They’re not … Jim crossed the porch and looked inside the bag. He turned around slowly, taking a long breath.
They’re not my girlfriend’s clothes, June, he said. I don’t …
Jesus, he hardly had to explain himself.
I get it, she whispered, wild-eyed. You’ve gone and done a runner!
From the porch he could see the Müllers’ cows clustered by a grove of hazel, their eruptive pisses, their flicking tails. The light was dimming. Whenever he passed they turned their deep, limpid eyes to him, torsos still as old trees. Across the lane, a fresh wombat hole, dirt mounded beside the entrance. Cockatoos posed in a nearby cedar, yacking and squawking. In the morning he’d wake to find six types of animal shit on his doorstep, as if they’d convened there while he slept. Always, and more than in the city, this sense of being watched.
I suppose you heard about the bones? June was scratching her head.
Pardon?
Stefan Müller found a skeleton near the Lower Mountain Road, not that far from here actually. Yuman, she said in a low voice.
Really? Jim said. You mean human, with an ‘h’?
Now she was really pissing him off. His leg ached, his eyes were dry and itchy. He was suddenly stupendously tired. The river, the walk home, the thoughts of what that Müller woman was doing up there.
Apparently a car crash, said June. Don’t you wonder who could it be?
Has someone gone missing from town? he asked, tapping his temple theatrically.
She looked at him crossly. Then stared at the bag of clothes and it was her turn to laugh now, a high, chirruping sound.
What? he said.
You’re meant to be a teacher. All those books in there! But you don’t know anything, do you?
He studied her for a long moment, remembering the show she’d put on one night at the Lodge, the Vanishing Coin, the Magnetic Hand, various levitations – cards, rings, pencils. Her Magick Act was so raw and unpolished, and the audience so sparse, he’d had to hide his snarky mouth behind a VB coaster.
Pretty soon you’re going to find out, she said, what went on up there. She pointed to the mountains.
I’ve heard quite a bit already, he said. He felt the burning itch of the co-opted to shut the busybody up.
My mother’s still at the commune, she said, matter-of-fact. Then turned to his garden.
You should try companion planting, she said. She rubbed her nose, jammed a hand under the opposite arm. Marigolds will deter those cabbage moths.
He looked into the tangled vegetation.
Hold on, I have cabbages?
She laughed again, eyes downcast, and clomped off down the weedy path towards the lane, hands swinging, bruises along her narrow calves. He had a sudden urge to paint her, this figure on the verge of dissipation.
Inside, he placed the bag carefully by the fireplace. When he opened it his throat closed up, his skin began furiously itching. He pulled something out. A skirt. An odd smell, what was it? Then he realised – some pungent unguent Agatha, the Red Lodge hausfrau, had used for washing. He picked up a blouse. Its soft life, the form it had once taken around a body, had been destroyed with new, starched creases. Fucking Agatha! It was ironing as spite.
He put down the clothes and paced the small, sparsely furnished room, peered out the front window towards the Müllers’, examined his shin where the blood was caked and considered showering in the dank stall, or could he be bothered filling the bath?
He glanced at the postcard. A generic scene from the Radisson courtyard. Each week they’d snuck into hotels Sylvie could have afforded. She worked in Mergers and Acquisitions with a harbour view and original Rover Thomas’s on the walls. At midnight, after seeing a band or eating out, they’d stride boldly into one of those marbled city hotels and take the lift to the rooftop pool. There, under the electric haze from the ranks of nearby buildings, they’d swim. Snowy towels. Spotless sandstone pool surrounds. Sometimes music, piped underwater, to which Sylvie would drunkenly mime aquaerobics, emerging in a sudden leap with her hands in prayer above her head, a dripping sheath, marble-skinned. She’d been beautiful then, most seductive like that, absorbed in the vivid moment. They’d dived and surfaced as the traffic sounds resounded, epic, oceanic. They’d looked out to the Heads or the wheeling coloured neon of Luna Park. Now and then a scream detached from a rollercoaster or disco-ferry and floated over the harbour. At some point, for Sylvie, it was no longer pretence. She wanted a high life he could never give her.
When she got pregnant Sylvie dreamed of the child they would not have. A boy that looks like you, Jim, dark-eyed, dark-haired, she said. He’s on a beach somewhere, he looks lost already. And he’d comforted her at the abortion clinic till she asked him to leave and he drove back to his Kings Cross flat so he could sit finally at the ugly, burned Formica table, and cry. A month later he’d packed his old life, and booked his flight. Three months up here now, teaching at the River Primary.
From his porch that night the rippled fields, indigo and grey. Jim looks across to the Müllers’ farmhouse. Is she in there?
Some people in this town haven’t forgiven me, Evangeline said as he’d pulled her from the river that afternoon. And she struggled to keep her face expressionless as they sat together on the bank.
I feel their eyes on me as I pass, she said. I stopped going to town altogether. She began to fidget and reflexively scratch her knee. She lowered her voice. There are individuals who follow me around. A woman I’ve wronged. A man who could reappear in my life any moment. But up here, she gestured towards the garlanded tree, I try to just think about Pip. I try to stop time.
He’d stayed beside her, the trees converting their breath to oxygen, the clouds skimming rapidly across the dimming sky, and tried not to look at her slick, bare limbs. There were no rules on how to grieve and how long, what forms it should take. He’d wanted to say this but could not. His mother’s clothes so carefully packed. Her daughter’s shoes and medicines nailed to that mountain tree.
Has he ever met a woman so determinedly like a poem, like an elegy announcing its grief so overtly? He decides next time he’ll try to make her laugh.
Now he thinks he might sketch something of the day’s events in 2D on the canvas: a woman in a river, a body in a bee field. But he’d given up painting since his canvases had become so cluttered. For two years he’d worked on stark, figurative scenes in imagined rooms, where certain objects were symbolic, charged. But he’d become unable to tell which elements pulsed with meaning, which appeared flat and inert. He’d set out to paint a bed and find it was just a bed, with no relation to the rest of the scene. His smeared palette was more compelling than any colour on his canvas. So he tried instead to sketch, working back to the assurance of outlines. If painting was, as his tutors once said, feeling arrayed in space, what exactly was the problem? He’d sit, smoking dope, and try thinking his way out of the dilemma until he was so far gone from instinct, impulse, flow, he could no more have painted than split an atom. He’d walk instead, through the narrow, haphazard streets of Potts Point and down past the matt grey Navy ships and the old wooden piers to Woolloomooloo. Then up into the Botanic Gardens where he’d spent so many humid afternoons with his mother. In there he could finally think clearly and he saw it was partly true what his mother said, that nature could optimise the mind. You had to squint, though, to keep the culture from intruding, you had to narrow your gaze to delimit; the Gardens were jostled by high-rise towers, the harbour was walled, its surface slick with diesel.
He glances nervously now around his three rooms. He’d worried since moving, that the deadness in his painting might infect his new home; he’d shoved all his canvases well out of sight, unsure if he’d ever retrieve them.
Through the window, Honig Farm. The farmhouse lights are comforting, the cows’ lowing long and guttural through the valley. In the windows, an occasional silhouette of some passing Müller, going about their evening. When he shortens his gaze he finds his own
possessions enlivened by this proximity and feels briefly, precariously content. How often does she go up that mountain, to swim naked in the river?
7
The first time we open a hive there comes over us an emotion akin to profaning some unknown object, charged perhaps with dreadful surprise, as a tomb.
Stefan recalls this passage after searching the house, the barn and fields, and finally glimpsing the bright vertical line by the studio door. He enters slowly, pausing on the threshold. Here’s that mineral glow, cascading from high, grimy windows, and Evangeline, spotlit, back to him. She’s standing before the huge canvas, which had been covered for years in a sheet. Seeing the fresh gloss on it, the raw strokes of black paint, Stefan thinks of Maeterlinck’s words. It’s something about that sudden glare, and how she seems unaware of his presence; it’s the musty odour of this space, mostly unused since Pip; a queer, illicit tension.
Pinned on the wall, some sepia photos. It’s these, not her own work, Evangeline’s gazing at now. In each shot the same rider in dark coat and bowler hat leans into a galloping stallion. The photos form a sequence, like movie stills. They look familiar, though he can’t recall where he’s seen them.
Stefan watches her rocking on bare feet, a finger tracing a fetlock or tail. He senses her fervid energy, the subaudible hum of her focus. He thinks of those interludes, during each daughter’s infancy, when she seemed restored to a more solid self, touching their doughy, nuggety limbs, her face suffused with disbelief and awe.
Paint drips from her brush to the floor. For several minutes he stays leaning against the buckled doorframe.
Edward Muybridge had an accident, she says without turning.
Muybridge. The photographer. Stefan remembers now, glancing again at those sepia prints.
He’d been on this … what-you-call-it? Stagecoach, she says. As it came down the mountain, the horses stampeded. He’s thrown clear from the coach, knocked out.
She taps the scar on her forehead.
It’s after that, she says, that he becomes a photographer.
Stefan exhales. He’s heard this story, years ago. Or perhaps it just exists in the ether, like those thousand things concerning his wife that he’d absorbed without ever having discussed them.
The guy has serious head injuries, Evangeline continues. Then personality change, confused thoughts, double vision. Some years later he starts taking these photos, not just of the Yosemite mountains, but also of horses, in motion. He gets into this wager to prove that horses’ hooves are completely airborne while running.
She turns to him, black paint on her forehead and cheeks, as if decorated for some rite. How she becomes when she’s absorbed, he’d almost forgotten.
This horse problem, she continues, was called the theory of unsupported transit. But, see, it’s really to do with time.
And so? Stefan says, then seeing that nervy flicker in her gaze, softens his tone, What do you mean, Lina?
He’s annoyed. His own news still alive on his tongue. He hasn’t expected a history lesson. She’s still staring at the photos – silhouettes really – of horse and rider, and he looks over at the stretched shapes of her animals against the hill. He knows the real story behind that scene. A tale of two men, and a commune deal gone sour. A story for the police. But there was too much at stake to go after such people, she said.
Painting, which some called therapeutic, doesn’t seem to illuminate any of it. It’s more like she’s sculpting, he thinks, like she’s scraping away at memory. All this Muybridge business has to do with her own head injury, the Ghost Mountains, the time she stumbled, blindfolded, in a field with horses. He doesn’t need a degree in Freud to recognise the elements. All of this when he barely knew her – he’d just been a visitor at The Hive back then. He’d travel to and from the commune, stay some weekends, before hitching back to the coast to surf and figure out what to do with his super-fresh antipodean life. He was still half-involved with a woman on the coast; he’d been, how should he say, undiscerning until he laid eyes on Evangeline. An interloper, Jack Hodgins had called him once, using such an unfathomable tone, his heavy hand on Stefan’s neck, that the epithet had teetered between insult and acclaim.
Stefan watches the animation on his wife’s face. Her slow, sensual movements. Horses can do this to her; painting can, he sighs, but he can’t. A sudden hankering for one of Nora’s cigarillos. He can almost smell that aged fruitiness, the bitter filament on his tongue. But no good thinking of Nora when your wife’s just metres away.
She looks him over. How are you, darling? You must be tired.
Lina, he says, trying not to relish the tiny punishment in his news. Police will be coming this afternoon.
The other day, he continues, near the Lower Mountain Road, I’m finding these – ah – bones. And actually, a car wreck.
She puts the brush very deliberately down by the oils, tucks her hair behind an ear, daubing her face with more paint.
Bones?
On our property, he says. So natürlich, they must speak to us.
She bites her lip, her cold pallor, charcoal smudges under the eyes.
An accident, Stefan? What kind of car?
Hard to be saying. Lina …
… Well, big or small? What colour?
He looks at his feet, puts his hands at his waist. OK. A van, he says.
She stares, her voice shooting up as she asks, And the body?
No body. Only bones, he says.
He watches her swallow. He rocks back in his work boots and points to the sepia photos, asking, And so, what happened to your horse man?
She gives him a reproachful look, then turns back to the pictures.
He’d never have found his calling, she says, if he hadn’t hit his head. Before the accident, the man was a bookseller. After, he chose horses. He learned to stop time with his photos.
Yes, yes, Stefan thinks. The man was shaped by his past, aren’t we all? But he’s really fed up thinking about it. When he looks back he can’t figure which parts of his life to linger on, which parts to excise. Each memory called up seems to trigger others, more insistent for having been expelled. Each memory leads him, inevitably, to Pip. One evening he’d come in here alone, and found the sketches. They’d floored him for months after. Pip’s face, all her features starkly sculpted, hollowed out as they’d looked in her final year. The pale lashes very distinct against her skin, her lips so defined, the pure line of her nose. Evangeline had spent countless hours with their youngest, but he’d never seen her drawing, only sitting on the bed, holding Pip’s hands or reading aloud, and sometimes they seemed to be waiting, and other times both seemed entirely without expectancy, mother and daughter in each other’s hands. Some nights Evangeline would come exhausted from the room and say she wished she could reabsorb her smallest girl, wouldn’t it be more bearable if she could take her back inside her own body? How would she ever let go? He was an answerless man back then, his hands blunt instruments. Evangeline’s hair had just begun to curl again. Months before he’d watched her scissor it off in one swift action and pass him, without expression, the long ponytail. Why? he’d asked. Evangeline opened her other hand then and showed the much finer, golder hair. Pip had started losing hers.
Now, he thinks, it’s safer to forget. No sign anywhere of those sketches. She must have put them away.
He turns stiffly so he’s side on to her, kicks a boot against the doorframe. Increasingly now, this feeling of performing the farmer. A niggling illegitimacy. Certain people bring this out in him, certain gruff types around town who’ve worked the land for generations. Or the easeful, chunky young men he employs sometimes, short on speech but plenty secure in themselves, unquestioning.
To his left, the mountain ridges crouch behind blue fog. Above, the peaks seem very tranquil, ancient, attending. She’s trying to say something about what happened to her at The Hive, about what happened to all of them. But he’s done with all that. He wants pure future, unblemished, rammed wi
th possibilities. He wants time to accelerate through every adhering moment. He’s left so many selves behind. The German boyhood, the hippie-surfer shtick, the habit of father-protector which sloughed away the day of the funeral. But for his wife the past is a fever that doesn’t seem to break.
You’ve never told me, she says as he steps out the door. Back then, The Hive fire, where were you?
You think if I am coming when I said, it would not have happened? he asks.
Another failure, not to have rescued her from the men that pursued her, from Jack Hodgins and her mother, Anita, who’d bargained with her future so they could better secure their own.
Were you with Nora that day? she asks, her voice very tamped down.
No! I was surfing. I have told you. Was only one time with Nora, and before you and I had even …
It’s half a lie – because he’s never spoken about Nicole Jamison, the surfer – only his friend Nick, a piece of sexual history he’d been slow to shuck off. Seemed no point in laying it out – he knew which woman he had a future with. Because it’s half a lie and he cannot think what else to do, he walks off, very abruptly, over the square of camomile lawn. He’d sowed it years ago so that, crossing barefoot to her studio, Evangeline might absorb the calming oils. But he hadn’t thought of the bees when he’d planted it, and how they’d like to visit the flowers, so that crossing shoeless became a hazard. Still she’d loved it; she’d lain, face down, then smiling said, I hope it doesn’t make me too relaxed, or how’ll I ever paint? He walks and walks, aware of his gait and how he must appear to her, weak, avoidant, another beast of the field. Man up, is what the young people say, what Leith, the farmhand, says to the bulls as he castrates them, slapping them almost sexually on their languid rumps. And Stefan marvelled: how could a person know so purely what it was to be a man?
He’d been halfway up the Mountain Road, salt in his hair, sunburned and sleepy after a day at the headland break with Nicole; he’d been thirty kilometres from the commune when the authorities flagged him down and said: go back. He protested, Evangeline was up there, either in or near that blaze. But they had not let him pass. So he’d turned, then waited at the foot of the mountains as large flakes of ash came down and the sky went bruise-coloured, hemmed with red along the lower ridges. He’d listened for news on the car radio, then, hours later, found her at St Catherine’s, her head bandaged, her chest burned, in a kind of delirium. His absence had tarnished him, he’d not manned up when he ought to have struggled past the roadblocks, committed some heroic act of rescue. After that he’d promised: he’d be a hundred per cent present for crises; he’d be hers, in every weather.
The World Without Us Page 5
