by Kate Lyons
He started throwing things across her back seat. Shoes, hats, dismembered paperbacks. A hail of greyish underwear. In the warmth of the car, the stink got stronger, the shockingly intimate aroma of a hot iron meeting the armpit of an unwashed shirt.
The dog was growling in earnest now. She kept one hand on its scruff, one eye on the rear view. A wooden coat hanger, what looked like a Bible. A rusty bread knife. How could one little suitcase contain so much?
She’d reached the turn-off and had started to pull over when he clamped a hand on her shoulder. Startled, she punched the accelerator and the car swerved back into the middle of the road.
‘Wait! I’ve got a message for you.’ And she realised then what he was. An omen. A harbinger, in Harry’s universe. Some vengeful ghost of an old habit, fashioned from dusk, sticks, shadows, the small stone of her own longing, on this bleak stretch of road. Even as she’d first seen him, even as she’d told herself he was too short, tree shadows having distorted his figure on the road, and too old, his face a travelled maze of purplish leather, the colour of bodies found in bogs, part of her had been cutting the cloth to fit. The pop of his hat corks, that jaunty dip to his knees. His red scarf and blue shirt, coin bright against pewter landscape. The crude old-fashioned lines of him, as if he’d stepped out of some simpler, more softly tinted history, the faded world of those old Polaroids. And the outdoor life could do terrible things to you, couldn’t it? Just witness the man from the pub.
‘Have you met the Lord? Have you taken him into your heart?’
She hit the brake and a plague of pamphlets erupted from the back seat.
‘Wait! You’re going the wrong way!’
She said something stupid like, I thought you were going to Coonabarabran. ‘Evils of the flesh,’ she thought she heard, thighs chafing against her slacks. The dog’s growling rose a notch. The car was spiky with warnings now.
‘Listen, I’ve just remembered. I’ve forgotten something.’
It was infectious. She was talking in bloody parables now.
‘I have go back, the other way. You’ll have to get out.’
Beneath the stench of unwashed body, she smelled it, that salty bitterness men give off when aroused. Then everything else was obliterated by the smell of entrenched halitosis as he stuck his mouth right next to her face.
‘God sees, you bitch. He knows what you do.’
Thank God or whoever for the dog. With an agility she wouldn’t have given it credit for, it lunged backwards, went straight for the old man’s throat. With similarly surprising speed, as if a much younger man was hiding beneath that ragged disguise, he opened his door, tumbled out. She floored the accelerator, back door still swinging, steering with one hand while grabbing behind her with the other. Finding the handle of his suitcase, she heaved it sideways. In the rear view, she saw his medieval curses fluttering gaily across the road.
For just a moment, she felt fifteen again. As if instead of finding a broken ghost of Ray by the side of the road, she’d discovered some looser-limbed, more flamboyant version of herself, swaggering single-handed round those icy curves.
The feeling had deserted her now.
She should get up. All this tartan was giving her a rash. Should comb her hair, wash her face in ye olde ewer. Ring the rental place and arrange another car. But it was still early and her mobile was out in the glove box, and in the spirit of all this faux Victoriana, no phone in the room. There’d been incidents, according to a stridently punctuated notice on the bedside table, and all non-local calls from reception must be paid for prior to checkout, which was 10 am, on the dot!
The dog started whining so she fed it a chocolate. Watched it slobber in arthritic circles, distributing strings of drool. Convinced herself no one would notice, given the hectically swirling carpet. She couldn’t just keep calling him the dog. Bloodshot eyes, saggy jowls. Winston. That would do.
She could hear his stomach rumbling from across the room. Shouldn’t give a dog chocolate, she remembered. Shouldn’t have it in here at all. The author of all this elaborately patterned discomfort also objected to children, vegetarians and the wearing of shoes upstairs.
When the dog started to retch, she turned the radio on. Another sugary love song, then an ad for tractor parts.
After the accident, after the car hit the guard rail and came to rest, leaning like a curious sightseer over the drop, she’d stepped shakily out. The dog remained sitting bolt upright in the front seat, still staring straight ahead. She was starting to wonder if he was quite all there. The car itself she hardly dared look at, a twisted lump of metal where the front numberplate should have been. When she opened the door to get the dog, the smell of Holy Roller lingered. Walking around the layby to calm herself, she found one of those awful God pamphlets stuck to her heel.
At the edge, a sign pointed down a flattened tunnel of grass. A lookout, some world-famous waterfall. Pushing past a cluster of Closed and Danger warnings, that same little man they always used, toppling over and over from a cliff, she found herself on a slim finger of sandstone hanging over the darkening blue. She sat down on the bench provided, closed her eyes. Listened to the dreamy tick of insects, the rustle of treetops like a woman’s skirt.
You should stay away from high places, Harry used to warn. As if there weren’t pills and ovens in the world. This was after she’d told him about her daily visits to the cemetery, how she’d climb over the safety barrier, walk along the cliffs, head right to the edge. Balanced there above a chaos of surf and rocks, she’d close her eyes, lean out, try and see what Simon had seen, in his paintings of this place. Instead of a curve of blue littered with gulls and sailing boats, that whiteness which had eaten all his work towards the end. A vacuum outlined by an emptiness, like the tool silhouettes in her garden shed. As if his inner landscape had been nuclear blasted, leaving only the blind certain shape of what he was not.
I see, Harry had said, steepling his fingers, sunlight picking out the bald patch behind his ponytail. I see, he kept saying, while seeing nothing at all. Yet he’d seemed so unshockable and sponge-like in his home-made jumpers, she’d told him everything. Well, not everything. In the air of humid intimacy Harry carried with him like weather, even the bones of the truth had stuck in her throat. In the end, it had been a mistake to tell him anything at all. On top of his kindness about Simon, she’d then had to endure him being kind about Ray as well. It was such a burden, Harry’s kindness. Delivered in big, moist servings, in lumpen daily doses, it was impossible to fend off, digest, absorb. Always lurking in hallways or crawling up phone lines, waiting to obliterate her outline, like the Blob in that movie which had scared her witless as a kid.
And Harry wouldn’t have understood. All that talk about opening to grief and gaining closure, like she was a cupboard or something. You could tell he’d never been in love. When she’d told him how her partner of six years had just left one day, had taken his suitcase of spare clothes from the spare room and just walked out, through the back door and out the back gate, disappearing forever into the white-hot point of a Sydney summer afternoon, and how she’d been looking for him ever since and, worse, finding him, in every rangy, white-haired, blue-eyed man, Harry’s solution had been to take a course. A great believer in courses, Harry. Always on one himself. One week rebirthing and car maintenance, the next flamenco guitar. As if there was a course he could take which would make him into a man she might want. How could you want someone whose violin-patterned socks poked through the toes of their orthopaedic sandals? Who, when the buckle broke on those sandals didn’t swear like a normal person, just smiled beatifically and tied them up with string? A man who used the word bloke in invisible inverted commas, as if it was a passport to some club he wanted to join.
The thought of Harry propelled her off the bench, right to the edge of the cliff. Bracing herself against the smelly bulk of the dog, she hung her head over, waiting either for the swell of terrible freedom she used to feel after Simon left, or for the l
urch of terror she’d felt as her car teetered against that guard rail, heading for the abyss.
She found she felt nothing. Vaguely hungry, despite the chocolates. Faintly curious about this famous waterfall, which she couldn’t see, only feel. A fine spray on her cheek, as if God was spitting on her head.
Something had shifted, without her permission. Perhaps when she realised Simon wasn’t coming back and wasn’t dead either. She’d seen his name in the paper, some art exhibition, Melbourne or somewhere. He’d just slipped sideways from the outline she’d allotted him, leaving her mooning over seagulls, a cliché on a cliff. Left her with Harry and his unravelling jumpers and his endlessly unravelling feelings, his relentless picking over her feelings, like she was a bag of fabric remnants he was determined to make into something else.
Perhaps when Mam died, another sinew to the past torn away. Where once she’d thought she was still that woman at the cemetery, someone who, if she believed her own propaganda, should have been brave enough to throw herself off the edge of things, she wasn’t that woman and in fact had never been. If she was, she should have welcomed that hitchhiker’s rusty knife with open arms. Should have wished for a breath of wind, a crack in the guard rail, something to disturb the hairsbreadth balance of the car as it hung over the drop.
In the end, she was too bloody-minded. As Mam used to say, stubborn as a root. How else to explain all those hairpin bends she’d taken with such spinsterish diligence, all those semitrailers she could have driven into, all that icy road she’d negotiated between abandoning the hitchhiker and that moment when, blinded by the last rays of sun through a dirty windscreen, she’d seen him, ahead of her again. Rebuilt from guilt and ether, his little suitcase bursting with mysteries and mildew. Thumb cocked, waiting for her by the side of the road.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
He got all the way to the Twenty Bends turn-off before it dawned on him. Then just sat there, in the middle of the highway, a sitting duck for any P-plater roaring round the curve. Aghast at himself, his cow-eyed addiction to the old rhythm of things.
All those times he could have turned right toward the tip and the industrial park and the turn-off to Frederick Street, and he’d kept on, slipping through possibilities like a fish. After the hospital, where Mick got the all-clear on his X-ray and some Panadeine for his head, instead of taking the bypass over the rail crossing, circling the racetrack and the grain silo, he’d driven straight through. At the feed-barn corner, where Dad always had a debt to settle and where he should have turned right, across the bridge where he’d first learned to swim, he’d sat at the lights, in the middle lane, hypnotised by the past. Smell of chaff and shame and horse leather through the open window, all mixed up with the river mud, bags of blood and bone. After that he must have sailed unseeing along the whole three blocks of the Memorial Park, its grey Spitfire erected in honour of some war hero not his father, flying nowhere over the monkey bars.
At some point he didn’t remember, he must have circumnavigated the footy oval where at twelve he’d broken his nose in a ruck and played straight through. Hadn’t noticed. Too busy obeying some other, more potent architecture. Beneath those flaking wooden stands, gone now probably, old Chinese Alf had taught him to box. An unlikely assassin, five foot nothing, old as Moses and skinny as a root. But deft, deadly, silent, his narrow face wizened as one of his roast fowls. Ducking and weaving, relentless, in board-filtered light.
‘Ray? Reckon I’ll head home. I got money. I’ll be right.’
Past that mailbox he was staring at, through the gate and up that winding track, inside the house he couldn’t see but which, from the sign out front, had just been sold, had lived the man Alf had taught him to defend himself from. A big man, twice Ray’s height. Hands so strong, they could bend fence wire without pliers, break another man’s fingers with a single squeeze. At fourteen, Ray had thought that if he could only make himself as strong and big, his anger and muscles just as hard, he’d be all right. Didn’t realise that fists were no defence against things you couldn’t see or name.
‘Ray? I gotta head back. Get the house ready, for when Mum gets home.’
The old milk can mailbox had seen better days. The name barely visible, just a faded M from McCullough, the white ghost of the J&A, the rest of it held together by rust and paint. The top gate was goose-winged against deep furrows, the road Dad had made with Mr Tangello’s grader mostly potholes now. The driveway was so overgrown with Paterson’s curse, the white stones marking it had all but disappeared. Some wanker had taken a pot shot at the real estate sign. The metal post all dinged up.
‘Ray? You listening? If you drop us in town, I’ll get a bus.’
Could have kept the mailbox up. Least they could have done.
‘No buses out your way, not from here. And I can’t. I promised your mum.’
‘Yeah, well. Don’t reckon she’d be too keen.’ Mick lifted his shirt, flashing the bruise where the glove box had got him, a blue-green shadow below his ribs.
‘Just drop me in town, eh. I’ll work it out from there.’
‘Shut up for a bit.’
A puff of dust was coming off the track. Heading down to the road.
‘Who lives here anyway? You know them or something?’
The dust materialised slowly into a shiny white HiLux, bristling with bull bars and aerials. Could afford to trick their ute up like Christmas, but couldn’t be bothered to paint a mailbox or fix a gate.
Ray wrenched the ute in a savage uey, headed back into town.
Didn’t need to look for the house number on Frederick Street. He spotted the plump white curves of Eddie’s Holden even from the corner, such was the generous sprawl of new bitumen, the burnished arc of heated air.
What was Dad doing here? If he’d sold the old place, surely he could afford something better. Yet the man at the funeral home had confirmed the address. Always the rough side of town, this bit near the tip and the wreckers’ yards. The desolation had spread now though, a welter of car parts, old tyres and rusted caravans. One house roofless, another with a hole in its front wall. But this new road had nothing to do with them. At the top, behind a chain-link fence, bulldozers were grinding away, flattening piles of stink. A billboard promised something called Whispering Pines. Not a pine tree in sight, just their dead counterparts, little timber-frame boxes all up the hill. So cheek by jowl, you could spit from your kitchen window, hit someone next door.
‘I’m starving. Is there a Maccas?’
‘Probably. I dunno.’
‘Mate. I want a burger.’
‘Mate, how about I just take you back to Sam’s?’
Mick subsided, picking at a hole in his jeans.
Ray pulled up well shy of the driveway. No matter if it never went further than the front yard, you could never park Eddie’s Holden in. As a boy, Ray had hated that car, the smug shiny chrome of it, the fleshy curves and female bulges, the fins swooping like Brylcreemed hair. All those Saturday afternoons he’d spent washing and buffing it, just so Dad could drive it back into a shed and cover it with a tarp.
‘Wait out here. I won’t be long.’
‘But it’s boiling! And I’m thirsty. And it’s boring out here.’
‘Yeah? You reckon? I’d take boring any day over what’s in there.’
Why did he say that? He didn’t know that. Not any more. Knew only the old pattern, hot tedium to raging explosion and back again, as if Ray was cold water and Dad was caustic soda and they were shaking themselves together, over and over, inside the four walls of a house.
‘Why? Who lives there?’ Mick was gazing curiously at the house.
‘None of your business. Look, use the hose if you want, and while you’re at it, give the dog a drink. But don’t forget to wind it up again. And whatever you do, don’t touch that car.’
Why was he issuing these frozen little Saturday afternoon rules? Weren’t his rules, had nothing to do with Mick. Nothing to do with this little stone house, gleaming lik
e a bone on its treeless block. A single rosebush languished beside the fence. The front yard was concrete edging a single square of grass. The tiny patch of yellow buffalo was so infested with water-filled soft drink bottles, not even the bravest dog would have risked it, or so it seemed to Ray. The hose coiled with iron precision, the rosebush pruned to within an inch of its life. Not a piece of driveway bluestone out of place. Nothing to show the disarray of grief.
Yet there was something, wasn’t there, in the way light was falling, so clipped and sheer across the modest wrought iron of the gate. A thin light, resonant with chores all done, life rushed through, hours finished far too early and folded away. By late afternoon it would slant through half-closed venetians, bounce dully off clothes long dry on a line. Bring time and its passing into shallow focus. Make even a mean old bastard stifle a sob.
That bit of pity was the only thing moving Ray forward when everything in him wanted to run the other way. As he squeezed past the Holden, he knocked some bluestone off the driveway. Bent to put it back. His shadow gone apelike on the ground.
He ignored the front door. At home, the back door was always the front. Round the side, he tried to peer in at a window but the venetian blinds were thin-lipped. Out back, a big garage and a Hills hoist took up most of the yard. Dad must hate that, how small it was, all these fences around him, curlered heads poking over to count his empties or check the state of the washing on his line.
The back door was open. The TV was bellowing, a hardware ad. Maybe he was in the garage. Ray listened for the sound of the axe. But it was the height of summer and a glimpse through the shed window showed enough split ironbark to last a homestead through a dozen winters.
‘Hello?’ The flyscreen rattled under his knock. ‘Dad? It’s me.’
Me. Stupid. After all this time.
When there was no answer, he pushed the screen door open, walked in.
Dark in there. Hot too, and musty, the smell of egg grease and nylon carpet funnelled by looming furniture, close wood-panelled walls. The combustion fire glowered from a corner, although it had to be thirty-five degrees outside. The curtains were all drawn, so the sun didn’t fade the carpet, one of Mam’s old rules. The only bright spot was her old linen tablecloth, shining pearl-like in the centre of the room.
