She stands in the hall and breathes in the still musty air. The door to Larry’s study is shut. She is sick of this, doesn’t want to be in it a moment longer. But there is no way out. She wants her home so badly she can hardly breathe. Her kitchen, her garden, her cat, her bird table, her sister, her friends. She doesn’t care at this moment about anything, not what’s happened, not even Graham. Just wants to be home now. Somewhere normal now. For all this never to have happened. She closes her eyes and wills, prays for this place to disappear, prays for her own view: gingham curtains, holly bush, blue-tits singing, the hill of trees. Snow? But when she opens them, there, of course, is the the study door, the high, dim, airless hall.
She unlocks the bathroom door, stands in the white space, the mirror reflecting her messiness back, never even washed her face or combed her hair this morning. She holds her breath against the sickly smell of sandalwood. Her teeth are dirty. She runs her tongue round them, eyes Larry’s toothbrush, can’t use that. Could. A shivery laugh.
She pees, washes her hands, splashes her face with water and buries it in a deep towel. Looks at herself in the mirror. It all makes sense, of course. She watches the reflection of her face as she makes sense of it. She is mortified to think of the things Larry must have seen, the things he must have heard, the things they said, the lovemaking – that feeling she had of being watched – that night she got wet and stripped off in the kitchen. He was probably watching. That night. He must have planned it. He must have watched her strip off, dropped something in her wine, watched as if took effect and then –
But now he’s gone and it is over. And that is right. She won’t feel bad about it. She looks boldly into her own eyes and takes a breath. He is gone and it is right.
She goes back into the kitchen, sits down by Graham. Looks up at the ‘fire sensor’ on the ceiling. They wait in silence till Fred comes in leading a bleary Mara, hair bushy over her breasts.
She looks round at them all with startled eyes, then gives a little moan, sits down, rests her forehead on the table. Graham stands up, he stares at Mara, at Fred, at the pile of bloody shirts. He looks so pale, bruised hollows under his eyes. He looks as if he’s aged ten years. Cassie wants to get up and put her arms around him, but he goes out.
‘What shall I do?’ she asks Fred.
‘Dunno.’ Fred sits down heavily. ‘Cup of tea, Mara?’
‘A nice jam sandwich,’ Mara says, suddenly sitting up.
‘What?’
They all look at her. ‘A sandwich. With jam.’
‘OK.’ Nobody else moves so Cassie gets up, watches herself get out a loaf, butter, a jar of jam and then, seeing the dark, clotted colour of it, push it back. ‘No jam,’ she says, ‘honey?’ As she slices and butters, her mouth begins to water. The bread is crumbly and textured with sunflower seeds, the butter is cool. ‘I think I might,’ she says, amazed at the sudden healthy hunger that rises in her. ‘Anyone else?’ She slices all the bread and makes a stack of sandwiches, oozing with honey and they eat, stolidly, wordlessly, chewing their way through them as if it is some kind of labour.
Thirty-four
Fred gets up and stretches. The wads of khaki hair under his arms are sodden; his vest stained; he reeks of sweat. They all smell of staleness and fear, the flies snarl about in it, happy as – happy as – there will be flies on Larry now. Cassie bites her finger-ends, directs her mind away from him, from the flies, from everything, down to the spark inside her. The possible spark. Safe now. Home soon. Home. She forces her mind into order. Into what next.
Mara moans and puts her face on the table.
‘Does she need anything, do you think?’ Cassie asks, nodding at the pills.
‘Nah,’ Fred says. ‘Let’s see how she does without them.’
Mara sits up. ‘But Larry says I need my medication.’
‘We’ll see how you do,’ Fred says. ‘What about a bath, eh? In the proper bath.’
Mara smiles, cautiously at first but then it spreads. ‘I could, couldn’t I?’
Cassie gets up. ‘That would be good, if we could get clean, but –’ She can’t bear that soap, that sandalwood, the smell, even the thought of the smell. ‘I’ll get my own soap,’ she says.
She goes out. It’s dark. The moon hiding its face in a rag. She breathes the fresh air. It’s very quiet. She walks round to the shearers’ shed. Her legs don’t feel like her own. The shearers’ shed looks like a stage set, plonked there in the bush, moonlight flat on its roof. She goes to the sink. Two bars of soap: lily-of-the-valley and coal-tar; can’t decide. She stands for a long time, a bar in each hand. If she can’t decide between two bars of soap then how will she proceed? How will her life proceed? Coal-tar soap, what a strange idea. Whoever thought of making soap out of coal tar?
She looks at the door. Graham in there? Should go in and see how he is. She turns, suddenly fearful, to look back at the dark shape of the house. Where Larry is. She drops the lily-of-the-valley soap and goes to find Graham.
No candle. He’s invisible but she can smell the fear on him and the whisky. He should have a bath too. Then he’ll feel better. They must get clean. With the coal-tar soap. Once they’re clean then they can proceed.
‘Graham,’ she says into the dark; she steps cautiously across the floor, sits on the bed, feels him tip towards her. He doesn’t speak. She puts her hand out, touches something – his arm. She closes her fingers round it, warm, rubbery. She sits listening to the quiet, to his breath, to a faint creak from the pump.
‘Can we do it?’ she says, not entirely clear what she means. Can we keep our mouths shut. Our minds shut. She strokes her thumb along his arm, the soft hairs, her eyes becoming accustomed to the dark. She can see the dim shape of the white cardigan. This is something they can never tell another person. She can never even tell her sister. Is that possible? There’s never been anything in her life she hasn’t told her sister. Only Graham will know. She and Graham will be locked into this secret for the rest of their lives. Can they do that? ‘Can we do it, Graham?’ she says again.
He doesn’t answer, maybe he’s right, maybe now it’s best to stay apart, stay separate, keep the knowing in their eyes inside their own eyes, let it all die down and focus on – on what comes next. Anyway he’s probably too out of it to think: ill, knackered, drunk. He needs to sleep, like Larry said, sleep is nature’s healer. That was one true thing he said.
She squeezes Graham’s arm and gets up. There’s something she really has to know.
She goes out and hurries back through the darkness with the soap in her hand, keeping her eyes away from the back of the house. When she gets in it seems so strange – so oddly normal – the door open to the hall, the sounds of voices and water running in the bathroom. She goes to the open bathroom door. In the steam, Fred stands behind Mara, brushing her hair. They don’t see her at first. A lump rises in Cassie’s throat, the tender way he brushes right from the root down to the ends, smoothing it after each stroke with his wingless hand. The water tumbles silvery and plentiful into the bath. Fred turns.
‘I’ll leave you to it. Got to –’ he looks down, ‘sort some stuff out.’
‘After you,’ Cassie says to Mara. ‘Would you rather be alone?’
Mara shakes her head.
‘You stay with her,’ Fred says, ‘she’s had a shock.’
‘We all have.’ Cassie feels suddenly weak. She sits on the wide lip at the end of the bath, watches Fred pull Mara’s hair into a ponytail and twist it up so it won’t get wet. He does it so well, as if practised, but then – Cassie thinks of the wife, the two little daughters. ‘I’ll never trust myself with another person again,’ he said once, but he will trust himself with Mara, she can tell, the way he touches her, as if with a kind of relief.
Fred tests the water with his hand; turns the taps off and goes out. Mara steps into the bath and slides down, wide hips wedged against the sides, backside squeaking against the bottom. She shuts her eyes with the pleasure of it. Cassie
watches bubbles rise from her skin and fuzz the water. This may be the last time she has alone with Mara. And there are things she has to know. Focus. Mara seems blurred in the dim steaminess, her brown body gleaming, breasts lolling lazily down her sides.
‘I need to ask you something,’ Cassie says.
Mara’s eyes snap open like a doll’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Some of the things I’ve done – I don’t know – just know I’m sorry.’
Cassie frowns. What has Mara done? She does almost nothing.
‘Mara,’ her voice comes out more sharply than she intends, ‘I want to ask you something.’
‘What will I do now?’
‘Mara, please listen. Concentrate. I don’t know how to say this. You might hate me but I have to know. Do you think it possible – do you think Larry might have,’ she searches for another word but there really is only one word for it, ‘do you think he might have raped me when I was drunk or drugged or–’
Mara’s laugh is like the sudden shock of breaking glass. She sits up and the water surges up and splashes Cassie’s thigh.
‘What?’ Cassie says, rubbing the wet with her hand. ‘What’s funny?’
Mara settles down again. Sighs. ‘Course he would. He could never get it up type of thing with someone conscious.’
Cassie waves her hand as if to part the steam which seems to have invaded her head. If I am pregnant then, it could be Larry’s, she thinks. A simple plinkety plink of a thought that changes everything.
‘Oh.’
‘And he likes his pictures.’
Cassie squeezes her eyes to shut out the waxy warp of Mara’s wet body. It won’t be Larry’s. It is hundreds of times more likely to be Graham’s. But it could be. There will always be that tiny chink of doubt. Fred comes in and Mara’s face turns to him. Grey-faced, he goes to the basin and washes his hands, lets the water run over them for a while before he turns. ‘Come on love, get washed up, let Cassie have her turn.’
Mara smiles up at him. ‘Yes.’ But she doesn’t move.
He makes a fond, disgruntled sound in his throat, comes over and picks up Larry’s soap, rubs it between his hands, ready to wash her.
Graham wakes and for a moment has no idea where he is. Feels like his head has been scooped out, his limbs turned into sand. And then a bird screeches and he recognises the heat of the baking room, the sun straining through the curtains. He opens his eyes. Cassie not there. He elbows himself up to sitting, feels so crap he can’t believe it and then he remembers. He looks down at his bruised hand. Can hardly believe that it is true but it must be true.
They have killed Larry. Between them they killed him. Killed. His heart curls up inside him as if to hide its face. He lies down again, stunned, hardly even able to think until he’s so thirsty he has to get up.
The sun already sizzles the ground, the distance wavers. The chickens crowd up to him. Cassie’s not fed them. He finds her in the kitchen, on her hands and knees, emptying the fridge.
‘What?’ he says, looking at the jars and bottles, bowls half-full of stuff, old vegetables.
‘Thought I’d sort it before we go. Look.’ She waves some rubbery celery at him. ‘Can’t leave Fred and Mara to sort it.’
He swigs some water straight from the tap and sits down. ‘The chickens,’ he says.
‘In a mo.’
He watches her bottom in its faded cut-off jeans move back and forward as she reaches in to wipe out the fridge. The floor, he notices, has been washed, a tang of disinfectant in the air, the mop airing by the door, its crazy head stained pinkish. He looks away, gets up, puts on the kettle. Top of the stove scrubbed clean too. She must have been up for hours. Or maybe she never came to bed.
‘Where’s Fred?’ he says.
‘He’s gone –’ She hesitates, sits back on her heels, but doesn’t look at him. ‘He’s taken the – he’s taken Larry to that place.’
‘Wagamarra.’
She stands up and dumps a load of stuff into the compost bin. A cloud of flies rise and buzz. She goes out to do the chickens. He’s being useless and he knows it. He sits, hands limp, listening to the slight rattle of the heating kettle; watching the flies settle down in the bin.
‘Where’s Mara?’ he says when she comes back in.
‘In the bathroom I think.’
‘Cassie,’ he starts.
‘Right,’ she says, rubbing her hands on her thighs, ‘we haven’t got long. When he gets back we’re off. Airport. I reckon we’ve stuff to sort out, don’t you?’
He stares at her but she doesn’t look back at him. ‘Have a bit of breakfast. You must be starved.’ She puts a loaf on the table in front of him, butter and a knife. ‘I thought we could have a fire.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a lot of things we wouldn’t want anyone to see, don’t you think?’
He looks at her.
Mara comes in, her hair in wet snakes round her shoulders. She’s wearing a towel tucked round her like a sarong. She half smiles and sits down at the table. She smells like Larry, his soap or something.
‘Coffee?’ he says. She nods. ‘Cass?’ Cassie sits down. Looks as if someone has suddenly pulled the plug on her energy. The dog comes in. He looks up at them and whines, puts his head on Mara’s knee. Graham watches the dreamy way she strokes him.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks.
She smiles at him, her eyes flinching off his. ‘All right,’ she says.
Graham makes the coffee, but Cassie pushes hers away.
‘I’ll just have water,’ she says.
‘Do you think he was putting it in the coffee?’ Graham says, remembering the strong and bitter doses Larry brewed him before his mornings with Mara.
‘All sorts I should think,’ Cassie says. She stands by the sink and gulps a mug of water. ‘Anyway, when you’ve finished, let’s get the stuff out of the study.’
When he’s chewed through a piece of bread, Mara takes the mugs and plates to the sink and runs the tap. He watches her for a moment. Strange to see her doing something.
‘Come on,’ Cassie says. He follows her down the hall to the study. She hesitates a moment before opening the door and then takes a deep breath and flings it wide. His eyes go straight to a dark stain on the floor. Otherwise it is just as it was when they went in – only last night? They stand for a moment. He tries not to breathe, probably only imagining a trace of sandalwood in the air. Cassie reaches over the desk, takes down the picture of them on the bed and rips it in half.
‘We must destroy all the evidence,’ she mutters. He has a sudden urge to laugh. Sounds like a line from some poxy movie, but he gets a hold of himself. Cassie picks up one of the files marked PHOTOGRAPHS. His heart lurches when she seems about to open it, but her fingers stop at the catch. She looks up at him, her irises flooded almost black. ‘Let’s not look at anything,’ she says. Their eyes meet for a second and then skid quickly away.
They lug out all the files of photographs and correspondence; the notebooks; the audio tapes; the computer, scanner, printer, everything, and pile it all on the ground a safe distance from the house. Cassie brings out the blood-stained washing and, he notices, throws on top the white Egyptian cotton shirt. Fred arrives back, slams the door of his ute and does a thumbs-up. Graham feels a strange sensation inside him, like something snapping and falling away. So that’s that then. Larry has gone.
Fred leads Mara out to watch. ‘Go on, mate,’ he says and Graham tips half a can of kerosene on the pile and flicks at it with his Zippo. They all stand back as the bonfire roars into a sudden whoosh of life: things exploding; glass splitting; plastic warping; stench of acrid smoke; soaring embers and flakes of ash. Like fireworks. In the face of all this vivid destruction some shred of Graham wants to cheer, or do a war dance, but Mara, standing with her hand in Fred’s, looks sad and blank, and Cassie’s expression, flickering in the flame, chills him to the bone.
Thirty-five
Graham wipes his brush on his s
weater. Knee-length woollen thing, holey and paint-smeared, more paint than wool, Cassie says. On the canvas: red ridges, deep crimson tinged blue, thick; the delicious oily stink of linseed in his nose; fag pinched in his mouth; excitement unfurling in him as the colours work. The pebble in his pocket – he can feel it like a throb – as his hand, his eyes, his arm, build and thicken the land, feel of the land, the bush. The light is bad. Snow blotting the skylight but the light he needs is burnt into his brain. And though it’s cold, the paraffin heater not doing more than taking the edge off the chill, he’s as hot as he works as if toiling under the blazing sun.
He sucks in the last wet smoke from his dog-end and grinds it out. Stops himself immediately rolling another. But he does paint better with one in his mouth so he gives in, rolls it, lights it, breathes in the fresh hot smoke. Takes a swig of the cold coffee. Good sign when you forget to drink your coffee.
He squeezes out a worm of cobalt, dips in the edge of a palette knife to bruise the crimson lake before he wedges it on. Will take an age to dry. Satisfaction, this is. Coffee, fag, quiet, work. Nothing like it when work is a part of you. Without it a part of you missing. Which it has been. On the plane home he’d written to his parents, just a scribble on a card. Not said much, just Happy Christmas, let’s be in touch. Given them his number and in a few days, whenever the phone rings he’ll be on edge, he knows it. Hoping.
He can hear Cassie moving about downstairs, the toilet flushing. He feels wary of her, as if he doesn’t quite know her any more. Always thought her soft. Softer than himself. An image keeps coming back to him unsettlingly: her face by that fire. And her face on the plane had been steely almost. Deep frets between her nose and lip, her sun-bleached eyebrows. ‘We have to forget,’ she’d said, ‘and get on with our life.’ Our life. He’d looked out of the window at the coast of Western Australia and his eye had snagged on a hook of land, a sand bar, dots on it tiny, too tiny to make out. Maybe people, maybe animals, maybe cars.
Cassie and Larry, did they, did they? He shakes the question from his head. He will never know and she will never know about Mara and what the hell should it matter now?
As Far as You Can Go Page 29
