by JH Fletcher
‘A caff,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ve always fancied.’
He couldn’t see himself in a caff. Or anywhere inside four walls, come to that: he’d always been an outdoor man. Insofar as he’d thought of it at all, he’d visualised life going on pretty much as it had before, but with Linda trotting off every day to the office. He’d thought he could sweet-talk Hoss into letting them use a corner of the cliff house, at least for the time being, but Linda was having none of that. She had been delighted by the situation of the cliff house; as for living there … Most definitely not. She had made up her mind what they were going to do and what Linda wanted, he was beginning to discover, Linda got.
Linda found the caff she fancied in the inner city, with a couple of rooms over it. Charlie stood in the doorway, his back to the shop, and stared about him. All around, the grey streets, buildings, people extended endlessly, sealing off light and air.
‘I’d feel like I was suffocating …’
Linda was not to be put off. ‘You’ll soon be used to it. Plenty of people means plenty of money. It’ll be lovely, you’ll see. Just the three of us …’
Three? Oh yes. Right.
‘How do we pay for it?’
‘Uncle Leo will help out.’
Uncle Leo was the big wheel in the family. He had Interests: in business, and politics. He had friends. He served on the boards of several church charities, had even had tea with the bishop. Or someone.
Charlie remembered Marcel Chantemps, whom he had dumped in the harbour, and Wendy’s father, who had thought Charlie not good enough for his daughter and had said so; Charlie had spent his life guarding his back against people like Uncle Leo.
He expressed doubts, but Linda swept them aside. ‘Of course Uncle Leo will help us.’
So he did, but on what terms Charlie never heard. No reason why he should; on one point everyone was very clear: the caff was Linda’s project and would be her property. Charlie would work for her or, as she put it, give her a hand.
Hoss, making an effort, put aside his glum look and suggested they go to the track together, but it was no use.
‘I got no time, mate. I’ve got furniture to buy, the place needs painting, there’s a coffee machine to put in. I’ve got to go to the church, fix up the service, speak to the priest, organise the choir …’
To say nothing of the million permits the wartime authorities imposed.
‘No time?’ Hoss shook his head. He was no longer resentful but sad for the friend who had strayed into what he was convinced would be catastrophe. ‘Never heard nuthin like it …’
And went off to the track by himself. While Charlie, tangled in a grey maze of days and streets, painted walls, heaved beds and tables around the corners of the narrow stairs and wondered what had happened to his life.
He was still wondering on Saturday 28 April 1945, the day — as they later learnt — that the bodies of Benito Mussolini and his mistress were hung up by the heels in Milan. It was also the day that Charlie Mandale watched his bride come floating down the aisle towards him in a cloud of tulle, with all the promises and threats of the future in her face as she smiled triumphantly about her at those who had come, perhaps, to wish them well or at least nailed down: scowling Aunt Chloe, grim in sanctimonious black; Uncle Leo staring at the rafters as though planning a bid on the roof. Linda had a knowing, challenging, stick-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it look that would have put any bloke on his guard, had he been willing to read the signs.
Charlie was not; he saw her coming, saw her smile, radiant yet timid, through the diaphanous veil, and the hollow place in his stomach filled with affection and a sense of tenderness and humility that this woman was willing to entrust herself to him.
It was what he remembered best about the service; that, and Hoss at his side, all Adam’s apple and pointed nose, strangling in what was probably the first collar and tie he had worn in his life, the best man who was more like a worst man or at least a man as out of place as it was possible for anyone to be; his jerking and twitching made the red-haired priest, a carrot in robes, glare more than once as the service progressed.
Linda took her hand from her uncle’s arm and manacled herself, side by side and thigh by thigh, to the man she had not only selected but rescued from the slum-like hovel in which she had found him.
Uncle Leo thought Charlie a poor choice. He had favoured Randall Peach, who he said had a head on his shoulders, but Randall Peach was not a gullible man. No, she needed a father for her child, and Charlie was very suitable: a compliant soul who would dance willingly to her tune. Charlie would do very well.
2
The clang of church bells was followed at once by the clang and clamour of a world that would no longer be denied. In his years on the cliff, Charlie — he understood it now — had been in hiding from existence, his own more than anyone else’s. Now the existence of others came through the caff door to greet him, to demand attention, sometimes to assail him with hot words over the quality of pies that Linda had bought on the cheap from one of Uncle Leo’s mates.
‘If I give ’em to me cat he’d be a bloody cannibal …’
Quite likely they were right. Not that it made any difference to Linda, who in any case preferred to preside from the rooms upstairs and was seldom in the shop.
‘There’s plenty of others out there. They can piss off, they feel like that about it.’
He had always admired Linda’s poise and manners. The public servant working in an office, always well-spoken, always nice, had seemed to him a real lady. No longer. Almost overnight she became strident; as the months passed, he began to think he had never known her at all.
To begin with, he blamed it on the baby. Linda certainly did; long before it was born, she was holding it responsible for everything: for not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, for being too tired to make Charlie’s tea after the caff closed its doors, for her unwillingness to help. Even the sex, which in the early days had been a triumphant blare of trumpets, became too much of a hassle.
In blaming the unborn child, she was also, by extension, blaming him.
‘All right for a man …’
It followed him through the day like a screech of galahs. It became her anthem and his dirge.
Things’d be right after the baby, he told himself, but had come to doubt it.
3
A week before the child was due, Charlie came upstairs halfway through the afternoon to find Linda taking the weight off her belly in a stained armchair they’d picked up cheap through another of Uncle Leo’s mates.
Linda stared up at him and he read defiance in her face. By the side of the chair stood a suitcase.
He looked at it, and at her. ‘What’s going on?’
‘You didn’ think I was going to stay here to have it, did you?’ Linda’s face was like stone. ‘I’m going to Auntie Chlo’s. Time like this, a woman needs other women.’
‘I thought you’d have it here,’ he said.
‘With only a man around? What could you do?’ Contemptuously, she dismissed the idea. She was in the mood, more and more familiar, where men were useful only to carry blame for the wrongs of the world. Which, from wars to periods, were all their fault. ‘Not that I’d expect a man to understand that …’
Charlie mumbled something about a midwife, but Linda was not listening.
‘Auntie Chlo will do what has to be done. Besides, I need my family around me.’ From which Charlie, it seemed, was excluded.
Charlie knew better than to argue. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he offered.
‘Don’t be daft! Who’ll look after the caff? Leo’s coming for me.’ She looked at the clock. ‘Any luck, he should be halfway here by now.’
Downstairs the doorbell rang as someone came into the shop.
‘You better get down there,’ Linda said out of her stone face.
Charlie looked at her and went, not in subservience but rage. He told himself Linda was right. It made sense, of course it d
id, yet in his heart he knew it was not right at all. It was wrong. To be excluded, even from this …
‘Yes?’
It was a young woman, after a packet of fags. She was pretty; she smiled at him and bent, taking her purse from the basket on the floor by her feet, and he saw the soft and tender swell of her breasts within the shadow of her dress.
After she had gone he stood with his hands on the counter, while a passing truck rattled the shopfront window. He barely heard it; he was staring at images. Only the other week he had come across a picture of the rainforest in a magazine; now he saw it again: a blessed sanctuary of silence, of ferns and dripping water, of green light filtered tenderly through the fronds of ferns.
He knew he had made a mistake. He was lost here, in the narrow shop looking out at the grey and narrow street filled with people he did not know. Even the air was grey. He thought of the girl who had come in for fags and how, when he had smiled at her, it had been the first time he had smiled all week.
He had to get out, while he still had the chance. He had to do what he had come around the world to do. He was still only in his twenties; he still had time. But he had to do it now, had to escape from this prison guarded by the stone figures of Auntie Chloe and Uncle Leo and a family for whom he did not exist. He had taken it for granted that he and Linda — his wife, for God’s sake — would form one unit, the nucleus of a family that in time would grow and become their personal world amid the worlds of others, interlocking yet separate, complete. He had been wrong. He had never succeeded in easing Linda out of her own family because she hadn’t wanted — had never intended, he thought now — to come. He was the man on the edge, the one who looked after the caff. Bitterly, he thought that was all he had ever been.
He would not think of Linda’s motives, because that might raise questions he did not want to face. The child was his; it had to be, otherwise he would have nothing. Yet the child was part of the trap. If he went north, he would have to leave it behind. How could he, when there remained at least the possibility that it was his own? And there remained the other problem that had troubled him before. If he abandoned his wife and the child, everything that made him know who he himself was, if he went north to find the Cloud Forest of his imaginings … He had been wrong about Broome; he had been wrong about the life on the cliffs; he was coming, increasingly, to believe he had been wrong about the marriage. If he abandoned it, if he cut loose and went north and found that in this, too, he had been wrong, he would have nothing at all, nor any prospect of anything. He dared not risk it.
There were other memories: the youth outraged by the martyrdom of Babette; the man willing to take his future in his fists and knock that slimy bastard Marcel Chantemps into the harbour; the deep plunge into the coolness of the waters off Penang. He was in his twenties, yet he looked back on these things like a man who had come to the end of his life. In a sense he had, because he knew that the life he now remembered was lost beyond hope of recall, and with it had taken the courage he would need to seize any possibility of a new life by the throat.
He would stay. He would remain in this grey world that he had chosen, with the wife who had perhaps chosen him. He would endure all these things, even the absence of love, because there would be love, in spite of everything. The child would be his. And always, by the simple act of not seeking it out, the Cloud Forest, too, would remain. Wally Bart had said it had sustained Charlie’s father through the horrors of the war. Now, perhaps, it would sustain him, too.
When Uncle Leo came shouldering his way through the door, minutes later, he stared curiously at Charlie’s face.
‘You bin cryin’?’ That’d be right, his expression said. Bloody sook.
‘Of course not.’
In darkness, dreams, too, could console.
TWENTY-ONE
1
Charlie was buried, with what remained of his life, in a job that he hated, a locality that choked his spirit, the very blood in his heart, a woman who he came rapidly to believe had despised him from the first and didn’t even have the decency to keep it to herself.
‘If you were half a man …’
There were times when Charlie suspected she was daring him to belt the living daylights out of her. Times, too, when he came close to doing it; but he never did. At first he had too much pride to let her see how she had damaged him; too much respect for himself to become a wife basher. Later he didn’t care enough to be bothered; although pain, always, remained.
The child in whom he had placed such store was born without difficulty: a girl of seven pounds ten ounces, Auntie Chloe told him with a sniff. Not a real Callaghan at all, she implied, whatever the birth certificate might say. Callaghans ran to big bones and beef, bonny babies weighing in at nine pounds and over. They had blonde hair and blue eyes; this child, a quarter Frog, after all, had none of these things. Pointed, dark features, slender limbs; she was reminiscent more of a flower than a side of beef, a runt. But what could you expect?
Deirdre — that, Linda informed him, was the name she had chosen after the hours of agony that she had undergone in order to produce this mouse of a child while Charlie, no doubt, was having fun with his mates — had his eyes and mouth; his colouring, too; there was no denying the parentage that had caused him such doubts.
He felt guilty that he should have doubted; delighted, too. He was quick to cradle the tiny creature in his arms, willing to crow in his pride and joy, but not for long: Auntie Chloe pounced at once, removing the creature — runt though it was, poor blood though it had, female though it lamentably was but, by evidence of the resentful and resistant flesh from which it had nevertheless emerged, still undeniably a Callaghan — from the embrace and probable germs of a man, and not even an Irishman at that, who might be the biological parent but whose undesirable influence would never, from the very first hours of the child’s life, be permitted to taint the air that she drew into her exploratory and no doubt still susceptible lungs.
‘Give her here …’
And bore her away. Deirdre might not be much, but she was theirs and would remain so.
Charlie objected but it did no good. Somewhere during his years of drift with Hoss, he had lost the knack of imposing his will on the world. To Linda, Charlie was easy meat, to be used and despised accordingly. Charlie was a man; he had the caff to run; he might be permitted to own neither wife nor child but was expected to support them. Linda had other, unspecified, responsibilities. She went out when she felt like it, never saying where she was going or when she’d be back. There was one occasion when she returned sleepy-eyed, smiling secretly, and Charlie was again tempted to knock her about a bit. Again he did not but had to hold himself back, while the blood pulsed in his head.
One day, things changed. Charlie was walking back from the bank. He normally went the direct way to reduce the time the caff was left unattended, but today, on a whim, he turned down a side road and climbed the stone steps at the end, granite like the surrounding buildings to match the prison-grey of his life. At the top of the steps was a little park, a handkerchief of worn grass patched with humble trees. From the park he could see, beyond the grey monotony of the intervening roofs, the blue spaces of the distant harbour. To see the sea again, even so far away, was like air to his lungs, his starved spirit. He stared at the harbour as at a vision of the blue and foam-bright freedom he had lost, and asked himself what the hell he was doing with his life.
He went back, still dazzled by the blue light of revelation, to find Linda, extraordinarily, at home and serving a cup of tea to an iron-faced woman in the caff.
‘And where have you been?’ she asked.
He looked at this woman to whom he was married and who possessed none — none! — of the attributes of a wife.
‘Out,’ he said.
He went through the caff and up the stairs to the cell-like rooms he had called home. Home! He stared in wonderment at the shabby furniture, the shabby years of his imprisonment where even the air was barr
ed to keep out breath or life.
I have been living in a jail of my own devising.
Outraged feet pounded up the stairs.
‘What you playing at?’
He looked at her, wondering how he could have been conned so easily, and for so long.
‘I’m thinking how right you’ve been.’
Her eyes glared suspicion. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’ve treated me like a fool all this time and you’ve been right. I have been a fool.’
Below them the doorbell clanged as someone came into the caff.
‘Best get down there,’ he told her. ‘Otherwise you might miss the trade.’
‘I’ve got to go out,’ she said. ‘I’m late already, thanks to you.’
‘Please yourself.’
He went into the bedroom and pulled his suitcase from the top of the lop-eared wardrobe. Linda, torn between money going to waste downstairs and what looked unpleasantly like a peasant’s revolt up here, dithered and screeched.
‘Charlie! What’s got into you?’
Charlie was no longer listening. He did not trouble to answer but took shirts and pants from the drawer and stowed them in the case.
Linda decided the risk of losing business needed more urgent attention than a husband who had clearly and inexplicably lost his marbles. She ran downstairs, raked in whatever fortune in copper coins the customer gave her, and came pounding up again in time to catch Charlie clipping the catches on the case. Which he lifted, smiling at her as she stood blocking his passage through the doorway.
‘I’m not letting you past until you tell me what’s going on.’
Charlie’s memory, dormant for so long, had returned. He was the man who had dumped Marcel Chantemps in the harbour, fought his way through a Broome cyclone. Still smiling, he walked directly at Linda, pushing her gently but firmly out of the way, and carried his suitcase down the stairs.
She hurled her voice at him like a spear. ‘What you think you’re doing?’
