by John Clanchy
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Which could be a question about anything. But Toni answers:
‘Because I thought I might get you into trouble.’ And she can see from my face I don’t believe this – or not only this. ‘And because I was ashamed.’
‘Oh,’ I say, and months of hurt disappear in a stroke. And I wonder what to say back to her. Which is crazy, because all these weeks and months there’s only been one thing I’ve wanted to tell her. But now she’s here, I find all I can say is:
‘Do you want to take off your jacket?’
‘When I saw you in the street,’ she says, ‘all I could think of was how much I’d missed you.’
‘I thought you were telling me to go away. To mind my own business.’
‘If Dwayne hadn’t been there –’
‘Does he live there?’
‘For as long as I hadn’t seen you, it was all right. I could convince myself you were still here, nothing was different for you, and as soon as I was ready …’
‘It’s been nearly three months.’
‘As soon as I’d got things sorted out in my mind … But somehow you never do, and then I saw you, on the bus, and I watched you follow me, and all the time I was in this blind panic.’
‘You looked so calm, so happy.’
‘And when I got to the door, and Dwayne was there, I suddenly didn’t know what to do. So, I ran. I rushed inside before he saw you and knew, because if he knew then other people would know too and everything would get so –’
‘I felt like you never wanted to see me again.’
And it’s weird because we’re saying these things, and we’re in my room, and we’re only feet apart, and we’ve known each other forever, but there’s still this chasm between us, and it feels like we’re reaching back and forwards across it but our hands never seem to meet, and the next thing I’m offering her coffee because I’ve got this jug in my room now, and she’s taking off her jacket at last and even folding it before she puts it on my bed, and I’m even asking if she takes sugar now, Christ. And she can’t help it either and actually says:
‘Two, please.’
I swear she says – this is Toni, talking to me – ‘Two please.’
While we’re waiting for the water to boil, she picks through the books on my bedside cabinet. Turns over the top one, glances at the blurb on the back. ‘Voss ?’ she says.
‘It’s wonderful.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘This German explorer. In Australia in the nineteenth century.’
‘Is it history, or what?’
‘No, it’s a novel – though you can read it slowly, as well, like poetry. Anyway,’ I tell her, ‘Voss is this crazy visionary –’
‘What, like Peter Costello?’
‘And it’s about how he tries to conquer the country just by the force of his own will. And he even gets to think he’s God. But he fails, of course.’
‘So, what’s it saying … ?’ Toni says, tossing Voss onto the bed and stirring through the books underneath. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth, or something?’
And Toni, I find, can still take your breath. I look at her back, its vulnerability and strength.
‘Ye-es,’ is all I can say. ‘Sort of.’
But she’s not even listening. Having finished Voss, she’s on to something else.
‘You’re not still reading this,’ she says, and I see, from the blunt spine between her fingers, it’s Larkin, The Collected Poems. ‘You were reading this when we went away.’
She stops then, realizing what her words point to. She starts to read the poem where the book fell open. Where the bookmark has lain untouched for months. She reads the opening lines aloud:
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far …
‘It’s a pun on lying,’ I remind her, as she reads on:
An emblem of two people being honest.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘I’m sure I’ve read this before? We didn’t do Larkin, did we? With Miss Temple, or something?’
‘I read it out to you from my journal. While we were out there.’
‘Oh shit, yes. The poem you showed Philip. That prick hasn’t showed up again, has he?’
‘He did ring me.’
‘Don’t tell me, he’s woken up. He wants you to get back together again.’
‘I told him I was too busy. But actually I didn’t want to. I’d sort of said goodbye to him already.’
‘Lolly, don’t waste your time even thinking about him. There’ll be a chain of guys for you.’
‘I’m not interested just at the moment. In anyone. I’m just –’
‘I know,’ she says, as the jug clicks itself off. ‘You’ve got your head so far up your bum studying.’
‘I’m not doing Biology,’ I say, and we can at least smile. ‘I’m doing Physics, remember?’
‘You still need leverage,’ she says, ‘if you’re going to get it any way up there.’
‘Or yoga!’
And we almost laugh then, as I stretch out my arm with her coffee.
‘God,’ she says as she takes her mug, ‘what’s that? A slave bracelet? It’s a bit tatty, isn’t it?’
‘Cheap but,’ I say. And put another twenty cents in the jar. While Toni watches.
‘What is it?’ she says, coming back to the bracelet. ‘String or something? Couldn’t you even afford leather?’
‘It’s just a kind of reminder.’ I pull the sleeve of my jumper down so that it covers the white cord looped round my wrist. ‘It’s for my grandmother, she’s sick.’
‘Sick? But I went to her funeral.’
‘The Greek one. Yiayia Irini. She’s nearly blind now.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ she says, and sups at her coffee, makes a face because it’s too hot, and then starts guessing – wildly as usual.
‘So, you’re going to see her,’ she says. And she doesn’t even phrase it as a question. ‘That’s what the jar’s for.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I feel I have to say. Toni’ll have me on the plane next. ‘That,’ I say, nodding at the jar, ‘wouldn’t get me the bus fare to Mascot.’
‘But you are going,’ she says. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Tha itane kala,’ I asked Katina Xyrakis, who’s only in Year 11 but is Greek Greek. Proper Greek. ‘Does it mean, It’d be nice?’
‘It depends,’ she said, and pulled a string of hair across her mouth. She sucked it, and then drew the wet strand out in front of her face, and started to untangle it. Katina is large and slow. Her father’s a builder, and Toni says Katina looks like one of his constructions. Which, in a way, she is, I suppose. ‘It could mean that,’ she told me.
‘Does it normally?’
‘I’d have to see the –’
‘The what?’
‘The thing.’
‘Jesus,’ I breathed. I was starting to feel like Miss Temple.
‘The letter, you mean?’
‘No, the sentence,’ she said. ‘The –’
‘Context?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, here’s the sentence,’ I said, and showed her what I’d copied.
She read it – for an age – her hair sawing back and forwards through her teeth.
‘Does it mean,’ I said, ‘It’d be nice if you could see her?’
‘Not really.’
‘What then?’ I said, on the point of shaking her.
‘It means you should. You’ve got to.’
‘I’ve thought of going there,’ I say to Toni now. ‘If I can work over the summer. And save the money.’
Our eyes rest on the jar. On the small pile of silver barely visible at the bottom of it.
‘Miriam would give you the money,’ she says. ‘You know that.’
‘I want to save it myself. Besides, I don’t know how she feels about me going.’
‘Why wouldn’t she? Want you to go, I mean?’
‘I
think it’s tangled up in her head with Dad. With Stavros … my father. Somehow it’d be like going back there herself, and it kind of frightens her.’
‘Oh.’
Which reminds me. Because I haven’t forgiven her yet. And she still hasn’t said sorry or anything.
‘I saw your Mum,’ I say. ‘When you left …’
She sips her coffee, without speaking, and her face closes against me.
‘She was really upset.’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘She was just by herself. Drinking. I don’t know if your Dad was even there.’
‘Turd,’ she says.
‘Turd yourself,’ I say, and she pulls her head down, protectively, between her shoulders. ‘Not telling her where you were going like that.’
And then I’m caught because one part of me’s glad to see her hurting, acknowledging at last, and the other part of me’s cringing and disgusted at what I’m doing. Getting my own back like this.
‘Do you know what she said to me when I was going?’
‘Lolly, please –’ Toni says. ‘Don’t.’
‘No, no, it’s all right.’ I go over and sit on the bed beside her. ‘It’s all right,’ I say again, ‘it’s funny – or sort of funny.’ Toni looks at me as though, even this close, I could still lash out at her. But I never would. ‘It’s sort of funny and sad at the same time. Do you want to hear it?’
‘Yes,’ she whispers, and her eyes, inches away now, are gigantic and blue. And still absolutely clear, despite the water I can see in them.
‘She said: “If she was going to leave home, the least … ” ’ I have to hold myself round the ribs just to get it out.
‘Go on,’ Toni says. ‘Go on. Don’t stop now. What did she say?’ ‘She said: “If she was going to leave home, the least she could have done … ” ’
‘Lo-lly!’
‘ “Was take me with her”.’
And at last we can touch. We have no choice anyway, clinging and rolling against one another in our helplessness. It may only be relief from the last few minutes, but Toni laughs until the tears come. And we lie side by side on my bed then, looking up at the poster pinned to my ceiling, Doisneau’s The Kiss, the famous one with the two lovers kissing on a Paris street. And, looking at that, we gradually recover.
‘Is that where he lives?’ I say at one point. ‘At that place in Glebe, with the blue front door?’
‘Would you like to see it?’
‘Does he live there?’
‘No, only on weekends.’
‘But –’
‘It’s true, Lolly. On Saturday, when you followed me, when I was so desperate to get inside, I’d just forgotten my key. That’s all.’
‘Oh,’ I say. And realize how weird it is, I didn’t even have to ask her.
‘I’ve got two rooms at the front, and there’s this couple, Peter and Erica, but they’re out all the time, I hardly see them.’
‘And the rest of the time he’s with Mrs Prescott?’
‘Yes.’
‘And his children?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you?’ I say. Because I have to. Because it’s her.
‘At first …’ she says, and suddenly she’s much older again, and it’s like she’s discussing a period of her life that’s past now but still painful, and her eyes, I see all this time, are searching the poster of the lovers kissing, moving from detail to detail within it, which is weird because I’m not sure she’s looking at it at all, but at something else, years or miles away.
‘At first I thought it would be easy. Dwayne would leave Amanda …’
And I don’t know why my blood surges, just hearing Toni discuss other people, Mr Prescott’s wife, like this, calling her Amanda, almost as though it’s the two of them, the two women, who are having the affair …
‘… and he’d come and live with me and see the children -Gerry’s the boy, and the baby – at the weekends maybe.’
‘But he’s still living with her?’
‘He finds it hard. To make the break. Because of the children.’
‘Still?’ I say.
‘But at least I’ve got him on the weekends,’ she says. And she brightens her voice, and I know we’re not going to discuss this any further. ‘Till we sort it out.’
She reaches between us, and snatches up the book she’d tossed aside. ‘I like this bit,’ she says, and reads:
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
‘This is better than all that stuff we had to read,’ she says. ‘Who was it, Tennyson and Keats and that? All that poetry poetry stuff.’
‘Yes.’
‘I liked that other one best, the one who won the Nobel Prize. What was his name, Seamus Heaney?’
‘Shamus.’
‘What?’
‘You pronounce it Shamus, not Seem-us.’
‘You know what he said? I saw him on TV. “Whatever you say,” he said, “say nothing.” ’
‘He was talking about the IRA, not poetry,’ I say.
But Toni’s talking now, not listening.
‘What does this bit mean? “At this unique distance from isolation …” What does that mean?’
‘Us, I think,’ I say.
‘Us?’
‘Lying here. On the bed like this.’
‘O-oh,’ she says. ‘So near and yet so far?’
‘Sort of.’
‘O-oh,’ she says again. Joking Toni, her voice says. But her eye, I notice, is more serious, scouring through the book, taking note of the title, of Larkin, of Philip, of the publisher, the date.
‘Do you want to come and see?’ she says.
‘Your flat?’
‘During the week,’ she says quickly. ‘You could see it, we could eat something – I cook now, we share this kitchen. And then maybe go into the city.’
After the exams,’ I tell her.
‘Head too far up bum?’
‘Yes,’ I say. And she doesn’t press me, we don’t mention it again.
‘Well …’ she says, and casts about. And we both maybe feel a bit strange now, lying here, seemingly trying to think of something to say. When there’s so much, and so little. Whereas what I’m actually thinking is, do I tell her now, in this lull, this silence, tell her that I know? And suddenly it’s as if, in my head, I’m shouting, do it, do it, do it now, as if it’s the most urgent thing in the world, and if I don’t do it now, I never will. And my head is bursting.
And I turn to her to say, Toni… but she’s there already, before me:
‘Lolly?’ she says.
And I know immediately from her tone, she’s been thinking exactly the same thing as me. We lie there, looking at each other for a moment.
‘What?’ I whisper, and it’s so unbearable I can’t hold her gaze. My eyes look instead at the lovers, at the perfect, isolated point where their mouths meet.
‘There’s something you don’t know,’ she says. And now that we’ve finally brought ourselves here, to this point, I have no choice but to turn to her and face her.
‘That day at Uluru …’ she says, ‘when you came up the hill and found us …’
And I can see how much this is costing her, how alone she is.
‘Toni,’ I say, wanting to meet her, to match her courage. ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know.’
‘That day,’ she starts again, not hearing, not aware of anything beyond her own voice. ‘That day …’ But then she stops. And I can tell now she’s heard me. She’s staring at me, at my eyes, moving from one to the other.
‘I know,’ I say again.
And the truth of this finally reaches her.
‘Oh, Lolly,’ she says, and suddenly, it’s crazy, but we’re both crying, crying like we’ve never cried before, and hugging each other so hard it’s as if we’re saying we’ll never let each other go.
‘What will you do?’ I say even
tually.
‘Nothing. Live, I suppose. Like everyone else.’
‘But how will it end?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, and seems resigned to it. As though she’s made her way to this wall lots of times herself, by herself, and simply accepts she can’t see over it. For the moment anyway. And it only really comes home to me then how different the lives are that we’ve led from the ones I’d always thought we’d led. And how much more complex Toni’s has been. Then, and now.
‘You’ll be in Greece,’ she says, the tide of her thoughts already turning. ‘You’ll marry some wog over there.’
‘Careful. My Dad’s a wog, remember.’
‘You’ll have a dozen kids by the time you’re thirty …’
‘Joke,’ I say. ‘Likely.’
We’re lying together and apart now, our fingers – splaying about – sometimes meeting. Our gazes, separately, assess The Kiss.
‘And I’ll be back home again, living with Mum …’
I can tell, from the tension in her fingers, she’s building to something.
‘And every night we’ll sit in the kitchen together and crack a new bottle, and sigh, and think about you, and say …’
‘What? Say what?’
‘She could at least –’
My knees lift then, involuntarily, helplessly, towards my stomach because I can already hear what Toni, my best friend – who can be so stupid – is going to say next:
‘She could at least have taken me with her.’
Acknowledgments & Cultural Note
I am grateful to the Trustees of the estate of Philip Larkin and to Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to reproduce “Talking in Bed” (from The Whitsun Weddings © Philip Larkin, 1964). Special thanks are due also to Brigid Ballard and Mark Henshaw who read and commented on early drafts of this novel, to Marianne Jauncey and Son Nguyen whose medical expertise saved me from even grosser technical error than my own wilfulness might otherwise have led me into, and to Judith Lukin-Amundsen and Rosie Fitzgibbon for their professionalism and redoubtable skills as editors.
Note: The words of the Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara language which Laura overhears in the Park are not the words of any actual ceremony or imma associated with the Anangu people or with the hare-wallaby Dreaming (the Mala Tjukurpa). They are simply expressions which Anangu women of Uluru use in urging one another to begin such a ceremony – to get up and join in, if you like. (Re) framed here as a recitative or chant, they provide some sense of the authentic sounds of the language while avoiding any intrusion on restricted cultural knowledge.
