A Stolen Season

by Rodney Hall

  Enough of that.

  Half a life, they say, is better than none. The proof woven into it being a memory of Bridget when he first knew her, the silkiness of her thighs, the subtle skin-smell driving him nuts. Then, of course . . .

  Scissoring to the window. Adam gazes out at Yao’s untidy place down below. Across the road the park sprinklers twirl arcs of diamonds.

  Josh and Vanessa, arriving ready for work, find him asleep. Bridget leads them into the kitchen to wait while she rouses him. ‘He hates being caught unawares like this.’ As if he’ll ever be otherwise. But the professionals will have no such nonsense. They insist on their own purposes.

  ‘It’s part of our brief—to be a resource for you, too,’ the counsellor rebukes her. ‘We are not just here for Adam. You must have your own life. Our policy includes carers. We never take carers for granted. The Department can arrange home help, if you like.’

  ‘You think I neglect him!’ Bridget flares.

  ‘No. No. Nothing like that. But there is a pattern.’

  And those in the know nod at one another.

  ‘We see a lot of families.’

  ‘I’ll go and wake him.’

  Actually Adam hears them . . . through the fog of connections . . . he hears and does not hear. Oh, he has demons to suppress before he can cope with other people: himself the destroyer, exalted by the force and beauty of destruction, glimpsing his apotheosis when the powerless were sent flying. Though it never crossed his mind that the war was theirs to fight, not his. Nor that he might fail. He went to war like that—lit up and driven by pure energy—to prove his independence. Also as a way out for Bridget.

  Some days wakefulness comes jackhammering the heart. Sparkles crackle behind the eyes. Other times it’s a drift between the uncertainties of life and death while the media stir up the latest fuss. Even in a wasteland of outer suburbs tragedies dark as Shakespeare take shape with unprovoked killer punches, deadly spores in hospital air-conditioners, abandoned old people and children hanging themselves behind closed doors. And the government does its best, whipping up fear and paranoia with shrill warnings against terrorism. A few desperate youths, spied on by their own mobiles and computers—sent stir-crazy by the lack of anything to believe in (including a future)—are reported as volunteering for the sainthood promised by some unanalyzed pill. Well, he takes it all in.

  There seems to be as much preoccupation with death in sleepy Australia as actual death in Iraq.

  ‘Something’s definitely up,’ Vanessa observes when she and Josh, having finished the visit, shut themselves in their departmental car. ‘I don’t miss much.’ She nails it. ‘There’s a glint in that young lady’s eye.’

  Bridget’s privacy has been invaded, even though the offence may have been kindly meant. She frets. No good. So she goes for a short run around the lake. Of course, her conscience won’t let her stay out long. But exercise clears the mind and the lake is soothing.

  There’s nothing new about unhappiness. Truth to tell, it goes back a long way to the misunderstandings of their marriage. Yet then Adam was the one to provide the solution. His choice of the army caused her to wonder if he understood himself better than she’d given him credit for. It hit her hard, even so. Failure is never easy. Suddenly the lake is right there, welling up to swallow her. A cosmic throat. The tilt of a grassy slope propels her towards it, so she needs to pull back against gravity. She avoids colliding with a child only just in time, a child who runs crosswise down the lawn chasing a kite, persistently tugging the string with enthusiastic squeals, a child gifted with creamy skin and brilliant eyes. The kite swoops toward disaster, dips one tip in the water and then—miraculously lifted by shrieks of encouragement—jerks up again into its own element. Bridget catches a glimpse of someone possessed and fierce in that small person . . . and now here is the obedient father, baggy pants rolled above the knee, already questioning Bridget with his smile of recognition.

  ‘So you come here, too!’ she objects, dismayed by how unwelcoming this sounds.

  The little girl stops stone-still and lets the kite flop at her feet while assessing the intrusion with not-expectant interest. Does her daddy know this person? Well, yes, and now she catches an unwanted connection between them: an exchanged stare which, passing her by, excludes her importance. A warning. She remembers the bogeyman in his spider cage.

  ‘This park is the best thing,’ Yao explains across a bridge of space chock full of fragrance and combative claims.

  Bridget nods to encourage more. Her claim on the place—and wanting to keep it for herself—is unreasonable. She tries suppressing the rebellious thoughts that dance in the air between them like swarming stars. There is even a demonic gardener to alert her to the danger of men, steering his motor mower in straight lines across the curved lawn as the ruthless assertion of power. Bridget blazes with clarity.

  ‘Good morning, Yao,’ she says lightly.

  At that moment it occurs to her as curious that such a careful individual ever came to lose a partner. A blink of the shutter. And she observes him as a scarcely known stranger.

  ‘You have fun,’ she instructs the little one, who listens with the solemn patience of refusal.

  ‘We never found the puppy,’ Yao volunteers.

  Bridget, once the fact registers, thinks it through.

  ‘Somebody may have taken him in. They may be feeding him. You could put up a lost dog notice. Stick it on the lamp posts and in the window at the café.’

  ‘A notice . . .’ He seems to fling the hopeless suggestion back at her.

  And hope, as she knows, has a habit of dying. In this case even a day or two is too much time to elapse since the loss of a puppy. And notices are mostly for useless transactions.

  In fact, he comes to quite another opinion.

  ‘A notice . . . may be just what we need.’

  ‘With a picture, Daddy.’

  ‘A picture of Baby,’ Bridget confirms, though she cannot know whether or not he—the one who matters—is really thinking of Baby. The trace of bewilderment in his voice could be for a greater loss.

  ‘Poor Linda.’ He confirms it. ‘There are times when she misses her mother.’

  The child watches him curiously. The idea of a mother no more real to her than a fairytale. Baby is the important thing. She still cries for Baby.

  ‘Anyhow, I promise to come soon and build your ramp.’

  Bridget smiles agreement.

  Among the recognizable categories of silence is the aftermath of shock. Mudbrick granaries disintegrate. Hovels and hospitals are bombed. The last remaining doors and windows blown out and roofs blasted off, minarets crumple as the sky explodes noiselessly. The oasis is left poisoned, crops wither and a single-strand telephone wire shivers with meaningless frequencies. A diesel carrier on big rubber treads pulls over at the roadside, motor clicking in the scarcely cooler air, as though some fragile thing has snapped under the bonnet, the membrane of conscience among memories of what Nobby said when those ruins first rose into view on the horizon: ‘Imagine building any fucking thing, any fucking thing at all, out here in the boondocks—the bloody heartbreak!’ When no one responded, the man who was soon to die tried to soften it with a joke. ‘And imagine having to start all over when we finish blowing it up for them!’

  The guys emerge from under their helmets, tugging their goggles off, leaving goggle-shaped masks on naked faces. Grit among stubble, the curved blade of shade slicing the base of a sunburnt nose. Watchful witnessing eyes. Under the ridge of eyebrows a dangerous sparkle of reflected sunglare. Emptiness. In the distance the call of a muezzin. Camels cluster in the shade and—one after one and grumbling with resignation—sink to the ground by stages. Soon no doubt this place, entirely erased by scarifying gravel, will remain as nothing but a ghost town in satellite photos not yet updated on Google Earth.

  *

&n
bsp; Stretched out in bed beside her sleeping lover Bridget has leisure to take in her surroundings. She assesses the real estate value of his everyday luxury, the Vogue elegance of flush glass and geometric furniture: his starkly stylish choices. Even the diagonals of daylight are evidence of ambition. His warmth envelops her in an intimacy somehow impersonal. Yet does she even like him? Did she ever? Dispassionately she looks him over. A long time she looks. Her gaze travels around his nakedness. The entirety of his lean body. Groomed skin and hair. She already knows him with her hands. She has learned what her enquiring fingers can mould, hardening him and building him, hollowing him out and tuning his sinews . . . the outcome is predictable. She can please herself and she values her pleasure. Even so she can just as easily not do anything. Here and now, for instance. She witnesses the passive erection that will, as she knows, outlive her pleasure and his. Strange man. She will give him up altogether, her magnificent toy.

  Still she hungers. And immediately after dismissing him she cannot do without.

  Like a sleepy lioness she claws at him, frustrated by his beauty. His eyes crack open. He does not object. After a few moments of disorientation he wakes to his duties. He arches over her, exploring her skin. She has what she wants.

  Adam vows to lift his game for Bridget’s sake, beginning with more practice at managing the Contraption. A thicket of thorns stirs in his veins as he goads his feeble arms to action. That’s working. And something else. He must learn to suppress the desperate hopeless need for sex he cannot have. Shag on a rock. The big idea standing clear in his mind is: it’s going to take a lifetime to get to know who I am now.

  The elliptical lake in the park is being watched by no one. Trees stand around, whispering to themselves, while armour-plated insects work among their roots. A tipped table of light slants across the water’s surface, brilliant with expectation. And banked up clouds bustle in, touched pink and bunched tight as a brain, while brief thought-insects scatter giddily among the domes to create zigzags of genius on the water’s skin. Like a bullet the last bird of afternoon, shooting across the reflected sky, is lost forever.

  Evening.

  4

  JOHN PHILIP

  John Philip Hardingham lives a life of comfortable seclusion. He was born into a family. There was no way out then and there is none now because, for at least five hundred years, this family has been satisfied with every aspect of itself. Its distinguished roots go deep and spread right around the globe, drawing sustenance from speculative investments in places as far apart as Archangel, Abu Dhabi and Adelaide.

  The success began with a composer and diplomat, a genius of sorts. His royal reward for various talents and endowments included a baronetcy. And fertile pushy generations of Hardinghams promptly multiplied to batten on the labouring populace. In 1661, with Cromwell’s Commonwealth out of the way, they founded a merchant bank destined to accumulate so vast a base their insularity could last a further thousand years, the strata of compound interest piling up, beyond use or application, impenetrable as a pyramid. They branched out into the American colonies, naturally, then Malaya, British Honduras, Malta and Ceylon. They were at the forefront of the Victorian and Californian goldrushes and the Industrial Revolution encouraged their assiduous penetration of a wide scope of fabrication and manufacture. With a further hundred years of turning a blind eye to the plight of the exploited they seized on the windfall of a twenty-five-year British mandate over Iraq, signed in 1930, as highly advantageous in the matter of oil. Already they had become a world phenomenon, outpacing all attempts to keep track of them. The family tree—a veritable forest—sprouted branches so compact that the entanglement of property rights and collective investments would take any firm of lawyers a lifetime to sort out.

  With his birth on 29 May 1944, John Philip Hardingham became the youngest claimant to this heritage. And soon enough he heard about it. While still an infant he was taught to understand that things were not his: not even the toys in the toy chest which had been played with by his father, by second cousins, by sundry uncles and even a grandfather or two. Nor would he be the last. By no means. He must exercise reverential care with things because they were destined to be passed on. Everyone agreed that nothing belonged to anyone and everything belonged to everyone. That’s how much accumulation was going on. His parents provided a case study, moving several times, always to another house already in the family, each time ascending through the ranks of an invisible entity founded—so he grasped with childish simplicity—on doing good.

  And that’s how he grew up, with others knowing who he was and him not able to guess more than a thing or two about them. Good and bad behaviour each had its place in a strict code. Things were done or not done. No argument. The family dignity overwhelmed him, from its remote origins in the angelic harmonies of a Gloria echoing around the fan-vaulting of Gloucester cathedral to the extreme distinction of mayoral, parliamentary and ecclesiastical positions held by this or that patriarch, or about to be inherited by some relative within the beneficent reach of the family’s international ramifications. Hardinghams were all over the place, intermarried with Herberts and Rouses, Malefants and Fitzsimmonses in any number of decorative or disgraceful alliances.

  As the centuries accumulated, so successive generations of the family came to seem, from the boy’s point of view, to resemble an eternally self-reproducing board of managers. People were pointed out in the news as having connections. In crowded photograph albums great-grandfathers sported feathered hats and great-grandmothers showed off pearl chokers. There were shots of persons of merit aboard steam yachts, others climbing stairs to take their pleasure in waiting airships, one muffled in furs planting the Union Jack in a snowdrift, a couple swinging golf clubs . . . even to the pith-helmeted hero, complete with smoking gun, triumphantly lording it over a dead Bengal tiger. Uncles and aunts waved from the top of Niagara and the bottom of the Luxembourg Canyon, they sat enthroned in vehicles pulled by human beings and under tasselled canopies mounted on elephants, every last one of them imposing in his or her irrelevance and diminutive isolation.

  Yet where he was concerned, the more he rose with gangling awkwardness from grade to grade at school, the more John Philip revealed himself as a hopeless case. ‘Lonely’ wasn’t the word for it because he didn’t necessarily value company or seek it. ‘Solitary’ came closer. ‘Insular’ perhaps closest. Perpetually he found himself marooned on a vast structure of privilege as invisible as air. His bushy hair defied the hairdresser’s skills. All knees and elbows—and mocked for his long chin—he found himself carried along at his Melbourne grammar school, flotsam on the margins of the action. Against his pimples and eczema there was nothing money could do. His parents, alert to the child’s undesirable peculiarities, assured one another he would certainly grow up to be someone special. They believed it. And so, secretly, did he. Not even a humdrum catalogue of disappointments quite knocked it out of him.

  Destined to be tall, he turned out unsatisfactorily thin. By stooping he made himself less noticeable. Such was his success with this perverse trick that he could walk into a party and, with an unerring eye for the inconspicuous, immediately vanish into an armchair. As a consequence of finding himself on the outside he cultivated a cynical turn of mind. He had that curious faculty so highly developed among the hunted: he could instantly make up his mind about anyone he met. Within seconds he had them. He had assessed the risk. He had seen through them and spotted the most effective way of evading trouble. Already retracting into his shell with what he knew, he seldom had reason to change his mind.

  His life, as mapped for him by others, duly proceeded. The family calendar provided a fertile succession of events to be attended or escaped. Having so many advantages stripped everything of importance. The obligatory courtesies seldom concerned anything more elevated than birthdays, scheduled visits to one beach house or another, anniversaries and invitations to friends of the family who had proven di
screet at ‘fitting in’ (showing respect for the hierarchy of aunts and great-uncles), such inspired delights as arranging for a picnic instead of lunching in, or going with everyone to the pictures, slumming among the peasants and munching delightedly on popcorn, perennial fancy-dress parties, theme dinners and the like, any one of which—he hoped—might achieve the status of a special event to be treasured in memory.

  This was his Alcatraz.

  Soon he became too indolent to bother trying to escape, too preoccupied with the meaninglessness of existence, too filled with doubts and regrets, too shy to make new friends and, in the end, too comfortable with his capitulation. Incurably rich, he knew his voice gave him away, as did his careless manner, his self-effacing style (complete with a touch of shabbiness worn like the proof of durable quality) and his fastidious concern for hygiene. Growing skilled in tactful lies he warded off those who made an effort to stay in touch.

  Even in middle-age his insignificance did not let up. He gave modest support to selected charities (even to serving as family member on the board of one) and indulged a few eccentric hobbies. All the while it was perfectly understood among everyone who was anyone that money was never to be spoken of, let alone wasted or splashed around. Although the ghost of fathomless wealth still cloaked him invisibly when entering a concert hall or ordering dinner at a restaurant, he never cared. Nor was he any good at anything anybody respected: driving a car, playing football, cricket, boxing, tennis or even cards. As for sex, he tried it several times. On the basis of experience he didn’t see what the fuss was about. When it worked at all it ended in a brief flush of pleasure, true, but the mechanical means of reaching that moment he found messy and spoilt by self-disgust. He gave up thinking about it. He would rather spend time with his model railway.