Diamond Dust Read online

  Of course Polly had been introduced to Art as an infant. Of course the local school provided her—indiscriminately, as it did all children—with paint and clay and crayons, and she had made, as all children make, representations of her home and family—triangular-shaped father and mother holding hands, box-shaped brother in outsized shorts standing apart—as well as of daisies in a vase, and even a lopsided teacup or two, each of them intensely satisfying for a day or two, then desperately unsatisfying thereafter.

  But what Miss Abigail at the camp introduced her to was Real Art: in her whispery, bubbly, disquieting voice she had urged them to 'paint your dreams—show me what you dreamed last night'. She had spaced the words, leaving great gaps for them to fill, and then sighed a replete sigh, as one might when overcome by swirls of incense or opium, when Polly presented a particularly lurid or mysterious painting—headless, shrouded figures in shades of purple appearing on the surface of a lake with large, many-pointed stars shining down on them out of a streaky sky, or purple pigeons swooping down out of a pink sky to light upon lilac roofs (Polly was very attached to the colour purple, and perhaps it was only a coincidence but that was the colour that dominated Miss Abigail's tie-dyed shifts too). For the sake of that narrowing of green cat's eyes, that slow exhalation of breath that spoke such volumes, and simply for the sake of staying close to that enchantingly incense-scented young woman with her flowing red hair and flowing purple dresses, Polly dedicated the summer to paint, letting others canoe, shoot arrows, roast marshmallows or run around working up a sweat like the damned and the demented.

  She came home reluctantly, dazed into an uncharacteristic silence, with her paintings rolled up into an impressively long roll—Miss Abigail had insisted she always use large sheets of thick paper for her art. The family had been faintly surprised by what she spread out on the dining table for them; they turned to her with quizzical looks and remarks like 'Very nice, dear,' and 'Now what is that supposed to be?' making her roll them up again in offended exasperation, and carry them up to the attic where she spread them out along with all her painting equipment. She was determined to find herself a tie-dyed skirt, wear her hair loose, not in tight painful pigtails any more, and spend the rest of the summer drawing long strokes of purple and lilac paint across sheets of paper, humming the melancholy tunes Miss Abigail had hummed at the camp. 'And then my lover,' she moaned under her breath, 'left me a-lone...'

  Unfortunately it was very, very hot under the attic roof, and in that thrumming heat of late August she would find her head spinning after a while. So much so that she was compelled to stretch out on a sheet of canvas and fall into a kind of stupor, struggling to keep her eyes open. Spiders descended from the rafters and spun their wavering webs, or dangled like aerial acrobats over her head. Seeing one unroll its lifeline and drop, cautiously and investigatively, closer and closer to the nest of her hair, she swatted at it, and upset a mug of water over a painting of a volcano spewing blood-red and orange paint. The water and paint seeped through several layers of paper, staining not only one but several other paintings as well.

  That was when she descended the stairs, arms crossed over her chest, chin sunk, looking down at her bare feet, oppressed by the burden of being an artist. 'What's the matter, Polly?' her mother asked, 'got a headache?' and her brother jumped out from behind a door, with a 'Yar-boo!' that made her drop her arms, jerk up her head, then stick out her tongue and scream 'You—pig!' or was it, her mother wondered, aghast, 'You— pigs?'

  It was then that the maple's drooping August skirts and the rotting rubber tyre hanging from its branch became the only option for her during, the remaining days of summer. It was then that she discovered she could sail through the green leaves and the yellow air and be the artist without having to go through the sticky manoeuvres required by actual painting. Truth be told, she had no distinct memory of any of Miss Abigail's paintings, only of her loose hair, the long skirts, the whispering voice. She became convinced that art was not so much a matter of painting as of being an artist. Her eyes blurred, seeing not the dusty leaves or the scolding squirrels, the grass with its sandy or weedy patches giving it an undesirable patchwork effect, or her brother's face with its ginger freckles leering at her through the bean vines that sagged off the garage roof, but great watery sunsets, wild frenzies of blossoming plants, suns colliding with stars, wisps of carelessly cavorting hair, and 'Paint what-e-ever you drream,' she sang to herself, stubbing one toe into the dirt and making the tyre swing upwards.

  Unfortunately, the old heavy circle of ridged rubber could not be made to swoop upwards. At best, it dangled in its incurably pedestrian way, refusing to. lift her into the higher realms where she wished to go. Those unpredictable roseate dreams were cruelly limited, encroached upon by the undeniable reality of the house, yard, suburb—enemies, all, of Art.

  Although the suburb was as neat and trim as a picture (a childish picture, not the kind Polly had embarked on with Miss Abigail to inspire her)—white frame houses with black or green trim, standing in meticulously mowed lawns, neatly raked driveways, garages that housed two cars and had roll-up metal doors—there were those necessary but unsightly bits and pieces, too, that owners had managed to conceal with varying degrees of success: garbage cans with lids weighed down with rocks to prevent raccoons from tipping them over and spilling the rotting contents, washing lines hung not only with pretty skirts and coloured shirts but also with more unsightly items of apparel, and stacks of wood that had not been touched for many seasons and were slowly rotting where they stood. There was even an occasional sick tree begging for a visit from a tree doctor by dramatically holding up one blighted arm or exposing a wounded flank.

  One of the most unsightly bits of the neighbourhood stood, shamefully, in their own yard, in the corner where the driveway curved away from the house and disappeared behind the lilac bushes that no one ever trimmed, so that it really was not visible to anyone else but to them, and then only if they happened to go past the garage and around the lilacs to the end of the drive. Normally it was only their father who went there, in winter when he was obliged by contract to ¿lear the driveway of snow, because at the end of the drive stood a two-roomed wooden cabin with a condemned porch and a sagging roof that had been let out to their tenant, Miss Mabel Dodd.

  Of course the tenant herself was visible, when she drove off to work in the gauzy grey steam of early morning, in her beaten-up old maroon Dodge with the grey paint showing through and flaking off as it creaked past the lilacs, fell into and lifted itself out of the deep ruts outside their kitchen window, scraped by the low-hanging branches of a thicket of lugubrious larch and spruce trees, and then cautiously edged onto Route 2, pointing towards Amherst. It was usually already dark when she made her way back at the end of the day, the headlights of the Dodge dragging through the leaves and grasses, leaving behind shadows. The cabin itself could not be seen from the house. The tenant spoke to none of them unless absolutely necessary and greetings were not: the mother had discovered that when she tried to greet her on their occasional, inevitable meetings in the driveway and there would be no reply. The father claimed he had actually had some conversations with Miss Dodd regarding particularly heavy snowfalls and problems with heating, but the children had not witnessed them and suspected him of imagining a relationship that did not exist, even so minimally. He would do that, pretend to be sociable when he was not.

  When she first took up occupancy, the children fantasised about her, made up stories about her secret life as a witch. The first Hallowe'en, they had even gone around wrapped in bedsheets and with baskets on their heads, to chant 'Trick-or-treat?' under her windows. She had simply not answered the door. The children persisted: the car stood outside, after all. They pressed their ears to the front door, listening for a sound—and heard creaks, cracks. They peered through the grimy windows to see if they could spy a shadow or a light, and Polly, peering through a slit in the sheet of grey plastic that hung over the window, thought sh
e did see something pale, wedged into a tall-backed chair in the corner; it was certainly not a light. It had the substance of flesh, but without any variation, entirely pallid from top to toe—or at least as much of it as Polly could see. And a faint swirl of smoke wound around it, slowly floating in the dark. When the other children began to push at Polly and ask, 'Can you see? Can you see anything?' she turned and elbowed past them, then leapt off the porch, swearing, 'It's a ghost!' All of them echoed, 'It's — a — ghost!' and Polly could not explain that the ghost had not been light and afloat as it should have been, but solid and fleshy and dull.

  It was easy to forget that Miss Dodd lived there at all. For long stretches, they did forget. They built themselves a tree house one summer and sat on its uneven planks, dangling their legs and looking out over the sagging, crumbling roof of shingles that seemed a natural outgrowth of the earth. It was a long time since the walls had been painted and it was impossible to tell what colour they had been. Now they were the colour of dried blood, a boring brown. There was nothing that could be called a garden or a yard around it; in fact, it was a wilderness of ivy and scrub and some peculiarly vigorous ferns.

  Polly was still humming 'Pa-aint just what you-u dre-eam -' when she slipped out of the rubber tyre and slouched across the grass to where the jungle spread in order to examine those ferns; her painter's eye saw some promise in their furled and unfurled shapes and tightly wound, or else exuberantly unwound, clusters. There was something serpentine about them, something you might come across in a dream. She was barefoot, and cautious, as if she expected them to hiss and sway, and when she heard sounds behind her, she snapped her head around to look. But it was only Tom following, lifting up his knees and plonking down his feet like an intrepid explorer, a switch held in his fist in readiness.

  Since the tenant was always out at that time of day, they could explore at leisure, and what they found surprised them: at the bottom of the mouldering backstairs that ended in a tumble of rhododendrons were a stone head, bald, blind, rising out of the ivy, its shoulders submerged in all the dark groundcover, and other bits of statuary—petrified hands and limbs pushing out of the soft mould like gravestones, or lying scattered under the branches of the spruce trees. They might have been the remains of a battle, or else ploughed up out of a graveyard.

  Polly and Tom said nothing to each other, but breathed hard and noisily as they turned over and kicked at various bits of stone and clay and plaster—mostly human shapes, thick and clumsy, and some abstract ones that could not be called squares or circles or anything at all, just contortions, blunted ones. There was something disquieting about these ugly, abandoned pieces that appeared to have been flung out of the windows of the cabin, only one, the bald head, evidently planted. The children, unnerved, were silent, as if they had walked into an invisible spiderweb in a forest or come upon bones in the wilds.

  Polly thought of the yellow stack of National Geographic magazines piled up beside the sofa in the den, with photographs of steaming jungles, vast ruins, ancient idols tumbled from their pedestals and lying prone on the forest floor. She caught a wisp of her hair between her teeth and chewed on it. 'Miss Abigail at the camp was a sculptress,' she said. 'She made a ballerina out of plaster. She said she'd help me if I wanted to try. It was real pretty. Not like this stuff—' and she kicked at it, but not hard, being barefoot.

  'But that ole Miss Dodd didn't make this stuff, did she?' Tom said, striking out with his switch at a flattened nose. 'Bet she got it from somewhere—some witch doctor, maybe. Maybe she does voodoo,' he growled; he'd looked through the National Geographies too.

  'Voo-doo!' Polly echoed him, in an even deeper voice. They began making spitting sounds of condemnation. There was an unpleasant smell about the place too. As they came around the back of the cabin, they saw the cause of it: under the kitchen window lay a pile of refuse, household garbage, kitchen waste, simply tossed out and lying in a heap, some brown, some black, some wet, some solid.

  'Ugh! Did you see that?'

  'Gross!'

  'Diss-gust-ing!'

  'We better tell Dad!'

  That evening they did and he allowed some wrinkles to work their way through his forehead, but only said, 'Guess the raccoons'll eat it up,' and went back to staring at the TV screen in the den: a sign he did not mean to get up and get involved.

  For a while their mother did her best to make him do something about it. 'Think of the flies,' she urged. 'It's a health hazard.'

  'Christ,' he said, turning red—he'd been looking forward all week to this match. 'I've put two garbage cans outside her door—what "more am I supposed to do? Clean her yard for her? With the rent she's paying us, it's not worth it.' The ball game was coming to an end in a frenzy of waving flags and blowing whistles. Frustrated, he got up. 'And that cabin isn't worth more than the rent she's paying—we're lucky she wants it,' he added. That was that, he implied, switching off the television.

  But their mother would not let it drop: the thought of flies, and disease, was something she would not tolerate in her own backyard. Finally she brought out an unopened box of garbage bags and handed them to him, ordering him to take them across to her. 'If she won't come out, leave them on her porch. She'll have to get the message.'

  He went off grumbling and they waited for him to come back and report. He returned with a hurried gait, his head lowered, and still clutching the garbage bags.

  'Didn't you give them to her? She's there—her car's there—I saw it,' began the mother, but he flung them onto the table, muttering something about, 'You can't just go bursting in on people like that,' and disappeared into the den.

  'What do you mean?' the mother demanded, following him. She stood in the doorway, questioningly. The children could not see him, he had sunk onto the sofa, and it was difficult to hear what he said since he had switched on the television again, but they were almost certain—later, when they discussed it, they found their certainties matched—that he'd said, 'What was I supposed to do? She was there, she opened the door—nekkid as the day that she was born. Stark nekkid. Not a stitch. What was I to do—hand over the garbage bags for her to dress in?' The mother quickly shut the door to the den. Polly and Tom stared at each other till sputters of laughter began to erupt from them. Tom's sputters turned to spit. Then Polly's did. They dribbled their laughter till it ran.

  By what had to be an odd coincidence, the next Sunday morning they looked up from their breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup, and saw the maroon Dodge come bumping slowly over the ruts past their kitchen window, then turn around the lilacs and disappear: their tenant had already been out that sleepy summer Sunday morning and was already back, this time bringing with her a visitor. She had never been known to have a visitor before. That he was a black youth whose upright, only slightly inclined head they had briefly glimpsed was equally extraordinary—in their neighbourhood.

  After breakfast, the children edged out into the backyard before they could be caught up in any busy activity their parents might think up for them. They made for the maple tree and took turns at swinging in the tyre seat, then climbed into the branches to see if anything remained of their tree house. That was what they told each other—'D'you think there's anything left of it?' 'Can't see.' 'Let's go look.'

  There was still the platform although the roof and walls had blown down in the previous winter's storms and snowfalls, and from it they could look across the yard and over the lilacs to/the cabin. What they saw there was the black youth, in oversized jeans and a military-looking shirt hanging out below his hips, wearing a baseball cap turned backwards, sweeping up the porch with a broom, then coming down the rotten steps to sweep that area. Then he returned to the house and they saw his head at the kitchen window, bent over what must have been the sink and taps.

  It was mysterious, and unsettling. Had she heard them, somehow, discuss the filthy state of her house? How? She would have had to be a witch, hovering in the air above them, invisibly. And who was the youth? A g
uest? But no one had a black boy for a guest. Had she employed him as a cleaner? What was going on? Was he going to stay?

  The last question was soon answered: before noon they saw the car going up the driveway and edging onto Route 2, the tenant with her great flabby jaw sunk upon her chest as she drove, and the youth on the front seat beside her, also in a sunken posture. There was no explanation for this unusual visit, this departure from habit—none at all.

  And it was repeated the next Sunday, so that it seemed to be a new habit. Quite failing to keep their curiosity to themselves, the children disengaged themselves from the rubber tyre and the maple tree—Polly had also quietly abandoned the paint pots in the attic—and found games to play on the gravel of the driveway in front of the battered old cabin. Hopscotch—something they hadn't played in years. The black youth, coming down the steps with a broom and a rag, unexpectedly stuck out his tongue, then grinned at them. He started to sweep the dust and cobwebs off the walls and from under the eaves where they hung in swags, then started to wipe the windows, so long obscured by dirt as to make them opaque. Turning around suddenly, he caught them gaping at him. 'Dirty, ain't it?' he said conversationally. 'Ugly, too.'

  They did not know how to reply. Ugly it was, and dirty too, but it was theirs. Was it a comment on them, and their lives, and status? Certainly the facts were undeniable and they said, uneasily, 'Yeah,' and 'Guess so.'

  'Y'know what,' he added, 't'owner's ugly, too. An' dirty as hell.'

  They retreated, shocked. The boy and his efforts at cleaning up the slovenly shack became even more mysterious. He was not a guest, then. So what was he—to their sullen, black-browed tenant?