A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [44]
Jerome sat up straight, became more attentive and formal as he always did when it became clear to him that there was something he could explain to her. He was struck, suddenly, by the familiar pleasure he felt when he knew there was something, even a kindergarten poem, that he could unravel for her. It gave him an edge, a brief flush of superiority. “Robin” he told her, “the bird. From a nursery rhyme.”
Jerome watched as the girl bent to unwind a skein of wool from a large pink shape—rather like candy floss—that rested near her left foot. Sometimes all he wanted to do was sit across the room and look at her. He, who had always been so prone to activity, so dependent on plans, so restless and so easily bored, now found himself becalmed, happy to float in the vicinity of a knitting girl. Her beautiful arms, the tilt of her head. Over and over he was surprised by such things.
“ ‘Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin,’ “ he quoted. And all at once he wondered how it was that the rhyme had been implanted in his own memory since he had never seen it in a book. Had his tired mother recited it to him? It seemed unlikely. How, then, had this bird-filled children’s dirge entered his family’s suburban world of freeways and strip malls and cement apartment buildings on the edges of the city? A world conducive to neither birds nor children. The memory of his bicycle came again into his mind, the sight of it rusting in dirty snow on the winter balcony of their apartment, then twisted and broken in a drift ten storeys below. He had stopped riding it once they began to live in the apartment—too humiliated by the journey in the elevator with the bicycle resting uselessly against his hip, too shy of the inevitable adult who would enter the elevator and ask, as if it were not utterly obvious, if he intended to go for a ride.
Mira looked up from her work and gazed at the cat, who was ambling toward her like a sleepwalker. “There were many rhymes, many stories when I was growing up, stories about animals who wouldn’t be able to survive in this climate. Some of the animals in the stories were Gods—Ganesh, for example—so I believed that all tropical animals were deities and that’s why I figured I didn’t see them hanging around the neighbourhood.”
“It would be wonderful, though, to find Ganesh strolling through the streets of this city,” Jerome said.
“How about Saint Jerome’s lion? He has certainly taken to the streets … particularly in the alley in the vicinity of garbage pails.”
“Just like an autumn bee.” Jerome stood now and moved to the back of Mira’s chair, then placed his hands on her shoulders, allowing his fingers to rest in the twin hollows between the muscles of her upper back and her collar bones. He bent toward her ear. “I think that in your previous life you were most likely a bee,” he whispered. “Or was it a wasp?”
Jerome was intrigued by the fact that Mira was fascinated by bees and had once even taken a course in beekeeping. She liked their colour, their shape, their commitment to labour. Most of all, she was impressed by the way they enthusiastically constructed the hives she referred to as “paper houses.” Unlike any other woman Jerome had known, Mira would announce the presence of a bee with joy rather than with terror. There was something oddly beelike about her, Jerome had concluded; she was so industrious, so alert she almost buzzed, and often when she was near him, walking through the galleries, shopping at the market, her presence