The Landing

by Susan Johnson

  ‘Everyone eats meat, yes?’ he called down the table.

  Through the volley of voices declaring their carnivore love, he heard Rosanna’s small protest. ‘Sorry? Was that a no?’ She nodded.

  ‘I hope the meat’s halal,’ said Glen. ‘You know we’ll all be eating halal soon. You sheilas will be covered from head to toe in black curtains, with little slits for your eyes.’

  Marie gave Penny an I-told-you-so-look, a look that flooded Penny with a high, operatic, out-of-proportion emotion. In the company of Marie her emotions were enlarged, perilously close to the surface, including feelings she did not previously know she possessed. Marie acted upon her as a kind of truth serum, causing her inner self to stand revealed—or at least her more primitive self, which predated manners.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Penny said, ‘this anti-Muslim hysteria is ridiculous.’

  ‘You won’t be saying that when you get your hands cut off for adultery,’ said Marie.

  Pete guffawed: a loud, rude belly laugh of the kind that drove Penny nuts. Her ex-husband was a zealot stripped of a cause: as a young man he had joined a cult—Children of God or some such nonsense; some madness involving pretty girls ‘love bombing’ defenceless young men such as him—and after he had extracted himself from the cult and an early marriage, he was fanatically against religion, manipulative women, political systems; against everything and everyone who attempted any coherent system of belief, especially enthusiastic folk plagued by the notion they must tell others how to live in order to make the world a better place. He got his nickname, Pessimist Pete, at thirty; by forty, he was known as PP, famous among his colleagues at the Department of Education for not voting and regularly getting fined for it, for arguing that changing governments made no difference, in the same way it made no difference joining the union or attempting to change world poverty or the human lust for war, because in the ruined world evil invariably triumphed over goodness. The Holocaust proved this, Stalin’s dead millions, men who raped and murdered children.

  Somehow Penny had intuited her way to the bleakest man in Australia; some suffering in her led straight to the suffering in him. Pete thought feminism was a cult, more destructive than the Children of God; he thought dedication to anything—especially to work—was unhealthy, a certifiable psychiatric illness, and that human striving was pointless because in the end life was meaningless and everything turned to dust. Yet throughout their long marriage, Pete charged off on a series of new devotions—surfing, Italian, pottery—blazingly overexcited about each new passion. She remembered his fanatical dedication to photography (which lasted longer than most passions), the building of a darkroom, the long weekends he spent photographing whatever it was he was photographing while she was left alone with Scarlett, a colicky baby, weekend after weekend after weekend. She did not complain; in fact, she made sure her responses to his efforts were effusive, flattering, excessively complimentary, hoping that this particular passion might be the passion of his life. But he gave up photography, too, devising a rambling, gloomy explanation about how concentrating too hard on one thing was bad for the psyche. She remembered arguing that the world would not have the Sistine Chapel or space travel or the beauty of Rome if humans were not compelled to concentrate on one thing. She remembered Pete’s infatuation with sailing, which was how they came to be at The Landing in the first place, after he negotiated a transfer from Brisbane to the Nambour office; how at the shining crest of each new beginning he thought everything before his grateful eyes was beautiful, including her. But to Pete the travel brochures always turned out to be more lustrous than the real, dismal thing, and actual life, and love, eluded and disappointed him; he was temperamentally set at borderline despair, a pessimist and a cynic because his heart was so pure, so willing, furnished with immense, inarticulate hopes, unfulfilled ambitions and unrealised, inexpressible desires. Pete’s tragedy was that he could not value what was his, and could not see the vast dimensions of the kingdom beneath his hand; he didn’t want what he had, he wanted something better. Penny knew all this, and yet the day came when she could not bear to listen to him complain for another second about the smallness of their house or the smallness of their life together. It happened not long after Scarlett ran off to Paris with Paul, in those sorry days when the very air in the house smelled bitter; she thought something was off in a cupboard, truly she did, and one morning she took every single thing from the pantry and laid it out, helter-skelter, on the kitchen floor.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Pete said.

  ‘I’m leaving you,’ she said.

  She hadn’t known she was until she said it. She was bestowing benediction, granting his most cherished wish for release into something finer.

  SIXTEEN

  A moist-eyed look

  He had better keep the water jug filled. Everyone was getting pissed, fast, Jonathan noted—everyone except Rosanna, who was on what she called ‘a detoxification journey’, and Marie, who sat, a handkerchief in her hand, intermittently wiping something near her eye. She did not look relaxed, but as if she were prepared for flight at any moment.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Joni,’ PP was saying. ‘Studies have shown you can take exactly this much of Joni Mitchell before you want to kill her.’ PP raised the forefingers of both hands in the air, as if illustrating the measurements of a fish.

  Gordie, opposite Marie, was disagreeing with Celia about everything, except that the world was possibly being overrun by Muslims.

  ‘I’m against fundamentalist Islam—but only fundamentalism, mind you—because of its innate conservatism,’ Gordie said, attempting to explain the nuances of his position. ‘I’m not against Muslims per se.’

  ‘Oh, I am,’ said Celia. ‘They think we’re infidels. It’s the War of the Roses all over again.’

  Jonathan admired Gordie’s restraint. ‘I think you mean the Crusades,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever war it was. Muslims are always having wars, aren’t they? Screaming and howling on the news, carrying coffins.’

  ‘Correct,’ said Marie. ‘Wherever they go they cause nothing but trouble.’

  ‘I read somewhere that in fifty years, ninety per cent of the whole world will be Muslim, even Australia,’ said Rosanna from the far end of the table.

  ‘It makes you think,’ said Celia.

  ‘Really? Ninety per cent?’ said Gordie. ‘That figure sounds rather improbable.’

  ‘It’s got the whiff of a conspiracy theory,’ said Jonathan. ‘Like the where-were-all-the-Jews-when-the-Twin-Towers-fell-down conspiracy.’

  ‘Mate, that one’s true,’ said Glen. ‘The records show that four thousand Jewish workers who should have been at work on September 11 didn’t show up.’

  ‘Oh, that’s preposterous!’ said Penny. ‘And anti-Semitic. You should be ashamed of yourself for repeating it.’

  Jonathan looked at her with admiration; she had fire and spit, a quality of integrity he had possibly mistaken for vexatiousness.

  ‘It’s all on the record, Penny,’ Glen said. ‘The only part where there’s no written evidence is why the Israelis did it. One theory is that Israel was in cahoots with the American government to justify the War on Terror.’

  Jonathan saw that Glen was drunk, in that he appeared to have melted, in that he had spread out from the outline of himself, his shirt free of the restraint of his pants, his eyes smeared, his gestures smudged. Jonathan glanced at Celia who, clearly, was not going to be of any help. Her tiara of daisies was askew.

  ‘Who’s for cheese?’ he said. ‘I hereby ban all discussion of politics because I am king of the house.’

  ‘Can I say one more thing?’ Anna, whose red lipstick had run, did not appear as drunk as the others. Her voice was low, melodic; everyone leaned closer. ‘My best friend Niala is Muslim. Her parents are from Pakistan but she was born in London. During the London bombings she was spat on in a bus.’

  Penny’s face had a queer expression; in the flickering candlelight,
she looked sunburned, aflame.

  ‘That’s awful!’ said Cheryl. Jonathan risked a glance; he was not proud of himself. How many kisses in the world were misguided? How many misspent?

  ‘I held her hand while she cried,’ said Anna. For a moment there was a respectful silence.

  ‘The fact that some of your best friends are Muslims doesn’t mean anything, sweetheart,’ said Pete. ‘I’m sure Goebbels was a nice man when he was at home. Gadaffi was an absolute whiz in the kitchen. Bin Laden wasn’t much chop, though.’

  ‘Enough!’ said Jonathan. Anna rewarded him with a moist-eyed look.

  ‘Can we talk about how many wives we’ll be allowed to have under sharia law?’ said Pete, blundering on. ‘I’m requesting four.’

  ‘One’s enough, mate. One’s too fucking much,’ said Glen. Pete laughed; a dismal sound.

  Penny was struck by how undone Pete looked, how sadly he laughed. He appeared miserable, one of those failed, overweight, middle-aged men he had once so feared becoming. How had she not noticed before? Was it because he was sitting next to Marie, his former mother-in-law, with whom he had shared so many familial tables? For the first time in years they were seated side by side again, allowing Penny to see how young her mother looked and how sadly diminished her former husband appeared beside her. She had just seen—for the first time—that one of Pete’s side teeth was missing: he saw the shock on her face, and quickly moved to cover his mouth with his hand. A broken tooth! He was falling apart!

  ‘I’m getting it fixed next week,’ he said, as if she had asked. He looked heartbreakingly vulnerable, unveiled as a child, and she realised with horror—with a terrible drunken sense of illumination and certainty—how baffled and alone he was.

  She was flooded with remorse, with a dreadful awareness of her own culpability. How stranded he looked, how hapless! She felt his terror, and her own, and a dreadful new certainty that it was not him who was chronically disappointed by life but her. She felt winded, exposed, as if everyone in the whole world had known this long ago—everybody, that was, except her. She looked quickly around the table, but everyone was talking, laughing, drinking. No-one knew, not really, if anyone was happy or sad, if anyone woke with dread in the night. How alone Pete was! How alone they all were in their adult lives, the only ones responsible for their own yearning. No-one knew the most intimate things about her: if she was still taking those anti-depressants the doctor had prescribed two years ago, if she was slowly drinking herself to death. All those years trying to get Pete to go and see a doctor about his depression, when all the while it was her! Not even the red flag of the doctor prescribing antidepressants in the guise of menopause relief for hot flushes had alerted her to her own misery. Was misery too strong a word? She did not know; all she saw—suddenly, terribly, and all at once—were the lies people told themselves, including her. How intricate the lies, how obscuring; the marvellous scaffolding erected around the small, sad facts.

  She was too drunk to stand up, but her spirit did; that muffled ghost rose from the table. The smothered thing inside her stood, even if all the while Penny’s body remained tethered to the chair. Her new knowledge lay curdled inside her, the ingloriousness of it. Why did she keep reading books as if she was going to find the one book that would tell her everything she needed to know? Why did she relinquish her desire to make a piece of art of meaning and beauty? She wanted to know why the world was so sad; what her mother’s suffering was for. Who are these people? she wondered, looking around the table. Am I supposed to care about this one, or that? Her eyes moved from face to face; she felt as if she was on the point of some truth, a miraculous clarity, if only she could concentrate hard enough. What was her small life worth, or silly, self-important Celia’s, counting her shoes? What was it all for?

  Her eyes travelled to Marie’s face and straight away she saw something was not right. Marie’s head sat at an unnatural angle; a puffiness down one side of her face. Instinctively, drunkenly, Penny stretched out her hand and to her great surprise—the shock of it, her mother’s flesh which might be her own; the flesh she never touched—her mother took her proffered hand, holding fast, as she slowly went down.

  SEVENTEEN

  Anyone who was anyone

  Incrementally, day by day, hour by hour, Marie reconciled herself to exile. She was on the far side of the earth, estranged from everything she knew, but the achievement of her exile and resurrection were shot through with an underlying sorrow for the loss of something left behind for good. Her new life felt not quite real, as if it were only temporary, a sort of story or a movie that would soon come to an end. Her lost life lived within her, a far-off land, more real than the new visible world in her eyes. Privately she thought most Australians resembled lucky children and she quickly learned where all their soft spots were, all their hurts, all their capacity for provincial affront. Like a proud schoolchild, Brisbane lay its achievements at her feet: Mount Coot-tha Lookout, Moreton Bay, Lennons Hotel. Sometimes at night she wandered through the solid brick buildings of the city, in search of the opposite of the wooden houses she lived in, where there was only the flimsiest distinction between inside and out, between the press of nature outside the thin walls and what passed for civilisation within. In every house, windows were left open and the sounds of outside—the bush, the streets, the cries of children—poured in; every house a house of sticks capable of being blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. When she stood at the lookout of Mount Coot-tha, holding on to her hat, the city below looked like a great army camp, temporarily pitched, surrounded by bush. Her own life felt provisional, flimsy as a house of sticks; she was homeless, homesick for a home that was no more, a perpetual stranger.

  He came to the McCanns’ front door, his hat in his hand. ‘Prince Charming’s at the door,’ said Mr McCann, winking.

  When she went down the hall, all the McCanns started peeking out from the rooms along the way, and before she reached the door she turned around. Terry and Mrs McCann and Mr McCann, their heads poking out from the kitchen; Wendy and Rhonda from the bedroom they all shared; Lance, Pat, Johnny and little Shane from the lounge room. It looked like a joke, a still from a warm-hearted Hollywood movie, and she laughed. ‘Shoo, you lot,’ she said, still laughing. It was an expression Mrs McCann used all the time—Shoo, you lot—and it was the first time Marie had used it appropriately.

  ‘Marie,’ Syd said when she opened the door, ‘can you ever forgive me?’

  She closed the door behind her. Not speaking, she led the way down the head-swallowing front steps, down the bright cement path leading through the treeless front lawn and out the gate. The heat had not yet faded from the day.

  She knew the way down to the river, the river that lay brown and wide and endlessly moving; the same river into which he had landed. She was not thinking straight; of course she should not have gone anywhere near the river, but it was the place her feet took her. Pat and Johnny had shown her their secret camp, where they caught tadpoles and tried to catch eels and fish and where they were attempting to make a canoe. Marie led him there, beneath the cool damp of the hanging trees, where they sat on two upended kero tins.

  ‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he said.

  Still she did not speak.

  ‘Actually, I do know why I did it. I love you, Marie, and I can’t bear to think of living without you.’

  Doesn’t every girl dream of hearing such words? Isn’t every girl supposed to long for love, her imagination jumping from love to marriage in a moment?

  ‘Marie?’

  She looked at him, his long skinny legs crossed, his hat still in his hands. His face was kind, tender, she saw that, but she did not know him, she did not know where he came from, how he had lived. He might as well have been an African or an Eskimo, so different was he from her. She was shaking.

  ‘Oh, you’ve caught a chill,’ he said, moving closer, cradling her in his arms. It was then that she was reduced, touched, enveloped in living arms coursing with warm b
lood, her struggle momentarily suspended, her head falling as if in surrender to his chest. Marie Arene, in his arms!

  She raised her eyes. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you,’ she said, although he had not asked her again.

  ‘Oh, my darling,’ he said, kissing her.

  She did not love him; she was outside herself, looking at the girl kissing a strange man in the darkening green, alone, frightened, relinquishing the old, broken part, pushing it away, being grateful and happy to be in a safe place; like Mrs McCann said, all that was the past, gone, there were no wars in Australia. She did not need to think any more of the headmistress’s office and being told that her mother was dead, or what she was doing that night in London, three days after she last saw her brother, Eric—a chasseur parachutist, a hunter of the skies, down from training school in Manchester on a twenty-four-hour pass, getting ready to be parachuted into France, so proud of himself, laughing and practising his bad English, insisting on ordering the tea. She need not think of her father, of the workings of grief, of the sadness that stopped his heart. She need not think of her cousins, those strange and vulgar people, wringing the necks of animals, leaving their soiled underwear on hooks. Was she washing her hair the night Eric perished? She might have been making a piece of toast under the electric grill which sometimes turned on and sometimes did not; she might have been doing any number of banal things. She was so tired. She was tired of endless walking, of endless loss. She longed for that moment when experience passed into memory, for that moment when, without her participation, the years would effortlessly move her from the wounds of the present to a place where the past could no longer reach out and grab her by the throat.

  Syd’s mother, Min, was not keen on him marrying a reffo. Marie was too dark, too dramatic, too other. Besides, if she had caused Sydney to throw himself off a bridge, what other tricks did she have up her sleeve? Now, if he was marrying that pretty little Gwen Harris at least Min would know everything she needed to know: who her people were. Marie might even be a gold-digger; it wasn’t unknown for girls to set their sights on wealthy young men, and Syd was certainly wealthy; everyone in Queensland, probably everyone in Australia, knew McAlisters. Why, Syd had served an apprenticeship with the famous London store Selfridges and gained special experience in the silk factories of France! But Evelyn, who taught with Marie and who was responsible for introducing her to Syd in the first place, laughed at any suggestion of Marie being a gold-digger. ‘Don’t be silly, Mum,’ she said. ‘Marie wouldn’t know McAlisters if she fell over it.’ Min found this hard to believe.