The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  Looking for signs of a crazy hippie diet? said Evangeline, very loud. Just because I lived in a commune the department thinks I’m anti-treatment! Why don’t you test the water by the old well fields? That’s where all of this started, she told the woman.

  She believed she’d become contaminated from drinking there years back. Five other kids in town had developed leukaemia. The national paper had called this a cluster. The social worker wrote everything out in a book that snapped shut with a built-in elastic. She spoke in a gentle voice used for a child, lighting Evangeline up with fury.

  Maybe her teacher is right, maybe there is a kind of inside weather, Tess thinks as she scans the lounge and the sepia cones of light in the hall, remembering how the house felt when they returned from St Catherine’s, how she can tell, without even looking, if her mother is home, whether her father has taken his first drink for the day. How the bedroom felt the night after Pip’s death, even though she’d been away from it many other times. The room had throbbed with a different order of emptiness: blue-tinged and total. The girls had warily eyed her clothes and toys, and then looked away. Who did they belong to?

  If the weather is, as her teacher says, a gateway between the earth and sky, where is Pip, who was said to have ascended to a higher plane?

  Tess puts her head on her arms as memories come, storied, simultaneous, dreamlike.

  On another drive home, past Harper’s Bend, she’d watched an eerie shadow slide over a field of bright canola. Then, not far past the escarpment turn-off, something began hitting the roof. Soon, the car windows were smeared a glassy green.

  Tess sits, smooths her book then writes it all out:

  ‘Locust plague!’ your father yelled above the noise. He turned on the wipers to clear the windscreens. It was the big rains that made the insects fat and restless. ‘They’ll cause an engine to overheat,’ he said and pulled into a Mobil. Beside all the bowsers were hills of gross dead locusts from the other cars’ radiators. Your mother really needed to go. But crossed her legs tight. She’d rather wait. She hated petrol stations, and the gasoline smell. Her eyes would go empty. The other thing was that sometimes she’d retch. She stayed in the car while your father poked the locusts from the grille. The world was greasy yellow through the killing windows.

  Towards the end, Pip was only allowed liquid out a straw. Her hands felt so strange in hospital. Like she’d warmed them at a fire. ‘What must Pip think of us?’ your mother asked as your father propped the bonnet. ‘We can’t go on, just leaving her in there.’

  Sometimes your mother stayed over in the ward. You could make this type of bed from a lounge chair. Your father packed the morning lunches and laid out school clothes. Washed, dirty, did it matter? You had odd socks and inside-out shirts because of stains. You had butter sandwiches for ten days. You had dinners left by other people at the house. Your father served them in their weird flowered crockery. Sago and macaroni cheese. Pumpkin soup and strawberry sponge. Everything soft, so your father said, ‘They think already the Müllers have forgotten how to masticate.’ There was food from Nora especially, and you weren’t to tell your mother but this always tasted best.

  On the night of the locusts you waited for Meg to finish. Then you climbed into the cold bath. Most things look better underwater. You held your breath till it felt like your chest would tear open. You found your mother’s razor and shaved your legs up to the knee. When you wiped the steam the long mirror showed a person wearing beige socks below dark-haired thighs. Blood ran from the nicks on your calves.

  Another thing was that Benjamin Davis from 5P had sent the family a sympathy card. It had a lopsided love heart in one corner. You felt a bit sick, looking. How had he got your home address? You hid it inside your pillowslip.

  Next week the weather turned very clear. The house echoed and the edges of the doors and windows seemed straighter than before. On the day your parents brought Pip home the sun barged in. The house timbers sighed in the heat. Your legs were itchy and the many cuts had turned into silver lines, or scabs where you’d sliced deepest at the ankle.

  Tess has used her best cursive. She stretches a hair elastic around the notebook, so it will shut with the same snappish authority as the social worker’s.

  One week later she stands by her teacher’s desk, her matted hair absorbing the light. In the hall some girls are waving, very urgently in their nearly imperceptible style, hands low and close against their thighs. Tess dully remembers how it was to have a friend. The living weight of Amy’s head on her shoulder; the gooseflesh pleasure of linking arms. Her spontaneous, airborne playground hugs. It is this exuberant physical force of friendship that she misses most, and which had dwindled when she’d stopped wanting to talk any more about her life.

  Finally Mr Parker, tidying shelves, turns around.

  Ah, Tess. Hold on, he says, shuffling papers. Then hands her a catalogue. On the front: MATTHEW BRANDT, Lakes, Trees and Honeybees.

  How about this guy’s art! he says. See those – they’re real bees. Brandt found a bunch of them dying on a lake shore. So he printed his photo, using emulsion from the bees themselves. And then soaked the print in the lake water for months.

  Tess breathes in sharply, pushing her glasses up her nose. Art from dead bees. She stares at a lagoon beneath what looks to be a rain of fiery snow, the photo paper damaged. Above the Sylvan Lake is a spooky cloud formation, like a rent in the universe. What are you supposed to think – an artist making ruin into beauty?

  She wants to say, I’m not artistic. He has her confused with Meg, or her mother, whose paintings he’d stared at one evening after he’d come for tea. And yet this singling out has warmed the slight sense that she’s truly worth attention.

  Mr Parker returns her journal, then leaves. Inside are some small ticks. He hasn’t said whether her writing is good or bad, he has not graded it, only: A powerful account of place and memory. And where are you in the story, Tess? Which of the ‘you’s is you?

  12

  It’s around four pm when Jim hears the footsteps. She’s already on the threshold and then she’s inside before he can whip off his mother’s gown, before he can hide his habits of loss.

  Evangeline. Her lips cracked, her brow glossy with sweat. A drumming pulse at her temples, her great gusty exhalations.

  That morning he’d climbed the mountain again, pausing at the spot where he’d found her undressing three weeks before. The river was glassy and calm. The bush smelt of loam, rotting leaves, eucalypt. When he reached the tree she’d decorated he thought of aboriginal djurbils – those beseeching rituals for more plentiful possums, for increased echidna, emu or kangaroo rat.

  Evangeline had performed her own, secular rite on that tree. But what exactly was it for? He’d examined the white boxes nailed to the trunk. The faded labels, the cardboard pocked and holed by weather. Must have been there a while. He could just make out the girl’s name in black type. Pippy Müller. Evangeline’s youngest. A memorial then. On one of the red sandals, roped to the trunk, the small shadow of her sole. He thought of his mother’s empty shoes in the cupboard, signalling the time before she was ill, when her living weight had left its traces. Then remembered the day his father had discovered him.

  Usually, hearing the muted swish of the Saab door, Jim would put away his mother’s things and retreat from that room where her smell was fading, where he’d stand before her mirror trying to bring her back. But that afternoon his father was already by the door. He lowered his briefcase, lifted one large hand. Jim, seeing it headed fast towards his face, tried not to flinch. But his father just cupped his ear gently, pulled back. In his open, extended palm – one of the gold clip-on earrings Jim had forgotten to remove.

  In the bedroom, Veronica’s things were dangling from cupboards and drawers – a shirt arm, a jeans leg, one shoe aimed at the door as if trying to flee. His father, absorbing all this, had said, This isn’t the way, James, then trudged slowly downstairs, leaving the stunned boy alone. It
had been a ritual of sorts, Jim supposed, to covet everything she’d once worn against her skin.

  He was a tall and broken fifteen-year-old then. Clear-skinned, bean-thin. Top of his class. A brilliant sprinter with an oiled, compact stride. Every morning after she died he bolted around the neighbourhood till his knees buckled, then waited, his ear pressed to the grass in Centennial Park, then ran again, motherless, with a father gone mute but for business things. He ran and it was like swallowing the world in great, racking gulps of air. And all the Paddington streets made him wretched with their boutiques and bars and clots of shoppers with their vintage fucking bags and shoes and their chain-store accessories for slummy cool. And their animals with all the dogness bred out of them.

  Sometimes he’d wag school and drift through the city, the scene of their many outings – down Art Gallery Road past lunchtime joggers, where once they’d watched paramedics working so long and violently on a man you thought they must be doing his chest more injury, and down into the Gardens. In the winter ponds the dried lotus stalks stood broken necked and all the trees had lowered their coverings to the earth. He’d stay until dark and listen to the industrial noise played in the defoliated trees to keep the five thousand bats away.

  Towards the end he’d often crouched outside his mother’s room just to make sure she was still breathing. She’d often caught him at it. Oh darling, I used to do the same when you were a baby! Come here. He’d climb on to the bed and they’d sit folding origami while she talked of Akira Yoshizawa, the famous Japanese master of folding, who’d decorated military patients’ beds during the war. She’d learned some basic origami as a kid watching Harbin’s TV show in East Sussex. They liked the fantastical beasts best: the Hippogriff, the Cerberus, Pegasus, winged lions. She’d often fall asleep in the middle of a difficult fold, and Jim would complete the animals, lining them up like Yoshizawa had for his patients, at the end of her bed. Not wanting to keep her awake, Jim’s father had taken to sleeping on the fold-out couch. His bed, utilitarian, unmade, in the downstairs lounge, gave the whole house an eerie feeling of impermanence. Worse, though, when the cleaner had finally folded it away. That mattress, soundlessly sliding into its recessed place, an echo of his mother’s coffin gliding.

  In the Ghost Mountains, beside Evangeline’s tree, Jim realised he’d had none of this woman’s resourcefulness in grief. After Veronica’s death he’d found no solace in river, forest, mountain or lake. The funeral was formal and restrained, curated by his father, or his father’s secretary more likely. At the wake, the seven distant British relatives had congratulated them on the tasteful service. One played discreet, bland music on the baby grand so Jim felt like he was at one of his mother’s department-store functions. Upstairs he found the London cousin zammed out on Veronica’s leftover Sublimaze, reading Harper’s Bazaar in the empty bath.

  Jim, still Jamie among his relatives, had retreated to the garden where the pool was covered for winter. He slid the canvas back and climbed inside the empty cavity. Thin currents of light sieved in from tiny holes in the fabric. Why burned not buried? He lay down in the cold pool and wondered about the difference between ash and dirt, about the confounding word cremains. He’d never returned to the place where his mother’s ashes were interred, that wall of niches, oddly ordinary like the PO boxes at the local PostShop.

  That woman’s offertory, in a glade by the wild Repentance River, was so primeval and so much more suited to loss than the militant ranks of spruce at the Northside Crematorium.

  Hello, she’s saying, right inside his house now and crossing the floor, her hair down her back, arms bare to the shoulder. Lina, was that what Stefan had called her? A different woman maybe, to this haughty Evangeline.

  I was out walking, it’s hot. Could I beg for a drink?

  He stands, embarrassed, unlooping the scarf from his neck, uncording the dressing gown. Beneath it, the ripped knees of his old jeans.

  Very stylish, she says neutrally. Silk?

  Not mine of course, he says, I just … Sometimes I …

  But she’s looking around at his spartan quarters.

  He takes off the gown and tucks it out of sight. Then fills a glass with cider. He clears the table, pushing aside books flagged with Post-its. Walden, Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost, Bill McKibben, Bruce Chatwin.

  He gestures, says, Sit.

  When she puts her elbows on the cracked wood, he sees it. Poking from a pile of labelled folders. Sylvie’s latest postcard. Jim, when are you going to stop avoiding your past. Call me, please. He jabs it out of sight.

  Somewhere on the mountain, axed wood starts groaning and splintering; his floor shudders when the trunks fall. He’ll sometimes imagine, after a joint, that his cabin boards are sighing, he’ll imagine the very sap in the wood stiffening in empathetic horror.

  They sit drinking, in the quiet. Very weird, trying to act like he hasn’t already seen her half-naked. But now he supposes it’s his self that’s been exposed.

  She pulls out a page from his notes. He’s taken the kids on field trips into the mountains, sketching and photographing, gathering evidence of the changes wrought by climate.

  She reads it slow and haltingly and he notices, for the first time, an intermittent throatiness in her voice.

  What is the message that wild animals bring … ? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves – that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination?

  Her forefinger moves over the page like a child new to reading, her hair slipping around her face.

  That’s true, she murmurs, the world is wild.

  He swallows, nodding, recalling the notes the younger kids took on their first field trip. Wombats are so cute, one boy had written, but only from afar. Wombats rub their bums on trees, they jump a metre in the air.

  Do children really understand? she asks. Life, unpredictable in goodness and danger?

  Probably more than us, he says.

  Does she talk in class?

  Tess? he asks. No. But still, she’s taking everything in.

  Doesn’t tell me anything. Doesn’t talk at home, either, you know. I’m told that’s unusual in selective mutism.

  Selective mutism? He hadn’t been given any special term for Tess’s silence, only told by the school it was part of her grief.

  I blame myself, Evangeline says, standing, forefingers pressed to the table.

  At The Hive, she tells him, there’d been a distrust of technology. She’d been raised to believe in the healing powers of crystals, ley lines, tinctures. They’d tried them all, along with the conventional medicines that devastated Pip’s body without destroying the disease. But once Pip went into transformation the doctors confirmed – no machine, no medicines could save her. They decided then to bring her home.

  He waits, aware of his jerky breathing, her grey eyes dulling.

  She crosses to the window, puts her forehead on the glass.

  I didn’t think I could save Pip. But I knew where she belonged. Perhaps I was wrong, though, to put the others through it.

  Jim remembers the long afternoon in the house after school, when his mother was taken to the hospice. Each empty room had contracted around his fear. What was a chair, what was a couch, what was home without her in it? All the objects turned very rigid and immovable. Each designer item repelled him. He’d gone for a run, every step like he might alight from the crooked suburb. Everything in him stopped up, so he didn’t hear the car that felled him, coming around the Pike Street corner.

  You think that’s why Tess isn’t talking?

  She shoots him a quick, uncertain smile and he wonders if it’s a disguise for shyness, her demeanour. She shrugs and looks back out the window. What must she make of his clear view of her house, over the lane and across the fields?

  He takes a long sip. If she was so thirsty she could’ve walked the few metres further t
o her own kitchen. So then, was she here about Tess, or something else?

  Was it just your decision to take her home? he asks. How about Stefan …

  … Oh Stefan’s … agreeable. Let’s say he’d found me, the other day, in the river. He would have just let me alone. Whereas you jumped in, she laughs, her gaze cleaving the air between them, as if you could rescue me.

  He drains the bottle, trying to work out what she means about her husband, and how he is with her.

  Seems like you’re angry, he says.

  She brushes her palms together.

  Oh don’t do that, she says, frowning. The counsellor thing. I can’t bear it.

  She comes closer to where he’s sitting at the table. Curriculum documents, photocopies, assignments. Her daughter’s journal somewhere in that pile. It’s very important, he sees, not to move an inch in any direction.

  You have Tess every week. How’s she doing? says Evangeline, tucking a hand under each armpit.

  I think she’ll be fine if you are, he says, exhaling.

  Then in three swift strides she’s right before him.

  Well, she says, I just want to be …

  She pulls his hands on to her waist.

  … lost.

  He stays very still, his mind racing. The Cusp Fold, the Swallowtail, the Butterfly Crimp. With her hands holding his fingers flat against her hips, his skin jitters with memory. In the futureless weather of his mother’s bedroom, from those coloured squares, they’d folded themselves into another dimension. The world, larger than your imagination.

  Do you think that’s possible? she asks.

  Then she leans down and puts her mouth against his hair.

  Two

  … they will have no time now to visit the gardens and meadows; and tomorrow, and after tomorrow, it may happen that rain may fall, or there may be wind; that their wings may be frozen or the flowers refuse to open …