Whatever came from being is caught up in being, drunkenly forgetting the way back.
One man turns and sees his birth pulling separate from the others.
He fills with light, and colours change here.
He drinks it in, and everyone is wonderfully drunk, shining with beauty.
I can’t really say that I feel the pain of others, when the whole world seems so sweet.
And then, as Meg saunters through the house, emboldened by vodka, Rumi follows: Birth pulling separate from the others. Whatever came from being is caught up in being. She wonders about the drunkenly forgetting, picturing Nora staggering down the main street. Her father pulling over to drive her home. Don’t tell your mother, Meg, she’ll only get upset. Nora had repeated Ich bin sinnlos betrunken and laughed. Her bare feet curled on the front seat making her seem even younger than the girls, her sudden weeping frightening them. The feeling, later, of holding the secret reminded Meg of the day the pressure cooker exploded and the boiling stew hit the roof; of how she and Tess had stifled their excitement in the face of their mother’s dismay.
In Nora’s bedroom a bed so immaculately made that Meg tiptoes around it.
She climbs back out the window with the bottle, and from the porch watches the moon rise behind the pines and go ballooning in the sky. She turns to the black water, the steely rain, then sits, crossing and uncrossing her small knees, waiting for lake music. But there’s only an insect tick between downpours. No harp sounds or electric wires. No celestial sounds or human voices, which Nora’s heard. Last April, hundreds of fish had leapt from the lake. With Tess she’d biked out to watch them dying onshore, their mouths full of sand and pointless air. Meg looks back to see the waves burnished with luminescence. She scans the purple-black bent-over trees, the bushes crouched around the house, the buttery roses and stephanotis. All throbbing with expectancy. She cranes around to the back of the property and sees an odd shape dangling from Nora’s clothesline.
It can’t be? She clambers up. A body, chopped at knees and neck? Then her heart slows. A wetsuit, hung out to dry. Still, it’s weird – everyone knows Nora doesn’t swim. A man’s wetsuit, Meg thought, looking at the proportions.
Cold air constricts her throat. She sees the escalating rain, how the lake is lapping already at Nora’s yard. She frisks her wet self for the inhaler, then remembers it’s back inside by the empties. She’s drunkenly forgetting, her breath obstructed, her flesh glowing like burning wax, as the tide comes surging across Nora’s front lawn.
5
Where you headed then, missy?
Tess shifts in the passenger seat. The belt welts her neck as she strains towards the window, away from the man’s onion scent. Hard rain beats the car, blurring the road ahead.
I’m off to look at some stallions, he says. They breed them super-fast at the Golden Stables. Superior outfit, ’bout yay far past the Jericho Swamplands. Very fine racing horses.
His right hand rests lazily on the wheel, the other raking a bulgy thigh. Tess stays quiet, inventories the car. Itchy-looking backseat blanket, empty chip bag, carton of strawberry Moove with gnawed straw. Freckled sausage-fingers, petrol-station sunglasses taped on one side, a quarter head of gingery hair. A compulsive snorter, a sinusy voice. A whole story, right here, for Pip.
Name’s Edwin P. Murphy, but she can call him Murph.
He fumbles for something, inverts a tube of mints, scraping one out with teeth. His top lip, peeled back like that, reminds Tess of horses. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Murph! So she stays very fixed on the road as if she’s the driver, not him swivelling his head, yawning, switching the high beam on and off to see the way better in the rain, adjusting his seat so he’s leaning right back, with his arms straight out towards the wheel. The rain slows as they pass an occasional house, and an old, dented phone box with its receiver hanging like someone’s just bolted, mid-conversation. They pass stables and barns and rusty hay-balers and now a long stretch of nothingland. She hasn’t eaten since morning and feels hollow and unreal.
He twists his head, asking, What’s that? as the car jumps the kerb and bumps back on to the road again.
On the rear window, see? he says. Fly, wasp? It’s not a hornet, is it?
Tess cranes around but can only hear the innocent buzzing, the insect body butting something. From the sound, though, she can pretty much tell.
Wind your window, girly, so it can escape.
Rain spits in and her arm is soon wet and cold. Outside there’s a clean, stony scent, as if from the stars. We’re part of that, her father had said. We’re part stardust, did you know?
Her father. Which isn’t even a fact any more.
The flies they got round these parts bite, he says. Horseflies. Doesn’t sound like a fly.
Edwin flips off the radio. Listen carefully, he says. We’ll find the bastard.
Tess folds her hands, crosses her legs, subtracting herself. She might have vanished from her questionable family, but now the bug-eyed gaze of Murph. Harder than she’d thought to simply disappear.
Fields of electricity towers, like space beings stalking with arms up; their wires powering TVs, computers and electric toothbrushes, iPhones, blenders, porch lights. All the houses, darkened, with their people and their machines turned off inside. Think about it, Mr Parker had said, how we live is nothing like our parents did. When you turn on a tap, a heater, the world’s limits rush into your house. We’re so much more aware than they were, of our limited resources.
Tess thinking of limited resources pictures Pip, running out of tomorrows, confused to the end, about the limits of today.
Where are your bags then? Where you staying? You got family waiting?
Murph swats wildly at the air.
Jesus, girl, it is a bee! You didn’t even say!
Tess tries not to laugh as he bats at the insect, only making it angrier of course and more likely to sting. She goes very calm and wonders where the bee’s from, maybe in the car the whole journey, perhaps even a city bee, happier and healthier, Tucker claims, because the cities are greener now than the country. Country life is what damages you: the unreported mine leaks, the rolled tractors, the pesticides. At Vinegar Hill, your mother says, the kids stay inside to avoid lead poisoning from the smelter. You cannot hang your washing, or let your babies crawl on the ground. You can’t grow veggies because of lead in the soil, air and grains. You mean some other country? Meg asked. No, said your mother, a small town just a few miles away.
… I sold her when she was twenty, he says. But she was strong for ten more years. Then he turns to her slowly and asks, How old are you then?
Tess stares at the fogged horizon. She holds up two hands, then another.
He nods, squinting. Underage, he says. Illegal. A bit of spit goes flying.
Tess, sliding closer to the passenger door, feels the solemn thudding inside her chest.
Quite a few never wore out. The large one, Sukie, she was whip-smart, and the red roan ran like the wind. I called him Windy.
Krazy Town Alert! If Meg were here they’d be pissing themselves, but Tess pities him, something seems ajar in his head. She grows drowsy, listening. She pinches her arm to stay awake.
Tess drifts, picturing her mother’s paintings, the horses huddled in a deep field, one blindfolded. The bits she’d repainted, with the past showing through. Then recalls that cloud, suspended by an artist in a stately room. Mr Parker had shown it to her. He’d called her in from the hall where he’d found her alone, eating an apple and watching the school clock wrenching its slow hands through the lunch hour. An artist who must also be a chemist, he’d said as they’d puzzled over it. And then he turned very suddenly to face her and said, Tess, I don’t believe your silence actually belongs to you.
Her eyes had darted around frantically then. Inside her chest, a searing. Everyone seemed to know something of her inner life, though she’d tried so hard to brick it up.
… That one was a dun with a
black mane. I never saw such an animal, very deep-chested, quite long of tail.
Tess’s eyelids grow heavy; the vehicular air is close and depleted, smelling of peanuts, and now of roast chicken, of the thousand meals that have passed through Murph’s car.
When she wakes, the car’s empty and still. The world beyond, liquid dark. That prickly blanket tightly wrapped around her body. She yawns and sees, in the cold cabin, her own white breath suspended. Remembers that cloud artist and thinks, well, anyone can make such a work. You only have to exhale in the right kind of weather. It gives her a delightful second of hope.
She searches the dark beyond the car and, now fully awake, remembers to worry and fear. She turns to the black block of unlit house. The man has completely vanished. But has she?
6
Evangeline in the kitchen, under harsh pendant light, flicks through Tess’s schoolbook, frantic now for clues or signs. She’s soaked to the skin after dashing from the farm to Jim’s to ask – had he seen Tess, had something happened at school? Jim would say nothing, or had nothing to say. And hadn’t he suggested, some days back, that his loyalties were divided? Even more since that Sydney woman, using up all the air in his cabin.
How about her friends? Jim had asked.
And when Evangeline replied, She doesn’t exactly have friends, the ex-girlfriend’s lovely face was racked.
Young girls go off, Sylvie said, when finally recomposed. That’s what they do. And if there’s family trouble?
Evangeline sensed this was not rhetorical. But was suddenly struck by an image of Peter. How long since she’d last seen him sauntering out of a shop in town, then boarding a bus at the corner? More than two years surely. She’d marched over to Jim’s work table then, with the woman’s gaze searing her back, and searched till she found the journal she’d given Tess years ago. If you cannot say it, then write it. Some empty maxim from her own childhood: better out than in, as if emotions, contained, were a force for ruin.
It’s after nine. Meg, out looking. Stefan, driving the bees. And Tess? Evangeline stands at the table now, head bent, wet hair glued to her neck, and turns the pages. She gnaws a fingernail, shifts from foot to foot, redistributing baby weight, easing the sacral muscle spasms. She’s ticking, on the verge of a cry or scream, full of anticipatory restlessness. She reads it over again, lips moving, one finger travelling beneath each word, this account of a time she’d not been part of, this glimpse of Daughterland.
Undertow
Ever since she was small, Pip had confused her todays. Every morning she’d want to know, ‘Is it tomorrow, Tessie, or yesterday?’ You marked time by what she could see from her window. The day of Watery Sun and Cumulo Nimbus. The Blustery Day of Bowing Trees. The day of Three Wombats and a One-armed Joey.
This one night Pip woke and said yesterday was too far off and she wasn’t tired AT ALL. ‘You mean tomorrow,’ said Meg, yawning. It was past midnight so tomorrow had come already and now it was today. There was no weather to describe to Pip that night. Only stars pricking the sky. ‘How many?’ Ten thousand, you told her. ‘Lots more but we just can’t see them.’ ‘What are their names?’ You looked them up and read them out until she closed her eyes. Zaurak, Zavijah, Zibal.
Yesterday came and went, for everyone but Pip. She hovered, not awake or asleep for three more days. She took no food or water. You told her the story about the lost and injured man who crawled for days and nights down a mountain till he found the light of safety. He crossed a glacier, and in his thirst he heard running water. He crossed the hard snow on his belly until he could no longer tell when his days became tomorrows and he began to feel part of the mountain, the ten thousand stars, the rocks and the dirt. Zaniah, Zuben Elakrab, Zuben Elakribi, Zuben Egenubi, Zuben Elschemali. No today, no tomorrow, no yesterday. Just Pip’s breath and the wheeling stars. In another room your father’s crooked beeswax candles were burning slowly down.
At first, Evangeline scans for one word only, thirsty as that crawling man for her youngest’s name, for any new fact on the child she’s lost. But when she rereads it she hears a sound gone missing from their lives for so long. She hears Tess recording what was lost and what might still be saved.
7
Before Stefan takes the northern exit, he heads up the mountain to see what he’s seeding, what he has sown. His farm bees are stacked on the truck. They’ll do their work under almond blossom, eight hours north where the sun beats in a flat plane. Fifty hives left on the farm. But first he wants to check the wild bees in the elevated air. Wild swarms are naturally driven to build comb. Trucked bees get stressed by their journeys. Which colony will fail? Which, if any, will thrive?
As he grinds the gears on the Upper Mountain Road he thinks of that wreck on its lower reaches. The coroner had deemed the death suspicious. Plastic-wrapped drugs and money had been found in the back of the van.
They were both called in – he and Lina – separate rooms. Nora had given the police a name, Peter Tucker, and said he was known to the Müllers also. In fact, she said, related.
Had he ever laid eyes on such a van? the detective asked. White Hyundai, plates DMG 765.
Stefan sat with the plainclothes man in the airless chamber, walled with the stench of sweat, air freshener and cigarettes. He said there were many such vans around the mountains, every second backpacker hired one.
How about the man that was in the van, and now dead?
The detective showed him an identikit. It looked yeti-like, in the way of such things, it looked barely human. Was it Peter? Or Gus? Stefan struggled to recall either face. He shook his head, shrugged. But swallowed.
Interesting fact, the detective said, the deceased did not seem to have been the driver. The driver had fled perhaps, or gone for help and disappeared, leaving his dead or injured associate. Yet the wreck was never reported. The drugs and money were left behind. And no one had witnessed the accident or filed a Missing Persons. The crash wasn’t so far from Honig Farm. There must have been noises, comings and goings, after.
You heard and saw nothing? the detective asked.
Is a big property, said Stefan. I don’t farm every corner. Actually I have never been before in that section.
The detective blew his nose theatrically.
I’m often away, Stefan said. The bees, you see, what I have to drive. I’ll ask my wife if she heard anything …
The policeman tore open a pack of Fisherman’s Friend.
Your wife had amnesia after the fire? A head injury? How was she wounded?
A long story, said Stefan. I’m sure she tells it better than me.
Then he asked for water. Showed the pills. The room had begun to flare and pulse. His right eye swam with dark, oily blots.
I have a script, Stefan said. Migraine. So, nothing unlegal here.
It’s illegal, said the detective. The word is illegal, Mr Müller, not unlegal.
Stefan dry-swallowed the pill, coughed. He had nothing to hide but a minor infidelity. But the real story – of Peter and the fire – was his wife’s to tell.
We did a sweep. In the back of the van, said the detective, we found a tooth.
Stefan pictured Pip’s incisor, set in gold, which Evangeline wore around her neck.
And then he knew the whole scenario as he heard them say, it is a match with your wife, and he wondered again if it was Pete or Gus who’d died in that crash – neither had been seen around town for so long. And he tried not to hope – because the thought alone made him culpable – tried not to wish that it was the father of his child.
Stefan checks his phone as he changes gears on the incline – a message, two familiar numbers. Nora Roberts. Lina. Then the screen fades. No reception up here, or it’s the battery. He sticks an arm into the mountain air. Even the bees in the ute have gone silent now, sensing the altitude perhaps, or saving energy for the feed ahead.
Twenty minutes later at The Hive, he stands by the rocky escarpment and looks down into the valley. The farm grids, part
ly shadowed under a shelf of cloud, the threads of river and tributaries, the eerie planes of Lunar Lake. He’d never liked swimming there. That lake mysteriously draining and filling. He does not like things without pattern or season, he needs to believe in these or how else will he farm? Rain driving in slanted lines on all the houses. Up here, though, it’s very dry. A faint eucalypt scent slinging him back to when he’d first visited Evangeline at The Hive.
The memory comes in fragments: her waist-length hair around his fist; her long neck, arching back; her belly still soft from the pregnancy; the beat of a high, hot mountain sun. And the baby, who he’d soon call his, falling silent as she was put to the breast. All three, lying in sweet, dry grass. A new contentment, a revelation – this instant family. It had felt bestowed by some higher order, it had felt entirely natural. But Tess’s father would arrive at The Hive, then hover, pissed off because Evangeline had changed her mind: she hadn’t given up the baby, she’d given him away instead.
This new family had been the counterpoint and balm to the other strobing scenes in Stefan’s head: his father with a hand at his mother’s throat, or bending him out a fifth-floor window to make her beg. It had been his brother, Gerhard, who’d shown how he ought to feel. From Gerhard’s horrified gaze, Stefan learned emotions he’d not been capable of mustering for himself.
Hasn’t thought of Gerhard for some time. He’ll look him up when he gets home. Maybe visit. Hamburg, is it? Bonn? It’s time to tend his mother’s grave, to skirt the borders of where his father’s still living. Talk with Gerhard about anything but the past. Gemütlichkeit, the word comes back, and the unthinking way his mother had used it, even though nothing in the house had been cosy, or nice; everything had been utterly fucked.
Now, as he crosses the grass at The Hive, calm. Up here he’d found a woman educated in little but peace. In those early years he’d never heard her raise her voice. The limited facts she had about the world astonished him. But he did not disabuse her – he needed to believe in her purity, her quaint faith. How she took her clothes off, so natural! A man and a woman in the long grass, God-made, essential. He’s fed off that memory for years but it can no longer replace reality. A woman who no longer wants to share her body, wants him to insult her while using it, as she says. Her new circuitous route to pleasure. He can’t fool himself any more. After the fire and her forgetting, and then, after Pip – she’d become, like his mother, another woman bearing the unbearable. It was not the men, she said to him once, who’d damaged her most. Before losing Pip it had not been the men, but the fire.
The World Without Us Page 19
