by Joan London
According to family myth, Jacob had rescued her from a dangerous criminal. Did she fall in love with him in Cy Fisher’s kitchen? She couldn’t remember. Or did she – unconsciously – seize on him as a means of escape?
She wondered if she’d ever really been in love with anyone apart from her kids.
On the first day she and Felice watched the painters troop up the back stairs with their ladders and trestles, the handsome, hung-over Capelli brothers – their father owed Cy a favour – and a friend they introduced as Dutchie. All of them had cigarettes in their mouths. She registered Dutchie as different from the brothers, quieter, more introverted, as thin as a teenager in his outsized borrowed overalls. Unlike the Capellis’ lustrous black curls – to the base of the neck, the longest their father would allow – his rough tawny hair was cropped short. All day she could hear their footsteps and radio and the scrape of ladders on the ceiling overhead. They were still working when she closed Park Lane. She and Cy were staying with Régine while the flat was painted.
One slow, hot afternoon when everyone else was out, she slipped upstairs to check the painters’ progress. Only Dutchie was there, high on a ladder, slapping a roller back and forwards over the kitchen ceiling like a robot, like a kid playing games to relieve the boredom. A paint-spattered transistor tuned to 6PR was blaring on the scaffold beside him.
‘Hi,’ she called.
He swung around, knocking transistor and paint tray onto the tarpaulin covering the floor. They watched while a wave of white paint spread across the canvas. He scrambled down and tried to block its progress with rags. His face was red. ‘I’ve got no aptitude for this sort of thing,’ he said. It was so hot up there, with the sun through bare windows bouncing off the white walls, that he had to shade his eyes when he looked at her. She invited him downstairs for a cold drink.
‘Coke? Beer?’ she said as she opened the little fridge.
‘Water will do,’ he said, then gave a short, self-conscious laugh. He was about her age but of the other camp. A hippie. At last she had a chance to talk to one of them.
What man could ever resist the opportunity to explain himself to a receptive woman? He seated his paint-spattered rump on her desk, and talked for two hours. Political activism was all but over since Vietnam, he said. It had been replaced with a non-violent, non-materialist movement that was spreading across the world.
As soon as he had enough to buy a Kombi he was heading down south to find himself a commune.
Upstairs the puddle of spilt paint hardened on the tarpaulin.
‘Am I boring you?’ he asked. By now the sun was shining low through the trees in the park and light seemed to outline his body. He’d renounced all asceticism for the evening and was accompanying her in a second gin and tonic. They sat facing each other on opposite desks.
‘I think about this stuff night and day,’ he said, half to himself. There was something melancholy about his long cheeks, their fullness around the jaw, but his mouth was firm, obdurate. His eyes were wide-spaced, idealist’s eyes. He had a wispy beard and moustache that you didn’t notice.
He ran his hand through his rough hair. ‘I got a fever in Ceylon before I came back. They made me cut this off.’ He laughed again. ‘They said my head had to cool. I was thinking too much.’ Everything about the men she knew, it seemed to her, he had eliminated. The gestures of aggression and defence, the hard presence, the air of humorous patience if a woman spoke … He was gentle, open. Could this be a new sort of man? It was deliberate, she thought, something larger than himself was at stake. She felt the pull and strangeness of his conviction. A spattered paperback stuck out of the pocket of his overalls. The late sun caught on the silver Sikh’s bangle on his thin brown arm. She thought of the word light when she saw him.
He was a good storyteller. Already a vision had been transmitted and was taking form in her head, a strange mixture of the tropics and the bush. Torchlit processions, bare feet on dirt tracks, the sound of drums and singing. Cooking fires all over the valley, lamplit tables, rain through trees. Children’s laughter.
Any moment they could be disturbed but they kept sitting there on the desks, swinging their legs as the light softened and their faces glowed in the shadows. Already, if they only knew it, he had crossed the peak of zealotry and was on the other side, going down. Later he was to say – with some irony – that this was his true moment. Never had he been so articulate, his mind more agile and creative. This was what he’d been waiting for. His ideas had finally served their true evolutionary purpose, that is, to attract to himself the faith of a good-looking woman.
His eyes suddenly shifted beyond her. Cy Fisher was standing in the doorway. How had he managed to materialise without so much as a creak on the floor? A smooth exchange followed about the speed of drying paint in the heat. But that was it, Toni understood. The next day Romano Capelli came to finish off the painting. She knew better than to make any comment.
That night she lay beside Cy on Régine’s feather pillow and went to a place in her mind, a small house, a clearing, sheets snapping in the wind. A tank for water with a pipe running into it. The sound of children playing. Was it somewhere in her own childhood she wanted to return to?
She knew he was lost to her forever. She tried not to think of him in case Cy picked it up. She was consumed with fear that the hippie painter would suffer some mysterious injury. One thing was certain, his career wouldn’t prosper in this town.
She wanted to warn him, tell him to leave for that commune of his or at least lie low. He’d mentioned that he was living with an old friend who’d come back from London. She couldn’t risk sending a note via the Capellis. You never knew who was an insider. Any further sign of interest on her part could be fatal. This sounded like a joke in the morning light. But I’m not joking, she said to herself.
She remembered Jacob telling her that he grew up a few blocks away from the Capellis, above that funny dress shop on Fitzgerald Street. While Cy was in a meeting out the back, she told Felice she’d buy Greek cakes for morning tea and fled down Fitzgerald Street. She entered Arlene’s to a peal of jangling bells and, trying to calm herself, rifled through her awful frocks.
Arlene was with a customer. Guipure lace to soften the neck, she was saying, off-the-shoulder Thai silk. Sand-coloured or bone. She had a broader accent than her son, a low-pitched, relentless voice.
She had glimpsed Arlene before, in brief sorties to the shop with Felice and Sabine, but now she looked at her with new eyes. Strange to recognise his features in this large, professional woman, like landmarks overlaid with time and change. Already there was a sense of familiarity about her. Her gray eyes were his, though very slightly bulbous. Her hair was silvery-gold, back-teased in the style of the sixties, but with Jacob’s widow’s peak. All the time she was talking she was taking garments off the racks to display to the customer and hanging them up again, straightening and smoothing with expert twitches of her plump wrists, as if each were a piece of art. She herself was costumed in traditional saleswoman black, though the ruffled skirt was not flattering.
‘Can I help you with anything?’ Arlene called, once the customer had left.
Toni asked for Jacob’s phone number. She had her excuse ready, but the bell rang again and Arlene scribbled the number down and handed it to Toni without speaking, hardly looking at her. Toni stayed a few minutes more, browsing politely, listening to Arlene’s spiel. It wasn’t that Arlene was unfriendly, she thought. She couldn’t tune in to anything that wasn’t to do with clothes.
She rang Jacob from a public phone box in the early evening before Cy came home. He sounded dozy and friendly, he said he’d been asleep in front of the telly after a long day’s painting. So the Capellis hadn’t been instructed to sack him. Cy must have wanted him to stay where he could keep an eye on him.
‘Have you told the Capellis about your commune plans?’ He laughed. ‘The Capellis think all drop-outs are just uni kids.’
‘Have you told any
one else?’
‘Only my ole pal Beech.’
‘Can you trust him to keep his mouth shut?’
‘Well that depends,’ Jacob started to be humorous, but he sensed her urgency. ‘Sure, if I ask him to …’
‘I think you should head off down south right now.’
‘Hey,’ Jacob said gently, ‘that just isn’t possible. Not until I get some cash together.’
‘Then please lie low for a few weeks. Watch your back. Go away as soon as possible. And don’t talk about where you’re going.’
He was silent. Did he understand why she was telling him this? No doubt the Capellis had given him the lowdown on Cy. But how to explain the speed, the thoroughness of his revenge? Jacob might think this was strangely intense after what was, after all, one casual conversation, but it didn’t matter. Yet she couldn’t quite bring herself to say: keep away from me.
‘I liked talking to you,’ he said.
‘Do you want to talk some more?’ she heard herself asking. Suddenly, as if she’d been planning this all along, she told him of a lonely little burger joint on the ocean road to the north. She’d noticed it on one of her drives a few months ago and must have stored it away in her mind, as a place that no one she knew would ever go to.
‘Tuesday, two-thirty,’ she said, amazed at herself. ‘Or the following Tuesday, if I’m not there.’
That’ll test him, she thought as she hung up. She ripped up Arlene’s piece of paper and threw it down a drain. Better to forget that number. Now to buy those cakes. She was suddenly shaking with fear.
Strange how the traditional shape of a church, the upward reach of its spire, like a lightning rod to God, seemed to promise comfort. Toni, wandering back into the street, felt herself drawn to the old, black-bricked church opposite Maya’s office, as if to a place where she might ask for help.
But as soon as she sat down in a back pew she remembered the school chapel. The same smell of wood and mustiness and incense. The same punitive hush. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee O Lord, and save us from the perils of the night. She could almost hear the nun-like chant of adolescent girls. The clap of their skirts as they fell to their knees, like birds landing.
She went to sit outside in the courtyard on a plastic chair beneath the trees. Maya would have sat here, she was sure of it, at home each one of the family liked to sit outside alone in the sun with the birds and the wind in the trees. She felt closer to Maya here than in Cecile’s house.
The sun disappeared and for a moment all went quiet. A chill came over her spirit. All her life, wherever she lived, it seemed to her that each street, block by block, had a different presence and character that affected her, so that she chose certain routes according to her mood. Here, in the middle of this city street, in spite of the soaring glass buildings around it, it was the old black church and its courtyard that presided. There was something uncanny about this little precinct.
What was it that had trapped her daughter?
Fear, she was forgetting fear, the way it made you do things.
Where to now? Not back to another day of waiting to hear from Maya. Not back to Jacob on his couch. What more could she do? She stood up, tightened her scarf, dug her hands into the pockets of her jacket. Her fingers grasped a card. Suddenly, clear as a photograph, she remembered Kesang and the kindness of her face. She hadn’t really stopped thinking of her.
The card was deep blue, with a stylised white lotus. Beneath it, The Mahayana Institute was written in fine white lettering. We work to relieve all beings from suffering in all its forms. On the back was scribbled a mobile phone number.
11
Warton
‘Is she pretty?’
‘Stylish. Her hair’s sort of red and her skin’s really white and she wears red lipstick every day. She looks like someone from London. She talks like a Pom.’
‘What are her clothes like?’
‘Black.’
‘Is she nice?’
‘Pretty much. She’s taken Winnie off my hands. And she cooks really amazing meals …’
Maya interrupted him. ‘I gotta go now.’ The line went dead.
Kitty won Winnie’s heart in her usual way, through food. She bought big meaty bones for her from Warton Meats and slipped her snacks when she was cooking. Within a day Winnie had given up school, too busy following Kitty everywhere. They went on long walks together, sniffing out the town. Kitty was still trying to understand how Jacob could have buried himself here for so many years.
Even mid-morning the main street looked uninhabited. The shops were vast barns half-lit by fluoro strips, the sparsely stocked shelves reminded her of Prague in ninety-one. Plastic streamers flapped in the doors. In the newsagency she ordered The Guardian Weekly and the woman behind the counter put on the glasses which hung from a chain across her bulging tracksuit top and introduced herself. Rhonda Carpenter.
‘We didn’t know Jacob had a sister! If there’s anything you need, just sing out …’ Her eyes, enlarged behind the glasses, bored into Kitty.
‘Thank you.’ Kitty heard her voice sounding plummy and English. ‘We seem to be doing quite well.’
Jacob mustn’t have told her about me, Rhonda thought.
She sensed that everyone knew who she was. Trailed by Winnie, all in black, she pursued her research, picking up leaflets on the town’s history from the Shire office, stalking in and out of Warton Real Estate, Billabong Crafts and Warton Homeware, run by some funny-looking sect. She hated the ugliness of everything. If she lived here she’d be like one of Chekhov’s angry, yearning provincial spinsters.
Four-storey truckloads of sheep thundered past. Bells rang, a bar came down across the wide street. All traffic stopped while an endless wheat train trundled its way towards the distant silver towers of the silos that melded into the whiteness of the horizon.
It was a tame world Jacob had chosen. There was so much you didn’t have to deal with here, noise, queues, strangers, crime. Urban life seemed very far away. Yet when he was a boy, it was cities her brother had wanted, like her, great cities that promised to save them. They were both, after all, half European.
Eighteen years in this town: perhaps you got attached to it, as prisoners do. Perhaps it got so you were afraid to leave.
She explored the oval, the showground, the cemetery, the bleak Shire picnic grounds beside a creek as brown and sluggish as a drain. The township was a frail grid placed over the landscape. So quickly, after the stage set of the main street, it dissolved into paddocks and bush. One day, she thought, when all the farms are owned by corporations, Warton will be a ghost town, absorbed back into the land.
In the Moke with Magnus, testing out her driving skills, she drove to the lake, ten kilometres to the east. They parked at the top of a hill and looked across a silver-white expanse, edged with dead black stick-like trees. It stretched as far as the eye could see, like a Russian snowfield. When he was just a little kid, Magnus told her, everyone used to come here to picnic and swim. Gradually the lake salted up till swimming in it stung your skin. Now beneath the white crust was a thick mud with a terrible stench. Everything was silent out there, even the birds. She could see rings of salt surf, like petrified time.
Each morning, she woke Magnus to an international breakfast, pancakes or hash browns like the Americans, or English bacon and eggs, French toast or Israeli fruit salad and yoghurt, even chops and grilled tomatoes like Australians used to have. Lots of coffee, her fresh lipstick smearing the mug as she read her Guardian and left him to eat in silence. Then she whisked him off to school in the Moke, Winnie grinning in the back. He croaked ‘Bye’, and loped inside just before the bell.
The school was of the model of the school of her childhood, red brick with an iron roof and white-rimmed, twelve-paned windows, one of hundreds that the government erected in the fifties to cope with the baby boom.
Wonderful trees grew all around, immense gums with pink trunks and thick leaves that caught the morning sun. The
kids she’d taught, shivering in dark ancient courtyards, would think this was paradise. She watched some teenagers in a line throwing a basketball, healthy-looking boys and girls in high spirits, showing off to one another. No mobile phones. Mist was rising above a distant playing field where tiny boys playing soccer were dwarfed by giant trees. An Aboriginal mother dropped off a carload of small kids. A group of girls from another era, wearing long skirts and headscarves over waist-length hair went through the school gate, the older ones ushering the small ones ahead. It wouldn’t be a hard life, teaching here.
Like an echo of the past, she heard a handbell clang, the scrape of chairs, sing-song greetings breaking out in classrooms. Then the old-fashioned chortling of magpies in an emptied playground.
The back shed was Jacob’s study, Magnus said. Of course he’d have to have a place for himself, like her, they’d grown up living secret lives in separate rooms. There was a battered wooden school table beneath the window and a cheap office chair. Except for an old tape deck, the table was bare. Spidery stacks of boxes took up one wall: he’d never got around to making shelves. She sat down in his chair. The view was straight across the terrace into the kitchen window. The fridge light came on and there was Magnus pouring himself a glass of milk. A yellowed teaching timetable was blu-tacked to the wall and a fly-spotted photo of a little thatched pavilion under a coconut palm. No sign of teaching notes or research, but then how much preparation would you need, year after year in a country junior high?
Jacob’s room: it was as if the young man she knew had died.
In the drawer of the table were two bound folders, each with a title. How Much Land Does a Man Need? – A Screenplay adapted from Tolstoy by Chickie Fitzgerald. And Glad Rags – A Screenplay by Chickie Fitzgerald. This one had a received date stamped on it, 29 June 1994. From what she could read, flicking hastily through the yellowed script, it was a kind of slasher movie set in a country town. By Jacob? No, not Jacob, Chickie Fitzgerald.
