As Far as You Can Go

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Twelve years.’

  ‘Twelve years.’

  ‘Said I’d never – never trust myself with another person.’ He makes a kind of smile come on to his face, hauling himself back into the daylight of the kitchen. ‘And I never have. Which is why I live on me tod. Haven’t had the heart for painting since.’

  Cassie takes a breath. She must say something, something is required but Larry comes into the kitchen then, rubbing his hands together. Fred lets go her hand.

  ‘Morning.’ Larry’s clean and sharp in a crisp white shirt, pleased with himself. There’s a tang of aftershave or cologne in the air. How does he keep himself so clean? And whatever he drinks he’s never hung over, not so it shows. The dog follows him in and lies under the table on the dirty floor. Cassie sees rice and dog hairs, a hair clip, all sorts. As if it hasn’t been swept for days. Which it surely has.

  Larry nods at the fretting kettle. ‘Coffee on the go? True confessions, eh?’

  Cassie gets up. ‘Shall I make one for Mara?’

  ‘She won’t wake this morning.’

  ‘She might. She might like a chat, I could take it over –’

  ‘She won’t.’ He switches his attention away. ‘You off this morning, Fred?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Fred says, ‘reckon so.’

  ‘How long will it take you?’ Cassie puts Fred’s coffee down beside him. She gathers up the orange peel and dumps it in the compost bucket. ‘I’m going to clear up today,’ she adds to Larry. ‘Sorry about the mess. I don’t know how –’

  ‘Not to worry.’

  ‘Couple of hours, maybe three,’ Fred says.

  ‘A long drive,’ Cassie says.

  ‘Long!’ Fred throws his head back and laughs, quite back to normal now. She wonders if maybe he’s a little mad. From his loss and from being, as he said, mainly on his tod. She wouldn’t blame him, ‘Couple of hours is nothing,’ he says. ‘Get the air-con on. Bit of music. Gives a bloke a chance to think.’

  ‘What’s it like, where you live?’

  Fred’s eyes chip across at Larry and away. ‘Nice town.’

  ‘We could visit sometime, maybe,’ says Cassie, thinking of her list.

  ‘Dying to escape, eh?’ Larry says.

  ‘No, just there’s some things I need. And I like looking round shops.’

  ‘Flaming sheilas!’

  ‘No,’ Cassie says, annoyed. ‘I want to go in a bookshop. I want a book about organic gardening in Western Australia.’

  Fred shakes his head, pulls a packet of papers from his shorts and rolls himself a fag in a curiously dextrous way that compensates for his missing thumb.

  ‘You can order anything you need,’ Larry says, ‘I told you. And it will be fetched. Anything you need.’

  Yes but I want to go myself.

  ‘We’ve got some cards –’

  ‘Put them in the box.’

  ‘Has there been any post yet? I’m sure my sister will have written.’

  Fred closes his eyes and leans back in his chair. ‘Nah, not yet but I’ll check when I get to Keemarra.’

  ‘I found some paint,’ she says, swallowing her disappointment. ‘White. Mind if I spruce up the kitchen a bit?’

  ‘Far from it.’ Larry looks around and then at her, more, into her. ‘You really are a useful soul, aren’t you?’ he says.

  Dear Jas,

  Can’t believe how far away this is. Amazing, like you said. A different light OK. How you doing? Getting bored, not enough pals, not enough doing. Life passing by. Could be on another planet. Miss you and everyone. Wish you woz here.

  Luv,

  Graham

  Sixteen

  Graham sucks his oily fingers, one by one. Tomatoes warm and oily. New bread. The four of them have eaten their way steadily though a loaf, dunking chunks into tomatoey oil, mopping it off their plates.

  ‘I will have a lesson today,’ Mara states, bringing down her water glass with a clack that breaks the spell of lunchtime dreaminess.

  ‘Yeah?’ Graham blinks at her.

  There is a pause.

  ‘That was, was it not, part of your rubric?’ Larry says.

  ‘Yeah, that’s cool.’ He smiles at Mara. Her chin is shiny with oil. ‘When?’

  Cassie looks at him quizzically.

  ‘Fantastic bread,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks.’ She picks a grain of salt off the table with her finger and licks it, smiling straight back into his eyes, dazzling.

  ‘What did it feel like, dancing with Mara?’ she’d asked and idiotically he said, ‘Well, she felt nice,’ out of awkwardness, obviously not the right thing to say. But what could he have said?

  ‘Her nakedness, it doesn’t mean anything,’ he’d tried, attempting to convince himself. ‘It’s just how she is. Think of her skin as animal skin.’ But with everyone else fully clothed it is disconcerting and impossible to get used to. Whatever he says or pretends, it gets to you, having a naked woman around the place, breasts, buttocks, hairy shadows however hard you try not to look. And he gets the – paranoid maybe – sense that Larry is enjoying his unease.

  ‘Gray!’ Cassie leans across the table, grinning at him, snapping her fingers.

  ‘So,’ Larry says. ‘I take it that’s all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Graham smiles, suddenly relieved. To concentrate on someone else for a change. Might be just what he needs to break this spell of doldrums. ‘Just say the word.’

  Graham raps at Mara’s door. Still can’t get over it – that she lives in a shed. The stories they’ll have to tell when they get back. He felt cheerful this morning, waking not to the knowledge that he should be painting but to the prospect of working with someone else. Perhaps it’ll even set him off again, who knows? And he’s intrigued to see what Mara can do. To get to know her.

  The door opens. Mara takes his hand and draws him in, the sunshine smothered by the swish of the thick door-curtain.

  ‘Ready?’ he says into the nearly dark. ‘I’ve put some paints, paper and stuff on the veranda – unless you’d prefer to be somewhere else?’

  ‘Here.’ Mara sounds surprised. ‘I’ve got paint here.’

  ‘But we can’t paint in here. Mara, you need light.’ The air is thick with joss-stick smoke, candle wax, the smell of her skin.

  ‘It’s more private,’ Mara says. She takes his hand. He’s glad that she’s at least wearing her dressing gown.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You can’t paint in the dark.’

  So hot in the room. It’s unbelievable.

  ‘No,’ she says. She lets go of his hand, goes behind him to the door, rustles the curtain. He thinks she’s about to open the door but she slides the bolt. ‘There. Locked.’

  ‘What’s that for?’ he says. ‘I could just unlock it.’ He slides his finger in the air.

  She laughs. ‘Not to keep you in, silly, to keep them out.’

  He looks round. His eyes are getting used to the gloom. Velvet everywhere, the red Turkish carpet on the walls. The cloth over the window is embossed with stripes and the sun swelters through it like the orange bars of an electric fire.

  ‘There’s no way we can work in here,’ he says, quelling a sort of claustrophobic panic that rises in his throat.

  ‘It is warm,’ she allows. ‘You could take your things off. Are you sweating? No, only pigs sweat. Or horses? Are you perspiring? Ladies only glow.’ She laughs and stretches open her arms – and the dressing gown. ‘I want you to paint me.’ With a flap of her arms, the dressing gown falls to the floor.

  ‘I don’t do portraits, look, Mara –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let’s talk about this outside.’

  ‘Look,’ she says, ‘look.’ She comes close to him. He has to force himself not to back away. She seems so much bigger in this enclosed space and all the light in the room is gathered on her skin. She lifts her breasts to him. ‘Look.’ He gets an urge to laugh, it’s so preposterous. She can’t kill him with her breasts.

&
nbsp; ‘Look,’ she insists. He has no choice but to look and sees then what she is showing him. On her breasts she’s painted something smudgy, green and white. ‘Lilies,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to paint on yourself. Can you do them right? And I can do you.’

  ‘What?’ A startled laugh catches in his throat. A bead of sweat trickles down his cheek. ‘Listen.’ He rakes in a deep breath. ‘I’m gonna – Seriously. I need out –’ The room swims, dots before his eyes.

  She steps back. ‘Go then. Get out.’ Angry but he can’t help it, he has to breathe.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says and struggles his way into the curtain, shoots open the bolt and steps out into the swingeing heat. He leans over, hands pressing his weight into his thighs until the faint-ness passes. Jesus. This place is lunatic.

  Balanced on a stepladder in the kitchen, Cassie rolls white paint on to the ceiling. ‘You’re not the only one who can paint round here,’ she says, her voice strained with reaching up.

  ‘Hey, Cass,’ Graham says. She finishes the paint on the roller and it really is brilliant white beside what was there before. She’s wearing a white shirt he’s never seen, a man’s white shirt and, although she must be wearing something underneath, you can’t tell, the way her thighs disappear under the cotton.

  ‘What’s up?’ She frowns, half laughing. ‘You should see your face!’

  ‘I want to go,’ he says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I mean, go. Leave. Now.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘This place is nuts. I’ve had it.’

  Larry comes into the kitchen, the screen snapping shut behind him. ‘You’ve upset Mara,’ he says. He looks furious.

  ‘Graham. What have you done?’ Cassie says.

  ‘Christ, man, she’s barking. Wanted me to paint her.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So?’ Cassie says. ‘What are you on about?’ She puts the roller in the paint tray and comes down the ladder. On her nose there’s a snowy freckle of paint overlapping her own freckles.

  ‘To paint her,’ Graham says.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Let’s have a drink.’ Larry says. ‘You seem shaken.’ He tries to put his hand on Graham’s sleeve but he flinches away. ‘Lemonade, Cassie?’

  She gets a jug out of the fridge while Larry puts three glasses on the table. Cassie made the lemonade, her grandmother’s recipe, she says. It’s cloudy and floating with bits of pip. Graham takes a sip and it puckers his mouth. ‘Sugar,’ he says, wincing. She must have got the recipe wrong. It almost hurts the way the saliva pumps inside his cheeks. He sucks them in and squints.

  ‘It’s not that bad!’ Cassie pushes him the sugar tin. ‘Now, what’s up with you?’ She stirs a spoonful into her own glass.

  ‘Possibly I should have explained a little more comprehensively,’ Larry says. He is so cool. You have to give him that. ‘You understand very well by now that Mara isn’t quite – which is why we live here.’

  ‘What’s wrong with painting her anyway?’ Cassie says.

  ‘Paint on her. Her skin.’

  ‘On her?’

  ‘I can’t see that that’s so terribly outrageous,’ Larry says. ‘What harm is there? Body decoration is an ancient form of art. Arguably the most ancient. Here, of all places, in this ancient land, is it not natural that an artist should develop such an interest? Wait.’

  He goes through the door into the house to fetch a book, puts it on the table in front of Graham.

  ‘Took a look.’

  He flips through the lavish coloured pages: paintings, piercings, tattooing from all the tribes of the world, close-ups of black skins smeared ochre and white, white skin intricately tattooed.

  ‘If I had anticipated such a hysterical reaction,’ Larry says, ‘I would, of course, have primed you first. Mara has, as you know, stopped painting, paper, canvas, I can’t prevent her wanting to destroy what she has painted and now she’s taken this sudden hankering for painting on skin and I really don’t see the harm. Perhaps it might lead her back to a more permanent form of art. Think of it as a kind of therapy if you wish. Art therapy. Cassie, your opinion?’

  She shrugs.

  ‘But she wanted me to paint her.’

  ‘Just to begin with.’

  ‘But – it felt, it seems, don’t you mind me touching, painting, your wife?’

  ‘Good gracious, what a small mind you must think I have!’

  ‘I don’t think Cassie’ll like it.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s that small-minded.’

  ‘It is a bit weird to me,’ Cassie says.

  ‘Seems fucking weird to me,’ Graham says.

  ‘Now, now.’ Larry allows a missed beat. ‘If you don’t want to help Mara, then don’t. No one forces anyone to do anything round here.’

  Graham stirs another spoonful of sugar into his glass. Doesn’t matter how much he puts in, it is still too sour. He gets his tobacco out, hands shaking a bit. He feels a complete fumbling prat as both of them watch him roll a smoke. ‘So it would be OK,’ he says, facing Larry out, ‘if I refused?’

  ‘It would be all right with me,’ Larry says, ‘though your refusal would disappoint poor Mara and would, if you think about it, rather make your appointment as,’ he clears his throat, ‘a sort of artist in residence seem rather, shall we say, redundant.’

  Graham puffs contemptuously. Cassie frowns at him, shakes her head. Larry stands up, puts his empty glass beside the sink. ‘It is entirely up to you. Now I, for one, have work to do.’ Abruptly, he leaves the room. Down the corridor they can hear him unlocking a door and pulling it shut behind him.

  ‘Graham,’ Cassie says, crossly.

  ‘Fucking great prat,’ Graham says. ‘I’ve had it.’

  ‘You can’t give up already! That’s pathetic.’ One strand of her hair is stiff and white. He looks down at her brown thighs under the hem of the white shirt. Feels a stirring in his groin, presses his fist against it.

  ‘Please,’ she says, ‘just go along with it. A bit longer. For me. Please.’

  He runs his fingers from his hairline down to the nape of his neck, smoothes his ponytail through his hand. ‘Christ,’ he says. He sips the lemonade and his mouth puckers again. ‘This is too sour.’

  ‘Particularly sour lemons.’

  ‘What?’

  She shakes her head. There is a long pause, as if she’s working herself up to speak. She takes his hand. ‘Gray,’ she runs her thumb up and down the bumps of his knucklebones, ‘you couldn’t … fancy Mara or anything, could you?’

  He snorts. ‘We come all this way and you still –’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’ She smiles, gappy white teeth, white freckles, white quiff of hair. ‘Look, why don’t you help me paint this kitchen, then? We could get it done today. Oh look!’ she points to the ceiling where a creature is flapping, one wing stuck to the paint. ‘Poor stupid thing. Can you get it?’ The sleeve falls back, light gleams on the blonde hairs on her arm.

  ‘You know something?’ he says. ‘You look sensational.’

  ‘This?’ Cassie tugs the rolled-up sleeve of the shirt. ‘Egyptian cotton, Larry’s. I said anything old but this is beautiful, don’t you think?’ She gives a twirl, the cotton lifting away from her legs.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he says. He climbs up the ladder to try and free the dying bug.

  Seventeen

  Cassie sits at the veranda table. She feels almost cool; a tall glass of lemonade in front of her. She opens her notebook. Ought to jot down some ideas for her new module. Outback Gardening. Though, she thinks, that might seem rather irrelevant back home. Would anyone sign up? And anyway, there’s nothing much to say. She hasn’t done anything. She frowns and chews the end of her pencil. What is up with her?

  Larry comes out. ‘Mind if I join you for a moment?’

  ‘Not at all.’ She’s glad to be distracted. Larry looks tired, drawn around the eyes. ‘Can I get you some lemonade? Cup of tea?’ she offers.

  He shake
s his head. ‘Kitchen looks splendid. Thank you. Above and beyond –’

  ‘No. I – we – enjoyed it.’

  She’s pleased with it, with herself. Pleased with the clean white, with the wet inky smell of emulsion paint. It doesn’t cover everything, but it nearly does, if you don’t look too close.

  He brushes the seat of a chair and sits down. ‘Hard at work?’

  ‘Well –’ She grimaces, shows him the empty notebook.

  ‘How’s the gardening? Enjoying yourself?’

  ‘Just keeping it going really, so far. I did ask Fred to bring me some seeds. Want to grow some scented things, alyssum and stuff. To attract bugs.’

  ‘Not enough bugs for you?’ He smiles.

  ‘Yeah! But nectar-eating insects – they’ll prey on the pests. I wonder how I could attract more lizards?’

  He regards her for a moment. ‘I do admire you,’ he says.

  ‘Admire me!’

  ‘Your – industriousness.’

  ‘But I haven’t been! Usually I’m –’

  ‘No, no. I like the way you get on with it. You cook wonderfully, inventively. You take things – how can I put it? – seriously.’

  ‘Well!’ She doesn’t know what to say. ‘I – I admire you,’ she says at last. ‘Being here with Mara and being, so –’ Patient she wants to say, patient with Graham. Though that might seem disloyal.

  ‘Being what?’ His eyes are warm, the lines around them crinkle gently.

  ‘Well, Graham can be a bit – a bit – difficult. About painting Mara –’

  ‘Hmmm.’ His chair creaks as he leans back. It’s late afternoon, the air humid. A crow lands on the veranda rail, hops heavily, launches itself off again on its shadowy wings. The light is deepening and in the distance there are clouds like bundles of dark cloth.

  ‘What were the last people like?’ Cassie asks.

  He folds his arms. His gold watch catches the light and winks at her. ‘The last people?’

  ‘Was she called Lucy?’

  The sides of his nose pinch in as he breathes. ‘They were very – nice. But they proved unsuitable. Not up to the job, shall we say. What do you know about them?’

  ‘Nothing much. Mara just mentioned Lucy in passing. That I looked like her, or something.’