A Stolen Season

by Rodney Hall

  The idea tweaks a wary nerve. She herself does not wish to be observed.

  The perimeter of exposed foundations is laid bare. The surrounding landscape is on a bigger scale than the rest of the world would credit. Sun-filled barrancas and islands of farmland. But what most astonishes her is a clearly worn track snaking out of the forest and reaching right to the foot of the monument. Why didn’t Placido bring her here? She need never have risked that swamp. Immediately below her the track ends in a turning circle. And there stands a parked minibus. Marianna’s heart skips a beat. In an instant she knows everything. The voices, everything.

  She must hurry, hampered though she is by broken chunks from the platform above and having to avoid holes hollowed right down to the solid fill at the core of the building. Wreckage and decay. Prodigiously high, the final level above her, dark as the underside of a mushroom, now presents itself as perhaps unreachable. She loses her rhythm. Dislodged pebbles bound away as betrayers, skittering and scattering down the stepped parapets. Terror stalks.

  Flakes of coloured plaster up at this level still bear images. Ogres, one of which, crowned with a feathered helmet and set above the others, sits on a two-headed beast. Mayan dignitaries swirl round him with upraised arms, kilt girdles flying. Javelins in mid-flight thatch the air, pennants and whipping straps etch the action: a forgotten combat. Tinted rose gold.

  But Marianna has no time to spare. She must survive her clumsiness. Hanging on to her nerve, she counts aloud to objectify the numbers. She risks glancing back under her arm. Vertigo instantly scoops her into its vortex. She fights the magnetic pull of a fall. With nothing to catch hold of, she crouches on all fours—huddled against the angle of the step—to prevent the world whirling away.

  The sun stands still. She uses that. Panting and in peril.

  She concentrates on the task ahead, even as the crown of the temple inscribes the arc of earth’s rotation. And soon enough, she stands on the broad platform at the top, confronted by three hundred and sixty degrees of exposure. The land reveals itself as a map of radiating lines. With, right at the centre of the web, herself. Buffeted and unstable, she gazes far out across the quilt of forests where afterthoughts of lightning glare mutely from serpentine sheet-metal rivers. Engulfed by the sky. Her heart gallops. Above her head a knot of colliding winds unravels to dislodge air monsters and graceful swooning vultures. Even underfoot she feels the thrust of an incalculable tonnage of living stone.

  Ah-ha! She is immortal.

  Once she gets her head balanced her eyes begin to recover. Waveringly she asserts the right to be there, even while the giddy Earth’s horizon tilts. With nothing she can reach for to anchor her, Marianna calls on years of training. Steady, steady. Death, of course, is never just death. Didn’t she demonstrate this when she attempted to drown herself, before the rescuers dragged her from the water in time to spoil her proof? The stillborn child was altogether different. And so was Manfred’s end. Oh yes.

  Marianna questions this whole enterprise. She despairs at her stupidity: why did she need to risk the climb just to understand the obvious? The temple, of course, had to be useless. Professor Shilling’s point. No purpose could possibly justify all that blood and suffering. Uselessness on a gigantic scale being the intention. She sees it now. The same still applies to armies and invasions and nuclear bombs. She peers in at the doorway to the priests’ chamber. All she can see with her sun-punished retinas is a gleam of stone walls, ghostly as violet mirrors. Sinister reflections.

  She inhales foetid air. This humble evil-soaked cell was where people’s hearts were torn out by those with the power. She knows her history, much as any ignoramus. She steps in. A corner section of roof, having caved, lies as a heap of rubble highlighted by a shaft of bleached daylight. The gangrened altar is disappointingly small. She never felt more alone. Sour-smelling pollen puffs up when some living thing—claws scrabbling at millennia of droppings and shuffling its bat wings—shifts to make room for her. She gags and lets out a sob of terror. Still, she can’t leave yet.

  She realizes this is what she came for. Feeling stupid and inadequate she makes the only gesture she can think of. She places the flat of her hand on the stone, stone black with generations of blood.

  Manfred’s tragedy was foreseeable from the moment he burst into her studio—even his Germanness being more a consequence of destiny than coincidence—because, when it came to the point, he preferred imprisonment in his own past to the gifts she willingly gave. Perhaps he hoped the child would release him into a new experience of love, just by virtue of being a little von Clausewitz, latest of the bloodline. Who knows? He might have stayed . . . yes, except for that phone call from the hospital. The stillbirth defined his limit, so he packed his bag.

  Marianna sums it up. If she is to take the measure of him and his place in her life she must embrace Manfred’s cruelty, Manfred’s magnetism, Manfred’s vanity and Manfred’s detachment. His death gave shape to her life though he turned out to be someone she had never heard of. Here at the top of her stone pyramid she will not accept the name Konstantin von Clausewitz, nor give it substance. For him she felt nothing. What she felt was the kick of the weapon in her hand. The noise shockingly violent. How far she has had to come! And how long it has taken her to believe she did what she did!

  The look of disbelief on his face will haunt her forever.

  On these authorized sacrificial terraces, high above the crust of the planet, what she sees with indelible clarity is her Melbourne backyard—the backyard she had been so desperate to escape—a rusted chair under the fig tree in one corner, the three-legged table where Manfred’s ashtray was left half-filled with squashed butts, a clothesline with her work skirts billowing in the wind. She is struck by a piercing insight that, even so, something still cries out for recognition.

  She needs to dislodge the deeper secret, the secret she has been keeping from herself—concerning the foetus that grew in her womb—and she faces it now. The foetus in her womb may have cried out (in silence) for weeks or even months. To warn her. After all, it was delivered with its mouth open. Who can tell when that tiny person gave up living? Yet she, the mother no less, never knew. There was nothing she could have done, of course. Except . . . she might have felt differently. As it is, she recoils from the thought of a dead creature inside her, attached by its useless cord.

  How shameful, to be disgusted by her own child.

  She delivered death, not life.

  Marianna is empty. She blunders out through the doorway into the midday glare. Right to the brink. And there she sees what she sees. Way below, in one corner of the courtyard at the foot of that vertiginous fall, a man stands on the measured chess board of flagstones. With the supernatural power known to the human eye he beams his gaze across the chasm between. He holds her in his power. Even at this distance she recognizes him. Placido.

  Shaken, she cannot tell what his motive might be. Has he come for her, though he promised not to leave the car? She is brought up against the fact that she does not know him. Nor can she guess the intentions of such a man. Did he stalk her through swamps and jungles known to him all his life? Did he exchange judgements against her with the pipe-smoker and cactus farmers? Now he is here. Has he come to fetch her, or to ‘get’ her?

  With nowhere to hide and nowhere to run, her only escape is down. Down the whole way. She must unravel the puzzle and reverse her body’s accumulated solution. Balancing, she faces him, seeking a sign. The tiny enigmatic figure returns her gaze. She feels the monument collecting its colossal weight and beginning, with millennial slowness and in cosmic silence, to sink into the ground. Staircases and corbels crumble beneath her—is it real?—to rush her away, for the vast landslide of collapse to precipitate her helpless bleeding body into the old man’s arms.

  No. Get a grip.

  Seized by foolish hope that she might escape by using the opposite side (where he can’t
see her) Marianna crosses the platform to take a look. The tree-crowded countryside down there, rich with a thousand hiding places, invites her. She must hurry. But even now, at the moment of decision, something snags the corner of her eye: a ghoulish hint of evil . . . a kind of fluid organism . . . way below . . . picking its way up the stony scree. She checks again. Actually it’s a collective creature. And, next minute, with better focus, she finds herself watching a bunch of bowed heads . . . some with hats, some with comb-overs . . . intruders, climbing strongly despite the heat, pursuers, evidently intent on capturing her . . . one of whom looks up from under a tilted straw brim as if hearing the call of a voice, the face a blank pink dish.

  In a flash Marianna recognizes the Australian tourists from the previous evening—if tourists they are—and, not knowing their dark motive, she guesses the worst. Once she identifies them she finds she can hear their voices: fragments of remote chatter distinct from the cacophony of birds and thrumming insects. Did Manfred pay for them? Did he foresee everything, even his own fate? His deviousness acquires a touch of genius. And the threat is clear because, if they were not sent by Manfred, they must surely be in league with Placido.

  Trembling she draws back, her choice being between one or other of the remaining stairways. Marianna collects her nerve. The least sound will betray her. She moves on tiptoe. At the brink of two hundred and sixty stairs in five banks of fifty-two. She knows, she doesn’t need to count them to know. So her descent begins, gathering rhythm as the numbers unwind. She flits past the carved panel of slaves without noticing her own angled shadow. Her alien Nikes have wings. Surefooted, she dances down. The wind snatches her hat. Her hair stands on end. The way is clear. Fear grips her mind but—amazed—she taps into secret reserves of strength. Swiftly down and dancing swifter. She must reach the bottom before anyone discovers they have been tricked. Her feet twinkle on the steep wet incline . . . the dazzle-pattern . . . no longer counting, she flies . . . and this time—help—she really does . . .

  *

  Marianna is long gone. Placido is gone. The emergency is over and the tourist-pilgrims are gone. The temple—if temple it ever was—stands above a restless sea of wind-tormented foliage. There is no one to notice the collapsed backpack outside the doorway to the sacrificial chamber, the unopened picnic lunch, the half-empty water bottle. Nor does anyone witness the agitation of a discarded book by a dead professor, open pages flittering like butterfly wings.

  7

  ADAM & BRIDGET

  The Minister sits facing Zac across their square starched tablecloth, crushed napkins and the remnants of breakfast between them. Sharing the powerful coffee aroma and the pleasant busyness of waiters passing to and from the kitchen servery. The restaurant is full. There is even a small queue waiting on benches just inside the door.

  ‘We’ve shut down whatever can be shut down,’ the Minister advises him with an impersonal smile. ‘The medal and the nomination. Some sort of planned street access from the house. All gone.’ She is a blaze of red, with matching lipstick and black eyelashes, her scalp erupting tawny curls. ‘All except the orthopaedic thing that props him up.’

  ‘Of course, I understand,’ he agrees.

  ‘What a disaster. Well, at least we managed to keep it off the ABC national news. And that took some doing.’

  Demurely Zac brushes his share of breadcrumbs from the cloth. He reaches for the bill, but her claw of varnished nails closes over his hand.

  ‘Your cousin has already gone too far. He mustn’t be allowed any more slack. Talk him round,’ she warns and squeezes for emphasis. ‘Pursuing this social media nonsense is not a good idea.’

  So, Zac’s career has begun at the top. All thanks to Adam and Adam’s bombshell—the horror-vision of stitched-together flesh televised in close-up—the camera discovering a creepy resemblance to undersea shots of dead reef coral. Gross. Capped by Adam’s staring eyes crowded with paranoia while he stirred up that old hysteria about the Iraq War. Leftist propaganda. News as stale as the Global Financial Crisis. Who wants to know? Then Zac’s phone had begun ringing even before the closing credits rolled. And, next thing, seven million hits!

  ‘My shout,’ says the Minister for Rehabilitation, claiming the bill. ‘This one is legitimate.’

  They stand together.

  ‘You’ll be doing him a favour,’ she clarifies her demand, friendly varnished nails touching the back of his hand again. ‘America is not happy, either. And they take everything seriously. He’d better believe it.’

  Now Zac is the man behind the wheel, driving his car up the spiral ramp wrapped around the central tower of a city parking station.

  America! Well, governments need to govern. Ours too. Given the thousands of jobs at stake. That’s hard-nosed political reality. Trillions of dollars. Plus the nation’s safety. New submarines and aircraft a necessity, despite public doubts—hence the PR blitz as an essential part of the campaign—but to get a decision through the upper house the numbers must somehow be cobbled together. And it seems to be down to him.

  With a surge of power Zac guides the city hub, his firm hand power-steering a course through predictable traffic. Pointless to ask what possessed the idiot to claim he was a victim of friendly fire. Grandstanding. Hyperbole. Besides, how could he possibly know? Embarrassing everyone. Zac shouts at a red light, ‘He wasn’t thinking of me, was he?’ He adds, ‘Or how he might damage my career?’

  Streetscapes loom into view veiled by lingering patches of fog. It’s not yet eight o’clock. Clubs are closing. The nightlife expends itself. Exhausted youths hover round the exit signs. Time was, he would have been among them. He and Adam, out on the make. Of course, when they house-shared they knew all about each other. Moods, quirks, weaknesses. He’d found pictures of girls hidden beneath folded jocks in Adam’s bottom drawer. Chancing upon other nudes between the pages of books. There were several taped to the lid of an old suitcase under Adam’s bed. He’d hunted obsessively for more, till his researches were brought up short by things stuck together. Red light. Then Adam turned eighteen and grew up. Once he began to insist on taking the lead in everything he turned out to be more annoying than anyone. Green.

  Ballooning shadows explode in slow motion between the tall buildings as the big car slides among frayed billows. The town hall passes harmlessly. An early tram clatters across the intersection. Zac accelerates as he scoops a left. The lower end of Collins Street closes behind him—ghostly temple replicas dwindling in the rear-vision mirror—while the tree-lined avenue of the upper end opens out ahead. Well, the silly bastard volunteered to fight in a war he knew nothing about. So whose fault was that! He negotiates another left. Spring Street. The lights are still on in the empty office buildings ahead. State Parliament swings ajar (some homeless person asleep on the grand staircase, a vagrant who ought to be moved on) and he trumpets, ‘Where are the police when they’re needed!’

  Adam wakes to the piercing awareness of being kept alive, surrounded by meds and equipment. To pep himself up he takes the long view of his predicament, skin flexing with unease while this or that orifice opens to utter words, take in food or, finally, eject what must be ejected. Simple as a giant worm. Pretty hilarious, actually. That is to say, hilarious in the intervals between bouts of paralysing shrinkage.

  Household sounds hum and hush, insistent, irregular and indifferent.

  Put it this way, there was a mountain and we were climbing it, our worn boots broke the gravel. The army seemed like a good idea, drill being a kind of meditation structured into the body to take shape as muscle and bone. But Adam is no longer asleep. He’s at work. His blog wavers and jumps about on the screen as he struggles to focus: is stuxnet the beginning of cyber warfare. the usa destroyed iran’s nuclear centrifuges simply by hacking the system. Really? I don’t remember writing that. whatever the justification, the risk shuld be a warning, he gazes at the ‘shuld’ through the refracted lens o
f flinching. Something seems wrong with it, though in the end he can’t see what.

  Rescue comes in the form of a knock on the door. Yao.

  Yao, who appears to have lit a joint already, sits close. Emerging from arabesques of smoke, passing a jay. A century elapses. Now Adam guides the Contraption to lift his arm. This needs negotiation. By concentrating on the arrangement of insufficient fingers he receives the delicate paper tube. Crushing it.

  ‘Here,’ Yao comes to the rescue.

  But Adam won’t give in. He makes another attempt, the exo-skeleton muttering.

  ‘No fucking. Luck. Useless fucking. Contraption.’

  ‘Here.’ Yao holds it to his friend’s lips.

  ‘Useless fucking. Ar. Body.’

  Inhaling gingerly because he fears the agony of coughing, Adam exhales a wisp.

  ‘Un-. Real.’

  ‘Take it easy, mate.’

  They negotiate a second puff. Yao takes his turn.

  ‘O boy,’ Adam gasps, his voice reaching the room from far away.

  A smile of heartbreak touches his cracked lips.

  ‘Here’s the thing. The ramp’s been finished awhile now, you know. I dropped over because I thought you might be up for trying it out today.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  So it’s Bridget talking, really. Talking to Yao—they are differently dispersed around the room—even while Adam’s own shadow, like a tall diagonal scaffold, lances across the floor. The joint is long since finished and he’s up on his feet. And one day closer to something or other.