‘Like your earrings,’ Cassie says.
‘Fred made them for me.’
‘Make you some an’ all if you want.’
‘Oh thanks!’
‘Keep your eyes skinned for a couple of nice feathers.’
‘Most intelligent creatures on the planet, parrots,’ Mara says. ‘Fred said, didn’t you Fred?’
‘Humans aside, presumably.’ Larry eases out another cork.
‘Heard it on the radio.’ Fred flips the kangaroo steaks over one last time. ‘Ready with them plates, Laz?’
Laz? Things are obviously fine between Fred and Larry now but earlier he’d left them in the kitchen to go for a slash and when he’d got back they’d been rowing. Least, he’d heard Fred shout something and, rather than walk into the middle of it, he’d gone away again. But maybe he’d got it wrong.
‘Some test they did,’ Fred continues, hefting alarming hunks of meat on to the plates, ‘whales, dolphins, dogs, parrots, and parrots came out tops, would you believe.’
‘Can’t imagine how you’d test a whale alongside a parrot,’ Cassie says.
‘Anyway!’ Mara is triumphant. ‘Parrots won!’
Graham winces at the thought of such intelligent creatures flying free, thinking all over the place. Thinking what? Doesn’t seem right, somehow. Some old aunt or something of his mother’s they used to visit when he was small had had a parrot, a stinking grey thing, blind in one eye, that clutched your fingers in its scabby claws if you stuck them through the cage. ‘It’ll have your finger off,’ the old woman used to say but he couldn’t resist poking at it, though the smell nearly made him choke. He wonders what it thought, if it was so clever.
Larry hands out the loaded plates. In the light from the kerosene lamps the meat looks almost black, covered in ashy flecks. Graham takes a bite of the tough charry meat and chews.
‘What do you think of the kangaroo?’ he asks Cassie.
‘Very nice,’ she says through a mouthful, refusing to meet his eye.
Larry sits back down beside her with a contented sigh. ‘Fine bread, Cassandra.’
Cassie swallows with difficulty. ‘Thanks. Please call me Cassie.’
‘If that’s what you’d prefer. Though it seems a shame to mutilate such a beautiful name,’ Larry says.
Fred guffaws. ‘Mutilate! Get a hold of yourself, mate!’
‘Cassie,’ Larry says, tipping his glass to her.
She smiles and sips her wine. Graham stares at her expression, sort of pleased and smug. Is she getting off on these smarmy looks?
‘So, you’re gonna be painting?’ Fred says. ‘Used to dabble in that line a bit meself.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Years back.’
‘The painting in the kitchen that caught your eye,’ Larry says.
‘That’s not you?’ Graham looks through the smoke at Fred, a shadowy shape but for the lit point of his fag. ‘It’s beautiful, man. And you don’t paint any more?’
‘Nah.’
‘That’s criminal.’
‘You can talk,’ Cassie says.
‘Criminal,’ Larry repeats, amused.
‘What exactly is it that you do, Larry?’ Graham says.
‘Research,’ Larry replies, shortly.
‘On what?’
‘Collation of pre-existing data.’
‘Into –?’ Graham says. He enjoys making Larry squirm. What’s the big mystery? And where does he get off, looking at Cassie like that? Prat.
‘Graham,’ Cassie says, giving him a look.
‘Good and lean,’ Fred smacks his lips.
‘There’s plenty more,’ Larry says, ‘do eat your fill.’
‘What do you do then, Graham?’ Larry says. ‘I take it you haven’t been artistically productive lately.’
‘I’m starting a compost heap,’ Cassie says.
Fred almost chokes on his food.
‘So put all your fruit peels and tea leaves in the bucket by the sink.’
‘I can get you a sack of compost, love.’
‘No,’ Cassie says. She leans towards Fred and begins to explain.
The meat in his mouth, the smell of Mara by his side, remind Graham of something. He strains his mind at the tease of it and remembers the old woman with the parrot again: how once he’d had to stay with her alone, can’t remember why, Mum in hospital maybe. She’d called him into her bed in the mornings, for a cuddle. She’d had no children of her own, she’d told him, never even married, but she did like to cuddle a boy, she’d said, and he had submitted, face against the scratchy lace of her nightie, holding his breath against the smell of her. Once she’d said, ‘Shut your eyes and stick your pinkies in your ears,’ but he’d watched her squat over her chamber pot, her nightdress spread, and heard, despite his fingers, the slow widdly sound, watched how she patted herself dry with her hem before climbing back into bed.
And in her cold kitchen the meat she cooked for the cats. That’s it. Something rises in his throat, preventing him from swallowing. She didn’t keep a cat because of the parrot but all the strays in the neighbourhood would come every afternoon to her door. Her friend the butcher gave her unsold meat to feed them with and afternoons were the smell of it boiling, the grey liquor she poured down the sink, the knobbles of chewed gristle and yellowish beads of bone the cats left in the yard.
He swigs his wine, empties his glass, the thick purple taste of it washing away the taste of the meat. He hasn’t even thought about her for years. And now, he almost misses her. Although she must, surely, be dead? And he never knew. Can’t even remember her name. Or who she was. He’s hardly given his parents a thought for that matter. Never felt the lack. Though it is a lack. Only from this distance can he feel it.
Beside him, Mara chews the meat, he can hear it mashing and catching between her teeth. He focuses his ears away, outward to the noises of the night, scuffles and cries, the generator. Mara’s arm brushes his. Through his sleeve he can feel the cool of her solid flesh. The skin at the tops of her big sheet-flattened breasts is brown, almost sheeny, the line between them fine and black like a brushstroke. He looks away quick. Under the veranda he sees a movement, catches a gleaming eye. Only the lizard thing, the goanna, squatting by the veranda steps.
‘I’m whacked,’ Cassie says. ‘I’ll have a cup of tea and go to bed if nobody minds. Anyone else?’
Fred startles everyone with his laugh. ‘Tea! Bloody sheilas!’ He knocks back his beer and cracks open another bottle.
‘Gray?’
‘No, ta.’
Cassie carries her plate inside. To chuck her meat away, he guesses, enviously. He’s got to a thick bit that may not be cooked right through.
‘I’m going in too, Larry,’ says Mara.
‘I’ll get you your pills,’ Larry says.
‘Don’t hurry,’ Mara hauls herself up. ‘I’ll go and talk to Cassie in the kitchen.’
‘No,’ Larry says. ‘You’re tired. You should go to bed.’
Mara pauses, opens her mouth, then shrugs. Feeling Graham’s eyes on him, Larry turns. ‘She mustn’t get overtired,’ he explains, ‘it exacerbates her condition.’
‘Hey,’ Graham says, a surge of energy, impatience. He puts his plate down. With any luck the dog’ll eat his meat. ‘Before you go, Mara, I’ve got a trick, wait –’
He goes to fetch the ladder.
‘Shine the torch, Cass.’ He points to Fred’s big tungsten torch sitting on the veranda rail.
‘Why? What are you doing?’ Cassie says, but she switches it on. It dazzles him a moment.
He holds his finger up, ‘Silence please, ladies and gentlemen,’ The ladder rises above him to the stars. He climbs one rung, the next and the next, hearing Mara gasp, smiling as he steps up again, swaying, swaying, he sees the long swaying shadow, maybe too much wine, his foot slips and he has to jump down, just manages to catch the ladder before it crashes on to the barbecue.
Larry gives a slow handclap. ‘I’d say, stick with th
e day job if –’
‘Try again,’ Mara says.
But Cassie is shaking her head at him. She switches off the torch. The energy has gone. Prick. ‘Nah, need more practice.’ He puts the ladder back, and standing in the dark, looking out into the pitchy nothingness, feels like he could cry.
Cassie scrubs her teeth, spitting the froth into the sink. There are still stringy threads of meat between her teeth. Doesn’t really like eating meat but at least kangaroo is free-range, about as free-range as you can get. Can’t find the floss. Too tired to care. Too tired to care that her skin is clogged with suncream and sweat. Too tired to care about anything but getting her head down. Behind the bedroom door, she lets herself go in a voluptuous yawn and stretch. The candle burns low. She lights another. The light wavery and soothing, kinder to her tired and prickly eyes than electric would have been. She sheds her clothes and staggers into bed, the creak of it carrying her almost immediately into a deep and fur-lined sleep through which she doesn’t hear Graham come to bed.
The first she knows is a hard kiss on her mouth, so lacking in tenderness, so unlike him, that for a moment she thinks it must be somebody else. But it is his face, the chin bristly, the breath hot with wine and meat.
‘Hey,’ she grumbles, ‘I’m asleep.’
But he doesn’t stop kissing and in the candlelight his eyes look blind. He fumbles at her breasts, jams a knee between her legs, forcing them apart.
‘Hey?’ she says and tries to pull away but finds herself unwillingly turned on. He’s never like this, it’s weirdly exciting. She puts up a mild struggle but he forces himself inside her, sore and tight. He’s hardly in before he finishes, groans and rolls off. And that, it seems, is that.
She lies staring at the ceiling, waiting for him to speak, but he says nothing.
‘How was it for you?’ she says after a minute.
He mumbles something. Maybe sorry? She gets up, the insides of her thighs warm and tacky.
‘You bastard,’ she says half-heartedly. She pulls on her dressing gown and goes outside to wash. The sky is sequinned above her, preposterously bright. She stares upwards, all those wonky stars and the cloudy swathe of the Milky Way. When she gets back in he’s asleep, lashes casting angelic shadows on his cheeks in the candlelight. She stares at him. Did that really happen? Asleep and breathing evenly, like a child. She thinks to kick him awake, turn him out of bed, make him sleep in his bloody studio.
But it is Graham. And she is tired. And doesn’t want to be alone. She puffs out the candle, climbs back beside him, rolling unwillingly close against his hot skin. The starlight prickles through the thin curtains. Between her teeth the threads of meat begin to taste of rot.
Dear Mum and Dad,
You’ll be surprised to hear from me. I am surprised to be writing to you. I’m in Western Australia with my girlfriend on a kind of disused sheep station. I’ve come here to paint. I
Twelve
Alone in the kitchen, Cassie slices onions and weeps. Weeping because this morning she broke her mirror. Just knocked it flying. She picked it up but the glass was cracked, still in place but cracked into maybe twenty pieces, curved and geometric shards that reflected her face in bits like something by Picasso. She can get new glass, of course, when she gets home, but it won’t be the same glass that reflected her grandma. Cassie remembers Grandma holding it up so that she could check the back of her hair, in her dressing-table mirror. New glass will not be the same. She didn’t cry when she smashed it. Maybe the sting of the onions has set her off.
And maybe it is tiredness too. Couldn’t sleep last night. Graham’s peaceful sleeping breath. She’d lit the candle and watched his cheeks ballooning with air and then his lips opening with a soft puck on every exhalation. She’d tried to think about the garden. If they could start a pond and have frogs then the frogs would eat the bugs. She’d wondered if there were any indigenous frogs in this dry place, must ask Larry. She tips the onion skins into the new compost bucket (how will she ever stop it swarming with flies?), pours oil into a pan, slides it on to the hot plate.
She wipes her eyes and turns at the sound of the door opening, hoping it is Graham – he was up and out early this morning so there has been no chance to talk. And he never gets up before her. Up and out early to make damn sure there was no chance to talk. At least he can’t escape for long. Not here.
But it’s not Graham, it’s Mara, stark naked except for a pair of men’s boots, laces trailing.
‘What’s up?’ Mara says.
‘Nothing.’ Cassie wipes the back of her hand across her face, smearing tears with salt sweat. She half smiles, wondering if Mara is aware of her nakedness. She seems completely unabashed. Cassie doesn’t know where to look.
‘What are you making?’ Mara asks.
‘I normally start frying onions then I decide.’
‘Use up the poor kangaroo?’
‘Roo Stew?’ Cassie wrinkles her nose. A speciality in Cassie’s Outback Kitchen?
‘Fred adores stews.’ Mara pulls up a stool and sits down, her heavy breasts resting on the table like a couple of seal pups. It’s hard not to stare. The breasts are fine, at least supported by the table like that, the skin smooth and plump, years younger than that on her neck and face.
‘Larry says you haven’t been well –’
‘Not well! I am a danger to man and beast! What has he said? Larry?’ Mara grabs Cassie’s hand and pulls her near. ‘What has he said about me?’
‘Nothing, he only says –’ but Cassie’s mind has gone blank. She’s distracted by Mara’s nipples gazing at her like calm brown eyes. The hand squeezes. She can’t remember quite what Larry said or implied. ‘Something like you needed peace and quiet – that you are –’ The word ‘delicate’ comes to mind but that is the last word for this broad, brown woman in boots. ‘That you like your own space,’ she tries and Mara releases her hand.
‘My own space. Well, that’s right.’
‘He’s obviously devoted to you.’
‘We are a devoted couple,’ Mara says. But the way she says it – Cassie frowns. ‘I’m not stupid you know,’ Mara continues, fiercely.
‘I can see you’re not. Larry says you’re brilliant,’ she improvises.
‘He says that?’ Mara’s face opens with pleasure. ‘Brilliant people – they must be sensitive. The world does hurt so.’
Cassie picks at a speck of something on the table. The world?
Mara gives a sudden cavernous yawn, stretching her arms up so that her breasts lift, so that Cassie glimpses the wet red at the back of her throat. She turns away and slides the onion slices into the pan of swimmy golden oil. The sizzle is immediate, electric, sweet.
‘Fred now,’ Mara says. ‘What do you make of Fred?’
‘Seems nice enough.’
Cassie gets the remains of the meat out of the refrigerator. She puts it on a wooden board and saws through its sinews with a knife. Blood oozes into the grooves on the wooden board. She holds her breath against the smell and the memory of the thick clump against the bottom of the car as they’d hit a carcass in the road on the way.
‘Oh, Fred.’ Mara smiles and shakes her head. ‘Care for an anchovy?’ She goes into the larder. The shape of the chair seat is printed on her wide and dimpled bottom. Her hair is in a thick plait down her back, the tail of it reaching into the groove between her buttocks.
‘Not for me.’ Cassie hacks the meat into rough chunks, shoves it into the pan and rinses the wooden board and knife under the tap quickly to rid them of the blood. The frying pan makes a deeper sound, the blood instantly killed, turning to sticky brown.
‘I adore anchovies,’ Mara says. ‘But I can’t open the flipping tin.’
Cassie takes it and unpeels the top with its fiddly key. Mara sticks her fingers in and lifts out a couple of bristly fillets. Dripping oil, she puts her head back, opens her mouth and pops them in. Cassie smiles, thinking seals again. Mara’s eyes close as she relishes them.
‘Anything salty,’ she says, ‘but anchovies especially. Anchovy paste now. That on toast.’ She sighs.
‘Never tried it,’ Cassie says. ‘Have we got some?’ A spoonful of anchovy paste adds an intriguing dash of flavour. A drop of fish-flecked oil slithers into the gully between Mara’s breasts.
‘Yes. Larry loves Gentleman’s Relish. Peperium. What a word.’
Cassie hears a noise outside – maybe Graham. She starts: what if he walks in with Mara stark – but it is only the dog nosing his way round the flyscreen.
‘Yella,’ Mara says and the dog jams its nose into her crutch. Cassie looks away. Graham’s bound to come in, sooner or later.
‘Mara,’ she says, waving her hand vaguely, ‘you are –’
‘What? Oh, you mean me. Get off.’ She pushes the dog away and he humphs and curls up under the table. ‘Don’t believe in clothes,’ Mara says. That’s why we live here, partly. Heard of naturism? Didn’t go down well in Lewes – but here –’
‘Naturism? Oh. But Larry –’
Mara holds her belly and bends over in a fit of mirth. ‘It’s not Larry’s … cup of tea.’ She straightens up. ‘Without his clothes he would be … insignificant and we can’t have that!’ Her eyes sparkle with mischief. ‘And he makes me cover up in company. But you’re not company any more, are you? You’re part of it and he pays you.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Worrying about your man?’ Mara laughs and sucks a finger.
‘Might make him uneasy though, don’t you think?’
‘Does it make you uneasy?’
‘To tell the truth – well, a bit. We’re just not used –’
‘But you’ll soon get used. You could take yours off too.’
Cassie hesitates, then giggles, imagining Graham’s face if he was to walk in on the two of them naked in the haze of fried onions.
‘The others, they never got used –’
‘The others?’
‘You look like her.’
‘Who?’
As Far as You Can Go Page 9
