Samantha Harvey - Dear Thief

When I look back on our years of friendship it seems to me that you are a person who, with fair consistency, has had more interest in others’ happiness than your own, though you had volatile ways of showing it.

But what am I saying? Can I really mean this? Sometimes you peer at me through the dark as I write and the familiarity of your face forces my hand into words that are kinder than they are truthful. To rephrase: you did not go out of your way to make another person happy, but you did not go out of your way to make them unhappy, either. You never went out of your way. It isn’t even that you are a selfish person — in fact isn’t the opposite true, that you are fundamentally selfless? By which I mean somebody who lies low like a card in a pack, until the cards are dealt. Sometimes her appearance in the hand will be good news, sometimes bad, but she herself is neither. She is just offered up, and played or not.

I am thinking now of the time you were staying with us, two or three months after we got back from the pearl-fishing trip I told you about. Ruth came to visit for a day and night — to visit Nicolas, that is, because I hardly knew her then. She was one of his friends originally, from childhood, and I find it easy to forget this fact now that we have our own decades of friendship between us. You must have been staying with us for three weeks or more and in my memory these were happy times. It was a rogue, hot May day and we were all in the garden, sitting around the old wrought-iron table and chairs that we inherited in the move.

I am sure at first you didn’t want to be there for Ruth’s visit, but obeyed when we insisted you stay — and I mean obeyed, because you sat with all the subservience of a tethered dog. But I could see that you liked Ruth instantly, and I knew why. She is capable and one of life’s doers — dark, large, deep-voiced, lovely; she is lovely still. She can wear big brash jewellery with finesse and she will never ask how you feel, or ask you to account for yourself. Not a human being but a human doing , Nicolas used to call her. In the weeks prior to that, since your arrival, you had deflected all my questions. Where have you been? What are your plans? Have you been happy? You had said only, ‘None of it matters, all you need to do is tell me when you want me to leave.’ (To which I replied, ‘I never want you to leave.’ I repeated it so many times, was so relieved to have your company in the loneliness of motherhood, that you did my bidding and stayed; have I only myself to blame?) But my point is that Ruth was exactly the kind of person who would remove any burden of explanation or justification and simply accept your existence in the garden as a fact amongst any number of other facts that were neither here nor there to her.

When you discovered that she could sing you came to life; there was no mistaking the moment you became interested in something — the image I have is of accelerated footage of a fern opening, where something inward becomes outward and unstooped and ready. I remember that she sang the Solemn Vespers so strikingly that the neighbour came to watch, and we were never to forget it because that neighbour, Christina, didn’t again manage to have a conversation with us without mentioning it. Ruth’s voice wasn’t trained, but it was churchy, rich and capable of almost anything. Each time she got to the end of a song you would pick whatever flower or weed was growing in the bed next to you and toss it towards her with a ‘Brava!’, an ‘Encore!’ You went to her and put your fingertips on her throat to feel her vocal cords vibrate while she sang, and when she finished you did something that I imagine must have been extraordinary to her at the time, you kissed her on the lips. She mentioned it once recently and I pretended I couldn’t remember the occasion at all.

I think we all went to the table then and poured drinks. Having witnessed that kiss, Nicolas sat back, impressed and threatened. There: that one-sided smile I liked so much, which was the containment of a pleasure that compressed not quite invisibly in his mid-chest, and rose far enough to twitch his Adam’s apple as a horse-flank twitches under a fly. Meanwhile he leant back a touch more and linked his hands in his lap so that his masculinity could defend itself. He did this combination of half smile and retreat whenever he saw something in womankind he liked and couldn’t control, and because he did it only with respect to women and nothing else it made me see in him, by turn, something I liked and could not control. He then said, more assertively than usual, ‘You sing, Butterfly.’

‘I can’t sing, I’m flat as a pancake.’

‘That can be remedied.’

‘It can?’

‘Of course.’

‘People can be divided into two categories,’ you said. ‘Those who think everything is fixable and those who think everything is breakable. You are the former and I’m the latter.’

Nicolas smiled; I had the impression that he was satisfied to have been noticed and judged by you, regardless of the judgement.

‘Let’s try,’ he said.

‘Try to fix me?’

‘Come on,’ he shrugged. ‘It can’t hurt.’

To my surprise you stood. ‘Very well, I’m yours.’

The two of you had coexisted politely those previous weeks with little to say to one another, and with a paranoid awareness of the other’s space. I do clearly remember that phase of courteous sidestepping because I remember being touched by it — how, with me, you were vivid and quick and caustic, and yet how with Nicolas you and he both became awkward. You in particular seemed to have all the confidence pulled from you: you bent your head more, which made you long-necked and grebelike and apparently meek; you were always glancing up from the floor. You were not coquettish, I wouldn’t want to suggest that any of this was planned on your part. I think you were genuinely pinned by a social ineptness I’ve seen in you before, with the others at school, say. Yet you stood, and said — not just to Nicolas, but to Ruth—‘I’m yours’ and you waited without mockery for them to make of you what you knew couldn’t be made.

They straightened you. Ruth put her fingertips on your shoulders. ‘Draw them back,’ she said, and then, ‘More.’ She tucked her fingertips lightly under your chin and asked you to look to the horizon. She asked you to breathe with her. ‘You can’t sing well if you can’t breathe well,’ she told you.

‘I can’t sing well regardless,’ you said, but you were not frustrated or impatient. Nicolas lifted your arms and let them drop, uncurled your fingers from their fists. He put one of the plucked flowers between your teeth, so you could not protest. I remember that Teddy found this funny and let out his thrilled cackle, and I see you standing there winking at him, thin and upright in the cut-off shorts we had made from my old jeans because the weather had turned hot. Long, pale legs patterned at the back with chair swirls, toes clutching at the grass. You had even forsaken your shawl and were wearing a long-sleeved cheesecloth shirt. Ruth sang a note and asked you to match it; yours was flat. At the next attempt it was a semi-tone higher, but still flat. There would be a return to breathing and a general re-elevating of your posture — chin up, shoulders back, chest open — as though this would rally the note from a higher place.

I knew, as did you, that it wouldn’t. We had sung together enough in the past to know that the cause was hopeless, and hopeless because you didn’t care to be in tune; just as you had said, you were not a person who believed things could or even should be fixed. They were as they were. But how could Nicolas or Ruth know this about you? To them, you were a painting that needed restoring, which implies that they thought you had come from a perfect state of harmony and could go back to it. Foolish assumption, this one we make about beauty, to assume that it must have come from perfection. Sometimes, to use your word, it’s the result of pure randomised chancery, some happy irreversible spillage.