‘Well, yes.’
‘Someone phoned him – an emergency, took him for the doctor, and he went to help and then, well, then he swapped places with his brother. His brother was buried as him.’
‘No! Did it work? What about his family?’
‘Dad dead, mum gaga. Kept away from family friends and so on. And they were peas in a pod.’ Mara hesitates. ‘Didn’t know him then. Wasn’t really wrong, was it?’
‘We-ll.’
‘He worked there for a while and he managed all right. I was a patient, that’s how I met him.’ She stops, a cloud darkening her face.
‘Yes,’ Cassie waits. ‘You lost a baby, didn’t you? Graham told me. I’m sorry.’
‘Larry says I mustn’t tell anyone ever, otherwise I’ll be put in prison, I’ll be locked away. Larry takes care of me. Have to do what he says. Or else.’
‘I –’ Cassie flounders, startled by the sudden change in Mara, her whole shape and voice have altered. Perhaps she really is mad. About to go berserk. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. Another pancake?’
But Mara keeps talking. Cassie slides the pan off the heat and sits down. ‘When the baby died I – went off my head type of thing – and Larry and me, well we – we had an affair – sort of – well, we got together. Started with him helping me and then one night – don’t remember this but he told me – I went mad, completely off my head and –’ she whispers, ‘killed my husband.’
‘You killed your husband? How?’ Cassie says. ‘Why?’
‘Don’t remember. He was ill anyway. Larry was treating him. But violence. I was off my head. Larry covered it up somehow. See, if he hadn’t brought me here and hidden me then, then I would be in prison or in some mad house. Mad and dangerous.’ She pauses. ‘Mad and dangerous. Don’t remember what I do. Sometimes don’t know what I do. Some things I do that I don’t want to do I do for Larry. Sorry. Sorry.’
What? Cassie can’t think of anything that Mara does. ‘But,’ she says, her mouth dry, ‘you don’t seem dangerous.’
Mara gets up and, involuntarily, Cassie flinches. Mara laughs. ‘No? Need a drink of water. Room for one more pancake.’
‘Sure, sit down.’ Cassie fills a glass for her and pushes the pan back on the heat.
Mara drinks. ‘Not dangerous now,’ she says. ‘Right now I feel fine. Sort of clear-headed. But shouldn’t have told you. Larry says, he says if I ever tell anyone I’ll be sorry.’
‘You’ve never told anyone?’
‘Fred knows everything. Fred’s my friend.’
‘Fred’s lovely,’ Cassie agrees.
‘Don’t tell anyone this,’ Mara leans towards her and whispers loudly, ‘but I love Fred and he loves me. If we could be together we would. One day …’ She sits back and smiles.
Cassie sits down. Too much to take in. She finds herself wavering, losing faith. Fantasy, like Larry said?
‘Do you want coffee now?’ she says.
‘Fred and me, we – we understand each other.’ Mara gets up suddenly, juddering the table. ‘Be careful, won’t you?’ she says.
‘Careful?’
‘You looked just like her when you came out of the bathroom. Made me start. Wait.’ She goes out. Chair marks printed on her buttocks. The screen clatters. Cassie’s heart skitters. A fly lands on the corner of her mouth and as she slaps it her fingernail snags her lip. She follows Mara out of the door and waits. Mara emerges from her shed with something in her hand, a bit of paper, no a snapshot. She comes up the steps. ‘See,’ she says.
‘Lucy?’ Lucy is blonde, medium build and height. Her hair hangs over her chest in two long plaits, raggy ribbons at the ends.
‘See what I mean?’
Cassie frowns. ‘A bit similar maybe, longer hair.’
Mara starts to speak, stops, lifts up her hand. There is the sound of a vehicle approaching. ‘Larry,’ she says, peering into the distance.
Cassie shades her eyes and squints. ‘But he said a few days,’ she says. ‘Could be the others coming back for some reason.’ Please, please let it be them. Not yet possible to tell what is inside the approaching cloud of dust.
‘Shouldn’t you maybe go and lie down?’ she says, ‘he might be –’ But Mara doesn’t move. Stands so close to Cassie that her breast presses coolly against her bare arm.
‘Why be careful?’ Cassie says. ‘What did you mean?’ She runs her fingers through her hair, nearly dry now, but getting sticky already with sweat and she never even brushed it smooth. A sickly weight settles in her stomach as she sees the glimpse of white that means it is Larry’s car.
‘Don’t ever say anything I told you,’ Mara whispers, urgently. ‘Promise.’
‘Course not.’
‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ she repeats. And shivers. ‘Really, maybe you should go and lie down.’
But there is no time for that.
Twenty-five
The car draws up. Larry gets out and slams the door. Yella goes out to greet him, wagging his half-mast tail. Larry greets her with a tight smile on his face. He looks flushed, even a little dusty. He will want a bath.
‘Mara awake!’ he says. ‘I’m surprised. Are you all right?’ He looks darkly at Cassie. ‘There are some things in the car, could you possibly?’
‘Oh no!’ Smelling burning she darts back into the kitchen and pulls the pan off the heat; the pancake is black, the kitchen hazed with smoke and stink. She avoids Larry’s eyes as she goes out again. The stupid hens scutter squawkily up to her, expecting food again. Never thought she’d be the sort of person to want to kick a hen. On the floor inside the car is an eskie and some carrier bags of food. The smell of bruised apples. She loops a carrier over each wrist and holds the eskie in front of her. When she gets back, the kitchen is empty but for the smoke. She begins to unpack food into the fridge. Butter, milk, bacon, mince. No sign of any post. When she turns her head, Larry’s there.
‘Where’s Mara?’
‘Back in her room.’
‘But she was –’ Fine, she wants to say, absolutely fine.
‘How little you understand,’ Larry says. He shakes his head at her. ‘Now, more to the point, where are the others?’ He waits, gives a little bark of a laugh. ‘Surely not abandoned you?
‘No, no, they went to see some cave art. Just a little trip.’
He looks puzzled. ‘I don’t remember being consulted.’
‘Well –’
‘What the eye don’t see, eh?’
‘But everything’s fine. And they’ll be back tonight. Maybe late afternoon. I said I didn’t mind.’
‘Everything’s fine?’ Larry repeats. ‘Everything’s fine? This!’ He waves his hand through the haze of smoke. ‘And Mara overstimulated, on the verge, I would say, of a psychotic episode. Always heralded by lying. Has she been lying?’
‘No, I don’t think so. No. We were just – chatting.’
‘What were you chatting about?’
‘Not anything really. Food. Pancakes.’
Larry looks into her eyes for a moment and she flushes, looks down at her feet, her smoothly shaved legs.
‘And did Fred give Mara her medication before they set off on their jaunt?’
‘He told me exactly what to give her.’
‘What was it?’
‘Well –’ Cassie swallows. ‘See, I knocked the bottles over,’ she says. ‘He’d left them in the right order. It wasn’t his fault. A yellow, was it, a white, three blues –’
‘Show me.’
Her hands shake so that she can hardly unscrew the lid.
‘Fortunate I came back when I did,’ Larry says. ‘Most fortunate they didn’t trigger a psychosis. These are blue.’ For Larry, he has almost lost his cool, his breath coming hard behind his words. He tips some capsules into his palm, a different colour, yes, she can see now.
‘Sorry.’
Larry returns the pills, screws on the lid. ‘Not your fault,�
� he says. ‘Don’t get upset. But I will have a word with Fred.’ He puts a finger under her chin and tips her hot face up. She has no choice but to look into his eyes.
They are calm, almost kind again. ‘No harm done,’ he says. ‘No need for the long face, eh? I’m sorry, I got a bit agitated there. Tired, you know. Tell you what, I’ll go and freshen up, why not make another batch of pancakes, eh? With bacon. I’ve quite an appetite, suddenly.’
He wipes his finger on his sleeve, goes out of the door into the hall, the eskie under his arm. Drugs? Did she lock the cupboard again? Yes, she did, she did. She looks at the back door. If she could run. But it is OK. It will all be OK. How could he know she’s been in the bathroom? He can’t know.
She takes bacon out of its paper bag, peels the gummy strips apart. But the door opens again and he comes in. She lays the bacon slices in a pan. She squats down to check the fire in the belly of the stove. His eyes burn into her back.
‘Enjoy your bath?’ His voice is level, grating gently with disappointment. With her thumbnail she picks at a blister of pocked enamel on the stove door. ‘Straighten up, Cassandra, don’t be stupid. I never thought that you were stupid.’
‘All right,’ she says. She stands up, wobbles a bit. Hands greasy with bacon fat.
He has a hair stretched out between his fingers like an invisible garrotte. ‘Yours, I believe.’ He holds the hair up between a finger and thumb, squints at it, before letting it fall, rubbing his fingers fastidiously together as if to rid them of the sensation. ‘How did you get in?’
‘Keys.’ She fumbles them out of her pocket.
‘And where?’ Larry indicates the table with his head.
She puts them down. ‘There. Behind the cupboard under the sink.’
‘Behind the cupboard under the sink.’ He snorts. ‘And what on earth were you doing behind the cupboard under the sink?’
‘Cleaning,’ she says.
Larry laughs. He slaps his thigh. ‘Oh my my.’ He comes across and grips the tops of her arms. A shiver runs through her at the touch of his hands. He looks closely into her face. His breath smells of Cinnamint. The whites of his eyes are faintly pink.
‘I don’t like anyone in my bathroom.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And one thing I loathe above all other things is a snoop.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Perhaps you think it strange?’
‘No!’ she says, flushing. ‘It’s your house.’
‘Indeed.’ He runs his tongue over his front teeth and then he lets her go. ‘Let’s have breakfast then,’ he says.
Fred’s out of it, flat on his back on the bus-seat bed, snoring till the windows rattle. Ziggy’s moving about, what’s he doing? Something was said about food. How long ago was that? Graham looks at his watch again. Still not noon. Some grass. But still not noon?
‘Watch stopped?’ Ziggy looms above him. ‘Crackers?’ He brandishes a crackly orange pack of Jacob’s.
‘Yeah.’
‘Another Bloody Mary?’
‘Nah.’ He swallows, thick taste of tomato juice cloying on his tongue. He scrunches his eyes at his watch, trying to catch the second hand, a fly’s leg that should be jerking round. As he frowns at it, it does a feeble kick and trembles without moving forward. He giggles.
‘Magnetic field.’ Ziggy wrenches open a can of sardines. ‘It’s a bugger round here.’
‘So what time is it?’
Ziggy looks down at the mash of little fish. ‘Lunchtime, I’d say,’ and though it’s not funny they crack up. Graham clutches his stomach, the laughter jerking out of him till it almost hurts. Hasn’t laughed like this since Christ knows.
‘No, really,’ Ziggy says, when he can speak again, ‘I do rely on the old turn to tell me the time.’
Fred sits up, his bloodshot blue eyes blinking wildly till he works out where the hell he is, and then he grins.
‘Going for a slash,’ he says.
‘Don’t you want to eat, old chap?’ Ziggy says.
‘Give a bloke a minute, mate. Nature calls, old bean, tally-ho or whatever.’
Toodle-pip,’ Ziggy shouts after him. ‘Have I taught you nothing?’ Graham chokes on a laugh, coughs till his eyes stream. Ziggy clouts him between the shoulder blades and he eventually gets himself back under control. Takes a long swallow of lukewarm water. Pours himself a shot of vodka. Better without the tomato and stuff. Clean, carves a hot tube down his throat, so he can breathe.
‘You’re from England, right?’ he says when he can speak.
‘How on earth can you tell?’ Ziggy grins; it is so huge, that grin, you could get lost in it, the expanse of cracked lip-skin, the dance of teeth, the slice-of-melon size of it. ‘Mum an Abo – that’s where I get my looks.’ He frames his face with his hands and shouts a laugh. ‘Dad a travel writer. Yeah! Wrote a famous book about Aboriginal art. Stepping into Dreamtime. Read it? Course it’s been superseded now but it was a classic of its day. Fuck off, old chap.’ He bats his hand through the air at a fly crawling on the sardine tin. ‘Good for you, sardines, if you eat the bones. Calcium.’ He crunches. ‘They went to England, I was born, Mum couldn’t hack it – the weather, the prejudice, the philistine way of treating the land – came back, but Dad persuaded her to leave me there for my education. Winchester, the lot! But –’ He shrugs.
‘Man.’ Graham’s mouth is dry, nearly stuck together with cracker crumbs. He knocks back the vodka. ‘Do you see her much? Your mum.’
Ziggy shakes his head. ‘I’ve seen her. Didn’t – didn’t work out. She’s living on the Kallikurri reservation. New family. Very resentful, unfortunately. I think she’s decided to edit the episode that includes me out of her life.’ He brings the wide tip of his index finger down and squashes the fly dead against the oily tin, sucks the oil off his finger, wipes it on his vest. ‘But – well, that’s her prerogative, isn’t it? Don’t blame her actually.’
‘And you just live here alone, all the time, don’t you get – you know – lonely?’
Ziggy sticks his fingers in the jar of pickled cucumbers. The vinegary scent is sharp. Graham reaches his own fingers in. Fork, Graham, Cassie would say. First time he’s been out of her sight, practically, for a couple of months. He catches a cucumber and pulls it out, vinegar running down his wrist.
‘My choice. Tried marriage,’ Ziggy said. ‘Delia, English woman. Got a kid actually, up in Cairns.’ He lurches up and fumbles through a pile of papers till he finds a photo, a boy in shorts, pale-brown skin, knock-knees, yellow hair that looks like it’s been ironed flat against his head. ‘Billy. Nice lad. I catch up with him sometimes.’
Graham savours the vinegary nip, the dill-flavoured scrunch of the pickle.
‘Thing is,’ Ziggy says, ‘he can just about get away with being white, what with his mum. But if I turn up –’
‘Hey!’ Fred blunders back in. ‘Let’s have some tucker, mate. Or have you scoffed the lot?
The light has changed. First Graham thinks it’s his eyes, the dope and drink, the suffocation, the sweltering heat. He goes out to have a piss. Walks back to the water, darker now, rippling steadily against the bank. Notices another carving on a tree. A fish, its bones and innards showing, a maze-like map of a fish. The more you look, the more you see. The swans obviously fake swans, not fake, they’re art.
He frowns at the distinction, can’t think straight, pulls off his T-shirt, thinking to jump in again, wash the sweat away, clear his head. But the light changes as he hesitates on the edge; the sun casts a hard bright fan of beams and then slips down behind the quarry side, leaving him dazzled, leaving the car park in shade. He shivers. Too quiet. And why the ripples, when the air is still? A face painted on a rock catches his eye, or its eyes catch him and won’t let go. A primitive face, mouth open, eyes cornered in white against dark-blue stone. He puts his T-shirt on again and walks towards the bus, feeling the eyes on him, fake eyes that’s all, not eyes at all, daubs of pigment but still he’s glad to get
back in the bus.
‘Getting dark,’ he says.
‘Eh?’ Fred doesn’t turn his head. He’s looking at a magazine, where a blonde girl with her tongue stuck out spreads her legs, shaved cunt gleaming like a freshly opened whelk, a staple right there painful at her centre.
Graham winces and looks away. ‘Shouldn’t we be making a move?’
‘Can’t drive now,’ Fred says. ‘Oh dear, we’ll just have to stay.’ He flips the page, the same girl kneeling, arse in the air, from the back. Tattoo of a rose right in the middle of one buttock.
‘You’re most welcome,’ Ziggy says.
‘Open the Scotch?’ Fred says. ‘Let’s get settled in.’
‘In fact, I insist you stay. Where are my manners?’
‘Cassie’ll go ape-shit,’ Graham says.
‘Nah, she’ll be fine. Tonight, tomorrow, what’s the difference?’
‘You reckon?’
But there is no choice. Not up to driving himself even if he had a licence. Why didn’t he think? He can just hear Cassie saying that. You never think. Consequences, all that shit, responsibility. Fuck it. He reaches for the vodka bottle and tips his head back for the dregs.
Twenty-six
It’s dark. They won’t be back now. Cassie’s ears ache from straining all afternoon to hear, sure several times she could hear an engine approaching but no; nothing. Just aeroplanes dragging trails across the sky, birds cackling. No sign or sound from Mara. Larry in his study, working. Stiff and polite when their paths have crossed, though she’s avoided him as much as possible, spent much of the day in the garden.
Standing there under the shady nets she’d wished she’d made more of an effort. She turns the compost, amazed to find the centre of the heap already decomposing, dark and crumbly. The magic – eggshells, tea leaves, orange peels, turning into such lovely, sweet-smelling stuff – has happened ten times faster in this heat than at home. She hopes they’ll keep it up. Maybe she’ll pin some instructions up for whoever’s next. But apart from the compost heap she’s left nothing to show for herself. She feels a pang of guilt, thinking of Mara. But she can’t tell her. As if to try and make up for their imminent departure, she’s spent ages weeding, watering, tidying before picking the salad stuff for dinner. She’d thought they would all be there and made a huge pan of Bolognese, rich with her own sun-dried tomatoes, but now it looks like it’ll be just the two of them.
As Far as You Can Go Page 20
