‘Lucy. Anyway, Larry’s not here. Just me. It’s only me – and Graham – and he’s seen you, hasn’t he? He knows you, inside out.’
‘Lucy?’
But Mara shakes her head.
Cassie moves the pan away from the heat, the meat is cooking too fast. It will be tough as Mara’s old boots. Probably should have marinaded it. ‘Anyway, where is Larry? Do you think he’d mind if I opened some wine, for the stew?’
‘Doubt it. He went off with Fred. Didn’t he say? See, now you’re here, he’s got the freedom. To come and go.’
‘But where?’ Cassie stares at her. ‘I’m cooking all this stew.’
Mara shrugs. ‘I could eat a horse,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’ll have an egg to be going on with.’
Graham’s head is thick, brains curdled with sun and dust. The scale is impossible. The light makes no shadows and even where there is shadow there is no moulding. It is all too big. He is helpless in it. The ridges of hills they flew over he understands now as like the ripples of sand left on a beach after a choppy tide – but immense, gargantuan. He stands insect-like, a speck under the steady pulse of the sun, lost in the vast spaces between the dry ripples. There is no clear place to start.
He’ll head back instead. Face the music. In the early morning, feeling ridiculous, grinning to himself at the absurdity, he had left a trail of objects as he walked out – to guide himself back. But it proves not to be absurd because he sets off back in the wrong direction. There’s something that confuses him every time. Maybe the sun’s in the wrong place? The other side of the sky? You might think you don’t notice where the sun is but if it’s on the wrong side, in the wrong hemisphere, it disturbs something in the brain. You are disorientated on some level you didn’t know you had.
He walks back, the way that feels the wrong way and finds the first object: a matchbox. He heads off now with confidence, picking up a pencil, a book, toothpaste (that has split its minty chalk into the red dust), and a couple of beer bottles, till he begins to recognise the lie of the land, that stand of gums then the eye-stinging glint of sun on a tin roof. His mouth is dry, head wet under his hat. A crow mocks him with its Siamese cat’s cry, hopping and dragging its tail feathers, flapping heavily upwards and landing in the dust beside him as he follows his trail. The bird with its dirty carrion beak and its knowing eye makes him feel sick or maybe it is just the sun.
He’s hung over. He wants Cassie, longs with sudden fierceness for her northern arms around him, for the something cool that she retains. But she’ll be mad still about last night. It isn’t him at all, to act like that. And then to fall straight asleep! He simply, momentarily, wasn’t himself. Almost literally. Yet he can imagine what she’d say if offered that as an excuse.
He smells cooking from miles away, approaches, hears women’s voices in the kitchen. Something comforting about that. Something ordinary. He pauses outside, takes off his sweaty hat. Inside, it takes a moment for his eyes to focus on Mara’s skin. Broad back, swell of hips, sturdy legs in boots. Cassie’s eyes meet his over Mara’s shoulder.
‘Something smells good,’ he says, voice coming out a bit high.
‘It’s me,’ Mara says, turning, massive tits shoogling about with laughter.
‘Roo stew,’ Cassie says.
He goes to the fridge, opens the door and stands with his front in the cold waft of stale air. ‘Beer?’ he offers.
‘Let’s all have a beer,’ Mara suggests.
‘Should you?’ Cassie says.
‘Yes.’
He sits down, stares at the mess on the table, eggshells, crusts, a sticky anchovy tin with, of course, a fly dragging its legs in the pooled oil. Big nipples, tiny black hairs like spiders’ legs –
He opens three bottles and presses the chilled glass of one against his cheek, gulps it down, the beer so cold and prickly it almost hurts. Mara passes him, her breasts swaying inches from his face and sits down. Her skin is every shade of caramel brown. Cassie is watching him so he can’t look. Can’t think of a thing to say. The ceiling fan turns above, stirring the hot shimmery smell of cooking. He feels that he might choke.
‘Where is it?’ Mara asks.
‘Sorry?’
‘What you’ve done.’
‘Not today. You know how it is.’
Mara laughs again, a cascading jiggle of flesh. ‘You’re embarrassed. By me. It will rub off.’
Graham stands up. He forces himself to look squarely at Mara before he leaves the room. The lines of her. To look at her as a thing, an object in space. Taking in all of her he can see at the table, the overlap of flesh at the seat of the chair, the brown shin with its straight black hairs disappearing into a flap of boot, the shoelace coiled like a query on the floor. He looks up at the large breasts, the kind of breasts you could cast yourself upon and weep. Cassie’s eyes are on him, watching him look. He can’t look at her.
He goes out. The cold bottle already heating in his hand. He stumbles over hens round to the shearers’ shed, runs the tap, sloshes his face with tepid water. He takes off his shirt and splashes his chest and neck. He picks up the soap and tries to make a lather with the briny water, not much of a lather but still it smells childishly of coal tar.
In the hot room, he pulls off his shorts and flops face down on to the bed, grinding his face and hips against the scratchy cotton of the patchwork quilt. Last night rises in him again like a dream. And a jumble of images – dust and meat and naked skin. He groans.
Cassie opens a tin of chickpeas, another of tomatoes and adds them to the pan. She crumbles a stock cube and throws in a handful of herbs, her concentration shot, the way Mara is watching her. Makes her clumsy.
‘You cook with – what’s it? Pizzazz,’ Mara says.
‘Pizzazz! This kind of thing, it’s you know –’
‘No?’
‘Never the same thing twice. Hey, Mara, it’s nice to have someone to talk to. A woman.’
‘Shouldn’t really.’ Mara puts her head on her arms. Her long plait knobbles like a second spine down the centre of her back.
‘Shouldn’t what?’
‘I’m sleepy.’
‘Why not go and lie down?’ Cassie gives the pot a final stir and puts a lid on it. ‘I’ll clear up then I might take a break.’
‘OK.’ Mara’s voice comes muffled by the flesh of her arms.
‘Will you be all right? When will Larry be back?’
‘Maybe tonight, maybe not.’
‘All right, well, this’ll keep. Might taste better tomorrow. Mature.’
‘He was embarrassed,’ Mara says, sitting up suddenly, her face red and damp.
‘Well, maybe a teeny bit.’
‘I call it naturism but really it’s – I can’t bear a thing about me tight, especially about my waist. It chokes me.’ Mara’s voice rises to a wail. ‘And the choosing. One day I woke and knew I couldn’t dress or else. Couldn’t choose. I can’t tell you what the feeling’s like – like graspers.’ Her fists open and close, a look of panic on her face.
‘It’s OK,’ Cassie says. ‘Calm down.’ She looks at the door, wondering about Mara’s medication, if she should be taking something right now. Larry should not have gone off like that without a word.
‘If Larry hadn’t been there. It is why – why everything here – what I did –’
‘Yes?’ Cassie bites a finger. What to do?
‘And here I am free of waistbands and obeying. Free to paint. To not.’
‘I see.’
‘And Larry he is a saint although … he is a saint, getting me the drugs I need and deciding everything for me so all I need to do is be. All I need now –’ Mara loosens her fists and lays her hands on the table, palms up, the skin fretted with nail marks.
‘What?’
Mara shakes her head.
‘Anyway, I think I understand,’ Cassie says.
Mara searches her face for a moment. ‘Yes? I think I must go and lie down.’
Cassie breathes
out. ‘Yes, yes, that would be best.’
Once Mara’s gone she leaves the clearing-up, hurries straight round to find Graham. He’s flopped face down in the middle of the bed, wearing only his boxer shorts.
‘Hey.’ She perches on the bed’s edge and takes off her sandals; starts to pull her T-shirt off, changes her mind and smoothes it down again.
Graham turns over. His hair is stuck in wet strands to his forehead. She hesitates and then lies down beside him. ‘Move over,’ she says. He tries to inch across the hollow mattress, but their bodies tip inwards. His arm comes up, pauses, comes round her shoulders. She sighs and lifts her head to let it.
‘So?’ she says. His arm is hot and rubbery under her neck.
He puffs a stream of slightly sour breath. ‘Sorry, OK? Don’t know what got into me. Maybe a bit pissed.’
‘You only had to ask –
‘Just came over me,’ he says, ‘like a huge urge.’
She giggles warily.
‘Won’t happen again.’
They lie for a moment in the cube of sweltering air; relax against each other as the tension leaks away.
‘I love you, anyway,’ she says.
‘Me too.’
She turns and kisses the side of his face. ‘What about Mara, then?’ she says after a moment, lifting herself up on her elbow to see his face. ‘You got quite an eyeful there.’
‘Nowhere else to look, was there?’
‘S’pose not. Did it turn you on?’ The question flips out of her mouth before she can stop it.
He breathes in, holds it, replies on his out breath. ‘Just taken aback.’
‘Taken aback! Yeah, me too.’
‘What about Larry then?’ Graham says, narrowing his eyes.
She wets her finger and smoothes down his eyebrows, which are bristly with dust. ‘What about Larry?’
‘Fancy him, do you?’
‘Graham!’ Surely he can’t think that? She stares at him to see if he’s joking but his eyes are shut. She lies down and snuffles up the smell of him: sweat, soap, his own peppery man smell. ‘She normally does go naked, she was saying to me. Clothes give her a sort of claustrophobia. Sounds like she has had some kind of breakdown. Larry made her wear the sheet just till we got settled in.’
‘We’ll have to get used to it then,’ he murmurs.
‘She got a bit – worked up. She’s quite disturbed. We need to know what to do if – if she goes off her rocker or anything. Hey, did Larry tell you he was going away?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Not very good, is it? Just pissing off like that without a word.’
‘No.’
‘What shall we do?’
Graham turns on to his side so they’re facing. His long green eyes smile into hers. ‘Hmmm?’ She catches her breath. He runs a hands down from her shoulder, skimming the side of her breast and brings it to rest on her hip. The tip of his tongue rests on the centre of his lower lip, as he concentrates on her in the way that makes her melt.
‘Again?’ she says, her voice gone husky, her belly dissolving to syrupy gold.
Thirteen
He wakes to the sensation of her hand stroking softly from his breast bone to his belly, ticklish. He squirms, opens his eyes. His limbs feel like sandbags. He could easily sleep again. He shuts his eyes against her scrutiny.
‘Just smoothing down your hairs.’ He feels her breath on his chest as she leans close. ‘Oh look, you’ve got a white one.’
His heart goes still under her fingertip.
‘I’ll get some tea, shall I?’ she says. ‘Or shall we get up?’
He feels her move away, the bed shift as she leaves it.
‘Won’t be long.’ She pulls a dress over her head, sticks her feet into her sandals and goes out. He listens to the sounds: some cicada thing, birds, a gurgle in his guts. He sits up and looks down at the wings of hair on his chest, and there is one white hair amongst the black ones. Not only that, he sees with horror a kind of softening around his belly. Could be the gut of an older guy. A middle-aged gut. His heart beats dully in his ears. He takes the white hair between his finger and thumb, pinches it between his nails and tugs it out. Sharp nip that brings a sting of tears to his eyes. You settle down, you get old, you die. He holds up the hair. It glistens, a sinuous white pointer to somewhere he doesn’t want to go.
He gets up, pulls on his jeans, a vest. Leans forward to see himself in Cassie’s cracked mirror. Separate scraps of face. Lines round the eyes; white hairs along the hairline and when he bares his teeth they look yellowish and uneven. He goes out to the dunny to have a crap. Sitting in his own smell with the rumble of a million flies beneath him, he feels a surge of panic. There is no way out of it. Either you die young or you grow old and die and he’s already too old to die tragically young.
He goes out. Must do something, it’s rushing past like a film, he’s here now, what is he doing here? This is his life. He reaches over and puts his hands in the dirt, kicks up, falls down, kicks up again and again until he’s balanced on his hands, wrists straining, arms trembling and he takes a step.
Cassie comes round the corner: teapot, biscuits, mugs on a tray. She stops and blinks. She’d thought he was going back to sleep and here he is walking on his hands, neck bulging with the effort, hair trailing in the dust. ‘Hey!’ she says. She feels like that woman from the nursery rhyme, what is it? Old Mother Hubbard. She went to the baker’s to get him some bread, when she got back he was stood on his head.
He flips his feet back to the ground, stands up, red-faced.
‘Coming back in for tea?’
He hesitates, looks past her as if there’s somewhere else he’d rather go, then shrugs. ‘OK.’
They go in. It’s so hot. She slips off her dress, sits cross-legged on the bed, naked, pouring tea. He stands by the door as if ready to bolt.
‘What’s up with you?’
He comes over to the bed and sits down. Reaches for a half-smoked roll-up and lights it.
‘If we have a baby together,’ she says, ‘big if, I know, you’ll give up, won’t you?’
‘What?’ he says, drawing the fag away from his lips and squinting at it.
‘Smoking.’
‘Give up smoking?’
‘What was all that about outside?’
He shrugs. ‘An impulse.’
‘You should have been in a circus, you.’ She smiles. ‘Have your tea. At least not smoke in the house, then, not around the baby.’
He puts his head back and lips a smoke ring and then another. She watches them rise, swell and disperse. Though the smoke is still there in the air. She’s surprised he doesn’t set the alarm off. A spasm of irritation tinges the warmth she was feeling.
‘You never answered me,’ she says.
‘It’s hypothetical.’
‘But that’s what this is about.’ He stares into his tea, picks something out of it, a little fleck or a fly. There’s red dust in his hair, getting on the sheet. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mean that. I meant what we were talking about before.’
He looks at her, a skin of something hazing his eyes. His pupils are huge. Even his long curving lashes have dust on their tips. ‘Why do you want to know? You’ll only get upset.’
‘So we can,’ something like fear slides in her stomach, ‘so we can start with a clean slate.’ It sounds pathetic, even to her. Why does she want to know? He’s right. What does it matter?
‘This isn’t going to work,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘I shouldn’t have come.’
She feels winded. She says nothing. The impulse to cry drags her mouth down at the corners so she can’t sip her tea.
‘I mean, fuck it all!’ He gets up. ‘A year! A year of my life. Stuck here. I can’t waste a year.’
She manages to get her lips under control. He’s smoking angrily, shifting about, making the floor creak. ‘A year will go past anyway,’ she says, ‘whether you’re here or not.’
He frowns at her, then snorts so that smoke streams from his nostrils.
‘Anyway, it’s not a waste, is it? Not if you get painting again. Really, in a way,’ she treads carefully, ‘you could say the last few years have been wasted if you look at it like that. And –’ She holds out her hand to him and, after a beat, he takes it, ‘if we’re going to be together. I really do,’ she presses his fingers, her lips tremble, ‘love you.’
‘Yeah. Me too. Maybe I’ll go and paint then.’ He goes out quickly, leaving her wincing with a spasm of painful love. She looks down at the crumpled dusty sheet; a smear of ash; the place where tan turns to white high on her thighs. At least here he can’t run away.
Box 25
Keemarra Roadhouse
For Woolagong Station
16th November
Dear Patsy,
Feels like we’ve been here yonks already. Sometimes I wonder how we’ll stick it for a year. G and I getting on fine, mostly. But we are on top of each other a lot (ha ha). We are, literally. I have never felt so randy in my life. Must be the sun. I’ve stopped using my diaphragm – can’t wash it properly, don’t want to catch something amoebic – and Graham says condoms spoil it. (Did I say there’s no bathroom? Which is good of course, ecologically speaking, dunny outdoor, far less water wastage, but I must admit I’d love a proper shower and hairwash. My hair looks like shit – can’t shampoo it properly, it just goes all sticky with the salt. Goodness knows how Larry always looks so clean.)
So if I fall, I might end up a single mum. Don’t care. Anyway it’ll probably take months. Took you a few months didn’t it? I really really miss you. No one to talk to. We had a row this afternoon. He’s gone back to walking on his hands and stuff. Is that a good sign???? Another kid!!!! ??? There’s a man called Fred who’s nice, very Australian, kind of rough but normal if you know what I mean. Hope Katie likes this koala card. I’ll bring her a stuffed one (toy!) when we come back.
Love to her and Al, extra Munchies for Cat.
Miss you loads,
Cassie
xxxxxxxxxxxx
PS You’ll never guess, he accused me of fancying Larry! What a turn-up for the books! Do you think that’s a good sign? PPS I don’t of course, though I admit he has got a certain something … Maturity, I guess.
As Far as You Can Go Page 10
