The High Places

by Fiona McFarlane

  There followed a happy time of croquet and boating expeditions; then Alice went through her suffragette period, of which I pretended to disapprove. Things are more settled now. We read Darwin together, without telling her parents, and she’s discovered Marx. We take walks in the country, where my naturalist wife sends me scrambling into trees for birds’ nests. Things aren’t what they used to be, but there are consolations: a certain elegance to the way she stands at open windows, and longer, darker nights now that the town has switched from electricity to gas. But I’ve noticed in her lately a strange inability to see the resemblances between things: a tennis ball (she plays modestly, in white dresses) is nothing like the sun; a glass of water, she says, has no relation to the ocean; she scowls if I comment on the similarity between her neck and a swan’s. In fact she dislikes the similarity of things even without recognising their likeness, and can’t bear, for example, to see a brown short-haired dog on brown short-haired grass. The rest of the town is like this too. They have a horror of seeing photographs of themselves, even the hoary daguerreotypes they love so much. They’ve removed all the mirrors from their houses, and the paintings of jaded horses on hillsides, and the china that depicts, in blue and white, the far-flung tale of luckless lovers. It’s as if they’re allergic to the very idea of reproduction; or, at the very least, don’t wish to be reminded of it. What a singular world they live in, in which no thing has any relation to another! They no longer mention the movie. They no longer watch movies. They’ve taken up laudanum. They expect to live forever. They seem happy, however – timeless and happy. I watch them all, a little wistfully, in my fraudulent frockcoat. Meanwhile, the trees shake out their leaves in the wind, and in the evenings my wife walks through the spent garden. Her face is like a flag that says Surrender.

  Cara Mia

  Cara’s mother was at her best on Saturday nights. On Saturday nights she lit long white strings of Christmas lights and little candles in tins. She took the rubber bands off the wind chimes, which otherwise kept her awake at night, and hung paper lanterns from the clothesline. The back screen door opened and shut as the children ran in and out of the garden, to see the lanterns and bat at the wind chimes; the door snapped and thundered and let in gusts of mosquitoes until Cara told them to stop it, and Cara was the eldest, so they did. But their mother, Rachel, didn’t care how much noise they made, because it was Saturday night. She was black-haired and red-mouthed, she wore a sharp scent and a floating white dress, and now she produced her purse from somewhere (she always hid her purse, with so many children and so many boyfriends, though for the moment there was only one boyfriend, only Adam). She sent Adam out for fish and chips. Now that he lived with them, he could be sent on errands. Cassidy went with him, because Cass was the oldest boy.

  Cara set the long dining table while they were gone. First she bundled away last week’s dirty tablecloth. The younger children bumped and ran and offered their help, and Cara had to calm them – she let them straighten the new tablecloth, carry knives and forks, salt and pepper, and, in a confident mood, the cool pink bottles of sweet chilli sauce. But only Cara was allowed to open the cabinet in the corner and choose the platters for the middle of the table, the special glasses in blue and green and purple, and the vases in milky silver. The children trailed Cara into the garden and watched as she cut flowers (she had little shining scissors expressly for this task, they used to be her grandmother’s, and they hung in the kitchen from a piece of velvet ribbon); depending on the season, she cut freesias or ferns or squat yellow daisies, swags of Christmas bush or oleander, and whatever she chose Rachel accepted and turned into bouquets, perfect, without even trying.

  The guests began to arrive: friends of Adam’s, friends of Rachel’s, people Rachel worked with and people Cara had never heard of before, not always young and pretty but always with some distinguishing feature – an electric-blue hat, a foreign accent, a vast cosy beard – and they brought bottles of wine or beer and sometimes sweet-smelling dishes covered with tea towels, and baskets of bread. The children were introduced: Cara, Wallis, Marcus, Elsa; Cassidy is out with Adam getting dinner, said Rachel, don’t worry about remembering their names, nobody does. The younger children looked at their mother, anxious. They were shy for a minute and wanted jobs to do.

  Cara turned ice cubes out into glasses. She found bags of nuts in the cupboards and poured them into smooth wooden bowls; the kids could pass them around. Elsa was naked and it didn’t matter. Marcus had unearthed two old Christmas crackers; they snapped, people shouted and laughed, Marcus and Wally wore tissue-paper crowns for the rest of the night. Cass and Adam returned, laughing in the steam of their hot parcels, Cass self-important because he had been allowed to burrow into his for salty chips on the way home. Into the dishes on the table: piles of battered fish, potato scallops, chips, and lemons cut in wedges. Coleslaw out of a plastic container. Then the long meal, the arms crowded onto the table, everybody swinging plates and lifting drinks, using their fingers, kicking each other without meaning to. Apologies, jokes, music to which no one listened. Elsa spilled her drink; Cara mopped it. Cara found more lemons. Stains bloomed on the white tablecloth, the ice all melted. Send Adam for more! Adam went for more ice; Cara offered to go with him. Out into the dark streets, the running traffic, people walking to the pubs or walking their dogs or walking arm in arm and who knows where. The service station was only two streets away, and Adam smoked as he walked; he said very little, sang one time, turned his head from Cara to blow smoke. Cara hung back as he bought the ice. She watched as girls came into the service station swinging the keys to their little cars; she watched as they spotted Adam, looked again – some of them knew him and approached with cries and squeezes. Sometimes he would introduce her as ‘my Cara mia’, and these girls would smile and squeeze her too. Once, some girls from Cara’s school were there; they asked who he was and Cara said, ‘He’s Mum’s boyfriend,’ but she would have preferred to say ‘I’m his Cara mia.’ And the girls from school gaped and said, ‘I thought he might be your brother,’ which was a compliment, because he was so good-looking, but it also meant he was too young to be any mother’s boyfriend. The best part was coming home: the house lit up behind the trees, all the windows wide, and everyone inside quiet for a moment as the man with the beard told a story or the woman with the accent sang a song; then, just as Cara and Adam passed through the front gate, all the voices started up, sometimes applause or laughter, and the people walking on the street would see and hear and wish they could go into the house and be welcomed there; and Cara could.

  With the help of the children, Cara carried the dishes to the kitchen. The greasy fishy paper curled in fantastic shapes on the floor beside the rubbish bin and flower cuttings littered the table. Cara washed and Cass dried. The other children wandered in and out – into the lounge room, where the adults drank and talked, and Rachel leaned into Adam on the couch; into the kitchen, where Cara clattered in the sink, where Cass might snap them with a tea towel; out into the garden, where the snails crawled on silver paths, until Cara told them again to stop banging the door. The adults made drowsy, wistful talk. Rachel lifted her arms to push the hair out of her face and her children heard the jangle of gold bracelets. The younger ones tiptoed in and volunteered for goodnight kisses, which they received from Adam and the woman in the electric-blue hat – Rachel blew kisses from the palm of her hand. Cara made the children brush their teeth before bed. She closed their bedroom doors herself. The candles were slugs of light curled in the bottom of the tins and the tablecloth was sticky wherever the chilli sauce had touched it. The guests called: Leave the table, Cara. Come and sit down, said the woman in the blue hat. Her hair was tightly curled, she wore yellow stockings. How old are you, Cara? she asked. Only fourteen? She looks older, don’t you agree? Adam agreed, and Rachel smiled with a yawn. Someone had brought a tray of pastries from the Greek café. Cara spilled icing sugar on the carpet, it didn’t matter. The children slept. Adam moved his thumb ov
er Rachel’s forearm, up and down and slowly. The Christmas lights above his head were a crown of stars. Cara, shy, laughed when the adults did. One of them wanted to smoke. You don’t mind, Cara, do you? It isn’t cigarettes. Cara shook her head. Nobody told her to leave, but she went to bed. Now that Adam had moved in, Cara was the only person in the house to have her own bedroom. Outside, the palm trees shrugged and struggled in the wind. That was Saturday night.

  * * *

  They lived in a low wide white weatherboard house in a Greek part of Sydney, right next to an Orthodox church. On Sunday mornings the noise of chanting men rolled out over the ripe garden. Under the sound of it, Cara lifted a blue shirt against the clothesline and pegged it in place: now there were five Adam shirts floating on the line. She lay in the grass beneath them. It was November; the fierce magpie mothers were nesting in the gums and an ibis stood sentry in every palm. Cara thought Rachel looked like an ibis: long-legged, with a black curve of hair along the neck. Rachel and Adam were in bed. Every Sunday morning: in bed. All the children had shooed themselves from the house. The yellow bedroom curtains remained shut; the house was sweet, white, forbidding. Marcus and Elsa hunted lizards, Wallis stripped bark from a tree, Cass kicked at a ball. Cara lay curled in the sun with an arm across her face. She was too tall, with a rushed vertical look and no chest or hips to speak of. And black hair like her mother’s. She curled to hide her height.

  The children began to complain, as they did every week. ‘We’re hungry,’ they said, not so much to Cara as to each other.

  ‘Cass, go in, get us something to eat,’ said Wallis. Wally knew she was named for a king’s girlfriend and liked to issue commands.

  ‘Shit no,’ said Cass, pleasant and slow, kicking his ball.

  Cara lifted her arms above her head. A high laugh came from the house, which was worse than silence. Wallis sat on Cara’s legs; Elsa came through the garden and collapsed over Cara’s flat front. Cara could summon the girls like that, only by lifting her arms. Not the boys – but who cared? They only yelled all day and had a weird kicking way of walking. She used to love them blindly, with a vicious loyalty, but when Adam came she saw him size them up, laugh, and shake his head; then she knew their deficiencies. Sometimes she copied Adam’s way of reaching out to mess their hair – a soft skating cuff to the rough backs of their heads that made them duck and grin when he did it. With her they only scowled.

  ‘Cara,’ said Wally, and Elsa said it too. ‘Cara Cara Cara,’ they chanted, and slapped their small hands against her feet and legs.

  ‘How long will it be?’ asked Wallis. ‘It’s hot out here. Is it hot?’

  Cara wanted only to lie still and feel the sun and think about the church, which was white with a dome and a blue cross, and palm trees and ibises, so that it might be somewhere in the Mediterranean, and if that were true then Cara might be, also, somewhere on a foreign sea, maybe older, maybe beautiful, Cara mia. If Adam was out here, she thought, he would put Elsa in the laundry basket, or Marcus, and lift them high over his head. They would shriek and laugh and tumble into the grass. Then Adam would go away from them, from the garden and the house, to walk around the block and smoke. Rachel had told him never to smoke in front of the children. Cara thought of Adam smoking, the way his forearm looked as he lifted the cigarette to his mouth, the particular tense muscle that clenched in his golden jaw. She shivered in the grass. Wallis caught Cara’s shiver and hugged herself.

  The singing quietened down next door. The doorbell was ringing – on a Sunday? And who ever rang the doorbell? The postman with a special package, Cara’s teacher the time she visited, men in suits who wanted to save everybody from hell. Didn’t they all know: Don’t make noise on a Sunday, not on a Sunday morning, and not with the doorbell, a real brass bell (brought back from India, from the neck of a sacred cow dripping with flowers, or from Switzerland maybe, a healthy Swiss cow in a high mountain pasture), so loud it could wake the dead. Cara lunged up from the grass so that Wally and Elsa slid and tumbled. She hurried around the side of the house, where weeks ago Cass had drawn a penis in blue chalk. The children followed. Who was at the front door, waking the dead? A girl with brown hair, a small wheeled suitcase, and an enormous belly. A pregnant girl. Cara pulled at the hem of her short blue dress. The other children pressed behind her, except for Cassidy, who was eleven. He slouched against the fence, pretending indifference. The church opened up behind him and people milled about.

  ‘Hi,’ said the girl, and Cara said, ‘Can I help you?’

  Oh, the girl didn’t seem to know. She let go of her suitcase and began to cry. The crying made her red face redder, her hair damper, and there were rings of sweat under her arms and on the yellow T-shirt that stretched so far over her stomach; the rainbow on the T-shirt was twisted and wide.

  ‘Is this where Adam lives?’ asked the girl, and because she said his name – this was how it seemed to Cara – Adam opened the front door. He stood there for a moment wearing only a pair of shorts, his hair in all directions. Then he stepped outside and held the girl – his arms were long enough to reach around her, despite her belly, and she pressed her face into his chest with her hands knotted under her chin, crying, crying, until all the children ran away and only Cara saw him kiss the stringy top of the girl’s damp head.

  Adam smiled at Cara after giving the kiss.

  ‘This is my sister,’ he said, and the girl lifted her swollen face. ‘This is Danny. And Danny, this is Cara.’

  Cara could see in Danny’s soggy smile that she was more happy than sad; or that her sadness, now that she had been held in Adam’s arms, was complicated by joy. So Cara felt savage and said, ‘Does Mum know?’

  Adam only laughed and stepped back from Danny, which made him disappear into the house. Danny followed. Cara pulled the suitcase behind them as quietly as she could. She eased the front door closed. The door to Rachel’s room was still shut, sealed by Sunday; Danny seemed to know to lower her voice. Adam didn’t, but his voice was never loud, although it carried. In the night and on Sunday mornings it carried and carried.

  He looked at swollen Danny. ‘Johnno?’ he asked, and she nodded. In a shy way she seemed pleased with herself. Her face looked rubbed and sore but pleased. ‘And why’d you leave?’

  ‘Dad.’

  Adam stood with his hands on his hips the way he did at barbecues and the beach.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and Cara, standing beside the suitcase, felt all the tolerant history of that ‘Ah’ and hated it and found it lovely. Adam rocked back onto his heels. ‘You should sit down.’

  Danny sank onto the couch in exactly the place Rachel had sat last night in her shining dress.

  ‘Well, here you are,’ said Adam.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Danny, crying again, and at this Adam knelt before her, he held her hands over her knees and kissed them, he said, ‘Hey, Dan Dan, Dannygirl, you’ve done the right thing, it’s good, I’m glad you’re here, it’s fucking amazing to see you, Dan. Hey, it’s beautiful.’

  He pressed his face into Danny’s knees. She looked at Cara over the top of his head; her face was so naked with relief and self-pity, Cara turned away.

  ‘Want to tell me about Dad?’ asked Adam, raising himself as if to join her on the couch, but he paused before sitting. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘We need coffee. Coffee?’

  Danny shook her head.

  ‘I’ll just duck out and grab one for me, yeah? I’ll be five minutes. Less.’

  He went to Rachel’s door and opened it; the light swimming out of the room was green and murky, and Cara noticed the way he entered without hesitation. He said something and returned with a T-shirt and thongs. He took his cigarettes from where he hid them behind the piano, winked at Cara, and said, ‘Back in a mo.’ And left, shaking the coins in the pocket of his shorts. The house collapsed a little, emptier. The younger children crept to the doorway and peered at Danny, who peered back.

  Now that she wasn’t crying, Danny looked like Adam, but wasn
’t pretty: her mouth was too large, her eyes too small, and instead of his burning gold she was only an ordinary pinkish-brown. It was hard to think of her buckling under some loving man. She didn’t touch her belly the way some women do; she only looked at it as if someone had put a cushion in her lap without telling her why. She would endure the cushion for the sake of politeness.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ asked Cara, because she was hungry, and the girl said no.

  ‘Do you live near here?’ asked Cara, and the girl said no.

  ‘How old are you?’

  Danny placed one hand on her stomach. ‘Sixteen,’ she said.

  ‘Mum was sixteen when she had me.’