Homing by Henrietta Rose-Innes

cheeks,” said Belle. A quick glance from Amelia, over the mauve rims.
    Marion sat still, keeping her head motionless as the brush tugged at her hair, suppressing the impulse to leap to her feet and shake out her hair with a shout, to kick and jump about. As a child she’d hated having her hair done, hated the enforced stillness every morning as Celia hacked at the knots with a comb, the tugs painfully communicating her mother’s own frustration.
    “Leave the child, Belle, for heaven’s sake. She’ll go if she goes and she’ll stay if she stays.”
    “What’s in the city? Greed and grief, that’s what. Greed and grief.”
    Belle had worked out the knots now. The brush made a few last passes through the damp hair, and then Marion could feel her aunt nimbly separating three handfuls, the weight lifting away from her nape as the strands were braided together and secured. The tight sensation at the base of the plait was pleasurable. She was calmed, like a groomed horse.
    And sitting here by the fire, watching the rain beating at the milkwoods outside the window, one mad gull spinning high up in the turbulent air, Marion did indeed feel safe – in the warmth of her aunts’ affection, in this house that her grandfather had built for his daughters. She wanted to be in here with them, not out in the storm. Perhaps it might be possible to stay for good this time.
    Behind her, Amelia sighed with satisfaction. “ Voilà! ”
    Marion turned to see her positioning a piece on the framework of the phantom vase. It floated there, bellying out the lost curve.
    “Well done, Auntie A! You got a fit.” Marion stood and went to her, reaching out to touch the vase.
    “Careful,” said Amelia, and Marion smiled. After storm and wreck and tidal grinding, now to treat it like crystal. But she was careful.
    “You’ll never find all the pieces, surely?”
    “Of course not. That’s not the point. This isn’t a jigsaw. But we can make it more whole than it was.”
    “You and your old pots!” Belle snorted, pinching hair out of the brush. “Spoils of empire, that’s what they are. Flotsam of greed and conquest!”
    Amelia directed a private smile at her floating vase and pressed the abutting pieces more snugly together. “But still, very pretty,” she murmured.
    “Rubbish. Why don’t you collect the local pottery, Amelia? Now that’s beautiful. And useful.”
    “Stop fighting, you two,” said Marion. It was an old argument, and the aunts were enjoying themselves. In this house, nobody raised their voices in earnest – not any more.
    “Oh, don’t go back to the city, darling child,” Belle sighed, laying a hand on Marion’s smoothed hair. Marion knew that she was thinking of storms and disaster, greed and grief. But her aunt sounded resigned, as one is resigned to history.
    That night, Marion dreamt again the dream of her mother: her young and beautiful mother, burning, throwing again and again a clear glass vase against the wall of the bedroom. Marion woke with the shattering all around her. It took a moment or two for her ears to clear, her heart to still; to hear only the quiet of the night, with its distant hushing of waves.
    In the dream it was always that one particular vase, turning and turning through the air, while around her mother’s tall, ecstatic figure the room was filled with sparkling splinters and a constant grinding sound of breakage that never seemed to slacken or to cease.
    One ordinary evening two weeks before, Marion had taken each of twelve good dinner plates – plain white china, which she had desired and saved up for and bought precisely because of their blank purity, the only complete set of crockery she’d ever owned – and thrown them, one by one, at the wall of her flat. For no real reason. A bad day in a bad week. A fight at work, a phone call from an old boyfriend. Not really reasons at all. It had frightened her, had made her feel that she was standing on the edge of a cliff, hurling