by David Malouf
“What would Dulcie think of it?” his friends Sherman and Jack Anderson say, and try, amid shouts of laughter, to reproduce one of her dead ordinary ways of looking at things, without ever quite catching her tone.
She eludes them—"One for you, Dulcie,” Donald tells himself—as she has for so long eluded him.
He watches her now, fork in hand, pushing baked beans about, piling them into modest heaps, then rearranging them in steep hills and ridges, then using the prongs of the fork to redistribute them in lines and circles, and finds himself thinking of the view from the plane window as they flew in from Alice: a panorama of scorched, reddish rock that must have been created, he thinks, in a spirit of wilfulness very like his mother's as she goes now at the beans.
He smiles. The idea amuses him. His mother as demiurge.
He continues to watch, allowing the image to undergo in his head the quiet miracle of transformation, then once more begins to write.
Mrs. Porter sits in the tourist bus and smokes. Smoking isn't allowed of course, but there is nobody about. She has the bus to herself. She has no qualms about the breaking of rules.
The bus is parked in the shade but is not cool. Heated air pours in at the open window, bearing flies. She is using the smoke to keep them off. Outside, the earth bakes.
To her left, country that is flat. Orange-red with clumps of grey-green spiky bushes. It, the Rock, is a little way off to her right. She does not look.
People, among them Donald, are hauling themselves up it in relays; dark lines of them against the Rock's glowing red. Occasionally there is a flash as the sun bounces off a watch or a belt buckle, or a camera round someone's neck. Madness, she thinks. Why would anyone want to do it? But she knows the answer to that one. Because it's there.
Except that for most of the time, it hadn't been—not in her book. And what's more, she hadn't missed it, so there! When they drew maps at school they hadn't even bothered to put it in! She had got through life—dawdling her way past picket fences, barefoot, in a faded frock, pulling cosmos or daisies through the gaps to make bouquets, parsing sentences, getting her teeth drilled, going back and forth to the dairy on Saturday mornings for jugs of cream—with no awareness whatsoever that this great lump of a thing was sitting out here in the middle of nowhere and was considered sacred.
She resents the suggestion, transmitted to her via Donald, that she had been missing out on something, some other—dimension. How many dimensions are there? And how many could a body actually cope with and still get the washing on the line and tea on the table?
That's the trouble with young people. They think everything outside their own lives is lacking in something. Some dimension. How would they know, unless they were mind-readers or you told them (and then you'd have to find the words, and they'd have to listen), what it felt like—that little honey-sack at the end of a plumbago when it suddenly burst on your tongue, or the roughness of Dezzy McGee's big toe when he rubbed it once on her belly while she was sunbaking at the Towns-ville Baths. “Waddabout a root, Dulce?” That's what he had whispered.
She laughs, then looks about to see if anyone has heard, then laughs again. Eleven she was, and Dezzy must have been twelve. Blond and buck-toothed, the baker's boy.
All that seems closer now than this Rock ever was. Closer than last week.
Plus a butcher-bird her uncle Clary owned that was called Tom Leach after a mate he'd lost in France. Which was where—a good deal later of course—she lost Leonard. It could whistle like a champ. And a little stage set, no bigger than a cigar box, that belonged to Beverley.
Buss's mother, that consisted of a single room with walls that were all mirrors, and little gold tables and chairs, and a boy in silk breeches presenting to a girl in a hooped skirt a perfect silver rose. It played a tune, but the mechanism was broken so she never got to hear it. She had pushed her face so close once, to the tiny open door, that her hot breath fogged up all the mirrors, and Beverley Buss had said, "Look, Dulce, you've made a different weather.”
Cancer. Beverley Buss, she'd heard, had died of cancer. Beverley McGowan by then.
She had loved that little theatre, and would, if she could, have willed herself small enough to squeeze right in through the narrow doorway and join that boy and girl in their charmed life that was so different from her own barefooted one—she bet that girl didn't have warts on her thumb or get ringworm or nits—but had managed it only once, in a dream, and was so shocked to be confronted with herself over and over again in the seven mirrors, which were only too clear on that occasion, that she burst into tears and had to pinch herself awake not to die of shame in front of such a perfect pair.
So what did this Rock have to do with any of that?
Nothing. How could it? It wasn't on the map. It wasn't even on the list—there was a list, and you had to find out where the names belonged and mark them in. Capes, bays, the river systems, even the ones that ran only for a month or two each year. You marked them in with a dotted line. But this Rock that everyone makes such a fuss of now wasn't on the list, let alone the map. So there!
It certainly wasn't on her map. Her map, in those days, was five or six cross-streets between their weatherboard, her school, the open-air pictures where coloured people sat on the other side of a latticed partition, and the Townsville Baths. Later, in Brisbane after the war, it was the streets around West End as she dragged Douglas and pushed Donald, up to the shops and then back again in the boiling sun, her route determined by the places where you could get a stroller over the kerb.
Big grasshoppers would be chugging past, and at nesting time you had to watch out for magpies. Nothing to see on the way. A stray dog sniffing then lifting its leg in the weeds round a lamp-post. Roadmen at work round a fenced-off hole. A steamroller laying a carpet of hot tar, and that smell, burning pitch or hellfire, and the fellers in army boots and shorts at work beside it, most of them leaning on shovels or sitting on one heel with a fag hanging from their lip, waiting for the billy to boil over a pile of sticks. The tar smell thinning at last to the peppery scent that came through a paling fence. Dry stalks in a spare allotment.
Sometimes she stopped off to have morning tea with her only friend at that time, a Chinese lady called Mrs. Wau Hing.
Mrs. Wau Hing had a cabinet in her front room made of carved cherrywood, with shelves and brackets and appliqud ivory flowers, chrysanthemums and little fine-winged hummingbirds. It was beautiful. Though you wouldn't really know what to do with it. Mrs. Wau Hing called it decorative.
Mrs. Wau Hing called her Blossom (which was silly really, but she liked it) and gave her chicken in garlicky black sauce to take home, which Leonard said “different.” Too different for her, but never mind, it was the thought.
What pleased her was the fine blue-whiteness of the bowl her friend sent it home in, with its design of pinpricks filled with transparent glaze.
When she went out barefoot in her nightie to get a glass of water at the kitchen sink, there it was, rinsed and shining in the wooden rack along with her own familiar crockery.
So what did the Rock have to do with any of that? Or with the stones she had in her kidneys in 1973?
These days, mind you, it's everywhere. Including on TV. Turns up dripping with tomato sauce as a hamburger, or as a long red-clay mould that starts to heave, then cracks open, and when all the bits fall away there's a flash-looking car inside, a Ford Fairlane—stuff like that. Its red shadow turned into a dingo one night and took that baby.
Suddenly it has plonked itself down in the middle of people's lives like something that has just landed from outer space, or pushed up out of the centre of the earth, and occupies the gap that was filled once by—by what? She can't think. Movie stars? Jesus? The Royal Family? It has opened people's minds—this is Donald again—in the direction of the incommensurable. What a mouthful! It is exerting an influence. Well, not on her it isn't! She gives it a quick dismissive glance and takes another deep drag on her Winfield.
Cathedrals. With Leonard it was cathedrals. As soon as the war was over and the big liners were on the go again he started planning their trip. They made it at last in 1976.
Cathedrals. Great sooty piles at the end of crooked little streets, more often than not with something missing, like the veterans they made a space for, mutils, on every bus.
Or on islands. Or high up on cliffs. Leonard's eyes went all watery just at the sight of one of them and she felt him move quietly away.
He wasn't religious in a praying way. When Leonard got down on his knees each morning it was to polish his boots—Nugget boot polish was what he believed in. The smell of it hung about in the hallway long after he had taken his briefcase and hat and run off to the tram. But with cathedrals, she'd decided, it was the gloom that got him. Which had been brewing there for centuries, and connected with some part of his nature she recognised, and felt soft towards, but had never felt free to enter. She associated it with the bald patch on top of his head, which you saw, or she did, only when he got down on his knees in the hallway on a sheet of newspaper, and held one boot, then the other, very lovingly to his heart, and stroked it till it shone.
She felt such a surge of tenderness for him then. For his reliability, his decency. And for that bald spot, which was the one thing she could see in him that he couldn't, a hidden weakness. That's the sort of thing that got her. But cathedrals, no thanks!
When she did manage to feel something, other than a chill in her bones that was like creeping death, was if the organ happened to be playing, or the sun, which was rare enough, was dropping colours from a stained-glass window on to the stony floor, in a play of pink and gold.
As for the proportions, as Leonard called them, well, she didn't go in for height, she decided; all that gave you was a crick in the neck. What she liked was distance. A good long view towards the sunset, or at a certain soft hour at home, towards an empty intersection, and if you got a glimpse of something more it would be the way the hills blurred off into blueness beyond the last of the flashing roofs. You would feel small then, in a way she found comforting.
What really put her off was when Leonard, half lying in one of the pews, with the guide laid open in his lap and his arms extended along the wooden back, rolled his eyes up, like suffering Jesus or one of their Catholic saints. Where, she wondered, had he got that from? As far as she knew he was a Methodist.
As they moved on from Cologne to those others—the French ones—she'd taken against the cathedrals, started to really resent them.
The way you can resent a teacher (that Miss Bishop in third grade for instance) who has got a set against you and decided you're a dill, or some little miss at the bank.
She had never had to worry, as some do, about other women, but she'd felt then that Leonard was being stolen from her. The moment they pushed through the doors and the cold hit her heart, she felt the change in him. Lying awake at his side in poky rooms, she would stare up at the ceiling and have to prevent herself from reaching out to see if he was still there.
She began to feel a kind of dread. The sight of yet another of those Gothic monsters looming up out of a side street and opening its stone arms to him was more than she could face.
But when it happened it wasn't in a cathedral but in one of the hotels, and for two days afterwards she sat waiting in the room beside their ports, eating nothing, till at last Donald arrived to reclaim her and take his father home.
“It's something you should see,” Donald had told her, speaking of this Rock.
“Why?”
“Because you should, that's all.”
“You mean before I die,” she said, and gave a rough laugh.
It's what Leonard had said. “I want to see Cologne Cathedral before I die.” But after Cologne he had got in another six.
“Are there any more of these things?” she asked of the Rock. “Or is there just the one?”
Donald gave her a hard look. He wondered sometimes if she wasn't sharper than she let on.
She had come out here to please him. He was easily pleased and she knew that if she didn't he would sulk. It was a break as well from the unit, and from having to show up at Tess Hyland's every afternoon at five thirty—the Happy Hour—and listen to her complaints about the other owners and what the dogs were doing to her philodendrons.
Tess Hyland had been a convent mouse from Rockhampton when, in all the excitement after the war, she was recruited by UNRWA and went to work in the DP camps in Europe, then spent twenty-five years as a secretary at the UN in New York, where she had picked up a style that included daiquiris at five thirty in the afternoon and little bits of this and that “crackers.”
Five thirty, the Happy Hour. Personally it was a time she had always hated, when a good many people might think seriously of cutting their throat.
She would also miss out, just this once, on babysitting her three grandchildren, Les, Brett and Candy, on a Saturday night, and her drive in the back seat of Douglas's Toyota on Sunday afternoon.
They had given her a room out here with an en suite, and the menu, even at breakfast, “extensive.” It was only three nights.
The first thing she'd done when Donald left her alone in the room was to have a good go-through of the cupboards. She didn't know what she was looking for, but people, she knew, were inclined to leave things, and if there was a dirty sock somewhere, or a suspender belt or a used tissue, she wouldn't feel the place was her own.
The drawers for a start. There were two deep ones under the table where they had put her port, and two more at the end of the long cupboard. When you opened the cupboard a light came on. There was a good six feet of hanging space in there, with a dozen or so good hangers. Real ones, not fixed to the rail so you couldn't walk off with them like the ones in France.
But all that hanging space! All those shelves and drawers! Who had they been expecting? Madame Melba? How many frocks and matinee coats and smart little suits and jackets would you have to have, how many hankies and pairs of stockings and undies, to do justice to the facilities they had provided? She had brought too little. And even that, when she opened her port and looked at it, seemed more than she would need. And why were there two beds? Both double.
In the fridge, when she looked, and in the bar recess above, was all you would need to put on a good-sized party: cans of VB, bottles of Carlsberg, Cascade, champagne, wicker baskets packed like a Christmas hamper with Cheezels, crisps, Picnic and Snickers bars and tins of macadamia nuts and cashews.
So what am I in for? she wondered. Who should I be expecting? And what about those double beds?
Casting another panicky glance in the direction of so many tantalising but unwelcome possibilities, she fled to the en suite and snicked the lock on the door.
The whole place gleamed, you couldn't fault them on that. Every steel bar and granite surface gave off a blinding reflection. There was a band of satiny paper across the lid of the lav. You had to break it to use the thing. Like cutting the ribbon on a bridge.
You could crack your skull in here. That's what she thought. Easily. It was so shiny and full of edges. Or fall and break a hip.
She settled on the rim of the bath and considered her predicament. Just stepping into a place like this was a big risk.
Suddenly she saw something.
On the floor between the gleaming white lav and the wall was a cockroach, lying on its back with its curled-up legs in the air. It could hardly be the victim of a broken hip, so must have died of something the room had been sprayed with, that was safe for humans—well, it had better be!—but fatal to cockies and such. She got down on her knees and took a good look at it.
Cockroaches, she had heard, were the oldest living creatures on earth. Survivors. Unkillable. Well, obviously you could kill individuals like this one, but not the species. They would outlast anything. Even a nuclear explosion. She sat back on her heels and considered this.
The cockie statistics were impressive, but when it came to survival you coul
dn't beat people, that was her view. People were amazing. They just went on and on. No matter how poor they were, how pinched and cramped their lives, how much pain they had, or bad luck, or how unjust the world was, or how many times they had been struck down. Look at Mrs. Ormond with her one breast and that husband of hers who was always after the little boys. Look at those fellers in Changi and on the railway—Dezzy McGee had been one of those. Look at that cripple you saw down at the Quay, in a wheelchair with his head lolling and the snot running down into his mouth. Living there—sleeping and all—in a wheelchair, with no other shelter, and young fellers running in off the ferries in relays to wheel him into the Gents and put him on the lavvie and clean him up afterwards at one of the basins. Look at the derros with their yellow beards and bare, blackened feet, shifting about among the suits in Martin Place. They were all up and moving—well, not that one in the wheelchair—pushing on to the next day and the next and the one after, unkillable, in spite of the bombs and the gas chambers, needing only a mouthful of pap to live on, like those Africans on the TV, and the least bit of hope. Hanging on to it. To life and one another.
She took the cockroach very gingerly by one of its brittle legs, used the side of the bathtub to heave herself upright, went through to the bedroom, and tossed it out into a garden bed. Something out there, ants or that, would get a meal off it. Good luck to them!
But when she turned back to the room and saw the wide-open empty cupboard with its blaze of light she regretted it. She could have thrown the cockroach in there. A dead cockroach was all right. It wouldn't have disturbed her sleep. Not like a dirty sock.
She closed the cupboard door and squinnied through a crack to see that the light was off, then sat very quietly on one of the beds. Then, after a moment, shifted to the other.
