He’d had headstones put up, but never visited. When Maia was alive, he’d believed in God. Now he wasn’t sure. Now Jesus Saves seemed like a sick joke.
He cut short his walk and was home before the light disappeared completely. In the dark, outside the kitchen window, a pair of grey fantails cavorted in the air and on the ground. He smiled at their antics, so sure of themselves.
Seven
Skel sat on the sandy ground of the hillside staring across to the clearing and Greta’s shed. She hadn’t appeared outside for over half an hour and he was beginning to get bored. There was not enough light inside the building for him to see her movements if she walked, or sat, in front of the windows. At arm’s length there was a large, neatly formed ants’ nest made up of hundreds, probably thousands, of small sticks. He wondered how they found so many pieces all the same to build the mound, and who was in charge of construction, to make sure of the perfection of shape and size. So far the ants were not disturbed by his presence and remained focused and busy. They know what they want, ants, and they do it. They don’t think about other stuff. He looked up when he heard the door of the shed being closed. There she was, ready to go walking, by the look of things, and maybe for some while because she was adjusting her backpack and wearing a hat and sunglasses. He watched until she disappeared along the track and into the trees. She seemed to be heading westwards, towards the coast.
He waited at the edge of the trees, just in case Greta returned, then he stood up and made his way to the shed, knowing it would not be locked. He was still fearful that she might come back and catch him inside. Maybe she had forgotten her water bottle, or the camera that he’d seen her with down at the coast.
He had no clear idea what he was going to do, but he could guess. His heart beat quickly and loudly and his hands were sweaty as he opened the door. Unlike their shed, Greta’s had two small bedrooms, separated from the living spaces. He moved slowly across the kitchen area and into the first bedroom. This was not the one she slept in. It had the tidiness of a room rarely used. He walked to the window and looked out. The nearby peppermints were beginning to stir in the afternoon breeze, but made no sound. Nor could he hear any birds.
Ever since they had returned from their visit to the city Skel had known he would do this—go into Greta’s house while she wasn’t there. It was risky, and exciting for reasons that he couldn’t understand. He could get caught. He thought of Peaches, who was not yet Mum, and certainly not Prue. He stood in the doorway of Greta’s bedroom and breathed in its smells; he looked at the double bed, neatly made, and the chest of drawers with its mirrors in the middle and sides, with scarves hanging over one corner. Closer to it, he could see himself double, and watch himself watching himself. He smiled. He took the top off a bottle of perfume and dabbed a little on the inside of his wrist, as he had seen his mother do when they visited. It smelled woody, similar to the smoky, spicy perfume of burning peppermint that Tinny liked using for their open fire. He would say, ‘It’s good, peppi, hard and burns slow. And look at the colour of it without its bark. Like human limbs.’
He opened the wardrobe and looked at the clothes hanging there, mostly sombre and dark with occasional splotches of colour. On a shelf above there was an array of hats. He slid his hand in under them and was surprised to find a small computer hidden there. Or perhaps not hidden, just stored there. It wouldn’t be much use to her here, without any power on, or a telephone line. Next to the hats was a photo album. He took it down and flicked through a few pages, but there was nothing there that interested him. Meaningless groups of people and lots of photos of Greta standing alongside a lake. In each one she looked different, but the lake looked the same. There were some loose photos tucked inside the cover. There was one of Greta in her bathers, a brief bikini. She was smiling at the camera. He wondered who took the photo, who she was smiling at. He stared at her, imagining for a moment she was smiling at him. Then he put the photo into his pocket.
He sat down on the bed, then heard a noise outside, and crouched down below the window, as if that would do any good. He waited, holding his breath. The sound didn’t come back. It was probably a goanna rustling in the leaves. If Greta returned, she would find him in her house and he would not be able to explain what he was doing there. He put the album back and then looked through more of her things: the drawer with her jumpers neatly folded, the little drawers at the top of the dressing table, which contained jewellery—necklaces and earrings and two rings. And finally the drawers which he always knew he was going to open, where she stored her underwear. He felt foolish and embarrassed but raised the soft pants and bras to his face, feeling their silkiness and inhaling their perfume, which did not remind him of her body, or anyone’s body. He put the items back as neatly as possible, hoping she would not notice any difference. Before he left, he brushed the sand off the floor and into the palm of his hand. He straightened the indentation in her bed. He didn’t think he would need to come back again—not in this way.
She stood in the trees and watched him leave. She’d seen him outside, not moving, just standing there staring at her dwelling. After a while she’d realised he was not going to approach while she was there. It was something else that he wanted. So she would go out. She had planned to walk in on him while he was inside, to catch him trespassing on her property, intruding—although not exactly breaking in. But when she circled through the trees, doubling back after a few minutes, she found that she couldn’t do it. She did not want the embarrassment for him, the boy Skel, or for herself. She didn’t want her heart beating any faster than it was already. She stood there, catching glimpses of him through the windows, but not through the door, which he had closed behind him.
Her heart settled down and she started to feel hot. She looked down at her feet, bare except for a pair of thongs. She had been standing too close to an ant’s nest and now they were crawling all over her feet, the bottom of her pants, up her legs. She moved and brushed them off before too many of them began to bite her. A moment later the boy left. She couldn’t see the expression on his face.
Eight
Tinny was having a clean-up. In his shed there were no cupboards, just open shelves for everything, except for the stuff in the fridge. Food, cutlery, crockery, clothes, all were on display and attracted dust and dirt. Every so often he would remove everything from the shelves and wipe them down, get rid of the grime. But before he did this he would attack the spiders in their webs in every corner of the room and around the light bulbs. They were big and black—not the poisonous redbacks, but all the same he didn’t like them. They looked nasty even though they seemed to keep to their webs, rarely travelling across the ceiling or down the walls, not like the huntsmen, which he didn’t like either, although they were supposed to be harmless, and useful because they caught flies and insects. Didn’t all spiders? He couldn’t bring himself to kill the huntsmen: they were too big and they took too long to die if you sprayed them or tried to squash them; and because they were grey rather than black, he didn’t think they looked poisonous.
The previous night he had woken when he felt one crawling over his forehead. He could feel the size of it; it had to be a huntsman. He’d flung it off him, leapt out of bed and turned on the light, looking for it everywhere. He’d removed the duvet and sheets, layer by layer. He’d looked under the cover of the mattress. No spider. He knew how good they were at hiding and repeated the process, shaking each item in case it was on the underside, clinging on fiercely. He went back to bed and couldn’t sleep for a long time. He would remove the next huntsman he saw by placing a glass over the top of it and sliding a piece of paper between the spider and the top of the glass. He would walk a long way from the shed before releasing it.
Tinny decided he wouldn’t bother cleaning the windows; they didn’t look too bad when the morning or afternoon sun streamed through them. As he worked, he was thinking of his two boys. And their trip to the city to see their mother. When he saw them after a week, they h
ad said very little, but he thought they were not quite the same. Somewhere, somehow, something had shifted. He couldn’t put his finger on it. The silent one was more silent, if that was possible. And Rock was less forthcoming than usual. That is what he sensed, without being able to point to particular examples. Talk that dried up a fraction too soon. An idea, or feeling, considered—and withheld. What were they hiding from him? What had Peaches said?
‘She said you were a good man, a good father, but she couldn’t keep living this way,’ Rock told him. ‘She said she hadn’t been a very good mother—in fact, not really a mother at all. But now she would like to see more of us—that’s if we wanted to see her, and if it was okay with you.’
‘What do you want to do?’ he’d asked them.
For a while there was no answer. And then Rock had said, ‘We think she’s nice, even though she did desert us. She doesn’t feel like a mother …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I dunno … but maybe like an older person who could become a friend.’
‘How is that?’ said Tinny.
Again there was a long pause. ‘Because, sometimes, you sort of know what she’s going to do, and say, before she’s done it. And she walks a bit like Skel. So you think you know her, even though you don’t.’ At this, Skel had nodded in agreement.
‘Sure thing, boys, she’s your mother.’ But Tinny knew he wasn’t really happy with the idea of Peaches coming back into their lives. He wanted to be generous, fair, reasonable, kind. He wanted to be comfortable with the possibility of his sons reconnecting with their mother. The voice inside his head returned; his lips moved.
‘Are you comfortable with that, said the psychologist/ therapist/judge. Well, now you mention it, no, I’m not. I am discomfited, as they now say. What is my problem? Is that a mature response? you ask. No, it’s immature, it’s selfish, it’s wanting to hold on too long. It’s human. That’s what I am, you see, a human being, with flaws and limitations. Those boys help fill the empty part of me. I know eventually they will have to leave here, but not yet—not yet, your honour.’
He looked up. ‘Ah, Skel, you have returned from your mooning and mooching. Just in time to help with the cleaning.’
Skel smiled. He could see Tinny had everything shipshape and there was no more to be done. ‘I’ll chop some wood,’ he said.
‘Good one, Skel. Thank you for letting me know.’ As the boy headed back outside, he called after him. ‘I’m thinking of asking our neighbour, the German, Greta, over for a meal sometime. We should get on with those who are near and dear to us. What do you reckon?’
The boy nodded his head without turning around.
Nine
Greta wondered why it was that she could not confront Skel—why she thought she would be the embarrassed one, rather than him. She had entered into a space that was becoming familiar to her, where thoughts slid sideways into images that lost precision, as if she were looking out at the world through a windscreen blurred by rain. She knew what would happen next: a dream recalled which now entered into her consciousness like a memory. She was crawling along a corridor or passageway, and at the end of it there was a door which she needed to open, and then whatever she was looking for would appear. But when she got close the door became something else, like a cluster of clouds where everything lost shape, familiarity; she would lose her way and start to panic. It seemed to her that her mind was at work independent of any control she could exercise. She kept thinking of the people in her life and her responses to them, especially the men. And one man in particular. Or, if she were really honest, and strong, two. By day’s end she had begun to put the bits together, perhaps for the first time, the emotional jigsaw where the one consistent piece was her sense of embarrassment. Or stronger than that. It was closer to guilt. Underneath, she knew what some of that was about, at least for her adult self. She did not want her thoughts to arrive at that point too quickly; she did not want to think about it, not immediately, for the images to return, for her body to become rigid with grief. For now she would let those thoughts—or feelings, really—remain in the half-light. She knew she could not avoid that destination, but for a moment she could trick herself, even while she knew what she was doing; she could go the long way around.
Some time ago she’d decided that, like all healthy neurotics, she could begin by blaming her parents—and especially the patronising way her father treated her mother, whose passive-aggressive response made her daughter want to shake some sense into the woman. She realised two things: that over the years she had come to blame her mother for her inadequate responses, rather than see her father as the cause of the deep unhappiness between them. In the end it was he who left—to live by himself. And that she, the daughter, had assumed some of her mother’s guilty nervousness in her relationships with men. She couldn’t fathom why it was the woman who was to blame. Always, it seemed, for the inadequate behaviour of men. She wondered, too, about her sisters, Katrin and Eve, and how it was that they seemed to have escaped such conflicted responses—but then maybe she didn’t know them well enough, as adults, to be sure what thoughts and feelings governed their lives.
In the stillness of the late afternoon she sat on the step, a glass of red wine in her hand, and stared at the patches of light through the trees. She believed she wasn’t free from responsibility for some of the recent events in her life that continued to trouble her, including the attack at the coast. At first she could make no sense of it, but two years later she’d begun to see a pattern of cause and effect, on a scale that transcended the particular. She had behaved in ways that were careless of others, with disastrous consequences. She thought that she deserved what had happened to her, although that did not excuse the individual perpetrator, who, she felt sure, was not innocent, whatever his story. What forces brought into being this karmic justice she could not begin to imagine. But there were causes. And effects.
Like death. It seemed too present in recent times to be a mere accident, a statistical probability. In her mind dying was inseparable from the movement of her body through time and space: at airports, on trains and buses and boats. Death and leaving. Leaving and death. Something falling away from her, like a trail of dust, deadly, in a rear-view mirror. She’d left her father and sisters behind in Germany, not long after the death of her mother. Since she’d come to Australia her father had also died, but she was sure that had nothing to do with her. She’d left Oliver in the middle of a fire, in itself inexcusable, but it was the returning that did all the damage. With Oliver in hospital, she was once again overtaken by that restlessness. That need to be on the road. And so she had gone up north—and then she’d left Marvyn. Not once, but twice. First with her body, and then her mind. That fact she couldn’t avoid. This was a leaving she could not bear to think about. This was where she had to stop herself. These were the thoughts she had to shut down or her body would start to panic, her heart beat too fast, and she felt she would pass out and perhaps never regain consciousness.
Because, in that time before, there was that other leaving.
She considered, briefly, the possibility that she was guilty of self-aggrandisement—to think that she was in any way responsible for the fact that people died! She tried to hold on to that thought. She put her hands to the sides of her head, like a child.
There was one friend where she was free of conflict, sure that she had not contributed to any suffering that he may be subject to. That was Skyler. The constant, undemanding Skyler. It worked because their expectations were mutual; they shared ideas but not their bodies. And they shared hopes but remained muted about the darkness that bothered both of them.
‘Hello …’
She flinched, spilling her wine.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t—’
‘That’s okay, Skel. I didn’t hear you—didn’t know you were there.’
‘No.’
‘I was miles away … Visiting me again?’
His expression didn’t change. ‘
If it’s alright.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. I presume wine is not appropriate for you. Would you like something else? I’ve got a can of Coke there somewhere.’
‘That’d be good.’
She went inside, poured herself some more wine, and retrieved the Coke from the fridge, powered by gas, and temperamental. She then joined him on the step; she needed to say something to him.
‘How was your trip to see your mum?’
‘We liked it. She doesn’t feel like a mum, but she’s nice.’
‘How do you know she doesn’t feel like a mum?’
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