by Joan London
He caught sight of Dieter’s silver film canister tucked behind the speakers and couldn’t help smiling: exactly where you used to find it in one of those freewheeling shared households in the seventies. He opened it and sniffed the secret nostalgic aroma. Once it had been regarded as a holy weed, a short cut to revelation … Like a whisper in his ear he heard the words Why not? The merest pinch … he’d tell Dieter when he next saw him. With a smoothness that shocked him, he found himself sitting on the couch rolling a quite passable little number. He hadn’t lost his touch, he told himself grimly.
On the balcony upstairs you looked down over the traffic passing in the street, and into the upper branches of the trees in the park opposite. Leaves on the evergreens swayed in lush, rustling armfuls. He’d come up here with his wine and his joint to enjoy a change of vista. The only access was through the French doors in Cecile’s room, but he presumed the balcony wasn’t private. He walked swiftly through her room without looking. No more prying! No more trying to work the poor girl out.
It was a bit like being on the top deck of a ship. He lit up, inhaled and was flooded with well-being. Inhaling again, he saw a sharp wind run in a wave towards him through the tops of the trees. It blew the smoke into his eyes and slammed the door behind him and when he turned he saw there was no handle on the door. He threw the butt down into the fishpond and tried to fit his little finger into the hole where the handle used to be. He ran his nails down the edges of the doors. He looked around for a stick, a piece of wire that he could insert in the lock, but the balcony was without furniture, a bare slab of concrete. He peered down over the iron balustrade and his eyes met those of little old Mrs Chen next door, sweeping her spotless white-tiled porch. She was frowning up at him, one hand on her hip, the other on her broom.
‘I know wha’ you do!’ she shouted. ‘Drug addick!’
Jacob leapt back, an accused man. Guilt made him panic. He looked around for escape.
The walls on either side were wedged up against the neighbours’ walls. If he held onto the top of the balustrade and let himself drop, he would land, heavily, onto the rocks and slime of the fishpond. He was only wearing socks: in the custom of the house he’d left his boots by the front door. His sprained foot was still tender. He’d certainly damage some part of himself, worst of all his spine. In boots and with two sound feet – or if he were younger and lighter – he might have had a crack at a Tarzan leap from the balustrade onto Mrs Chen’s verandah roof. The roof might collapse. Mrs Chen, now gone inside, would call the police. She would tell them about ‘the drugs’. She would sue him for damages, for giving her a heart attack.
If she came out again, would she listen to him while he begged her to find the key under the Buddha, let herself in and come upstairs to release him?
He could hail a passer-by. Though he’d have to make a quick judgement about the person. Otherwise it could be an invitation to ransack the place while he was stuck up here. But as far as he could see there was no one on the street or in the park opposite. The six o’clock traffic sped past.
He could break one of the glass doors, using his shoulder or fist. Then he would have to find an afterhours glazier to come straight out and secure Cecile’s room before nightfall. He couldn’t bear the thought of her coming home and finding the room strewn with splintered glass.
He decided to wait for Cecile to return. Take a chance that she wouldn’t be too late. Wait it out until he couldn’t bear it anymore. Hadn’t she implied that the job she was working on was nearly finished? He sat down on the concrete, his back against the wall and stretched out his long legs. It was in postures like this that the skeletons of explorers were often found, after they’d died of thirst and exposure …
He tried to remember if he’d scrolled right back to the beginning of the Clarice file. Had he put the canister back? He’d left his leather jacket slung over the back of her chair, incriminating evidence. What would Cecile think if, after discovering these intrusions, she came upstairs and saw his large shape crouched outside her bedroom door?
Windows lit up one after the other across the apartment blocks. Sunday night. Cars braked over and over at the lights on the corner. He heard the distant rumble of a tram, metal on metal. There was no sign of Mrs Chen, and no one out on the street to shout to. It reminded him of twilights when he was a little kid, looking down from the flat at the rush-hour traffic, the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he called ‘homesickness’, even though he was at home.
How had he got himself into this situation? There was a hunger inside him that he couldn’t even name. How undignified it was! A man of his age, who regarded himself as being, in his own way, honourable. (He couldn’t think of any man he knew who didn’t think that of himself.) What would his family say if they saw him now?
He pictured them standing on the footpath opposite, pointing up at him, the kids bent double with laughter, Toni shaking her head. She always had been the more grown-up of the two of them.
This was how he’d watched them, night after night, year after year, from his desk in the shed. A family in dumb show, passing to and fro across the kitchen windows, lit up as they argued or snacked or talked on the phone. Leaves from the vines over the terrace framed the scene: they looked as natural and self-centred as animals prowling in their lair.
Once, after one of his annual declarations that he was giving up cigarettes, he was standing at the shed door smoking, when suddenly a loud knocking started up on the glass of the kitchen window and he saw his children frowning and shaking their fists at him. Even Magnus, who generally minded his own business. For a moment he couldn’t move, gripped by shame and panic. Then they burst out laughing and disappeared.
He cut himself off from family life with his desire to create. He used to toil in his shed all during the long summer breaks, trying to write screenplays. One hot evening when he was at his desk, his plastic fan whirring, Maya burst in, panting, her face alight. She was in the middle of one of the wild, terrifying games the kids used to play with the Garcia boys in the dark. She’d come to him for refuge. For a few minutes she stood beside him, her elbow on his shoulder, watching him type. Her breath on his cheek was warm and sweet like the scent of the long dry summer grasses and he didn’t turn or speak, so as not to break the effortless bond between them. She took a sip of water from his glass, tapped a farewell on his arm and ran off again into the night.
He could still feel the confiding touch of her fingers and he groaned aloud. He hadn’t been able to protect her. In this, the most primary of responsibilities, he had failed.
Always looking through windows. Arlene’s boy, peering through the chink in the curtains. At the Garcias’ millennium party, a few long months ago, he slipped outside to smoke a cigarette. His last for the old century, he’d told Toni, though it was well past midnight by then, the older guests had gone home. The hot lounge room was empty except for Magnus, absorbed in playing Carlos’s old LPs.
He stood on the porch and surveyed the street. The Garcias’ verge was lined with cars, old bombs, utes, four-wheel drives. He could name the owner of each of them, even the history of purchase and maintenance of most of them. As he knew the history of the dent in the Garcias’ brown striped roller door, and of the Forbes Carpenter Real Estate sign on the block opposite, which had been there for fifteen years. He stubbed out his cigarette and took a walk around the house, skirting Chris’s strange white mildewed pit. For some reason it had always embarrassed him. The horses were awake, shying and snorting, taking off in little nervy spurts around the yard. There’d been fireworks at the showgrounds, and from time to time a spray of stars still broke out in a bang over the roofs of Warton. All the livestock in town would be awake. Through the arch of the pine trees he saw the shape of his own roof. He caught the echo of one of Winnie’s mournful howls.
In the Garcias’ backyard a group of very drunk young men and a few girls, Josh’s friends, were standing around the barbecue, staggering and laughing,
slapping each other with frozen steaks. They’d come back from the bash at the show-grounds, his own kids with them, Maya looking distant and bored. None of the social events on offer in Warton held interest for her anymore. He couldn’t see her now. Had she gone home?
He lurked in the shadows, looking into the kitchen. He could see Toni standing by the window, wearing a sarong, the fall of her hair on her bare brown shoulders, her strong arms crossed, a drink in one hand. Tom Gabbelich, the Phys Ed teacher, new last year to the school, was reaching out to top up her glass. Were they flirting?
The first time Tom met Toni, as a dinner guest at their place, he blurted out to her: ‘You look like Elizabeth Hurley.’
(I don’t think young Gabbo’s got much between the ears, he said to Toni later when they were washing up.)
Suddenly he made out Maya’s pale young face against the far wall, deep in observation of her mother. He was swept with relief that she was still at the party, that his family was starting the new era together. He couldn’t quite read her expression. Toni, without trying to, without wanting to, somehow took the light in a room. Usually, he thought, it was the other way round, the mother kept her eye on the daughter.
They both watched as Toni, smiling at Gabbo, put her hand over her glass and shook her head.
It was nearly dark. If the sky wasn’t so opaque he’d see the first stars. The tower blocks loomed, lit up festive as ships moored in a harbour. The tossing trees seemed like the only things alive on the street, he almost felt neighbourly with them. It was getting dangerously cold but he couldn’t afford to think about that, or regret his jacket and his boots. The cold of the concrete slab seemed to spear through his buttocks and he sat on his hands for a while. He was locked up in a fresh-air prison.
He hadn’t felt this bad about himself for many years. The grief over Nathalie Maguire had long gone, but the black hole, once known, always lurked ready to open up again before him and now, with Maya’s defection, he knew he must take himself in hand. Focus on something, follow a train of thought or memory. To prevent madness a prisoner had to discipline the mind.
At least it isn’t raining, he thought, and then the first sprinkles blew onto his face.
It was raining on the morning that he went to pick up Toni and drive down south to the commune. There would be no coming back, at least not to Perth, Toni warned him, Cy Fisher had a long memory. Who’d want to come back here anyway, he thought, as he crawled in thick traffic past the tatty warehouses and budget shops along Albany Highway. True to form, he was running late. That was because, when he was due to leave, he couldn’t stop rubbing at the blu-tack left on the walls of his bedroom.
Beech peered around the door. ‘Got cold feet?’
He kept on rubbing. He suspected it was a case of the Tolstoy factor and yet he couldn’t stop.
‘I don’t blame you. You wouldn’t catch me running off with a gangster’s moll.’ Beech advanced into the room, comfortably scratching his stomach.
‘His wife, actually.’
Beech whistled. ‘And you haven’t even porked her.’ Naturally that had been his first question.
‘That’s not what it’s about.’ Or was it? If it was the Tolstoy factor, then it meant that there was something he was avoiding. Deep down, all those years ago, he’d been afraid of becoming involved with Nathalie. After her death he made a pact with himself, that he’d never let another woman down.
‘I wouldn’t worry about the walls,’ Beech was saying. ‘This place’ll be knocked down soon by some big crook developer. Probably her husband.’
Jacob picked up his kitbag, made a thumbs-up sign to Beech, and left. ‘Rather you than me, old boy,’ Beech called out after him. There would be the occasional letter, but they never saw each again.
Beech was the only person to know where he was going. He’d had to tell him when he bought his scrapyard VW for two hundred dollars. Beech himself, only in Perth to spend some time with his old, ailing parents, was going to stay at the rectory before he went back to London in a few days. He could probably manage to keep his mouth shut till then.
He’d warned Beech not to spend another night in this house. Fear was a virus. Now he was always looking over his shoulder.
Everything had been planned down to the last detail. Toni was to leave her house at ten, after Cy had left, without taking anything more than a shopping bag. At eleven he would pick her up at the train station in Armadale. By now she’d have left her car keys and jewellery and chequebook in the top drawer in the bedroom, with a signed note saying she relinquished all rights to her account. In the shopping bag was a change of underwear and a toothbrush and her housekeeping money for the week.
Timing was essential. The longer Toni stood around Armadale station, the more chance there was that she’d be seen. She couldn’t wait more than half an hour. On the two or three occasions that Toni had ever been significantly late Cy traced her within the hour. Their best chance of staying undetected was in the wilds down south, she said, because of Cy’s nature phobia and general aversion to the country. But they couldn’t afford to make any contact with banks, hospitals, families. They had to drop out of the known world.
He didn’t know how it had got to this point. They had never even kissed, not so much as held hands. Each time they met she suggested another rendezvous the next week. Surely this only increased the danger, which was the reason she’d contacted him in the first place? But he always agreed to meet. He drove miles out to the backlands, to sandwich bars in industrial areas, a tacky Devonshire teahouse in the foothills, fish and chip shops overlooking bleak suburban coasts. Toni seemed to take pleasure in the unlikeliness of these places. She found them on the long drives she took when she wanted to be alone.
Their meetings quickly became a ritual, a secret part of each week, and then they became its focus, its romance.
Summer ended, autumn rain fell down greasy windows, they wore coats and blew their noses and left umbrellas hanging over plastic chairs. Each time they met she seemed more beautiful. He breathed in her perfume and tried to read the mood in her soft eyes. Once she came to meet him at a drop-in centre in an outer-suburban church hall, dressed in a long black coat like a Cossack’s and knee-high tooled leather boots. She was on her way to another appointment. He could hardly look at her as they queued up at the urn for their tea, her pale winter face emerging from her fur collar, the little diamond flash on her hand. Like Anna Karenina, like Natasha … Sometimes she turned up in a duffle coat and beanie, but nothing could disguise her fineness, her radiance. Everybody looked at her. In spite of the danger, he was proud to be seen with her.
Afterwards the meetings seemed dreamlike, a sort of fairytale.
They talked of one thing only, the commune movement, the quiet revolution, the alternative society. What else did he have to offer but his ideals? He was nervily aware that he was nearly thirty with nothing to his name, back in the town he’d vowed to leave forever. Utopian fervour, pastoral dreams gave him power. They were all that saved him from despair. He believed that the whole of his moral and political education of the past decade had led him to this. All that was left to him now was to take the step. It was the great adventure, the last frontier. Forty years ago this energy would have been consumed in fighting Hitler’s war: fifty years earlier he would have been a communist.
Toni learnt quickly. She was his first and only convert. One by one he lent her the books he’d bought in London, on Findhorn, subsistence living, folk medicine. She read them whenever Cy Fisher wasn’t around and returned them the next time they met. Talk of monastic-style rituals, harmony with nature, mystical things, made her lower her eyes and slowly nod her head. She spoke very little about herself, but said she’d wanted a different way of life for a long time. They talked only of the future and gradually it became their future.
Communes were springing up all over the south, he told her. Groups of people raised the money for the land, or leased it from a struggling farmer, and then lived on
the dole until they were self-sufficient. That was the goal. He thought of them as pioneers in a new way, an elite network that would eventually have its own schools, and bands and poetry, its own trading arrangements. He’d made contact with a couple he’d met in India, who were starting out on a piece of land in the forest on the south coast. It was all planned. There was work in the local timber industry so that after a few months they could buy materials to build their houses and put in a cash crop, nut trees or avocados. They’d called the commune ‘Karma’. Even he had to grin when he told Toni this.
He caught himself talking to her in his mind all the time, which always happened when he was going to get involved with a girl. He wanted to tell her everything about himself. Who was she? It seemed amazing that she’d grown up at the same time as him in Perth and yet their paths had never crossed. He tried not to think of her in a carnal way. She was a married woman with movie-star looks – ten out of ten – way out of his class. He borrowed Arlene’s car or Beech’s VW for these appointments and, like her, always parked at least a street away.
They were sprung when the brother-in-law of Cy Fisher’s sister Sabine walked into the roadhouse on the Great Eastern Highway where they were eating eggs and chips. ‘Don’t look around,’ Toni hissed at Jacob, her head bent over her plate. ‘It’s René.’ The young man made no sign that he’d seen her, paid for his petrol and left. But that was enough, Toni said. It was only a matter of time now.
‘You’ve got to leave town as soon as possible. Tomorrow. Please Jacob.’ He felt a stab of pleasure at her concern for him, her voice catching in her throat, her lovely brows knotted in a frown. She fixed her eyes on his.
‘I want to come with you,’ she said.
As he drove through the rain to Armadale, he could no longer avoid the thought which had lurked at the back of his mind for some time. That all along she’d been planning this, she’d been laying a trail in which to trap an unsuspecting man. Beautiful women always found a man to save them. They got men to do what they wanted. And she was desperate to be saved.
