Chapter Text
1: Claudia Atieno, Guests, 1972. Oil on canvas.
Her memories are not how she remembers them.
She has gone over the facts of Claudia’s departure from Cornwall – her disappearance – her death – countless times. It should be crystal clear in her memory, realer than real. When she searches for what she knows, it’s the story everyone knows: her last public appearance was on March 31st, 1972, at her home in Cornwall. She was hosting one of her famous parties, celebrating nothing in particular other than the first inklings of the summer season, in the company of some of the foremost artists and innovators of the New Society. So why do all the memories Roimata can summon of her last days with Claudia include cliff diving in the waning summer heat, squash and chestnut soup, and sunset-orange leaves?
She remembers the trip to Amsterdam. She took the train from St. Pancras on a crisp October morning, making last-minute rewrites to her lecture which she promptly mentally undid the moment the Rijksmuseum’s Events Coordinator introduced her to the group she would be speaking to. The students were fresh first years, halfway through their first semester. It put them in the awkward middle stage of shedding their acceptance-letter bravado and not yet earning their intellectual confidence. Their first assignments were coming due, and they were suddenly feeling like university was a huge mistake. Some would hit their stride, others wouldn’t. Time would tell. But Roimata would be long gone by then – she had only this brief snapshot of their time to steer them in the right direction.
Posing a question to the room, she was met with a deathly silence. But for the fact she could still see them all sitting in their seats, she might have suspected every student had suddenly vacated the lecture theatre for all the noise they made. Some averted their eyes – tactfully, they thought, avoiding her gaze so that she did not mistake them for someone with something to say. Others stared at her expectantly, waiting for her to cave and answer the question herself. Others still were obviously doodling or passing notes and might not have even noticed the lecture grinding to a halt, so consumed were they in their own affairs.
"Well, this will not do," she said tuttingly. "I know some of you have opinions." There was something of an awkward, half-hearted chuckle from some of the students. She waited another beat for a student to provide an opinion, although she already knew they would not. She met the eyes of a few candidates anyway, for effect. "It's no good waiting for the art to interpret itself. Come on, the lot of you. We're in the Rijksmuseum. Let's make use of it."
The museum’s collection was vast, but the conservators would not thank them for digging through the archive, and it might get the University in trouble, so Roimata looked instead for something appropriate from the displayed works, towing a herd of students behind her. She stopped in front of Edvard Munch’s The Kiss (1897) almost by accident, drawn in by the intimacy of the composition. Perfect.
“Alright, gather around. Here we have an Edvard Munch, I want you to look closely at it, make sure everyone gets a look.” She allowed for some shuffling and thinking to take place before she asked, “What feeling does this painting inspire? Anyone?”
There was another pause of reluctance, and she feared her gambit may have failed.
“Revulsion,” offered a student.
“Why?”
She shrank from her gaze a little, but answered, “Um… The two figures merge because Munch was critical of romantic partners who disappear into their relationships. He never married, or had any significant relationships.”
“Thank you. Now can you tell me, is that what the painting actually makes you feel, or is that just what you’ve been told it means?” She gave a pointed tap to the description tacked to the wall alongside the painting, provided by the Rijksmuseum, which said something to the effect.
There was silence.
“How do you know Munch had no romantic partners? Historical record? Tell me, are your relationships logged in a registry? What about your crushes, your obsessions, and the romances that never were? Are your private feelings made available to the public? Perhaps Munch burned every love letter he ever received, and the people he sent notes to have never been linked to him. Perhaps all he ever exchanged with anyone was a few raunchy drunken nights, recorded nowhere but the privacy of memory. Perhaps, if he did expound on the frivolity of romance, he doth protest too much.
“I want you to disregard Munch's intent for a moment. Not because it's not important, but because it is inaccessible to us. What feeling does this painting invoke in you? Not what feeling do you think Munch was trying to invoke in you – what do you actually feel? Take a second to think about it."
Silence resumed. It was the uncomfortable, strained silence of students reaching for an answer. Or reaching for the bravery to voice the answer they already had in their hearts.
"Longing."
"Very good!” she almost shouted it, beaming at the student who spoke. She waved her hand. “There is no right or wrong answer, every feeling invoked by this painting, revulsion, melancholy, scandal, boredom, all are valid. But that is an answer I like. For bonus point… elaborate?"
“The two figures are very close with each other, impossibly close. The framing makes me feel as if I’m looking on in envy or aspiration.”
“I’ll buy you a coffee later. I love that. Right, let’s look at another painting, and we’ll see who else wants free coffee.”
She feels a sensation like someone reaching into her guts, squeezing her stomach tightly, and pulling. She lurches back to the park bench, where she is assailed by a piercing headache and the most potent coffee craving she has ever experienced in her life. She’s dizzy, and there’s something like acid reflux or bile in the back of her throat. She staggers to her feet and tries to orient herself – why are the street names in French in Amsterdam?
That’s right, she’s in Paris.
No. No, she is in Montréal. She was just recording the audio guide for the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, for their 1978 Small Items/Big Picture exhibit. She hasn’t been to Paris since— Since…?
She needs caffeine if she’s going to clear the fog in her brain. Something about recording that audio guide has set her thoughts spinning, swirling like autumn leaves in a gale. If she can sit down in a warm café with a coffee, she can sort this all out. She’s sure it will start making sense. She finds a place near the waterfront with plenty of empty tables, orders a coffee, and begins to unravel.
Roimata had spent all day in a café like this in Amsterdam. No. It was in Paris. The original Café, le soir (1888) was painted in Arles, not Paris, but she remembers thinking she might have been able to produce a credible likeness to the Van Gogh from the scene surrounding her. The golden glow of the café’s lights contrasted harmoniously with the cool blue night. It was a beacon in the dark, inviting Parisians to enjoy a well-brewed coffee and make the evening last a little longer. It wasn’t so late, but winter had brought the night on quickly, and the cold with it. She was glad to be indoors.
Roimata had finally switched to decaf, not because she was ready to go to bed, but because she had drunk enough caffeine already today to mess with her sleep for the next week. She was much too polite to the waiters too many times in a row when they came around to ask her if she wanted a refill. She had written the first draft of two reviews in the first two hours. Then her hand had started to cramp, she had taken a break, then filled a third of a sketchbook, taken another break to order a quiche, walked around in the frosty outdoors a bit, sat back down in the same cosy window table, and nearly finished a book. The book was some airport novel that had been abandoned on the café’s windowsill, and despite not being a very good reader of French, she had got through most of it while the sun sank definitively out of sight.
She had also checked her calendar book approximately eight hundred times. Checked the names of the intersecting streets signposted on the sides of the buildings. Checked her watch against the clock above the Métro entrance. Checked with a random stranger that it was, indeed, jeudi, le quatre janvier (and checked her dictionary that that was, in fact, Thursday, the fourth of January).
Every time anger rose up from her gut through her chest, it got stuck in her throat as worry. She couldn’t be angry with Claudia. What if the reason she was late was there had been some terrible complication? What if there was a message waiting for her, somewhere, and she had sat at this café all day unable to receive it? What if she went back to the hotel and then Claudia finally arrived at the café and thought Roimata had stood her up?
She couldn’t be angry without getting worried. She couldn’t worry without crying. So she drank her coffee. She stayed huddled in the light of the café and thought about Van Gogh’s Café, le soir. It was a timeless, peaceful kind of painting. It made her think she might be able to wait forever.
Roimata realises that she is crying into her coffee. It feels, for a surreal moment, as if she has been at the café in Paris all this time. She reminds herself that she is in Montréal. She reminds herself not to openly sob in public.
She was in Paris to meet Claudia. She was in Paris to meet Claudia, and she never showed up. How had she forgotten Paris? How had she forgotten that they had plans, and the days of leg-bouncing, hotel-ceiling-staring, eight-cups-of-coffee anxiety when those plans apparently fell through?
…Why had she not reported Claudia missing, instead of Pavel?
“Is that yours?”
Roimata looks up and sees the waitress pointing to a leather wallet on the vacant table next to hers. She shakes her head, and the waitress looks at it for a moment, then shrugs and goes back to her job.
Curiosity getting the better of her – and welcoming the distraction – Roimata opens the wallet. Inside there are three hundred dollars in cash as well as one of those newfangled World Bank cards, and a Government ID. The name on the ID is Blake Walker, and from the regional government seal, it does not seem like they are a Montréal local. When she returns the bank notes to the pocket, they catch on something and she fishes out a gold wedding band. Someone left their entire life on this table, it seems. Roimata would wonder how such important things could be forgotten, but it would seem a little hypocritical at this point.
She knows that the party in the Guests painting was March 1972. It was the last party at the Cornwall house before Claudia disappeared. That part is true. Roimata was there, and Pavel, and Chrisette. It was the only party that all three of them attended in Cornwall, and she remembers Chrisette’s dress. It’s the right date. But it wasn’t days before Claudia’s disappearance. How on Earth could Claudia have completed an oil painting with that level of detail in that time? It’s so blindingly obvious, now that she has finished recording the audio guide for the museum. There was no way for Claudia Atieno to have disappeared in March, or even April, of 1972. It makes no sense for Pavel to have reported her missing then.
It had been the autumn. Every time she tries to go over that night in her mind – Claudia’s last night seen alive – she thinks of her surrounded by autumn leaves. They had a quiet dinner, just the two of them, and then they sat on the patio. Claudia had looked so beautiful, framed by the red-orange of the Japanese rowan in the garden and glowing with the setting sun reflecting off the ocean. Roimata had wanted to paint her, but she didn’t. Claudia did not want to be seen, these days. All the same, she remembered tracing her with her eyes, drawing her in her mind. Her braids wrapped atop her head like a robust cumulous cloud, heavy with autumn rain. Her hazel eyes catching the light through her glasses. Her dignified jaw and elegant neck. The curve of her breasts. The curve of her belly.
Her hand, resting on her tummy and making small, absent-minded motions while she painted, like she was petting a cat.
2: Roimata Mangakāhia, Providence, [n.d.]. Watercolour on paper.
Kahurangi. The thought came to her unbidden. It wasn't inappropriate, she thought, to see a sky so clear and think of a word – one of many – that could encapsulate it in te reo Māori. Why this particular one came to mind, she couldn't quite say. Did this sky have some unquantifiable specialness to it? Something to connote value, like an untarnished precious stone?
Why was it striking some melancholy chord in her chest, to think about? Whatever sense "kahurangi" had made, it was slipping from her grasp, like a dream upon waking. All it left behind was that melancholy feeling, like a hollow ringing sound against her ribcage.
She felt a raindrop run down her cheek on a clear blue day.
3: Claudia Atieno, Self-portrait with cat (unfinished), 1972. Oil on canvas.
Mreow.
Roimata sees through the glass door there is a skinny black cat waiting there. Her tail sways back and forth. The staff ignore her, and she tries to get inside the café when Roimata leaves it, bell jingling behind her. When her way is barred once again, she looks up at Roimata.
She bends down to give her a pet, and the cat sniffs her hand before swerving out of her reach. She does not dart away, but looks back at her with expectant green eyes. “What is it?” she murmurs.
Mreoww, she insists.
The cat doesn’t have a collar, so she is most likely a stray. She’s old enough that she must have survived one winter in Montréal already, but that’s no guarantee of anything. The hunting can’t be particularly good in the city, although if she’s going door to door begging at cafés, maybe she’s getting by. She follows the cat, holding her hand out and trying to coax her closer. If she had food, it would be easier. She thinks about finding a grocery to buy some cat food, but she can’t shake the sense that if she lets the cat out of her sight, she will be gone forever. The cat is not running, not hiding, but she’s not stopping, either.
Claudia’s scream carried through the entire house. Roimata was on the patio outside, and her paintbrush nearly jumped out of her hand, she was so startled. Granted, most every window and door in the house had been flung open to let the summer air through it. All sorts of insects had made their way into the house since it started warming up, and while Claudia was not fond of the flying kind, Roimata had not known the creepy-crawlies of Cornwall to elicit such a strong reaction. Maybe she had seen a mouse.
Roimata narrowly avoided loosing a shriek of her own when she rushed into Claudia’s bedroom to see Pavel entirely naked. This was not the same thing Claudia was reacting to – that would have been strange as she was, after all, clearly in the middle of something with him – instead indicating something under her bed. Roimata had no desire to lower her eye level when Pavel was making no effort to maintain his modesty, however.
“What is it?” she asked.
“There’s a cat under the bed,” Pavel said.
When Roimata eventually did look, it was obvious the cat appreciated a violation of its privacy much less than Pavel and Claudia did. It hissed at her, a big brute of a calico cat with a raggedy ear. Under her belly was a mess of fabrics that looked suspiciously like the missing pinafore and paint rags from the studio downstairs which she had been accusing Pavel of taking.
“I think she’s nesting,” she said. It was hard to see properly with the shadows under the bed, but the cat’s size might easily be explained by pregnancy.
“Well, can she nest under your bed instead, please,” Claudia said, wrinkling her nose.
“There isn’t any room under my bed,” she said, “and anyway, you can’t force a cat to nest anywhere.”
Roimata came back with a bowl of water and a plate of cold leftover chicken to inch close to the cat, which it did not deign to touch, instead choosing to continue glaring at her. She did not hold this against the cat. It was surely difficult to feel comfortable in a room where two huge strangers (previously rudely trying to have sex above your nesting spot) were talking about calling a pest control service out to the island.
“You two cannot be serious,” Roimata said. “It’s a cat, not a termite infestation.”
Perhaps she should not have interjected, because then the conversation shifted to who was to blame for bringing the cat to the island in the first place. Roimata refused to have this discussion while the other two were stark naked and left, foolishly thinking that by the time they had got dressed and come downstairs, they would have dropped the topic.
Claudia was adamant that it had been Roimata, who had gone to the village last, which she thought was exceedingly unlikely and simply a case of recency bias. Nearly anyone else was more likely. Yes, the last big party at the Cornwall house had been at the end of March, but cats were stealthy creatures. Assuming she had been smuggled onto the island by somebody either accidentally or on purpose, she could easily have slipped indoors when everyone was too drunk to notice and been hiding under various furniture for weeks. The only thing that made it sound slightly implausible was that they hadn’t found any rabbits or birds gored to death on the kitchen tile, but Roimata was as certain as she could be her latest trip to the mainland had included no stowaways. The only hiding place she could have had was under the seat, and the shopping bags were under it on that occasion. She was much more likely to have snuck on with a group of people inadvisably pre-drinking on the way to the island.
“I don’t see why I should have to take responsibility for her just because I’m the one that’s here.”
“Well, someone who’s not here can’t very well take responsibility for it, can they?”
“What about Pavel? No, why does this even matter— Regardless of how she got there, she’s living under your bed!”
The argument lasted for days. The cat was called numerous things during this time – mostly The Cat, Koshka, or Matryoshka, sometimes That Thing or Her, said very derisively by Claudia.
Claudia seemed to oscillate wildly between wanting nothing to do with the cat, and wanting to keep and name every kitten, a notion that Roimata found flatly ridiculous. Quite aside from the fact that she refused to involve any person or organisation that could remotely be considered professional—
“Why would you want to keep the cats? You don’t even like cats!” she argued, again.
“How do you know? I have never owned one,” she repeated.
She could no longer believe she had ever thought Claudia would like having a cat. She resented anything being in her space that she could not effectively order to leave at a moment’s notice. Often, Pavel would leave the island entirely as soon as Claudia became less than thrilled by his presence, but far from giving Roimata time to be with Claudia without his interference, they just argued more than ever. The fights would slide fluidly between Pavel and Matryoshka, and she could never recall how they began.
“This is not an art project you can leave half-finished when you get bored, Claudia, it is a living being. We need to find the kittens new homes. I can go into town and ask to put an ad up at the post office.”
“Haven’t you been saying you want a cat? So have one.”
“And when you go to Mwanza for the winter and leave this place empty, what am I supposed to do? My building in Plymouth doesn’t allow pets, and even if it did, I can’t exactly leave a cat alone for a few days while I pop to London, can I?” At the look on her face, she answered her own rhetorical question, “No, Claudia, I can’t.”
“Pavel said he would happily take one to St. Petersburg, and he’s not exactly a homebody.”
“That’s because he lets out his penthouse to his Rolodex of secret romantic partners every month of the year, I expect,” she snapped. He had already been back to Cornwall once after Claudia threw a fork at his head, as if he didn’t understand he had been broken up with, but to make things worse, Claudia let him. After a few days, he had left again, but a heated conversation half-heard through a wall suggested that Claudia had only asked him to go because his presence was riling up Roimata, which made her feel like a petulant child being pacified.
Whenever she brought up finding the cats homes, Claudia would say that Pavel and his friends had it under control. It did not matter how many times she said this, Roimata did not feel reassured. “If you don’t want to take any of the kittens, you can’t tell me I’m not allowed to let Pasha take them,” Claudia said, in a tone that was measured and patronising and infuriating.
“He’s not going to take care of them! He’s probably going to chop them up into little pieces or encase them in resin or something to that effect! Why would you trust him with anything anymore?”
“What do you care? You’ve made it very clear you don’t want to be involved, Roimata.”
Roimata was plenty involved. She bought the cat food. She cleaned the litter boxes that Matryoshka was slowly cajoled into using. She was just trying to be practical, and practically speaking, they were neither of them capable of taking on the responsibility. Wishing it different wouldn’t change it. And Roimata did wish.
Years later, she is following a different stray into a Métro station on the other side of the Atlantic. What does she think she is going to do with the cat if she catches it? She’s no more equipped to look after a cat now, she’s catching a plane tomorrow for pity’s sake. Still, she can’t stop herself from trying to keep the cat in her sight, ducking and weaving around people headed to their evening engagements. Her black form gracefully slips down into the well of the train tracks just as an announcement comes through the tannoy.
Roimata tries to catch the attention of a station attendant, telling them that they need to stop the train, but it’s too loud, and by the time she can be audible again, the attendant is already saying, “Ma’am, please calm down. What seems to be the problem?”
“My— A cat— There’s a cat, she just went down onto the track, it’s not safe—”
The echoes of the approaching train are already reverberating through the platform. Roimata has her back to it, but she feels the movement of the air as it rushes into place, as smooth and regular as the Métro ever is. The doors open to let people on and off. The attendant is asking where she saw the cat, but she isn’t responding. All the urgency got knocked out of her like air out of a cushion, and the time and place on the arrivals board might as well be in a different city, in a different year. Nothing else to be done. The cat was in the way, or she wasn’t, and she’s dead or she’s not.
After the kittens were born, when they were still mewling immobile little matryoshka dolls, Matryoshka would find where Claudia was painting and deposit all six kittens in her lap, then disappear. Claudia was not overly pleased about this, but she was even less patient when the kittens started tottering about on their own, peeing all over the floors and scratching the furniture.
When Roimata pointed out that this was exactly what she had signed up for by refusing to take Matryoshka to the veterinarian to begin with – now she had seven cats that might as well have been feral – she said, "They’re not my cats, Roimata. They belong to the island."
“If you imagine the island is going to care for them you’ll be in for a sore surprise. If they don’t get snatched up by the first herring gull that spots them they’ll just start killing off the local wildlife until they starve or freeze to death.” This argument did not seem to move Claudia much. Why should it? She had shown little enough interest in the kittens’ wellbeing to let Pavel’s friends take them, once they could be separated from their mother.
From the outside, the Cornwall house looked much like it had that summer, two years later. The garden had become overgrown, to be sure, but Claudia often let it go to seed for months at a time. Indoors, however, there was a thick layer of dust over the furniture, cobwebs rich with insect bounties in most corners, and all of the fresh food had been cleared out of the pantry. She always left before winter in former-England, fleeing to the southern hemisphere so that she could keep her weather warm and sunny year-round. The house looked like it usually did at the end of winter, only it was the middle of summer, now, and the Cornwall house should have been back in full swing.
The silence was deafening. Usually there would be the creaking of floorboards overhead, the Victrola or (very occasionally) the piano playing in the parlour, chatter or the clattering of pans in the kitchen. It had its quiet moments, especially when Claudia and Roimata were left alone, but at least they’d always had…
No cat had come to greet her when she walked through the vacant house. Matryoshka had never been particularly affectionate towards Roimata, but she did used to investigate whenever she came back from the mainland, smelling of a Cornwall market. There was no pitter-patter of paws to be heard. She was not in any of her usual spots when Roimata looked, sunning herself in the kitchen window or curled under Claudia’s bed or in the wicker chair on the patio. She checked the cupboards under the stairs, on top of every cabinet, only stopping short of sticking her head up the chimney. At some point during the search, she could not say when, she had stopped looking for an alive cat and started looking for a dead one. She found nothing. Her only comfort was that it did not smell like anything had died, particularly. For good measure, she did a circuit around the island, although she did not know if she would have spotted anything even if it was there to find. The tide could easily have carried her away if her bones were on the beach.
But there was no reason to think she was dead. Not really. She tried to be content to think she was out there somewhere, alive, but weeks later she was still thinking about what could have happened to her. She thought about finding an excuse to fly to St. Petersburg. She couldn’t find a good one, so she dispensed with excuses and turned up at Pavel Zubov’s doorstep without any warning whatsoever. She convinced the doorman to buzz Pavel on the intercom and he, perhaps out of curiosity more than anything, let her come up to his apartment.
Roimata should not have been startled to see that Pavel was not alone in the penthouse; his company on this occasion was a dark-haired lean man who looked to be at least ten years younger than him and bewildered by Roimata’s presence – though not much more than Pavel himself. The two of them spoke in Russian, and Roimata tried to ignore Claudia’s name in Pavel’s mouth. She looked in each room for signs of a cat, but there was not so much as a pet bowl in the kitchen, no litterbox, no cat toys, and all of the furniture was suspiciously free of fur and scratches. No cat.
“What are you looking for?” Pavel asked, exasperated. She did not answer, wallowing in the futility of the trip.
He and his lover du jour exchanged more words in Russian, which led to the other guest pulling on a shirt, ramming his feet into a pair of sneakers, and leaving the apartment.
“Alright, Andrei is gone. What is this about? I told you, Claudia isn’t here, I haven’t seen her since our trip to former-France.”
Paris. Her heart ached, recalling the days she had spent waiting for her there. She thought about turning around and leaving without explaining anything to him, for the mere satisfaction of confusing and frustrating him, as he had so often done to her. She did not quite stoop to his level, and said, “I’m here for Matryoshka.”
“What matryoshka?”
“Our Matryoshka. Koshka, Pavel, the cat.”
Recognition softened his face momentarily, but turned to confusion as he said, “I don’t have her.”
She could see that. “Well where is she!” she said, an accusatory tone creeping into her voice. Pavel was the last one to see her, after all. “Because she’s not in Cornwall!”
“You’ve been to Cornwall?”
“Yes,” she scowled, because she had just said that.
“And she wasn’t there?”
“No!” She had just. Fucking. Said that.
He shrugged, and his nonchalance made her want to punch him. “She wasn’t there when I last was. I assumed she was with you.”
Roimata opened her mouth to argue this point and burst into tears. Matryoshka should have been with her. She should have tried before now to find her. She should have said damn the blasted housing association and taken her to live in the flat in Plymouth. Or moved into a different flat that allowed pets. She shouldn’t have assumed Pavel would take care of anything. She should have done anything but sit on her hands for two years waiting for missing things to return to her by magic. She should have been anywhere but here.
Tears still blurred her eyes when she turned to leave the penthouse. She didn’t know anyone else in St. Petersburg, hadn’t sorted a hotel. Maybe she would make her way to the train station and get out of the city that very night.
“Roimata, wait,” Pavel said. She paused only reluctantly. He sighed at her back. “Do you want a drink?”
She hasn’t seen Pavel in years. Not that she wants to, but it is strange for someone to be such a frequent presence in your life, and to suddenly lose your entire reason for seeing each other and so just… stop. That drink they shared in St. Petersburg, the last time she saw him, was more cordial than she had ever been with him before. She wonders, vaguely, what he’s up to now, before remembering she does not care.
She finds herself at the end of a Métro line in a part of the city she has never been to before. It is later, the sky settled into a deeper dark that is nonetheless tinted orange by the lights of the city. Ordinary businesses are closed, leaving mainly bars as the sources of activity and light. She roots through her bag for her map of Montréal and a flashlight, and finds a foreign object – a flaking leather wallet. Opening it, she realises that it is the wallet that was left in the café earlier. She must have put it in her bag without thinking.
Well, it is too late to take it back to the café now. She supposes she could hand it in to the front desk at her hotel, but what would she say about where she found it? She does not want to be accused of theft. Resolved, she makes her way into the first bar or club that has no cover charge and turns the wallet in to the staff, saying she found it abandoned on a table.
4: Roimata Mangakāhia, Fingers Together, 1973. Oil on canvas.
Claudia never carried Pavel’s baby.
Roimata was glaring at Claudia’s original painting as she mixed linseed oil into her paints. The more she looked at that painting, the more she hated it. She’d not given it too much attention before the exhibition at the Ulster Museum; it was overrated, not nearly as symbolically complex as Tomato Plant and Sword or Orchid. The gallery had had a pre-written text to go with the piece that made Roimata’s stomach turn, and would have certainly prompted Claudia to throw something, if she was there to read it. She hated idle gossip.
Claudia never carried Pavel’s baby.
In the back of her mind, a vindictive voice reminded her, You didn’t carry hers, either.
5: Claudia Atieno, Sunglasses and Cigarettes, [n.d.]. Pencil on paper.
After Roimata’s memories come roaring back in Montréal, she thinks it will be a matter of hours before she is arrested. She’s kept awake all night waiting for soldiers to break down her hotel room door. She flinches at perfectly pleasant dogs on the Métro. She has an anxiety attack when the metal detector goes off at airport security, thinking she’s been caught having unauthorised brain waves, and it only gets worse when one of the security agents takes her into a private room to calm down. Memories crash over her like waves, each one a cold shock that knocks the air out of her.
It was not entirely unusual to see people in suits smoking outside the Times Headquarters in London. Roimata felt a flicker of paranoia borrowed from Claudia, seeing them, but she dismissed it just as quickly. There was no reason to think they were anything but office-workers on their break, and even less reason for anyone from a vague yet menacing government agency to be following her. She was here to speak to the Arts Editor about her August column, a conversation that was always as blithely pleasant as it was useless, and that was done, and she was bound for the Tube to take her to Paddington and then back to Plymouth. Sometimes she stayed in London for the night to catch a show at the West End or catch up with friends, but she was tired, and maybe she would finish reading her book on the train.
“Are you Roimata Mangakāhia?” asked one of the smokers, stepping in front of her. He was a respectful distance away, but his dog was pulling firmly on its leash, apparently eager to sniff her.
She tore her eyes away from the dog to look up at the person’s face, but found them a stone wall with plain black sunglasses. Eventually, she said, “Can I help you?”
“We would like to speak with you about Claudia Atieno.”
Her heart leapt. “Is there news? Have you found her?”
“Please come with us.”
She was ushered into the back seat of a sleek black car with tinted windows. They were miles away from the office building before she started to wonder where it was they were going, and – oh yes – exactly whose car this was.
“What agency do you belong to?” she asked.
Silence.
“Where are you taking me?”
Nothing.
She considered making a break for it. Jumping out of a moving car into a major roadway was hardly a safe option, but she might make the bet that it was better than being driven to a remote location to be detained indefinitely. Better to try it now, when she was still in the city and could attract peoples’ attention, or dive into a Tube station, or something. If they got out of the city, it would be harder. Less people. Less avenues to escape if they tried to physically arrest her.
She didn’t quite have the nerve. What was she thinking of? She was nearly forty. She couldn’t be flinging herself from moving cars, she’d do herself in. A need to escape continued to gnaw at her, though, until the car slowed to a stop at a red light. For a second that seemed to waste eternity, she dithered, glancing frantically at the faceless agents in the front of the car, the red light. Then she steeled herself like she was about to take a plunge off a cliff, yanked the door handle and threw her weight into shoving the door open.
It did not move.
In the cage at the back of the car, the dog barked once warningly. The driver raised his chin slightly, looking at her in the rearview mirror, and although he had his shades on, she knew they locked eyes. “Don’t do that,” he said.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded.
His attention had already moved away from her.
Inside thirty minutes, she had already gone through a comprehensive list of every person she knew and why they would not notice her disappearance. Her neighbours in Plymouth were used to her being away. If she didn’t submit her next column to the paper, her Editor at the Times would grumble, but how quickly would that turn into concern, if at all? How many friends did she regularly fail to contact for months at a time? She had said she would be at Cassandra’s next gallery opening, but when she didn’t show, whose assumption would be that she was abducted by strange men from the middle of London?
With a horrible pang of dread, she realised that it had been over two years since she had seen Claudia, and she was still reluctant to call her missing. For maximum irony, maybe this was how she found out what happened to her.
It is too big of a memory to have disappeared by mistake. It is the same feeling as recalling something that had simply slipped her mind for a moment, but on a massive scale. Like forgetting an entire room in her house. Roimata cannot stop shivering. There is a small but eminently anxious part of her that thinks she is dying, that this spluttering torrent of memory is the symptom an aneurysm about to stop her brain from working altogether. No more people will miss her now than when she got into the back of a black car in London four years ago.
“We have some questions for you about Ms. Claudia Atieno,” another black-suited agent had said. This one was a woman, Nancy, although she didn’t say it like it was her name. The room had had no distractions in it, despite Roimata’s efforts to find somewhere to look other than her stern face.
“Questions for me? I thought there was something you wanted to tell me,” she said, although that fiction had evaporated from her mind some minutes into the journey here. Wherever “here” precisely was.
“Do you have any reason to think that Ms. Atieno might have been pregnant before she left Cornwall?”
Her cheeks flushed with the memories of countless days and nights at the Cornwall house. That was probably not what the agent meant by any reason. She was asking because Roimata was Claudia’s friend, not because she was Claudia’s… “No. No, I don’t. Why do you ask?”
“Did she ever speak to you about wishing to give birth to, or raise, a child?”
Roimata did not like this line of questioning. “No, of course not. She didn’t find the concept of either pregnancy or motherhood appealing.” This last part was, at least, truthful.
“To your knowledge has she ever terminated a pregnancy without expressed confirmation from a licenced medical practitioner that the same pregnancy was a threat to her life?”
Roimata felt every cell in her body still. “No,” she said, although it came out barely audible.
Out of her manilla folder, Nancy plucked several items. The first was a glossy ultrasound scan that made Roimata’s heart thunder in her chest. All she could see was strangely-shaped static, but how would she know what to look for? Was there a baby in there somewhere?
Her eyes were torn away by the presentation of another document, blood test results. It was dense with acronyms and figures that she didn’t understand, but somebody had highlighted in yellow something called “hCG”, elevated above average. She could guess what this was supposed to imply. Did Claudia really see it through to the end, or did she change her mind at the last moment? Or… or did something go wrong? After a few moments of looking at the documents, squashing her racing thoughts, she said, “I’m sorry, I’m not a doctor. I don’t know what any of this means.”
She gestured to the papers. “This is just a small portion of the ample medical evidence which suggests that your friend was pregnant prior to her disappearance. There is relatively recent scarring in the womb, and the marked presence of a pregnancy hormone.” She watched Roimata’s face closely, and she tried to maintain a steady, faintly confused eye contact. As if this was all news to her.
Nancy sighed and started to gather the papers, and with a pang of panic Roimata leaned forward, searching both documents for a date before they disappeared forever. She glimpsed “23-NOV” on the ultrasound, but not the year, and she burst out, “When are these from? Where were these tests done? Did Claudia check into a hospital somewhere?” Sour dread settled in the pit of her stomach as a fresh horror occurred to her, and she sat back in her chair, looking at Nancy’s passive face. “Why are you showing me these? Isn’t it confidential?”
The agent rose from her chair with her manilla folder, looking almost bored.
“Is Claudia alright?”
She turned to leave the room, taking all of her information with her.
“Did she have the baby?”
Nancy paused. She looked at Roimata appraisingly for a moment. Then she turned and left the room.
6: Roimata Mangakāhia, Claudia Atieno with Cat, 1974. Acrylic on canvas.
It was not fair. Matryoshka always tried to climb in Claudia’s lap, was always begging her for attention, and despite the fact that Claudia hardly ever gave it, Masha never conceded to accept the attention that Roimata would have happily given her. Too many times to count she had tried to coax the cat over with treats only for her to leave as soon as she had eaten her fill. She had several bad scratches on her arms from times she had lifted Masha out of Claudia’s lap – upon her request, mind you – and she had immediately scrambled away.
The only good thing about Matryoshka’s obsession with Claudia was that she didn’t care for Pavel, either. She pissed all over several pairs of his carelessly discarded underwear. Roimata privately took this as confirmation that Matryoshka was on her side when it came to banishing him from the house.
She studied her photographs of Claudia’s painting carefully as she worked on her own. The facial expression of the self-portrait was so specifically evocative, displaying an affection that Roimata had never once seen Claudia have towards Matryoshka. She wanted to replicate it as exactly as she could. The rest could be less detailed, an acute expression of fondness directed only at abstract shapes and colours, dripping and melting out of her grasp.
7: Claudia Atieno, The Long Corridor, [n.d.]. Charcoal and pastel on paper.
The first thing she remembers about the Institute is how little she wants to return there.
She was not told the name of the facility. By the time she arrived she had been in transit for so long, she thought she mustn’t be in Europe, but other than that she had no idea where she might have been. It was pristine and hospital-like in design, but in temperament it was more like a school during exams. The halls were quiet, and what few people she passed seemed withdrawn, whether through exhaustion or fear. The staff at the institute, dressed in their crisp white uniforms, spoke and acted robotically and avoided looking at Roimata directly.
In an increasingly frustrating intake survey, an administrator asked neutrally, “Do you have a history of mental illness?”
“Do you have a history of hearing loss?” she snapped back.
The administrator was neutrally silent.
“No.”
“Have you ever been charged with a violent crime?”
“I’m about to be,” she muttered. Until very recently, she did not think she had ever been charged with any crime, but her interviewer had recently informed her that she was in violation of the Undisclosed Pregnancy Act (1956) and in lieu of imprisonment, was being detained at the institute for her “health.”
“I did not hear that. Please repeat yourself,” the administrator requested. Neutrally.
“I said no.”
“Do you consent to the Institute’s storing of your information in accordance with our data retention policy?”
“No.”
“Please be aware that patients’ noncompliance with the protocols could result in a criminal charge—”
“Fine. Can I read the retention policy?”
“That document is for internal use only. Do you consent to any and all medical procedures which are deemed by the Institute to be necessary to ensure and improve the health and wellbeing of the patient (you)?”
She could perceive no shame in the woman who wordlessly fastened a medical tag around her wrist and slid her a blue smock and pair of white slippers. The lack of eye contact was not bashful, it was as if it did not occur to her that Roimata even had eyes to look at.
Her appointment with the psychologist was hardly more illuminating. This one seemed more distracted than deliberately cold, giving the overall impression that she could not be less interested her patient. She gave no more than a cursory glance at Roimata’s file, evidently, because at one point she said, “I understand it must have been difficult to be separated from a child who you spent so long in close contact with.”
Roimata stared at her, and she did not stare back. “No, try again,” she said, feeling a tone of spiteful condescension enter her voice.
The psychologist blinked to attention, seeming to regard Roimata properly for the first time. She cleared her throat and flipped back a sheet of paper, eyes scanning it rapidly. “Sorry,” she said, showing the first speck of remorse that Roimata had glimpsed since she was snatched from the streets of London. The psychologist was still and quiet for a moment as she looked at the page, then said, “The pregnancy programme has made good progress in emotionally supporting individuals who go through pregnancy. It doesn’t tend to place a lot of attention on the partners of people who bear children, though,” she mused. “Often they are the ones who end up grieving the loss of the child alone, because the childbearer has gone through the Protocols, and who else is there to talk to about it?”
Who indeed.
The psychologist looked at her expectantly. Eventually, she said outright, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She let the silence stretch out. Maybe they already knew everything she could have said about Claudia’s pregnancy, but it hardly seemed worth the risk to talk about. Besides. Those last months in Cornwall were hers alone. She had no desire to share them with anyone, let alone a psychologist from a dubiously legal medical institution. She wasn’t about to provide a blueprint for every memory that needed to be excised from her.
Despite the cold reception, the room she was allocated was surprisingly nice. It looked almost like a room at a resort, not much smaller than her flat in Plymouth and dressed in a plain, yet soothing, pastel sea-breeze type décor. The windows, although they had latches to keep from being thrown wide, did open, and showed a view to dense forest sprawling up looming hills. Aside from the whole building likely being in the shadow of a dell, it was quite pleasant-looking. There was even a desk and an armchair, suggesting some kind of recreational capability.
There was no art on the walls despite being clear picture hooks, which she resigned herself to before noticing that there was a black canvas folder on the desk. Warily she opened it to find fifty or so art prints in plastic sleeves. She flipped through them, vaguely aware how absurd this was. There were no faces, no recognisable locations, which she should have expected. It was a lot of pastoral scenes, a lot of still lifes with flower vases and fruit. Some were well known, some were by artists Roimata didn't recognise. Both pre- and post-Reckoning stuff. The sort of thing Alfra Bond had liked to dryly call l'art de l'hôtel. Art for hotel rooms, generic enough to appeal to pretty much anybody. Anybody except Alfra Bond. Even when a well-painted bowl of fruit was just a well-painted bowl of fruit, she was unhappy.
Her fingers paused on one of the aforementioned flower-and-fruit prints. Still Life with Orchid. It wasn't printed especially nicely, too much colour depth lost in the process, the texture of the board doing it no favours. Still, she knew it instantly.
She continued flipping through with new intent. She counted four Atienos. Orchid, plus The Empty Pier; Marketplace, Summer Afternoon; and The Long Corridor. Nothing after 1965. Maybe that was unsurprising. Nothing of Roimata’s own, although if she wanted to be terribly vain she might imagine that they would have removed any of her own paintings from the selection knowing whose room this was. They probably would not have let Claudia’s paintings stay in that case, though.
An idea began to take form. She had no intention of giving up any more memories than she already had in childhood, state-mandated or not – and that was dubious anyway, because it wasn’t like she ever saw a court or even a badge-carrying police officer. How could she have been charged with a crime? All she had left of Claudia was her memories. She was not going to give them up, not a second of them. She was going to have to try and build a Roman Room.
It was not easy to do. You had to be predisposed to visual thinking, and you had to practice, and that most likely meant you needed a good reason. She was not perfectly sure that it actually did work, but she knew some people – mostly through Claudia – who swore by it, and it certainly seemed compatible, or rather counter-compatible, with what she could remember of the Protocols themselves. It was a lot of visualisation exercises, and the Roman Room was a visualisation exercise too. The way she had heard it, it was a palace with dozens of interconnected rooms, and if you could memorise the layout of the space, unlocking a memory was as simple as finding and unlocking a door. It worked best if it was a real location, one that was important to you and easy to visualise.
She began construction that night on Karikari Contemporary Gallery, brick by brick. Canvas by canvas.
Claudia had friends who could have got her to an abortion. She was very well-connected, and there were always ways to do these things for people with enough influence. People who did not want their career delayed by having to go through the pregnancy programme, people who did not want to risk their health or life for a child they would not get to raise or watch grow, people who plainly did not want to carry a child, for the New Society or otherwise. The mandatory pregnancy laws could be optional if you knew the right people, if you were the right people. Claudia was the right people. Which is why it was so surprising when she didn’t call her friends.
“I thought you would be happy!” she had erupted eventually, when Roimata had questioned maybe half a dozen times why she was doing this, refusing to terminate or to register with the Pregnancy Centre in Bath.
Roimata had been dumbstruck. It had not occurred to her to be happy.
“You want this, don’t you? You told me how you feel about your mother, the name she left for you. Wouldn't you like to do what she couldn't?”
Her cheeks burned in furious embarrassment that Claudia would use that conversation against her. “No!” she had lied. “Claudia, becoming a mother won't mean I've ever had one, and it won't bring yours back.”
She did want to be a mother. She wanted to feel what it was like to gestate a life inside of her and then push it out into the world and guide it in learning how to live. She wanted to love that child, she did love that child, privately, in daydreams of a different world. A world where Roimata had a working womb, and where parents could raise children, and where Claudia wanted to be a parent with her. She had confessed this fantasy to Claudia when she was feeling particularly wistful and wine-drunk nearly a year previous. Now she was paying for it.
This world could not become the one from Roimata’s dream by wishing for it. Claudia could not make it so. The government could prosecute Claudia for hiding a pregnancy, and even if they got away with it for those nine months, where were they supposed to get baby food, medicine, clothes, toys, how would the child socialise, how would the parents socialise, how would this – any of this – possibly work? It was a foolish pipe dream even if they somehow had all the resources they might need to raise an infant. Claudia’s mother had known a time before the Society. She had had a mother of her own to guide her. A community to guide her, even if that community was shaken by war. Claudia had a child’s memories of that, which was already insufficient. All Roimata had was old photographs of nuclear families.
“We cannot do this,” she asserted. And if we did, she added silently, it would be selfish.
Claudia had gone quiet. “Tell me honestly. Aren't you tempted to see if we could?”
If she had told Claudia yes, that they should try, she would probably still have ended up here. They would have been caught, they would have been put through the Protocols, they would have lost their baby to a Childhood Centre somewhere far away. But maybe they would not have argued before Roimata went to Amsterdam. Maybe Roimata would have been there to see the baby born, might have shared a few weeks – months – maybe a whole year, with that baby, and with Claudia. Being the mother of Claudia’s child.
She hung Fingers. Together. on the wall of the gallery in her mind.
“Imagine a door at the end of a long corridor,” the voice on the end of the tape said.
Roimata braced her arms against the wall and took a deep, steady breath in through her nose, out through her mouth. She leaned in closely to the print of The Long Corridor on her wall. It was easier to see on the original, the texture of the charcoal perfectly preserved on the canvas, but she knew what she was looking for. Faint, jagged cracks, running through the walls. Soft, almost imperceptible light bleeding through into the dark hall.
A memory bubbled up like wind in her chest, rude and warm. Tapping rhythms on her fingers and muttering the names of her friends in the childhood centre, trying to encode memory in touch and music. I won't forget you, was a common refrain, more like a mantra than a promise. I won't forget you. Syllables tapped into skin, hasty mnemonic poems. Someone had told her it would work, someone older, someone whose sibling had left them recently. Someone who was now gone, too, except in Roimata's memory. Someone who couldn't have earned the confidence they spoke with, but then, had Roimata actually believed them, or did she just hope it was true?
She could have laughed. Maybe she would leave the Institute with more illegal memories than she came in with.
The thing that might have been a laugh was aborted in her throat, coming out strangled and short. She realised she was choking on tears. Awareness and thought all came to her in the wrong order. Her chest was hiccoughing in suppressed sobs before she understood why.
It wasn't like the childhood mnemonics had worked – she couldn't dredge from her memory any classmates' names from before she was ten. She tried to reason with herself, which only seemed to further her misery.
Because she didn't know the baby's name. Claudia had seriously considered at least a dozen, pulling from English, French, Swahili, Luo, names for all genders, names taken from late friends, from famous artists, from Roimata-didn't-know-where.
Claudia had asked her to contribute to the list. She'd refused. Pavel had suggested Nadya, and now that was the one she kept remembering, and she hated it, hated him, hated Claudia. How could she merit Pavel's suggestions? Was it just spite? Was it her fault, for refusing to fuel this insanity?
Their insanity. If she had any sense at all she would go through the regimen and forget the blasted baby and be done with it.
Kahurangi. That was the name she tapped out on her skin, forming her lips around the word silently. There were others she might have considered, if Claudia were here, asking her again. But Roimata said Kahurangi and thought of a greenstone bracelet, and a clear blue sky that she would live to see again.
8: Roimata Mangakāhia, The Bodies, 1979. Oil on canvas.
Roimata holds her silence. She feels all the time that she is going mad, the only woman on earth to know the truth of Claudia’s death – or not the truth of it, but at least the untruth of it. She could not have died in Cornwall, as those fragments of bone and clothing on St. Agnes were meant to imply. Those suited agents had her medical documents from after Roimata left for Amsterdam, and from all the cloak and dagger, she could only conclude that Claudia had given birth, and she had been interrogated, but she had escaped. She had given the Institute the slip, rejoined whatever commune it was she had entrusted the baby to, and she was there now. This farce about bones was only meant to dissuade anyone from looking into her disappearance. From thinking she might still be out there somewhere.
Well, Roimata knows. But she cannot go looking without risking being followed to Claudia’s hiding place, and that would endanger her and the baby and anyone else taking refuge in such a place. Calling to mind the violence of the assault she might invite by pursuing them is the only thing that reliably tempers her indignation at being left behind.
Even then, she finds herself bursting into hot angry tears and mournful sobs in the quiet of the night. She has been doing this for years, but now she knows why. She does not want to forget anything. She visits every painting in the Karikari Gallery of her mind daily, keeping them sharp as an artist’s scalpel and just as disposed to drawing blood. She can talk to no one about it, she can write none of it down. All she can do is dip into the wounds with a brush and paint.
It starts as a study of Cogniet’s Scène du Massacre des Innocents in her sketchbook. An angular braided Black woman clutching a baby, hiding her from men and dogs stalking the night. No matter how many times she tries to sketch the face, she cannot get the expression of fear and fierce protectiveness to look natural on Claudia. Eventually, she burns all the sketches, too unsubtle to be borne and too incriminating to be left unattended. What she finally paints is abstract, a body curling around a smaller shape, shrinking from an ill-defined threat. The larger figure is a silhouette, russet reds and browns crisscrossing and blending into a disordered mind and curls of dark hair like nothing Roimata has ever seen Claudia wear. Cut out of the noise are two white eyes, wide with fear, and on the child, a small round mouth, beginning to yell. It looks like a piece of shadow puppetry played upon a wall.
Roimata thinks better of showing the finished piece to anybody. Even in this form, it seems so obvious what it is meant to capture. She has to be discrete. She cannot let anyone know that she remembers the Institute and what it tried to make her forget. Every waking moment is spent ensuring that she only lets her grief and rage explode out of her in ways that no one will ever see.
Until the Ohara Museum of Art.