by Murray Bail
‘Still, he only had to glance down at Miss Kirschner’s alabaster skin, and back to the frisky male bird, for his resolve—his reason for being there—to return.
‘And so on a Sunday evening, when she left the room, talking as she went, he lifted the canary from his shoulder. He put it struggling in his coat pocket, and let himself out.
‘As he passed the window the brightly lit room with the piano was still empty. He kept his hand in his pocket wrapped around the bird. That way he hurried home.
‘Upstairs he returned the canary to its cage. For some time then he lay on his bed. He went back over the night he had first looked into the pianist’s room, saw the bird flying about like a moth, noticed her narrow waist. She too lived alone. He wondered what she was doing just then. If it was bewildering for her, it had been bewildering for him as well. With the bird safely back in its cage he could consider which of the females downstairs were most suitable to mate with the male. Clearly he had been doing something wrong; it hadn’t worked. Downstairs the chirping of the different canaries sounded curiously muted after Miss Kirschner’s piano-playing.
‘Next morning, waking early, Clem Sackler removed the dressing-gown he’d always draped at night over the cage. On the metal floor lay the grey male on its side, dead.’
Ellen walked up and down.
‘Where did you hear that? What an awful story I feel sorry for someone like that. I think you’ve made it up.’ Ellen stopped in front of him. ‘Is it true?’
Here he could look at her closely. He began wandering among the many different birthmarks and beauty spots. As for Ellen, her questions seemed to direct him towards her state of dress. For a moment, without looking down, Ellen wasn’t sure whether she was being buttoned or unbuttoned.
Came his voice, ‘When the breeder of canaries knocked on Miss Kirschner’s door he had dandruff on his shoulders. She had a squint in one eye—something like that. And she had the excruciating taste in furnishings usually found with musicians. It’s a mystery how an attraction can spring up in one person for another. Who can say why? It would be amazing, except it happens all the time. A person’s voice, say a man’s voice, heard in the dark or behind a door is sometimes enough. But it must be a combination of things. What do you think?’
‘Just voice isn’t enough, I don’t believe.’
‘There must be cases where the attraction is not deliberate. It just sort of happens,’ he proposed. ‘It can’t be explained—a real mystery. There’s no logic to it,’ he added. It was enough for him to shake his head.
‘Logic?’ She almost wanted to laugh.
‘I mean the person is not given a choice in the matter.’
In and out went the conversation, and the light and shade slanted between the trees. Normally he would have gone long ago. Clearly he wanted to stay. Frowning again, he was looking away from her.
And you don’t know whether your stories are true or not?’ She waited, not thinking of anything else.
So it was left in that intimate, unresolved state, which too can be seen as something of a mystery.
• 27 •
Diversicolor
IN A small town out west of Sydney a Greek owned a café in the main street. It was divided down the middle into booths with fixed tables, a glass dish on the tables holding the slices of white bread. The walls had been painted the colour of the sea, and near the cappuccino machine a photograph torn from a magazine showed a white monastery perched on a barren cliff.
The Greek’s wife did the cooking out the back, his daughter waited on the tables, and he sat all day behind the cash register, keeping his eye on things.
This daughter wore her black hair long, and blouses with a low neckline—sometimes it was a T-shirt. She never wore a dress or a skirt. She seemed discontented. She scarcely said a word.
The Greek had moved his family inland, as far from the sea as possible. This was to prevent his daughter being seen in a bathing costume. It was rumoured that a part of her body was disfigured by a wine-dark stain, though no one—certainly none of the hoons who sat around every night in the café—had seen such a mark with their own eyes.
There was never much going on in town. The few young men who remained spent the most vital years of their lives talking about cars and hazarding guesses about the waitress, only to clam up and grin when she came to their table. If one of them was lucky enough to take her to the pictures or for a drive to the next town her father wanted her home by 11 p.m., and she herself never allowed anyone to see what lay underneath her blouse and jeans. She’d grown up with these young men. She knew only too well the way they thought and talked, and how their hair would always be combed and look the same.
One morning a man no one had seen before sat in one of the booths and ordered a breakfast.
He had big ears and a small head. He wore a tie. To occupy himself he spent a good ten minutes trying to balance the menu on the lid of the bread dish.
This man took one look at the long-haired waitress and began taking breakfast there every morning, and gave the same elaborate instructions on how to turn the eggs, thinking it might amuse her, which she ignored.
He was staying at the hotel. He had always been a talker. He could talk about any subject you cared to name. He especially liked introducing himself to a woman, and going from there. He found that his incredible ugliness wasn’t a handicap. In fact, it may have helped. He was a good listener. Even when he was young he was ‘as cunning as fifty crows’. He had started out selling cough-cures door to door, then it was vacuum cleaners, and Singer sewing machines. On the side he was on commission for a manufacturer of flagpoles, who’d recently diversified into stepladders—difficult things to move in large numbers. He always looked hungry. The usual laws of disappointment apply more to a travelling salesman than to most other men.
He’d been attracted to the sullenness of the waitress, and when he asked around and heard she had something on her body so zealously guarded no man had managed to report its details he decided he would not leave town until he had seen it for himself.
With this in mind he took all his meals at the Greek’s. At night he made sure he was the last to leave, even if it meant ordering another coffee. But he soon found the technique which had given him such success across dozens of country towns—namely, outrageous flattery and obviously absurd exaggeration, and the same old jokes, while fixing his eyes on the woman in question—was getting him nowhere. The waitress showed no interest. If anything, she became downright suspicious, hostile even.
After a week of rejection he decided to give himself one more night; he couldn’t stay in this dump forever. The decision came as easily as ordering another toast. He left his suitcase on the bed and set out for the café. In the dark a woman in a black shawl appeared in front of him. She was an old woman he hadn’t seen before. ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ she seemed to be saying, grabbing at his sleeve. She had forgotten to put in her teeth. Taking his hand she rubbed it with her fingers, and pointed. ‘Become an upright citizen, all ears.’
At least that’s how it sounded—either a riddle or a scornful screech. As he turned away with a good-natured laugh he tripped over and grazed his knee.
It was the waitress with her customary tired look who noticed. She actually spoke, ‘What have you been doing?’
And looking down he found splinters all over his hands.
After that he noticed the Greek and his daughter glancing at him. Unexpectedly the father nodded and smiled. But it was too late. The man had already decided what to do. Without trying to win her over on that last night he finished eating and didn’t even order a coffee. He waited outside for the place to close. There wasn’t anybody around. When her bedroom light came on he went behind the café.
Carefully he climbed the picket fence. He felt like whistling a little tune. Why hadn’t anyone else done this before? There was a loquat tree, a fowl yard, bits of wood. At the louvred window he stood on tiptoe.
In her roo
m the young waitress was stepping out of the last brief piece of clothing. Casually she turned. He almost gasped at the bulging strength of her nakedness; the rich tangle of black below the hips.
To see more he stretched: and there he saw it on her legs, a dark stain, as if she was up to her knees in ink.
At that moment she faced the window. Although she didn’t cry out, he stepped back; or so he thought. Something solid met him from behind. He couldn’t move. There was no point in struggling. He could still see into the room and the waitress’s pale body. His arms disappeared into his sides. And he felt himself merge into something altogether hard and straight; unusually tall. Foolishly, he realised he should be getting back to his home in Sydney. His head became cold. He then began to hear voices.
From the waitress’s muscular legs the stain was transferred across the short distance of chicken wire, bottles and tins, lengths of useful timber, etc., over the grey splintered fence to the base of the new telegraph pole, Karri, which would stand in all weathers with a clear view of the Greek waitress in her room, regularly naked.
She of course lived happily ever after, sometimes enjoying the company of men.
• 28 •
Decipiens
TO THIS day examples continue of a man coming across a woman undressed who is simply unable to avert, let alone shut, his eyes. Very common within the species. At any given moment it happens somewhere in the world. Accidental? More than likely an essential deep-seated mechanism is at work here; and as the eyes possess the unprotected body, a secondary mechanism is activated which can produce unexpected consequences, on occasions, retribution.
• 29 •
Neglecta
TWO DAYS had passed: and no sign of him. To Ellen the encyclopaedic landscape took on a completely blank and sullen appearance.
Nothing much moved, at least nothing out of the ordinary; no figure seen coming towards her.
On the third, winds and slanting rain came from the east and whiplashed the eucalypts into helpless shrubs, a panorama of dented reputations, great trees shivering and flinching in feminine distress, some split or uprooted, while a small paddock of pale brown grass was combed into a vast mat, the sort of orange-haired mat found outside certain hairdressing salons in Sydney.
Made jagged by the wind Ellen began having restless, irrational thoughts. Now he was gone. What had got into her? As she kept thinking she frowned. Turning towards him naked that day at the river she had felt an extreme, open simplicity. It was also trust in him. In a sense she had already given herself; hardly could be seen as a stranger now.
Waiting at the places where they usually met she immediately knew he wouldn’t be there. She went further afield, wandering, tree to tree.
Eucalypts, selfish trees, give precious little shelter. On one of those days Ellen was a long way from the house, and perhaps wishing the dripping gums had the umbrella qualities of oaks, or ordinary plane trees, or even gloomy Teutonic pines, became wet through, forgetting to button up her stockman’s coat. It was true that with her hair plastered across her forehead and ears, and having just hurried a zigzag course, water still running down her face, she felt at the centre of a possibly sad drama; she wore a determined, set expression. Why else remove her wet dress and place it on the mysterious nail in the trunk of her tree? Without thinking, she’d come across the E. maidenii—and there was the nail. Hanging to dry, the dress repeated a collapsed version of herself.
At least the weather brought a halt to Mr Cave’s implacable march. Out of habit, though, he still arrived in the morning, stamping his muddy boots on the verandah, he and Holland. Each gripping a mug of tea they contemplated the dirty weather.
Only the far triangular paddock remained, of mostly stringybarks, containing at its point closest to town the one and only Ghost Gum. The ornamentals lining the drive up to the house he was leaving to last. Apparently the idea was to name the last forty eucalypts in a sort of triumphant sweep up to the front door. Mr Cave told Holland he needed another day, two at the most.
Ellen heard this over and above the rain on the iron roof as she brushed past on the verandah, without a dress under her waterproof, and almost stumbled.
Everybody but Ellen could see Mr Cave was about to win her hand. Incredibly, she had again concentrated all her thoughts and energies elsewhere, in another person out there somewhere, quite a compelling invisible man, perhaps hoping that by turning her head in the opposite direction the industrial advance of Mr Cave would somehow veer off and go away. There was little her father, or anybody else, could do to save her now.
When the weather cleared she went up into the tower and searched in all directions for any movement, any sign of him. Familiar things had shifted positions, others had left bits of themselves strewn on the ground, breaking the line of a fence, or else stood up at strange angles. Here and there hollows normally filled with shadow glittered with water; a landscape after a battle.
So trees produced oxygen in the form of words. Ellen could hear his voice. Stories with foreign settings came closer to home. They came back to her. It was due to sheets of water lying around, and the bedraggled eucalypts begging for attention.
Between stories Ellen had allowed him to reach out and help her quite unnecessarily over a fallen tree or rocks.
The River Peppermint (E. elata), it has more botanical names applied to it than any other eucalypt. ‘In one of the harbourside haciendas in Vaucluse lived a small bright-eyed woman in gold sandals who had been married and divorced so many times she had trouble remembering her current name. Other women liked her, and yet she was never happy. One day for no apparent reason a muscular man with a star tattooed on one shoulder and wearing nothing but boots, shorts and navy singlet dumped a load of wet yellow sand in her drive and—would you believe?—ambled up to the front door for a receipt. She was still in her dressing-gown, her hair a mess. It took a minute or two to sort out the confusion, only for it to be replaced as they remained looking at one another by an altogether different, deeper confusion which she recognized…’
As for the slender Steedman’s Mallet (E. steedmanii) from the west, naturally Ellen anticipated something about larrikin jockeys or drovers; instead he brought up the sad case of the postman in Botany (a suburb of Sydney) who found the job of delivering mail beneath him, Ellen smiled, and performed his duties with such reluctance he was transferred to smaller and smaller country towns until he ended up in this very town just over the khaki river, where his sister served at the counter and he could occasionally be heard moving about or clearing his throat inside the office.
Trees with the most shameless histrionic common names, such as the Lemon Scented, Silver Princess, the various Yellow Jackets and the Wallangarra White dropping leaves in the dam, to mention four, wandered in and out of view which became memory. And Ellen felt his words circling closer; quite insistent, really.
There’s a place called Corunna in north-west Spain, he had said. A place of rocks—geological delirium. Corunna is known for just two things: foul weather, it never stops raining, and its lighthouse built of granite in the Dark Ages. Local families call it ‘the Tower of Caramel’. In this tower, the story goes, was housed a miraculous mirror that could reflect anything that happened anywhere in the world. The women of Corunna went to the mirror to see where their men were at any given moment, their hardships and dangers at sea, as well as births, deaths and marriages.
One Sunday a local man in a black suit went up to check on the woman he was meant to marry. Instead he found a young foreign woman with a strong jaw and broad hips consulting the mirror—at the suggestion of the local tourist office—to discover the whereabouts of her always exuberant girlfriend who had neglected to leave a forwarding address. The Spaniard was about to go when he saw clearly in the mirror his fiancée in the arms of the mayor’s son! Beside the bed was a carafe of wine. As he stared his fiancée moved to be on top of the other one. The Spaniard turned to the startled Australian. ‘I’ll kill them! Now!’ He real
ly meant it.
The no-nonsense Australian woman saw nothing in the mirror, not even a sign of her cheerful friend, and placed a soothing hand on his arm.
She was from Geelong. She was always leaving or coming back, as if she was attached to a very long length of elastic. First it was Bali. After that, India. She went to London and came back. South America was on her list. She went back to Europe, doing it on trains, using London as a base, before feeling the tug of home. On her return she would at once begin planning her next move.
To cut a long story short, he said, the young woman from Geelong and the Spaniard left the tower together, and were seen enjoying themselves in one of the cafés. She stayed on in Corunna. He came to her room. The dark sea that kept trying to squeeze in through the window and into her room, and the sounds of the seabirds and the foreign words outside, while inside this man with the blueish face gave her such solemn attention, his eyes and hands never stopping, combined with the energy of her youth to produce a sympathetic intensity—he had said—an intense spreading softness she had never experienced before.
In the room with him she measured her smooth good health and saw her life laid out ahead, sunlit, obeying the laws of perspective. Nevertheless, after a week she became restless again. In a mass of good-natured smiles she announced it was time for her to be leaving; the man showed his surprise by shouting at her. But she had decided, though when she looked back from the bus at his receding figure she felt confused and blew her nose.
