‘You think death is fun?’ she sneered.
The lake was created when a small village in the valley was flooded some decades earlier. It was extremely deep. Apparently some people had refused to leave the town before it was submerged – like those ship’s captains who remained on the deck of their sinking vessel – and I imagined them in their watery houses: sitting on their couches staring resolutely ahead, cups of tea at hand, hair floating like seaweed about their pale and swollen faces.
Various items, having drifted loose from whatever bound them to the lake’s bottom, floated occasionally to its surface. Toys, bits of plastic, clothes, playing cards, scraps of paper. Once a stuffed cat, which bobbed about for several days before sinking again. Books, bones, a child’s pink underpants. Lakes are very different to other bodies of water. Unlike a river, say, or an ocean, a lake is not so constantly renewed.
The lake water was almost always icy cold – even in summer. On winter mornings a ghostly layer of fog seethed across its surface. Sometimes it iced over, but the ice was never very thick and we were sternly warned away from ever attempting to walk or skate on it. Our mother used to swim across the lake and back several times a week, except in the coldest months. I’m going away for a while, she would announce to inform the household where she would be for the next hour or so. She liked to swim in the early evening best, and I recall her standing at the shore, snapping a swimming cap on her head before plunging in and churning across, until she grew smaller and finally disappeared in the gloom. I used to fret dreadfully when she fell from sight, so one day she handed me a pair of binoculars to observe her progress, and from then on would blow me a kiss when she reached the other side to indicate that she was fine, not to worry. Then I would wait on the shore until she trudged gleamingly from the muddy water and say, almost every time, You never regret a swim. As she dried herself she sometimes regaled me with what she had seen on her journey, extravagant tales populated with the spectral residents of the submerged town: of the baker setting out his wares in the window of his shop; of old Mrs Jones doing her knitting up a tree; of the local Aboriginal tribe conducting a ceremony for their boys. When I was older she asked me to join her, but half-heartedly; I have since become an avid swimmer myself and have come to recognise the pleasure in the solitude and the sense of entering another dimension, a netherworld we might visit but never fully inhabit.
Robert and I didn’t talk about the strange, long-legged girl on the way back and we didn’t mention her to our father, but we returned to the far side of the lake the following day, and the day after. The girl’s name was Leonora Bloom. She told us she was fourteen, a couple of years older than me and a year younger than Robert. She wore the same clothes every day, including the Viking helmet. Her breath always smelled of vinegar, and her allure – if you could call it that – was slinky and unpredictable.
We sat in the Datsun and gossiped about local people. She told us she had travelled the world and had visited the casinos of Vegas, the cafes of Athens, the forests of Tasmania. I had never been anywhere, so the mere thought of such places thrilled me. I skimmed stones across the surface of the lake and imagined them tumbling through the dark water, their descent like those of feathers in air: rocking to and fro until they came to rest among the skeleton of the old town. Perceiving the world beneath the surface was a kind of curse for me; rarely did I see something than I immediately invoked its shadow.
‘You should come and meet Jesus,’ Leonora Bloom announced one afternoon.
Bearded, wild-eyed Jesus was an itinerant man who was spotted stalking through town every year or so. All sorts of rumours swirled about him: parties, squalor, drugs; he’d fought in the Vietnam war; he’d once killed a cop; he had twelve children. I was terrified at the thought of meeting him. About two years earlier we were driving to the grocery store and my dad pointed him out. Jesus was wearing a plaid shirt and tattered jeans; it took me several seconds to identify him among the crowd waiting for the dole office to open. ‘There’s our saviour, boys,’ my dad chuckled, ‘risen from the dead.’
‘We can’t go,’ I whispered to Robert. ‘It’s getting too late.’ I sounded like a scared little girl and, what’s worse, I knew it.
My brother was driving. In the back seat, Leonora Bloom removed her Viking helmet, shook out her dirty blonde hair and refitted the helmet to her head. Robert watched her attentively in the cracked rear-view mirror and although no one said anything, it was obvious a decision had been made.
‘Turn right here and pull over,’ she said as she clambered across the seat.
We followed Leonora Bloom through the pines, her legs thin as matchsticks, glint of late sunlight on her helmet. I turned to look back across the lake and thought I saw my father standing at the lounge room window, a tiny figure, so forlorn. His name was Frank. He was melancholy, subject to insomnia, a lover of crosswords. Although I suspected he was barely aware of it himself, he was still waiting, patiently waiting, for my mother’s return. At that moment I missed him terribly. A cigarette was probably burning between the fingers of his right hand. Our empty house, with its smell of sodden tea leaves and its hum of fridge.
I waved, but there was no response. I doubt he saw me. No surprise in that; children didn’t really exist for the fathers of my generation. Besides, by then it was almost dark.
Our mother was long gone. We all missed her, of course, but for Robert the pain never ceased. He was angry and dejected. I feared for him. He wept almost every night. After all, he said, he had known her longer than I had. This always carried the force of rebuke, the implication being that my own grief had not been sufficiently earned. His heart felt dislocated, he said – this strange phrase accompanied by twisting his hands together, as if wringing out a sponge or breaking the neck of a small animal.
Robert told me other stories about her, things I didn’t remember or was too young to have been conscious of, but which, over time and retelling, began to resemble my own memories: her fondness for Turkish delight; the time she dressed down the butcher for his overpriced beef; the powdery scent of her clothes.
Leonora Bloom led my brother and me to their camp, which was a cluster of old, broken-down mining shacks. There was no one else around. The largest building was constructed of dark weatherboard and built on the side of a hill. Its eaves were garlanded with vines. It seemed to hover above the ground, rather than sit upon it. Weirdest of all, however, was the fact that Robert and I had never encountered it before, even though it probably wasn’t further than two kilometres from where we had lived our entire lives.
‘How could we have never found this?’ I said.
Leonora Bloom shot me a scornful glance. Her forehead gleamed with perspiration. She licked the sweat from her upper lip. ‘Because only a few of us know how to get out here,’ she said. ‘You think we want the whole town here?’
I opened my mouth to speak but she was already walking away, with Robert trotting behind like a puppy. We sat on a big cane chair hanging from a tree by a chain, sharing a can of warm lemonade. I don’t know what I had expected, but it was peaceful there, almost completely silent apart from the birds. You could dimly hear traffic from the main street, but that was all. Leonora Bloom and my brother were tickling each other and giggling. I sat on the lip of the chair looking the other way, pretending I wasn’t bothered.
After a while I realised that a young woman was watching us from behind some trees. She had long hair and wore a tattered yellow dress. Then I saw an older man at the corner of the house. Another man was watching us from a dirty window. This man was bearded, hollow-faced, intense. On his head was a crown of what looked like dry, tangled vine.
Later, Robert rowed us home across the lake towards the orange glow of our kitchen, which was the only light to be seen on the far side. By then it was so dark and so quiet that we might have been astronauts navigating towards a distant space station. There was only the sound of our oars
in the locks, their rhythmic splash. I trailed my fingers in the cool, black water. Finally, we beached the little boat, dragged it up to the grass in front of the house and flipped it over to drain. Robert went and stood by the shore, looking across the lake. I stood next to him. There was nothing to see, of course: just darkness across the expanse of gleaming water.
‘We shouldn’t go back there,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Just don’t, okay.’
‘But why?’
But he was already walking away.
2
I started hanging around at the camp as often as I could. Aside from Jesus and Leonora Bloom there were two or three other adults staying there whom I saw only occasionally. I was never introduced to any of them and mostly they ignored me, like a pet occasionally underfoot. Perhaps this was why I liked the place – no one asked polite questions about school or treated me as if I were made of glass on account of what had happened to my mother; probably they knew nothing about her. Robert never joined me and although I sensed his disapproval, he did nothing to stop me going over there and he never told our dad.
Jesus had tattoos the size of insects on his hands and forearms. Numbers, a swastika, little dots and, along the flesh of his inner arm, a list of women’s names in cursive script, like signatures. Alice, Marilyn, Lorraine.
‘Innocence is the great lie of childhood,’ he said to me once. ‘Children are equally capable of evil. Maybe more so.’
He said these sort of things often and afterwards I would lie in bed at home pondering his words as our father drifted through the house – smoking, drinking cups of tea, running a hand through his hair.
Alice. My mother’s name.
Our house was cold. Any sunlight through its windows was thin. Blankets on our knees in front of the radiator, toast and baked beans for dinner, watching TV through the night and, in the morning, the honk of ducks across the water.
Sometimes at night I listened to an ancient transistor radio, scrolling through the stations with it pressed to my ear. I had by this time constructed an elaborate fantasy in which my mother had run away to join some sort of underground political resistance. I knew it was ridiculous, but I still hoped to hear her voice on the radio. I never did, of course. There was only music, lots of static, old tunes, news of the world.
When my mother disappeared, my father entered a strange state that he was yet to wake from. Sometimes I watched him sleeping, which he did with a look of intense concentration on his face. Grey hair at his temples and a pockmark on the bridge of his nose from childhood chicken pox. I hovered over him, inhaling his bitter, diazepam-stained breath, hoping to detect something of his dreams. I assumed his dreams were similar to mine: my mother walking by the lake in her blue dress with its pattern of white flowers, my mother’s expression of bemused happiness, scratching her calf with the toe of her other foot. Once, when I was leaning over him, his eyes flicked open and, momentarily startled, he said, ‘Oh, it’s only you,’ before rolling over and going back to sleep.
Several times, prompted by I don’t know what, there would be a party at the house on the other side of the lake and the residents dressed up and there was an abundance of food and wine. How to describe those nights? The fires, the feasts, dancing, the complete relinquishing of the senses? Women with antlers, men in cloaks. Snouts glistening with juices, candlelight and smoke, the sharp fizz of cider. It was strange and glorious, not of this world. It was ramshackle, heavenly, sublime. Yes, they took me in.
When it became cold, Jesus wore a fur coat so bulky that, combined with his large beard and long hair, he resembled a shaggy bear lumbering around the house. ‘So,’ he said to me late one afternoon as we sat together at a chipped wooden table in the kitchen, ‘do you think you can tell heaven from hell?’
I didn’t say anything; I was never sure, when he spoke like this, if I was actually supposed to answer, or merely listen. I smirked a little, trying to give the impression that I understood his cryptic comments only too well but didn’t, at that precise moment, feel the urge to respond. I was drawn to him, like fire; but, like fire, he frightened me. I could hear music coming from somewhere in the depths of the house. The sound was muddy. Then a woman’s sudden laughter, like glass shattering. I longed for someone to appear, distract him and allow me to slide away unnoticed.
He waved a hand around. ‘This is not all there is, you know. No. Entire worlds, whole galaxies. If you could see what I have seen, my son. Attack ships off the shores of Orion. Vast, hidden cities. The march of soldiers. Things. Such . . . things. You think events happen for a reason, don’t you?’
I shrugged; I didn’t really know what I believed.
‘That the world is some sort of vending machine, meting out experiences. That if you are good and put the correct change in the slot, then good will come to you – if not in this life, then in the next. Isn’t that right?’
I did more or less believe this but it seemed a childish thing to admit, like confessing to a belief in Santa Claus or fairies or God.
‘But sometimes things just happen. The world doesn’t care. The universe doesn’t care. The wind blows, trees fall over. People’s hearts stop working. Meteors strike the earth, waves crash upon the shore. We tell stories to impose order on the world, to give things meaning. To give us hope.’ He lapsed into silence, as if overwhelmed.
‘Why do they call you Jesus?’ I ventured at last.
His gaze, which had lost focus during his little soliloquy, turned on me. ‘Did your family never take you to church?’
I shook my head. My dad hardly took us anywhere, not even to school.
For a long time Jesus inspected the tattoos scattered across the backs of his hands, which he often did when he was thinking. Then he looked at me with his clear, blue eyes and, although he said nothing for some time, I understood at that moment why they all adored him; his smile was so unguarded, frailer than butterfly wings.
‘Because they murdered me,’ he said at last, ‘but I returned.’
3
One afternoon I encountered Leonora Bloom squatting on a tree stump by the lake shore, fishing. On the bank beside her was a little smoking fire of twigs. There was a knife in her plastic bucket, but no fish. Inedible, thick-bodied serpents lived in the lake and occasionally loomed beneath the surface like half-remembered dreams, peering up before disappearing again into the depths. They resembled the detached forearms of very muscular men. I never knew what they were called; we called them lake slugs. They had silvery scales and small, very sharp teeth, although they were harmless to humans. Once Robert and I hauled one from the lake in a net and watched it gasp and writhe about on the muddy bank until it died: appalled by its death, too appalled to shove it back into the water.
I opened my mouth to tell Leonora Bloom about these creatures but something in her manner made me hold my tongue. The fire softly crackled. She dragged in her line, replaced the bait and flung it expertly back into the water. She seemed annoyed at my disturbing her, but it felt awkward to leave without saying anything, so I tossed a few twigs into the fire and asked her why she always wore her helmet.
She rolled her eyes. ‘Because I’m a fucking Viking. What do you reckon?’
A tiny glint of sunlight caught my eye on the far side of the lake. I glanced at our house. ‘That’s probably my dad,’ I said, gesturing lamely, ‘watching us through his binoculars.’
Leonora Bloom followed my gaze, her features arranged in a sceptical scowl, before turning back to her line. ‘I had an imaginary family when I was a kid, too,’ she muttered as she threaded a worm onto her hook. ‘It was very comforting.’
I felt, suddenly, like weeping and stood up to go but, perhaps wishing to make amends, Leonora Bloom asked me to pass her the knife from the bucket. When I’d done so, she cut her line with it and fiddled about, replacing the hook she had been using with a smaller one. T
hen she cast again while I stood by, wanting to leave while not wishing to reveal my hurt. From the house behind the trees drifted a deep rumble of Jesus’s laughter.
‘Is he your dad?’ I asked.
‘No!’ she scoffed, as if the question were one of the stupidest she’d heard in her life. ‘He’s just some guy. No. A saint, really. That’s what he is. Guy’s a fucking saint.’
‘He said he had been murdered.’
‘Don’t you believe in miracles?’
Unsure how else to respond, I shrugged. I didn’t really believe in those things, but I sensed that this answer would only invite further scorn. I could already tell that she despised me; usually it took people longer.
‘It’s true,’ she continued. ‘A man killed him in jail. You should see the massive scar on his chest. And now he can do all sorts of things. Walk on water. See the future.’
‘Where are your parents, then?’
She pulled in her line and began packing up her fishing gear. ‘They died ages ago in an accident. Your mother’s dead, too, isn’t she?’
No one had ever actually said this to me before, but in that moment I recognised the truth of it. And, after the shock, it was a relief, an infection finally eased. Of course. Of course she was dead.
I nodded. ‘But they’ve never . . . found her. There was never a funeral or anything.’
‘That’s tough. Funerals are important. You know, we believe that when people are born, an old woman sitting under a tree carves into a stick a bunch of notches that indicate how many years the person will live for. Fifty, twenty-five, whatever. It’s all fixed,’ she added. ‘It’s fate. There’s nothing you can do.’ She paused, to ensure that I had understood her meaning. ‘You think she made it into heaven?’
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