Rikes?”
“He’s not interested either. He says it’s either random or learned behaviour.”
“Well, tut tut, that’s safe. What do they know?” My mother turned back to them again curiously. A young budgie flopped on the table and she brushed it off gently. We ate a can of spaghetti together, holding our plates in our hands so we could keep looking at the pictures.
“There’s an energy to them. Look at this one,” I said, “it comes to a point and crosses the page at a pleasing angle . . .”
“Do you see how the lines have a pressure and then disappear?”
“. . . yes, their trunks are as sensitive as a hand. She’d be physically capable of that.”
“Do you think she can see them?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“They don’t look like drawings made by someone relating primarily to visual stimulus.”
“What would they be then?”
“Maybe movement? I don’t know. The strangest part is in the variation of the line thickness, that’s done with intent.”
We got out some of my mother’s big art books and looked at oriental paintings and at the moderns. We put our dishes in the sink and experimented ourselves, with blindfolds, standing above the table with our markers. Her lines were freer than mine. Our papers crinkled and our strokes faltered. It was easier, at first, to do big strokes, like a child stretching out her arm and scribbling.
“Their trunks have a hundred thousand muscles,” I complained. “How many do our hands have?” and I tossed my marker on the table.
“I wish I’d known about this when I was teaching,” she said, sitting down suddenly. “The students would have loved it. Look what it does to your lines . . .”
The small carport attached to the kitchen caught the north wind and sent it howling around the window. Safeinside, warm and tired out, I leaned into the sound of the wind, snow would bury us yet again that night. I tidied our few dishes and glanced at my mother appraising our work and the elephant’s. Her eyes were bright, but her skin was dark and drawn.
Abruptly she said, “Did you see the last thing I was working on?”
Her studio, a small uninsulated log outbuilding, was about three hundred metres behind her house, tucked against a hedge that bordered on the Safari fence. She had an old-fashioned oil space-heater in the corner which would heat it up in a few hours, but neither of us had made the effort to go over and get the place warmed up since I’d come home.
“C’mon, we’re going out,” she said.
“It’s late, it’s storming.”
“To hell with it,” she said, “I might die tonight.”
“You’re not going to die tonight.”
We wrapped ourselves in heavy sweaters and socks and I helped her slip on a pair of boots. I pulled a thick wool hat over her bald head and put on my barn toque. I found a flashlight and said, “Wait, I’ll shovel a path, we can’t go through this snow.”
“Christ, Sophie! It’s late! I can walk in your tracks.”
And so, holding on to the back of my jacket she walked behind me. I made short steps through the drifting snow and moved forward slowly. I heard her voice but I couldn’t turn.
“You know, Sophie, everyone says they don’t want heroics at the end, but I do.”
“What?” I tried to swivel round.
“Don’t turn around,” she said. “If you stumble, I’ll go with you.”
“What do you mean, heroics?” I said, turning half forward and taking another step, feeling her mittened hand pinching a big fold of cloth on the back of my coat. She leaned her head toward me and spoke into my ear so her voice wouldn’t be blown away by the wind.
“I want enough to keep me out of too much pain but I don’t want any overdoses. If I want that I’ll do it myself. I’m not afraid of pain. I want the full experience of all this, it’ll be my last. I just wish there were some way of getting it down. That’s the great waste of it, one of the biggest experiences of your life and you don’t get