, but May had insisted on picking him up.

‘Your mum’s in an emotional state,’ May told him. ‘It’s a very emotional time.’

‘What does that even mean?’ Lorenzo asked. All times were emotional for his mother.

‘You know she always gets anxious when lots of people are coming over. Death is much worse than a marriage, say, or even a new baby. Everyone turns up pretending to pay their respects, wanting a massive feed. And there’s no garden anymore, so everyone’ll be squeezed into the house, getting on her nerves.’

This was true. Lorenzo’s mother had rented the small brick-and-tile house in Mt Roskill for five years, ever since his father had moved to the Gold Coast with a woman named Vicky. Relatives over sixty referred to Vicky as Lorenzo’s father’s Fancy Piece, but she was, in fact, his Life Coach and now — as Lorenzo’s father insisted on calling her — his Life Partner.

Two years ago, the owner of the Mt Roskill house subdivided the garden so another, bigger house could be built at the back. This new house was ‘Tuscan’, according to Lorenzo’s mother and her landlord, maybe because it was painted the colour of an apricot or an orange or a peach — naming colours wasn’t Lorenzo’s strong suit — and because its roof was flat, as though the weather in Mt Roskill was sunny and dry like the weather in Tuscany. It was a stupid and stupidly expensive house, in Lorenzo’s opinion, with a big garage and high walls. The looming presence of the House Behind, as they called it, meant that Lorenzo’s mother only got sun after three in the afternoon, and her back garden was barely deep enough for a washing line.

‘Speaking of babies,’ said May, though nobody had been speaking at all for several minutes, ‘I went to see the doctor again about why we’re not having them. You know, me and Tony.’

‘You don’t have to tell me anything personal,’ said Lorenzo. This was not the kind of anecdote he wanted to hear from anyone — not a cousin or sister, not a girlfriend. No woman at all needed to confide such a thing in him, at any point. He knew he should have caught a taxi home.

‘Because there’s nothing wrong with me and there’s nothing wrong with Tony,’ May continued, changing lanes in her usual erratic way. ‘According to the specialists.’

‘It’s a very emotional time,’ Lorenzo said, and hoped that would be the end of it. Agreeing with people, he found, sometimes shut them up.

‘Well, this has been going on for two years,’ said May. ‘So I went back to see my doctor, and you know what he said? That I may have a womb that repels sperm.’

Lorenzo said nothing. He’d remembered, too late, that agreeing with women often encouraged them to divulge more.

‘I kind of like that,’ May said. ‘A sperm-repelling womb! I’ve had a superpower all these years and never realised it.’

Lorenzo still said nothing. You couldn’t hang up on yourself when you were sitting next to the other person in the car. For the first time in his life, he wished he was in a meeting in Wellington.

‘A sperm-repelling womb,’ May said again, lingering over every word, and he realised she was saying all this to wind him up.

‘I guess I’m still really preoccupied with Uncle Jack,’ he said, looking straight ahead. ‘I’m just really … sad.’

‘Liar,’ said May. ‘Uncle Jack had a good run. It was amazing he lasted as long as he did, with all that smoking and drinking. Not to mention the dairy products.’

She swerved into Lorenzo’s street, and he gripped the handles of his bag, ready to leap out.

‘He looked pretty good, really, all things considered,’ May was saying. ‘According to Mum, it’s because he never had children. Children age you, apparently. Not that we’ll ever know, eh? Me and you. Though it’s not too late for you. Biologically, men can go on until—’

‘Thanks for the lift!’ Lorenzo said, opening the door even though the car was still in motion. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be dressed as Wonder Woman,’ May called after him. Her voice was clear and loud, so she must have buzzed the windows down. That was always the thing with May: she didn’t care who heard things. If Uncle Jack were still alive, she’d be shouting away at him tomorrow about her sperm-repelling womb, determined that he heard every word, not content until she made him choke on his tea.

Uncle Jack was lying in his coffin on the spare bed, looking small and spindly. He didn’t smell of smoke anymore, and he didn’t look anything much like the framed old pictures of him arranged around the spare room. He’d looked so wily and nimble, once upon a time, Lorenzo thought. He’d looked like a man of the world. In three of the old photographs, he had slicked-back hair and was wearing tennis whites, in the manner of some European playboy.

Lorenzo tried to imagine the photos they’d pick if Lorenzo himself were laid out on the spare bed. He’d be dressed in a rumpled suit in most of them, pictured with long-forgotten colleagues while attending a product launch or strategic away-day. His shoes would be unpolished. He’d be wearing a lanyard or name badge. He’d probably have red-eye.

May was talking to someone in the hallway, offering up her car as coffin transportation on Monday. A hearse was unnecessary. A rip-off, she announced, and Lorenzo agreed. It was bad enough that the undertaker appeared to be holding the coffin lid to ransom. Lorenzo wasn’t sure why. Couldn’t their family be trusted with the lid? Hadn’t they paid a large sum of money for it?

‘He’ll bring it round on Monday,’ said Lorenzo’s mother. He’d sought her out in the kitchen, where she was rearranging the freezer to accommodate a tinfoil pan of lasagne from Mrs Devich across the road. ‘We don’t need it until then. You always worry about the wrong things.’

What he should be worried about, according to his mother and the huddle of hairsprayed aunties monopolising the kettle, was the party going on that day at the House Behind.

‘They’ve got a sign up on the driveway! With balloons!’ This was Auntie Joan, May’s mother. She was morally opposed to the subdivision of sections, and had written various letters to the Herald advocating a high-speed commuter train to Whangarei and/or Hamilton, effective immediately, to relieve the housing crisis in Auckland.

‘It says “This Way to the Garden Party”,’ said Auntie Sila, who wasn’t a relative but had lived two doors down from them in the street where Lorenzo had grown up. ‘While we’ve got a funeral on here, the curtains drawn. It’s disrespectful.’

‘The funeral’s not until Monday,’ Lorenzo pointed out, and the aunties rose up, bristling like furious sparrows, and told him not to split hairs. They were all getting smaller as they aged, he’d noticed, but they were also louder and fluffier, inflating with every new small outrage.

‘You need to go up there and tell them that we’ve had a tragic loss here, that a respected kaumatua has died, and that—’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Lorenzo. ‘It’s an emotional time.’

‘It’s Wellington that’s done this to him,’ one of the aunties complained to the others, and he left the room.

Lorenzo stood for a while on the front steps, blinking in the sun. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to the people in the House Behind. He couldn’t ask them to cancel their garden party because Uncle Jack had keeled over en route to the dairy, in an unsurprising and non-tragic way, and was lying in the spare room until Monday, being visited by everyone they’d ever known, as well as a Ratana minister and a cluster of watchful Mormons. Probably the House Behind people — not neighbours exactly, not yet — had planned this party for weeks or even months. They would be happy that the weather was so good, that it was as sunny and cloudless today as it was, presumably, all the time in Tuscany.

But the aunties were right, in a way. Lorenzo saw the new houses of the neighbourhood, hidden away like citadels at the end of long, secretive driveways, as inhabiting an entirely different place. Those people drove different cars, ate different food, sent their children to different schools. They weren’t so much joining the community as colonising it. Soon all the little houses would be bulldozed and a new Tuscany would rise up in its place, dreamy pastel townhouses encircling the scrubby green maunga like some medieval hill town. And all the aunties and uncles and cousins, their superettes and fabric stores and takeaways, their schools and churches and mobile health centres, would be packed into the high-speed trains to Whangarei and/or Hamilton, where land cost less and people were still allowed to have gardens and low wages.

May emerged from the open front door, pulling on her shoes. She wasn’t dressed as Wonder Woman after all; she was all in black, the clothes she wore every day.

‘If you’re going up there, I’ll come with you,’ she told him. ‘I’d like to have a nose around that place.’

‘It’s not an open home,’ he said, but he didn’t really object to May coming along. When they were growing up, she’d always been the tough one, protecting him from hostile battalions of other cousins. Recently she’d started studying part-time to get a legal executive diploma, and he’d tried a couple of times to talk her into going to university instead, to become an actual lawyer. It was too much money, May said; she and Tony were saving to buy a home unit like the one they lived in now, except in a neighbourhood that was even scruffier and further away.

‘We could rip down their sign and the balloons,’ she suggested. ‘Or I could cry. Do some keening and wailing. Collapse on their doorstep.’

‘No crying,’ Lorenzo said, though he had no better ideas. He stepped out of the way so eight members of the Tigafua family could make their way up the stairs and through the front door. His mother would be pleased, because they were carrying a large amount of food, because they’d left the smallest children at home, and because their presence here today, a delegation from all the way around the corner, was a sign of respect to Uncle Jack.

Someone else was lingering in the wake of the Tigafua family, a tall blonde girl clutching a fabric shopping bag from Nosh.

‘Hi,’ she said, looking from Lorenzo to May. ‘I live — up there. Round the back.’

The House Behind, Lorenzo wanted to say, but he said nothing, and neither did May. The girl was in her twenties, he guessed, but she was dressed like someone from a World War II movie, in a tailored floral dress, her fair hair in smooth waves the shape of sausage rolls. Her lipstick was bright red. Dog-penis red, as May used to say.

‘We heard about your — uncle, is it? The undertaker was blocking our driveway. I mean, it wasn’t a problem.’

‘Great-uncle,’ said May. ‘Our Great-uncle Jack has died.’

The tone of her voice made it sound such a dignified thing. Lorenzo was impressed.

‘Really, so sorry.’ The girl was flushed. ‘It’s awful. Very sad. And I just wanted to say, I’m sorry that today of all days we’re having a party. A stupid garden party. Themed. You know, vintage.’

She gestured at her hair. Lorenzo still said nothing. Women’s hairstyles were not something he liked to discuss. In his experience, they were a minefield, like height, weight, the use or absence of make-up, and all items of clothing.

‘I’m Laura,’ she said, still pink-cheeked.

‘I’m May. And this is my cousin, Lorenzo. This is his mother’s house.’

‘Lorenzo?’ Laura seemed startled. ‘Are you Italian?’

‘From Tuscany,’ said Lorenzo, thinking this would be funny. But neither woman smiled.

‘He’s Maori and Dutch,’ May told her. ‘And maybe a bit of French as well, going back.’

There was something doll-like about Laura — her pink cheeks and red lips, her dress — and Lorenzo almost felt sorry for her, venturing down from the House Behind into the low-lying, dank marshes where the peasants still lived. But why had she wandered in here with her Nosh bag and her fancy dress? To let them know that the undertaker had blocked her driveway? To explain to them what the sign and balloons had already announced?

Inside, the Tigafua family was singing a hymn. Lorenzo remembered it from school: ‘Pe‘a Faigata Le Ala, Taumafai! If the Way be Full of Trial, Weary Not’. He wasn’t sure why the Samoan version had an exclamation mark and the English version didn’t. It was just one more unanswered question in a life of small, niggling anxieties.

Uncle Jack’s way may or may not have been full of trial: Lorenzo wasn’t sure. Uncle Jack never seemed to weary, at least, but Lorenzo felt exhausted most days. He’d wanted to fall asleep on the plane yesterday, coming back from Wellington, but the flight was too short: by the time the shouty All Blacks safety video was over, and someone had demanded he choose between a savoury or a sweet snack, it was time to land. He wouldn’t mind lying down on the spare bed next to Uncle Jack’s coffin right now, just to close his eyes for ten minutes, though people kept trooping in and out, telling stories about Uncle Jack’s exploits and rude sayings.

May stood on the steps humming along with the hymn. The Tigafuas’ voices rose, rich and swaying, above the sound of distant traffic and the whining lawnmower down the street. Laura, the Nosh bag clasped in her arms, stared down at the cracked concrete of the path. When the hymn ended, she looked relieved, and something else as well. Trapped, maybe.

‘It’s a very multicultural neighbourhood, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘It was,’ said May, her tone pointed, and Lorenzo folded his arms, suppressing a smile. This was so much better than the two of them creeping along the driveway, knocking on the other front door like salesmen, like service providers. Laura had come to them. They could have their way with her, whatever their way might be.

‘I brought you some food,’ Laura said, squeezing the Nosh bag. ‘Some things from our party. Just little sandwiches and cakes. It’s not much. I’m sorry.’

She looked defeated. And she was quite right, Lorenzo thought; compared with the formidable vats and trays borne by the Tigafua delegation, this bag of fancies wasn’t much at all. Once Lorenzo had brought Uncle Jack some miniature croissants, leftovers from an office lunch, tucked with limp triangles of ham and lettuce. Uncle Jack had laughed so much, he’d started coughing. He’d spat out one of his fillings.

‘It’s just a little, you know, a koha,’ Laura continued, and this seemed to soften May.

‘You’d better come in.’ She reached out to take the Nosh bag. ‘Pay your respects.’

‘Really, I don’t want to intrude.’ There was panic in Laura’s voice, but if May heard it, she was ignoring it. Lorenzo followed them inside, lingering on the doormat because Laura was blocking the narrow hallway, straining to unbutton the straps on her shoes.

‘These are Mary Janes,’ she told Lorenzo, sounding apologetic, and he shrugged. Perhaps Mary Jane was her sister. He had no idea why she thought he’d be interested.

He walked her to the spare room and May disappeared to round up aunties. Lorenzo’s mother came in, dabbing at her eyes with a tea towel.

‘I find that hymn very moving,’ she said.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Laura said, and she certainly looked very sorry. ‘I don’t mean to intrude at such a private family moment.’

‘Nothing private about it,’ said Lorenzo’s mother. She glanced up and down at Laura, at her strange floral dress and sausage-roll hair, and then at Lorenzo. He was leaning against the candlewick cover, one proprietary hand on the coffin. He still couldn’t understand why they couldn’t be trusted with the lid. It was their lid. What if the undertaker brought the wrong lid on Monday? Uncle Jack would have a two-tone coffin. ‘Lorenzo didn’t mention anything about a girlfriend.’

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ he said.

‘You met at work, I suppose. Are you the reason he’s always going down to Wellington?’

‘She’s not my girlfriend.’

‘I live here,’ said Laura, pointing at the floor. Lorenzo’s mother frowned. ‘I mean, up the back. The house behind yours — you know, sixty-two A. We’re having a garden party today. My parents.’

‘Lorenzo never mentioned he knew you,’ said his mother.

‘He’s a dark horse,’ said Auntie Joan, who had materialised along with other aunts and female cousins, all crowding around the narrow bed, dislodging pictures, giving Lorenzo long, accusing looks. ‘Just like his Uncle Jack.’

‘Not one word,’ said his mother, addressing Uncle Jack in his lidless coffin. ‘He tells me nothing about his life.’

‘Well, it’s a very emotional time,’ said May, slinging an arm around Lorenzo’s mother. She winked at Lorenzo, which he didn’t appreciate at all. No doubt she’d been spreading misinformation in the kitchen.

Laura had started to cry.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a small, high-pitched voice. Lorenzo tried to edge away from the coffin and the bed, but the room was a thicket of bristling sparrows. ‘I didn’t know your Uncle Jack, but he looks so peaceful here, doesn’t he? So still and calm. Surrounded by everyone who loved him.’

‘And the Mormons,’ said May, sidling close to Lorenzo. He wanted to think she was coming to his rescue, but experience told him the opposite was almost certainly true.

Laura was sobbing now, her thin body shuddering.

‘Ah, your little girlfriend is crying,’ said Auntie Sila, and lines from the All Blacks safety video pounded through Lorenzo’s head. All lighted signs and placards, too. His mother was crying and Laura, who was not his girlfriend, was crying. In the living room the Tigafua family was cranking up another hymn.

‘Please stop crying,’ he said to Laura, but she just gripped Uncle Jack’s coffin and sobbed.

‘Shall I tell her about my superpower?’ May whispered.

‘Not now,’ he said.

Laura turned to him, her cheeks even more pink, her eyes blurry with tears.

‘Isn’t life just …’ she began, and Lorenzo wanted to tell her that her voice was breaking up, that he was entering a tunnel. ‘I mean, isn’t life—’

‘Isn’t it,’ said Lorenzo, and he pushed his way out of the room, hanging up on himself the way he always did, just as Uncle Jack had done by dropping dead in the middle of the road, so people would think it was someone else’s fault.

Great Long Story

At the graveside of Robert Johnson, I was stung on the neck by a bee.

Before he died, Robert Johnson was living in Greenwood, Mississippi. Greenwood still calls itself the Cotton Capital of the World, though nowadays Greenwood farmers prefer to grow corn and soybeans and catfish. The Amtrak train called City of New Orleans stops there en route to Chicago. At Greenwood, two rivers — the Tallahatchie and the Yalobusha — become the Yazoo and run through Vicksburg to the Mississippi. Some people say that Yazoo is a Choctaw word for ‘river of death’.

Nobody knows exactly where Robert Johnson died.

We drove along Johnson Street in Greenwood, looking for the place in Baptist Town where Robert Johnson may or may not have lived. Johnson Street is not named after Robert Johnson. We were looking for a building on the corner of Young and Pelican, where Robert Johnson may or may not have died. There’s no building there anymore, just an historic marker. Residents of Baptist Town were out in the street, eating barbecue. It was Saturday afternoon, Halloween. A local hospital had set up some kind of information tent. We read the marker without getting out of the car. The neighbourhood was like New Orleans, but smaller and shabbier. Some of the houses were falling down. People looked at us, sitting in our car. We looked at the historic marker.

Nobody knows exactly where Robert Johnson died. Some people say he died out at the Star of the West plantation, north of Greenwood. There is no plantation house out there anymore. Paige at the Greenwood Convention and Visitors Bureau thinks it fell down, or was torn down, many years ago.

The Star of the West plantation was named after a Union steamship captured by the Confederates and sunk in the Tallahatchie River. Some people say it was sunk to avoid recapture. Some say it was sunk to block a Union flotilla headed for Vicksburg.

Nobody knows anymore exactly where Robert Johnson is buried. His death certificate said he was buried at Zion Church. Someone erected a grave marker near Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Quito, south of Greenwood. Some people say that the last place he performed was at Three Forks in Quito.

Some people say that the Three Forks where Robert Johnson performed for the last time was a club west of Greenwood, not south. We drove to the intersection of Route 49 East and Route 82 where the juke joint once stood. It’s very close to Walmart. Some people say it wasn’t called Three Forks. It was just a juke joint around the back of Schaeffer’s Store, and probably destroyed, along with the store, by a storm in 1942.

In 1991 Columbia Records placed a marker at Mt Zion Missionary Baptist Church on the road between Quito and Morgan City. They thought this was the Zion Church listed on the death certificate. But in 2000 an old woman named Rosie Eskridge said her husband was the person who dug Robert Johnson’s grave. He was a field hand on the Star of the West plantation. She said he dug it under the pecan tree near the Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church. This cemetery is just north of Greenwood, across the Tallahatchie River.

At the graveside of Robert Johnson, I was stung on the neck by a bee.

Halloween. I stood reading the historic marker at the cemetery just north of Greenwood. On the other side of the road: a field of stubby cotton. The ground was muddy, waterlogged around the pecan tree. It had poured with rain the night before, when I was doing a book-signing in Oxford. I wore a long chain around my neck — silver, dangling a silver globe. Something touched my throat, something that wasn’t the chain. I reached up with one hand to brush it away. A piece of fuzz, I thought, until I registered the pain of the sting. The red welt kept growing and throbbing. I was having an allergic reaction. We had to drive to Walmart, on the west side of town, to get antihistamine cream. Robert Johnson sent a bee to sting you, said my husband. You stood too close to his grave.

Nobody knows anymore exactly where Robert Johnson is buried.

At Walmart, a woman approached my husband and asked him the kind of question someone asks a pharmacist. He is a white man, like the pharmacist. At that moment, in the pharmacy section of Walmart, he was the only white man anywhere in sight. She seemed to think he was the actual pharmacist. I wondered when the red welt on my neck would stop growing and itching and hurting. We had to drive to Jackson for another book-signing at four. My book is a ghost story. It was Halloween.

The gravestone at the cemetery just outside Greenwood may not mark the spot where Robert Johnson is buried. Even if he is buried in that cemetery, he may not be buried under the pecan tree. He may be buried near the historic marker where a bee stung me on the neck.

At Walmart, my husband approached the pharmacist behind the counter and asked if we were buying the right kind of antihistamine cream. The pharmacist said that we could buy meat tenderiser instead and make it into a paste. This would draw out the sting. But we had lingered at the cemetery where Robert Johnson may or may not be buried, and then we’d driven around looking for a pharmacy. It was too late for the paste to work. We had waited too long.

Robert Johnson lay dying for three days.

Nobody knows exactly where Robert Johnson died. Some people say that he was carried from Three Forks to a house in Baptist Town and that he died there. Some people say that he was carried from Three Forks to a house on the Star of the West plantation and that he died there. Some people say that he was carried from Three Forks to the house in Baptist Town and later to a house on the Star of the West plantation. His death certificate reads: Greenwood (outside).

Robert Johnson lay dying for two or three or four days. He died on August 16, a Tuesday. Elvis Presley also died on August 16, a Tuesday, thirty-nine years later. Like Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley was born in Mississippi. He was three years old when Robert Johnson died.

There is no birth certificate for Robert Johnson. His half-sister said he was born in 1911. The State of Mississippi was not required to keep birth or death certificates until 1912.

Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Hazlehurst is the county seat of Copiah County, once the Tomato Capital of America. Like Greenwood, it used to have an opera house. Without realising it, we have driven past his birth site many times. The house where he was born was moved in the sixties to accommodate a ramp leading to I-55, on the east side of the highway. In 2009 it was moved again, into downtown Hazlehurst. The house was falling down. Trees and vines were growing in it. The roof has collapsed. Only two original rooms are left.

Things I wrote in my notebook at the graveside of Robert Johnson: pale blue sky. Muddy hollow. Scattered graveyard. Puddles of water. Pine trees. Pecan tree, rusty leaves. Water in the grooved ridges of the field. It hurts to get stung in the neck by a bee.

Nobody knows exactly where Robert Johnson died. It was August. It was hot. He had to stop playing at the juke joint because he was violently ill. He’d drunk bootleg whiskey, the same as everyone else there. He wouldn’t have been carried to the big house on the Star of the West plantation. He would have been taken to one of the shacks, where someone he knew lived. Some people say it was a shotgun house. Some people say the man living in the shack was known as Tush Hog.

The gravestone in the cemetery outside Greenwood quotes Robert Johnson’s song ‘From Four Until Late’: When I leave this town / I’m ’on’ bid you fare … farewell / And when I return again / You’ll have a great long story to tell.

On the other side of the gravestone the engraver has reproduced the handwriting of Robert Johnson. These lines are not song lyrics. They are words Robert Johnson wrote down on a piece of paper ‘shortly before his death’. They read: Jesus of Nazareth King of / Jerusalem. I know that my / Redeemer liveth and that / He will call me from the grave. Some people say that the piece of paper was found in the shack where Tush Hog lived.

Paige at the Greenwood Convention and Visitors Bureau says Miss Rosie Eskridge’s house is still there, on what used to be the Star of the West plantation. But nobody can go there anymore, because it’s private land.

At the graveside of Robert Johnson, I was stung on the neck by a bee.

The road to the cemetery north of Greenwood is called Money Road. We passed a small white house on the edge of the cotton fields. A sign on the house read ‘WABG 960 KH’. We tuned the radio. The station was playing the blues.

Money, Mississippi, is eight miles north of Greenwood. It used to be the Woodstock plantation. It still had a cotton mill in the 1950s, but now so few people live there it’s not a town. Its official designation is Populated Place. In 1955 Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was there visiting his uncle. It was August. It was hot. At Bryant’s Grocery he whistled or said something to a white woman. Several days later her husband and another man took Emmett away from his uncle’s house. They beat him up, fracturing his skull and his legs and his arms. They gouged out one of his eyes. They shot him. They used barbed wire to fasten a cotton-gin fan around his neck. They threw him into the Tallahatchie River. When his body was fished up three days later, Emmett Till could be identified only by the ring on his finger.

In ‘Hellhound on My Trail’, Robert Johnson sang: I got to keep moving / Blues falling down like hail.

Nobody knows exactly how Robert Johnson died. Some people say it was strychnine poisoning. But strychnine is hard to disguise, and it wouldn’t have taken days to kill him. The poison might have been made from boiled mothballs. It might have been made from arsenic. He was poisoned by a jealous lover, or maybe by the husband of a lover. Maybe the husband didn’t mean to kill him. He just wanted Robert Johnson to leave town.

Robert Johnson got sick at the juke joint. He had stomach cramps and then maybe he got pneumonia. Maybe he had some underlying condition that was triggered by the poison. Some people say that Robert Johnson had Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder. No cause is listed on his death certificate. The only thing written in that column is: No Doctor.

In ‘Preachin’ Blues’, Robert Johnson sang: The blues is a low-down achin’ heart disease / Like consumption, killing me by degrees.

At the graveside of Robert Johnson, I was stung on the neck by a bee. The bee flew on to my neck because it was attracted by the sun glinting off the silver chain. It stung me because I tried to brush it away.

Robert Johnson may have sent a bee to sting me on the neck because I stood too close to his grave.

Robert Johnson may have been called from his grave and transformed into a bee. When I brushed him away, he stung me, and then he died. I may have killed Robert Johnson.

During his lifetime, Robert Johnson was not diagnosed with Marfan syndrome. Signs have been deduced by examining one of the extant photographs. One of his eyelids seems to droop; his fingers are very long and thin. Another sign is joint flexibility. Maybe this is why his playing could sound like two performers, two guitars. Some people think that the violin virtuoso Paganini had Marfan syndrome as well. It can result in aortic dissection. One of the symptoms of aortic dissection is severe, stabbing pain.

Nobody knows if Robert Johnson made a pact with the Devil. People said that about him, because he played so well. The same thing was said of Paganini. The Archbishop of Nice wouldn’t allow Paganini a church burial. Paganini’s embalmed body lay in his house for several months before city officials insisted that it be moved. For a while the body was on public display. Paganini wasn’t buried in Parma cemetery until 1876, thirty-six years after his death. Some people say Paganini was poisoned.

Some people say that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Some people say that this intersection did not exist during Robert Johnson’s lifetime. Some people say that the crossroads in question is in Rosedale, where Highways 8 and 1 meet, or further south on old Highway 8, where it crosses Dockery Road, or somewhere south of Tunica, known as the cross-town road, or somewhere else in the old cotton fields outside Greenwood, or any number of other roads in the lush green Mississippi Delta.

The juke joint where Robert Johnson performed for the last time was on the crossroads of Route 49 East and Route 82. It’s very close to Walmart. In Greenwood these roads cross in more than one place. Even if you’re at the right crossroads, the crossroads have changed. These are big roads now, highways. They’re not the same as the roads in the 1930s. We pulled over and wandered the grass verge where the juke joint may or may not have stood.

Robert Johnson wrote a song called ‘Cross Road Blues’ but it does not mention selling his soul to the Devil. Robert Johnson wrote a song called ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ but it does not mention a crossroads.

Some people say that the reason that Robert Johnson is so desperate in ‘Cross Road Blues’ to flag a ride is that it was dangerous for a black man in Mississippi to be out alone at night.

Another Johnson, Tommy Johnson, born around 1896, claimed to have sold his soul to the Devil in return for the ability to play any song. Another Johnson, Robert Johnson, born around 1582, wrote the music for a song in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The song was ‘Where the Bee Sucks’.

Crystal Springs, Mississippi, is ten miles north of Hazlehurst. Crystal Springs was once known as the Tomato Capital of the World. It is the home of the Robert Johnson Blues Museum, although Robert Johnson was from Hazlehurst, not Crystal Springs. Tommy Johnson, the blues musician who said he sold his soul to the Devil, lived in Crystal Springs. He died in 1956. He is buried in a cemetery outside Crystal Springs, but nobody can go there anymore, because it’s private land. He has no gravestone.

Robert Johnson had two known recording sessions, the first in San Antonio and the second in Dallas. Robert Johnson had two known marriages, the first to Virginia Travis and the second to Calletta Craft. There are two known photographs of Robert Johnson, one taken in a photo booth and the second in a studio. He may have made another recording, an audition record. There may be another photo, of Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines. There may be three or four or five photos of Robert Johnson. There were many other women in Robert Johnson’s life, but no more wives.

Even if Robert Johnson is buried in that cemetery, he may not be buried under the pecan tree. Rosie Eskridge was eighty-five or eight-six years old when she told that story. It was 2000. Robert Johnson died in 1938. She says that Luther Wade, who owned the Star of the West plantation, told her husband to dig the grave. Rosie went to the cemetery to take her husband some water. She pointed out the spot in 2000, when she was eighty-five or eight-six years old. She may have remembered the correct spot. She may have been confused.

I can’t remember things that happened last year. I can’t remember if we drove around Baptist Town before we went to Walmart or afterwards. Maybe this was why we were too late to make a paste with the meat tenderiser. My husband had to remind me about the pharmacist suggesting meat tenderiser. I had forgotten this part completely. I didn’t write it down in my notebook.

Things I wrote in my notebook at the graveside of Robert Johnson: empty whisky bottles, crushed can of Red Bull, Howard County library card, condom packet, Mardi Gras beads, rain-soaked flattened straw hat.

In ‘Me and the Devil Blues’, Robert Johnson says: Baby I don’t care where you bury my body.

Nobody knows exactly how Robert Johnson died. He was married twice, but he moved around a lot — Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas; Memphis and Chicago — and had liaisons with a lot of women. He may have been poisoned by a jealous woman, or by her jealous husband. The night he was taken ill at the juke joint, the jealous husband was Ralph Davis, known as Snake. The jealous woman, the one Robert Johnson was sleeping with, was named Bea.

Everything I’ve written here is true, apart from the things that are wrong, and the things that are lies, and the things that are misremembered.

Halloween in the Mississippi Delta. Cemetery on the road to Money. Pale blue sky, stubby cotton fields. I lingered too long at the graveside of Robert Johnson, and Bea stung me on the neck. She didn’t want to kill me. She just wanted me to leave town.

In Antwerp

This story doesn’t begin in Antwerp; it begins in bed. The bed was in a hotel called The Langham on upper Regent Street in London. In 1867 the hotel was quite new, and still expensive and fashionable. A rich young woman took up residence there, throwing parties in the evenings and spending much of her day in bed. She was a writer, and in this bed she worked on her novels — writing on purple paper, surrounded by bouquets of purple flowers. In some versions of the story she liked to draw the curtains of the bed, so she was cocooned, propped up with pillows, a lace of black ink splattering the white linen sheets.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t rich, not really. The hotel stay was an affectation, an extravagance. Although she’d make a lot of money from her novels, she would always spend far too much. At the time of her death in 1908, she would have absolutely no money at all.

Her real name, the one her English mother gave her, was Maria Louise. She was born in Bury St Edmunds, a small market town in Suffolk, and her father, Louis Ramé, was French. He was much older than his wife, and they were unhappily married. Her parents lived most of their married life apart, with Louis Ramé disappearing for extended periods of time, to France or casinos or both. There were rumours that he was a secret agent. He was last seen alive in 1871, fighting in the streets in Paris during the Prussian siege, and was presumed to have died among the barricades, in a bombardment or a political demonstration, or from famine.

Maria Louise grew up in England among her English relatives, but when she started writing she began calling herself Marie Louise de la Ramée, as though she were a French countess. Before long she’d acquired a shorter pen name — Ouida — and demanded that everyone call her that. William Allingham, the Irish poet, described her as having ‘a clever, sinister face’ and ‘a voice like a carving knife’.

Ouida didn’t have enough money to keep writing in bed at The Langham. Her profligate French father had spent most of the family money, including the English portion of it, so in the late summer of 1871 she and her mother set out for the Continent where everything was cheaper. They were aiming for Florence, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning — another English writer trying to stretch her income — used to live.

Their first stop in Europe was Brussels, and they stayed there for a while in the Hôtel de l’Europe on the Place Royale. This was an older hotel than The Langham — Berlioz had stayed there in 1842, Dumas in 1851 — housed in an eighteenth-century mansion in the expensive French-speaking Upper Town; it has changed names and owners over the years, and is now home to the Magritte Museum.

Ouida and her mother made brief visits to other places in Belgium, probably including Antwerp and its surrounding villages. Paris wasn’t far to the south, but it was a dangerous place in 1871 (see: father’s death, above). When they left Belgium, Ouida and her mother travelled via Germany and Austria to Italy, the place she’d spend the rest of her life.

Somewhere along the way she wrote a story called ‘A Dog of Flanders’, published in an 1872 collection of the same name, drawing on notes and impressions from her stay in Belgium.

‘A Dog of Flanders’ is a tale — either mawkish or heartbreaking, depending on your point of view — of an adolescent boy and his dog. The boy is called Nello, and he’s a poor orphan raised by his grandfather. The dog is called Patrasche, and Nello has rescued him from an abusive owner. Dog and boy deliver milk from their village on the canal to Antwerp, while Nello dreams of becoming an artist like local hero Peter Paul Rubens. He’s desperate to see Rubens’ great altarpieces, The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross, in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, but the paintings are hidden behind curtains; he can’t afford the price of a ticket.

Local rich girl Alois is Nello’s only human friend, but her father bans them from seeing each other. Nello wants to enter a competition to win the money to go to art school, but can’t afford paint. All he can submit is a charcoal drawing.

Lots of terrible things happen to Nello because of cruel men, classism, capitalism, winter, etc. On 23 December it’s bitterly cold and his grandfather dies. On Christmas Eve the local mill burns down and Nello gets the blame. Cold and starving, he and Patrasche make their way into Antwerp. Snow is falling, and it’s almost midnight by the time they reach the Cathedral of Our Lady.

Mass has just ended, so the doors are wide open and the great works by Rubens are uncovered. For the first time in his life, Nello can see them. He and Patrasche, his faithful dog, fall asleep at the altar. In the morning the priest finds them huddled together, frozen to death.

Forty years after Ouida spent her days in bed at The Langham hotel — scribbling on purple paper, wearing her hair loose to evening parties, plotting a life some place where hotel rooms weren’t quite as expensive — she died. She was living in Viareggio, near the sea, with one maid and a number of dogs. Dogs were her great passion, and she believed in feeding them a lot: boiled liver and bread at 11 am, beef and rice at 7 pm. Big dogs, she believed, could have captain biscuits — hardtack — as a treat, and little dogs could be fed sponge cakes.

At the end of her life she had no money left, and even the carpets on the floor had to be sold. She’d been evicted from various rented properties in Italy, and her belongings had been seized more than once. When her mother died in 1893, Ouida wouldn’t part with the body for ten days; she was ashamed that her mother would be buried in a pauper’s grave.

In the winter of 1908 Ouida realised she was dying. She asked her maid to care for the dogs, though she had never really trusted Italians. ‘When you can no longer feed them,’ she said, ‘shoot them with a revolver.’

The New York Times printed an obituary, because Ouida was a character; she dressed in gaudy clothes and brandished a riding whip; she loved dogs but disliked other women and all Americans; she looked down on Tolstoy because he admired Dickens, and so on. In 1908 some people still read her books, though many of her novels were sensationalist or a little ridiculous; one book was titled Held in Bondage. Her work had been the target of satirists for a long time. Purple ink, purple flowers, purple prose.

A Japanese diplomat living in New York read the obituary and went out to buy a copy of ‘A Dog of Flanders’. Like Ouida, he loved dogs.

He sent copies of the book back to Japan, where he was sure it would be popular; he was right. ‘A Dog of Flanders’ was translated into Japanese and became a much-loved children’s classic there, read by generation after generation of sentimental Japanese children. Film and television adaptations were made, in Japan and in the United States. Nobody in Belgium knew much about it.

In 1982 a man named Jan Corteel was working in the Tourist Information Office in Antwerp. He’d never heard of Ouida or ‘A Dog of Flanders’. A Japanese tourist came in asking about it, and Jan Corteel started investigating. He decided that the village where Nello lived was Hoboken; in the nineteenth century this lay just outside Antwerp. The story described the village as on a canal and a league away; the cathedral was visible to the northeast, and there was a windmill where Alois and her snobby family lived. Hoboken seemed to fit the bill, because it was on the Schelde River, and there used to be a windmill there.

Jan grew obsessed with the story. Promoting ‘A Dog of Flanders’ became a vocation for him, the way painting was for Nello. He was also obsessed with Japan. He started collecting Japanese books and magazines about ‘A Dog of Flanders’. He learned Japanese. He made fifteen trips to Japan.

One of the many Japanese tourists who came into the Tourist Information Office asking about ‘A Dog of Flanders’ was a woman named Yoshimi. She met Jan there; he was standing behind the counter, ready to answer her questions. It was 1997, and he knew everything about ‘A Dog of Flanders’. He was forty-seven years old and Yoshimi was twenty years younger. She returned to Japan, but they kept in touch. After two years of a long-distance relationship, Yoshimi moved to Antwerp to live with Jan.

They married in 2001, but the love story didn’t last. Jan Corteel wanted a traditional Japanese wife; Yoshimi wanted to become a Dutch-speaking European with her own bank account. She got a job as a cleaner at the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, the place Nello and Patrasche froze to death, clutching each other in front of the Rubens paintings. Yoshimi didn’t like Jan waiting for her after work. She told him she wanted to travel home from work alone. She told him not to hold her hand in public.

Their relationship got worse. Yoshimi refused to have sex with him anymore. She refused to eat meals with him. She refused to speak to him at home, other than replying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. She divided up the household appliances, like the kettle and toaster and coffee maker; some were his and some were hers, and he was not permitted to touch any of her things.

One of her co-workers at the Cathedral of Our Lady was a Belgian named Pierre, who either worked behind the counter in the book shop, or worked behind the counter in the library, depending on which newspaper account of their relationship you believe.

Yoshimi and Pierre fell in love. Jan Corteel found out his wife was sleeping with another man, but begged her not to leave him. He was obsessed with Japan. He wanted his traditional Japanese wife. It was 2008; they’d been married seven years. He didn’t want to let her go. And also: a film crew was making a documentary about him and his discovery of ‘A Dog of Flanders’. Without him there’d be no Dutch translation, no little statue of Nello and Patrasche in Hoboken. Without him, Toyota would not have paid, in 2003, for a second monument, a bed-like slab of granite outside the cathedral in Antwerp. He knew more about the story and its local associations than anyone else in Belgium.

One morning in January 2008 Jan Corteel rang the police and told them to come to his apartment. He lived on Ferdinand Verbieststraat in Antwerp, a quiet and ordinary street of low, shut-eyed apartment blocks. Perhaps he lived in the sturdy sand-coloured thirties block with concrete balconies, the Carrefour supermarket on the far side of the street beyond a serene green median; perhaps he lived in the scruffier seventies block, boxy and down-at-the-mouth, further along the street. Because it was winter, the trees planted along the pavement were bare.

The previous evening he’d been invited to a reception at the Cathedral of Our Lady. Yoshimi refused to go with him, but she’d turned up anyway, canoodling with Pierre, flaunting their relationship. Jan felt humiliated. He was well-known in Antwerp because of ‘A Dog of Flanders’, and because he was now director of the Tourist Information Office. Everyone at the reception could see Yoshimi and Pierre pawing at each other. There was Jan, standing right there, the object of public pity, or scorn. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He’d had enough of Yoshimi and her open contempt for him. But he couldn’t confront her — not at the cathedral, and not at home that night.

The next morning, when the police arrived at their apartment, they found Jan Corteel in his pyjamas, blood on his hands and clothes and face. Yoshimi they found on the living-room floor. That morning he’d stabbed her twenty-two times with a kitchen knife — two kitchen knives, in fact, with black handles; they were possibly Japanese as well. There were wounds in her liver, her lungs and her heart. He’d strangled her, too, just in case.

Without ‘A Dog of Flanders’, Jan Corteel would have never travelled to Japan, would have never grown obsessed with it. He would not have married a Japanese woman. He would not have become a murderer. After all, he didn’t murder his first wife, Lydie, though she too was unfaithful to him. When Lydie confessed to an affair, all he did was slap her once in the face. They never spoke of it again — the affair or the slap. Instead they spent twenty years sleeping in different bedrooms, staying together for the sake of their three children. Jan only moved out of the marital home in 1997, the year he met Yoshimi.

His three grown-up children testified at Jan Corteel’s trial. They said he bottled things up. He never spoke of his feelings. He had a tendency to let women walk all over him.

In court Jan wore spectacles and a dark suit and a white shirt. His cropped hair was grey. His skin was northern-European grey, like the dim light of a winter’s afternoon. The public gallery was packed with his supporters, including some Japanese tourists.

The prosecutor said that Jan wanted to control Yoshimi. He wanted a Japanese trophy wife and was enraged at the prospect of losing her to another man. He was jealous and egotistical; he was too obsessed with Japan. But his lawyer told the assize judge that Yoshimi bullied Jan. Sometimes she grabbed him in a headlock, pulled at his eyelashes and drummed her fingers against his forehead. After these incidents she’d glow with sadistic pleasure. Jan was so traumatised by her bullying that he’d been planning to kill himself. Instead he’d killed her, but only because of what had happened the evening before at the Cathedral of Our Lady.

He was found guilty of manslaughter, and sent to prison in Antwerp for fourteen years. Filming of the documentary about him and ‘A Dog of Flanders’ was suspended.

The street in Antwerp where Jan Corteel lived with Yoshimi is named for a sixteenth-century astronomer, mathematician and Jesuit priest named Father Ferdinand Verbiest; he was obsessed with China, and spent the last thirty years of his life there, initially squabbling with Protestants and avoiding execution, and later inventing things and advising the Chinese emperor. There is a statue of him in his hometown of Pittem, which is neither in nor near Antwerp.

There is a statue of Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp, near the Cathedral of Our Lady, but no statue of René Magritte in his hometown of Lessines. There is a statue of Ouida — holding a dog — in her hometown of Bury St Edmunds, a place she despised.

The small sculpture of Nello and Patrasche stands outside the Tourist Information Centre in Hoboken. Today Hoboken is part of Antwerp, not a separate village, and it’s more industrial than rural. (It’s not the Hoboken that Frank Sinatra comes from; that’s in New Jersey.) Tourists can catch the number four tram there and visit a rebuilt model of a windmill; they can peer into the church where Nello and Patrasche would have been buried if they had been a real boy and his dog, and if they had come from Hoboken, and if churches in the nineteenth century were enthusiastic about burying dogs owned by paupers.

Ouida was buried in a coffin made of chestnut, in the mountains near Lucca. That the low-lying granite monument in Antwerp is shaped like a bed is entirely coincidental. Although she wrote in English, few readers in the English-speaking world have heard of her. We have short memories. At some point no one will have heard of Edith Sitwell or Rudolph Valentino or Dame Nellie Melba either. At some point — only slightly more distant — no one will have heard of Barbara Cartland or Nelson Eddy or Jennifer Lopez; the Kardashians will be as obscure as the Dolly Sisters.

Officially, the monument to ‘A Dog of Flanders’ in Antwerp is a bench, not a bed. Few of the numerous film adaptations of ‘A Dog of Flanders’ use its original ending, the one written by Ouida. The death of the boy and his dog are seen as too sad.

Billy the Kid

Imagine if you dug him up and brought him out. You’d see very little. There’d be the buck teeth. Perhaps Garrett’s bullet no longer in thick wet flesh would roll in the skull like a marble. From the head there’d be a trail of vertebrae like a row of pearl buttons off a rich coat down to the pelvis. The arms would be cramped on the edge of what was the box. And a pair of handcuffs holding ridiculously the fine ankle bones. (Even though dead they buried him in leg irons.) There would be the silver from the toe of each boot.

His legend a jungle sleep.

— Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

When I was a child, before videos were invented, my mother and I used to watch old movies on TV. They were screened on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and many of them were in black and white. I lay on the window seat, and my mother sat in her usual prime position, on a two-seater sofa that changed over the years (orange wool to green leather), knitting basket to her right, TV straight ahead.

She’d always loved going to the movies: during her childhood in England, they ran continuously from 10:30 in the morning, and patrons could enter at any time, so my mother would stay on to watch films over and over again. Under-fourteens were supposed to be escorted by an adult, but my mother’s big sister was an usherette at one of the big cinemas in South Shields, and would smuggle her in through the exit door.

A lot of the films my mother knew best and wanted me to watch with her dated from the forties and fifties — musicals, dramas, war films; Three Coins in the Fountain and Bonjour Tristesse; Sophia Loren in Houseboat; Lucy and Desi in The Long, Long Trailer; the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. She especially loved Westerns, and so did I: they were exciting if sometimes perplexing, because it seemed obvious that Jeff Chandler and Debra Paget — two of the stars of my favourite, Broken Arrow (1950) — were not actual Indians. I didn’t realise that the hero of our much-loved fifties series Zorro — enjoyed by the whole family in endless re-runs — was really a Sicilian from New York who later played astrophysicist John Robinson in Lost in Space.

Even if they were filmed on California backlots, cowboy-and-Indian movies suggested a Southwest that was stark and dangerous, a place of canyons and ravines, mountains and deserts, merciless sun. This was the home of Cochise and Geronimo: the ferocious men of the Apache and Comanche burned Jesuit missions, swooped on wagon trains, fended off attackers and raided ranches. In rickety towns of saloons and hitching posts, drunk men fell into water troughs, and gunslingers, rustlers, bounty hunters and sheriffs had shoot-outs in dusty streets. Log forts awaited the cavalry. It was border country, disputed territory, the Wild West.

And it was the home of Billy the Kid — the place the boy outlaw grew up, went bad, was shot by Pat Garrett and — dead at the age of twenty-one — soared into the popular imagination. Paul Newman played him in The Left Handed Gun (1958). In The Outlaw (1943) he outwits Garrett and rides off into the sunset with Jane Russell. The truth was nothing like either film, of course. Billy the Kid wasn’t a Hollywood star. He lived a short, unromantic and violent life. Much of it was spent in Mexico or New Mexico, on the run, hiding in the hills, crossing the Rio Grande. He stole cattle and killed people.

I grew up and left New Zealand; Westerns went out of fashion, as did black-and-white movies. But the surreal landscape of the Southwest and its feral citizens, however fake and misrepresented, were implanted in my imagination. A few days after Christmas 2003, my husband, Tom Moody, and I set out from snowy St. Louis, Missouri — his home town — to drive to California for a wedding. I told him that I was particularly keen to pick up Route 66 wherever we could, so I could take corny pictures of an America I only knew from movies and eighties jeans commercials. But really I wanted to get a glimpse of the even older West, and look for traces of Billy the Kid.

It took a day to drive down through wintry Missouri, across grey, emptied-out Oklahoma and on to the parched, windy plains of the Texas panhandle. We passed through places that once only existed for me in pop songs (‘Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa’; ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo?’), trying to reach Albuquerque, New Mexico, by the second night.

Although New Mexico is America’s fifth-largest state by area, it’s one of the most sparsely populated, home to only two million people. Twenty-two tribes of Native Americans are represented there. The state has the highest proportion of Hispanic residents in the United States: one out of three New Mexicans speaks Spanish at home. A third of its inhabitants live squeezed between the mountains encircling Albuquerque. Although that city is famous to foreign TV viewers now, because of Breaking Bad, it’s not all that big — about the same size as Düsseldorf, or Newcastle in New South Wales, or Honcho in Japan.

New Mexico was admitted to the union as a state only in 1912, and when we drove around it in 2003 it still felt to me like a frontier, all long lonely roads, scruffy desert and dark mountains. Its wide open spaces have lured scientists (the first atomic bomb was developed and detonated here in 1945) and aliens (who allegedly crash-landed a UFO near Roswell in 1947). Buddy Holly hopped across the border from Texas in 1957 to record ‘Peggy Sue’. Georgia O’Keeffe moved here to paint, and D. H. Lawrence arrived hoping to stave off TB and founded a utopian community. Ansel Adams found the material for his first book, Taos Pueblo, with the help of Lawrence’s rich patron, Mabel Luhan Dodge, who fostered a ‘Paris West’ for modernist artists. These days there are big summer art fairs in Santa Fe, home to hundreds of galleries, but it’s primarily an expensive art market rather than a cutting-edge artistic location in the way Dodge envisaged. George R. R. Martin has a house there. Julia Roberts owns a ranch outside Taos.

When we crossed from the Texas panhandle into New Mexico we changed time zones, gaining an hour by driving into Mountain Time. But it felt like a move back into the past, the world of the early Pueblo Indian inhabitants, who built walled cities and farmed along the Rio Grande, and the conquistadors of imperial Spain, who arrived looking for gold, as ever, and founded a capital here in 1598. The first church ever built in North America still stands in New Mexico, as does the union’s oldest public building, Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors, built in 1610.

On the drive through eastern New Mexico it’s still possible to get a sense of the ragged edges, the desolate, dusty vastness of the Old West. In the plains east of the Sandia mountains, where the landscape blurs into an undulating sea of scrub, and cattle outnumber people, the wilderness of the past appears least changed. This is where I persuaded Tom we should take a detour, turning south on to a country road at Tucumcari. We drove towards Fort Sumner, where Billy the Kid is buried.

Like many of those who’ve sought refuge in New Mexico, Billy the Kid was an outsider. He was born William McCarty — probably in New York, probably in 1859, probably to Irish immigrants. His parents may not have been married; his father may or may not have died during the Civil War. Billy, his mother and brother moved to Indianapolis and then Wichita, where Catherine McCarty ran a laundry and later bought a small homestead.

In Indianapolis around 1865 she met a young Civil War vet, William Antrim, whom she finally married in 1873, when she was forty-three and he was thirty. By then the family had moved on from Wichita to the pre-railroad wilds of New Mexico. The wedding took place in Santa Fe and then the Antrims moved south to Silver City, a mining town in the Mogollon mountains.

There Catherine died of TB in 1874. Billy’s stepfather moved further west alone, to prospect. At fifteen Billy was arrested for hiding goods stolen from a Chinese laundry, and he escaped the jail house by climbing up the chimney. He ended up across the border in Arizona, working as a ranch hand, known to his friends as Kid Antrim. He stayed long enough to kill someone — an Irish-born man named Cahill — during a brawl, then fled back to New Mexico. This was 1877: he was seventeen.

Billy fell in with a horse-rustling gang, and assumed the name of William H. Bonney. (This may have been his father’s surname.) After he returned to New Mexico he was known as Billy Bonney or Kid. When a newspaper, late in 1880, dubbed him ‘Billy the Kid’, he wrote an indignant letter to the governor of New Mexico complaining that he was Kid, not ‘the Kid’.

If identities were fluid in the Old West, so was the definition of right and wrong. There was plenty of work for young drifters who knew how to handle a gun, drive cattle and steal horses. Billy was quick-thinking and intelligent, literate in English and a fluent speaker of patois Spanish. Slight and good-looking in an almost girlish way, he’d learned young how to fight and defend himself, and also how to ingratiate himself with people: contemporaries recalled him as charming and witty, a ladies’ man who liked to dance.

Late in 1877, Billy found work in eastern New Mexico in Lincoln County — an area the size of South Carolina — as hired hand to wealthy young Englishman John Tunstall. This was the era of cattle barons, corrupt lawmen and guns for hire, and the rough-edged frontier town was the epicentre of the infamous Lincoln County war of the 1870s — a power struggle between newcomer Tunstall and James Dolan, who virtually controlled the region’s economy, including lucrative business with the local military.

After Tunstall was ambushed and murdered by Dolan’s posse, Billy — known for his loyalty and nerve — was sworn in as one of the Regulators, a band deputised by a JP to run down the killers. But badges so easily handed out could just as quickly be removed. The brazen Regulators shot dead the sheriff, a Dolan man, on Lincoln’s muddy main street, and — after both factions busied themselves with numerous bloody shoot-outs, revenge killings, lootings and sieges — Billy was once again on the wrong side of the law.

The new governor of New Mexico, Lew Wallace, arrived in Lincoln eager to take Billy up on a written offer to testify as a state witness against Dolan’s gang. They met in secret, and Wallace — amazed that the teen thug was ‘an object of tender regard’ to many of the locals — promised him a pardon. Billy gave his testimony in front of a grand jury, but Wallace returned to Santa Fe without handing over the pardon. Billy went on the run again, gambling and attending dances in Fort Sumner, and rustling cattle and horses from New Mexico to Texas. His notoriety grew, and by the end of 1880 an impatient Wallace put a price on his head. The new sheriff of Lincoln County, Pat Garrett, cornered Billy and his gang near Fort Sumner, killed two of them, and put Billy and two others on a train to Santa Fe.

We drove into a quiet Santa Fe on a cold afternoon in late December, snow glinting on the Sangre de Cristo mountains, workers taking down municipal Christmas decorations. The town, 7000 feet above sea level, looked like an adobe film set, a place of airbrushed rusticity with its clean cobbled alleys, glazed-tile storefronts and secluded courtyards, streets of expensive jewellery shops, restaurants and hotels radiating from a sandy central plaza. Santa Fe was much dirtier and more chaotic in Billy’s day. He arrived by train in January 1881 and was led in chains to the county jail.

Although its population is only about seventy thousand, Santa Fe is still the state capital. It’s also one of the top tourist destinations in the United States, especially during its big events, like the summer opera season and the annual Indian Market in August. Draconian city laws mean that new buildings have to be constructed in the approved ‘Pueblo Revival’ style, so it was hard to tell what was old and what had been built yesterday. Indian sellers of pottery and jewellery sat shivering in the shadowy verandah of the Palace of the Governors, a one-storey building that looked more like an adobe office block than a museum.

There were only four of us on the afternoon tour led by Bill, a genial retired professor from Texas, but the other two visitors drifted away after twenty minutes, bemused by the museum’s eclectic exhibits. Bill let us linger over a Concord stagecoach which carried mail and passengers along the Santa Fe Trail in the 1870s, and the sagging leather chair in which governor Lew Wallace wrote his most famous novel, Ben Hur. By the time Billy the Kid was in shackles in Santa Fe, trying to dig an escape tunnel out of his pitch-black cell, and writing pleading letters to Wallace, the governor was in Washington, trying to leverage his status as best-selling author into an ambassadorial appointment somewhere more glamorous and civilised than New Mexico.

The next morning we spent half an hour browsing in Collected Works Books in the Cornell Building on San Francisco Street. A brass plaque on the outer wall claimed this was the site of the jail house where Billy the Kid was held. In fact, the county jail was on Water Street, a block further south. The plaque on the Cornell Building, dated 1944, is signed ‘Murray J. Cornell’. Like so many local business people, he wanted a piece of Billy the Kid.

In the store I found a photograph of Burro Alley, just across the street, taken in 1900. In the picture donkeys loaded with stacks of wood wait in the dirt outside a low-lying adobe building, Indian blankets hanging in the doorway under a sign that reads ‘Curiosity Shop’. When I stepped outside the shop to compare and contrast, everything about the alley looked different. The Curiosity Shop on the corner was an art gallery housed in a sleek three-storey adobe-style building from the 1930s. A copper sculpture of a burro, burdened (in art as in life) with pieces of wood, guarded the street’s entrance, a fluorescent traffic cone placed, for obscure reasons, before its front legs. Santa Fe knew its history, but it also knew the way people wanted to see it now — as a sculpture, cleaned up and camera-ready, on a pristine city street.

After three cold, dark months in jail, Billy was moved to Mesilla to stand trial. Mesilla is on the way to El Paso, and both the train line and the Interstate follow the old Camino Real south along the Rio Grande. It was a four-hour drive for us. For Billy, the train only went as far as Rincon, 40 miles from Mesilla but nine gruelling hours away by stagecoach.

Mesilla was a busy town — and even, briefly, a Confederate capital — until the railway bypassed it in 1881 and nearby Las Cruces became the county seat. It’s much smaller today than the town Billy knew, and much more self-conscious about its charms. The old plaza was wedged with shops, galleries and restaurants, attracting visitors from both sides of the border. From the bandstand at the centre of the plaza, I could spot the courthouse where Billy was tried, now a rose-coloured adobe gift shop balancing a giant nativity scene over the doorway, a garish yellow sign announcing its Billy the Kid connection plastered to an outside wall. Inside, it was hard to imagine what the place once looked like — whitewashed and bare, apparently, with a wooden floor and rows of benches — before it was defiled with shelves of fridge magnets, chilli sachets and souvenir pottery. At the tiny café at one end we bought coffee, and the affable clerk pointed out a photo of the building from the late nineteenth century. The plaza looks as deserted as a ghost town; crumbling and plain-faced, the courthouse appears almost derelict, although it was still in service as a jail and a schoolhouse — with school suspended for hangings — after it lost its county courthouse status.

In April 1881, Billy was found guilty of two of the Lincoln County murders. When the judge — a Dolan sympathiser — delivered his summation, it had to be translated into Spanish for the all-Hispanic jury. Billy was sentenced to death and taken back to Lincoln to be hanged. His was the only successful prosecution of the Lincoln County war.

The Mexican border is just 20 miles from Mesilla, and when we drove west out of town we had to stop at a compulsory checkpoint. It wasn’t clear if the police were checking our car for illegal immigrants or for runaway prisoners: several road signs warned us not to pick up hitchhikers, because there was a prison in the area. The border patrol waved us through. A billboard on the highway announced that 19,421 pounds of drugs had been seized. That year? At that checkpoint? Another sign advised that ‘Dust Storms May Exist Next 15 Miles’.

Of course, Billy wasn’t hanged in Lincoln. On 28 April 1881, when Pat Garrett was out of town, Billy made one of his trademark daring escapes. He snatched a deputy’s gun, wriggled his slim hands out of their cuffs and killed the two guards. Then he addressed the townspeople of Lincoln from a balcony, explaining why he’d had to shoot the deputies, and sawed through the shackles on one leg. On a commandeered horse he rode away, but not far enough. Rather than cross the border to Mexico, as his friends urged him to do, Billy stayed in hiding for several months around Fort Sumner, near the ranch owned by his friend, Pete (Pedro) Maxwell. Some conjecture that Pete’s sister, Paulita, was pregnant with Billy’s child, though she always denied it. A romance with Paulita would explain why he stuck around somewhere so dangerous, and gives Billy’s story a Hollywood ending: he died for love.

The internet vibrates with rival theories and accounts of Billy’s death, but the most common is this: on the night of 14 July, spooked by the sight of one of Garrett’s henchmen in the yard, Billy crept into Pete Maxwell’s bedroom, asking ‘Quien es?’ (‘Who is it?’). Garrett was there, by his own account, to grill Maxwell.

He said that the Kid had certainly been about, but he did not know whether he had left or not. At that moment a man sprang quickly into the door, looking back, and called twice in Spanish, ‘Who comes there?’ No one replied and he came on in. He was bareheaded. From his step I could perceive he was either barefooted or in his stocking-feet, and held a revolver in his right hand and a butcher knife in his left.

Garrett says that Pete Maxwell whispered ‘That’s him!’ and then Garrett shot him dead. He published this scene in his book The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, written with the help of ghostwriter Ash Upson. For decades Garrett’s version of Billy’s life and death was the main historical record, and helped transform him from ‘Noted Desperado of the Southwest’, as Garrett’s subtitle described him, to a mythic outlaw known to the entire country.

Billy was buried in the old military cemetery behind the house, near the graves of the two friends Garrett had killed the previous Christmas. His grave was marked by a plain board stencilled with his name. Garrett says he witnessed the burial.

I said that the body was buried in the cemetery at Fort Sumner; I wish to add that it is there to-day intact. Skull, fingers, toes, bones, and every hair of the head that was buried with the body on that 15th day of July, doctors, newspaper editors, and paragraphers to the contrary notwithstanding. Some presuming swindlers have claimed to have the Kid’s skull on exhibition, or one of his fingers, or some other portion of his body, and one medical gentleman has persuaded credulous idiots that he has all the bones strung upon wires.

This grave site is one of the few attractions in present-day Fort Sumner, a tiny town that looked colourless and still to us in the dull grey of early winter. The only people we saw walking along the main street were two young Mormon missionaries in grey suits, talking over a gate to a cowboy sitting on a horse. Billy’s grave lay in a square yard surrounded by a low adobe wall and shaving-brush trees, behind the musty Old Fort Sumner Museum.

A stone marker was erected in 1932 with the inscription ‘Pals’ above the names of William H. Bonney and his two friends, Charlie Bowdre and Tom O’Folliard. After decades of souvenir-hunters chipping away at it, the gravestone was secured behind bars — though this didn’t stop vandals in 2012 managing to knock it over.

Despite Garrett’s insistence, Billy’s imprisonment in this caged grave may be entirely illusory. His original grave marker washed away in the 1904 floods. Jules Furthman, who wrote the screenplay for The Outlaw, wasn’t the only person to contend that Billy the Kid faked his own death — maybe with Garrett’s collusion — and that a stooge was shot and buried in his place. Perhaps Billy was never there at all that July night, and Garrett killed the wrong man, claiming the notorious Kid as his victim to lay claim to the ensuing fame and fortune.

In 2003 the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, lent his support to the exhumation of Billy’s mother, Catherine Antrim, to compare her DNA with that of a Texan pretender, ‘Brushy Bill’ Roberts, who died in the 1950s claiming he was the Kid. (The town of Hico, Texas, holds a ‘Billy the Kid Day’ every April, mainly to antagonise New Mexicans.) As Catherine’s grave in Silver City had been moved in the 1880s, this was unlikely to prove conclusive.

In the last year of his term, Richardson set up a website asking New Mexicans to argue for or against a posthumous pardon for Billy, a cause espoused by a local historian because Lew Wallace had promised clemency. In 2010, in one of his final acts as governor, Richardson decided not to award the pardon because, he said, of ‘historical ambiguity’ about Wallace’s decision to renege on his promise to Billy.

The man in the Old Fort Sumner Museum chatted about Albuquerque restaurants and sold me a postcard of the only authenticated surviving photograph of Billy the Kid — grasping his Winchester, revolver holster on his left — taken at Fort Sumner in 1880. He’s got a baby face and buck teeth, wispy hair curling out from his hat. His clothes are a scruffy jumble, his boots worn. This picture is the reason many people believed Billy was left-handed. Gore Vidal was one of them — he wrote the original script for The Left Handed Gun — until he learned that the photograph was a tintype, a mirror image.

The picture is speckled and rusty with age, and the details of Billy’s face are indistinct, as though he’s fading into the background. But there in the drab, dry country around Fort Sumner, far from the groomed plazas of Santa Fe, it was possible to look at this picture and get a sense of Billy before he was a myth, when he was still a cocky young man living by his wits, and his gun, in a dangerous, unforgiving world.

Women, Still Talking

My mother talked too much. Her stories would stretch on for hours, for entire car journeys and social visits and telephone conversations. The stories had no beginnings or endings. Listeners would lose sense of time and spiral into another dimension, a place of swirling words unrestrained by narrative structure or pauses for breath. Anyone trying to be polite and make a good impression — new boyfriends, district nurses, tradesmen, confused home-stay students from Japan or Bolivia — found themselves swept up in my mother’s Milky Way of words, lost in space.

Although I lived overseas for decades, I didn’t escape the stories. My mother got a special phone plan that gave her cheap calls to the United Kingdom, United States or wherever I happened to be at the time. Whenever I came home to visit, I was the cavalry, riding in to relieve my immediate family members of the strain of listening. If I said I was popping up the road to the Te Atatu South shops, say, to get something vital like an ice cream or lottery ticket, my mother would offer to accompany me in the car.

‘You haven’t come all this way to be by yourself,’ she’d say, and I’d have to argue to get out of there alone, just for ten minutes of peace. Once my husband and I drove my mother to the Morris and James Pottery in Matakana, about 60 kilometres north of Auckland. When we got out of the car, my husband looked mutinous.

‘Do you realise that your mother talked non-stop the whole way?’ he asked me. I’d sort of noticed, in the same way I’d notice that my mother had brown hair. She always talked non-stop. I was just glad we weren’t driving to Whangarei.

My mother’s long-distance phone stories were often about people I was expected to know, who may have once lived in a street near us, or had children who attended a school with either me, my sister, my brother, or none of the above. My mother made identification difficult by referring to the characters in her stories as ‘you know, so-and-so’. Then she would talk about the one who’d left her husband for the (also married) scout leader, or the one whose son had moved to Sydney, where he’d quite suddenly — and through no fault of his upbringing in Auckland — ‘gone gay’. Sometimes I’d get scenes from a Samoan wedding, or a twenty-first at Kelston Community Centre. These were the more interesting stories, the ones where I paid attention. More often I felt as though I was listening to the plot summary of various soap operas, none of which I’d ever watched, most with sprawling, interchangeable casts and unsatisfying denouements.

My mother had two tactics for imposing structure on her stream of unrelated anecdotes. Deep down she knew, I think, that her stories meandered and that the components lacked dramatic coherence. When one act rambled its way to its inevitable and confusing anti-climax, she would say one of two things. The first was: ‘however …’, followed by just enough of a pause to imply suspense. The second was: ‘and that passed off’, which usually signalled a leap in time, or perhaps an entirely new story, with new characters and predicaments, bearing no relation to what had gone before.

In her zeal to speed onwards with the never-ending story, my mother would add yet another dimension of confusion. Instead of finishing a sentence, she would substitute the word ‘thing’ for all or part of the information.

‘You know, so-and-so,’ she’d say. ‘The one who used to live on Covil Ave. Her daughter … thing.’

The task was to guess what ‘thing’ meant. There were always a number of possibilities. In this example, ‘thing’ could mean ‘has bought a house on Royal View Road’. ‘Thing’ could mean ‘Julie’. ‘Thing’ could mean ‘was convicted of drug-running and imprisoned for ten years’. ‘Thing’ could mean ‘was in Foodtown today’. ‘Thing’ could mean ‘has contracted typhoid’. There was no end to what ‘thing’ could mean — a word, a sentence, a chapter’s worth of plot.

Of course, I could have interrupted. Anyone could have interrupted my mother, if they had the nerve and a loud-enough voice. I could have said: what passed off? I could have said: what do you mean, thing? I could have said: I think you’ve told me this story before. At one time or another, I did say all of those things. But interruption did nothing but prolong the story. The story only ended when I put the phone down or walked away. Before my husband married into our family, my sister gave him precisely that advice.

‘Just walk away,’ she said. ‘She won’t notice.’

I wonder now if the story was always going on, whether any of us were listening or not.

On a train from London to Newcastle, I sat in first class, eavesdropping. Perhaps because I grew up half-listening to someone else’s stories, I can’t help tuning in to other people talking.

Two middle-aged women got on the train at Lincoln and sat down in their reserved seats across the aisle from mine, both facing the direction of travel. One of the women’s sons was getting married: they were on their way to Newcastle for the bride’s hen night. Events were going to begin at a wine bar. Her friend was worried that they’d be the oldest there.

When the train stopped at York, they sat gazing at girls in shiny short dresses climbing off another train.

‘Are the races on today?’

‘It’s cold for a dress like that.’

‘Maybe they’re on a hen night as well.’

‘Early!’

‘They start early now.’

‘I feel cold just looking at them.’

Another woman got on the train and sat down in her reserved seat, across the table from the two women from Lincoln. They soon drew her into their conversation. She was returning home to Newcastle, she said, after a night in York.

‘I’ve started seeing a man here,’ she told them. ‘I’ve known him for years. We went to school together.’

Her husband had left her and their teenage sons a year earlier, to live with a much younger woman. The women from Lincoln tutted and shook their heads.

‘Nice that you’ve found someone new,’ one of them told her.

This weekend was the first time she’d stayed overnight in York, with the man she’d known at school.

‘How much younger is the woman, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Much younger. In her twenties.’

‘She’ll get bored with him soon. The thrill’ll wear off.’

She told them how to find the wine bar for their hen night. When the train rattled across the Tyne, the women from Lincoln asked her to join them.

‘Come on. You’ll have a good time.’

‘Oh, no. Thanks, but I need to get home to the boys.’

‘Shame. You’d enjoy yourself. We’d enjoy it if you were there.’

She stood up while the train was still moving, clambering onto a seat to pull down her bag. Her black tights were laddered down the back of one shin.

‘Lovely talking to you.’

‘Lovely.’

‘Lovely to meet you. Good luck! Are you sure you won’t come out?’

We all got off the train. They were still talking to her as we walked along the platform towards the ticket barriers, all of us wheeling our bags along. She told them which way to walk to their hotel.

I wished that I’d spoken up and joined the conversation instead of pretending to read or look out the window. I still had questions about the husband who’d left, and the younger woman, and the man in York. I went to university in York: I would have mentioned that, and asked about the neighbourhood where he lived. I would have tutted and sympathised, shaking my head.

My mother would have joined in. She would have listened, as well, taking it all in, not talking too much at all. Sometimes she was a good listener, especially with strangers. Maybe she needed the material — more stories to tell other people on the phone.

Buried under the rubble of banal West Auckland anecdotes lay my mother’s good stories. Many were about her childhood in England during the war, involving bomb shelters, gas masks, a mined beach, Churchill on the radio. But for years she only told us a small cluster of stories about her childhood, repeated over and over until we groaned and begged her to stop. For example, we didn’t need to hear, once again, the story about her biting off one leg of a chocolate camel — a gift for someone else — especially as it sounded to us like a Christmas story rather than an Easter memory, as she insisted.

Recently I attended an indigenous writers’ forum in Canada, and one writer talked about her mother and aunts playing cards and repeating stories over and over. Only later did this woman realise that they were making sure the oral history of their family and community was implanted in her head, so she could carry the stories on and tell them to new generations.

I don’t think that was my mother’s intention.

When my mother was in her early seventies, I asked her to type up some of her stories. ‘Today is Monday, 19th January 2004,’ she wrote, ‘and I am determined to begin my memoirs in earnest.’ I would read what she wrote and send her questions, and eventually she typed twenty-seven pages of stories and descriptions of South Shields, her home town. I’ve visited South Shields many times now, so it was easier for me to visualise the places she lived — spartan top-floor flats on brick terraces, washhouses and coalhouses in the back yards. ‘I seem to have gone off on a tangent,’ she wrote after writing about a new Easter coat she’d received as a child, but in the memories tangents were good: I encouraged her to digress as much as she liked.

She quoted my nana, someone I barely remember from her brief time in New Zealand when I was a child. ‘I’m sending you out like a new pin and make sure you return that way,’ my nana would tell my mother. ‘Don’t drown the miller,’ she’d say when they were making bread together. ‘I am not kind with you’ meant that she was annoyed.

My mother wanted to write, but she didn’t want anyone but me to read it. I was aware that there were gaps in the narratives, things she’d hinted at and couldn’t bring herself to type. The truth of the story was too much, too personal. It still meant something to her, unlike her tales of so-and-so who lived on Covil Ave.

The memories were abandoned rather than finished: we never got to the bombings, or to her first job, at the age of fourteen, or to her father’s death around the end of the war. Sometimes I think there are more than the twenty-seven pages, that we must have printed them out and shuffled them into some unknown file. There must be more than these pages. Where’s the rest of the story? Why didn’t I press her to write more, while she could? Why did she write things down if she didn’t want anyone to read them?

My mother talked a lot, and so do I. Yet beneath all that chatter she was secretive, and so am I.

I asked her to write down her memories, and she did, sort of. And that passed off.

Sometimes when I eavesdrop, I write things down in my notebook. The dialogue in one scene in my second novel, Hibiscus Coast, was overheard in a restaurant in Shanghai. I almost fell sideways out of my chair straining to hear that conversation. More recently I got some good material during a bus ride (Mt Albert to the university) that I might be able to use some day, an argument about whether South America is a continent.

If I have time, I write down the scene in more detail when I get home. Here’s an example, taken from notes made in a café. The place was nearly empty but two women sat down at the table right next to me, talking in loud voices. One had just taken part in a psychology experiment up at the university. She had to answer a series of yes/no questions about learning English as a child, acquiring language, discovering meaning. She couldn’t explain because it was too complicated and anyway, she wasn’t really paying attention to the questions. She did it for the money.

The other woman said she needed money, too. Someone at a poetry reading had approached her, a potential client. She’d been recommended as a vocal coach, which annoyed her because she was a singer, a songwriter, a poet, and then a vocal coach, in that order.

She’d given the guy her card, but maybe he wouldn’t get in touch. She’d been asked to leave that particular poetry reading, because she was quizzing each reader, interrogating them about process and meaning. The organiser said it was disruptive.

Her friend told her that more experiments were coming up at the university. Participants didn’t always get paid, but usually they did. Especially, she said, if you agree to swallow something, or if you give blood.

I don’t remember where the café was, or even the city. I couldn’t really look at the women, because I was writing in my notebook and pretending not to eavesdrop. I used to be able to zone out of my mother’s chatter without any problem, but these days I listen to anyone talk about anything. Speak up, I want to tell them. Speak more slowly: I’m writing this down.

Even before I wrote books and stole other people’s conversations to use as material, I wrote conversations down. In June 1991, when I was a production assistant at BBC Radio (starting wage: nine thousand pounds a year), I toured southern Spain with a boyfriend. The holiday didn’t go well. When we got back to London, we broke up. I lived south of the river in zone two and he lived way to the north, in zone four, so the relationship was always doomed.

During the trip I must have sensed that the end was nigh, because I only took photographs of the scenery, not of him. I can look at my Spanish pictures now — Seville, Cordoba, Ronda, Granada — and pretend that I went there alone.

‘If you must know,’ he said, pouting his way around Ronda, ‘you driving us everywhere makes me feel emasculated.’

Well, learn to drive, I wanted to say. Maybe I did say it, though I think not. I was younger then, more polite.

In Seville we went to a restaurant at eight o’clock in the evening, which meant the only other people eating dinner there were tourists like us. I heard New Zealand accents at the next table — two men and a woman, who looked old to me at the time but may have been in their fifties. The woman started talking to me. Her name was Madge. The men were her husband and a family friend. They all lived in Taranaki. They’d never been overseas before.

Europe was expensive, Madge said. They’d been visiting adult children in the UK, and now they were touring the Continent on an organised trip. Everyone else on their bus was British. They’d smuggled in a small burner, and in their hotel rooms they cooked beans and toasted bread. ‘It’s all right for these English,’ Madge told me. ‘They’re just on a two-week tour. But we’re travelling for seven weeks, all the way from New Zealand. We have to watch our money.’

That night at the restaurant the friend had ordered paella, but Madge and her husband were eating egg and chips, ‘because we’re tired of ordering things we don’t like’.

They asked me if I had any news from home, but I knew even less than them. We all knew a little about the America’s Cup. ‘I don’t know,’ said Madge, ‘but with the All Blacks and this yacht race …’

She didn’t need to finish saying that things were looking up for New Zealand. Also, perhaps, that it was clearly superior to all European countries, particularly the UK.

The next day we saw them again, in Seville Cathedral. They were coming down the stairs of the tower as we trudged up.

We smiled at each other, calling out hello and goodbye: they were hurrying back to the bus. ‘At least in St Mark’s in Venice,’ said Madge, ‘they have lifts.’

In the journal of that trip, I wrote down all these quotes from Madge, and the ‘Good on you, Kiwi!’ the friend shouted when they left the restaurant. I didn’t write down a single quote from my boyfriend. Aside from the emasculation comment, I don’t remember anything he said.

For the last four years of her life, my mother had cancer. Gradually she lost the ability to communicate.

The first thing she gave up was writing. When I came home, I wrote for her — Christmas cards, birthday cards, a card for a bridal shower. Sometimes she gave me direction on what to write, but usually I wrote what I liked. In a birthday card to one of my English cousins in South Shields I wrote: Happy birthday to my dear nephew.

Once she asked me to write a condolence letter, telling me what she wanted to say. Speech was getting harder for her by then. I wrote down what she seemed to be trying to say, fixing the letter as we went along so there weren’t any repetitions. I added and removed things in her sentences so they sounded more like her old self, her real self. I read it back to her, waiting for a nod of approval. Then I signed her name for her, because she couldn’t do that anymore.

On one of my visits home, while I lolled around in my parents’ retirement-village apartment, my mother told me she wished she’d written some of her old stories down, while she could still type. I told her that she had, back in 2004, and that the document was almost thirty pages long. I printed it out for her, and she sat reading and re-reading it. She’d completely forgotten writing it. She may have even forgotten living those experiences and adventures in the first place. She read the stories and wondered at them, at the marvel of them, of all those words she’d poured onto the page.

But soon she didn’t feel like reading anymore either. She was always a voracious reader. My nana hadn’t approved of reading, which she regarded as a sign of idle hands; the only thing my mother remembers her own mother reading was the local paper, the Shields Gazette. Nana would always stand up to look through it, as though sitting down to read was lazy. Second-hand books were banned because Nana believed they carried disease, so the books my mother devoured as a child must have come from the library.

As she wasted away, my mother stopped reading books and reading the newspaper. She would read emails that my father printed out, and then, when she grew too tired for that, other people would read them to her.

The last time I saw her was May 2014, three months before she died. By then she could barely speak.

‘I don’t have the words,’ she said, pointing to her mouth. My father had to find them for her, guessing at what she meant, what she was thinking. Sometimes what she wanted to say had to be left unsaid. We tried to lure her out of silence with questions. We leaned in to hear what she was whispering, to encourage every sentence along. I thought it might be a relief for us — the quiet, after all those years of too much talking, the endless stories, the repetitions.

However—

Rocky Ridge

Southern Missouri, 1928. On a green ridge outside the sleepy town of Mansfield, an elderly farming couple lived in a white wooden house, its soaring stone chimney built entirely from the rocks on their farm.

Their prodigal only daughter returned from Europe to live with them after years away spent working as a writer. Adventurous and sophisticated, trained as a journalist, she’d been married and divorced. She’d learned four languages. She’d driven across the desert toward Baghdad and sailed the Aegean Sea.

She’d made her name and living as a writer of popular fiction, mainly stories and serials published in magazines and newspapers, and returned to America to write, stabilise her finances, and spend time with her ageing parents. She planned to return to Albania, one of her favourite places, and build a house there with courtyards and fountains, to live in splendid, exotic isolation, visited by intellectuals and politicians and writers from all over the world.

In Missouri she was joined by an old friend from her days working for the Red Cross, a wartime nurse who had travelled across Europe with her in a Model-T Ford. This friend set up camp on the lawn behind the house. She’d recently published her World War I diaries, and would go on to write a series of books based on her own experiences as a young nurse.

Every afternoon they sat outside in the garden drinking coffee served in an elaborate Albanian tea service. The rest of the day they wrote. The daughter pounded away on her typewriter up in her old attic bedroom, writing stories for The Saturday Evening Post and working on a novel inspired by family stories of pioneer life.

From the point of view of children’s literature, Mansfield in the late 1920s is an incredibly significant time and setting. This was Rocky Ridge Farm: the prodigal daughter was Rose Wilder Lane; her mother was Laura Ingalls Wilder; and work was about to begin on the classic children’s series known as the Little House books. Rose’s friend was Helen Dore Boylston — from 1936 the author of the Sue Barton series instrumental in creating the popular ‘career novel’ genre.

Almanzo Wilder, Laura’s husband and Rose’s father, wasn’t a writer. He was in his seventies, a man of few words, happiest working with horses. For forty years he’d walked with a limp, after a bout of diphtheria that led to a stroke. Both Laura and Rose had an uncomplicated, affectionate relationship with him. Laura called him ‘Manly’. He called her ‘Bessie’. Both Rose and her friend Helen called Laura ‘Mama Bess’. Everyone called Helen by her childhood nickname, ‘Troub’.

It sounds idyllic, but it wasn’t. Laura and Rose had a difficult relationship, made more difficult because of conflict over money and conflict over writing, and because Rose did not want to be back at Rocky Ridge. Rose thought that the solution to some of her problems, at least, would be a little house, built for her parents on another part of the farm.

She was wrong.

Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs.

I still remember the thrill of reading Little House in the Big Woods for the first time. It was 1972 and I was seven years old, living in a new house, in a new suburb, in New Zealand.

I read all Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, more or less in the order in which they were first published in the thirties and forties. Some were bought for me by my parents, but most I borrowed from the Te Atatu South public library, thick hardcovers with plastic wraps, stamped with the due date in red ink and returned, with a thud, on Friday evenings while my parents shopped at Foodtown and my sister took ballroom dancing classes at the Community Centre. Later I nagged to get the books in paperback, and I still have those worn and fingered copies.

Through the books I followed Laura and the Ingalls family from log cabins in Wisconsin (Little House in the Big Woods) and Indian Territory (Little House on the Prairie); to a river-side dugout near Walnut Grove, Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek) and a surveyor’s house in eastern South Dakota (On the Shores of Silver Lake); and then to a claim shanty and store building in the new town of De Smet (The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years). In the first book Laura is a little girl, with a big sister named Mary and a baby sister named Carrie. Along the way another sister, Grace, is born. Their Pa is a jolly man with a beard who plays the fiddle; their Ma is soft-spoken and demure. The series ends when Laura turns eighteen and marries the handsome Almanzo Wilder. I read the other book in the series — Farmer Boy, about Almanzo’s boyhood in upstate New York — at some point as well, but I was much more interested in Laura.

The Little House books revealed a strange new world to me. I had never seen a prairie. I had never touched snow. I had never seen a wolf, fox or muskrat. Unsliced by driveways and footpaths, the prairie — and the past — seemed a wild, open place, where the imagination could run free and not fall off the edge of the Earth into the ocean. The books described an outlandish world of grasshopper plagues and prairie fires and hidden marshes; of trees that spewed syrup and lakes that froze over; of sleigh rides and wagon trails and train tracks that ran as far as the eye could see. This was a land as magical as Narnia, but better — because this was real.

And in the quiet camaraderie of the Ingalls family, I found a haven. Unlike our house, the little houses of the books were peaceful. Parents never raised their voices. They always knew right from wrong. They were cheerful in the face of terrible adversity, and made cosy homes for their children in lonely, dangerous places. We ventured out into the countryside with a chilly bin, flask and cheese-and-Marmite sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper; they ventured into the unknown with an axe, a gun and a covered wagon, ready to fell trees, light fires and fend off claim jumpers or hostile Indians. From this family, this safe haven, a heroine as smart and daring and spirited as Laura could emerge. I idolised her. I envied Laura her pluck, her place, her life.

When I moved to the United States in the early nineties I realised that — at long last — I would be able to experience the places described in the Little House books first-hand. I could travel to some of the sites of log cabins, schoolhouses and false-fronted store buildings, and see what places like Kansas and South Dakota really looked like. I could find out what happened to everyone in the Ingalls family when they grew up. The books would come to life in the dispersed hamlets and endless fields of America’s vast, secretive heartland. It would be a pilgrimage and an adventure.

It was, sort of. It got out of hand, as my obsessions often do, and turned into numerous odysseys over a two-year period, visiting every site related to the books and Laura’s life, and sitting through three Little House pageants — in Minnesota, South Dakota and Missouri — which is at least two pageants too many. I discovered that all the towns where Laura once lived are declining in population. I spent intense weeks at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, immersed in diaries, letters, manuscripts and other people’s personal business. I learned too much. I bored other people.

I stopped envying Laura. Sometimes I didn’t even like her that much. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a complex woman. A resourceful and determined adventurer, she could be snobbish, dogmatic and manipulative.

She wrote books celebrated for their simple integrity, yet in her personal life she was often disingenuous and sometimes spiteful. The Little House series is a paean to the self-sufficiency of her close, loving family, but as an adult she lived far from them and didn’t visit her mother or older sister at all during the last twenty years of their lives, even though she travelled to other places equally distant. Rose, her only daughter — as mercurial and determined as her mother — went through life feeling bitter towards Laura, and unloved. Laura in turn was a little scared of her daughter, and, even as she urged Rose to remain at home, found her almost impossible to live with.

So much that I’d believed about Laura and the stories of her life was wrong. Even the pioneering path of the Ingalls family — Wisconsin to Kansas to Minnesota to South Dakota — wasn’t exactly faithful to history. ‘I lived everything that happened in my books,’ she’d said, but this statement wasn’t the whole truth. The ‘true story’ was only true some of the time. And a lot of what isn’t true about the books was the work of Rose Wilder Lane.

Rose was born in 1886 in Dakota Territory, where the climate was at war with settlers. People like her grandparents, Caroline and Charles Ingalls, had moved west for two reasons. First was the Homestead Act of 1862, which meant a citizen could claim a quarter section — 160 acres — of surveyed but unclaimed land and own it outright after living and growing crops on it for five years. The second was because the new railroad opened up the Dakota Territory in the late 1870s and early 1880s. This is how the Ingalls family ended up in De Smet: Charles Ingalls had a bookkeeping job for a while with the railroad, and De Smet was one of the tiny towns that sprouted along the line.

Her parents, Laura and Almanzo, suffered disaster after disaster: their house burnt down, their baby son died, they both fell dangerously ill with diphtheria, and drought caused crop after crop to fail. The Great National Panic of 1893 morphed into a nationwide Depression, following Europe’s lead. Panic-selling in New York by British investors was one factor in tumbling stock prices and failing banks. The US economy declined, unemployment soared and cities witnessed violent strikes and protest marches. Crop prices fell and farmers in the middle of the country, in too much debt, lost their farms to the bank.

This happened to Laura and Almanzo. They retreated to Minnesota to live with his family, then to Florida with Laura’s uncle to try out homesteading there. They even considered moving to New Zealand. But, after returning to De Smet to see if anything could be salvaged there, they set off in 1894 for Mansfield in the Missouri Ozarks, based on reports of a good life in the Land of the Big Red Apple. The journey — of 650 miles — took them six weeks. ‘We joined long wagon trains moving south,’ Rose remembered years later, and ‘met hundreds of families going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold on the land.’

There they camped in the woods until, with their savings, they bought the land that formed Rocky Ridge Farm. For a decade they lived in a crude cabin. They were dirt poor. At first Almanzo made a living selling firewood. At the town school, Rose was the poor country cousin and she felt ashamed of her poverty: she had no shoes and her clothes were shabby. This was a sense she carried throughout her life, of the misery of a poor childhood, and some sort of inferiority that could not be overcome.

She wrote that as a child she concealed from her parents ‘how much I felt their poverty, their struggles and disappointments. These filled my life, magnified like horrors in a dream … I lived through a childhood that was a nightmare.’ In her diary of 1927, when she was still in Albania, she described her childhood as ‘no affection, poverty, humiliation’.

Rose was a sensitive, bookish child, a loner, someone who easily felt excluded — this didn’t change throughout her life. In her letters and diaries she often vented resentment towards friends with more middle-class backgrounds, particularly if they were from the metropolitan Northeast: in her lowest moments, she still felt patronised and dismissed, at a social and economic disadvantage.

In 1929, when she was back at Rocky Ridge Farm, Rose answered a questionnaire in The Little Review. In one answer she wrote: ‘I would change places with any young woman — about 20 — with intelligent, simple, harmonious parents, good health, good breeding and a cultured background.’ So she wanted to be young again, to start over — perhaps in this new era, where so much more seemed possible for women. And she wanted the thing she felt she most lacked, a ‘cultured background’. Laura was to glorify her own poor childhood in the Little House books, but Rose had no residual fondness for hers. She escaped Mansfield at seventeen, working as a telegrapher in Kansas City, and then moving to San Francisco, where her journalism career began (and a short-lived marriage, to Gillette Lane, began and ended).

She was to mix, and hold her own, in many cosmopolitan circles in Europe and New York, but she retained the self-image of the barefoot, under-educated child in the wagon train, her family one of the desperate thousands hoping to eke out a living somewhere else. She had to work much harder, she believed, than many of the other writers she met. ‘A person who starts out as a malnutrition [sic] child in an Ozark log cabin,’ she wrote to her lover, the playwright Guy Moyston, in 1925, ‘and gets as far as I’ve got, does it by raising hell about things.’

Her diaries are crammed with calculations about money, about how much she could earn and save, and her writing career was a series of compromises, in which she wrote things she despised — like corny Ozark tales for Country Gentlemen magazine, later compiled into a book called Hill-Billy — or acted as a ghostwriter for other people. Making money was always the most important thing. The financial insecurity of her childhood never left her, exacerbated by a life that relied on income from freelance writing.

She also felt financially responsible for her parents. They’d built the farmhouse at Rocky Ridge in 1911, but their life was still one of rural drudgery, particularly harsh in the winter. She wanted them to travel more and to enjoy modern comforts, like electricity and running water, or maybe to sell the farm altogether. The more magazine stories and popular novels and biographies Rose wrote, the more she earned, and the more she could give to her parents to buy them freedom from farming, beyond the five hundred dollars she paid them (or struggled to pay them, at times) each year during the twenties.

She wanted another kind of freedom as well, for herself — to be free from the obligation of being in Mansfield, helping to feed the pigs, mop the floors and haul in wood. One of the appeals of Albania for Rose: she could afford servants there. She didn’t want to live at Rocky Ridge being a servant herself.

Her parents, she told Moyston, still thought of her as an irresponsible child. To them she was this ‘unaccountable daughter who roams around the world, borrowing money here and being shot at there, learning strange languages and reading incomprehensible books’. They would have preferred a conventional daughter who married and lived locally.

When Rose returned in 1928 to Rocky Ridge, she was a middle-aged woman. A long-term relationship with Guy Moyston had ended. She was coming back to her childhood home, to stay with her parents on a long-term basis. No wonder she brought a friend with her. On the voyage back from her beloved Albania early that year, Rose wrote in her diary:

I will spend no more time, effort or money in realizing dreams, until I have a safe and solid $50,000 properly invested. I shall try to do this by the end of 1930. Six thousand a year contributed to the Palmer account should do this. Ten thousand a year earned. One serial and a few short stories. This seems to mean three years in the States, mostly in Rocky Ridge farmhouse, and it involves delicate personal adjustments with the family and Troub. If I can only make it a fresh, sunny, open-air life, without all this smothered smoldering — A busy life, active and energetic. At the same time, a learning life, studious. So that when I’m free to go again I shall be ready.

Her parents were happy to have their only child back, but the daily hubbub of farm life, and her mother’s desire for her company, intruded on Rose’s writing life. Troub had a small inheritance as well as her investments: she could write for fun. Rose needed to write — and her agent needed commercial work to sell — so she could become financially independent, with her ‘solid $50,000 properly invested’, and leave. The magazine market was booming, and financial freedom seemed just within reach. Like many adult children who skulk home in order to regroup, she wanted to save money and to be left alone.

Rose — temperamental, domineering and prone to depression, as well as flush with investment money — decided that her parents needed to move out. She’d use a few thousand of her savings to build them a little house just over the hill, with all mod-cons and no stairs, ideal for their doddering old age. She decided to remodel the farmhouse, install electricity and modern plumbing, and live in peace with Troub and any other visiting writer friends. In the long term, after she returned to Europe, the farmhouse could be rented out. In the short term, she paid her parents sixty dollars a month to rent the place herself.

The little house Rose built was from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue of 1928. It was called the Mitchell and, announced the catalogue, was ‘the latest idea in English architecture with a touch of the popular California studio type’. It had rock walls, gables, a shingled roof, a tall stone chimney and five rooms, plus a telephone nook in the hall and built-in bookcases in the living room. Rose bought all new furniture for the place. The Wilders dubbed it the Rock House, and moved in at the end of 1928.

The writer Flannery O’Connor also returned home as an adult to live in her mother’s house. She moved from her New York City life back to Milledgeville, Georgia, driven there by failing health, and never returned permanently to her sophisticated Yaddo circle or the independent life she was building for herself in the city. She had lupus, and only expected to live another five years, though she lasted fourteen. But in the restricted society of small-town life, O’Connor drew deep on the inner resources of her imaginative life and wrote her two novels and her greatest stories.

O’Connor took a wry view of life with Mother. They raised peacocks, and on election days they walked to the polls together, as she wrote, to cancel out each other’s vote. However O’Connor felt about the hand she’d been dealt, whatever rage or frustration or bitterness or sense of isolation, she found the strength to create profound and compelling works of fiction. She believed that the biggest threat to a writer’s gift was ‘self-inflation’, which she described as ‘the pride of the reformer or the theorist’. It’s unfortunate, but she could have been talking about Rose Wilder Lane.

When we read the Little House books as children, we see them very much, I think, as nineteenth-century stories. We know that the Laura Ingalls of the book is a real person, the younger self of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and that the sequence they follow — Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota — as the family moves by covered wagon, looking for a better life, is the true story of the Ingalls family and their various homes and farms, successes and disasters.

That this isn’t the case at all reflects the time period in which the books were written. Despite their setting (around 1870 to the mid-1880s) they’re not nineteenth-century books; they are novels written during the Depression and the war years, published between 1932 and 1943. Laura didn’t intend to write a series of novels: she intended to write a short memoir of her childhood, something her worldly, well-connected daughter could help her polish and publish. Her writing experience at that time consisted of columns for the Missouri Ruralist, some of which included childhood memories.

After the stock-market crash of 1929, Rose needed money. She and Troub and the Wilders had lost their investments. Rose had nothing but debts. The building of the Rock House had cost way too much: she’d budgeted four thousand dollars but it ended up costing her eleven thousand. She still owed money for the fixtures and furniture she’d bought on credit in Springfield. So now the need to write, and to sell what they wrote, became an urgent necessity for both Rose and Troub. Rose spent long hours typing in the attic, but publication options dried up.

The Depression trapped Rose at Rocky Ridge. She simply couldn’t afford to leave. Returning to Albania would not be possible. She felt guilty, too, that she’d persuaded her parents to invest money in the stock market, money that was gone for good.

For Troub, the Depression was a wake-up call. She hadn’t grown up poor: her father was a dentist. She and her family had lost their savings, but her father could still work, and so could she, as a nurse. The day the last of her investment money dried up, in November of 1931, she decided to move back east to find work. After six years of friendship and travel with Rose, Troub was gone.

At the end of that year, Rose reflected on her own financial situation. All her investments had disappeared. She owed eight thousand dollars. She had just over five hundred dollars in the bank. Magazines were cutting rates, laying people off and taking less. In fact, Rose earned nothing at all from her writing between October 1931 and April 1932. She could no longer afford to pay her parents the expected five-hundred-dollar annuity. By 1933 she could barely afford the sixty-dollar rent each month for the farmhouse. One month, when Rose couldn’t pay, Laura announced that she and Almanzo would turn off their electricity at the Rock House to save Rose money. It was emotional manipulation that Rose hated. ‘It’s amazing how my mother can make me suffer,’ she wrote in her diary. Rose wrote a cheque and her mother left happy. Rose didn’t have enough money to pay that month’s bills and had to disconnect her own electricity supply.

Cheery news from Troub didn’t help her mood. Troub wrote to announce she was house-sitting in Connecticut that summer, with use of a car. It was, Rose wrote, a ‘crowing, triumphant letter. There is a woman well into the thirties, with no more sense of responsibility than a spoiled child — lazy, untidy, careless, self-centred, short-sighted, and completely insensitive, with the New Englander’s curious pride of intellectuality based on nothing — no achievement, no effort towards achievement. And she always gets what she wants … While I, who must pay for everything I get, will never get anything I truly want.’

There’s no record of what Rose thought when Troub started publishing her own books. In Troub’s 1984 obituary in The New York Times, the seven books in the Sue Barton series, published between 1936 and 1952, are described as having sold millions of copies.

Laura and Rose began writing together in 1930, when Laura showed Rose the handwritten manuscript of Pioneer Girl and asked for help. It needed a lot of work. A typed manuscript is held in the Hoover Presidential Library: this is something Rose had already ‘put through’ her typewriter, as she used to say, and cleaned up. Its original title is ‘Prairie Girl’, corrected in Laura’s hand to her preferred title. Within these pages are the bones of the Little House books, and much else besides that doesn’t end up in the books.

Rose not only typed it: she edited and polished it, moving the Wisconsin section into a separate manuscript, called When Grandma was a Little Girl. This, she thought, could become a picture book. The rest might run as a serial in a magazine. Rose sent the manuscripts off to contacts in New York, and went there herself to try to place it.

After publishers rejected Pioneer Girl, Rose distilled the Wisconsin episodes and the tales Charles Ingalls had told of his own childhood, and shaped them into a novel for children. The book was a compilation of ‘your father’s stories’, Rose, in New York, wrote to Laura:

taken out of the long PIONEER GIRL manuscript, and strung together, as you will see … I do not think you will make a great deal of money out of this book, but it should go on for years and years, paying a little all the time. And you will have those stories preserved in book form, and beautifully, which after all is the main thing.

The book was published in 1932 as Little House in the Big Woods, and the career of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author and heroine, was launched.

The publisher wanted more books. Rose immediately started work rewriting Laura’s draft of Farmer Boy — one of her mother’s ‘juveniles’, as she called them. This was no quick fix: Rose spent months working on the novel, time she resented because it meant she couldn’t focus on her own work. ‘Preparing to rewrite my mother’s second juvenile,’ she wrote in her diary in January 1933. ‘Work on it every day till teatime, going over first typed mss. with pen. Would like to finish it this month but can’t possibly.’ The amount of time needed suggests how much of the book was Rose’s work.

Rose managed to finish both Farmer Boy and a pioneer novel of her own, Let the Hurricane Roar, based partly on the experiences of Laura’s parents. The novel, initially titled Courage, was an expression of Rose’s fundamental beliefs about the American character. She was to become an ardent opponent of the New Deal, and in the novel invoked pioneer hardships and stoicism to criticise the support-seeking destitute and the un-American pessimism of everyone else. Writing the novel liberated Rose from the gloom of hack work, and it was well-received at the time. But Let the Hurricane Roar is overwrought and on the nose, and hasn’t endured.

This is what Flannery O’Connor was saying, I think, when she wrote that the biggest threat to a writer’s gift was ‘the pride of the reformer or the theorist’. ‘I am now a fundamentalist American,’ Rose announced in 1935, contending that ‘individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit’. Rose’s great drawback as a writer wasn’t her writing style, which was strong and vivid, particularly in her letters. But when she was trying to write ‘serious’ fiction, as opposed to the commercial work she did for money, she thought too much of its moral and political purpose; she didn’t trust herself to write intuitively, to create art with individual characters rather than symbols, the stories self-consciously loaded with meaning, striving to be important.

It was telling that just as her mother started writing the stories of her own family, Rose grabbed for the same material — and there’s a reason right there for why Laura’s books continue to be read and Rose’s novels don’t. Great books transcend the time in which they’re written; they’re not reliant on the political points — perhaps no longer intelligible — that the author wanted to make.

The problem with Rose and Laura is that they were too up in each other’s business. This mutual dependence — mother on daughter for writing help, daughter on mother for stories — caused terrible tension at Rocky Ridge, as Rose’s angry diary entries attest:

I want to finish work on my mother’s juvenile by the end of this month if possible … But there can be no genuine pleasure in generosity to my mother, who resents it and does not trouble to conceal resentment.

When Laura saw an advertisement for Let the Hurricane Roar, she read it ‘with an air of distaste’. Rose had named her fictional protagonists Charles and Caroline — Laura’s own parents, and the autobiographical protagonists of Little House in the Big Woods. A sullen exchange between mother and daughter ensued, as Rose recorded in her diary:

‘Why do they place it in the Dakotas?’ [Laura asked]

I = ‘I don’t know.’

She = ‘The names aren’t right.’

I, alarmed = ‘What names?’

She = ‘Caroline and Charles. They don’t belong in that place at that time. I don’t know — it’s all wrong. They’ve got it wrong, somehow.’

Rose had purloined Laura’s family history for her novel, and twenty years later Laura was still annoyed. ‘The characters in her story have no connection with my family,’ she wrote in 1952. ‘Her choice of names was unfortunate.’

But for a variety of emotional and financial reasons, Rose could not disentangle herself from her mother’s past, her mother’s writing, or her parents’ lives. Laura couldn’t disentangle herself either. Even after Rose left Rocky Ridge Farm in 1937, her collaboration with her mother continued. William Holtz, in his book The Ghost in the Little House, argues that there would be no series at all without Rose: Laura was incapable of writing the books alone. As Laura grew in confidence as a writer, arguments about style and structure in letters between the two increased. But she knew how much she owed Rose. In a 1939 letter, Laura told Rose: ‘Without your help I would not have the royalties from my books.’

Later in the thirties, Laura started work on an adult novel, continuing the story of Laura and Almanzo after their marriage. This manuscript she mentioned to Rose, but her daughter only read it when it turned up, among other papers, after Laura’s death. Despite the clamour for more books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose did no editing or rewriting on the manuscript, and never tried to publish it.

It appeared after Rose’s death, as The First Four Years. I first read it when I was about twelve, eager to know what happened to Laura and Almanzo after their wedding. I knew the beginning of the story well, a small step back in time to the proposal scene of These Happy Golden Years. I was shocked and disappointed. The book felt flat, despite its various dramatic incidents. It plodded. When Laura mentioned the manuscript to Rose, in a 1937 letter, she had suggested that she ‘could write the rough work. You could polish it’. The published book is just the rough work, without Rose’s polish.

Also, it suggested that not everything in the previous book was faithful to the facts of Laura’s life. In These Happy Golden Years, Almanzo suggests a hasty marriage and Laura agrees ‘if it is the only way to escape a big wedding’. In The First Four Years, the same scene is replayed, but this time with additional dialogue:

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to marry a farmer. I have always said I never would.’ … Laura refused to make a joke of it. She said, ‘I don’t always want to be poor and work hard.’

This must be what Laura meant by the elliptical: ‘All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.’

The Big Woods are gone. They were gone in 1930, when Laura was first gathering together the memories of her early childhood, and I knew they were gone, but it was still disappointing to go there in the nineties and see how completely and utterly gone they are. Those woods swishing with owls and panthers, as magical and frightening as the endless dark forest that ensnared Hansel and Gretel, had been cleared long ago to make way for farmland, like most of the eastern half of America. In place of trees were pastures and crop fields, clumps of trees encircling exposed ranch houses with carports and satellite dishes. Lake Pepin was still there, of course, a fat smudge off the glistening Mississippi, and the town that Laura wrote about still nestled at its edge, lively with day trippers from Minneapolis.

Laura was born there in 1867, in a log cabin several miles out of town. The event is commemorated with an historical marker. After the house’s foundations were located and uncovered, a reproduction log cabin was built over them, puzzlingly unlike the one Laura described in Little House in the Big Woods. There’s no admission price and the cabin is left open every day in season until dusk. I walked around the site late in the afternoon. The cabin was empty and felt meaningless, like a recently built child’s playhouse. The only other people there were a teenaged couple who had pulled up on a motorbike, giggling and making out behind the historical marker.

For generations of us, the members of Laura’s family were as real and vivid as our own, and Laura’s beloved Pa — with his big beard, jokes and fiddle-playing — is the central figure. Laura came to think of her first book as a tribute to him, because he was at the centre of her earliest memories of log-cabin life in the wilderness.

The Big Woods of Wisconsin were a fitting home for the big man Laura wanted her father to be. It was here in the dangerous wilderness that he appeared biggest of all. She later conceded that he was ‘no business man’ but instead, she said, he was ‘a hunter and trapper, a musician and poet’. He was a dreamer, always looking west, edging his way across the continent from New York State, where he was born, to the very edge of the Great Plains, getting as close as Indian Territory and his final resting place, De Smet. He had the mythic pioneer dream of moving west and rode the last wave of it, just before the frontier closed.

But he was doomed to fail. The quarter section determined by the Homestead Act was ample space to farm back east, but out west it wasn’t enough. The land he was trying to farm in the Dakotas was perilously close to the hundredth meridian, which meant on the edge of the Great Plains. ‘To expect a person to make a living on a little square of this vast region,’ writes Ian Frazier, ‘where animals and Indians used to travel hundreds of miles looking for food, where clouds slide all over before the winds, where you have to import many necessities — it was like expecting a fisherman to survive on just a little square of ocean.’

The hundredth meridian is the dividing line between east and west, between the humid and the sub-arid. Beyond the hundredth meridian it’s hard for farmers to grow corn or have dairy farms. The Great Plains were once known as the Great American Desert, which is why settlers before the Civil War bypassed it, opting for the Pacific West instead. Charles Ingalls, trying to work his claim at the start of the Plains, was beset by major droughts and storms. His farming experience was that of a traditional small farmer in states back east, where there were woods and regular rainfall; he struggled, as many others did, with the thin soil and poor irrigation. And the picture of him that emerges from the books, and from historical research, is as an explorer at heart who voyaged west twenty years too late, only to find growing towns instead of the game and land and open sky he craved.

The man who moved his young family to five different states in his search for a place he could live and prosper ended his days working as a carpenter, living in the middle of a town, a life he’d always despised. His neighbours remembered him as a gaunt figure with a bushy beard who stalked the boardwalks of De Smet’s filling streets, tool kit in hand. He was helping to raise the buildings that hemmed him in. Every ring of the hammer sounded the end of his Western adventure, his ambitions, his flight from the crowded Big Woods to the never-ending Big Sky of the Plains. The relentless optimism of the Little House books is a way of never admitting this defeat.

Around the time I was travelling to all the Laura-related sites in the Midwest, my sister and I visited Concord, Massachusetts, the home of Louisa May Alcott. Louisa May Alcott published Little Women in 1868, a year after Laura’s birth. There are similarities between the two writers, although they were born a generation apart, and in different parts of the country. Both were dragged from pillar to post by an idealistic father. Both were second daughters in families of four girls, with a conventional older sister, sickly younger sister and a pretty blonde baby of the family. Both had calm, loving mothers who argued against their peripatetic lifestyles. Both saw themselves as the ‘son’ of the family, with a strong sense of responsibility for family finances, and both turned to writing to earn money.

But while Louisa May Alcott rewrote the chronology of her childhood, transforming paternal failure into Civil War heroism and keeping the egocentric eccentricities of her father off-stage, Laura gave her own father a central role. She calls on all of us to embrace her father’s restlessness, with all its magical promise of adventure:

Their shadowy outlines drew her with the lure of far places. They were the essence of a dream … She wanted to travel on and on, over those miles, and see what lay beyond those hills. That was the way Pa felt about the West, Laura knew. She knew, too, that like him she must be content to stay where she was.

The Big Woods is where this dream began — the dream Laura shared with her father, and the dream she shared with her readers. In Little House in the Big Woods, she not only mythologised Pa and the wilderness of her early childhood, she also started messing with facts. The chronology in Pioneer Girl was correct, but when Rose pulled pieces out to form a novel, two stints in Wisconsin were merged into one. The family’s time in Indian Territory, when real-life Laura was a toddler and her younger sister Carrie was born, needed to be moved to work as a sequel to Big Woods. Not only that: Laura couldn’t remember much from that time. Later in life, Laura excused the discrepancies, inaccuracies and time shifts of the series by saying that ‘at the time I had no idea that I was writing history’.

She worked on the manuscript of Little House on the Prairie — ‘my Indian juvenile’ — for much of 1933. Rose tackled the rewrites during the sweltering early summer of 1934. Because Laura was drawing on her father’s stories rather than memories, this is the most fictional of the books. She and Rose made a field trip to Oklahoma to look for the cabin site, without any luck — unsurprising, as the Ingalls family had lived in Kansas, just outside Independence, a day trip from Rocky Ridge. Today there’s a reproduction log cabin on the site, its location determined by eager-beaver local historians.

The book was my favourite in the series because it was exciting. The beginning sees the Ingalls family set off across the frozen river to become true pioneers. In Indian Territory they encounter Indians (of course), wolves, dangerous illnesses and a prairie fire. Little House on the Prairie ends with a dramatic forced departure. A neighbour called Mr Scott arrives with bad news. The government is sending soldiers to frogmarch all of the settlers out of Indian Territory. Pa is furious. ‘I’ll not stay here to be taken away by the soldiers like an outlaw!’ he says. ‘If some blasted politician in Washington hadn’t sent out word it would be all right to settle here, I’d never have been three miles over the line into Indian Territory.’

They load up the wagon and leave the log cabin and their garden behind forever. The first night out on the empty prairie again, Pa plays a rousing song on his fiddle:

‘And we’ll rally round the flag, boys,

We’ll rally once again,

Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom!’

The truth of their departure is quite different. In the Pioneer Girl manuscript, Laura mentions that the ‘soldiers were taking all the white people off the Indians’ land’. But on the next page, the real reason for the Ingalls’ departure is clear.

After driving for days and weeks, sleeping in the wagon at night, we came at last to the place we had left when we went west. The land was Pa’s again, because the man who bought it from him had not paid for it.

This default brought them back to Wisconsin. In the books there is no mention of it, or of any return to Wisconsin: neither suited the developing narrative, shaped by Rose, to reflect her growing political dogmatism. The pioneering Ingalls needed to keep moving onwards, not retreating: they were made of stern stuff, unlike the Depression-era slouches whining for handouts. They would have helped civilise wild Indian Territory, of course, had an intrusive and untrustworthy government not interfered with their freedom, an American birthright since the Revolution.

From now on, Rose found ways to incorporate her political agenda into Laura’s books. This wasn’t against Laura’s will: she, too, was a conservative, and not beyond changing the facts to flatter the Ingalls family and their resilience. The Long Winter, a gripping story of survival during the endless winter of 1880–81, omits any mention of the other people, George and Maggie Masters, who shared their home. ‘I think it adds to the feeling of it that the Ingalls family should be more of a solitary unit than they would be with kinfolks around,’ she argued in a letter to Rose. ‘I can’t have any relatives cluttering up Hard Winter [the book’s original title].’

But while in Laura’s manuscript for Little Town on the Prairie it’s noted that Dakota Territory funded Mary Ingalls’ studies at the College for the Blind in Iowa, in the final book — revised and edited by Rose — that information is removed. The reader believes that only sacrifice and savings on the part of the poor Ingalls family gets Mary her education, not government subsidy.

Rose completely rewrote the 4th of July chapter in Little Town on the Prairie, with excerpts from the Declaration of Independence drawing a pointed analogy to FDR, who — like George III, in her opinion — had ‘erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people’. In 1939 Rose told a bemused Senate Judiciary Committee that she was ‘a revolutionist’ and predicted an imminent second American Revolution. Independence Day on the prairie was an opportunity she couldn’t miss. The young Laura of the book is given an extended reverie on the concept of freedom, which, as a young teenager, I found extremely perplexing.

The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.

Laura decides that ‘God is America’s king’, and this perplexed me as well. What if an American didn’t believe in God? Wasn’t it supposed to be a country of religious freedom, with a separation between church and state? Of course, what I was reading was not the record of a small-town celebration — originally a scant paragraph in Pioneer Girl — but stodgy propaganda.

Laura wasn’t above taking liberties with the truth herself. In the manuscript of The First Four Years, she includes an incident about Indians visiting the Wilder property. In her margin note, intended for Rose, she writes: ‘This is true but happened to a friend of mine.’ Another incident — wolves threatening their sheep — she modifies because ‘why spoil a good story for truth’s sake’?

As Rose got older, she must have forgotten all this. The books, she instructed a critic in 1964, ‘were the truth, and only the truth’. The only modification of the factual record, she conceded, was adding two years to Laura’s age in Little House in the Big Woods. This decision Rose blamed on the publisher, making no mention of the way the book conflates two periods in Wisconsin, or how many of its incidents follow rather than precede the adventures of its sequel, Little House on the Prairie. In old age she grew ferocious about insisting on the utter truth of the series. ‘If my mother’s books are not absolutely accurate,’ she wrote in 1966 to a thirteen-year-old William Anderson, later a leading Wilder historian and critic, ‘she will be discredited as a person and a writer.’

Rose published another novel, Free Land, in 1938, as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post; it was also about the pioneer experience, drawing on Laura and Almanzo’s experiences as newlyweds. Its title was ironic: claims weren’t ‘free land’, the novel argued (because that’s what Rose did in her ‘serious’ fiction — argue and lecture, and borrow her mother’s source material). ‘Of course, there never had been free land,’ she’d written in The Saturday Evening Post in 1935. ‘It was a saying in the Dakotas that the Government bet a quarter section against fifteen dollars and five years’ hard work that the land would starve a man out in less than five years.’

The novel was enough of a success that she could pay off her debts, including the large amount of money she owed Troub. But after that Rose seemed to lose interest in writing fiction. The last fiction writing she did in her life was on the Little House series, for which she received no credit. By the 1940s her concern was social and political theory — railing against FDR, the war, and the intrusion of social security numbers; her major publications were the Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework and a still-influential libertarian tract, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority. Rose, in some ways, was Charles Ingalls’ true heir — a stubborn loner, restless adventurer and increasingly ardent libertarian, carrying his restless legacy to its extreme conclusion.

The log cabin in Wisconsin is not the only reproduction little house. Nor is the log cabin erected near Independence, Kansas, to commemorate Little House on the Prairie. There are no extant Ingalls houses in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and the claim shanty in South Dakota is long gone as well. The surveyors’ house mentioned in On the Shores of Silver Lake still exists, but has been moved to a different location.

The only extant house in which the Ingalls girls lived as children is in Burr Oak, Iowa. This is where the family lived in 1876 and 1877; the youngest daughter, Grace, was born there. Laura wrote about it in Pioneer Girl but it does not feature in any of the books. It wasn’t a westward move; it was a regression. The Ingalls were driven there after a disastrous time in Walnut Grove. It wasn’t a pioneering move, either: they cleaned rooms and served meals to travellers in a not-very-wholesome hotel, and Charles Ingalls relied on odd jobs to keep his family alive. They fled town one night, after dark, because there wasn’t enough money to make the move if they paid the landlord, Mr Bisbee, overdue rent. Her Pa ‘always paid every cent he owed and he always would,’ Laura wrote, ‘but he said he’d be darned if he’d let that rich old skinflint Bisbee keep us from going west’. Driving off at night with bills owing, returning to Walnut Grove so Pa could work in a store, didn’t fit the Little House super-narrative of moral self-sufficiency.

Omitting Burr Oak also made it possible to leave out a death in the family. For there weren’t four Ingalls children: there were five. Between Carrie and Grace was the only boy of the family, Freddie, who was born in 1875 and lasted not quite a year. Perhaps Rose and Laura decided his short life was too sad and serious for the Little House audience. When Laura made her ‘not the whole truth’ concession, in a Book Week speech in 1937, she noted that ‘some stories I wanted to tell but would not be responsible for putting in a book for children’.

Certainly, the death of baby boys was a subject to be avoided at Rocky Ridge Farm. Rose had lost a baby son during her marriage to Gillette Lane. Although Rose didn’t know it, Laura and Almanzo also had a son who died: Rose only discovered this when she read The First Four Years manuscript after Laura’s death. The Ingalls baby, the Wilder boy and Rose’s own baby son, all short-lived, would each, in turn, be written out of the family history, with only one given name (Freddie Ingalls) and one grave (Baby Wilder) among them.

Pa — Charles Ingalls — died in 1902 at the age of sixty-six. Caroline Ingalls outlived her husband by more than twenty years, and this meant she had almost no income. Her life was spent in genteel poverty, living the quietest of lives with her blind daughter, dependent on neighbours’ gifts of food. Laura and Almanzo returned to De Smet during her father’s final illness, and that was the last time she saw her mother and Mary.

Mary, blind at fourteen, was the sister who wanted to grow up to become a writer. ‘I am planning to write a book some day,’ Mary confided in Laura, during one of her summer vacations from college. ‘But I planned to teach school, and you are doing that for me, so maybe you will write the book.’ Despite her dreams and her education, Mary would write little in her life but conventional verse. As her mother predicted, she ‘would be home to stay when she finished college’.

Mary is usually characterised in books as cheerful, resigned to a life of knitting and Braille books, but in the photographs of De Smet social life — clubs, porches, tennis players, church groups — she looks drawn and anxious. The College for the Blind in Vinton, Iowa, listed her in its enrolment book as physically weak, and this wan demeanour never left her. After her college days, Mary would make only two more long journeys, both by train: one with her father to Chicago, to seek medical treatment for her searing headaches; the last to stay with Carrie in the Black Hills, where she died in 1928.

The last few years of Mary’s life were precisely the time Laura was turning her attention to her childhood stories and memories, beginning to formulate Pioneer Girl, and writing to an aunt to request family recipes and history. But she never visited her older sister, even though Mary would be such an important figure to her that the Little House series would initially be known as the Laura and Mary stories and the local librarian would recall that there was nothing Mrs Wilder liked better than to reminisce about her beloved older sister.

Carrie was a different story. Most readers of the Little House series think of Carrie as small and sickly, in need of Laura’s protection. In fact, Carrie, too, inherited her father’s wanderlust and his appetite for hard work. She became a newspaper woman, a photographer, printer and reporter, and travelled throughout the West. In her thirties, Carrie returned to South Dakota to take up a homestead claim of her own, and once it was secured moved to the Black Hills for a newspaper job, marrying there in middle age. Dave Swanzey, Carrie’s husband, is credited with naming Mount Rushmore, and a street in Keystone in the Black Hills is named after him. Carrie is memorialised in a plaque outside the post office, and by a tiny china shepherdess in a glass case in the museum, supposedly the legendary ornament of the Little House books. I made the long, hot, mercilessly straight drive across South Dakota just to see it.

Both Carrie and Grace would embarrass Laura with their requests for financial help. Laura was particularly ashamed of Grace, her youngest sister, who suffered from ill health and dire poverty throughout the Depression. But they would also both be asked to stump up memories for their older sister’s books.

Grace died in 1941, Carrie in 1946. Like the Alcott sisters, the Ingalls girls were buried close to each other beneath the pine trees of the local cemetery, under small flat stones, near the upright obelisk of their father’s grave.

Laura is the only exception.

In 1972 the Little House series was adapted into a TV show called Little House on the Prairie that ran for ten years. It would have made Laura roll in her grave. She was opposed to any film version of her books that were not entirely faithful renditions. Rose agreed, and rejected any offers after her mother’s death to adapt the books for TV or movies. The Little House TV series fixed the Ingalls family in the town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota, the setting for On the Banks of Plum Creek.

The TV series involved a combination of melodrama, sentimentality and slapstick, and some of the episodes were direct rip-offs of episodes of Bonanza, the show on which star and producer Michael Landon found fame. In the TV series a boyish Pa cries every week, a pretty Ma simpers and giggles, Jack the bulldog is a shaggy Disney extra, the family gets an adopted brother, blind Mary gets a husband and Laura brawls in the street when she suspects Almanzo of having an affair.

If Laura and Rose were both dead set against a TV series, how did this happen? Laura had been dead since 1957; Rose had died in 1968. So who controlled the estate? Who sold the rights? Who stood to benefit from them?

This is the part not many people know. When Laura died, she left her literary estate to Rose with an important stipulation: that when Rose died the rights would revert to the library in Mansfield, an institution that book-loving Laura had helped found. Her will stated that on Rose’s death: ‘I direct that said copyrighted literary property and the income from same be given to the Laura Ingalls Library of Mansfield, Missouri.’

But the local library didn’t inherit anything. In 1972 they were given a cheque for US$28,000 and told that this was the only royalty cheque they would ever receive. It’s been the subject of two subsequent lawsuits, the most recent in 2000.

What happened between Laura’s death and Rose’s was this: the copyright on each of the books was renewed in Rose’s name, so they were no longer part of Laura’s estate and no longer subject to Laura’s will. This was done on Rose’s behalf by her lawyer and business manager, Roger Lea MacBride.

He was also Rose’s protégé, and liked to call himself her adopted grandson, though they weren’t related at all and she didn’t legally adopt him. Politically they were both libertarians, Rose’s politics growing more extreme as she got older. Roger Lea MacBride was the chief beneficiary of Rose’s will, and his heirs now control the estate, estimated to be worth around a hundred million dollars.

Back to 1972 — me in Te Atatu South, Roger Lea MacBride in the United States. He was a Republican who’d served one term in the House of Representatives in the early sixties; he’d tried unsuccessfully to be the Republican Party nominee for the governorship of Vermont. In 1972 he was living in Virginia and was one of the Republican Party’s electors — that is, he was supposed to go to the convention and cast his vote, on behalf of Virginia, for Richard Nixon. Instead he cast his vote for the Libertarian Party candidate. This new party had just been founded the previous year. By 1976 Roger Lea MacBride was its presidential candidate, with ballot access in thirty-two states. All political campaigns in the US are very expensive, and running for president costs a lot of money. MacBride financed his campaign, essentially a platform for his extremist views, with the income from the Little House books and TV series.

He received a grand total of 173,000 votes. He also went on record to say he hated the TV series, blaming Michael Landon for all its faults. But he took the money, and ran with it. He wrote a manifesto called A New Dawn for America, declaring the Republican Party dead and demanding the repeal of all income taxes. Late in life he began a sequel series to the Little House books called Little House on Rocky Ridge, based on Rose’s childhood, which his daughter and various ghostwriters continued after his death in 1995.

So when I persuaded my parents to buy me paperbacks of the Little House books, I was helping to finance an extreme right-wing politician in the US who had twice betrayed Laura’s explicit wishes: to have no TV or film adaptation that wasn’t scrupulously accurate; and to have her literary estate pass to the Mansfield library.

Rose must have colluded in the latter — she knew when all those copyrights were being renewed that they were passing from Laura’s property to her own, and that all would be left to MacBride when she died. Perhaps she was at last claiming some kind of implicit ownership. William Anderson called the creation of the Little House series ‘teamwork’ between mother and daughter; less charitably, William Holtz saw the books as ghostwritten by Rose. Weren’t they her books as well, in a way?

I visited Rocky Ridge with my friend Julia Hamlin Marsden, another Little House obsessive. We’d both flown into Kansas City — Julia from Los Angeles and me from New York — and driven the four hours down to Mansfield in a rental car. It was May 1998, and we had to drive to Springfield, Missouri, 50 miles west, to watch the finale of Seinfeld and get a drink. (There was no TV in the place we were staying, or any bar in Mansfield, let alone one with a screen; we were told the county was dry.)

Mansfield is a very small town in southern Missouri, near the woods and peaks of the Ozarks, and Rocky Ridge Farm lies a mile to the east. The population of Mansfield in 1998 was around 1400; now it’s closer to 1200. The old town centre feels moribund, because the highway bypasses the town, and everyone drives to big stores like Walmart to shop. The biggest employer when we visited was the steel mill. The town’s major attraction was Rocky Ridge Farm.

The farmhouse itself is white, irregular and individual. Even with the road nearby, its setting is serenely pastoral. A charmless museum built in the sixties abuts the house, breaking sight lines. Its insensitive proximity signals both the desire and the rush to commemorate, a lack of forethought that speaks of enthusiasm, amateurism and practicality. Like so many old houses and local museums in America, Rocky Ridge Farm’s preservation is due to the dedication of individuals rather than government initiative. Rose would have approved.

When we visited, the museum was staffed by a fierce array of middle-aged women. Our guide, Vi, ushered us to the compulsory first stop, the video room, and gave us lots of statistics: twelve tour guides; five bookstore workers; fifty thousand visitors; sixty million books sold. Julia and I were the first visitors that day. We sat on trestles watching the video collage of old photos and listening to the sound of ‘Pa’s fiddle’. By the time this finished, a group of elderly ladies in bright sweatshirts were waiting impatiently outside, and we asked permission to see the house before we looked through the museum — an outlandish request, judging from her shocked expression — in order to get a head start on the new visitors. Inside the house we were hurried from room to room at quite a pace, as though there were hundreds at our heels waiting to enter through the screened back porch.

Apparently everything sat just as it was when Laura died forty years ago. (The last record she played is still sitting on the turntable: ‘Annie Laurie’ by John McCormack.) The house was an appealing jumble of small rooms, reflecting a place built in stages as the Wilders could afford to expand. Almanzo had built a low chair for Laura — she was very, very short — and constructed kitchen counters to scale so she wouldn’t have to stoop, as well as window seats and boxes to store her things. With its bright yellow and green paint, the kitchen felt like something out of a dollhouse.

The living room featured a fireplace built with giant slabs of stone, something Laura personally demanded. The windows were large. Laura wrote about them in a Missouri Ruralist column in 1916. ‘Did you ever think that great painters have spent their lives trying to reproduce on canvas what we may see every day?’ she asked. ‘I have in my living room three large windows uncovered by curtains which I call my pictures … I have never seen a landscape painting to compare with them.’

After the house tour, we sat on a bench under an oak tree. The next set of visitors was a large group of Amish people. The elderly ladies made a brisk tour of the house and then climbed back into their snappy white minivan, pointing us out to each other.

We had to drive to the Rock House, because Vi told us it was no longer possible to walk there across the ridge as Rose did every day to drink tea and talk writing with her mother. The little house where Laura wrote her first four books looks exactly like the picture in the Sears catalogue: England meets California. It faces east, its back turned to the farmhouse on the other side of the hill. The view was a broad meadow and an almost unbroken vista of green.

Julia pointed out that the windows have small square panes, framed in green, breaking up the view into a grid. For someone like Laura who loved her big windows, this must have been a daily irritation.

Later that day we returned to the old house to linger outside in the last of the afternoon sun. The rock chimney stood tall and rugged, unlike the spindly Rock House chimney that needed to be rebuilt several times. The farmhouse was calm now, house and carpark emptied of visitors, the back and side doors hazy behind screened porches. Sun lit up the roof above Rose’s attic bedroom and the trees threw shadows on the lawn. On our house tour, the only room we were not permitted to see was Rose’s.

After Rose left Rocky Ridge for good in 1937, Laura and Almanzo moved back here. The Rock House was too small. Laura wrote the rest of the Little House books in the big house, with her big picture windows. She was world-famous before the series was finished, answering readers’ letters from her rocking chair in the dining room. Rose never lived in Mansfield again. She didn’t even return for a visit until her father’s funeral, late in 1949. The little house she built just before the Crash — when everything still seemed possible in her life, and the Little House books didn’t exist — sat empty, just as it does today.

Inheritance

In June 2016 I was back in Denmark, attending a witch-burning.

Two years earlier, I’d spent a month in Denmark. Tom and I were in Svendborg, on a writer’s residency at the Brecht House. Svendborg is a port town on Funen, the big island where Hans Christian Andersen was born. Copenhagen sits gazing towards Sweden on the island to the east, Zealand. To the west is a large peninsula called Jutland, stretching from the German border and pointing north to the rest of Scandinavia.

Much of Funen feels like a rural idyll. Farm stands sell local new potatoes and strawberries. People ride bikes. The main attraction in Odense, its biggest city, is the Hans Christian Andersen Museum. The harbour in Svendborg, on Funen’s south coast, is a stop for yachts from Germany and all over Scandinavia.

The Brecht House sits west from the town of Svendborg, in what used to be countryside and is now more of a suburb. It’s a whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof, and from the study there’s a view of the Svendborg Sound. Bertolt Brecht and his family moved there in 1933. They left Berlin the day after the burning of the Reichstag, no longer safe in their own country: Brecht was an active anti-fascist, and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, was Jewish. They hurried to Prague, then Vienna; they considered a move to Switzerland. But the writer Karin Michaëlis invited them to Denmark, and this was their haven until 1939. By then Brecht’s German citizenship had been revoked; he’d been declared an enemy of his own country.

War meant the family had to flee again: to Sweden, then Finland, then via Vladivostok to the United States. Brecht’s creative collaborator (and lover) Margarete Steffin died en route, in Moscow. They couldn’t stay in Svendborg, because of that land border with Germany. When Denmark was invaded, it fell in six hours.

It’s impossible to sit working in Brecht’s study, looking out at sailboats on the blue water, Danish flags flapping on white poles, the wooded slopes of the island across the Sound, and think of it as purely a peaceful place. When Brecht lived here he was plagued by the booming guns of German warships on manoeuvre. He could never forget what was happening at home. In his poem ‘Concerning the Label Emigrant’, he wrote: ‘Oh, the stillness of the Sound doesn’t fool us! We hear the / Screams / From your camps over there.’

In 2016 Tom and I returned to the Brecht House for another month-long residency. I was working on a novel, the last chapters of which play out in Skagen (pronounced ‘Skane’) — a town at the northern tip of Jutland. I was happy to be back in the house, a seagull nesting in its chimney, the sea breeze rattling the windows. In Brecht’s study, the old computer had been removed and the desk was a clear space, pushed under the window for the best view. The bust of Brecht, smooth-headed and cross-eyed, still sat on the sill, looking vaguely disapproving. The weather was rainier this time; asparagus was still in season.

Though most things about the house were the same, one important thing was different. The last time we were there, in 2014, my mother was still alive. That July was the last full month of her life. In Svendborg I sent her a long email every day, writing something each evening after we finished dinner, and including pictures of the small pleasures of the place: boats passing by, fields of long grass, sunsets, the tall red hollyhocks outside the shed.

These emails were timed so they’d be there in the morning, when my mother awoke. My father printed them out and my brother, calling in on his way to work, read them aloud to her and her carers. He’d sit on the bed and read her my accounts of excursions into Svendborg or to the nearest farm stand, and my misadventures learning to ride a bike again. (I am a life-long incompetent.) Apparently the carers took a close interest in my activities, and made various asides about my numerous bruising falls. One day, according to my brother, a carer remarked: ‘I notice she hasn’t mentioned getting back on that bike.’

I got back on the bike.

Sometimes, my father told me, my mother would ask him to check the computer in the evening, to see if I’d sent another email. She couldn’t read books anymore and she couldn’t pay much attention to television, but she liked hearing the daily reports from Svendborg.

So this year I was in Denmark again, ready to report on our small activities, the day’s rise and fall, the view from the study window. But my mother’s not at home. The carers are gone, looking after other dying people, making their last days comfortable. Some of the carers came back to visit after my mother died; one of them sat on her bed and wept.

My mother’s not waiting for me to describe anything, or to tell her any more stories. But still, I gathered them for her, unwilling to break the habit.

The day before St John’s Eve, which falls on 23 June, we drove west to Jutland and then north as far as we could go, to Skagen. St John’s Eve is Denmark’s midsummer celebration. On this date every year, all over the country, people walk through the twilight to the community bonfire, sing Holger Drachmann’s ‘Midsommervise’, and watch the effigy of a witch disappear into the flames. In Skagen, where Drachmann is buried in the dunes, the bonfire is on the beach, and hundreds of people turn out.

There’s nothing ancient — or even medieval — about the witch-burning element. Most people think it’s a post-World War I development. The bonfires are alleged to dispatch the witches to their favoured meeting place, Blocksberg or the Brocken, the highest peak in northern Germany. ‘Now to the Brocken the witches ride’, Goethe wrote in Faust, though he was talking about Walpurgis Eve — or Hexennacht — in April. In Europe the pagan and the religious, as well as key dates and regional traditions, tend to bleed into one another.

On the beach in Skagen a large crowd gathered around 9 pm, though the night was cold and wet. There were speeches on a stage, the longest by someone who works promoting Denmark as a tourist destination to German tourists. We tried to sing along to ‘Midsommervise’, clutching a damp song sheet, but Danish is tricky.

Gusty wind meant the bonfire could only be lit from one side, and it instantly looked dangerous. Three nonchalant firemen stood by while graduating high-school students, wearing traditional white caps that made them look like sailors in a stage musical, tossed study notes into the flames. A few hardy teens stripped down to underwear and ran into the sea. The witch — more a gender-fluid scarecrow — flew off to Germany when I wasn’t looking. Darkness loomed, and the rain grew heavier, so we walked home around half-past ten, soaked to the skin.

My mother would have loved the witch-burning, I told Tom, and he agreed: he knows that both my parents were always fond of a bonfire. They dedicated many weekends of their lives to the battle against the bush on our section in West Auckland, and there was a permanent clearing for bonfires by the creek at the bottom of the garden. Sometimes these fires threatened to get out of control, like our garden, like our family.

The day after St John’s Eve the rain cleared. Once Skagen was an isolated fishing village; now it’s a picturesque tourist town in an affluent country, with lots of small clothing and jewellery shops. My mother would have loved the bonfire on the beach, but I know she would have loved the shops in Skagen most of all.

Not long before I travelled to Denmark I conducted a half-hearted tidy-up of my bag collection. I’ve given lots away over the years — to friends, relations, charity shops — but I still have many more than I need. A snakeskin bag of my mother’s, bought in Australia in the eighties. Beaded bags from the seventies. Threadbare evening bags from decades earlier. Two kete my grandmother made, too delicate now to use.

One bag of my mother’s I decided to toss rather than give away. Its black ‘leather’ was moulting, peeling like withered skin. The label read ‘Prada’, but nothing about it was real. I bought it for my mother in Shanghai in 2005, because she wanted a fake designer bag.

These days I’m more particular about intellectual property, but in 2005 I let a teenage girl lead me away from the sprawling market of knock-offs down various litter-strewn alleys. We entered a grey apartment building, walking through a primitive kitchen where an old woman was cooking, and into what was probably the flat’s living room and bedroom, transformed into an impromptu handbag showroom. It felt strange, dark and illegal, and I regretted going. But the young women running the place were not going to let me leave without buying something.

I spent about half an hour there, though it felt like much longer at the time. The knock-off Prada bag I spotted quickly, and knew my mother would like it. But nothing had a price; everything had to be negotiated. My starting price was US$10 and theirs was a hundred dollars. The calculator went back and forth; there was a lot of sighing and shaking of heads. At one point we all grew fatigued and stood around in silence, eating mandarin oranges. When the girls refused to go lower than $50, I decided it was time to escape into the street. I managed to find a way out, different from the kitchen route, though once in the alley I had no idea where I was.

One of the girls chased me into the street and shouted: ‘Let me have face!’ So back in I went, and agreed to a price that was just above my final offer, exhausted by the whole ordeal. The girls were smiling now and very complimentary. I was, they said, a very good negotiator.

My mother was delighted with the bag, and even used it occasionally. This was surprising, because many of her bags she didn’t use at all. One of the last things I ever bought her was a clutch bag in the Waipu museum shop that she desperately wanted, though I never saw her take it anywhere.

In the last two years of her life, my mother was too frail to walk around shops. My sister and I would borrow a wheelchair in the Westfield mall in Henderson, or in Smith & Caughey’s in the city, and push her about the place. My mother loved wheelchair shopping, because she could drag things off rails and shelves and pile them on her lap. Once, in Smith & Caughey’s, Tom was in charge of pushing the wheelchair. Before too long he realised that my mother had accrued various items of clothing and a handbag, and was riding around with a considerable stack on her knee. He had to stop his wheeling and return them all. She wasn’t intending to buy any of them, anyway. She just wanted to get her hands on them for a while.

The issue with my mother and things: it wasn’t that she needed them, or wanted to wear them somewhere in particular. The acquisition was the thrill. When she died, some of the clothes she’d asked me to buy for her over the years in England still hung in her wardrobe, dangling their original sales tags. She had boxes of expensive Italian shoes, unworn. Her feet were smaller than mine and larger than my sister’s, so we gave them all away. First choice was offered to her hairdresser, who came to the apartment to cut my mother’s hair when my mother could no longer venture outside.

In the last years of her life, my mother grew particularly obsessed with jewellery. She would save up her pension and then buy another expensive ring. She would tell my sister and I that they were really for us; we would tell her we didn’t want them. My father struggled to manage all the household expenses on his pension. He couldn’t afford to attend my nephew’s wedding overseas. We begged my mother to stop buying rings. We nagged my father and brother not to drive her to David Keefe’s shop in LynnMall.

The last ring she bought — diamonds and rubies — she never wore; she just slept with it under her pillow.

My mother had grown up poor in the north of England. Her mother’s side were coal miners, but her father’s family were shoemakers and had more money. Her father was gassed in World War I and didn’t work again, apart from occasional cash-in-hand cobbling gigs; he died when my mother was sixteen. Her mother, my stern English nana, decorated other people’s houses to earn money: she was expert at wallpapering, and expert at making a little money go a long way.

My mother was working in a shop by the time she was fourteen. My nana moved away and remarried. My mother lived with her older sister, until there were too many children and not enough room for her. She lived with relatives who didn’t want her, and after that she lodged with strangers. In her teens she learned how to type, moved to London, and got a job in the civil service. She always wanted more, much more, than seemed possible at home. She lived in Paris for a while, then Luxembourg, then London again. She tried living again in the northeast of England, but there was no going back. In 1964, with my father — a homesick New Zealander — and my sister, she moved to the other side of the world.

My mother’s Great-aunt Pauline was wealthy. She lived in a three-storey Victorian house high above the golden sands of the beach. We visited her in 1978, when she was a tiny old lady; everything about the house looked and felt Victorian. She was a Victorian herself. My mother spent a lot of time at that house during her childhood. She loved the grandfather clock and the piano and the family portraits. She loved the meals Aunt Pauline made her. She loved Aunt Pauline. Much of the affection and happiness she experienced as a child was associated with that house.

But when Aunt Pauline died in the early eighties, she left everything to my uncle. My mother had moved to New Zealand, an act of defection. He sold the house and everything in it, even the family portraits and a sampler embroidered by the girls of the family a century earlier. My mother got no memento, no item of sentimental value. My uncle used some of the money to visit us in New Zealand. He and his wife brought us clothes from Marks & Spencer.

My mother had no inheritance of any kind. No money, no house, no land, no things. Her parents left her nothing, not even a wedding ring. My nana, who I believe suffered from depression, burnt all the family photographs. I saw a picture of my mother as a child for the first time last year, when an old class photo surfaced on someone else’s Facebook feed. When she moved to New Zealand, she had nothing to bring from home but clothes.

This may be one reason she was so acquisitive, and why she placed so much value on things. Perhaps she wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things, to know they were there. When she was a girl, new clothes were something you got at Easter. When she moved to London to work as a young woman, she had two skirts for work, and she had to hand-wash her slip each evening in the hostel where she lived, because coal-infused smog had coated the hem with grime.

Even when she was living in New Zealand, earning money and able to buy things, she saw new clothes as taonga, in a way, to be kept and treasured rather than used. This is why there were so many pristine items in her wardrobe when she died. When we got new things as kids, we were never allowed to wear them at once. They had to be kept for ages, for some future ‘good’ occasion, or for some distant trip. When I was about twelve, the girls across the road and I all got tiered floral skirts from the same dressmaker. Later that day both of the others were flouncing around their house in the floral skirts, but mine had been taken away for safekeeping. It had to remain new and untouched for as long as possible.

Because of my mother’s insistence on this, if my sister and I buy something new, or are given something second-hand, we put it on immediately — just because we can. We are both ruthless about clearing out our wardrobes and giving things away. In the lobby of my apartment building in Auckland, the long sideboard that houses our mail boxes also serves as a general swap-shop. Anything left there is up for grabs — light bulbs, books, wrapping paper, last week’s Listener, fabric off-cuts, picture frames, chocolates. Clothes I can’t fob off on someone I know get left on the lobby sideboard; they disappear within hours, sometimes minutes.

My mother told me, more than once, that my parents had made my sister the executor of their will because my brother and I couldn’t be trusted. He would sell everything or throw it out. I would give everything away.

Skagen is an important location for my novel; it’s where everything falls apart for my characters. The bonfire on St John’s Eve is a key scene.

We spent several days there, staying in a house owned by a Danish friend who lives in England. In lieu of rent, we did some gardening for her and washed windows, preparing the house for her family’s summer visit. I imagined my characters staying somewhere similar, not getting along. When people I know heard I was in Denmark, they sent along helpful tips of places to see there, but I wasn’t on holiday. In Skagen I was only interested in places my characters might go, and places they might argue; I needed to investigate where one would moor her boat, and where another might try to do something drastic. I gave my husband updates, referring to the characters by their first names, as though they were friends of ours.

I was thinking about my characters, and I was thinking about my mother — how much she would have liked the picket fences and yellow houses in Skagen, its beach-town profusion of small shops and cafés, its busy docks and its broad, pale beaches. I could envisage her there, unable to walk past a jewellery shop without calling me over and pointing out every single thing she liked. (She would have also translated every single price into New Zealand dollars, exclaiming in horror, and both the incessant calling-over and the price comparisons would have driven me crazy.)

With every day we stayed there, Skagen seemed increasingly unreal, peopled by my imaginary characters and the ghost of my mother. On the fifth day we finished up our gardening, took a last walk in the dunes, then drove, through the long, light evening, back to the Brecht House and Svendborg.

There was one thing we did in Skagen that wasn’t about my work at all. We went to the glossy shop that sells the Skagen brand of watches, bags and other pricey accessories. It’s the kind of place my mother would have found irresistible. We went in to look around, and I didn’t want to leave, even though most things were very expensive. My mother would have lingered here, so I had to as well, as though obsessive browsing made her feel close by, still alive and talking and shopping.

I tried on a number of glittering watches and then spent far too long touching, opening, examining and trying on practically every bag in the shop. I stroked suede and sniffed leather, and imagined which ones my mother would have liked, the long discussions she would have inflicted on me about which bag would go with what outfit, or be suitable for what occasion. She would have disrupted every careful in-store display and demanded the assistant fish things out of the window for closer scrutiny. She would have darted from one thing to the next, excited and restless as a child, eager to get her hands on everything.

I didn’t buy a bag that day, because they were expensive and I don’t need another one right now. I can admire beautiful things without having to own them. My collections are more idiosyncratic and low-value, like Merrill paper dolls, though I suppose my own urge to collect is a product of my childhood, too, that greedy desire for the things I coveted then.

Of course, when I buy paper dolls now it’s not the same as getting them as a child. Now I don’t cut them out or draw new clothes for them, let alone play with them. I look at them and admire them, the way my mother looked at the narrow Italian shoes nestled in their tissue paper, at the tailored woollen coats too heavy for the Auckland winter, at the clothes sent from England and never worn. Once, decades ago, she must have longed for beautiful things, for new things, for an excess of things rather than barely enough. I wonder how far out of reach they seemed to her when she was young.

My mother is dead, but she was alive that day in the shop in Skagen. For the time I was in there, touching and admiring everything, I knew how she would have felt. She would have wanted everything. She would have wanted it all.

Sick Notes

It’s March 2017 and the university year has begun: I find myself, once again, with way too much to do. I am teaching more than I’m paid to teach. I rush from place to place, always late, always in a hurry. My lower back spasms and clenches, so I have to rush back and forth to the chiropractor as well. He’s a young South African named Neil. He clambers over me like an ardent terrier, trying to make my body work again.

‘Are you the kind of person who rushes everywhere?’ he asks me, not waiting for an answer.

My weekends in March are packed as well. Overdue work piles up on our dining-room table and anxiety about it keeps me awake at night. Reader’s reports. Book reviews. Grant applications. Student marking. A couple of months earlier Renee Liang (playwright, poet, librettist, doctor) asked me if I’d teach again on one of her ‘New Kiwi Women Write’ workshops. I agreed without checking dates.

When the weekend in question looms, I’m double-booked. This year I’ve signed up for a certificate in Maori Arts at Te Wananga o Aotearoa in Mangere, learning how to weave flax. My grandmother was a weaver of kete and tukutuku panels, and although I have no natural talent — or time — I want to do something with my hands that doesn’t involve drinking or typing. We meet for one weekend a month: Friday evening, all day Saturday and most of Sunday. All meals are provided, and we can sleep overnight if we want to. (I never want to.) In order to teach for Renee, I’d need to skip out for about four hours on Saturday afternoon, and leave early on Sunday. The latter I can manage, but the former is impossible, given the amount of flax prep — stripping, softening, boiling and dyeing — that I need to do that day.

The first thing that pops into my head is a lie. I’ll tell Renee that I’m sick, and that’s why I can’t make it.

I am fifty-one years old, and still reaching for the excuse I used at primary and intermediate school: sickness. At least back then I believed it was true. I was ill all the time, always off school, or retreating to the sick bay to lie down and sleep. I was wheezy with endless bronchial conditions, ears and nose clogged. At night I slept on two mattresses, one on top of the other, like the Princess and the Pea, propped up with big pillows, my chest buttered with Vicks VapoRub.

In March 2017, however, I’m not sick. I’m just lying. I email Renee and tell her the truth: that I’m double-booked, only able to teach on Sunday afternoon. If I were truly sick, she’d be sympathetic: I would have been ‘poor you’. Instead I’m just someone who lets other people down. Victim versus Villain: I know which one I prefer.

Last year I asked my father: was I really sick a lot when I was a child? I remember being home a lot, and being too sick to go to school. But was it actual illness?

‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said, ‘whenever you started a new school, the first place you looked for was the sick bay.’

When we had that conversation, my father was sick himself. It was November 2016, and I was asking him questions because there was no time left. He was going to die very soon, and there were things I needed to know. Was he a printing apprentice before or after he was an ambulance driver? How long did he play hockey for Seddon Tech? What year in the 1950s did he sail to Europe?

Was I ever really sick at all, or was I just a spoiled and lazy little liar?

My father was diagnosed with cancer in October 2016. He’d been admitted to Waitakere Hospital because he was anaemic and kept falling over. A scan revealed the reason: colon cancer that had already spread to the liver. The doctor — Asian, slight, possibly a teenager — stood at the end of my father’s bed, curtains drawn around us, giving the bad news to me and my brother.

‘I’m supposed to be having a hip operation soon,’ my father said.

‘That’s the least of your problems,’ said the doctor.

Earlier that day my father’s long-time respiratory specialist, Martin Phillips, had been visiting the four-bed ward to see another patient; he’d spotted my father, asked why he was there, and checked on the scan himself. ‘Looks grim,’ he said.

We asked the young doctor how long my father had left. He didn’t know. Maybe a year. The oncologist at the hospital would know more.

My brother reached for my father’s hand and squeezed it. None of us cried. Maybe he’d have a year, maybe more. After my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she lived for four years.

On the way home I was already planning the things we’d do that summer. Drive my father up north to Pakiri, the place he was born. Maybe get him on a DOC boat to Hauturu, Little Barrier Island, if he felt up to it. We could take the ferry to Aotea, Great Barrier, and explore the places important in our family history.

‘We’ll have a really good Christmas,’ I told my brother, and he agreed.

My sister rang the hip specialist to cancel my father’s planned operation. I asked her if she remembered me being sick as a child and having a lot of time off school.

‘I don’t know about you, but I loved going to school,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and see all my friends. I was never sick.’

I asked my brother what he remembered.

‘I don’t remember anything,’ he said. In the exercise book he uses as a notebook, perhaps because he can’t remember anything, he wrote down what the young doctor said: my father had one year to live.

This is what I remember of my childhood: being sick and hating school. Before I started school — Freyberg Memorial Primary, sometime in 1970 — I was an indoor cat, cloistered and quiet, unused to other children or playing outside. School was a zoo, screeching with feral creatures. They could stride up the concrete saddle in the playground and run on hot asphalt with bare feet. When I tried to twirl with the others on the maypole, it was too fast and frightening, and one of my shoes soared away. A boy ran up to me and took a greedy bite out of the scone I was eating. Another boy knocked over the blocks I was playing with in class. My mother walked up the road to the school to complain, and my teacher told her that the boy in question was a Maori boy, and therefore naturally naughty. Paula, she said, would have had no experience with Maori children and their boisterous ways.

‘I told her to look at your middle name,’ my mother reported afterwards. ‘I told her that you knew more Maoris than she’d had hot dinners.’

Teachers, I believed, favoured the outdoor cats. On a sunny winter’s day, my teacher sent us all out to run around the field, and wrenched my Aran sweater off in the classroom doorway. ‘You won’t need that,’ she said, though I was pleading with her to stop: I only had my vest on underneath, and to be seen in vest and kilt alone felt humiliating. Another day Miss Bridger — sturdy, ferocious, looming high in the school hierarchy — batted my hand away when I touched dangling pages of big print. ‘We’re not learning to read yet,’ she said. But I could already read, I wanted to tell her. I didn’t want to run around the field or clamber up the mountainous concrete saddle; I wanted to sit in a quiet corner, prim and unmolested in kilt and home-knitted Aran sweater, and read.

One day, during the morning tea or lunch break, I decided to leave. I walked down the slope to the school’s back gate, the one that led to the long loop of my street. I was home in about fifteen minutes. I remember how elated I felt at wriggling free from the rowdy affronts of school. I told my mother I was sick, and she thought the school had sent me home. I was curled up asleep before the school rang looking for me.

Another time I arrived home to find just my English nana; my mother and younger brother were out and Nana was on her way out as well. Nana lived with us for a year, and made no secret of her feeling that my brother and I were ‘funny’ children; she preferred my older sister, who she’d known as a baby back in England. I lay down on the settee in the lounge, and she covered me with an itchy blanket, leaving me to sleep off whatever illness I was feigning. I’d never been alone in the house before. It was scarily quiet, apart from the brash tick of the cuckoo clock. But anything was better than the racket of school.

High-level adult conversations must have taken place, because soon I knew that meal-time break-outs weren’t permitted. My only sanctuary was the sick bay, a sterile room with a doctor’s examining table and windows that stared back at the classroom block I’d escaped. I spent a lot of time in the sick bay, mostly sleeping. I’ve always liked an afternoon nap: it was one of the highlights of kindergarten. The supervising adult wasn’t a nurse, I don’t think. Whoever it was tended to be genial and quiet. One drew felt-tip pictures of me — in my pinafore dress and orange skivvy — and stuck them on the wall.

Miss Bridger didn’t approve of my sick-bay sojourns. One day she discovered me there and marched me back to class, ignoring my protests.

‘You’re not sick,’ she said, striding ahead across the playground. I moped along behind her, fuming and powerless. I was sick: I knew I was. Sick of school, anyway.

Between actual bronchial illnesses and devious attempts to avoid school, I was sick a lot. If I’d lived in a wealthy family during the Victorian era, I would have been confined to my bed. And that would have suited me just fine.

Early in November 2016 my father was summoned by his GP, Dr De Silva. She’s from Sri Lanka, a recent replacement for the much-loved Dr Islam from Malaysia who’d presided over my mother’s decline. The surgery’s in a converted bungalow on Te Atatu Road, almost impossible to reach because of a blockade of roadworks. It’s not far from the surgery — around the corner in Vera Road — we attended all my childhood, where Dr Madgwick, and later Drs Ho and Hing, harassed me with tongue depressors and stethoscopes, sent me off to have my tonsils and adenoids out, and finally, when I was in my teens, started calling my ‘wheezy bronchitis’ asthma and prescribed a Ventolin inhaler.

My father asked me and my husband to go with him to see Dr De Silva because my sister was working that day. Daddy and I ambled up the wheelchair ramp, propping each other up. I’d only been out of hospital a week or so myself, after a hysterectomy, and I was still tired and tender.

Dr De Silva’s office was decorated with family pictures in silver frames with heart cut-outs. She was warm, capable and no-nonsense, the ideal GP. (A few weeks later she sent my brother his blood-test results with the message DIET AND EXERCISE scrawled across the page.) She took one look at me and told me to lie on the bed. But it was hard to join in the conversation from a prone position, so I scuffled over to a plastic chair.

She sat tapping at her computer, filling in an ‘End of Life’ plan for my father. Some of it was information for carers, in case my father couldn’t speak for himself. He needed to sleep sitting up, we told her, because of his bronchiectasis. He liked watching crime shows and sport on TV. Would he like to be taken outside sometimes, in a wheelchair, for some fresh air? Yes, said my father, he would. If he lost consciousness during a medical procedure, would he like to be resuscitated? No, said my father, he would not.

I started crying and Dr De Silva handed me the box of tissues.

My father decided he had no spiritual needs and didn’t want a vicar to visit. All he wanted, he said, was his family around him.

When we stood up to leave, the doctor and I had a whispered conversation about my hysterectomy, the gory details of which we were keeping from my father. I asked her if it was normal to have numbness at the top of my legs a week after the surgery, and she said yes.

Dr De Silva told my father he could ring her any time, that she could drive to his place at lunch or after work. But this didn’t happen, because within days of this visit the hospice nurses had taken over his care. He wouldn’t go back to the doctor’s surgery again. He would only leave his apartment in a wheelchair, or in the vehicle he said the retirement-village residents jokingly called the big yellow taxi, an ambulance.

When I was young, many of the books I read were written in a distant era: What Katy Did (first published in 1872), Heidi (1881) and The Secret Garden (1911), all of which featured a sick child confined to a wheelchair. In every case the sufferer was cured, but in the interim they got to languish and be wheeled or carried around, something that seemed very appealing to me. I learned about the delights of Bath and sedan chairs, and longed for more civilised transportation than my father’s white work van.

In these books, the recovery of the invalid is key. Without recovery, there’s no lesson to be learned. In The Secret Garden, young Colin Craven is bedridden for no particular reason; after his mother’s death, he’s been cast in the role of invalid. He’s spoiled and stroppy, and therefore in need of a moral lesson. Mary, the book’s heroine, is a sickly moaner herself until a few brisk walks on the Yorkshire moors improve both her health and her temperament. She decides that there’s nothing wrong with Colin that a few trips to the secret garden — and bracing spring weather — can’t cure. By the book’s end, to the delight of his father, he’s walking.

In What Katy Did, Katy Carr has an accident on a swing in the barn, and suffers a ‘fever in the back’ and a spine injury. She’s ‘young and strong’, her father tells her, and will recover in time, but not for many months.

Katy’s role model in invalidism is Cousin Helen who is ‘ill’ and has to lie on a sofa or bed and have regular ‘rests’. She is ‘sweet and patient’, according to Katy’s father, Dr Carr, who carries her up and down the stairs when she visits. Although she has what she calls ‘the back-ache, the head-ache, and the all-over ache’, Cousin Helen is charming, vivacious and kind, even though she’s had a ‘dreadful accident’ and couldn’t — wouldn’t — marry her devoted fiancé, Alex. An invalid who can’t have children couldn’t be a ‘real’ wife, so Alex marries someone else, moves in next door and calls his own daughter Helen after his lost love.

After Katy’s accident, Cousin Helen visits again. Katy’s in a deep funk, lying prone in a darkened room weeping because she wants to run around and go to school. She’s in God’s school right now, Cousin Helen tells her, a place called ‘The School of Pain’, where she’ll learn the lessons of Patience, Cheerfulness, and Making the Best of Things. Cousin Helen quotes her own father, who said: ‘A sick woman who isn’t neat is a disagreeable object.’ So Katy agrees to open the blinds, brush her hair, wear a nicer dressing-gown and make herself ‘the heart of the house’. By the book’s end, she’s much happier, nicer to her siblings, and less prone to impatience and impetuous behaviour. And, to the delight of her father, she’s walking.

I read all three Katy books over and over, and my favourite was What Katy Did at School, after she’s escaped The School of Pain and gets into high jinks at an actual boarding school. In What Katy Did Next, she tours European spa towns and a handsome American proposes marriage, even though she’s too sensible and not pretty; this made me suspicious. I was also suspicious of the accident in What Katy Did: it felt like a punishment inflicted on Katy for being too lively, there just to teach her a lesson.

The invalid in Heidi is Clara Sesemann, and she’s already injured, mysteriously, before the book begins. Like Katy Carr, she’s twelve years old, an invalid in a wheelchair. Heidi, her country-girl companion, loves Clara, but she’s homesick and makes herself ill — not eating, sleepwalking, wasting away.

Sleepwalking was beyond my powers, but I was quite good at eating like a bird. I lived on Chesdale triangles, boxes of Sun-Maid raisins, carrot sticks, and crackers scraped with Marmite. Miss Bridger summoned my mother up to school for a reprimand: a growing child, she said, needed sandwiches and/or meat pies. My mother, enraged, checked my diet with Dr Madgwick and he said it was fine.

Heidi is sent back to the Alps and Clara is allowed to visit her the following summer, after six bracing weeks in a European spa town to ‘take the cure’. Clara arrives carried aloft in a sedan chair, porters pushing a wheelchair and brandishing shawls and rugs. Heidi’s grandfather gives her fresh goats’ milk and persuades her to try standing up. Although Clara is weak and swaying — unsurprising after years of sitting down all day — she tries to take steps. Fresh mountain air, fresh milk, fresh companions: this is all Clara needs. By the book’s end, to the delight of her father, she’s walking.

The thing is, I didn’t want to get better, to be lured from my picturesque wicker Bath chair with the help of fresh air and a cheerful new friend. I didn’t want sickness to be a test of my character, transforming me from impetuous to mature. I didn’t want to be the heart of the house. I wanted to be a little bit ill, just enough to keep me home from school but not enough to stop me from reading.

I envied Jo Bettany in the Chalet School books — she’s twelve, like Katy and Clara, when the series begins in 1925. Jo is mischievous, clever and feisty; she loves reading and writing; and, best of all, she is ‘delicate’. When she stands too long at an open door, she has to have a hot bath and be put to bed with hot-water bottles. Adults produce the ‘bronchitis kettle’, goose grease and a thermogene (some sort of olden-days wadding) soaked in turpentine. When she sprains her ankle skating on a lake, everyone is worried because like other ‘excitable’ children she’s quick to develop a fever. The doctor assures Madge, her older sister — the headmistress of the Chalet School until Madge marries said doctor — that Jo will grow out of her ‘childish delicacy’. She does: she grows up to marry a (different) doctor, have eleven children, and write dozens of books.

So to be delicate seemed to me the best of all worlds. Most of the time you could dash around as you pleased, knowing that in the future there’d be nothing wrong with you, but at regular intervals — often two or three times a book in Jo’s case — you’d be confined to bed, lying back on huge white pillows, and left alone, with nothing to do but read stories and write your own. That sounded much more appealing to me than going to school, unless the school in question was a boarding school housed in a lakeside chalet in pre-war Austria.

It wasn’t a conscious decision, seeing myself as delicate. I wasn’t even aware of it until I was in my twenties, and my then-boyfriend teased me about it. ‘The thing with you,’ he said, ‘is that you think you’re Princess Delicate-Welicate. But really, you’re strong as an ox.’

Maybe I’d grown out of it, as Jo did: by then, I rarely needed my Ventolin inhaler and my days of Vicks VapoRub sticking my pyjamas to my chest were long gone.

Or maybe I was never really very sick at all.

On 10 November, two days after his eighty-third birthday, my father was summoned to the oncologist at Auckland Hospital. We had a wheelchair for him now, borrowed from West Auckland Hospice on Swanson Road. My sister and brother took time off work to go with him; Tom and I went as well. There were too many of us for the small windowless office, and the oncologist — a slim young Irish woman named Orla — had to find more chairs to squeeze in. She asked my father what he knew about his cancer.

‘I’ve been told sweet Fanny Adams,’ he complained. So she showed us the scan of a black liver blotched with lighter speckles of cancer. The cancer had begun elsewhere, but the liver was the theatre of conflict now.

‘The liver cancer will kill you,’ she told him.

‘How long does he have?’ I asked.

‘Weeks or short months,’ said Orla. For the first time since the diagnosis, my father got upset. My sister and I sat crying as well. The specialist came in, to say everything again, and then we all got up to leave.

‘Will we see you again?’ I asked Orla. The answer was no. There was nothing that Oncology could do for my father. From now on he was in the hands of Palliative Care, the hospice nurses.

‘That doctor at the hospital told us a year,’ my brother said to me. ‘I wrote it down in my book.’

Eight days later my sister and brother-in-law took Daddy for his final appointment with Martin Phillips at Waitakere Hospital. The appointment was a regular checkup of my father’s bronchiectasis, something he’d suffered for over twenty years, but really it was to say goodbye. My sister asked how long my father had to live, and Martin Phillips said it was a couple of weeks at most.

‘Well,’ he said, standing up and extending his hand to my father. ‘Goodbye, my friend.’

My sister says she was weeping.

One thing about all those children in all those books: they didn’t have mothers. Katy Carr’s mother is dead. Colin Craven’s mother is dead. Clara’s mother is dead. Mary Lennox, Heidi and Jo Bettany are all orphans.

When I was at school, my mother didn’t seem to mind when I was sick and needed to stay home. Sometimes when she had something else to do I’d be taken to my grandparents for the day, which I loved. I’d lie bundled up on their settee, my grandfather in his chair nearby, TV on in the afternoon with unsuitable soap operas.

At home, my mother surprised everyone by being a patient and attentive nurse. I would always have clean sheets and fresh pyjamas. Often she’d make me Maggi packet soup for lunch. In the afternoons she’d lure me into the lounge — or later, after our extension was built, onto the window seat in our living room — to lie in the sun with cushions and a blanket.

When I was sick, she didn’t talk too much, as she did at all other times. The house was peaceful. I didn’t miss my friends. I liked being alone with my mother.

At night, when I woke up in the night struggling to breathe, or if I couldn’t sleep because of a bad dream, my father was the one who got up to tend to me, to slather me with Vicks or bring me a cup of water from the bathroom. I’d always call for him. He was the night nurse, always patient, always comforting, always there.

On the day of the oncology appointment, Emma and Maxine from West Auckland Hospice gave us a 1B5 exercise book. This was a ‘Communication Book’ to be left at my father’s apartment. We could all write in it — nurses, counsellors, carers, family members. If we gave my father medication or something to eat, we could write in it. We could write messages to each other. We could make notes about how he was feeling. They started us off with a direct message to my father, summing up the conversation they’d just had with him. ‘Things have deteriorated rapidly over the past few weeks and your recent cancer diagnosis has been a shock.’

Most of the notes in this book relate to doses of domperidone and Augmentin and prednisone and morphine liquid, and of the use — or refusal to use — the nebuliser. At 11:30 am on November 16th my sister notes that the duvet cover is in the washing machine and needs to be moved to the dryer. At 2:30 pm I note that this has been done and that there’s a fresh batch of chocolate Ensure in the fridge. At 3:15 pm Tom writes that LIQUID MORPHINE GIVEN and I write ‘too early — by mistake!’ next to it. Underneath this, Emma, the hospice nurse, writes ‘don’t worry, that’s fine’. On the 17th I note that Clare, the lymphoedema nurse, has shown me how to give a basic lymph massage to get the fluid moving from my father’s feet and lower legs. On the 19th I write that Daddy finally let me do this. In the messages and notes we discuss fatty cream, a heel support, slow-release morphine, antibiotics. My nephew and his wife, who live in Wellington, visit, and write: ‘Grandad took pill, drank lemon thing.’

On the morning of November 22nd I write that my father had a bad night of coughing, but we’d given him his breakfast and pills, and put a load of washing on. Tom and I had been staying at his apartment for a few nights. That day I had a doctor’s appointment, and then we had to drive to Hamilton so I could speak to a class at the University of Waikato. None of them had read the book I was there to talk about, Rangatira, and I tried to suppress the intense irritation I felt, how I wished we’d stayed in Auckland with my father. After class, Tom and I had lunch on campus, by the lake, and my sister texted to say my father was in hospital. Emma, the hospice nurse, had arrived not long after we left that morning.

‘Chest infection appears to be worsening,’ she wrote in the book. ‘Kiri wishes to go to hospital for treatment.’

That was the last entry. There are forty pages in the book, but we only used eight and a half of them.

When we were growing up, my sister had a big collection of sixties-era girls’ Diana and Princess annuals that I coveted and — she alleges — defaced with scribbles, along with my brother, when we were heedless toddlers. When I was old enough to read I consulted them over and over, as though they were ancient runes, transfixed by stories of girls who went to boarding schools, rode ponies, or performed in underwater ballets, all the while solving crimes. These annuals were educational as well, with easy knitting patterns, career guides, and illustrated life stories of famous women in northern-hemisphere history like Mary, Queen of Scots, Annie Oakley and Anna Pavlova.

In one annual I read the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Victorian poet who not only liked spaniels but had a hairstyle resembling a spaniel’s ears. According to this story, she languished on her couch feeling poorly and being cossetted by her family until she met another famous writer, Robert Browning, and eloped to Italy. Lying down, reading and writing, no school at all, then eventual romance and world travel: this sounded like a pretty good life plan to me. The trick was persuading everyone the lying down was necessary.

Years later I read EBB’s biography, and realised one reason she may have preferred a prone life. Her mother, married at twenty-four, had twelve children in eighteen years, and died at the age of forty-seven. For an avid reader and scholar like Elizabeth — or Ba, as she was known in the family — who studied Greek with her brother’s tutor and envied him when he was sent away to school, she saw her mother’s life as subservient and not something to emulate. A bouncing, jolly childhood gave way to a languishing adolescence and social anxiety, her list of ailments ascribed by one doctor to her ‘active turn of mind and inactive state of body’.

At fifteen, without any specific diagnosis, Ba was given opium and spent a year in a spa hotel in Gloucester, immobilised in a ‘spine crib’ that enfeebled her muscles. Enforced rest and picky eating made her weaker, and she was susceptible to bronchial illnesses all her life. Her father believed his ‘unduly sensitive’ eldest child needed special treatment, so he got Ba’s poems published and let her lie in bed writing. Still, when Robert Browning started courting her, he encouraged Ba to do the things that her father had been urging for years: eat sensibly, and get more fresh air and exercise. She moved with Browning to Florence and, at the age of forty-three, had a son. She died at fifty-five, outlasting four of her younger siblings.

Some of the symptoms Ba described — paroxysms, chest pains, erratic heartbeat, headaches, indifference to eating — are similar to those Virginia Woolf experienced as preludes to periods of intense exhaustion or depression. Did Ba also suffer from bouts of depression, or an overwhelming melancholia? It’s not surprising that she started seeing ‘tragedy around every corner’ after the death of her much-loved mother. It’s not surprising that 1840 was a particularly bad year for her health, given that the two brothers closest in age to her both died suddenly — Edward in a boating accident, and Sam from tropical fever on the family’s Jamaican estate. Her father moved the family to a London beset with epidemics of cholera, typhus, typhoid, scarlet fever, smallpox and influenza. In 1841 the mean life expectancy there was thirty-seven. No wonder Ba was a gloomy shut-in.

A young woman who loathed social events and believed, from a young age, that writing poetry was her vocation would see, in opting out of her fixed social role, the practical and imaginative possibilities of illness. This is how Woolf described it, in her essay ‘On Being Ill’:

Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time in years, to look round, to look up — to look, for example, at the sky.

Illness is an embrace of irresponsibility, a desertion of duties. The ill are ‘able’ in a different way, able not in body but in time.

EBB could afford being ill, of course: she could pay someone to wash the sheets and make the dinner and push her around the park in a wheelchair (thanks in part to the slaves who made her family fortune in Jamaica, the rebellion of whom seriously dented her father’s wealth and made the move to London necessary).

Time is still the thing all writers want — time away from family and jobs and emails, from someone asking what’s for dinner, from meetings and appointments. Many people I know are sarcastic when they hear I’ve been on ‘yet another’ writer’s residency. Another fellowship? Another scholarship? Another ‘free holiday’? What, exactly, do I get up to in my room in Ventspils, Latvia, during my exotic-sounding residency?

I could tell them that there I can be ‘irresponsible and disinterested and able … to look round’, but this would be as persuasive as me telling Miss Bridger that I felt sick.

Actually, in Latvia I was sick, or at least freaked out by uterine fibroids that made it seem as though I was bleeding to death. I emailed my GP, Dr Tamer, in New Zealand and he told me to go to hospital. I had to take my own cup and spoon, for the sweet tea and watery gruel I’d be given. At the hospital all the unsmiling medical staff spoke Russian and Latvian. The only English word my nurse said was ‘sleep!’ I was wheeled up and down corridors in my leggings and t-shirt for an ultrasound and later for a procedure involving a general anaesthetic. I spent the night in a hospital room that looked like a Soviet-era hostel, and allowed to return to the residency the next day. When I got back to New Zealand, the specialist at Greenlane received the medical records, but everything was in Latvian. My uterine fibroids were still there, or new ones had arrived as malevolent reinforcements; I’d need a hysterectomy.

I’m unfazed by surgery. It’s only a few years since I had two surgeries for lobular carcinoma, followed by six weeks of daily radiation. I’d recovered well, and felt confident I’d recover from the hysterectomy — scheduled for October — just as well. After all, I’m not Princess Delicate-Welicate anymore: I’m strong as an ox.

I spent the last day of my father’s life with him in Waitakere Hospital. My sister was due around lunchtime, to boss around healthcare professionals and demand answers and information. She’s very good at this. But one of us needed to be there at all times in case doctors, specialists or the palliative care team drifted in.

When I arrived, my father’s face was masked with a nebuliser. When he opened his eyes he was surprised and pleased to see me. I settled myself in the chair between his bed and the window, and sent some emails from my laptop. The curtains were part-drawn for privacy. Daddy looked tired and yellow, but he could still talk. He whispered to me about the man in the bed opposite.

‘You’ll be able to understand him,’ he said. ‘He speaks Italian.’

He wanted to know when my sister would be there, when Tom would arrive. He wanted me to tell the meal-deliverer that he only drank chocolate Ensure, not vanilla. I feel as though I spent half that day saying ‘My father needs a chocolate drink.’ After Kevin, the nurse who was as slight as a pixie, gave him a shower, I rubbed fatty cream over my father’s back and combed his hair. Most of the time he didn’t feel like talking, so I sat holding his hand.

His chest infection, the reason he’d been admitted to hospital, was still bad. I held the white plastic container to his mouth when he coughed, and mopped the phlegm away with a tissue. When the doctors came to discuss the infection, we all stared into the plastic container to assess the colour of what he was coughing up: was it green or yellow? They wanted him to have some kind of scan, and I asked if it would do anything to prolong his life or make him more comfortable. The answer was no.

I emailed my sister and brother to tell them I’d refused the scan on Daddy’s behalf, afraid that I’d done the wrong thing.

There were three other men in the ward. The man opposite, who was almost certainly not speaking Italian, kept soiling his bed. The man in the far corner was having audible bowel issues and swore or cursed every three minutes.

‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ he shouted when the cleaner came in to empty the rubbish bin.

‘How can you stand it?’ I asked her.

‘I’m ready for him to go home,’ she said.

The man in the bed next to my father’s was much younger than the others. I couldn’t see him but I could hear a doctor talking to him. It seemed as though he had mental rather than physical problems. When his lunch was delivered, it wasn’t what he ordered.

‘Fuck this!’ he shouted, and smashed his plate onto the floor. ‘Real men don’t eat quiche!’

‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ,’ grumbled the man in the corner.

I’d had enough of this ward. My father had said he wanted to die at home or in hospice, not in a room of incontinent foul-mouthed oafs. One of the medical battalions that had marched in and out that morning had said they’d make sure he got a private room. I marched out to the nurses’ desk to ask for the private room ASAP, making the mistake of glancing to my right as I passed.

‘What are you looking at?’ the plate-smasher screamed. ‘Why don’t you put a pillow over your old man’s face? He’ll be dead in a week!’

I stood in the corridor, shaking and crying, spluttering with rage. The plate-smasher kept shouting about how my father was going to die, how he should be suffocated. The nurses eddied around me, patting me on the shoulder, asking me if I wanted to sit down, telling me they were getting the room ready right away.

‘It’s a public hospital,’ one said. ‘We have to let everybody in.’

I went back in to sit with my father, whose eyes were closed. I sat by the bed sobbing, wishing my sister would arrive and fix everything. She would have got the private room sorted by now. She would have told off the entire ward.

The young man was still talking.

‘I’ve upset that lady,’ he said.

Because my father’s eyes were closed, I hoped he was asleep. But he wasn’t asleep. He’d heard the whole thing.

He reached for my hand and squeezed it.

‘Don’t be upset,’ he said.

Dr Tamer is Egyptian and works in a group surgery on Symonds Street, near the university. His identical twin brother also works there, and Tom and I see him — Dr Yasser — if Dr Tamer isn’t available. Sometimes I’m not sure which one I’m seeing, as they look alike and have the same last name.

After my father dies, Dr Tamer is worried about my mental and physical health. Apparently I need to lose weight, drink less and take a higher dosage of citalopram, the medicine Tom refers to as my ‘crazy pill’.

‘Don’t worry,’ I tell the doctor. ‘I’ve got my father’s La-Z-Boy in my office at work.’

Tom and my brother had hauled this into the city for me when we cleared out my father’s apartment. Now I can semi-recline while reading, or even meeting with students. When the weather turns colder, I plan to take a blanket in with me. It’s the closest thing I can get to a Bath chair.

‘So now,’ I say to Dr Tamer, ‘if I feel stressed I can sit in it and put my feet up.’

‘It would be better for you if you went for a run,’ Dr Tamer says, advice I will ignore. I don’t need to run, because I rush about everywhere, always late and in a panic. And anyway, Dr Tamer doesn’t know how delicate I am, how likely I am to fall over just walking across a road. In New York I sprained my ankle walking to a Kmart to buy a Martha Stewart bed skirt. In Auckland I sprained my wrist walking home in the rain after an Ayurvedic spa treatment.

After my ninth or tenth appointment with Neil, the chiropractor, he gives me a card with the word HASTE written in black felt-tip pen. He’s drawn a downward arrow next to it.

‘Less haste,’ he says, giving me a stern look. ‘Carry this with you everywhere.’

Before our next appointment I’ve mislaid it. I’m still hurrying everywhere, trying to cram too much in. The summer is over and I never went to Pakiri, or Little Barrier, or Great Barrier. The summer is a blur.

The evening my father died, I was at home. I spent about nine hours with him at the hospital that day. My sister had come and gone; we’d moved him into a private room. The palliative care team told us a bed might be available at the hospice the next day, but it might be too much strain on my father to move him.

He’d be OK at the hospital, we decided, as long as he was in his own room and had family around him. Tom and I went home to have some dinner.

‘Bye Daddy,’ I said, kissing him on the forehead. He looked at me but didn’t speak. ‘See you tomorrow.’

My brother-in-law left to collect my sister. So only my niece, Rebecca, and my brother were with my father when he said he wanted to get up, to go to the toilet. They tried to help him, but he was too heavy; they needed the help of two nurses. Then my father fell back, gasping for air. The nurses told them to step aside, or outside: I’m still not sure of the specifics. My brother said he was told my father had stopped breathing. But a minute or so later, my brother told me, my father gave a great gasp. That was it. It was awful to witness, my brother said.

My niece rang us, crying. ‘Grandad’s died,’ she said, and a noise came out of me that I’ve never heard before, an animal noise I didn’t believe I could make. Anguish is a sound, I know now, as well as a feeling.

In his hospital bed my father didn’t look peaceful or at rest. His jaw was locked, mouth wide open. His handsome face looked ugly in death, suctioned and mask-like. I sat by his side and took his hand; it was still just warm. The sheets were damp and yellow with urine.

‘Come back,’ I said. It was more of a screech than a sentence. ‘Come back!’

My lower lip trembled, like a pouting child’s. I held his hand and waited for him to wake up, get out of bed and come to me, the way he’d always done whenever I needed him. But he couldn’t come back, and we could do nothing for him. We left the room while two nurses cleaned and prepared him for the undertaker. And then we sat for hours — my brother, me, Tom — waiting for another young doctor to write the final notes in my father’s file, to fill out the necessary pieces of paper.

City to be Abandoned

In 2005 we were living in Louisiana, where I was teaching creative writing at Tulane University in New Orleans. We’d moved there a year earlier, from Iowa City, and had already evacuated for Hurricane Ivan. But this time the hurricane on its way was Katrina, and it looked much worse for the city than Ivan.

On the last Saturday of August I flew back from Denver, where I’d been visiting a friend; the plane had to land in Baton Rouge, 130 kilometres away, because New Orleans airport was already closed. Tom picked me up and we wended our way back along the old river road, past the cane fields and the remnants of nineteenth-century plantations. The highway, I-10, was entirely turned over to contraflow, to help people leave the city.

Early on Sunday morning the mayor, Ray Nagin, declared a mandatory evacuation, the first in the South since the Civil War, when Sherman and his troops were bearing down on Atlanta. We spent the morning carrying things upstairs and packing the car. We lived in a two-storey house, and downstairs was essentially an aboveground basement, typical in New Orleans. Our laundry was down there, along with boxes of paperwork and photographs, furniture we couldn’t fit in our small rooms upstairs, hiking boots, Tom’s bike, all the memorabilia of two lives lived in cities around the world.

We lived on Cucullu Street, one block to the river side of Claiborne Avenue, just below sea level. (In New Orleans, people talk about the lake side and the river side, meaning Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi.) Our street tended to flood in heavy rain, so things we didn’t lug upstairs we placed on shelves or on pallets that kept them just off the ground.

We weren’t sure how long we’d be away. Ivan had kept us away a couple of days, and we imagined this would be about the same, even if the hurricane swept much closer. Our neighbour, Sarah Doerries, kept dropping in to hurry us along; we were going to travel in convoy, with her and her friend, Joe. I worked with Sarah at Tulane; she was my closest friend in New Orleans.

Margaret Orr, the meteorologist on the local NBC affiliate, WDSU, was crying on TV. ‘That bitch!’ Sarah said. The then-governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, seemed weepy as well. Ray Nagin just looked confused, as though he’d just heard about the hurricane and wasn’t sure what to do. Sarah went home to light more candles to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

‘Sarah is a nut,’ Tom said, carrying another plastic tub — Christmas decorations — up the stairs.

We drove in our convoy into Mississippi, creeping along I-10 and then I-55. For the first few hours we kept the windows down and the air conditioning off, even though it was a sweltering day, to save gas. No one was allowed to leave the highway — to refuel or exit — until well into Mississippi. Every car on I-55 had a Louisiana licence plate.

Sarah’s car broke down across the state line and we had to all squish into our Ford Escort. She’d insisted we take this route even though it was the long way to Marksville, where we were going, and Alexandria, where she and Joe had places to stay. The drive to Marksville from New Orleans usually takes around three hours. On the day before Katrina hit it took us fourteen.

Marksville is the seat of Avoyelles Parish, in central Louisiana, with a population around five thousand. Alexandria lies about 50 kilometres to the northwest, on the banks of the Red River: it’s the seat of neighbouring Rapides Parish, and a city ten times the size of Marksville. It was burned to the ground by Union troops during the Civil War. Marksville is a key location in Solomon Northup’s memoir Twelve Years a Slave: the nearest town to the plantation on which he was a captive, it was home to the courthouse, the post office and the gallows. Northup saw it as ‘a small and insignificant hamlet’, and that description stands today, the chief attraction in town no longer the gallows but a monster-sized casino.

Tom and I were staying with Rodney and Paige Rabalais, who we didn’t know very well: we’d met Rodney in New Zealand in 2001, when he was visiting his son, our friend Kevin Rabalais. Rodney and Paige lived in an old wooden house just outside Marksville, near an old Civil War fort site, with a lush garden and an outdoor shower. The house was named Slowness, suitable for the sluggish pace of central Louisiana, where there’d been a drought for months and the September temperatures were in the high 90s every day.

We were anxious and unhappy guests; we drank a lot, and paced the floor. Rodney and Paige let us hog the internet and drove us to friends’ houses to watch the Weather Channel and Survivor on big screens and drink other people’s alcohol.

Late on Monday the hurricane hit, and it all seemed OK until the levees on the lake side of town broke and storm surge flooded in. People died. Houses were submerged. Sarah’s boat, moored in Lake Pontchartrain, sank to the bottom. Our street, like 80 per cent of the city, was underwater. On Tuesday we could see an aerial view on the internet: the lower floor was invisible. We were by no means the worst off, but we did have five and a half feet of water. Everything left downstairs — furniture, papers, our washing machine — was destroyed. ‘City to be Abandoned’, I read in one newspaper online. We were not allowed to go home.

I’d never been prevented from going home before. We hung around Marksville, with its stubby cotton fields and old town square, its giant Walmart where you could only buy white bread, its giant casino on the highway where four hundred people were sleeping, with other evacuees camping out in their cars out in the parking lot. Every house was full, every church. A disused factory had five hundred and fifty people sleeping in it, relying on donated food, cots, toiletries and clothes. I talked to a medical volunteer in town, who said the worst health problem they were dealing with was depression. Everyone wanted to go home, but nobody could.

To kill time, we visited Sarah and other people we knew in Alexandria. The only book shop we could find there was the chain Books-A-Million, which was like Barnes & Noble with a lot more Christian books and no copies of The New York Times.

On our first visit, we browsed a while and ordered coffees. On the counter stood a display of red wristbands, on sale for a dollar with the message ‘I Live for Him’. The sign above it urged customers: ‘Proclaim your faith’.

‘I’m enjoying y’all being here,’ the guy behind the counter said. One evacuee, the day before, had complained that he was chatting with the customers too long, and that there should be more than one cash register open.

‘And I told her, you are our guest here!’ he said. ‘If you don’t like it, you can just go home and swim.’

He told us that his brother-in-law was a paramedic, and he’d driven into New Orleans with colleagues to help the relief effort. After their car was shot at, they turned around and came home.

‘They need to kill some of these looters, he said. ‘Not just wound them, but actually kill them.’

Another customer — grizzled, sitting alone a table without a drink — got up to join the conversation.

‘New Orleans is a terrible place anyway,’ he said. ‘Right now …’

He shook his head.

In Alec we picked up things for the shelters there and in Marksville — towels, diapers, a microwave — with the gift cards friends in other places were sending.

The factory in Marksville — Garan, Inc. — used to make clothes until the jobs moved to Mexico. The sheriff, T-Bill Belt (‘T’ is short for ‘petit’ in Louisiana), owned the building and he’d deputised a guy called Roland Scallan to run the shelter. Roland was supposed to be in charge of a new communications company T-Bill planned to set up there. Helpers were volunteers from the community and inmates from the local prisons, both women’s and men’s.

Paige Rabalais and I visited the factory, a small, stark industrial space with no showers and limited bathroom facilities. In the air-conditioned half, people slept on a multicolour quilt of cots. Folding tables had been set up for food donated by Marksville residents. In the humid half of the factory, beyond plastic flaps, donated items were stored — boxes of old clothes, piles of toilet paper and sanitary items, dozens of bottles of water and canned goods. Someone had donated a refrigerated truck, to store milk, and someone else donated the diesel for it. Another local donated a washer and dryer. Local AC contractors came in to fix the units and make the place inhabitable. Marksville had a population of just over five thousand people, and everyone was helping someone from New Orleans.

Roland was a retired banker with a hoarse voice and a wild look in his eyes. He wore a polo shirt and khaki trousers, and a badge that gave his name but no job title, because he didn’t have one. When I first talked to him, he was clutching a bag from a pharmacy containing an insulin prescription for one of the evacuees, paid for out of Roland’s pocket.

‘People arrived here with just the clothes on their backs,’ he told me. ‘They have nothing. We have children, old ladies — one just had surgery and lost her toes. We just got her a wheelchair. We’re getting prescriptions illegally — we have to. Some won’t go to a nursing home because they want to stay with their families.’

Local pastors visited the shelter to see if they could move evacuees out of their churches and into the factory. People from the state Board of Health came by, ‘asking all sorts of questions,’ Roland said. ‘I’m telling them all kinds of lies.’

The medical professionals there at the factory were volunteers as well, local nurses on their day off. A doctor who was an evacuee himself called in to write prescriptions. The security guards on the door, checking people in and out, making sure nobody had weapons, were volunteers. So were the plumbers who’d come in to unblock the toilets when they got jammed with diapers, and to fix the urinals when someone kicked them loose from the walls. Some evacuees, said Roland, got ‘angry and it’s understandable. There’s so much uncertainty — people don’t know where they’re going next.’

He’d arranged school buses to collect people and take them to the youth centre 15 miles away for showers. Nobody liked that. Nobody liked the way Roland was rationing toilet paper and nappies after he discovered people were stockpiling them, or using them to barter.

‘I try to tell people, you’re not going home Monday,’ he said. ‘We might be here for a month unless they build a big refugee facility closer to New Orleans.’

The thing they needed the most, he told us, were pull-ups for the elderly, and maxi-pads. The next day Paige and I drove to the Marksville Walmart — now decimated, with no water left and most supplies gone — and she spent three hundred dollars buying tampons, pull-ups, maxi-pads and toilet paper. The guys in line behind us, a father and son in camouflage, giggled and pointed as we stacked everything on the counter.

‘You must have a real problem,’ the father said, tittering, gesturing at the pull-ups.

‘They’re for the shelter,’ I said, and Paige and I glared at them until they stopped giggling.

When we dropped the stuff off around the back of Garan, Inc., the women prisoners who helped us unload told us the shelter urgently needed baby socks and women’s underwear. The next day Tom and I made the forty-minute drive to Alexandria to buy some at Target.

Though we lived in Louisiana, Marksville seemed a surreal and intense version of it. Days there were hotter than hell, and love bugs turned every wall in the house black. I found a frog in a cocktail shaker. There were ants in my bed. At night a rogue armadillo dug up the garden.

We lined up at the Family Services office to get food stamps. The capable woman in orange directing foot traffic told us there were 3500 evacuees in tiny Avoyelles Parish, a figure that didn’t include people staying with friends and families who hadn’t registered for any disaster relief. FEMA, she said, had been spotted in the Marksville area, but weren’t ‘on the ground’ yet. It was 9 September. The mandatory evacuation order was issued on 28 August.

Food stamps took the form of a Louisiana Purchase automated debit card, with DISASTER ASSISTANCE printed across the bottom. After filling in a form (name, age, race, income, plus a rough assessment of how much we’d spent evacuating and how much we’d lost), a staff member assigned a monetary value to the card. Ours was $274 for a month. The woman in orange announced to the waiting room that nobody could spend the money on paper goods (like nappies, to the obvious dismay of a number of people there), alcohol, tobacco or cleaning products. However, unlike regular food stamps, the card was good for hot food in the deli section of a supermarket.

Rodney was friends with Sheriff T-Bill, and told us we could go out with him to feed alligators any time we wanted. We spent a night in a Winnebago in Shreveport, and another night with the Tubre family, Rodney’s relatives, in Natchitoches, where Tommy Tubre took us out on his boat along the Cane River. We visited the house in tiny Cloutierville where the writer Kate Chopin lived in the 1880s. The other people on the tour that day were from Texas.

‘You’re from New Orleans?’ they asked. ‘Have you lost everything?’

They seemed disappointed to hear that wasn’t the case.

We drove to the annual Frog Festival in Rayne, a small town on the Cajun Prairie, and caught the end of the frog-jumping contest. In nearby Lafayette we went to the annual Festivals Acadiens, where Cajun bands play and stalls sell everything from accordions to chainsaw-carved wooden fish. Although it was almost too hot to stand up, a number of people were dancing in the dust in front of the stage, including one half-naked man using a stick as a substitute partner. From the stage, it was announced that the following year the Festivals Acadiens would be held in October, news that elicited a weary cheer from the baked audience. The Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City, which we’d attended in 2004, had already been postponed until October, after hurricane season was over.

If it sounds as though we were having fun, we weren’t. We were just restless, stir-crazy. I couldn’t settle to any reading or writing. We helped around the house, washing dinners and sweeping away dead love bugs. We took things to the shelters. We obsessed over the news.

Sometime in September we drove north to Iowa City, where we had friends, and to St. Louis, where Tom’s family lived. At a Gap outlet in Mississippi we got an evacuees’ discount. On the way through Memphis, we learned from the radio news that the city was experiencing a mini-crime surge since the hurricane, and that no plea-bargains were permitted for crimes against evacuees.

People kept asking us if we’d lost everything. People wanted to hear stories, but we weren’t up to talking much. We returned to Louisiana in a car packed with donated items for the shelters: books, baby clothes, food, paper goods, baby formula. We delivered it all to the shelter in Marksville except for the beef jerky, which I gave to the Avoyelles Parish National Guard: they were having a snack drive for local guardsmen sent to New Orleans.

The volunteers in the shelter had more requests, so we drove back to Alexandria to use Target gift cards people had given us. We bought five giant bottles of laundry detergent for use in the sole communal washing machine, and one hundred towels. Nobody thinks to evacuate with towels: we certainly didn’t. Nobody thought they’d be away this long.

In late September Hurricane Rita hit. We’d never been on the eastern — and stronger — side of a hurricane before. On Saturday morning, when the power and water disappeared at Slowness, it seemed as though we’d all spend the day sitting around, watching the rain, reading and napping. Between sporadic bursts of wind and driving rain, I sloshed across the garden in Rodney’s rain boots to refill the birdhouse and collect various blown objects from the sodden grass, and took a surreptitious pee.

Sometimes the sky looked bright: birds flew between strands of trees, and pick-ups hissed along Blue Town Road. But when the rain returned it was loud and almost horizontal. The pond filled to its weedy brim. Rain drummed on the tin roof and the old house flinched and shivered in the wind. Just after two, the house really started shaking, the wind a piercing whistle, rain drenching the floor of the screened porch and blowing dirt and insect debris into the house. Wind bent the trees, and rain leaked into the house under windows and doors. The house seemed to be rocking on its foundations, drilled by the wind, and something on the front porch banged incessantly. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ I wrote in my notebook. We were all a little scared.

When the worst of it passed, the garden looked flattened and bedraggled. The birdhouse I had filled earlier was now six feet higher in the tree (and completely empty). The dog kennel was upside down. The swing seat on the front porch, unhooked earlier, had sailed away into the yard.

After a lull of about forty minutes, another band arrived (driving rain, mean wind), and then another more than an hour later. These weren’t as bad, although the second brought down the trellis, thick with vines, on the porch.

That night we had a shower at someone else’s house in town; he had water and intermittent electricity. On local TV we saw flooded gullies and roads choked with fallen trees. Sunday was hot and unbearable, and we drove back into town to sleep on the floor at the home of another friend of Rodney’s, John Ed Laborde.

The news after Rita seemed to focus on how major urban centres dodged the bullet (and other clichés), but this hurricane devastated southwestern Louisiana. Many small communities were destroyed. I read an AP report in The Advocate that the six Louisiana parishes and Texas counties most affected by Rita had higher poverty rates than the national average of 9.2 per cent, and none had median family incomes above the national median (of US$50,000).

A sadder statistic: even these people were better off than the 24 per cent of families living below the poverty line in New Orleans, where the median income in 2005 was only US$32,000.

Rita swept away and stillness returned, along with the infernal heat and another surge of never-say-die love bugs. Alexandria was thronged with even more evacuees. As well as the ones from Katrina who’d been stranded there for weeks, there were new arrivals from Lafayette and Lake Charles in southern Louisiana. Albertsons, the big supermarket there, was packed with people buying charcoal, water and snacks. (The ‘Beverage Boulevard’ aisle was particularly popular.) The gas station there had sold out of gas.

In Alec we visited our New Orleans landlords, Joy and Paul, who were fitting twelve people into a rented house, including six kids dressed in borrowed school uniforms. Joy’s uncle Lester Schmidt arrived; he was a colonel in the National Guard, usually based at Jackson Barracks in New Orleans East. The barracks were built in the 1830s and form one of the most impressive areas of antebellum construction in the country. Scenes from the movie Interview with the Vampire were filmed there. We’d had a party at Lester and Deanna’s white-columned house there the night before our wedding.

Lester was exhausted and desperate for a shower: there was no running water in the city. On the morning of Tuesday, 30 August, after the canal levee broke, a wall of water swept across the Ninth Ward and inundated Jackson Barracks. They could see it coming, Lester said. The building in which he was standing, watching the water approach, filled with six feet of water in minutes. Every building was flooded, and some were completely destroyed. The surge washed neighbourhood houses in, over the barracks’ perimeter fence.

Lester and his son Robbie took out a boat to rescue people in the neighbouring Ninth Ward, where the water was chest-high and slick with oil. He saw children falling off roofs, people desperate and dehydrated and in shock, calling for friends and family members who could not be found. They rescued ninety people in three days. Other guard members were out in boats as well, pulling people to safety, getting them to dry ground.

I’d heard a St Bernard sheriff on TV, saying that residents needed to understand they’d be coming home to nothing but their memories. The Ninth Ward and Chalmette, in neighbouring St Bernard Parish, would need to be entirely rebuilt, Lester said.

The highest part of the barracks, near the levee, had been drained, he told us, but there was a thick pungent sludge everywhere — oil and excrement and debris, dark and stinky. The whole place smelled of death.

‘It’s the worst thing to ever happen to New Orleans in my lifetime,’ Lester said.

The stories Lester told seemed a world away from Avoyelles Parish, where the leaves were starting to wither on the cotton bushes and the harvesting machines were moving into position. The summer was almost over; hurricane season was almost over. But still nobody could go home. And thousands of people had no home to go to.

After a long month of waiting, we heard we could get back into our neighbourhood to clean up. Then we heard that only business owners could get back in, but we drove home to New Orleans anyway. We crossed the Atchafalaya River to Simmesport and Morganza, past False River, through Baton Rouge, along the Bonnet Carré Spillway with its mud flats and stunted cypress trees, all the way into the city of New Orleans, where the once-white roof of the Superdome, visible from miles away, had been flayed by the storm.

We had to drive all the way downtown on the highway; our exit was closed. Then we illicitly doubled-back along Claiborne Avenue, hoping nobody from the National Guard would stop us. Before they evacuated, people had left cars along the neutral ground (the New Orleans way of saying median strip); a funeral home had parked its hearses there. All these vehicles had been underwater for weeks. Now their bleached carcasses sat at strange angles, along with children’s bikes that had floated out there, and tree branches, and toppled street signs. Windows were blown out of the businesses that lined the street; the wind had stripped away the sides of some buildings, leaving them open to the air, like dollhouses. I started to cry and Tom told me to stop. In our street we had to drive around a BMW with an open trunk and Mississippi plates. Maybe it had been stolen and abandoned before the water poured in.

Our house stank. The fridge, without power for a month, was a foul-mouthed incubator for insects, and had to be emptied, taped up and hauled out into the street with the help of Paul, our landlord.

Downstairs was a dark sea of sludge, everything up-ended by the tide. It smelled of brackish water, oil, sewage and rotting garbage. The whole city did, in fact. We wore masks and got through a box of disposable gloves. We spent two days carrying ruined things outside. A tall pyramid of sodden rubbish grew on the sidewalk. The only things we could salvage, like Tom’s metal Scout badges and some silver-plate used at our wedding, fitted into a small laundry basket. Everything else of economic and sentimental value — from bicycle to washing machine to spare bed to old letters to writing desk to shoes to ironing board to toolbox to Tom’s high-school yearbooks — was ruined.

We used the big bottles of water we’d brought with us to drink and wash. When night fell we drove out of the city to Metairie in Jefferson Parish, where there were functioning stop lights and no curfew, to stay with Paul and Joy: they were tired of life in Alexandria, and their house in Metairie had power and water. Near our place there was one place to eat, Slim Goodies on Magazine Street, where you could get a cheeseburger on a paper plate and a beer — cash only — and there was hand-sanitiser on the counter so you could clean your hands. We heard that Morning Call in Jefferson Parish was serving beignets and coffee, and that the big Target there was open, but not accepting food stamps. Down in the Quarter — now a military zone, but with electricity and a jovial atmosphere — we visited our friend Russell Desmond at Arcadian Books: he’d opened the shop because there was nothing else to do.

On Cucullu Street we had no electricity or phone line, and the water couldn’t be used for drinking or bathing. We saw rats and lots of stray dogs. National Guard vehicles rumbled by, because they were running the city now.

Back in Marksville the ad hoc shelter in the factory closed, and remaining evacuees were dispatched to the Riverfront Center in Alexandria, managed by the Red Cross. Hundreds of people slept in a communal room packed with cots and borrowed belongings. Most people there looked bored, or stunned, or simply exhausted. I’d felt anxious and irritable staying at Slowness. If I’d had to sleep every night in a huge room full of strangers, using communal bathrooms, told when I can eat, standing in line whenever I needed to get tampons or toilet paper, having to be checked in and out of the building by the National Guard, I’d be depressed as well.

The young Red Cross workers gave us a list of needs, and we did the trek to Target with our gift cards: a DVD player, a microwave oven, two basketballs, two footballs, two (Halloween-themed) play balls, two long jump-ropes, a pump, ten extension cords, four big packs of AA batteries, five towels and, with the left-over money, two big packs of Halloween candy. There were a lot of children in the shelter. The meal-time schedule, posted on a piece of cardboard, included a special early breakfast for kids going to school.

Katrina hit at the end of August. We couldn’t live in New Orleans until December. We moved back to live among the rubble and trailers, driving along streets still lined with junk and debris, passing military vehicles, or trucks laden with ladders and wood. Most traffic lights and street lights weren’t working. The streetcar track was a dumping ground, decorated with handmade signs announcing businesses that had opened or moved, or advertising mould removal, building services or electrical inspection.

We couldn’t move into our own place right away, because we had no electricity, gas or phone service. We camped out in the empty house of a colleague who was still out of the city. There were numerous ironies and irritations to keep us busy: receiving a disconnection notice from our phone company, MCI, because we hadn’t paid our home phone bill since the hurricane. We’d had no phone service since then, either, but I had to call MCI on my cellphone to tell them this, waiting more than half an hour on hold. MCI told us we’d have phone service again soon: specifically, February 28, 2006, at 8 pm.

Entergy had also sent a bill for estimated gas and electricity usage over the past three months. It was for sixty dollars, impressive when there was no gas or electricity in the entire neighbourhood. After more time spent on hold, I extorted a promise to reconnect our gas the same week, as long as I agreed to get to our house at 7 am and wait for someone to show up. He arrived at nine. I’ve never been so happy to see the burners on the stove light up.

‘Y’all haven’t had power since the storm?’ he asked. ‘All they need to do is flick that switch up there.’

With electricity back a day later, our house on Cucullu formed a little beacon of light in a trashed, still-empty neighbourhood. Paul arranged delivery of a new fridge, and we moved back in. During the day, workers gutted the innards of houses nearby, the neighbourhood noisy with the sounds of hammers, drills, and the crash of wood landing on piles in the street. At night, the only other lights shone from a couple of FEMA trailers parked outside. We held a defiant Christmas party for anyone back in town, and our porch light was the only thing visible in blocks. It felt as though we lived in the countryside, in the middle of a dark forest of empty houses.

Cartier, our mailman, came by every day.

‘I can’t believe you’re back at work,’ I said. He’d evacuated to Alabama and then Houston, but was back now staying with his sister across the river in Algiers.

‘What else am I gonna do?’ he said. His house was ruined, but he was rebuilding. He hoped to move back in next summer.

The guy from FEMA came by to confirm that we would not be receiving any compensation for our losses. Only landlords can buy flood insurance, and Paul didn’t have any.

The gas we’d been so happy to see was cut off again on Christmas Eve. Sarah was back now, living around the corner, and she had gas, so we walked there on Christmas Day, in our dressing gowns, to have a shower. Then we drove to our friends’ still-empty house to cook the chicken we’d bought with the last of our food stamps.

Despite the rash promises of MCI, we didn’t get a phone line again until the following April. The flooded BMW sat at its jaunty angle for almost six months, until someone had it towed. All the birds were gone, but rats were everywhere in our street, brazenly swarming our trash cans, until the contractor living next door laid poison. People drove the wrong way down one-way streets. People drove through red lights without stopping. No rules seemed to apply anymore. The city was a mess. Everyone was a mess.

City to be Abandoned. Now we were back in that abandoned place, the place that could not be lived in at all. Everyone had a story about the place where our homes could not house us: of driving into town where men in camouflage driving armoured vehicles were waiting to turn us away; of spending days dragging saturated belongings and stinking fridges out of mouldy houses; of waiting months to get gas, electricity, a phone line; of seeing street after street of emptiness, roofs smashed and cars toppled, weeds the only sign of life; of seeing migrant workers sleeping in a van on the corner or hanging around in a gas station waiting for work …

In CC’s coffee house on the corner of Magazine and Jefferson, people sat around telling stories. Like me, everyone had an evacuation narrative — how many hours it took to drive away, how long we had to spend away from home, how much we lost, how many feet of water. Sometimes I thought we should all wear badges, just to cut down on statistical competition. Mine would have read: ‘Five and a half feet, but we live in a raised house so it could have been worse.’

People who’d come back asked each other the same questions: Where did you live? Where did you go? How many feet? People stuck in trailers got extra sympathy, as did people who lived in Broadmoor, or Lakeside, or anywhere near one of the canals or levees improperly constructed and negligently maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers. When we weren’t reading about our plight in the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune — now devoted to reports on the slow-grinding cogs of FEMA and the Road Home recovery programme, interspersed with triumphant stories about LSU’s football team, pictures of debutantes, flood zone maps, and a scene-by-scene analysis of the TV show K-Ville — we were waiting for our turn to speak.

My husband went back to work at Maple Street Book Shop, where people swarmed to buy books about Katrina. There were dozens of choices: picture books, testimonies, anthologies. Their titles were a found poem’s worth of soap opera: Down in New Orleans, Missing New Orleans, Why New Orleans Matters, Heart Like Water, After the Deluge, Dispatches from the Edge, Life in the Wake, Eye of the Storm, Eyes of the Storm, 1 Dead in Attic, No Ordinary Heroes, The Ravaging Tide, Hurricane Season, Painting Katrina, Katrina: Ruin and Recovery, Katrinaville Chronicles, The Post-Katrina Portraits, Year Zero, Spoiled.

For a while, I thought that living at the centre of things, disaster-wise, was a great thing for a writer. This is what I said in a 2006 essay in the journal Landfall:

I’ve written about New Orleans before, but only from a distance. My challenge is to write about it now from inside the city, about the place it’s become and the place it’s becoming. La Nueva Orleans is shrill with stories. You hear them in every coffee bar, in every meeting, above the sounds of all the drilling and hammering in the street. Everyone has a story about the flood, their evacuation, their home, their neighbourhood. Tempers are running high, provoked by traffic and lawlessness, the political in-fighting, rumours and suspicions, corruption and bureaucracy. A writer would be a fool to leave such a place now.

But after a while I wondered if this was true. When people outside New Orleans asked me how things were going, how the city was doing, I didn’t know how to answer. ‘It’s OK,’ was my most typical answer. How to explain it all? Where to begin? Where to stop? I tended to say very little or way too much, talking until the glazed eyes of my regret-filled interrogators warned me it was time for the story to end. They weren’t interested in my inventories and histories and questions: they wanted a quick report, a prognosis. Buy the book, I should have told them — buy one of the books. Buy all of the books — and buy them from a local bookstore: they need your money.

Sarah Doerries told me she couldn’t write at all anymore. Before the storm, she showed me a stack of old engraved cards she’d come across in the drawer of a sewing table on sale at an antiques auction. Each card read:

YOUR STORY HAS TOUCHED MY HEART. NEVER BEFORE HAVE I MET ANYONE WITH MORE TROUBLES THAN YOU. PLEASE ACCEPT THIS TOKEN OF MY SINCEREST SYMPATHY.

‘Who knew those cards would be so useful?’ she said. There were too many stories. We were sick of them. We were sick of ourselves.

One story stayed with me, though, something I heard in Marksville when we were evacuated there. A man who was out of New Orleans on business when everyone had to leave the city couldn’t find his wife and kids. She’d taken the opportunity to leave him. Ten years later I sat down to write that story. Sarah had died, suddenly, at the age of forty-three, felled by a brain aneurysm while she was visiting friends in Strasbourg. We were living in the United Kingdom now; on regular trips back to New Orleans we always stayed with Sarah. Now she was gone, and the city, for me, was gone as well. She died four years ago, in 2013. I haven’t been back. I can’t imagine being in New Orleans without her.

I wrote ‘False River’ for her, and for Marksville, and for anyone who remembers the terrible sadness of that September when we were all lost, waiting to go home.

Acknowledgements

Early or alternate versions of the following works were first published in Five Dials (‘False River’); the New Zealand Herald (‘Premises’); Stories on the Four Winds: Ngā Hau e Whā (‘Three Princesses’); New Writing Dundee (‘La Rondine’); Katherine Mansfield and Psychology (‘Isn’t It’); Gutter, Ora Nui and Black Marks on the White Page (‘Great Long Story’); Ika (‘In Antwerp’); Metro (‘Billy the Kid’); Takahe (‘Women, Still Talking’); and The Journal of Urgent Writing (‘Inheritance’). Some sections of ‘City to be Abandoned’ appeared in different form in chapter nine of On Coming Home, a long-form essay published by Bridget Williams Books in 2015.

Photography credits: Matthew Hill, pp. 286–287; Tom Moody, pp. 52–53, 104, 126, 179, 219, 260–261; Paula Morris, pp. 1, 254 (Latvian house), 288; Kevin Rabalais, pp. 8–10, 34–35.

Many thanks to the residencies that made work on this book possible: the International Writers’ and Translators’ House in Ventspils, Latvia; the Brecht House in Svendborg, Denmark; the Passa Porta International House of Literature and Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium. For additional funding support, thanks to the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia; the Hoover Presidential Library Association; and the Faculty of Arts and School of Humanities at the University of Auckland.

For reading, fact-checking, insights and excellent company, many thanks to Jennifer Levasseur, Kevin Rabalais, Rodney Rabalais, Ieva Balode, Elisabeth Bekers, Kirsten Skou, Lone Kristensen, Deborah Keyser, and Selina Tusitala Marsh. I’m indebted to the patience and support of Harriet Allan and Jenny Topham of Penguin Random House, and to the good sense of my editor, Anna Hodge. This book is dedicated to my dear siblings, Lynn-Elisabeth Hill and Stephen Morris, and would not have been possible without the love, scrutiny and wise words of Tom Moody.

Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Whatua) was born in Auckland. Her first novel, Queen of Beauty (2002), won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book of Fiction at the 2003 Montana Book Awards. She has published three other novels, Hibiscus Coast (2005), Trendy But Casual (2007) and Rangatira (2011), the winner of the Fiction Awards at the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and the Nga Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards. Her other books include the story collection Forbidden Cities (2008), Hene and the Burning Harbour (Puffin 2013) and four young adult novels published in the United States. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (2009). Paula teaches at the University of Auckland and is the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.

“An extraordinary literary achievement and probably the best of recent New Zealand historical novels.”

— Nicholas Reid, New Zealand Books on Rangatira

“One of the best short story collections written by a New Zealander in years … These stories are fresh, engaging, and tinged with all those raw emotions that make for excellent fiction.”

— New Zealand Herald on Forbidden Cities

“Fresh, witty and delectably readable … Trendy But Casual … deserves to be the talk of the season.”

— Murray Bramwell, New Zealand Books

“Not only is Morris a seriously good writer — the tone doesn’t jar, the characters are satisfyingly complex, and there is an interesting reflection of the way we are now — she can also deliver entertainment. Like Dickens, she can tell a great story but also “catch” the world we live in, with all its complications and ambiguities.”

— Lydia Wevers, New Zealand Listener on Hibiscus Coast

“A stunning debut novel … Queen of Beauty had me mesmerised from the first words … a masterful work.”

— Penelope Bieder, New Zealand Herald

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Penguin is an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2017

Text and photography © Paula Morris, 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Extract on p.151 copyright © 1970 Michael Ondaatje.

Reproduced by permission of Michael Ondaatje.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

ISBN 978-0-14-377164-7

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