The Golden Book

by Kate Ryan

  ‘I’d like you to stop,’ she said.

  Cal stared, a haughty expression, challenging. ‘Not sure what you mean,’ he said. He smiled in Marco’s direction. ‘Not doing much here except drinking.’

  Ali thought of Tam again, wheeling around the playground with Bettany, the pair of them like wild birds let out of a cage. How suddenly Tam had appeared separate from her, as if she were a child Ali didn’t know, a changeling, or not of this world, another species completely. Cal was looking at her almost curiously now, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, his white shirt crumpled around the brown skin of his neck. How strange, she thought. They were both adults now. Not even young. There would be no other time. Ali swallowed. Her ears were roaring. ‘I was twelve,’ she said. ‘For fuck’s sake. Twelve.’

  Cal looked down. Perhaps his body stilled. He gulped his beer. The golden colour, the bubbles of cold around the glass. She saw the bulge of liquid pass down his throat. He gave a small cough. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know that.’

  She moved back to pick up her bag and jacket from a chair. Her head felt tight but light, as if she were feverish. She wanted a glass of water, but not to stop at the bar to get one. She nodded at Trudy. ‘I’d better head off. It was good to meet you.’

  Eli tried to catch her eye, looked at her expectantly. ‘You okay? What was all that about?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  31

  Once they started seeing each other, Ali realised she had been always looking for signs — of improvement, love, forgiveness, an end to fear. Eli’s coming along seemed to mean something. There was a film now and then, drinking in a beer garden in Surry Hills. In his quiet, Eli was much more like her than Jessie ever was. He had a job at one of the big chain cinemas, and Ali would meet him after his late shift. They would wander around the deserted city, looking in the Grace Bros. windows, or sit on a bench somewhere down near the water, sharing a pile of snacks he had taken from work — rock-hard choc tops, a packet of salt and vinegar chips — and crunching ice between their teeth as they passed a watery Coke between them.

  Soon they were spending more time together. ‘What can I get you?’ he would say when she came over. ‘Do you want some tea?’ He was like her dad. Kind. There were a couple of op-shop presents — a tiny picture of wintry trees in a gilt frame, a cup and saucer decorated with magenta roses. He cooked for her a few times: minestrone, rich with chickpeas and pasta, a curry. After the second meal, he walked her home and gave her a quick hug at the front door of her share house. The smell of his ragged cotton shirt reminded Ali somehow of Bega.

  She fell asleep thinking that she shouldn’t start anything with him. But she knew she would.

  Reading and smoking seemed to be Eli’s most vital activities. Reading about Buddhism, Islam, Sufism, Hinduism; reading Dante, Nietzsche, Sartre, Plato, Heidegger. After a joint or two, he talked about all of this endlessly. Ali hardly cared what he said, and she didn’t offer much in return. It wasn’t that he was trying to impress her or make her look dumb, as some boys did. She knew he was searching for something. And he was sad. And being with him made her remember that she was too.

  The first time they had sex, she cried. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, scrunching up his eyes in concern. For a moment she thought of saying, but then she pulled herself into his arms so that she wouldn’t have to. ‘Nothing.’ She couldn’t say that she had felt for an instant when they were making love that Jessie might be okay; that she had cried because she knew it wasn’t true.

  In the weeks after that, they lay around his room for hours in the afternoons after Ali’s classes, smoking and talking. Once Ali stayed in his room while he went to work, and heard his housemates, Nat and Sylvia, coming and going with an urgency that seemed incomprehensible. She lay, half-stoned, thinking about what it meant, about how since the night they had met up again, they had never talked about what happened to Jessie.

  She got out of bed and looked around. There were half a dozen postcards stuck above his desk: Klimt, Schiele, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Munch, Van Gogh. She pulled off the Van Gogh and read the back. It was sent from Amsterdam, from someone called Lisa, and ended with a row of x kisses. Have been getting lost in the markets and spending time with the red-haired guy who cut off his own ear. Amazing paintings but they’re doing my head in a bit. See you when I get back. Reading this, Ali felt a surge of jealous desire. He hadn’t mentioned anyone. She stuck the card back up, opened and closed drawers, and flicked through the sketchbook on his desk. There were café scenes, kids playing in the park, one of Sylvia sitting on the front doorstep, laughing, a cluttered kitchen table — a plate with orange peel on it, a dirty ashtray and a coffee cup. There were several of some unknown girl, a thin, sculpted face with big, dark eyes, long limbs; sitting at a table, and propped up on her elbows reading a book. Ali looked at these closely. Was this Lisa? She kept flicking the pages. The rest of the drawings were mostly landscapes, a straggly bunch of trees, a pale sea. Except for one — a wiry girl in shorts and a big square T-shirt with writing on the front. Bony knees and long, tangly hair. She was frowning, and the likeness made Ali feel she might stop breathing.

  She closed the sketchbook and in minutes she got dressed, gathered her things, left Eli’s room, and jogged down the stairs. As soon as she shut the door and walked out the front gate, she felt profound relief.

  But she kept coming back. Excitement mixed with shame when she felt the urge to see him again. Debating it in her mind and then setting out towards his house, without calling first — because that would have given her another opportunity to interrupt herself, to decide not to. Even as she did it, she knew the toxic repetition of the cycle. Until finally she knocked on his door. But once he’d opened it and smiled at her, and led her in and up to his room, she felt a sense of containment, as if she was going back somewhere, somewhere she was safe. They always made love straightaway, urgently and silently. After they had slept — Ali was always exhausted, as if the journey to get there, an easy ten-minute walk, had been physically taxing — she woke to the shame again. Though who would care or think anything at all about what they were doing? Only those who would never know.

  For a few months, everything receded. Ali scuttled in and out of her share-house, avoided her friends. She made it to fewer and fewer lectures. Some self-preservation made her hand in her essays, but they were rushed, badly written, and her marks fell. She thought often of stopping things with him.

  But when she was away, she felt his tug on her, as if it were the pull of the tide. She longed to be in his room again, the music Jessie had hated as a child spinning on the record player; the joints that drained away the need to do anything; the laughing about nothing, about Eli’s latest theory on happiness, or living or dying. Eli’s clutter of books higgledy-piggledy on the dusty shelves; his records in milk crates; his clothes spilling out of an open suitcase with ripped mushroom-coloured lining; his bed with its fringed blue cotton cover trailing on the floor; his desk with its brown bowl half-full of weed. The cobwebs in the corners; the crack on the ceiling; the glass paperweight with its pink-and-red origami flower inside like a heart; his cigarette papers; his notebooks spilling words; his postcards and sketches; his racing bike leaning against one wall.

  As if, though she knew she wouldn’t, she might at last elect to leave.

  The safety and the sinking. She couldn’t give them up.

  32

  Ali walked towards her parents’ house. The street was empty and wide. The air warm and velvety, the smell of something: boronia, grass; the grind of engine brakes from the highway. It was good to be outside. Maybe that was the end of it. Then, on reaching the park — its expanse of grass, its trees and shrubs emitting coolness — she stopped and, with sudden clarity, turned in a different direction.

  She turned down the path and walked onto the grass, feeling the sponginess under her feet, the layers of the day falling awa
y. She sat under the fig tree, where kids used to smoke, where Bernie had asked about Cal and the motorcross that day; Jessie, pokerfaced, daring anyone to ask what they were doing.

  After ten minutes Eli came, as she knew he would. He sat next to her, his warm arm that she didn’t want to touch. She could smell wine and sweat. ‘You have some set-to with Cal? Never picked you for a pub brawler.’

  Ali smiled. ‘Ha. Yeah. He had it coming, though.’

  They laughed quietly.

  Ali looked out across the grass, remembered Jessie planted on her bum, one red/white heel pulled back so that she could pull prickles out. ‘Little buggers …’ she had muttered. ‘Bloody everywhere.’

  Eli began to talk. ‘I slept in Jessie’s room for a while afterwards … When Aggie shifted her into her room …’ No response was expected, and he continued in a dreamy way. ‘It was the biggest, so she could fit all the paraphernalia in it more easily. Wheelchair and bed brace. All that stuff.’ He pulled a beer out of the backpack beside him. ‘Want one?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He handed her a beer, opened his and drank. ‘I should slow down. I gave up weed. Just suddenly had enough. Reminded me too much of Aggie. Who knows if this is any better.’ He started again, as if he were just telling a story and she could be anyone.

  ‘Cal left, couch-surfing, wherever, as long as he wasn’t there. He couldn’t stand it, seeing her that way. Matty went off to Sydney, and I moved into Jessie’s old room. Weird — it was more like she was still the old her when I was in there. As if she was just away somehere, maybe your place. I dunno.’

  Ali coloured. She had heard versions of this many times from her mother. But she hadn’t heard it from the inside. When she stopped going to visit Jessie with Diane, the house had been closed to her too. That was hard; like a dream place gone.

  Eli lapsed into silence and began again, more prosaic, just facts. ‘She just got pneumonia in the end. It was pretty quick. She’d stopped eating much, Aggie said. Maybe her immune system was shot.’ Failure to thrive.

  Ali looked at the lights popping on around the oval. A lone woman made her way around the track, running hard, stopping, running hard again. Pneumonia was an old person’s illness. She thought of Jessie and herself out late into the night, drunk for the first time on half a cask of wine stolen from Cal; running, laughing, spinning, rolling, chucking grass pats at each other, then flopping down on their backs. Ali’s eyes closed, then open, closed again. Wanting to sleep, and then the spinning waking her and the sudden churn of acid in her stomach; rolling over to vomit on the grass. Did Jessie look after her, take her back to her place? She couldn’t remember.

  Eli stared straight ahead. ‘I’ve got some stuff for you.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ali pushed her hair out of her eyes. Her heart began a thump thump. He was expressionless, gazing at the oval, the swings, the sky darkening more now, like a curtain coming down. ‘I was gonna give it to you at the pub …’ He pulled a plastic shopping bag out of his backpack and handed it to her. ‘Fi’s got me to see someone finally. A psych. She thought I should give some stuff to you and other people who knew Jessie. I kept wanting to hold onto stuff of hers, but it never made a difference. There’re some drawings and bits and pieces. Some photos. Thought you might want them.’

  She calculated the weight of the bag. There was nothing heavy enough, but she wouldn’t look yet. She didn’t want to find out something she didn’t know, or even something she did. ‘Thanks, but are you sure? Won’t Aggie want them?’

  ‘No.’ She registered his assertiveness — different, again, from how he had been. Maybe he would be okay.

  Alone in her room, Ali had added more and more to the Golden Book. She became reckless. She wrote about Cal: how she hated him and his motorbikes, his big boofhead, his ugly girlfriend, his mullet-headed friends. She wrote about the others too. Aggie was an airhead. Matty a greasy pothead. Only Eli was left out. Why? Because, perhaps, he was more like her. Jessie was always casual with the book. She left it splayed open on her floor, poking out under a dirty T-shirt, on her record player between a bunch of records. At home Ali kept it under her mattress or sometimes didn’t even bother to hide it from Diane’s tidying, which had grown lackadaisical in dashing back and forth from her mother’s bedside. It occurred to Ali again that she had wanted it found. It lay beneath her as she slept, a glowing thing, a mutant star, a planet towards which she seemed to be careering.

  In the playground a father had arrived with a little boy for a late play, and he lifted him onto a swing, illuminated under a streetlight. ‘Go, Daddy, go!’ he shouted, his voice carrying in the still night. ‘I wanna go high.’

  Eli watched them. ‘I’ve wondered about it — a lot. Whose idea was it go there?’

  Ali spoke quickly before she could stop herself. ‘Hers. Jessie’s.’

  Eli looked at her for a second, then turned back to the child and his father. He seemed to take something in, and then he made a small, performative shaking gesture with his head. He raised his beer to drink the dregs. ‘I thought so.’ He sounded businesslike, not dreamy any more. Just like when he rang to tell her she was dead. ‘Typical of her to come up with something that stupid.’

  Her mind went to the place. The moment before. She wondered again if she could have stopped it.

  ‘You were the writer, weren’t you?’

  Ali watched the boy and his father. The father was trying to get him to leave now, and the boy was bearing down and holding onto the swing, his tiny body a ball of determination. ‘Noo, Daddy, no. Don’t want to go!’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Why did I take you there?’ Eli rubbed at his eyes. ‘I left you there, knowing what she was like. So incredibly stupid.’

  Whose fault was it? Ali felt the clouding of her mind. It was different from the counsellors, from Ed. There was nothing to say. She wished he would stop speaking.

  ‘One time Aggie really laid into Cal when he was having a go at her, making out she didn’t care. Saying she preferred her afterwards. She went crazy, punching and kicking. Claudio had to pull her off.’ He paused, grimaced. ‘Yeah, she got back together with him … Anyway, she was screaming at Cal and he was crying. He said she was cold. And she went for him again … finally Cal just left. We didn’t see him for months. I don’t know what I think. She knew how to deal with us — me and Cal and Matty — but she didn’t know what to do with Jessie. It would have got worse. They would have been at each other’s throats, I reckon.’ Eli shrugged, and she saw his hand holding the beer was shaking. She thought of Diane’s comment about his mental health issues; her precise labelling of everything.

  They talked for a while about other things, work, kids, Aggie and her parents getting old, and then lapsed into silence. They could have talked about their affair, but it was as remote as childhood. They both knew it would never have happened. If not for what had happened to her.

  They were lying in Eli’s room in Newtown, the doona half off the bed and a winter breeze through the window. It was early morning, and Ali was still fooling herself that it was good — their little cocoon, their pretending life. She was in and out of sleep, curled around his body, when he started talking with no preamble, as he often did. ‘You know Mumbulla’s important for the local people?’

  Straightaway, Ali was wide awake. ‘What?’

  ‘Remember Nicky O’Hare?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Nicky was a Yuin boy who had been at high school with them, younger than Eli but older than Ali. She remembered seeing him at the pool once, lying on the lawn in black footy shorts, smoking; his caramel-coloured chest and his big smile. Singing up at Sue Fleming, who was wearing a black string bikini, the skinniest, brownest, meanest girl at Bega High, her legs astride his supine body. It was ‘Georgie Girl’, perfectly in tune: ‘Hey there, Susie girl! Hey there, Susie girl!’ long enough, and loudly and embarrassingly enough, for
Sue to spit, ‘Shut the fuck up, Nicky.’

  Nicky just flashed his white teeth.

  Of course they were having sex, so Jessie said.

  ‘He told me a lot of people didn’t want anyone to swim there. It was a special place. Ancient.’

  Ali nodded, mute.

  They stood in the street. A couple of tow-headed kids, a girl and a boy, wandered after their father as he walked to a car clicking an electronic key. Two teenagers, brown legs and flannel shirts, laughed as they left the supermarket, one of them carrying a carton of beer. They got in a ute, TP’s Plumbing Services, and roared off somewhere.

  Eli said he needed to get back to Aggie’s place. He was staying there. And he should call Fi. And deal with Cal. ‘Though, who knows, I might get lucky. Maybe he’ll have passed out by now.’

  They smiled.

  ‘Yeah, I better get back too. Mum’s dealing with a lot. Dad’s not that good now.’

  ‘I know, I heard.’ Eli held out his arms, and Ali stepped into them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  They moved apart. ‘Need a lift?’

  ‘Naah.’

  ‘Okay.’ Eli moved towards the car, and Ali raised her hand.

  ‘Bye.’

  She turned away and started to walk, the plastic bag with the detritus of Jessie’s life in her hand, hearing him open the door and the engine of his family car turning. She wouldn’t see him again.

  33

  It was late on a Saturday morning, and Ali was sitting at the kitchen table wearing shorts and an old T-shirt of Eli’s when he got up to answer the door. She never gave up her share-house room completely, but she was comfortable at his place by now. Sylvia and Nat accepted her, and just then, Monday’s worries about university seemed years away.