A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [48]
“Nope,” he said. “Don’t worry … got to go to work.” He glanced at her as he walked out the door, but Sylvia could see that there was no recognition in the look. He would not, this time, call her “Mom” in that condescending tone that was an acknowledgement of her age and demeanour. Not here. Not now that she was known by these young people, now that she was inside.
“That was Geoff,” said Mira after the door had closed. “He works at the music shop down the street, repairing instruments—guitars mostly, some violins.”
Jerome had moved to the edge of the sand and was now filming the patterns left there by Mira’s dance steps—if that is what they were. Mira was massaging her head, lifting the short, dark hair that had been pasted to her skull by the headgear.
“A performance piece,” the girl explained, “though, at the moment I’m still working on it. I have no idea where it’s going.”
“Where might it be going?” asked Sylvia.
Mira smiled. “I mean, where it will end up. How it will turn out. We had to repeat it a couple of times because of Swimmer. He kept rubbing up against my legs.” She walked toward the door of the place she called the bedroom, opened it, and released the cat. “We had to lock him up in the end.”
Today Sylvia would talk about how she met Andrew. She had imagined revealing this episode to Jerome the night before, had envisaged herself in the chair, him on the couch, the story a thread between them. Mira had not been in the picture she had seen in her mind and she began to worry about how she would be able to talk with the girl in the room, with the two of them together and the bond that existed between them so visible, so obvious to her.
Mira, as if sensing this, pulled her scarf and coat from a hook on the wall, then paused and stood still for a moment. “I wish I could stay,” she said, “but I guess I’ll leave you two alone now.”
“Poor Mira,” said Jerome. “Off to the salt mines.”
Mira wound the scarf around her neck. “Yes, the salt mines,” she said. “Though in some ways I suspect the real salt mines might be more interesting.”
“Smithson would have agreed with that,” said Jerome. “He loved mines, loved excavation of any kind, in fact. Even … no, maybe especially, industrial excavation. He wanted to know about everything.”
Mira opened the door. “I want to know about everything too,” she said, turning to look at Jerome. “I always have.”
When Mira had gone, Sylvia told Jerome about the tactile maps she made for her friend Julia. “She’s blind,” Sylvia explained, “but touching a map is one of the ways she is able to see. I didn’t think I could do it at first, didn’t think I could translate landscape into texture on a board. But then I know the County so well; I suppose that made it easier.” She shifted in her chair. “I came to love making the maps,” she confessed. “In fact, I am working on one, right now, in the hotel.”
“You’re making art yourself when you do that,” he said, “taking what you see in your own County and reproducing it on a flat space.”
Sylvia rejected the suggestion but found that she was somewhat flattered nonetheless.
“Andrew and I first encountered one another on the only busy street in the County,” she began when she could no longer remain separate from the idea of him. “The only thoroughfare that sustained anything that resembled what a city person might think of as traffic.” She described the town of Picton, its sidewalks, walls, and old windows, and as she did so, each square inch of that town’s surfaces presented itself in her mind, as if she were walking, right then, on one of the familiar streets. As always, she took quite a lot of pleasure from doing this, this long walk back to the subject of Andrew.
“I was carrying on a conversation with myself, or revisiting a scene from my childhood, or perhaps I was bringing something I’d seen—a pebble on a path, the grain of a fenceboard—back into being in my mind. I was walking down this busy street in the centre of a town two or three times larger than the town in which I live, but in my mind I was, as I so often