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Chapter One
LUX WAS COMING. Already she was somewhere in the wide expanse of London. My awareness of her presence unsettled me vaguely. Sometimes, before she flew in to visit, I dreamed strange dreams. Like a breeze, she stirred up things.
Midafternoon, I rode the Northern Line home to meet her and stared at the people scrunched on the surrounding banks of seats. Across the aisle, a man in aviator shades sat sketching in a notebook--I wondered if wearing dark glasses in the underground made the world easier to draw. Another man, sweating profusely, clutched a tabloid paper without reading it. Beside him, a woman in a golden sari clamped two polythene bags of groceries between her feet. Out of curiosity, I tried to imagine how each would look transformed by anger. How would the soft, relaxed line of the first man's lips contort, or the sad-eyed desolation of the second man's face, or the woman's dreamy distraction? I studied the first man's hands, dark fingers grasping a pencil, the thick wales of ruddy skin over the other man's knuckles. The woman's fingers were laced and folded over the pleats of cloth in her lap. I wondered what violence each was capable of and what was the worst act of violence they had committed in their lives so far. Had any of them ever punched someone, or drawn blood? If so, how did they explain their actions to themselves?
And, as often when traveling through London by bus or train or underground, I tried out my own version of the ark question--the ethics dilemma that high-school teachers and university philosophy professors liked to confront us with. You are in a lifeboat with a group of people but there is not enough food or water for everyone. Will you split what little there is or toss some survivors overboard? Who will stay and who will go? If I were stranded in a boat with these people--or if a bomb exploded on the train right now --who would prove to be the most resourceful, the least likely to panic? What risks would any one of them be prepared to take?
Lux had called me two days before at work. I was in the back room of the Centre for Contemporary War Studies when Moira Ikagoro, who runs the office, answering the phone and monitoring arrivals, put the call through.
"Arcadia?" Lux said.
My heart gave a little start. Part pleasure, part-- "Hello, you." I touched my free hand to one of my hair combs. "Where are you?" Because, with my sister Lux, you never knew.
"In Toronto."
"Not in London."
"Not yet."
"But you'll be here tomorrow."
"Almost bingo," Lux said delightedly. "Day after tomorrow."
"Is this business, or--"
"Well, we're shooting something, and then we're flying on to Johannesburg to do some more shooting. You know, mostly music, and how things have changed for musicians since--kind of a post-election thing. But of course I want to see you."
Lux made a habit of sudden annunciation. Sometimes I'd pick up the phone and she would be ringing me from Ankara or Moscow to tell me that she'd be stopping off in London the next day; or she'd be just about to board her plane at Pearson airport in Toronto; or she was in the air, in a 767, four hours away.
"Do you need somewhere to stay?"
"No, we're staying at that same place near Piccadilly as last time. A bit grungy, but it's fine."
"So do you want to make plans now or just ring me when you get in?"
"I'll call you when I get in," she said. "I'll ring ."
That night, I dreamed in green: a flurry of leaves, a green body on the ground, a girl in a green dress climbing a mountain of steps toward a plane. I woke up sweating.
Arcadia. Lux. What sort of people would give their daughters names like these?
My father, Benedict Hearne, was the one principally responsible. A nuclear engineer, he believed that naming children was not something you undertook lightly--that names should mean something, herald something, have a certain resonance. My mother has told me how, before I was born, he would come bursting through the door of their tiny Ottawa apartment, snow in his dark hair and nestled in the tweed of his winter coat, and shout out possible names. Bliss. Adam, if it was a boy. Atom. Or Molecule. My mother had argued against my name, on the grounds that I was bound to be teased, but my father had argued back that children will be teased no matter what their names are, no matter how common or peculiar, the ingenuity of childhood will always think up something, and I tend to agree with him.
His passion convinced her--the light in his face, the fervor stretched tight beneath his skin. He would lean beside her at the kitchen counter, or kneel by her rocking chair, pressing his cheek to the sleeve of her butter-yellow cardigan, dreaming a landscape for her. At thirty, he was a year younger than I am now. He'd rub her fingers and ankles, swollen in the late stages of pregnancy, and pull loose the barrette holding back the nearly black, growing-out bob of her hair. A blue fluorescent strip light burned above their heads. A north wind hissed in the pine tree outside the window. I don't believe he imagined idyllic fields and rolling hills dotted with sheep, no quaint pastoral landscape, but giant trees and brilliant light and bare knees of granite poking up through the earth. If it's a girl , he whispered to my mother, Anne, we'll call her Arcadia .
I started up from my desk as the front gate clanged shut and Lux strode through the front garden. She galloped down the outside steps that led to my basement flat (the garden flat, for in the rear there is a tiny plot of grass surrounded by flower beds). In one hand she swung a newspaper-wrapped bouquet, her black leather knapsack jouncing from her shoulders.
When I opened the door, she flung herself into my arms. "I'm knackered," she said, grinning at the English word. "It's good to see you."
"You, too," I said, and it was--to feel, as we kissed, the pressure of her arms, inhale her secondhand-smoke-and-cinnamon-chewing-gum aroma. There was an odd relief in this. She handed me the bouquet--sky-blue delphiniums. "Mmm. Thanks. Everything all right? You're early." Which Lux almost never was.
She nodded. "We were actually shooting in Camden--not very far away at all--I didn't realize before. This band called Fishwater. It's a pun on this Brazilian dish. Feijoada? Someone told me. The lead singer's Brazilian and about seven feet tall--he's been on the cover of some of the music magazines lately, but I don't suppose you've seen him."
She hosted a world music show called Mundo , produced in Toronto but aired on various music TV channels around the globe. Sometimes, late at night, I would curl up in my study and watch her. Lux Hearne in Havana, tracking down Cuban punk bands; Lux Hearne in Nairobi swinging to the rhythms of Swahili funk.
Just as strange was the instant's disjunction I felt now between Lux in person and on-screen. Live, she was smaller, slighter, as is true of most people who appear on TV, though her features remained forceful--dark eyebrows, wide mouth--and there was no change in the husky, buoyant timbre of her voice.
She dropped her knapsack to the floor. "How's the book?" she asked.
"Fine," I said. "Coming along."
I knew Lux's interest was largely polite. She did not care, on the whole, to talk about the work I did, not my job at the Centre, not my study of military intervention as a defining feature of late-twentieth-century war. Even now, both she and my mother hoped (it seemed to me) that war studies was something I would outgrow or pass through. Nor did they want to delve too deeply into why I did it, for this would mean invoking a past that none of us really wanted to discuss. At least my father did not instantly shy away from the subject of my work, which I interpreted as a sign, if tacit, of some sort of respect.
I shut down the computer, watching the screen go blank with an audible ping.
When I turned, Lux had picked up her knapsack. Her white T-shirt hung loosely beneath the hollow of her throat. Her dark hair fell about her face in a mop of choppy curls. In the shell-like ridge of her right ear gleamed a row of tiny silver rings and in the skin just above her left nostril a fleck of ruby glittered.
"That's new," I said. Since I'd last seen her, eight months before.
"Like it?"
"Yeah, I like it. I do. Are you thirsty? Fancy something to drink?"
"Sure."
"Sparkling water, orange juice--or shall I open a bottle of wine?"
The May weather was warm and muggy; there had been days in a row of droughtlike heat. "Wine later," Lux said. Behind me, the heels of her red cowboy boots clumped down the hall. "But just some water for now." When I glanced back, I caught her peering, as she passed, into my bedroom.
"Mmm," she said. "Everything's so summery here. It was raining in Toronto."
In the kitchen, I laid the delphiniums on the counter and hoisted the electric fan onto the table. From the fridge I took a bottle of water, and poured some into a glass for Lux.
In earlier days, when Lux was still a deejay, she would stay with me when she came to London, sleeping on a foldout cot in the study. The first few times she came, I'd even gone out to Heathrow to meet her and together we'd ridden the underground back into town.
"How're Mum and Dad?"
I'd last seen my parents a little over a year before, in Amsterdam. My father had flown to Brussels for a conference on nuclear-waste disposal, my mother with him. I'd suggested meeting up in Amsterdam and had taken the hydrofoil across the Channel. This was how we saw each other now, in neutral territory. Singly, and once together, they'd come through London, though I preferred elsewhere. In Amsterdam we'd stayed at the same small hotel, eaten an Indonesian ristafel , gone to the Rijksmuseum. We spoke about their house in Toronto. We did not speak--had barely spoken over the years--about why I'd left the city. We talked about my father's work, but not necessarily, or not as often, about the implications of his line of work.
Each time I saw them there were a few more flecks of silver in their dark hair, but they were still slim and handsome people who evoked the glances of strangers as they walked, my father's arm slung round the collar of my mother's sky-blue coat, her hand raised to touch his.
"They're okay," Lux said. "I have a letter for you. And some photos. Dad's cut back a lot. He's doing some safety-related consulting, but not a whole lot--he was in the States recently and in Ottawa for some commission on underground storage of spent fuel rods. And Mum, she's all right. She's taking canoeing lessons."
"Canoeing lessons?"
She gulped from her glass. "At a club. On the lake. Sometimes she takes the dog out. She goes, you know, around Ashbridge's Bay? Or sometimes up the Don River, or along Cherry Beach and around the island."
I tried to imagine my mother in a canoe--a canoe!--nosing past scrub willows, the jetsam of urban beaches, around the derelict harbor lands. What was she looking for?
"I mean, she's fine," Lux said, and gave me a look, as if to add, who are you--you who aren't there--to judge her?
Judge either of them.
I pulled out a chair and sat down across from Lux. A breeze blew in the open window from the garden and drifted against my skin. Nudging the heel straps free with my toes, I let my sandals drop to the floor. As Lux pushed up the sleeves of her T-shirt, the golden late-afternoon sun caught the round curve of her shoulders, lighting the little red heart tattooed just below her right one. "How's Haydee?" I asked.
Haydee, Lux's girlfriend, danced with a contemporary company and traveled as much as Lux did. I'd gone to see her perform when they'd last come through London, and, because Lux had asked me to, had gone backstage to meet her. Onstage Haydee flung herself through the air like a Molotov cocktail, fearless, topped with a head of raggedy, bleached-blonde hair. In person she was muscular but tiny, narrow eyed and feral. I thought she seemed nervous around me or silently judgmental.
Lux set down her water glass and rubbed her golden arms. "Haydee's great," she said.
Lux pulled her address book out of her knapsack and asked if she could make a phone call.
"Of course," I said, and listened as, red boots clacking, she made her way back down the hall toward my study.
Often, when Lux comes to visit--whether she stays with me or not--she gives out my number, and for weeks afterward there will be calls from people asking for Lux Hearne. Nasal London voices, voices with all manner of accents. Friends and what I assume to be various music-industry acquaintances. She seems to possess the lucky ability of making herself at home wherever she is.
At the kitchen sink, I rinsed the stems of the delphiniums, sliced off the ends with a knife, set the long stalks in a glass vase. Lux's voice drifted down the hall. From the fridge, I took out a bottle of New Zealand chardonnay, uncorked it, and, setting two glasses on the counter, filled them. Wineglass in hand, I unlocked the back door.
Heat from the sun-drenched flagstones rose through my bare feet. Some lie at crooked and tipsy angles, the cement foundation beneath them cracking, but at the flattest spot sits a weather-beaten wicker chair. I stepped out onto the grass beyond, testing the ground beneath for parchedness.
My idyll, I thought. My tiny paradise. I'd dreamed, when I first came to London, of living in a flat with a garden.
We spread a white sheet on my patch of grass and ate on that: cold chicken with rosemary, French bean vinaigrette. In the flower beds, yellow nasturtiums bloomed and the first rosebuds puckered like lips. A stray cat eyed us from the shrubbery until Lux threw it a scrap of chicken.
After we'd eaten we lay side by side on the sheet, staring up at the purpling sky, our legs in the shadow of the dwarf apple tree, our feet nearly touching the brick wall at the bottom of the garden. Lux's presence rippled just beyond my skin, and I was aware of the tug of genetic proximity, the intimacy of sharing the knobbly shape of our toes and the placement of a mole on our necks and the curve of our fingernails, a tug that, though not sexual, was erotic.
The scent of honeysuckle wafted over us.
"Cay," Lux said. Above the dimming rooftops and multihued windows, the sky had turned to plum. "I think you should come back."
I did not immediately say anything in response. It had been ten years--ten years almost exactly. There was nothing, really, that needed to be said. When I'd left, I'd sworn to myself that I would never go back.
"I'm not asking as anyone's go-between," Lux went on. "No one told me to ask you--although of course they want you to. It's just me asking--saying, I think you should come back."
"I don't really see the need." I laid one arm across my forehead. "You come here and last year I saw them in Amsterdam. And Dad had a stopover at Gatwick the year before that."
"It's not the same."
"I'm busy," I said. "We all are. But I make the time."
"There's no reason to think you'd run into them." She wasn't talking about our parents this time. "Cay, it isn't a good enough reason anymore. Maybe in the beginning, but not now. I live there and I've never run into them. Ten years ago is history."
"It is history," I said, "but that doesn't mean I want to go back, or need to."
"Come home," Lux said.
"Lux, not right at the moment."
Another sigh gusted out of her. "Cay--" A phone rang through someone's open window, a sharp brring, brring , and at the sound Lux sat up hurriedly. "Is that yours?"
"No," I said, turning on my side toward her.
"I left your number," she said. "There's someone I'm trying to get hold of."
Copyright © 2000 Catherine Bush. All rights reserved.
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