Eucalyptus

by Murray Bail

  In London at the most unexpected moments she saw the room in Corunna, which seemed from a distance to be jammed in at an angle among the black rocks. She kept seeing him across the room and close up. It was their room. He had a long face and hairs on his shoulders: she liked his solemn expression. She could feel his mouth and hear his voice.

  A person meets thousands of different people across a lifetime, a woman thousands of different men, of all shades, and many more if she constantly passes through different parts of the world. Even so, of the many different people a person on average meets it is rare for one to fit almost immediately in harmony and general interest. For all the choices available the odds are enormous. The miracle is there to be grasped. Perhaps in unconscious recognition of this she had tugged both his ears early one morning in a rush of gaiety which he extended by making a great show of rolling on the floor in agony.

  In London she realised she should never have left. At strange important moments a person is given one and only one chance; and that had been one.

  It was raining in Corunna. She hurried along the streets and tried the cafés. All the men could do was shrug. She gave descriptions of him. All morning she sat with a hot chocolate at their usual table. On the third day she went up to the mirror in the tower to find his whereabouts. There was nothing. The mirror was black.

  As she turned to go she had a glimpse of herself—a figure almost like her, from behind. Remaining still she saw herself in the mirror fifteen, twenty years down the track. Alone, quite muscular in the legs, she was holding a heavy shopping bag with a bunch of celery sticking out: near her was a thin tree, not very tall, with dark green, somewhat patchy leaves.

  Ellen made her way down from the tower.

  There had been no sign of him. She realised she wasn’t even sure of his name. What then about the near future? Too terrible to even think about: it was rushing towards her. On the other hand she didn’t want her life to be a vast empty paddock.

  In her room she felt as restless as the woman from Geelong, in his story.

  She scribbled a note. ‘We must talk. I am your unhappy daughter.’ She shoved it under her father’s door.

  • 30 •

  Papuana

  CONSIDER THE burden of being the first white woman born in New Guinea. Its debilitating effects can hardly be imagined by those luckily born looking like everybody else. Beginning as an incandescent child on the plantation, growing up there, to the boarding school in Brisbane, the various careers and romances after that, until marriage to the smartly dressed Italian, the faintly mental load she carried about can be likened to those of any number of island women condemned to spending their lives with a wide load of firewood or green bananas balanced on their heads.

  If she was in Brisbane, she would be known by many people.

  Large (seriously enormous), she took refuge in caftans and sunny florals, and wide-diameter earrings which swung and jangled whenever she moved. Her hair had gone from bottle-blonde to muddy-grey. For some reason, white skin does not belong in the tropics. Heat and humidity had battered her face and arms, though she had a lovely small smile. In Brisbane she ran a jewellery shop in one of the city malls. With no warning, and just when she had turned fifty, the husband left her for another woman. At around the same time the first of the melanomas were diagnosed on her cheek and neck. To their son, who had his own problems, what with a small family as well as his own retail business in a nearby mall, she gave instructions and made him promise—she had him swear on a Bible—that after her death he was to spread her ashes over the garden of her ex-husband, whom she hated.

  A ghost story for another time.

  • 31 •

  Patellaris

  HER FATHER had warned her about men. Did that include fathers?

  Otherwise, men were known to be weak and evasive. A man could not be relied upon, not really; they were always somewhere else. And men were constantly trying to convince. It was as if that was their purpose for being on earth. Ellen had her face to the swirling wallpaper. They told stories, spoke with tongues as smooth as you like, and with the one thing in mind—still, it invariably alerted something pleasant in her. Always wanting to convince.

  As for fathers, what about her own—the man now moving about in the other room?

  Women he once described as ‘little engines’. Speaking generally, that is; with just a touch of the usual exasperation. Visualising heat, pipes and vibrations was easier than trying to understand them. Ellen had noticed that with women in town her father assumed an indifferent, often blunt manner, which they even found attractive.

  In his room Holland was squatting over the plaques he’d had engraved for outdoor display, the names of all the eucalypts under the sun, sorting through them on the floor. Ellen came in, and when he didn’t say anything she sat down.

  It took a few minutes to become accustomed to the air in her father’s room. And as always Ellen looked around with curiosity: at the absence of true softness, of colour—no mirror in the room. Instead, she followed the haphazard brownness of bits of equipment, instruments, machinery parts, the rain gauge spilling pencils; heavy coats, spare boots, the pioneer’s camp stretcher; ledgers, papers, cigarette-rolling machine; suitcase, and the shotgun in the corner he said was ready loaded to keep the young bucks away; calendar showing the colossal Red Gum taking up an entire footpath in Adelaide—a gift at the beginning of the year, from Mr Cave.

  The room presented a silent untidy harmony similar to a hillside of fallen trees. And yet it was cavelike. Ellen respected its differences, signs of her father’s scattered self; a sort of random, long-established individuality.

  ‘Talk about havoc,’ he was now saying, ‘complete mayhem. Any number of trees have been skittled. It’ll never be the same.’

  ‘Dams are full, and I couldn’t get near the river.’

  Her father nodded.

  To one side he pushed the names of the weaker species, those split down the middle, uprooted, those with shallow roots.

  ‘Our friend Mr Cave’s out there having a quick dekko. Decent of him.’

  Ellen squatted beside him. ‘You can get replacements for all these. That won’t be so difficult, will it?’

  ‘It’s difficult to make much headway in this business. It’s taken all this time… And nature’s always ready to step in. Nature’s always leaning forward, very patient. Only the other day was an item in the paper about the eucalypt first seen by somebody, forget who, a hundred years ago. A description was recorded, it was given the name rameliana, but it was never seen again. I’m sure I’ve told you about this. Over the years it’s become one of the mystery trees. Mr Cave was even asking the other day whether it had ever existed. But now I read in the paper an expedition has come across a surviving specimen—in the desert, west of the Olgas.’ He nodded at the thought. ‘That would have been one to get our hands on.’

  Gazing at the back of her father’s neck Ellen saw she couldn’t talk to him. Trees had always offered refuge, she could see; quite a forest of interesting, nitpicking names. The neck was tanned and slightly gaunt and mangled from the years of supervising in all weathers the plantation’s vast design.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ he asked.

  Among the things she’d been determined to discuss was the idea of dropping everything and making one of their trips to Sydney, to the same hotel standing on the same rounded corner at Bondi. Perhaps then Mr Cave dutifully trudging in the same footsteps as her father, only more so, would get the message.

  Her father had paused, E. sepulcralis in one hand.

  As a way to say, ‘I’m all right, don’t worry’, Ellen stretched and kissed his rough skin. And as she did she felt an outflow of weakness; her despair trickled into sadness for him.

  If he had turned and looked at her, just then, she would have collapsed into shoulder-shaking and tears. Head bent he began lighting a cigarette. What was happening to her? She felt ill.

  It was not long ago as a child sh
e liked to put her feet into her father’s huge brogues and stagger around the house.

  Now she was the daughter about to go.

  To prevent the disaster overflowing she breathed through her mouth. At least her room offered some sort of refuge, soft in its familiarity, as the trees enveloped him.

  She made to go and, part of her awkwardness, reached out for a small wooden box on the mantelpiece, a thing she’d never seen before.

  ‘Take it,’ came his voice, ‘I found it the other day. It was your mother’s. She never got to see it. I was passing a ridiculously expensive junk shop off Oxford Street, man serving was sandpapering a woman’s head, and I thought I’d give it to your mother, to cheer her up. It’s a brilliant example of Swiss engineering, but… anyway, you’ll see it wasn’t suitable.’

  He called out, ‘Use the key on the bit of string.’

  Ellen carried the antique box on outstretched palms, like a nurse delivering fresh towels, the only object in the house which had a past reaching to her mother.

  Back in her room she felt hemmed in on all sides: not by the painted walls, more by her father squatting over every eucalyptus name in the book, and Mr Cave, advancing with his reliable tread. But then she became furious not at them but at the other one, the mostly invisible unreliable one, who fitted her age and interests and everything else, who’d decided after all those stories no longer to appear, not to help—leaving her.

  Ellen no longer knew what to do, where to go.

  And tears began their rise, from the warm well of them, not far within, a transparency of emotion, of all she was helpless about just then. These tears reached her mouth first. She held them back. She gasped and bit back these tears. So they returned to her eyes, which were already blinking, ready to flood. Almost immediately she opened herself, and felt the unravelling of her solid difficult self, all those confusions, into soft transparency, release in the form of obliviousness. Besides, there was nothing else to do.

  Absently she turned the key, winding up the box meant for her mother.

  The Dictionary of Miracles has multiple entries on the appearance of extraordinary tears, almost as many as water into wine and talking without a tongue. The weeping mosaics: a long and hypnotic history. Tears imply a purification; sorrow into ecstasy is a religious movement. Jesus wept. Saints are recorded among the serene weepers in history. Their tears go upwards, ‘by paths unknown to us’. Tears otherwise flow to a future, a result. Men and women are invariably attracted to rivers. Tears activate disintegration and impotence; during the disintegration of a weeping woman’s face the man experiences a corresponding impotence—impotence of a stranded, impatient kind, impotence of useful speech. Tears themselves flow from the uselessness of words. At the same time, men—to place the subject on the broadest flood plain—expect and want and often imagine a particular woman weeping. Many are the angry and dissatisfied women. By weeping less, if at all, men at least retain the use of words, to convince.

  Still more than the recorded miracles of tears, weeping women are honoured in art. These are women on canvas lost in weeping, faces disintegrated into multiple planes, for example, or smooth faces with a single glistening tear, directing our eye, and others suspended on the very edge of—eyes swimming, lips apart, gazing up from reading a letter or staring out of frame from the bridal chamber.

  At that moment Ellen was about to slither over to the full release of tears, when the varnished lid of the musical box sprang open, and coming forward on worn joints and up into a vertical position, like a mummy out of a grave, stood a figure of a straw-blonde, which was exactly her mother’s hair, only here was a milkmaid with blushing cheeks and a suitable cleavage, holding a porcelain bucket.

  Only one of the pine-laden alpine landscapes, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, would have produced, in reaction against the sublime, such a piece of uncertain kitsch.

  Indistinct music from a glockenspiel now came from the box.

  And as Ellen gazed and held back her own tears the milkmaid began mechanically weeping into the bucket. Most certainly there was a story behind this. A passing man had probably taken advantage of her in one of the treeless meadows, as they are called. The milkmaid had since passed through many hands.

  Lying on the bed Ellen studied the unhappiness of the pink blonde. Ellen saw she was about her own age. Whenever the flow of tears slowed down Ellen wound it up again. In that way she let the mechanical figure do the weeping.

  Weeping Box (E. patellaris) shows near creeks or on low slopes in unusually wide-apart locations: in the western part of the Northern Territory, and across to a spot near Port Hedland, in Western Australia. It has grey, fibrous bark; branchlets of pendulous or ‘weeping’ aspect (this applies to many eucalypts). Another smaller one which appears to weep, E. sepulcralis, is named after European cemeteries.

  • 32 •

  Ligulata

  LITTLE POINT here in describing the faulty photography of dreams.

  It is true Ellen woke early to find she had had dreams about him. And this immediately gave him a deeper, more insistent presence, as if he had been sharing her bed, the warmth of her own self, certainly more than he realised. To Ellen the dreams made him less of a stranger, yet more of a stranger.

  The trouble is, who can be confident on the origins of a dream, and what it may or may not mean?

  There are many variables at work here. A dream may represent nothing in particular, the way images or situations in broad daylight have no particular meaning or effect. Not all dreams have significance. Dreams too need to take a rest! Plenty of dreams, perhaps even the majority, are recollections of something arbitrary, a languid replay of something seen that morning, nothing more. The trigger all the way from the unconscious may have no psychological significance at all. The trigger may be as arbitrary as the Tumbledown Gum that happened to be standing in the path of young Sheldrake on the fateful Thursday as he left the dirt road by the river, speeding in his father’s red truck (the eucalypt was called dealbata).

  Ellen, though, she welcomed the privacy of dreams: in them she saw her strange feelings rendered still more strangely. At least she and he could float in a concentrated oneness; Ellen woke warm and wet, in grateful disbelief. These dreams perhaps exaggerated her feelings for him. As soon as she woke she recorded them in her journal.

  Beneath a frail specimen of E. nelsonii Ellen had quietly listened to almost a story about a Melbourne man blind from birth who regularly dreamed of images such as the sea and musical instruments and a goat repeatedly running underneath a horse, things needless to say he could not possibly have seen. It included a version of his own small face, which was near enough.

  Descriptions of dreams have a dubious place in storytelling. For these are dreams which have been imagined—‘dreamed up’, to be slotted in. A story can be made up. How can a dream be made up? By not rising of its own free will from the unconscious it sets a note of falsity, merely illustrating something ‘dream-like’, which may be why dream descriptions within stories seem curiously meaningless. To avoid glazing over, best then to turn the page quickly.

  ‘Cheer up, girl,’ her father touched her shoulder. She was pouring the tea from the old brown pot. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

  He remained looking at her.

  Ellen was still in her dressing-gown. Then he did something he hadn’t done since she was a girl. Encircling her waist he gently pulled her onto his lap, where she became smothered in his years, his whiskers and tobacco, the fairly firm straight-forwardness which showed in the smallness of his movements. ‘There’s a good girl…’ he kept stroking her hair.

  Ellen decided not to object, and not to cry. She swung from one to the other; just managed to hold herself.

  Holland merely noticed.

  Resting one elbow on the table Ellen stayed on his lap longer than she intended.

  Together they heard steps crunching on the gravel drive. At any moment Mr Cave would begin thudding across the wooden verandah. Ellen f
elt her father sigh.

  Mr Cave’s voice had been getting louder the closer he was getting to his prize, and a sort of abrupt informality had overrun all his arm and leg movements. Now he was letting himself in through the front door, already part of the family.

  ‘The bridge is down,’ he reported.

  Holland looked up.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The one that’s been here since the year dot, the little footbridge. The river’s gone mad and taken most of it away.’

  ‘What a shame,’ Ellen murmured.

  Her father said, ‘Never used…on its last legs…one man’s obsession…’

  The homemade bridge had stood as something firm in the midst of all the shimmer and fluidity near the bend in the river, where Ellen had once upon a time gazed down and dangled her feet.

  ‘And this,’ Mr Cave assumed a mysterious face. ‘Guess what I find hanging on a Maiden Gum. There’s a nail hammered in the tree.’

  With the forensic flourish employed by stern husbands he held up Ellen’s dress, now dried to a delicate shade of pale rhubarb or a long slice of ham (with small blue buttons).

  To Holland it made more of an impact than the news of the bridge. He looked perplexed.

  ‘There’s wild women in among those trees,’ Mr Cave grinned. Both men stared at the dress.

  Quite suddenly Ellen didn’t feel like standing there. And as she remained in the one spot, banging her hip against the table, she became overwhelmed with an elaborate, flowing looseness. All her joints became weak: the bone, blood and tissue. It invaded her eyes and throat; such a weary softness. She even became hard of hearing.

  From across the river she heard her father clear his throat; but he was still in the kitchen, putting on his coat to go off with Mr Cave. Ellen could see his puzzled look. She wondered if she had been rude to Mr Cave.