She has a sense of herself as a solar whiteness, without shape, without limits in space or time, pulsing with a kind of exaltation whose only analogue might be the dramatic rush of wind at the rainy edge of a cyclone.
If Verity were to climb the Glasshouses, she thinks, her past would become different. The life of Verity-on-the-mountain would have another history altogether.
But is it possible for Verity to climb the Glasshouses?
Might there not, in fact, be planes and spheres and tales which can never intersect?
It strikes Katherine that it might indeed be as impossible for Verity to climb Tibrogargan as for the Wanderer or Beowulf to sail their curved ships up inside the Barrier Reef. Is a sense of the tragic possible along a tropical coast? Can it be maintained? Does it have to be imported from Europe?
Energy — from the sun, or from the heady rush of her ideas — pushes her on and up, over the dimpled rocks. Yes, she thinks, both sombre and excited, as though thorny literary problems are solving themselves at last. Verity will always live in Le Raincy, the Wanderer will always sail the North Sea, they can’t be translated. But they endure in their original tongues. They endure.
Trees overshadow her again, a brown stand of gums fingering the rock. Beneath them the underbrush flourishes, and where a trickle of water drips out from between rocks and collects in a hollow, ferns grow thick and deep. It is possible, Katherine thinks, that no one has stepped into that greenness since the world began. From here, looking back, she can see the striped awning and toy people moving around it, and a row like ants threading its way up into the mountain. Above the tattered leaves there is nothing but sky and King Sun. She feels absolutely insignificant and absolutely omnipotent, immortal even, at one and the same time. Hubris moves through the ferns like a kingfisher, she feels the quick little brush of its wings. She tests her power: standing deep in the pool of curling fronds, she closes her eyes and summons up his white shirt, open over brown skin, his cloth hat, the butter-pale curls. She makes a wish: Nicholas.
“Katherine?”
She swallows and opens her eyes, but it is only the girl from her poetry tutorial, Myra — definitely, yes, that is her name — asking: “Why the hell did you take off like that? Whew.” Myra wipes her sweating forehead with the cloth hat. “We might as well sit and rest a bit, while we wait for the others to catch up.” She throws herself down into the ferns, wriggles a little to gain comfort against twigs and ants, and pulls a bottle opener and a Four-X from her knapsack. She seems to fill the entire space beneath the trees; the deep and endless pool of ferns has dwindled to leprous tufts. She flips the top off a bottle and takes a mouthful. “Yech. Warm bloody beer,” she says. “Already.” Nevertheless she continues to drink, then holds the bottle out toward Katherine whose mind, in slow motion, considers its response. She shakes her head, changes her mind, accepts it as though in a dream.
Myra raises an eyebrow. “The thing about you,” she offers thoughtfully, “is you always just do whatever you decide to do, right? I mean, you don’t care what anyone thinks, do you? Like just taking off up the track, back then.”
Katherine stares, amazed, the bottle poised on the way to her lips. Logically, she thinks, I could be as wildly blind about her. Myra laces her hands behind her head and leans back into the ferns. “So how do you do it?” she asks comfortably. “What’s the secret? You snap your fingers, so to speak, and Ashkenazy waits for your opinion in the tutorial. Or I have to come chasing you up the mountain. Or Nicholas the Dreamboat himself has to keep sneaking looks in your direction.”
Katherine has the eerie sensation of having taken a wrong turn in a theatre: she has wandered on stage in the middle of a production and now — this is surely an off-kilter dream — both players and audience turn expectantly toward her. But what are her lines?
Myra laughs. “Well, it’s certainly not the magic power of your voice, since you’re practically mute. Outside seminars, that is. Is that the secret? Why do I have the feeling that you sent for me?” She claps her hands, sits up and bends forward from the waist, a mock genie. “What do you want to know?”
Katherine smiles uncertainly and lifts her shoulders slightly to imply: I’m out of my depth. I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing I want to know. There are definitely, in fact, many things I do not want to know.
“Funny,” Myra says, rolling over onto her stomach and propping her chin in her hands, “the way everyone has this compulsion to talk about them all the time, isn’t it? I guess it’s the waste that drives us all crazy. What does he see in her? — apart from the obvious, I mean. Of course she is beautiful, you have to concede that, though it’s just her face really, isn’t it? None of the other standard attributes that we are all led to believe …. But it’s not as though he’s blind to it elsewhere. Let’s face it, as one fallen woman to another, you’ve got to search a long time to find someone who hasn’t at least necked with Nicholas. Damned if I know why we let him get away with it.” She stretches like a cat, purrs, licks the slow circle of her lips with a tongue indulging in memory. “Well, of course I know why,” she sighs. “What I mean is, why do we let her do it? Just a twitch on the leash, and whoosh, he’s miles away, even when you’ve still got him between your legs in the back of a car. Just what’s she got that we haven’t?”
For some reason, in the midst of the sensation of inner lurch (the kind of free fall that dreams can open into) Katherine thinks of Gene the Sailorman at the moment when he turns away to lunge for Bea’s sandal.
“There’s something manipulative about her,” Myra says. “Always has been. I’ve known her for ages. Same school.”
Is it possible, Katherine wonders, to go on and on, day after day, making the discovery that you are even more of a fool than you thought you were yesterday? She asks herself savagely: Does he carve notches on a gatepost somewhere?
“You know how I know?” Myra asks. “The way she had to have teachers eating out of her hand. Every grade, these so-called brilliant essays — about her tragic bloody past, ho hum — but one year the teachers compared, and all the stories were different. It was kind of a joke around All Hallows.”
“All Hallows?”
“Yep. Ahead of me, of course, by a good few years, but the stories were still around. And I remember her, sort of. The version that gets me is the parents bombed in the London blitz and all that jazz. She’s no more a Pom than I am, and that accent wouldn’t fool —”
“Of course she’s not a Pom,” Katherine says primly. “She’s French and Jewish.”
“What?” Myra hugs herself and rolls in the ferns. “French! Oh that’s a good one, I hadn’t heard that one. And the Jewish kick: well, that started up in grade twelve, I believe. Before that she had a vocation. The nuns lapped her up, of course, bless their dear little suffering-loving souls. It’s a miracle she didn’t break out in stigmata.”
Katherine thinks: I have a lunatic on my hands. “Myra,” she says patiently. “Think about it. With a name like Ashkenazy.”
“Exactly. How come her parents used to be just plain Mick and Thelma Delaney, before her father made a killing on the horses? Believe me, Katherine, my dad used to know Mick Delaney, and he reckons — my dad, that is — that her ladyship was born two blocks away from the Banyo railway station. She was baptised a Mick, and her dad used to drive a truck for Tristram’s Drinks.”
“Myra? How can you say these things?”
“How? Because my dad used to drink with Mick Delaney at the RSL, that’s how. They were both at Tobruk, which is the closest Miss High-and-Mighty ever got to France, if you ask me. Hey, here come the slowpokes, they’ve caught up with us. And Jenny Williamson — all over Nicholas still, I see. She thinks she’s hit the jackpot, silly fool.”
“I suppose, Charade,” Katherine muses, “that we merged in with the group and got to the top of Tibrogargan.”
Because yes,
Katherine remembers how the sweeping view across the Bruce Highway to Bribie Island and the endless Pacific has a bright white flag in one corner: the shirt of Nicholas, open at the neck; the sun on his wheat-pale curls. And she recalls how she pondered the nature of obsession, and the mysterious ways in which we invest objects with power and then wait like vultures for demythologising to set in.
“Though that process is never complete,” she tells Charade. “Never. I’m convinced of that now. What still mystifies me is how it comes about that we confer significance in the first place, and then it clings. Totemic objects can never totally lose their power, not for all the demythologising in the world. Because whenever I think of the Pacific, there’s a white sail on it that turns into Nicholas’s shirt. And whenever I think of the Glasshouses … Which is why, I suppose, by quick train of association, I saw him on the side of the Royal Bank.” She frowns and looks uncertainly along Front Street from under the brightly striped awning. “But the curious thing was … Well, I’ll get back to that later. First things first.”
Or last things last. Because it is when the group is dispersing again, as dusk falls on the picnic grounds, that Nicholas, shoving a canvas roll of green and white into the back of a van, reaches out and tugs on Katherine’s sleeve. “Want to ride back with me in the van?” he asks.
Katherine has many versions of what happened after this. She would like to think that she politely detached his hand and said something like “Thank you, but I came up in Myra’s car and I’ve already told her …” She would like to think she then calmly turned and walked away. She does believe, in all the versions, that she turned a corner that day and began to walk away from her obsession.
But also in all the versions is a certain amount of smoke and mist, and the thudding of her heartbeat, and the clear haunting notes of a recorder. And from somewhere in that time is the knowledge of Nicholas’s body, of the star-shaped mole in the hollow of his neck, of his lips on hers, of their legs intertwined — and when could it have been, if not that night? Unless of course it was a few months later, when she was off in north Queensland teaching in a country high school and Nicholas, incredibly, blew into town. Or unless it was the time after that, her twenty-first birthday, when she woke from a dream of him and there he was again on her doorstep.
Yes, that was real. That really happened.
“Happy birthday,” he said. “I thought perhaps a trip to the Garden of Eden?” And on that occasion they took the boat out from Cairns to Green Island where the coral bloomed and where passionfruit lay rotting under the trees. Was that when they finally made love? Because they did. Once. And it would have been, she’d always felt, such a terrible waste of location if the fall hadn’t taken place on Green Island. So they slept on the white sand and a snake sunned itself on a rock and she fed Nicholas pomegranates and mangoes and custard apples.
All of which happened, in one sense, only seconds ago: so she knows as she crosses Front Street in Toronto about twenty-three years later and sees a certain reflection, and rushes, heedless of cars and pedestrians, full tilt at the mirrored flank of the Royal Bank.
8
The Tale of Nicholas II
Once upon a time, Charade says, a woman named Katherine ran full tilt at the side of the Royal Bank on Front Street in Toronto. She thought she saw someone she knew, but the image had bounced from a taxi window to the plate glass building, and seemed to be walking toward her when in fact it was half a block away and heading in the opposite direction. A doorman at the Royal York Hotel slammed the taxi door shut, changing the freakish angle of reflection, and pouff ! the image vanished. Katherine, bewildered, stopped within feet of the mirrored towers, rubbing her eyes and looking up and down the sidewalk. She wondered if perhaps she was sleepwalking. She wondered if she had just been jolted out of the kind of nightmare in which one is about to do something unspecified but extremely embarrassing.
On the sidewalk of Front Street she saw wary eyes and snickers and the pressed-together lips of people trying not to smile. They might as well have projected their thoughts onto billboards. Loony, she saw in flashing lights.
She thought with a shiver: It’s true.
There was probably a medical term for it — manic obsessive? Possibly there were books, articles, treatments, summer camps for the kind of senseless and passionate attachment picked up much too early, back in unimmunised childhood. It was one of those diseases like malaria. It hung around. It skulked, dormant, in the blood, going into remission for years and years, for decades, and then shazam, flaring up again like poisoned toadstools after rain.
Something had made her think of Nicholas. (What was it?
A headline on a news stand? The trail of association was lost.) But definitely, yes, first she had thought of him and then there
he was. Pathetic. She would have liked to distribute leaflets to the politely smiling bystanders: I’m a married woman, a mother of teenagers, a fulfiller of civic obligations; this derangement is not typical of me.
But it was as though a rip had spread and spread, slick as quicksilver, from the San Andreas fault through the Great Lakes and up the length of Yonge Street. A swift but mercifully brief seizure, she thought, pressing her fingers against the bony rim of her eye sockets. Like an itch, like a rash of poison ivy, the recollection of Nicholas went licking across the surface of her skin, but it would pass. One could read any number of articles about such midlife aberrations, the little kinks and tricky riffs of memory.
And then, at the far end of the block, between the Royal York Hotel and the Whalers’ Wharf tavern, she saw him again. His back. He was just turning the corner, about to seep into the city, water into sand. She sprinted, half sobbing, half laughing, heedless of stares.
This had nothing to do with the making of a decision, or with any calculation of the pleasures/costs/complications of seeing him again. There was indeed not so much as a second to consider the oddness of boarding the Royal York’s shuttle bus to the airport. She saw Nicholas, in the middle of a fog of soft-sided luggage and suitcase-festooned travellers, climb into the bus. She followed him.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the driver said. “Got to get your ticket from the Gray Coach window first.”
“Oh where? where?” she asked, trying not to seem unduly agitated, but in fact breathless, frantic, scanning the bus seats
for Nicholas. The aisles were thick with bodies. There was a waving forest of arms craning to stuff luggage into the overhead racks.
“There,” the driver pointed, and she sprinted to the ticket window and paid her six dollars and rapped on the now closed doors of the bus until they opened with a pneumatic sigh and then she bounded back up the metal steps.
“Yeah, yeah,” the driver grinned. “End of the world if you miss your flight, I know. Six times a day, minimum, I’m offered bribes, threats, and prayers. Trip takes the same thirty minutes, fair weather or foul, ma’am. And the world don’t end if you gotta wait for the next flight out.”
“Flight?” she echoed, her brows puckered.
She could see Nicholas — the unruly curls across his forehead — halfway back, a window seat.
“I wonder,” she found herself saying with appalling brashness to the person beside him, “I wonder if you’d mind …? I’d be most grateful. Oh thank you.”
What did she expect?
Not, certainly, the quizzically amused look of someone who was accustomed to mild outlandishness in women, who took fuss as his due, but who nevertheless was perpetually amazed by the assertive ingenuity of total strangers. There was always a dash of titillation about it, a small shock that aroused him. As for Katherine, awareness of the error she had made was not quite instant — after twenty-three years, one expects some differences — and so it took several seconds for her own incandescence to fade. In those moments something twirled between the two of them, between the man and the woman framed by the vinyl seats and grubby windows of
the airport bus: a spindle of misplaced and mistaken sexual excitement.
It cast its own spell.
And then Katherine, beached on the shore of receding euphoria, said faintly: “Oh God.” Because he was not Nicholas. Clearly he was not Nicholas. At close range, she could not even call the resemblance striking. (Although, after twenty-three years, would the real Nicholas bear much of a resemblance to the one she remembered?) What she had seen from within the aura of her sudden recollection was a random convergence of details: the general size and shape of his body, the way he walked, the curls. But the curls were not sunbleached wheat-blond Nicholas- coloured at all. They were drab, they were the shade of old and yellowing parchment, they were the colourless colour of a once fairhaired boy who is now in his greying middle age.
“Oh God,” Katherine said, mortified. “I thought you were someone else.” She put her hands to her burning cheeks. “Oh, this is so embarrassing.”
“Not at all,” he said archly. “Not at all.”
“Oh I don’t believe I followed you …” She held the ticket stub out between them, for pondering, as an artefact of madness.
“The least I can do,” he said, “is offer myself as a substitute.”
“Oh, I’m so embarrassed.”
“You do that well.”
“Pardon?” She looked at him then, took in the meaning of his smile, considered (at roughly the speed of light) several possible courses of action. She considered saying courteously but icily: “I’m afraid you have misinterpreted my behaviour,” and then getting off the bus. She considered saying nothing at all, simply walking back down the aisle with dignity and …
The bus, she realised from the peripheral blur of buildings, was now in motion; she therefore considered, but quickly rejected, telling the driver she had made a mistake, asking him to let her off. It could be assumed that the driver, now negotiating traffic at a dizzying pace on the highway, lived in the constant expectation of new manifestations of lunacy with which to enliven his off duty hours. “Lady,” he would say, possibly gently, possibly rudely. “Sit down.” He would jab his finger toward the sign which said in two languages: Please do not talk to the driver while bus is in motion.
Charades Page 18
