The Precipice

by Virginia Duigan

  But there is no need for any of them to encroach on my territory. There is virgin bush in abundance behind their house. It stretches way beyond the twenty hectares that are now on their title.

  All the same, I should not have turned my back on her without a word. Bad behaviour on my part, no question about it. Uncalled for and rude. Moreover, I’m afraid, rather childish. I’m in my eighth decade and she is an actual child. An awkward, solitary child, too. Why don’t they let her bring a friend to stay? They have plenty of room. Was she perhaps looking for us? Waiting for Teddy and me? If so, she will have to learn that some places are out of bounds.

  Why should I have such an immoderate reaction to what is a natural feature, an exposed sandstone outcrop? Is it because I know it has a secret, interior life? The idea of another person, an intruder, discovering what is concealed there – it is anathema to me. It enrages me at a pure, visceral level. I can’t pretend it does not. The rage is boiling inside me and I cannot suppress it.

  The notion of inner lives has always appealed. The autonomy, the impregnability. Which, of course, is only apparent. Only an illusion. However much human beings may believe their secrets are impregnable, out in the natural world they are always vulnerable – to the plundering of their fellow humans. That is what I am fearful of, and always have been.

  I wish to be the only one who knows the secret. Because it is the single, certain way to keep it safe.

  Why do I feel like this? I feel a compulsion to justify it, in order to explain the extremity of my position. To explain it to myself, perhaps, as much as to anyone else.

  On an aesthetic level alone the rock is a still life of rare perfection. Its undulating architecture has been forged over centuries into a noble composition. This is its ‘public’ face. I have tried – fruitlessly, of course – to write poems about the public face of this rock. How it has lain under the sky down the ages. Down the lifetimes. ‘Since time immemorial’ is a hackneyed phrase, but I find it apt.

  There are curvaceous channels where rain has swept along in torrents and burrowed into the compliant mass. The girl was nestling in one such sinuous hollow, and I have done so myself on endless balmy days. Sat for hours contentedly with Teddy and a good book, cradled by the ancient warmth.

  These shapes bring to mind Japanese paintings of towering waves curled over, poised on the brink of breaking. Elsewhere the sandstone is honed into sharp edges, honeycombed with indentations that suggest giant prehistoric clams. Or some elemental creature’s monstrous fingerprints.

  Some contemporary residents live in the crevices. Teddy and I are well-acquainted with the blue tongue who stalks out to squat or stand alone in one favourite spot. It is a creature of habit, much like ourselves. Teddy has never once chased after this particular lizard, it is far too intimidating in its stillness – a primordial waxwork defying a melting sun. We are old friends, I like to think, who observe each other with companionable acceptance. Like Sandy and me, come to think of it.

  But the rock is not just the ancestral home of lizards, snakes and marsupials. Back in the distant past, in the realms of what we presume to call prehistory, it attracted the attention of another species. A very different proposition, this one: adventurous and propelled by curiosity. Relentless too, and destructive. But also – and uniquely – artistic.

  Concealed among the labyrinth of rock forms, very well hidden, is a low aperture leading to a small cave. Teddy found it first, and excavated some animal bones. Then one day I brought a torch and wriggled after him. I found myself in a tiny room, a miniature chamber curved like a vault and as dry as long-entombed dust. It was just large enough for me to stand, but not quite straighten up, and to take four steps.

  In the thin arc of the torch I saw some marks directly facing me on the wall. At first I thought they were natural chalky smears. Then, as my eyes slowly adjusted, I saw they were drawings. Cave paintings, two of them, one above the other. Centuries old, in all probability. Thousands of years old, conceivably.

  In the years following that first sighting I have gazed at those marks countless times. One is the outline of a wallaby. The other is harder to read because it is more like a diagram. It looks like a group of squiggles and wavy lines inside a television set. Which it can’t be, for obvious reasons, but I have never managed to decipher it.

  Not long after that first discovery, I think it was on the third visit, I noticed another set of marks placed down low on the cave wall. I couldn’t believe I had missed them, I could hardly credit it. What I saw now was the print of a left hand with the thumb and fingers spread. When I crouched up against it using a stronger torch, until my eyes were almost too close to focus, I could just make out what seemed to be tiny irregularities in the pigment. I was seeing what may have been the pores of the artist’s skin.

  I laid my own outstretched hand against it, my hand that was dry and cold but very much alive. I found it was shaking a little. My hands are largish because I’m tall and big-boned.

  The print was smaller than mine. It could have been made by a man, but I like to think – I feel it in my bones – that it was a woman, left-handed like myself, someone nobody will ever identify, who chose to leave a signature on her clandestine work. Who left behind the message of her creativity.

  Lately I haven’t gone in, not because of any fear that I might expire in there. With the torchlight fading away in the dark and the gleam of light from the opening, it would not be such a terrible end. No, simply because the contortions required are a bit beyond me now.

  There are other cave paintings in the mountains, but as far as I know these three have never been documented. I took some flash photos once with a throwaway camera. They came out surprisingly well. I told the girl in the chemist when I collected them that I’d been on holidays in the Northern Territory. Her total lack of interest or curiosity was a relief. I keep them in a drawer in my desk.

  It may be presumptuous to say so, but I think of these paintings as being in my custody. I think of them as my own, and myself as the sole curator of this tiny art gallery. It is a museum in miniature. For a long time I have been aware that, in all likelihood, I am the only living human being who knows it is there.

  The outcrop is only visible when you are nearly upon it. In order to find it at all the girl must have followed our route through the dense bush. Because when you leave the dump that is my cottage, you have to follow certain landmarks before you arrive at anything approximating a path. Landmarks? That’s a highfalutin word for what are particular trees, trunks and bushes, configurations I have come to recognise. There are no other guiding signs. The path itself could hardly be more obscure.

  It’s scarcely a path at all. Just the ghost of a trail, often camouflaged, winding through a thicket of stringybarks, grass trees, grevilleas and banksias. A fragrant tangle of foliage that Teddy and I have pushed through and trodden down together over the years, invariably in single file because Teddy likes to lead the way. He is my protector, checking that it is safe to proceed.

  How did she find her way there? She must have made a deliberate search for it. She risked getting hopelessly lost. Is it conceivable she waited and watched us setting out one morning? Careful to stay so far behind that Teddy was unaware? His hearing and sense of smell are not what they were.

  Was this her first visit, or had she been there before? Did she fossick among the twisted curves and crevices? Is that as far along the track as she went?

  I find these thoughts deeply unsettling.

  I felt bruised. I felt a need for some human contact, a rare event, to be sure. It’s always a mixed blessing, contact with our infuriating blessed species. This was no exception.

  I dropped in to Lisa’s. Sandy had just had a delivery, all the books from Arnold Monleigh’s estate. No one in the shop so I went through to the back. He and his sidekick, whose name always escapes me – pleasant enough woman – were on their knees, sorting and cataloguing. Sandy was all folded up like a concertina.

  Sh
e’s pleasant but unremarkable; I suppose that’s why I can never summon up her name. I can’t imagine she and Sandy have a thing going, in spite of what Monique and Bill say. Davy’s convinced too, but then he always thinks everyone’s on with everyone else. Except Teddy and me, presumably, which is the just the kind of bad taste remark Davy would enjoy.

  I was rather sorry I hadn’t asked her to the drinks. Seeing them together away from the shop, one might have had more of an indication either way. But I would have had to ask her husband, the pharmacist, who is even duller.

  Sandy clambered to his feet when he saw me. He was positively animated, all smiles beaming down on me from his great height. There’s nothing like a good deceased estate to bring the corpse to life, I teased. He was nice about the drinks too. You didn’t ring me, I forbore to say, unlike Davy. Nor, moreover, did you send a thank-you drawing of yourself enclosed by an elongated wombat.

  He gave the invaders the seal of approval. Said my new neighbours had already been into the shop.

  ‘The father and daughter lobbed in,’ he said. ‘He was after CDs and music books.’

  Frank wasn’t her father, he was her uncle, I reminded him. She was half-Vietnamese. I could see this was news to Sandy. And after all that palaver the other night. He obviously hadn’t taken it in at all, the funny old thing. He’s so unworldly he had trouble working the relationship out.

  I mean unworldly in that he lives in a parallel universe made up of music and thousands of second-hand books. It’s not that he’s naive. As Davy says, he may not have done it but he knows how it would be done. Very droll. I wonder if Davy says that about me?

  As we went back into the shop Sandy remarked, ‘The young girl Kim is an intriguing kettle of fish. What do you make of her?’ He knows her name already. I was surprised by that. He forgets the names of half his regulars.

  For a second I was transported into another landscape. I saw the girl in her red T-shirt perched up in the cradle of the rock.

  ‘That girl? I don’t make anything of her, in particular,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think she’s an unusual girl, Thea. We had quite an interesting little talk.’

  That turned out to mean a talk about books, of course. What else interests Sandy? I waited while he mused over it, puffing on his pipe. For someone who has smoked all his life he has an amazingly unlined face. A kind face, I’ve always thought, under that floppy thatch of white hair.

  ‘The thing is, you see, she has the mind of a reader but an erratic experience of reading.’ There were some things you’d expect, Harry Potter, of course, and the odd vampire book, even Agatha Christie. But it was scrappy, all over the place. Surprising things like dog training manuals, and Reader’s Digest condensed. He looked properly outraged. Condensed books are among Sandy’s pet hates, to the extent that he refuses to stock them.

  ‘You expect one thing to lead to another, but with her it’s been curiously random, as if she’s had no guidance. Self-help books …’ He trailed off with a groan. If there is one genre that Sandy cannot fathom at all it is self-help books. He has to stock them because people bring them in all the time, but he gets very upset when someone wants to buy one. He tries to deter them. Consequently, it is the fastest-growing section in the shop.

  That wasn’t curiously random at all, I told him, it was depressingly normal for nowadays. Reading is badly taught, school reading lists are abysmal and dumbed down, and you’re lucky if they read at all. Sandy only mixes with rarefied circles, people who read because it’s encoded in their DNA. I could see he was unconvinced.

  ‘What about this, then?’ He was getting quite worked up. ‘All those old boyhood adventure stories. R. M. Ballantyne and John Buchan. Rider Haggard. Jeffery Farnol, for Pete’s sake. She’d actually read Black Bartlemy’s Treasure, circa 1920. This is a girl, mind you. Pirates and torture. Yo-heave-ho, me hearties! Boiling water in his ears!’

  He was so excited he pumped my arm. ‘Now you can’t tell me you don’t think that’s odd. How could it have happened? Most kids wouldn’t touch those books with a barge pole. Nobody reads them nowadays.’

  Well, I did, I pointed out. And I was a girl too, once upon a time back in the dim, distant past, you know. To please him, I conceded it did sound unusual. Sounds as if you had quite a ball, the two of you, I added, reminiscing about those ripping yarns.

  Sandy never normally smokes his pipe in the shop. Must have been the rare combination of juicy deceased estate and that all-but-extinct species: eager young female customer. Most of his customers are our vintage, give or take twenty years.

  He’d found the perfect book for her. The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden. About right for twelve, didn’t I think? Suffused with nostalgia. Romantic but seemly. Rural France, grapes, growing up. As far removed from pirates as you could hope for. Not too old for her, was it?

  Really, I’ve never seen Sandy so carried away. There was no stopping him. She might turn out to be a bit of a find. Get them young and you’d got them for life, hadn’t you? She was painfully shy, but she seemed like a sweet kid, didn’t she? It must be rather satisfying, after all, having them living just across the way. Rather refreshing.

  Satisfying, after all? Refreshing? My jaw must have dropped several inches.

  He saw that but it didn’t faze him one whit. Satisfying in the sense that although I had lost my dream house, there were appropriate people living there and appreciating it. And refreshing in that, having lived out there on my own for so many years, there was an injection of youth and change.

  Appropriate: what an odd word to use, was all I could think to say. And I was never alone. I’ve had Teddy for nearly fourteen years, he knows that.

  After a pause he added, ‘I’m sorry, Thea. Don’t imagine I underestimate the pain of your loss.’

  Just before I came in, he said, neatly changing the subject, Monica had unearthed Arnold Monleigh’s copy of Lost Horizon. American first edition, no less. Mint condition. That would be good for next time, wouldn’t it?

  Monica, that’s her name. Monica ha! Harmonica, how could I have forgotten?

  They’d never dare say it in my presence, but the possibility occurs to me that people secretly think it’s a good thing I had to sell the new house instead of the dump. The dump is really only suitable for one human and dog, whereas the new house is spacious and flexible. I might have found myself with only one neighbour, and most likely a doddery one at that, instead of a bevy of youthful charmers, as Sandy would doubtless have it.

  What he said is probably what everyone is thinking. It’s good for me, I’ve been living a reclusive life out in the sticks for too long. It’s unhealthy to be so set in my ways, and at my age even a bit risky. Better to have people around.

  He understands the pain, I do believe that, but why is it so hard for Sandy, for everyone, to accept the rest – that I was not lonely and I did not and do not want change? Is it perhaps because it diminishes them? Their role in my life, I mean. Real or imagined.

  First edition Lost Horizon, my foot. Frank couldn’t afford it, or if he could he wouldn’t. Good for next time? I have an idea Sandy feels his Pygmalion period coming on.

  Even in the café I cannot get away from those people. My fault for going into one, but I needed a strong flat white. The moment I set eyes on Joan Mills I regretted it. The peripatetic woman is back from her latest extravagance. China, this time.

  I’d left Teddy outside. The laws in this country are absurd. If we were in France he could be sitting at the table, perched up beside me on a chair with a napkin round his neck and no one would bat an eye. They’re talking about changing the rules but nothing seems to happen.

  No sooner had I reluctantly sat down at her table (no avoiding it) when I heard my name a second time. The young woman dispensing menus was none other than Ms Ellice Carrington. She seemed amused at my astonishment. After she’d taken the order I went out and smuggled Teddy inside under the table, where I fed him bits of ham and cheese fro
m my toasted sandwich. I’m told my new neighbours find me intimidating, I explained to Joan, so she’s unlikely to have the temerity to object.

  ‘Intimidating!’ Joan exclaimed in her hoity-toity voice. ‘Toi? No, surely not.’ The idea that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit has never lodged in Joan’s minimal cranium. And she is loud – Ellice, emerging from the kitchen, gave me a quirky look.

  It wasn’t my intention but Joan ended up gleaning more information about the intruders in my life than I heard about China. In any case, she was obsessed by the pollution in China, to the exclusion of anything else of interest. The state of the world is horrific.

  Ellice has a degree of some sort – I can’t imagine what she thinks she’s doing working as a waitress. Joan, who is easily impressed, was quite taken with her. She announced her intention to invite them to one of her famous dinners. I’ll make an excuse, as usual. She’s welcome to them.

  Joan brought up the subject of her financial advisers, as I knew she would. She always boasted about them, and after what happened to me she is unstoppable. Nonetheless, I should have taken my head out of the sand and listened to her when she offered to put me on to them, should I not?

  I had no wish to pursue this train of thought. Luckily Ellice had spotted Teddy’s tail and chastised me for bringing him inside. Wasn’t I the naughty girl, then? If she wasn’t careful the boss would whip her ass.

  Not a punishment I wished to witness, I said. Just the excuse I needed for getting out of there.

  We were pottering along the road. It rained heavily last night, the ground was steaming, but too wet and muddy to take the usual circuit. A car chugged up behind us. It could only be theirs. Frank, leaning out. Hi there. Did I want anything from the village? Bread, milk, newspaper? Caviar or truffles, peut-être?