The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  During the meal Henry is silent, and as soon as it is finished the children are whisked off for their bath. He pours a drink then and sits down to the television news. There is the trumpet call of the evening broadcast, followed by the first bulletin, the presenter’s voice drowned out by the racket coming from the bathroom, the water too hot then too cold then not deep enough, Charlotte’s stern voice pitted against Lucie’s wails. Henry feels a rush of shame. It was a genuine suggestion but now he must pretend it was not. Worse, perhaps, is that his own error of self-judgment has been revealed; she knows what Henry, until tonight, did not know or did not wish to admit to himself. In marriage one wants to be equal. Such a desire might not be conventional, but it is what Henry wants. Yet now he feels lesser somehow, foolish and lowly. Fraudulent. Misplaced, even to her. As if Charlotte has known all along how the world must see him and for his sake has pretended otherwise.

  His attention drifts back to the set; the picture is fuzzy. He gets up from his chair and wiggles the antennae, then sits back down again. It doesn’t really matter; he isn’t especially interested in the picture—more irritated by the flickering of the screen. It is the peace and quiet that he likes, Charlotte and the children leaving him alone in the belief that when he sits down to the evening news he is doing something noble—Don’t bother your father now—keeping up with the events of the world for their collective benefit. “You are an intelligent man,” Charlotte said over dinner. “Really, how could you not think?” Her voice was steady—a parent reprimanding then absolving a wayward child. But he only suggested it for her sake, to help her and make things better. His attention drifts in and out. Sometimes, when the children are being bathed he has a little doze as the news rolls on, and this, too, is a failure to be accommodated, with Charlotte coming up behind him and stroking his head. “Poor darling,” she’d say, “you’ve been working too hard again.”

  By now the news has passed and the presenter introduces the weather. The cardboard map of the country comes into view, with the weatherman standing to the left of it and pointing with his wooden rod. There are numbers stuck on the map indicating today’s temperatures, and wavy lines to show low- and high-pressure zones. He’s never understood these details—the way air moves up and down, in and out. Many times he’s marveled at a bird rising higher and higher on an invisible current and supposes this must be part of it, but maybe not.

  In the background he can hear the bathwater gurgling fast down the plughole. Charlotte struggles to get them in, then struggles to get them out—pulling the plug is the only way, playing on the fear that they’ll get sucked down and end up somewhere else: China, she used to say, but now it would be England. Whatever place happens to be on the other side of the world. Upside down, back to front. Topsy-turvy.

  The picture on the television flickers and jumps. This time he gives the set a good thump and the picture steadies. There’s only a few minutes left, the presenter now tracing the wavy lines to indicate how the weather will change or not, depending; more heat, no rain. Henry stares blankly, not really listening but taking in the shape of the country, so large and roughly symmetrical. An island with a center, a center that is an interior. There is something consoling about this image—how it seems geometrically stable, as if it were of the right proportions to function as a raft, a landmass capable of floating amid all the surrounding water. A place of safety. Dry and buoyant. A line comes to him: No man is an island. No man is an island entire of itself. But that is the fear, isn’t it? The fear and the desire. And there he was, being ­exactly that in suggesting South Africa, showing his ignorance. Self-­enclosed, rootless, dislocated from the main. A person painted with the tar brush—a nigger, for want of a better word, because nobody knew what else to call an English Indian man in Australia. He’s heard of others not so unlike himself being excluded from the bowling club and the Returned and Services League, having stones thrown through their windows. Aliens, they were called, in formal parlance. He hadn’t really meant it, the South Africa idea, she must know that. It was just a thought, that was all, just another foolish thought.

  Henry switches off the set and sits back in his chair. The house is quiet: Charlotte is putting the girls to bed. He can hear, ever so faintly, the lilt of her voice as she sings to them. He closes his eyes and listens, Charlotte’s voice mixing with the sound of a birdcall coming from the night garden. The bird makes a hollow, hooting song, like that of an owl, but it is perhaps not an owl.

  * * *

  From where Charlotte sits she hears it too, the birdcall carrying through the house. She stops singing then and listens, the bird hoot-hooting while May drifts off to sleep. She imagines, just for a moment, that it is the sound of a ghost. But come now, she thinks, there is no such thing—this is what she tells the children—and ­wishes only that she knew the name of the creature so as to dispel the inexplicable rush of fear. May whimpers and Charlotte is pleased to move closer to her, finding comfort in the comfort she gives. For the bird ignites a familiar, troubled feeling, the feeling she often has at night, when the children are asleep and Henry has nodded off in his chair and she is left to wander through the house switching off the lights. She feels then not just that she is ­surrounded by a country unfamiliar but as if the whole known world has disintegrated into the salty, black air that floats around the house.

  * * *

  The next day is Saturday and Henry is up early, digging in the garden. The ground is tough, full of rock and root. He has no stomach for company and works hard; the sky is still pale, the sun not fully risen, but already he has sweated through his shirt. Almost there now, he thinks. Just this last corner to clear. After this he will double dig the new beds, plant out the cucumbers in mounds. The carrots have come out looking strange: stubby and knotted, with extra roots shooting off the sides like tentacles. He has put them in a bucket and will give them to Charlotte for scrubbing. He’ll have to talk to her then—they haven’t said a word since dinner last night. Henry can count on one hand the times they’ve gone to bed without talking. It’s never any good, he can’t sleep on a fight. Is it a fight? He’s not sure anymore—it feels as though they’ve reached a stalemate and he doesn’t know now who should be sorry for what. If only she would paint again, he thinks. If she could find her way back to this. Then maybe they could forget all the rest of it.

  He places his boot on the top edge of the pitchfork and ­presses his weight down on it. The prongs move deeper. He wriggles and levers and pulls the fork out, then drives it in again, wrestling once more with the mangle of stones and weed roots and the spindly suckers of palm trees. It is good, this. It is what he needs, what he’s always wanted—to be outside, in the sun, in the air. He ­straightens up and rests a moment. The sun is higher. The air hot and dry. He can hear Charlotte calling to the girls. His shirt clings to his back. He closes his eyes, to better feel the sun, and knows what it is, this place, its unexpected hold on him—how it reminds him of his old life in Delhi—the flat land, the pulsing, throbbing heat, the sky. If only he had never left it. If his sister hadn’t died and he hadn’t been sent away to that school in the hills. That was the beginning of the end, for although he was still in India, ­Shimla was where his life in England really started, in that mountain fog that the British flocked to, breathing it in and savoring a memory of home, the damp air carrying the faint smell of old pea soup, vegetable and fetid. He tries to unravel the logic of his life: if he’d never been sent to the hills, if independence hadn’t come.

  He gives a few more good heaves with the pitchfork, applying his weight to the knot of palm roots and levering the handle back and forth. When the root is exposed he bends down, grabs it in both hands, and pulls. He heaves and yanks and grunts and bit by bit the root separates itself from the dirt. Henry pulls harder, and harder, and harder still—he’ll get it this time, dammit, he’ll get this, he’ll damn well—Then the thing snaps and Henry is thrown backwards. He lies there, blinking slowly. The bre
eze moves over his face. The blue sky swarms above. There’s not even a cloud to look at. Trees move a little at the edge of his vision. A bird calls. A child can be heard; their voice higher, then lower, then higher again as they jump up and down on a trampoline. A dog yaps in a nearby yard.

  The world is drenched in light. Then, for a moment, it falls dark as Charlotte’s shadow steals across his vision. She is making her way towards the washing line. Henry stands and brushes himself down; her shadow is the only dark spot in the glaring landscape, the black bend of her shoulders and the curve of her hat wobbling over the lawn.

  At the opposite end of the yard Charlotte cranks the line ­lower. She hauls the white sheet onto the wire. The sun is too bright, shining on the white cotton, so she has to peg the sheet with eyes half-closed. The bottom of it trails on the ground. She ducks behind and pulls the hem down over the other side of the wire to lift the sheet out of the sand.

  Henry watches her bend down to gather up a wet towel. She wears an A-line skirt, a split running up from the knee. It is the skirt she often wears when doing housework, and the seam at the top of the split has torn open and been mended many times. It must have recently torn again and not been fixed, for the split is long and ragged, running halfway up her thigh. As she bends over, Henry glimpses a flank of white skin. He imagines it warm, a little sticky with heat, soft. He’d like to touch it. He’d like to come up behind her and put his hand inside her skirt. Run his palm along the length of her leg. To say, Leave the children to play. Come inside with me.

  Henry slips away into the front yard. Charlotte does not notice him return, so when he steps through the wet washing she starts in fright. “Here,” he says, passing her a posy of new roses, wrapped hastily in a sheet of newspaper. Charlotte shields her eyes with one hand and takes the flowers with the other. The scent sweeps over her. Black Prince, Wild Edric. Henry ­reaches for her head and pulls her gently towards him. Her hair feels warm to the touch. “I’ve been thinking,” he says. “Why don’t you paint me?”

  Charlotte lifts her face to him, uncertain, the roses held to her nose. “Just let me put these in water,” she says.

  All that day the air hums with the sound of lawn mowers. Now the window is open to the night and the sweet green scent of cut grass drifts through the kitchen. Charlotte pushes the dining table against the wall to create room for her easel and positions a chair next to the sideboard, a brass lamp lighting the space. “Make yourself comfortable,” she says, and Henry fidgets, crossing and recrossing his legs, putting his hands on the armrests, then taking them off and folding them in his lap. Charlotte lines up the canvas and takes her sticks of charcoal from their tin.

  “It’s a bit difficult,” he says, “when I know that I’ll get uncomfortable one way or another.”

  “Remember,” she says, “that you’ll have to keep your legs in the same position for each sitting—it affects the slope of your shoulders.”

  “Yes, yes,” Henry replies, crossing his legs the other way.

  * * *

  The self-portrait asks: Is this who I am? And almost in the same moment the painting replies: Yes. I am this question. Meanwhile, the portrait says, Look. This is who I have become, and the best ask yet another question: Who do you see, who do you think this is? It is the question of the self, for the self, one that brings a little ­tremor to the eyes of the sitter, and which makes them appear nervous when they are trying to look strong, sure, brave, or wealthy. Henry holds a blue hardcover book in his hand, his index finger wedged into its depths to mark his spot. “Can I read?” he asks, waving the book in the air.

  “No, better not, it will disturb the angle of your head. Besides,” she says, shifting the easel further into the corner, “I need to see your eyes.” He takes his final position and Charlotte ­crouches down to run a piece of chalk around the feet of the chair legs.

  After a while he begins to notice the sounds outside: the crickets chirping in the grass, the frogs out by the water. They must have been there all the time. Strange, that he did not hear them at first. Lucie heard these sounds as she fell asleep. “What’s the night singing, Daddy?” she asked as he tucked her in. “What’s the night singing?” Every question always posed twice. Once for her. Once for the person with the answer. They are not the sounds he fell asleep to as a boy—the caw, caw of the peacock and the rumble of trains. And they are not the night sounds of England—the wind moaning around the house, the squeak of rusty bikes passing by in the summer twilight, their riders whistling. Lucie’s first memories will be of an entirely different place. And how right that seems—whatever Charlotte says about tradition and history—how right that our experience should evolve and that our children’s experience should move in ever wider circles than our own. “My ­children,” wrote Hawthorne, “shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” Henry wants his daughters to have something like this, something different from what he’d had. Something better.

  The breeze moves at the back of his neck, and for the first time he feels a coolness, almost a thinness in the current of the night. First signs of water have begun to appear as silver dew on the lawn in the early mornings. Sweet white blossoms burst open on silver trees. Weeds have begun to sprout in the dirt and even the seedlings that Henry was sure had been killed off by the heat are coming back to life—the tomatoes and silver beet, lettuce and pumpkin. There has been nothing but sand, and yet out of it come miraculous bright green shoots, small and thirsty.

  He stares down at the floor; through the cracks of the boards he can see the dirt cave beneath the house. When he looks up Charlotte is staring at him and swaying as she considers his face from one angle, then another. Her gaze jumps back and forwards over the surface of Henry’s body. Every now and then she makes a mark or scratches out a set of lines, but most of the time she waltzes back and forth, then side to side, measuring his face with her thumb held to the vertical stick of charcoal. It is not what he expected. He thought he’d sit down and she’d set to work with the paints, throwing an occasional glance in his direction. Henry hears the clock, tick—tick—tick. Then he doesn’t hear it at all. Then it comes again, louder than ever. Tick—tock—tock—tick. It is as though time passes only intermittently. The clock on the wall is one of three clocks given to them as wedding gifts, this one a wooden cuckoo clock with white numerals and a yellow bird that peeps out at every hour. The other two clocks remain wrapped in paper and stowed in the bottom of a packing box. They hadn’t asked for such things. They already had sufficient; Charlotte had the grandfather clock, and they had the wind-up alarm clocks on either side of the bed. Not to mention their watches. Charlotte doesn’t like them—clocks in general, and the given ones in particular—and shipped them over only due to some peculiar superstition that it is poor form and a breeder of misfortune to discard such presents. The gifts were given, after all, to celebrate the longevity of love.

  Half an hour passes. An hour. Henry’s left foot grows numb, then his right buttock begins to ache. His bladder presses against the waistband of his trousers. These dull pains flare then recede, flare and recede, and each time the space between them grows shorter, the intervals of peace smaller and smaller, until each different sporadic pain becomes constant and the three or four small agonies coalesce into one and become fierce, the different parts of his body united by the strange blaze of total discomfort.

  Henry is taken aback when he looks at the canvas. After all that, there is hardly anything to see: a few lines, a mark where his eyes will be. The rough outline of a head. It will take a long time, he realizes, much longer than he thought. “Months, weeks, I don’t know, it’s hard to tell,” Charlotte says. “Tomorrow?” she asks. “We’ll keep going tomorrow.”

  Every night for the next three weeks Henry sits for his portrait. The chalk lines that mark the chair’s place begin to fade. Before each sitting Charlotte gets down on hands and knees to find the marks and line the chair up exactly. She’
ll have him staring straight ahead, she thinks, into the face of the viewer, his big dark eyes like tunnels. She wants to create that odd moment when it is hard to tell whether those eyes are looking at you or whether you are looking into them—a certain opacity, a certain depth—the deep wild eyes of an animal, like the horses with which her career began. Horses in the fields. Horses drinking water from troughs covered with ice. Old dappled horses in their stables. She liked the shape of them, the wide neat planes of their faces. What would she call this one? Man by the Window. Man Sitting. Portrait of Henry. Portrait of a Husband. It was like naming a baby: the title fitted for a while, then didn’t, the creation outgrowing her meager definition.

  “Could you turn to the left a fraction? And tilt your face down a bit? There. Good,” Charlotte says, hovering before him and pulling on her cigarette—a habit reserved for when she’s painting. She stands back, staring at the canvas, then squints as she sucks down more smoke. She breathes out, opens her eyes wide, and steps forwards with the brush.