by Joan London
Why couldn’t she leave? This was where the thinking stopped. He rushed in and out, distracted, sweating, anxious. You’re not yourself, her mother used to say when she was grumpy. Sometimes in bed he’d turn to her and clutch her and breathe her warm body into his.
Devotion. Devotion had brought her here.
‘He’s all right, just got some funny little habits,’ Maynard said to her on the plane here, after he’d had a gin and tonic. Mr T was in business class.
‘Like voyeurism.’
He tapped her hand half in praise of her vocabulary. ‘Maya, I didn’t think you’d be like this … He’s my business partner now.’
In her on-going, non-stop thinking, she was sometimes occupied by thoughts of strange people. Miriam Kershaw, Dory. How brave they were facing death. Rhonda Carpenter, famous for taking a look and coming back.
She woke to the toy-like ring of his mobile somewhere in the bed. Morning light filled the frosted glass of the window. In a panic she searched amongst the sheets and found it.
‘Andy here!’ A young man’s voice. Andrew. He sounded phony-cheerful. After a moment he said, ‘Dad?’
‘He’s not here.’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Maya.’
‘You’re with Dad?’ The line crackled with his surprise.
Accused, she looked around and saw all the evidence around her, the jumble of bedclothes and newspapers and tissues, last night’s pizza carton and empty cans, their pathetic, make-do life together. No point in pretending this was an office. She had no energy for lies.
‘He went out last night.’
‘Are you expecting him back?’
‘I guess so.’
The phone beeped dead in her ear.
She had to get out of this room. She rushed into the tiny bathroom, showered and dressed. Just as she was scraping up the coins in the fruit bowl, the phone rang again.
‘Maya? I’m sorry.’
She was silent.
‘Dad still not back?’
‘No.’
‘Maya, it’s OK, it really is. I know what he’s like. My mother knew.’
She was unable to speak.
‘Talk to me,’ he said gently.
‘What about?’
‘Do you like it there?’
‘No.’
‘Why don’t you leave?’
Silence.
‘My father used to talk about you. He said you were a country girl and nothing was too much for you.’
Silence.
‘I remember your face, Maya. Your flowers.’
She remembered his face too and the long, grieving tower of his body in the doorway. She cleared her throat. ‘Do you miss your mother?’
Silence, this time from his end of the phone.
‘I thought I was prepared. She tried to prepare me.’
‘Were you very close?’
‘My mother was special. Close isn’t the word for how she was with people. Sort of a saint, really. Maybe too much for poor old Dad.’
‘Do you love your father?’
He half-laughed. ‘You certainly get straight to the point.’
‘There isn’t much time.’ She was shaking. Any moment Maynard could walk in the door. He would be furious to find her talking to his son. He would be tempted to slap her. But from the moment she’d heard his voice, she knew that Andrew, like Magnus, was someone she could talk to. For some reason she knew he’d tell the truth.
‘Of course I do,’ he said.
‘Do you think he’s a good man?’
He hesitated. ‘We knew about his trips to Thailand and everything, my mother and I. But that’s only one side of him. I mean, he thought the world of her. He couldn’t stand it when she got sick. She was his heart and soul.’
She said nothing. He’s worse than you know, she thought.
‘How is he? I’m worried about him.’
So that’s why he’d rung back. ‘Dunno.’ Her voice went harsh again. ‘How’s Kirstin?’
‘Kirstin?’
‘Your girlfriend.’
‘Kirstin’s the daughter of Mum’s oldest friend, Francine. She’s the closest I’ve got to a sister. She’s just got engaged.’
Out into the narrow white-tiled corridors that criss-crossed the Mimosa, an identical map upstairs and down. Past the rows of numbered doors, the growly coughs of the morning, the talk-back and TVs of the permanent residents. Through every door now she could hear the muffled voices of the morning shows.
The woman who cleaned the hotel was so thin that she almost seemed suspended from the wings of her shoulder-blades as she bent over a mop at the end of the corridor. She nodded as Maya walked past. Her name was Helga. Close up you saw she wasn’t very old but had the lined face of a smoker and a weary flickering kindness.
There was a sign above the manager’s desk: Rooms not serviced daily. She’d forgotten to bring the pizza box and beer cans out of the room: it would smell when she returned. The Mimosa smell, mould, cigarettes, cheap room freshener, clung to her wherever she went. Neat dress and shoes required for the dining room at all times. The dining room, glimpsed through a glass door, with its chairs turned up on the tables, looked as if it had been closed for several years. Beside the office was a set of shallow steps with a sign above it, Kitchen Facilities Provided. Beyond was a dark cubbyhole with an electric stove and sink and a door opening onto the carpark out the back. Men sat around the doorway, smoking and talking at all hours of the day. Even in the morning someone would be drinking beer. Special weekly tariffs & long term tenancy rate available.
There was something grimly homelike about the place, with its regulars and its rules. But it was not a place you stayed in unless you had to.
Across the desk she could see the manager reading the paper at a table in his private quarters. Strange to see a normal living room, a couch, a cat, a television. The manager’s name was Terry, a Pom with a shaven head and a T-shirt which showed his biceps. Polite, brisk, uncurious: he wanted to get back as quickly as possible to his life in the living room. Sometimes he shouted for Helga who lived with him. He didn’t seem to have made her happy.
From the outside the Mimosa was a three-storey, redbrick façade with rows of frosted-glass windows, each with an air-conditioner protruding out of it. It was a masterpiece of ugliness. The first sign you saw was beside the front door. No Charities.
The Corner Cafe was next door to the Mimosa, up another set of steps from the footpath. It had a little terrace with an iron-grill fence around it and two white plastic tables set out beneath dusty umbrellas advertising coffee. In the middle of the terrace was a tall palm tree but if you looked up you saw its leaves were just a bunch of brutally pruned brown stalks.
Inside were more plastic tables in a dark bare space and a glass-fronted counter filled with rows of bains-marie. There were all sorts of Asian food, noodles, rice-paper rolls, couscous, curries, tagines. Or you could have chips and sausage rolls and toasted sandwiches. Today’s special, written on the blackboard, was chicken korma. The owners, a young couple called Ali and Rita, seemed to live out the back, and their relatives and children came and went through a bead curtain behind the counter. Business was steady, Maya noted, with a professional eye from her days in the newsagency, but it was seldom busy.
She was unable to eat. Sometimes she ordered fried rice or a toasted cheese sandwich, but more and more she wasn’t hungry. Her denim skirt had sunk dangerously low on her hips, soon she’d have to improvise a belt. ‘Are you trying to look like a model?’ he said one night. ‘You’re becoming gaunt.’ She even had to tighten the watchband on her wrist. Funny how you got what you thought you wanted – travel, living with your lover, being thin – when you no longer cared. Perhaps this was the secret to life? Maynard should stop wanting to be rich.
She ordered a cappuccino and took up her daily position at one of the tables outside. They were just beyond the city centre, on a wide, windy, indifferent street about to be reclaimed fr
om seediness. Businesses were moving in amongst the cheap hotels, old flats and boarding houses, a Persian Rug Centre, a Hair Concept Salon, a Flight Centre. A single flight to Perth cost $450. The lunch bars and newsagents and chemists were for the office workers. Men passed in white shirts and ties, and women in high heels.
There were trees along the street she’d never seen before, with long green leaves hanging from their stems like the teeth of a comb. Birds dived in and out of them. Around the corner was a jacaranda tree, catching the blue of the sky. Every day she went and looked at it. Her mother would do this, she caught herself thinking.
Rita brought the cappuccino to her table. They smiled, both too shy to speak. Rita was neat and quick with beautiful rosy brown hands. Today she wore her hair back, twisted up into a spout with a tortoiseshell clip, the way Cecile sometimes did. Rita made her long for Cecile.
Maynard didn’t like her talking to people. ‘Speak to anyone today?’ he’d ask casually, his only question to her. He even frowned when she said hello to Helga. He didn’t want anyone knowing their business, he said, there were some sensitive deals in the pipeline. They’d be moving on soon. When a day’s negotiations went well he was happier, gentler, like he used to be after sex.
She went walking. If she had more energy she would have liked to head for the hills, where she glimpsed parks tumbling down slopes, old timber houses, pylons, switchback roads. Maybe there’d be some bush to disappear into.
She walked around a bit in the city, the food courts, the war memorials and parks. She went to the Mall and walked amongst people of her own age. She felt cut off from everybody. Each day she bought a juice from the Boost Bar, an Energy Lift or a Stress Relief, so cold it made her head ache and her heart constrict. No food. If she could save a dollar or two she could buy Magnus a CD. The air was warm, there were tropical blooms appearing on the trees, she liked the dips and valleys, the frontier freedom of the streets after Melbourne. But she didn’t have the spirit to tackle a new city.
Mostly she sat in the Corner Cafe or on the fire escape at the back of the Mimosa, or lay on the bed in their room, trying to read. Cheap magazines with their tips for ideal bodies and lovers, and pages of celebrity pics. She slept.
She moved like a sleepwalker. A dull anxiety had taken her over and she didn’t like to go too far from the Mimosa. He didn’t have to worry about her talking. Days could pass without her speaking to anyone.
Except now there was Andrew.
She kept the phone with her. ‘Speak to you soon,’ Andrew had said, at the end of their conversation. She knew he was programmed into the top left-hand key. Number One in Maynard’s life. Just one little press of the button.
How much could she trust him? How much was he on his father’s side? Would he tell Maynard that she’d spoken on his phone?
He was right to be worried about Maynard. Dreams woke him, drenched with sweat. He was plagued by what he called ‘nasal problems’ with the spring pollens, so that he sat up in bed blowing his nose, lost in misery. His face jumped in and out of focus as she stared at it, like a mask pulled on and off, and sometimes for a moment a face she didn’t know peered out at her, wary, calculating, the eyes cold as stones. Yet his touch still had love in it.
A pale fat man in his thirties had come to sit at the other table on the terrace. He was wearing a sagging knit T-shirt and enormous moulded maroon suede sneakers. He had the air, like her, of having nowhere else to go. Rita brought him his breakfast, two sausage rolls and a cup of chips.
If this was a letter who would it be to?
It was coming back, a little shoot breaking through, the instinct to note the grit of details. If she had a notebook she would describe the man at the next table, and the private school girls who had just walked past in round hats and tartan skirts. A little gold chain swung out from Rita’s blouse as she took away her cup and she wanted to write that down too. Ever since she spoke to Andrew she’d started recording again. Was this a letter to him? Images came to her. She saw her father talking films with Carlos at the kitchen table. Her father at his desk in the back shed, his mournful eyes staring through the window. Sometimes with his kids he gave a harsh shout. Don’t tell me you were taken in by that! As if something in his past had hurt him or tricked him. She missed his crumpled, honest face.
The phone rang. ‘Hi. Dad?’
‘No. Maya again.’
‘Where are you? I can hear traffic.’
‘In a cafe, sitting outside.’
‘He’s not back?’
‘No.’
‘When he comes in can you tell him to phone Granny? She calls up every hour about him. She’s driving me mad.’
‘She’s a terrible old woman.’ Why was she so un-shy with him? The truth lay around her, a devastated plain. He knew everything, the only other person in the world who did. She had nothing more to lose.
He burst out laughing. ‘Are all you country folk so straightforward?
‘Not that country girl stuff again. I didn’t deliver dead calves or anything.’
‘What was it like growing up in all that space? Did you feel free?’
She considered. ‘I felt safe. Every single thing, trees and rocks and hills, kind of had a character. You felt they knew you. There were these pine trees that were like people. We had a whole world in the trees and down by the creek. The horses used to pretend not to watch us. Horses are mystical creatures, did you know that? I saw a UFO when I was ten. Do you think there are such things as UFOs?’
‘If people see them. Maybe they exist in the unconscious.’ He paused. ‘Do your folks know where you are?’
‘I don’t want them to.’
A hire car – No Birds – had pulled up on the opposite side of the street. Maynard got out, carrying his jacket and crossed quickly to the Mimosa. The car drove past and she saw the toady hunch of Mr T at the wheel and the glint of his glasses. She thought there was an Asian girl sitting in the back.
‘I gotta go now. Bye.’
She turned the phone off and hid it at the bottom of her bag.
18
Andrew
Cecile was waiting for him at the wine bar. She’d called him and arranged to meet him straight after work. There was a silver bucket with a bottle of French champagne on their table. He loved the way she did things. If he were meeting any other woman he would have ritually kissed her. Her face glowed up at him as he sat down, her hair crow-black, her skin like liquid. He knew what she would tell him. Clarice had agreed to be in The Prodigal.
‘I admit I was unscrupulous,’ she said. ‘I emailed her yesterday and told her that with a topic like this there was a good chance of festival screenings around the world and potential for a large Asian audience. Cannes was not out of the question, or for sure some place in Europe, and I promised to take her with me wherever I was invited. It didn’t take her long to make up her mind. Today she emailed back.’
A waiter opened the champagne and poured it for them. She lifted her glass in a toast to Jacob.
‘You look happy,’ he said. Strands of hair fell around her face, her eyes were bright.
‘Maybe this is the best time, at the beginning. I have new ideas every hour. I’m too excited to sleep.’
‘And you’ll be with Clarice.’ She didn’t see Clarice as he did, vain and wilful and self-centred. ‘Is Dieter enthusiastic?’
‘Dieter’s going to California. He wants to get involved in more commercial projects.’
Need someone to carry the camera? he wanted to ask. Book flights and hotels? Handle your temperamental leading lady? Hail taxis, order meals? Let me be your grip, your best boy. They were always mentioned in the credits but he never had found out what they did. How could he help her raise some money for this film? Capelli Brothers was now a multimillion-dollar business, you saw their name on building sites and trucks all over Perth. If he gave them a call? He sat very still for some minutes.
‘What are you thinking?’ Cecile asked.
‘I�
��m thinking that everything I thought was bad – capitalism, materialism – is now seen as good. And everything I thought was good has turned out to be … ineffective.’
‘But you know, Jacob, everything creates its opposite. Being creates nonbeing. Absence creates presence.’ She smiled, out of general happiness. ‘It’s the Tao.’
He decided to go to the house of M&D Flynn who never answered their phone. Action after non-action, he supposed. On the tram he tried to focus on Maynard Flynn. Middle-aged, a struggling businessman. Did he have kids?
This Flynn was the person Maya was last seen with …A man walking down a street, little Maya skipping beside him, holding his hand. No, not little Maya. His grown-up daughter. A law unto herself. But still with a sweetness of touch, a loving heart. What sort of older man would lightly take that for himself?
He knocked decisively on the Flynns’ front door. Modest, but on the way up, he thought, surveying the street as he waited. Looked like couples with young children were moving in. There was some sort of park down the end.
The Flynns’ house was bleak, the curtains drawn, the concrete front yard covered with fallen leaves. Unoccupied, he’d say, the life all gone out of it. This is how he’d report it to Toni.
But when he knocked again, he detected through the door’s coloured-glass panels an answering glimmer deep within the house. Footsteps. A tall thin young man opened the door.
‘I’m looking for a Maynard Flynn. Does he live here?’
‘He’s away at the moment. Can I help you? I’m his son.’
‘Any idea how I can get in contact with him?’
The young man stared at him. Early twenties. Unusual colouring, not Anglo-Celt. Pale olive skin, almost greenish, red glints in the hair, dark eyes. Shadows under the eyes. A quietness about him. Of course. He’d just lost his mother.
‘My name’s Jacob de Jong. My daughter Maya used to work for your father.’
