Heather Taylor Johnson was born in the United States and has lived in Australia since 1999. Jean Harley Was Here is her second novel; her first was Pursuing Love and Death. She has published four volumes of verse and is the poetry editor for Transnational Literature. She is also the editor of the anthology Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain. Heather lives in Adelaide with her husband and three children.
Also by Heather Taylor Johnson
fiction
Pursuing Love and Death
poetry
Meanwhile, the Oak
Thirsting for Lemonade
Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town
Exit Wounds
To Deb Martin
Your death cut our friendship short
and yet our friendship still endures
A Moment before the Moment
Jean Harley was here. Ask her mother, who will say it had been a difficult labour but raising the child was like a picnic: sometimes the wind picked up and sometimes the clouds rolled in, bringing chill or rain, but mostly there was sun. Ask her husband, who hates sleeping alone but will not take a new lover. Ask her son, who will need photographs to remember her face as the years forge ahead. Ask the professor she was assisting with research. They’d only had one day left together in their office before the university closed for holidays. ‘Bloody hell,’ he’d said that day. More than once. Ask someone from her bank. Ask the Australian Department of Immigration. Ask the three birds that flew from the tree when her bicycle hit the ground.
Some people say ‘she never saw it coming’, but there was a moment, before the moment, which made her heart jump. It was a pinpoint, as if everything she had ever done was about to culminate in the very next moment, and she knew this. She saw it inside of herself and then it was over. The moment had passed. Cars rolled on.
Ask the onlookers who saw its carnage and will remember the scene in great detail: the police lights blurry in the early morning rain; cars resting off to the side of the black road, crushing the wet grass, almost lost, almost confused; two police officers; an ambulance; a burly man who looked to have a foul taste in his mouth; a hysterical woman holding a small baby; the baby getting wet, but it wasn’t a heavy rain and it wasn’t a cold rain so at least there was that; witches hats guarding the tragedy; the banged-up bicycle; the crumpled cyclist being attended to.
Ask her closest friends. They will say that Jean Harley, the energetic woman who could dance without break for four hours straight but couldn’t hold her wee in if she laughed too hard, the shortest woman in the room who had the largest self-esteem but never, ever was she big-headed, they will say that, yes, Jean Harley was here. They will say to each other for a very long time that they do not understand, that it makes no sense. Ask the paramedic who worked on her in the ambulance; his morning had proved to be quite busy. Ask the attendant at the nurses’ station who had to ring her husband. Ask Charley, who had only wanted to post a letter.
Waiting for Betelgeuse to Die
Stan and Jean were destined to be lovers. It was painted on the walls of prehistoric mountains and sung by the fish in the southern seas; Stan and Jean were written in the stars.
As children, on opposite sides of the world, they took notice of the heavens. They each saw Orion’s Belt as upright and natural. They weren’t to know that in time they would both see it upside down and filled with possibilities, their bodies almost touching.
When Stan was twenty-three, he inherited thousands of dollars from his grandfather and left Kangaroo Island to spend six weeks skiing in the French Alps and six weeks mountain biking in the American Rockies. Only hours before he first met Jean, he was thrashing his bike over fallen wood and leaves. A canopy of aspens surrounded him while the incline of the earth tested his agility. His focus on the trail consumed him, which is why he hadn’t seen the deer – he’d heard it first, then hit it. Stan would later say the deer ran into him, but his front tyre hit the deer’s left side, so it was certainly he who ran into it. ‘I never saw it coming,’ he would later tell the story. ‘Never knew they were so big.’
Naturally he fell off his bike, banging and scraping his shoulder and leg. There was no pain at first, his body so full of adrenalin. He was stunned, even thought momentarily about death. ‘I didn’t know they were so strong.’ One cannot simply go back to camp and settle in after such an experience with a deer. One needs a large meal and a few pints.
‘Oh my god!’ the girl outside the Corner House Grill blurted out, no doubt seeing the hundreds of dots of blood seeping through the skin of Stan’s shin.
‘It hurts,’ he laughed, limping carefully. ‘I hope this place has beer.’
The girl stopped walking. Stan stopped too.
‘What did you do to yourself?’
‘I ran into a deer.’
‘A deer!’ Her mouth hung open. Was she shivering from imagining his pain or was it the chill from the fading light, from the breezes born off the San Miguel River, off the walls of Bear Creek Canyon, where Stan had met his deer?
He liked her surprise. Her reaction to the wound and its cause made him want to tell her the story. He had to tell someone. And there were other stories to share. The hailstorm he hit while cycling in Southwestern Utah and the shenanigans at the crazy little pub in Salida, Colorado.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Place called Kangaroo Island.’
‘No shit,’ she laughed.
‘Yeah, Kangaroo Island, South Australia.’
Her eyes grew wide, her smile seemingly caught midstream of disbelief and fascination. ‘What’s that like?’
‘It’s small. Full of beaches with fast waves. Good bushland.’
Bushland, he could see her thinking, as if summing up everything as ‘other’, yet ‘simple’ too.
‘Are there lots of kangaroos?’ she asked.
The same question every time and still he loved it. ‘Heaps, but I’ve never crashed my bike into one before.’
‘Wow.’
Wow – such an American reaction, somehow so innocent and big, and Stan thought it mixed perfectly with the bigness of her thick hair and fullness of her breasts, and her eyes too, blue and big. It was then that Stan jumped somewhere inside himself. It was only a moment, but it would stay with him forever.
After the girl marvelled at his leg for a bit, Stan showed her his shoulder.
‘Oh my god!’ This time she almost jumped backwards.
‘I know. Big rock.’ He was beginning to feel quite manly, impressing even himself. ‘Took a good chunk out, didn’t it?’
‘Sure did.’
There was a pause. A silence not quite awkward, not quite comfortable.
‘I’m Stan.’ He held out his hand with his good arm.
‘Jean.’ She happily shook it.
‘Have you had dinner yet, Jean?’
‘No.’ She appeared taken aback, as if sensing he was about to ask her to join him for dinner and not at all sure why a boy like him might do that.
‘Can I buy you dinner tonight?’
Jean laughed, looked around Fir Street and said, ‘Yeah!’ nodding her head. ‘Yeah!’
Stan ordered a bison burger. He had just run into a deer and was starving for meat, though Jean recommended the veggie burger because she was vegetarian. She said the veggie burgers were the most popular burgers on the menu, and she knew this because she worked there, in Telluride’s Corner House Grill: her first big gig away from home. Stan translated this as ‘an explorative year between girl and woman’. Felt he was doing the same bloody thing, only it was hi
s year between boy and man. Technically he was a man. When he got home, he was going to move into a share house on the mainland with some mates, so he’d be well and truly untangled from his mother’s apron strings. He was enrolled in uni to become a teacher, following an ancestral pull. He would miss Kangaroo Island, though (and his mum). The four-wheel-drive tracks round every corner. The fishing. The Arctic wind.
They compared KI to Jean’s home in Missouri, where dampness could thicken a summer sky, make it steamy, get a person restless. They compared the flatness and the hills that made up both of their homes, though one swam in saltwater and the other in the purity of Little Sugar Creek. When they closed their eyes, one said he saw golden and the other said she saw green. She told him she was homesick and blue, having found out only hours earlier her first boyfriend had died, drunken and drowned. The boy had been fifteen when they’d dated. She thought it might have been his birthday tomorrow and that he would have been twenty if he’d lived through the night. She told Stan that when she got off work she wanted nothing but to go back to the house she rented with Macy from Illinois and Lacy from New Mexico and watch a movie, something to make her cry, because she hadn’t yet cried about James, but she needed to: such a terrible waste of a human life. She mentioned James’s parents to Stan, his poor parents, and then she cried. Then followed discussions of a philosophical and spiritual nature, which all came back to Stan affirming that one must seize the day, while Jean wondered if she was doing the right thing living in Colorado. Did her parents and her brother and all of her old friends miss her as much as she did them? Did the Little Sugar Creek miss the feel of her feet? By the time the restaurant began to close, they’d told things to one another they hadn’t even realised needed telling.
~
Later, outside the Corner House Grill, Stan and Jean were silhouettes against the moon for any small insect looking up at them.
‘I have to make my way to Denver in the morning.’ It was a 313-mile bike ride and his plane left for Australia in three days. He wanted to kiss her and could feel she wanted to kiss him too. Together they settled on looking at the stars.
‘Orion’s upside down here,’ he told her.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Shit yeah.’
‘That’s amazing. To know you’re really on the other side of the planet, not because a map shows you but because the world does.’
They stared at Orion a little longer.
‘It’s such a big world,’ she said.
‘It’s not so big.’ He looked at her, hoping she’d look back. And when she did, the contact lingered too long, but not quite long enough.
‘See you.’ And when he walked away, he was already feeling nostalgic.
‘Careful of the bears,’ she called to him. ‘They’re much bigger than the deer!’
In the sixteen months that passed, the earth had tilted and spun in its foolish little way and jostled them ever closer. In the end it was determined that no land could separate Stan and Jean, no ocean could deter them, and the stars could not exist without their love.
Dinner was served from five to eight, and at seven, with a full dining room, the waves of Bass Strait reached three metres high. The ferry was doing its best to leap from the water into the heavens, moving from one form of darkness to another. People took their time walking from the bain-maries to their tables, stumbling while carrying their trays of roasted meats and vegetables. Bread rolls jumped. Hokkien noodles splattered on the floor. Red wine splashed onto tablecloths. There was plenty of noise, all the ohs and whoas of the diners trying to carry on conversations. It was sensory overload for Stan, and the cheesy broccoli wasn’t doing him any favours. The oil from the cheese coated his throat and his stomach felt pregnant with dead curd. The fact that the woman next to him told her husband she was going to be sick didn’t help either. The woman’s face turned rotting-apple green and, for thirty intense seconds, she stifled umlauted sounds while puffing up her cheeks, so Stan wasn’t surprised when the woman threw up. What did surprise him was when the teenage boy nearby took one look at the woman with vomit dripping from her chin and he threw up too. The woman was crying, her husband asking neighbouring diners for napkins, the boy’s brother laughing and yelling, ‘Gross! That’s so gross!’, every diner watching, so when Stan stood up to leave, everybody saw him. Including Jean.
She caught him as he was about to exit. Among passengers queuing for dinner – utterly unaware of how dinner might turn on them – Jean grabbed Stan’s arm.
‘Stan!’
When he turned and saw her, that was it. He would later tell the story that that was the moment he knew he was in love with Jean Harley.
Beyond retreating thunder clouds, clear sky was beginning to take shape. Perhaps the waves were calming down. Perhaps it was an illusion due to their distraction.
‘What are you doing in Australia?’
‘Going to Tasmania!’ Jean laughed, her body leaning backward and her hair blowing forward. ‘I’m going to cycle around it. I got the idea from meeting you. Been on lots of cycling trips now. What are you doing?’
‘Going to Tasmania,’ he countered. ‘A mate’s wedding. My girlfriend and I are going over for the week.’ His stomach turned and it wasn’t the waves or the cheesy broccoli; it was the word ‘girlfriend’ and the instantaneous knowledge that he and Jean would not kiss. ‘She’s sick,’ he said, looking to the sea and making a sweeping motion of all that came with it.
‘I saw those people next to you get sick. That’s how I saw you.’
‘Can you believe that?’ He rolled his eyes incredulously, laughing at the memory that would never disappear.
‘Totally charming.’
Stan thought Jean was totally charming.
‘Why are you in Australia?’ he asked again, stunned at the coincidence and already wondering if it was more than a coincidence. Stunned by the blue of her eyes, amazed he had somehow forgotten them.
‘After you left I started thinking about travelling. I figured if I went to college in some other country, then I could live there for a few years on a student visa. So I go to Flinders Uni and I’m on break now.’
‘Cycling round Tasmania.’
‘Cycling around Tasmania.’
They both looked out at the sea, as if they might be able to see the lights of Devonport together.
‘I wanted to go to Kangaroo Island when I first moved here,’ she said. ‘I thought I might find you.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Too much like a silly romance movie.’
‘And here we are now.’ When Stan looked back at Jean, his heart rose in his chest and tried to touch her cheek. He wondered if she could feel its vibration. It scared him that he wanted to spend the rest of the ferry ride with Jean. That he couldn’t scared him more.
They talked until nearly midnight, when it seemed most of the passengers had gone to bed. Stan said he should go check on Grier. Grier. Saying it aloud convinced him the relationship could not last. Grier was wonderful, a great girl and sexy as, but she was nothing like Jean.
‘Orion.’ He pointed to the hunter in the sky.
‘Upside down,’ she said.
Jean sent Stan a postcard from Bicheno, a laid-back seaside town on the eastern coast of Tasmania. Stan kept it on his dresser. He thought of Jean every morning while he went for his jocks and socks, every night when he turned on his bedside lamp just to reread her words: Sometimes I daydream about where we’ll meet next.
He stayed with Grier for another two weeks. It could have lasted longer, but Grier knew something was wrong and didn’t let it sit.
‘I’m not in love with you.’ It was the worst thing he could say, but it was the most honest.
‘Does it matter?’ she asked, and he felt humiliated by the way she seemed to feign the strength of a woman who also did not love her lover, although he k
new she was more than smitten. Yes, to Stan it did matter.
‘It’s been almost four months, Grier. I just don’t think it’s going to happen. It doesn’t seem fair to either of us.’
‘You don’t think?’
Stan crouched into himself, sitting on the beanbag across from Grier, who sat on her hands on the sofa. They were miles apart. ‘I know it. I know I can’t fall in love with you.’
Grier sobbed. They made love one last time and kissed goodbye in the morning. Stan sent a postcard to Jean’s address in Adelaide that evening on his way home from work.
Did you know that Betelgeuse is Orion’s second-brightest star? It’s also nearing the end of its life. When it finally dies, it will explode, and it will be seen at all times, even in the day. Maybe someday we’ll be able to look at a small part of Orion together over breakfast.
Years later Jean told Stan that she’d taken the postcard to be a very good sign.
In sixteen years a lot can happen. Stars are born and stars die; people too. The wet waves of first love become as jagged as a coral reef on bare feet but then, somehow, at some point, they smooth out into a sandbar and, before you know it, you’re swimming in waves of love again. It’s a cycle, though not as regular as the moon.
Sixteen years after Stan and Jean had come together over the riotous waves of the Bass Straits, all the odds were against them conceiving – the statistics, the doctors, the dysfunctional uterine bleeding. She’d been told that seventy per cent of women suffering from DUB don’t produce an egg during menstruation and therefore can’t conceive. ‘Stuff ’em,’ she’d told Stan. ‘I want a baby.’ Orion was born thirteen months later and the galaxy grew larger.
A ridiculous morning already at only a quarter to seven. Stan spilled the cereal all over the table and floor. It was impossible. Jean hadn’t torn the plastic bag properly along the perforated edge. She never did. She had the most annoying habit of tearing the bag so it ripped vertically and the cereal couldn’t possibly find a straight path to the bowl. He swore. His son said, ‘Dad,’ in an admonishing tone because, even at four (and the little guy would add ‘almost five’ given the chance), Orion knew these two things: ‘fucking hell’ was a bad thing to say, and his father was not a bad man.
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