by Joan London
Cannon Street was empty. Only the Lucky and the pubs were open. ‘You mightn’t see them,’ Jason said once, ‘but they’re always there.’
‘Like slugs,’ Maya said, ‘or snakes.’
Now Jason looked up under his straight fine brows and said softly: ‘Heard from Maya?’
‘Yeah. Have you?’
Jason shook his head. ‘How is she?’ He was smiling. He was always smiling. Most of the time, Magnus thought, Jason was covering up.
Magnus shrugged. Should he tell him about Maya’s call? Maya and Jason used to be very close. At dinner time Maya would tell them all this stuff about the Brethren that Jason had told her. Two or three times Jason had walked around the back roads to their house and Jacob and Toni had been very friendly to him.
Jason loved everything at their place, the music, the books, Winnie. How the parents were nice to their kids. He said they all laughed a lot, which they hadn’t been aware of. They showed off a bit to him like a family in a sitcom, an advertisement for the good time worldlies had at home. All the same, Jason couldn’t bring himself to eat or drink with them. That was forbidden by the religion. He liked best sitting on the couch, listening to classical music through the headphones. Music saved him, he said. Magnus offered to make him a tape but Jason shook his head. ‘Not allowed.’
Now Winnie was whining, pawing at Jason’s leg. Jason bent down to scratch her ears. You were always aware of Jason’s hands. More than anything else he would have liked to play the piano. Winnie was carrying on like this because she associated Jason with Maya. Did Jason know this? He was a sensitive guy. Soon he stood up and shuffled, murmuring goodbye. Brethren weren’t supposed to touch worldlies’ pets.
He ate the burger sitting on the bench next to the war memorial. It was quite dark now, there was nobody around. On the edge of town the red lights of the new mobile phone tower glared like the eyes of a giant animal. The first thing that Maya and Jason had found out about each other on the bus was that they’d both seen a flying saucer over Warton when they were ten years old. Nobody else had ever believed either of them.
Last year, a couple of weeks before the exams, Jason came to stay the night. Toni and Jacob had gone to a teacher’s wedding in Perth and, by coincidence, Jason’s mother and stepfather had gone to a three-day meeting in another town. His grandmother was staying with them, but she was old and Jason was able to sneak out. First of all Maya styled Jason’s hair in the bathroom, then she heated pizzas and opened a bottle of Carlos’s home-brew. She had made Jason promise to eat and drink with them. Jason downed a glass and started talking very fast. He told them what would happen if he was found out here. He would be withdrawn from. None of the Brethren would ever look at or speak to him again. His stepfather would thrash him and throw him out. Even his mother would cross the road if she saw him.
Then he’d be free, Maya said, he could come and live with them. Her cheeks were red, she was fierce, on fire. Jason said she didn’t know what being withdrawn from was like. No one ever got over it. It was like having the bone pointed at you. You went weak as a rag, you were afraid all the time. It didn’t matter that you knew it was irrational, you felt damned forever. You didn’t know who you were anymore. You’d been brainwashed from birth. Most people begged to go back.
They had a joint. Only music told the truth, Jason said, and he put the headphones on and drank more beer. ‘It’s too late for me now,’ he said. Then he was sick. Maya took him into her room.
In the morning when Magnus woke up, his parents were sitting at the kitchen table. They said that at the last minute they’d decided not to stay the night in Perth and drove home through the night.
‘Where’s Maya?’ he asked and they said she was asleep. They were calm and ordinary. Last night’s dishes had been washed, everything was tidy. There was no sign of Jason.
Later he went to Maya’s room and asked her what had happened, but she wouldn’t answer. She was lying face down on her bed. For some weeks she didn’t speak to any of them. From then on she was in a bad mood most of the time, until she went away.
He fed the last mouthful of the hamburger to Winnie, waiting at his feet, watching every bite. Should he or shouldn’t he tell the folks that Maya had called? He dropped the wrapping in the bin and Winnie stood up in one movement, ready to go.
They didn’t know Maya like he did, he thought, as he and Winnie set off home. In the pine-tree games she used to swing from roofs and branches with a knife between her teeth. She could never say no to a dare. Her name was Bandit Queen. Jordan was scared of her.
8
Massage
The Garcias. If they were home now, on Friday night, Jacob would be at the Garcias, watching the first elimination final with Carlos on their plasma screen. Because of the antenna that Carlos had rigged up, the Garcias had the best reception in Warton. Sometimes Toni and Chris joined them if the Dockers or Eagles were playing, and the couples ate hotdogs on the couch together.
From their first days in Warton the two families had been friends. The Garcias had come to live there half a year before they did. Like the de Jongs, not having been born in the town, they were outsiders. Also they voted Labor and didn’t belong to a church. When they were small, their kids wandered in and out of either house. The kids had grown apart now, painlessly, but they still gave each other carefully chosen gifts on their birthdays.
Very likely if the families lived next door in the city they wouldn’t have had much to do with one another. But the two couples had a pleasant time together. They didn’t flirt or take offence, or discuss their private lives as couples. They tended to get together to watch big occasions on television, elections, football finals, Diana’s funeral, the World Cup, the millennium celebrations. No doubt, if they were home, they’d watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics with the Garcias.
Placidly, year after year, season by season, they did and said the same things. There was comfort in the rituals. It kept the loneliness at bay. Who else was there to show the photos to after you’d been on a trip? They grew sleepy early from food and wine and lack of stimulation. The women left and went off to their beds. The men stopped feeling sleepy then and stayed up talking and watching videos.
The real friendship was between the men. They liked each other. (If they didn’t, it wouldn’t have been possible for the couples to socialise.) The boys, Chris and Toni called them, and it was true, when they were alone together they shed the burden of being family men.
Carlos was easy in his skin, practical, open to a good time, like the woggy boys Jacob had grown up with. Right away Jacob felt at home with him. In the early days Carlos helped him put up shelves and build a laundry. Jacob was always trotting out to the pine trees to ask advice from Carlos in his shed. They made excursions into the bush together to cut firewood with a chainsaw. Chris had built a high stone chimney in the Garcias’ new games room. She loved to keep a fire burning. ‘My little white ant’, Carlos called her, which made the de Jongs laugh, thinking of Chris’s busy walk, her small grim mouth.
‘Why is Chris doing this?’ Toni said. ‘These chat-line romances never work.’
Chris as a romantic? Pouring her heart out in emails? The Garcias weren’t people of words. Jordan, who never spoke, was like their spirit, silent and benign.
Sitting around talking made Chris restless. It was hard to remember the sound of her voice. There was always a project she was working on. She developed fierce obsessions, horses, DIY, that strange stone garden. Each new project replaced the others. When Wesfarmers closed down and she lost her job she started to spend ten hours a day on her computer. She didn’t train horses anymore and she never went near her garden.
‘How do you know they don’t work?’ Jacob said. Toni’s certainties could annoy him. He thought she sounded smug. ‘Why not?’ Why not, if you start a conversation that seems to feed a private hunger? That seems to wake up a part of yourself which you thought had forever shut down?
Chris was in love. What
did that mean? I’ve forgotten, Toni thought. The notion was as foreign to her as being struck with genius. She remembered the White Garden.
‘Poor old Carlos.’ Jacob saw his friend sitting at his kitchen table, leaning over his paunch, which he bore as gracefully and cheerfully as a pregnant woman. He saw his dark-stubbled double chin, his small hairy fingers rolling a cigarette. His eyes downcast, his thick black lashes. His quietness. Carlos was devoted to Chris. She had saved him. He was a junkie when they met, lying beaten up in a park in Northbridge. Chris had been jogging. She’d stopped and asked if he needed help.
Chris made him go cold turkey. When you saw her with horses you understood how. A born trainer, Carlos said, proudly. She brought him to live in the country. Carlos was grateful for every moment of his life. There was something loose about him that Jacob loved. He’d been blown open and there were no defences left, no illusions about himself. He was the humblest person Jacob had ever met.
He never lied, because nothing needed to be covered up, or different from how it was. The ordinary – a wife and kids, a porch, a barbecue, his job in the workshop at the local hospital – was a miracle to him. With Carlos, Jacob felt the old longing, to give up striving to be whoever he was and give himself to the simple pleasures of the world.
One winter when the kids were small, he and Carlos cultivated a dope bush behind the Garcias’ shed. After a smoke, everything in their domestic lives turned into comedy. Late at night, like bulky boys, they roamed beneath the starry sky in parkas and beanies, while the women slept, exhausted by the children. They loved escaping the intensity of living with a woman. We have to give this up, they said, guilty as lovers. They began to smoke more and more. Once, during the holidays Jacob went stoned to school, cruised down the empty corridors in his dark glasses, only just dodging Kershaw, sat at his desk, jotting down words like ‘beauty’ and ‘cruelty’.
Chris put her foot down. Carlos was an addictive personality, he was playing with fire. Jacob could lose his job. Carlos uprooted the bush and burnt it.
They started watching videos after everyone went to bed. Seasons of Cassavetes, Fellini, Bergman, old favourites and new directors from Japan, Iran, Hungary, that he’d painstakingly taped from SBS over the years. Some of the classics he ordered through the Education Department. Carlos developed a passion for Kubrick. Jacob liked to say that it was his greatest achievement as a teacher, to turn Carlos into a film buff like himself.
He remembered a line in War and Peace and hunted it down. They say men are better friends when they are utterly different.
‘Magnus has the best of intentions,’ Toni said from the kitchen, ‘but he doesn’t have a clue how to cook. He’ll never get himself to school. He won’t wash his clothes.’
‘He’ll survive.’ Jacob felt a sneaking sympathy with Magnus’s desire to be alone. ‘Do him good,’ he added. Wasn’t it a father’s duty to throw his son in at the deep end?
‘No, Jacob.’ Toni shook her head. ‘Three months is too long. If we can’t sort out Magnus we’ll have to go home.’ It would be a relief in a way. It seemed as if their departure had upset a balance, let new, hostile forces into their world.
At that moment the front door opened and Cecile came in, followed by a skinny fellow in a dark-green pork-pie hat.
Was the whole room brighter because a young woman stood in the conversation pit in her black socks, black pants and jacket? Jacob was surprised to feel an authentic thump in his chest. Cecile seemed larger than he remembered. He forgot his invalid status and rose to his feet.
Her companion hung his hat up by the door and removed his shoes. A regular. How regular? Jacob studied him as he came down into the room. His thin ashy hair seemed to have bites taken out of it, as if he’d attacked it himself in front of a mirror. His deepset, unfriendly eyes glittered above wide Slavonic cheekbones. Jacob shook his small white hand. Dieter.
‘How are you guys going?’ Cecile said softly. She reached up behind her head to pull the clasp out and shook her thick hair down around her neck. She looked tired but elated in some way.
‘Want to eat?’ Toni said.
‘Hear that, Dieter? He was ready to pass out from hunger as we came in the door. We’ve just worked twenty hours straight,’ she told Toni. Dieter said nothing. He went over to the breakfast bar and sorted through the mail. Jacob reflected that in all his life he’d never met a man in a little hat who wasn’t pretentious.
Everything seemed suddenly cheerful. It was a relief to be with other people again, young people with their buoyant self-involvement, their hearty appetites. Their powers of recovery.
Jacob hobbled into the kitchen and opened a bottle of red. Toni piled pasta into dragon bowls. They were a team again, in service. This is what they were used to and it made them feel better. Cecile and Dieter sat on one side of the bar, they sat on the other. Dieter put his head down and tucked into his spaghetti.
It turned out that Dieter was Cecile’s business partner. They had just finished a project for Prodigal Films, hiring the editing suite at the company where they both had day jobs.
It was a corporate video for Cecile’s parents, who owned a business in Sydney.
‘My adoptive parents,’ Cecile said. ‘They’re Australian. They came to Kuala Lumpur and adopted me when I was three.’
‘You grew up in Sydney?’ said Jacob.
‘Yes. But I learnt everything I know in the first three years of my life.’
‘Are you happy with the video?’
Cecile shrugged. ‘It’s a professional job. We did it to fund other projects.’
We. Dieter ate steadily, without attempting to join the conversation. Jacob remembered Joe Lanza, Arlene’s ‘business partner’.
‘My parents commissioned the film out of guilt. As a way of making me accept some of their money. I left everything behind when I came here, car, clothes, books, watch, everything they’d ever given me. I was twenty-one. I sat my parents down and told them that I never wanted them to give me another cent. I thanked them for my education, put my key on the table and left.’
There was a faint, apricot-coloured flush on Cecile’s cheeks. She’s a bit high from her work, Jacob thought. But she wants to tell us this. He felt a flare of happiness. He leaned across the bench and topped up her wine.
‘Can I ask you why?’
‘For so long it was kept in the dark. I wasn’t allowed to say I wasn’t happy. There is a wall of glass between me and my parents and there always has been. I have never belonged to you, I told them, and you know it. I could see in their eyes that they did. They sent me to the best schools and took me to Disneyland and put me in the will with their other kids, but I knew when I saw them at the airport, at three years old, that I couldn’t be part of this family. They quickly came to regret their little fit of philanthropy.’
Dieter calmly helped himself to more pasta with the air of one who has heard it all before.
‘When did you come to Melbourne?’ Jacob asked.
‘Nine years ago. I worked in a Chinese restaurant on Victoria Street while I finished the film course. I made a short film. I changed my name back to Wong, my mother’s name.’
Cecile was suddenly weary. She put down her fork. ‘Maya hasn’t called?’ She climbed down from her stool and stretched, her hands on her spine, her head tipped backwards. ‘Editor’s neck,’ she explained.
‘Toni can give you a massage,’ Jacob said.
Toni kept on stacking dishes.
‘She’s the official masseur of Warton. People come from miles around to see her.’ Jacob turned to Toni and recklessly went on: ‘Did you bring your oils with you?’
Toni nodded, unsmiling.
Cecile undressed without speaking. Her room opened through French doors onto the balcony above the courtyard and was full of restless shadows from the lights of the tower blocks flickering through the trees. Everything personal was stored behind a wall of white slatted cupboards. They set out a folded sheet on the carpet next
to the futon, and bent the neck of the reading lamp for the light to be discreet. It was a good space for a massage.
Toni took off her rings and boots. Loud music, jazz, was being played downstairs. Concentrate, she told herself as she rubbed her hands with almond oil. After all, she was grateful to Cecile and would like to do something for her. The small, warm body lay spread out before her, face down, torso covered with a towel. Only the legs seemed adult, with surprisingly muscular calves. She sensed an absence and knew that Cecile was falling asleep. Toni sat back on her heels, bowed her head and slowly twisted up her hair.
Why had Jacob put her up to this? He knew she didn’t want to massage anymore. Before they left for Melbourne she’d sent out cards informing her clients that the business was closing until further notice. Body & Soul Therapeutic Massage was no more. In fact the name made her shudder. The whole hubristic venture was over.
Tonight, without knowing it, Jacob had switched allegiances. The beam of his approval was now focused on Cecile. He’d become Cecile’s knight-at-arms, Cecile’s champion. It was as if an engine next to Toni’s ear had been turned off, a hum of involvement was silenced.
Why don’t I care? she thought. Recently a strange, primitive conviction had come over her, that to get Maya back there would have to be a sacrifice.
She had to clear her mind now, let her hands do the work. The touch of a compassionate stranger. She took a deep breath and started with a kneading movement to the feet, then, her hands rolling and pouncing like a concert pianist’s, she made her way up the perimeter of the body to dig her thumbs deep into the pockets of the shoulders. Cecile sighed. Her whole upper body was ropy with tension.
