She puts her hands together and they feel papery in the parched air. She would pray if she could; but in the place from which God once capriciously inclined his ear, there is nothing but a scorch mark. Over her desolate praying hands, she looks into the woman’s eyes. ‘Please go out on the truck tonight,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘Because.’ She rushes the woman with words. ‘Because otherwise you’ll be stuck here for months and you’ll hate it. There’s nothing . . . especially for a woman . . . and people are not very friendly to strangers.’ Under the woman’s gaze she falters. ‘Because. That’s all. I can’t tell you.’
‘Do you understand,’ the woman says gravely, ‘that you are offering me the first glimmer of hope I have had?’
‘There’s no hope here,’ Mercy says. ‘Not in Outer Maroo.’
‘I think of Amy as my daughter. She isn’t, though for a number of years, she was my stepdaughter. But she’s my daughter as far as I’m concerned. That is what she is to me. For various reasons, we are all that we . . .’ She is studying Amy’s photograph. ‘It’s curious how close hate and love are, there’s just a membrane between them. Did you know that?’
‘Yes,’ Mercy says.
The woman’s eyes flicker toward her with interest. ‘You’re young to know that.’
‘I just . . . I didn’t mean . . . I was just agreeing, just being polite.’ The woman raises her eyebrows, observant, and Mercy feels compelled to add: ‘Yes, I do know. I wish I didn’t know, but I do.’
The woman nods. ‘I’m not trying to pry.’ She sighs. ‘No matter what has happened to Amy, I have to know, do you see? My last letter from her was mailed from a place called Quilpie. I found Quilpie. In that last letter, she said she was heading further west, she was going to a place called Oyster’s Reef. I’ve heard nothing since.’
‘You see, there’s no such place,’ Mercy says urgently. ‘It’s like . . . it’s like El Dorado. There’s no such place.’
‘Isn’t there?’
‘No. No, really. No, there definitely isn’t.’
The woman lifts the photograph higher and Mercy averts her eyes.
‘Have you ever seen her?’
‘No,’ Mercy says.
‘You haven’t looked.’
‘There aren’t any foreigners here.’
‘You see,’ the woman says quietly, ‘I have already . . . When you don’t hear for such a long time . . . you phone embassies, you read newspapers, you have nightmares, you phone police departments, you write pleading letters, you write threatening letters, and then you write nothing, you pray, you light candles, you go to tarot card readers, you lock yourself up with exhaustion, you just need to know. Then you make airline reservations. I have accustomed myself to the idea that the worst might have happened to Amy. But no matter what has happened, I have to know. I have to know. Can you understand?’ She begins to repeat the words like a mantra, very quietly. ‘I have to know, I have to know –’
‘Please,’ Mercy begs. She leans forward and places her hand over the woman’s mouth.
The woman says quietly, slowly, looking Mercy in the eyes: ‘I am staying until I know what has happened.’
A great sigh shudders through Mercy.
‘So I suppose I should book a room in the pub.’
‘No, you can’t stay there,’ Mercy says. ‘You really can’t.’ She makes a sudden lunatic decision. ‘You can stay at our place. We’ve got a room, now that Brian’s . . . now that my brother’s gone. I’ll take you home with me, we don’t live far. But I have to . . . first I have to close up the shop.’
Urgent energy possesses her. There is a blur of chores: counting the money in the till; locking it in the safe; fastening windows and doors. Then she is directing the woman into the battered utility truck. ‘You have to climb in my side and slide across,’ she apologises. ‘The passenger door doesn’t work.’
She tosses her head defiantly at the stir of interest in the street. As she starts the motor, Mr Prophet appears. He looks pained, astonished, but Mercy pretends not to see.
‘Mercy,’ he says reproachfully, leaning in through the open window, leaning close. Mercy roars the engine. She smiles at him, regretfully, setting the bulwark of noise in between. The door rattles.
‘Mercy!’ he shouts.
He puts one hand on the wheel, but the vehicle reverses itself violently, as though caught off guard by its own gear, and leaves Mr Prophet standing there, shocked, staring at his hand. ‘Oh gosh, I’m sorry,’ Mercy calls, but the truck ignores her and lurches skittishly into full forward leap.
‘This is not wise, Mercy. The proper place for . . . Mercy!’
Mercy puts her foot to the floor, and the truck enters a cloud of red dust.
The woman looks dazed. After several minutes, she says with a kind of wonder: ‘You’re very young to drive. Especially like this. At what age do you get a licence out here?’
Mercy laughs. ‘We don’t bother with licences in Outer Maroo. We drive as soon as we’re tall enough to see over the steering wheel.’
‘What’s your name?’ the woman asks, coughing.
‘Mercy Given. I’m sorry about the dust. It’s better with the window up, even though it’s hotter. It’s a stupid name, I hate it.’
The woman smiles. ‘Amy hates hers too. At your age, everyone hates her name. Mine’s Sarah, by the way. Sarah Cohen. How –’ But dust barrels down her lungs and she abandons herself to a coughing fit.
‘Wind the window up.’
‘Yes. Sorry.’ When the coughing subsides, she asks, ‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘Amy was only seventeen when she left home. She was only seventeen. But that was four years ago.’
Mercy accelerates. Already her bravado is seeping away. What have I done? She drives faster. The dust lifts around the vehicle like a red mushroom cloud. Mercy swings off the unpaved road and turns on to a track between stands of she-oaks and gidgee. Saltbush scratches the car. Ahead is a long low house with verandahs.
‘Amazing,’ Sarah says. ‘It’s like a tiny green oasis. How is that possible?’
‘Bore water. See that pipe elbow sticking out of the ground, near the verandah? That’s the bore. We only had to go down twenty metres, we were lucky. Ah . . . they are going to be . . . my parents, that is . . . they’ll be a bit . . . We’re not used to visitors. And lately, since all the trouble . . . I mean, the drought and everything. Everyone’s nerves are shot. They are going to seem a bit shell-shocked, probably, a bit nervous. Please don’t take it personally.’ As she turns off the ignition, she says by way of warning: ‘Um . . . my dad’s the pastor of the Gospel Hall. Was, I mean. He used to be. There’ll, uh . . . I’m afraid there’ll be Bible reading and –’
Two sheepdogs, frenetically joyful, hurl themselves at the car. Mercy has to shout above the barking.
‘There’ll be prayer and stuff like that after dinner. Well, I shouldn’t say prayer, not exactly, not any more, not spoken out loud anyway . . . Exodus! Leviticus! Be quiet! There was a split in the congregation, and my father was . . . shunning, it’s called, de-fellowshipped, but they go through – Leviticus! stop it! – they go through the motions just the same. You can excuse yourself. They won’t mind. They’re not like Mr Prophet. Exodus, you crazy –! Get out!’
‘It’s all right. I love animals. What a jump!’ Sarah reels a little, nevertheless, under the dog’s boisterous greeting. ‘Who’s Mr Prophet?’
‘That man who leaned in the window, who tried to stop – Exodus, out!’ Mercy opens her door. ‘He’s elder-in-chief at the Gospel Hall. Well, he’s set himself up that way.’ Her manic energy is deserting her and going to the dogs. She feels weak. What have I done? What have I done for the sheer pleasure of defying Mr Prophet? She sees something, clear as a mirage, floating just above the bonnet of the car: three calves on shaky newborn legs, faces soft. They have the huge, luminous, puzzled eyes of animals born into the drought; they have the e
yes of her parents; Sarah’s eyes. She stares at them. She sees a bird of prey swooping down, the beak going straight for the eyes. ‘Uh . . . look,’ she says, ‘maybe this isn’t a good idea.’ Her hands are shaking. ‘Maybe I should take you back.’
‘In fact, I won’t mind at all about the prayers,’ Sarah says. ‘It’s all extremely interesting to me, because of Amy’s letters. I need to try to understand what drew her. It’s a total unknown to me, all that, Protestant mysticism, I mean, though I’m familiar enough with our brand of it, Hasidic and Orthodox, Lubavitcher . . . As must be obvious to you, since I’m Jewish.’
‘Jewish?’ Mercy frowns, puzzled. She is distracted from the mirage for a moment and turns. ‘You mean, like in the Old Testament?’ When she looks back, both the calves and the bird have disappeared into a pleat in the air.
Sarah laughs. ‘I wouldn’t think so, no. I’m just your regular non-observant American Jew, though my sister has become ultra-orthodox and moved to Israel, which upset our parents even more than my marrying a Gentile.’
‘I didn’t know there were still Jews,’ Mercy says with amazement.
Sarah stares at her. She presses her fingertips against her temples. ‘What is that strange smell?’ she asks vaguely.
‘Ah, that. It’s the Old Fuckatoo,’ Mercy says. ‘It’s roosting again.’
2
Beyond the swing doors of Bernie’s Last Chance, the darkness is thick enough to touch and smells of mushroom culture. Nick remembers the trays with their glass covers in his grandmother’s cellar; the coolness, the sweet fungal musk, the pearled clusters of white caps pushing through the humus; he remembers the small alcove beyond the arch, where he had to lower his head, he remembers the cobwebs, the dust-crusted bottles of wine and ouzo stacked high, and behind them the damp stone wall, weeping slightly. The smell of Bernie’s Last Chance is similar, a rich compost-heap kind of smell, yeasty beer slops, and body odours turning fungal, and mushrooms, and wine-damp, all mixed together, rushing him with vertigo and nostalgia. Here he is sliding backwards to that moment when he took his young son, his born-in-Melbourne fair-dinkum Australian son, three years old, back to the ancestral Greek village. ‘That one will be in and out of trouble all his life,’ his grandmother says, and there is Angelo clambering up a pyramid of bottles, fearless and self-destructive from the start, already searching for the pot of gold at the end of the wine cave, a mad light in his eyes, doomed before his first year in school.
Across twenty years the sound reaches Nick, the hum, like a murmuring of monks, at first just a low chant, then sonorous, rumbling, ominous, swelling, the bottles beginning to move. He can hear Angelo’s scream. In the pub in western Queensland, instinctively, he lurches and flings out an arm and manages, somehow, to pluck his scrap of a son from the carnage in the nick of time. (The nick of time, he thinks, sardonic; that’s me. This time too, he hopes, and mentally crosses himself.) The wall of wines sways like a sandcastle swamped in brine, it sags and dips and rolls, but miraculously, though the cellar is awash in rolling bottles, scarcely any of them break. They wheel and skid across the stone floor and Angelo clings to him, sobbing.
‘You’ll always have to keep your eye on him,’ his grandmother says. ‘Always. It runs in the family, it’s in our blood.’ She strokes Angelo’s hair absently, her eyes focused on something not in the cellar, and he knows that she is back on the Aegean coast with her own brother, the one who drowned. ‘Everyone loves the troubled ones,’ she sighs. ‘It’s a gift they have. A trick.’ She trails her fingers over Angelo’s face. ‘He has my brother’s eyes and his mouth. He’s going to break our hearts, this little one. Keep your eye on him, Nikos.’
Nick sometimes thinks, for minutes at a time, that he will die of anxiety for Angelo, whose soft little hands are so tightly clasped around his neck that Nick can scarcely breathe. He takes hold of the small arms and eases them away from himself. Angelo’s wrists are as frail as bird bones. Sometimes Nick can feel his arteries kink and twist and flip themselves over with the anxiety that his son evokes in him, with the intensity of his desire to keep Angelo from harm.
‘Perhaps if you are very vigilant, Nikos,’ his grandmother says, doubtfully.
‘Angelo,’ he whispers in his son’s ear. ‘Angelo, do you want to play with my toy soldiers? Your great-grandmother still has them.’
Angelo stops crying. He considers. He smiles tentatively. Then he wriggles out of Nick’s arms and begins to play with the scattered bottles, rolling them gently, smiling radiantly.
‘No one can save them in the end,’ Nick’s grandmother sighs. ‘Not those ones.’
‘Heat got to yer, has it, mate?’ Bernie asks.
‘What?’ Vertigo, dizziness, bottles raining down on him like skittles, Angelo’s face, Angelo’s needy eyes, Angelo’s birdbone wrists: he has to brace himself against the whirling bar.
‘Touch of sunstroke, I reckon,’ Bernie says. ‘Better sit down, mate.’
‘Oh. She’ll be right,’ he says. ‘Just need a drink.’ He is relieved that the words have simply presented themselves without any volition on his part. Push a certain button; get an answer.
‘Power’s?’ Bernie asks. ‘Cooper’s? Or good old Four-X?’
‘Four-X. Yeah.’
His own brain astonishes him, the way it handles language; the way the different little file drawers up there hear things, process them, comprehend without translating, automatically click back a response in the right vernacular. Different microchips, he supposes; and wired to every one of the senses with phenomenal precision. Smell your grandmother’s cellar, think in Greek; taste a mango, speak Australian; get bitten by mosquitoes or get a mouthful of bush flies, and you find yourself swearing in all the lurid colours of Queensland.
Once, a tourist, an American tourist, but a Greek American who had been born in the same village as Nick, had walked into his taverna at Noosa by sheer chance. Nick did not recognise this person, not consciously, and the visitor did not recognise him. They had been briefly at school together almost forty years earlier, for Nick had been a child when his parents left Greece for Australia. Nick and the man from his earliest years in school had not seen each other since. There was nothing obvious to trigger the memory, nothing to distinguish this visitor from twenty others at the tables round about, and the visitor spoke English with a strong American accent, and yet, without thinking about it, Nick found himself addressing the man in Greek, much to the man’s surprise. And to his own.
‘There you go, mate,’ Bernie says, pushing a Four-X across the bar.
Nick can still see almost nothing in the darkness: only grey shapes and the dull gleam of the brass foot-rail against the bar. Maybe he has scorched the retina of both eyes. This would not surprise him after so many hours in that oven of a truck, on that baked red flood plain, under that barbarous sun, that brutal light. The light in western Queensland is like the light in an interrogation cell, he thinks with a quick sick spasm of recollection. He feels a violent twinge of claustrophobia, the military police bending over him, the cell light in his eyes. Why had he made that ill-timed trip into Albania? For a friend, yes; but perhaps also simply for the risk?
The thing about risk, he thinks: it’s not just an aphrodisiac, not just a Benzedrine thrill, it’s also the best painkiller known. So how can he pretend to be surprised by Angelo’s life? (It’s in our blood, his grandmother sighs.) Passionate mistakes, Nick broods, as in full-throttle passion barking up what is positively, absolutely, the wrong tree: that has been passed direct, a genetic liability, from father to son. Add to that the damned family myths, told over and over. Wouldn’t they make Angelo feel obligated to self-destruct? Nick takes a mouthful of beer and is almost grateful for it. Almost. Beer, in his opinion, is little better than bilge water, but when in Rome . . .
Sensory memories are exhausting. They are as dangerous as sunstroke. They can prostrate you. He takes another grateful gulp of the vile beer. When in Rome . . . and when in Australia even more so,
since tolerance for different norms is not high. He can imagine what might happen to a man who asked for a glass of ouzo and a bowl of olives in an outback pub. He closes his eyes tightly and sees a red network of rivers branching and circling, a bloodshot photograph, perhaps, of all the dry watercourses he has passed in the last few weeks.
When he blinks, he can distinguish Bernie’s face up close, and further afield a watchful and silent circle: three men leaning against the bar, others at the pool table, others on stools near the shuttered windows. Not a sound, not a movement, all eyes on him. He wonders, for a moment, what it would be like not to feel foreign, marked. In Australia, it is not only a matter of birth. Nick has been in the country since the age of seven; Angelo was born here. I’d like to live without a hyphen, Angelo said to him once. Greek-Australian. It never went away.
‘I would like a room,’ Nick says, self-conscious under so many eyes, knowing his vowels slide out with a slippery mix of accents: broad Australian, which he thinks he has managed rather well in the brief and formulaic bar talk, and something foreign, an undertow of unplaceable sounds. But what really gives him away are the grammatical constructions. Every time. It is because, with his parents, he always spoke Greek at home. Even after a lifetime, the sentences can slip out with a wrangled formality, especially when he is trying hardest to be unremarkable.
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