The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  And there Ian sat, for pretty much the entire afternoon. Other residents coming and going, nodding, gesturing, saying little, but confirming that this was indeed Ian. Ian was top-notch, and feeling much better now, and look – he held out his arm, all healed up.

  No more run-ins with plate glass then, Ian?

  No, Stavros, not likely. Ian’s laugh was short and wheezy.

  There is, said this Stavros, such a thing as a door.

  When you gotta go, though, eh? When a man’s got debts he exits the fastest way he can.

  Stavros laughed, and walked off, firing gun fingers at Ian Tucker’s head.

  Now a dry coughing comes from the caravan. Too deep, Tom thinks, for a woman.

  Ian wears a baseball cap and his small grey, eczematic dog trots about, licking the skinny shin exposed when the man sits. Tom sees then how that body is a facsimile of his own – tall, slight, the hairless ghost-gum flanks. A face that matches the photo Tom found among his mother’s things. A fair man standing beside a dark-haired boy, the kid’s arm wrapped around the man’s thigh. On the back, Peter and Ian, Greendale, 1980.

  As Tom shuffles further behind the park perimeter, as he hops on one foot gone numb, the man removes his cap. On his bald head a long red scar. Beneath this, the sheared-off, geometric planes of his skull.

  Tom stares and stares until he fears that Ian Tucker will detect the heat of his gaze through flowering Murraya on the last day of spring, through chain-link fence and heady, orange-scented air. Those who are fatherless, think of me.

  Tom lines the two men up in his head. Hodgins v Tucker. And sees that Ian’s no giant, no protector – this probable father – cruelled by illness, fate or accident, one withered arm uselessly dangling, his left eye swerving inward when he looks up suddenly now, as if the eye had come unhinged whenever the skull had.

  The sound of coughing again, more intense this time, from inside the van.

  You OK, son? Ian turns to the caravan door. Have a lemon water, buddy, put some manuka honey in, he says gently. And then he goes alert as an animal, then he stiffens and seems to hearken at a sound. It is his paler, younger boy; it’s Thomas Adam Tucker, bolting away.

  20

  Tess will go out, on to the motorway. An act that was arrested, years back, before its completion. I dare you, Pip would say. All the sisters had by that stage of her illness were games, confined to the farm, to the house and finally, to the bedroom. And Meg and Tess had done their best to entertain her there; it was gold to make her laugh.

  The third dare had been: walk along the Eastern Freeway without undies. Tess had gone through with it, waiting for passing semis to blow her dress right over her face. Every afternoon for one week.

  Some days the traffic was jammed right along; the truckers call that a parking lot. Some days it was just hood ornaments – that’s motorbikes, buzzing like hornets, paying her no attention. An eleven year old in a school uniform, blinking away her excited fright. But mostly you could rely on a big-rig to get the wind up, and whether they saw your bum in their rear visions wasn’t really important. It was just the fact of having done it.

  One afternoon, though, the headmistress drove by. When Pru Jackson saw a girl’s bare arse and the school colours by the Edgeware turn-off, she veered her Renault right and braked. Tess, in the passenger seat with her knees pressed, put a Scout’s hand up and vowed not to do it again. Her parents had enough troubles right now, with Pip so ill, Ms Jackson said, and Tess ought to know better.

  I guess that’s you, Meg said later in the bedroom, to Pip. You are Troubles, and they all flopped about, laughing. The girls called Pip this name for the next few weeks, hysterical whenever they said it because of how Troubles conjured Tess’s pale, skinny bum on the highway, and Pip, up to so little in those bed-bound days, gloried in this amplified power.

  In lesser dares Tess had mixed foul smoothies designed by Pip. Bananas, mustard, milk, salmon. Quinoa, peanuts, tomato sauce, tuna. Potion Afternoons. Tess would carry these cocktails into the bedroom and very gravely sip while Pip kept time to see how long before Tess retched or bolted to the bathroom.

  Tess cut a hank of her hair, underneath, then shaved it right to the scalp. She ate a fly and went to school wearing her uniform inside out. She’d completed the Letterbox Challenges, with a final delivery of three live bees in a box to the Woolfs, the neighbours who’d complained, not long after moving from Brisbane, about the Müllers’ irritating electric farm noises. If Pip would name it, Tess would do it. And the doing kept them all from thinking about what lay ahead: the autologous transplant, the sibling allograft and what these procedures meant for Pip, and for Meg, whose bone marrow was HLA-matched. The whole family rhesus negative, except Tess.

  The next dare Pip made was: hitch-hike. Go as far as they’ll take you.

  They were in the bedroom, trying on some horrible hand-me-downs, scarlet flares with rhinestone-encrusted pockets. A babydoll smock striped with rick-rack, fit for a pregnant ten year old.

  Meg looked from Tess to Pip, saying, Not hitch-hiking. Nyet!

  Tess shrugged. Why not?

  How could you even prove it? asked Meg.

  I’ll bring a souvenir from the chassis. Fluffy dice. A David Hasselhoff CD. A pack of NoDoz, Tess replied.

  Some psycho might pick you up and dump you in the state forest, said Meg. You’ll – she cast around – you’ll have to eat at a truck stop from the bain-marie!

  All three girls drew breath at that one.

  Before the three-hour trips to and from St Catherine’s, their mother had always packed sandwiches. And as they approached a Mobil or Shell, their father would enquire, Can I interest you in a little something, Lina, from the bain-marie? Coq au vin? Boeuf bourguignon? One day Pip had struck a deal. If she had to eat from the hospital trolley, it only seemed fair. So one evening, after saying goodbye to Pip, the family had stopped on the journey home to dine at Reg’s Roadhouse, with its six-seater wipeable tables, and Dolly Parton sizzling through dented speakers. Under the fluoros with their cockroach silhouettes, the Müllers ate fried chicken wings, fried rice, greasy potatoes and what their father called murdered carrots. They toasted Pip with Raspberry Slurpees and ginger beer while Meg filmed it on their father’s phone. They’d breathed easily that night, for the first time in months, as if they were a regular family out for a regular meal with the regulation amount of sadness.

  When Pip came home again the girls would not go anywhere but school or medical appointments; their lives shrank to the bedroom. But Tess and Meg were rarely bored. It was Pip who hated stillness and required greater feats of entertainment, though later Tess wondered if Pip had really made these demands. Had Meg and Tess invented them just so they could feel useful?

  Tess had always picked dare. But Meg went for truth.

  One cranky day Pip said, You must sometimes wish I was gone already.

  Don’t be ridiculous, Tess replied.

  But Pip, very intent, said, Meg chose truth.

  No, said Meg, I thought we’d all live for ever.

  When I go you’ll be the youngest, Pip was pointing.

  Big deal, said Tess, steering Meg away. You really think she cares about that?

  Pip shuffled under the covers. The older girls stood in the burnished lamplight, blinking dully. Tess felt a weariness she did not think ought to belong to children. Outside a dank fog had swathed the house. They were drifting off then from everything dependably real.

  She’ll go out now and walk the highway. Should she leave a note? What had June said at The Hive? To make a person disappear was always popular. Such a trick helped people forget the lostness inside themselves. She recited this in the green tone of something freshly learned from a book. She’d been practising the Vanishing Woman for months, she said, with a sprung chair and some sculpted wire which looked, when rigged beneath a sheet, like a person was still sitting when really they’d gone by stealth through a lower trapdoor. As they rode home on the white mare, June shou
ted out the logistics of this and other magic. By Lunar Lake the horse slowed, and they watched the water building, the foamy crests on the jerky waves. It was then some half-stories had connected in Tess’s head.

  And now, as she plans her route down the highway, she thinks she’s figured it out, the whole silent landscape under a clouded or clear destiny – girls, this came before you.

  Who’s her father? And why has everyone kept it from her, for all this time?

  Three

  … the individual must sacrifice himself for the race, and substitute for visible things the things that cannot be seen.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  1

  Sylvie Bellamy strides through the market in maxi dress and silver sandals, bare-shouldered in the fierce morning heat. She hadn’t expected such handsome women, she says, pointing to the queue at the Karma Massage tent and linking arms with Jim. The natural tans, and sun-gilded hair, the tautly compact yoga bodies. She’d imagined way more calico and dreads. Or muddied Blundstones and badly sawn hair. She thought everything would have the dull recycled patina of hippie DIY.

  As she fills her basket from the biodynamic stall, Jim wanders off for coffee. But when he returns she’s gone. He swings around, scanning the crowd in a minor panic. Then finally spots her. She’s standing at the Honig Farm stall, face to face with Evangeline.

  She’d turned up yesterday, unannounced. Well, Jim hadn’t answered her texts or calls, how else could she forewarn him? She’d flown in from Sydney, then hailed an airport cabbie. Jim heard the whole saga as they sat on his porch in the evening. The goddamn journey, Sylvie said, the drunken yobbos delaying the plane, the turbulence and consequent spewing, the prognosticating cabbie on the drive to Bidgalong with his visions of frog rains or was it dogs or fish and his tarot garland obscuring the view. At the sugar cane burn-off – the exploding inner tube. And then, the electrical storm. Whether to sit in a cab while the driver changed the tyre in the rain? Or pass the jack, and hold the brolly? A modern woman’s conundrum.

  Finally at Fox’s Lane, they’d pulled up short of the cabin. I wanted to surprise you, she told Jim, as if it wasn’t enough to show up uninvited. But, as she stumbled in wedge sandals down the rutted road, she quickly regretted this tactic. Her wheeled case jammed in potholes and was soon talcumed in sticky dust; she’d nearly twisted an ankle in a burrow, which some confused creature had built on the road! Soon she’d passed that quaint farmhouse – the kind of double-fronted, sweeping-verandaed, fixer-upper her colleagues would mortgage themselves to for life, then saw the little huddled doll’s houses in a field.

  I thought it must be your place, she’d said to Jim. She’d felt ready to take up darning or the cold-fingered art of pastry. Then noticed the broad-shouldered blond tending cows in the twilight. Sort of sexy, she said, in his wide stance with his slow, curious wave. This, Jim realised, was Stefan. All that land, all those animals; Sylvie soon twigged it couldn’t possibly be Jim’s – let’s face it, she said, you’re just not that farmy.

  When she reached his cabin, he was standing on the porch. It took an age, she said, for him to notice her, he was so intent on the farmhouse.

  Hooroo! she’d called in mock country-fashion. Bet you can’t guess who!

  He visored his brow. Without his glasses, she was a butter-coloured blur. Sylvie?

  He came slowly down the lane with his head tipped sideways and gave her an awkward hug. Then looked very stonily at her luggage.

  Very brotherly, she said, with one hand on her hip.

  Huh?

  Your hug was very brotherly. Look, I know it’s a surprise – but you never return my calls. And I don’t have to stay here. Of course if you have a spare little cushion for me then – you probably only have your bed but … That’s assuming you live alone, that you haven’t moved on already, but if there is someone …

  He watched and listened, waiting for her to exhale.

  Inside they’d glanced around uneasily, as if both seeing the cabin anew.

  Very cosy, she said.

  He laughed, Meaning?

  An adjective, she said. I think it means snug, or homely. Conducive.

  To what? he asked as she flopped on the lumpen couch, then began scratching her thighs in their thin cotton skirt. She plucked at the hessiany fabric.

  What is this, James? Horsehair?

  From my neighbours’ shed, he said.

  The bee people?

  She pointed out to the house and fields, all shimmering in the last scraps of daylight. It was so olde worldy! She’d completely forgotten farmers existed.

  Yes, the Müller family, Jim said in his most schoolteacherly voice. He watched Sylvie’s eyes dart, then stare. On the back of a door, the flowered robe.

  I’m just assuming, she said, still eyeing the robe, that you haven’t hooked up with anyone already.

  Sylvie, he said. You turn up with no warning …

  But she was examining her phone, frantically scanning the icons and apps, all promising to take her elsewhere, to do something with her unquiet mind.

  The problem was that the body remained, didn’t it – paining.

  Now, as he sees Sylvie leaning over the Honig Farm stall, Jim attempts a saunter. He tries keeping a neutral face, swallowing the urge to shout and run.

  Sylvie, eenie-meenie-miney-moeing the stacked honey jars, points a finger as Jim comes up beside her, and says, Leatherwood.

  He’s mouth-breathing, in a sweaty funk, his forearm scalded with spilt coffee.

  Evangeline barely looks up as she wraps the honey, scrunching the yellow and black tissue. Impossible to read her serene face. Jim looks, instead, at Sylvie. Sooty under her eyes, because she hadn’t slept well, she said, on his musty couch with the scratchy blanket. She’d had a fit of sneezing, and then of itching. And so, sometime before dawn, Jim had taken pity; he’d let her crawl on to his futon. Then went out on his bike so she could sleep in peace.

  At breakfast that morning she’d promised, I’ll find a hotel tomorrow. A premises with a day spa, wet-edge pool, thick white robes. Luxury products – Payot, Decléor. Someone to put their impersonal hands on her and pummel them up and down. They both knew she wasn’t invented for the country.

  Evangeline counts Sylvie’s coins very deliberately into a tin. Jim decides she’s trying not to look at him, her jaw pulsing at the angles. He downs his short black. He’s been floating calmly since that dawn spliff by the lake. But hardly needs caffeine now to take the mellow off.

  Sylvie, pointing into the stall, says, You ought to get a stool.

  Evangeline rubs her belly. The taut skin beneath her shirt, so eerily translucent over the baby. Has he ever touched anything more erotic in his life?

  In this heat. You must get tired? Sylvie sounds hopeful.

  I’m pregnant, Evangeline says. Not disabled.

  Jim, drawing breath, looks very concertedly away. Then braces himself.

  It’s just that – when I was pregnant, Sylvie says. Don’t you remember, Jim? I felt sick all day. Just lay there eating buttered Saos till you came over. Now even the Arnott’s logo makes me ill. The rainbow lorikeet, the wheat stalk. Ugh! And I can’t eat butter any more, though it’s back in vogue, have you noticed?

  Evangeline’s eyes go stony.

  Jim feels it rippling through him – his confused loyalties, the dope and coffee. He has an urge to rend a hank of his own hair.

  Sylvie smooths her fringe to one side. When he returned from cycling that morning, he’d found her in lacy underwear, straightening her hair in the kitchen. She looked shocked when he walked in, like a 1950s wife who must hide her ablutions from her husband.

  Anyway, I miscarried, Sylvie’s saying now.

  I’m sorry, says Evangeline. But doesn’t sound it.

  Jim, thinking he must have misheard, turns around slowly.

  By now, Sylvie says, it would have been … I mean we could have been …

  … A family, says Evangeline, looking at Jim. But you
still have plenty of time.

  Jim, blasted with the chill of exposure, is soon frozen by another thought. Miscarried – is that really what Sylvie just said?

  But Sylvie’s wearing her silencing look, her lips gone thin and bloodless. He puts a hand on her neck, tries steering her away.

  You wanted sourdough, remember, he says at top volume. The good stuff’s usually gone by nine so we’d better …

  But Sylvie is ignoring him. You must be due any day!

  A few more weeks, says Evangeline.

  And Jim sees that she is privately absorbed and completely unmoved by this glimpse of his history. The disappointment is so crushing, he can hardly bear it. He tosses the coffee cup, missing the bin. His eyes begin to throb. He has a sudden memory of running a playground to hide uncontrollable tears. And another, from school camp, of balling wet pyjamas and burying them in a backpack. In the spidery night, through dense scrub, the toilet block had been another continent.

  But you look so much more … Sylvie’s saying. How exciting!

  Another pregnant woman passes in a beaded choli. Her exuberant health, her nut-brown belly, bared from navel to hip, seems a provocation to them all.

  Looks like there’s an epidemic, Sylvie says, of babies. And, well, fucking of course. In Sydney everyone I know seems to be on IVF.

  Not much fucking in the city then? says Evangeline. Have they forgotten how? And she casts Jim a sly, cryptic look.

  Both women laughing now. Jim thinks he might be sick. He feels as if someone has knifed him clear from groin to throat. Soon his guts will spill on to the market table.

  Shouldn’t joke about IVF, Sylvie says, it’ll probably be my fate. And then she tips against his chest.

  Are you all right? Evangeline raises an arm. You’re super-pale.

  Sylvie clutches the table with both hands. Then bends to rifle frantically through her basket.

  Vertigo, she murmurs, then comes up with sunglasses and a bottle of pills.

  Jim offers a small back pat, but he can’t get over how she’s just lied, or misspoken. Had she chosen the word miscarriage just to mask the more morally awkward truth?