The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  Charlie walked across the caff. He opened the door to the street loud with traffic. Only then did he turn to look back at her.

  ‘I’m out of here.’

  2

  Charlie went back to Cape Solander. He walked up the walkway, noting the frayed rope that needed to be replaced, exactly as it had been when he had left two years before. He banged with his knuckles on the door, from which even more paint had flaked in weary surrender to the ever-present sea air. He saw that Hoss still hadn’t chucked out the dead plant in the pot. It hadn’t been much to look at before; now it had weathered to little more than a spike that might have been anything.

  It eased his spirit that nothing seemed to have changed. This included Hoss, who opened the door and looked at him. His features winked and jerked, scowling and smiling, before he turned back into the house, leaving the door open behind him. Over his shoulder he chucked words like gravel.

  ‘You took your time.’

  Charlie picked up his case and followed him inside, shutting the door behind him.

  He stood at the salt-smeared window, the familiar and easy squalor of the house about him, and thought he had never been more pleased to be anywhere in his life.

  ‘Racin’ at Randwick this arvo,’ Hoss said.

  ‘Beauty!’

  No need to say more; to Randwick they would go.

  It was great to be back.

  3

  For a week Charlie heard nothing. He made no attempt to contact Linda or her family. Then, early one morning, before Charlie had even had time to rub the sleep out of his eyes, Uncle Leo pitched up, shoving square-shouldered along the narrow walkway as though intending to hurl the house and all it contained into the sea.

  Charlie met him at the door.

  ‘This nonsense is going to stop,’ Leo announced.

  His voice was loud enough to frighten the gulls but didn’t frighten Charlie, who’d had Uncle Leo in chunks, like Chloe and the rest of Linda’s bloody family.

  ‘I got nothing to say to you. Linda wants to speak to me, tell her to come herself.’

  ‘She can’t. She’s got to look after the shop, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘She can get someone to help out. You’re so keen to stick your beak in, why don’ you stand in for her yourself?’

  ‘I’m warning you, Charlie …’ Leo’s face was plum red.

  ‘She knows the way. She’s been here before.’

  And shut the door on Leo’s petulance.

  Leo shouted and hammered on the wooden panels which shivered but did not open. Eventually he stamped away, breathing Armageddon.

  ‘Uncle of hers,’ Charlie said in explanation.

  Hoss nodded. ‘Big shot, is he?’

  ‘Got mates on the council.’

  ‘Best make sure the rates are up to date, then.’

  Hoss dug the receipts out of some dark corner, but everything was okay, so off to Randwick they went, where they celebrated Uncle Leo’s defeat by winning fifty quid.

  On the way home they bought themselves two bottles of Scotch, and that night, drunk as owls, they stood by the open window and threw large words and larger promises at the roaring sea.

  ‘Bully boy thinks he can play his games with us, does he? Got another bloody think coming, in that case.’

  And glug went the bottles, tilting in unison beneath the round eye of a patient and philosophic moon.

  The morning brought a hangover and Linda, fit to be tied.

  ‘Come in,’ said Charlie, but she was already in, galloping like a squadron of cavalry at the charge.

  Hoss gave her one horrified look and took off, muttering something about having to see a bloke.

  Linda watched his rapidly retreating back. ‘Can’t face me. Ashamed, I suppose.’

  ‘Can’t stand you, that’s why. Never could.’

  ‘Same pigsty as always,’ she said, glaring around her.

  ‘He’d be sorry to hear you don’t like it. He arranged it specially for you.’

  ‘Dunno how you can bear it.’

  ‘Can tidy up for us, you feel that strongly about it. Wash the floor, too, while you’re at it.’

  Her eyes stabbed him. ‘I’ve no time for this nonsense. I’ve one question. When are you coming home?’

  ‘We haven’t got a home, Linda. We never had one. Maybe that’s the trouble.’

  They slung words at each other like skewers, hoping to hurt. Eventually, by what seemed mutual consent, they simmered down.

  She looked at him, as though hoping he could pull a miracle out of his trouser pocket. ‘What we going to do?’

  ‘It’s no good,’ he told her. ‘We’re not on the same wavelength. You should have married Randall Peach.’

  Which he saw hurt her more than all the hard words together, because it was true.

  ‘I didn’t want to marry Randall. It was you I wanted.’

  ‘You been seeing him, though.’

  Silence.

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  Her lips barely moved, her eyes watching a spot on the floor. ‘A bit, maybe.’

  More than a bit. But there was no point hammering at it.

  ‘It wasn’t either of us you wanted,’ Charlie told her. ‘It was romance. Maybe I did, too. And what did we get? A prison.’

  He’d wanted someone who’d be happy with the way he was, whereas Linda had wanted someone altogether different, someone who didn’t exist. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely her fault. He had become pretty sloppy over the years: you only had to look around the house to see that.

  ‘I guess it was just a mistake,’ he said.

  No matter what they called it, they were stuck with it: to the Catholic Callaghans, divorce was a no-no.

  ‘I want you back,’ she said.

  ‘You weren’t happy, any more than I was.’

  ‘Auntie Chlo won’t leave me alone.’

  ‘Maybe you should stick some poison in her tea.’ He wasn’t even sure he was joking. ‘Who gives a stuff about Auntie Chlo?’

  ‘Easy to say. Anyway, it’s not right for husband and wife to live apart.’

  Charlie was having none of that. ‘But okay for you to screw Randall Peach behind my back?’

  Outrage stained her face. ‘How dare you say such a thing?’

  ‘It’s the truth.’ Although he felt he had shamed himself as well as Linda by putting words to it. ‘Right for me never to see my own daughter, is it? Right for me to work all day in that caff? Bloody skivvy, that’s all I was. Well, I’m through with it.’

  ‘You think you’re any better off in this rat hole?’ She glared with red-hot eyes at the cluttered room, the tangle of clothes and old papers. She would have set the lot on fire if she could, and told him so, spitting in fury. ‘Smell a lot sweeter if I did, and all.’

  It was hopeless. There was sadness in admitting it but, even after they had finally stopped yelling at each other, neither could see any way forward.

  ‘It’s no good, is it?’ Linda was resigned.

  ‘I reckon.’

  ‘No divorce, mind. Nothing like that.’

  Auntie Chlo wouldn’t like it?

  Charlie decided not to say it; words only hurt yourself, in the end. Both of them were tired of fighting. They had a cup of tea, quite peacefully, like a couple of mates. Charlie was even sad to see her go. He thought she was, too, but her last words before setting off along the walkway struck a note of warning.

  ‘Dunno how Uncle Leo’s going to take it.’

  Divorce or not, the failure of the marriage couldn’t be kept secret forever; to have such a thing happen in his family might damage Leo’s cosy relationship with the archbishop, or cardinal, or even the bloody Pope, for all Charlie knew.

  ‘Nothing he can do about it.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure of that.’

  Linda even looked anxious; funny how the wheel had turned: from lovers to enemies and now back, if not to lovers, at least to a measure of concern for each other. Too late, of cours
e, or was it? Was it ever too late to feel kindness and compassion for another person?

  Leo did what he could, which fortunately wasn’t much. He tried to get the council on their case, claiming that the house was a health hazard, but Hoss had freehold title and his rates were up to date. Even for Leo Callaghan, the authorities weren’t game to chuck a legal owner off his turf just because he chose to live in what some would have called a pigsty: half the council would have been in danger of eviction, had that been the case.

  4

  The years passed pretty much as they had before. The two mates haunted the tracks, they won a bit here, lost a bit there, they no longer expected to be talked of as kings of the track. They led an aimless existence that satisfied men whose ambitions had been discarded long ago. They knew that they would never amount to much, and were content.

  Charlie bumped into Linda from time to time. They found conversation difficult, were stranger to each other than if they’d never met at all.

  Charlie did what he could to keep in touch with his daughter. He asked about her; he sent her a card at birthdays and Christmas; for a few years he got one back, firstly in Linda’s handwriting, then once in a young child’s laboured hand. After that he heard no more, but the card Deirdre had written he kept in its original envelope in a drawer with other odds and ends he’d accumulated over the years.

  Eventually the time Charlie had spent away from Cape Solander became like a myth, very faint and far away. He read in the paper that Auntie Chloe had passed on: ‘Beloved by All’. Good riddance, he thought. I hope hell’s hot enough for her. Leo was still alive, still up to his ears in chicanery and good works: there was an old bastard who would live forever.

  Then one morning Linda came stumbling along the walkway as though her world had fallen to pieces around her and Charlie’s life, once again, was changed.

  5

  ‘Dead?’ He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘How can Deirdre be dead?’

  Very easily, it seemed. She had been on some summer camp with a bunch of other kids, up in the Blue Mountains. They’d gone on a hike with a teacher to a place called the Grand Canyon. The track had been steep, masses of boulders at the bottom with a river running through them. Tricky, but nothing they couldn’t have been expected to handle. Deirdre had slipped, falling backwards off one rock and hitting her head on another. She had been dead before they could get help.

  The teacher, it seemed, was out of his mind with guilt and grief. Linda would have boiled him in oil while Charlie was distraught at the loss of a daughter he would never now have a chance to know.

  Linda wanted him to come to the funeral which, naturally enough, was going to be held at the Callaghans’ church.

  White shirt and black tie, shoes gleaming for the occasion, he walked down the walkway to the taxi he’d ordered: he had no wish to arrive hot and dusty at his only child’s funeral.

  Tears and black robes around the grave like an open wound in the sterile earth; rending sobs as the bearers lowered the coffin; some monseignor in a fancy get-up put in his two-pennyworth. Linda’s face was white and tear-stained, Charlie not far from weeping himself. At last, thank God, it was over.

  Afterwards there was what one cheerful soul called a good old Irish wake. Booze and laughter and backslapping and then Uncle Leo, of all people, came up to Charlie.

  ‘Sorry, lad. I still think you were wrong to walk out on the little lady the way you did, but perhaps you had your reasons. We’ll say no more about it. All I know, no one should have to go through what the two of you are feeling now.’

  So that Charlie wondered whether the talk and show, the booze flowing like tears, were not another way of expressing grief, of masking faces staring with stoic acceptance into the grim reality of loss.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and returned Leo’s handshake.

  6

  ‘Want to come back with me for tea?’ Linda ventured afterwards.

  ‘Won’t that cause a problem?’

  Something that might have been a smile touched her face: pale and watery, but a smile nonetheless. ‘We’re married, after all.’

  So back to tea Charlie went. The same rooms over the same caff.

  ‘I know it’s cramped,’ she said, ‘but it seems like home somehow.’

  Charlie asked what might have been a dangerous question. ‘You still seeing Randall Peach?’

  It seemed that Randall was history. Married himself and moved, she thought, to Queensland.

  ‘Somewhere up there …’

  As though it were darkest Africa. Charlie thought of the Cloud Forest; it hadn’t crossed his mind for years but he knew his feelings had never changed: he did not dare go looking for it. Stay away and it would always be there for him; go and he might lose it forever. He’d lost enough in life; he wanted no more.

  ‘You want to see her room?’

  It was the small room, little larger than a cupboard, which in Charlie’s day they had used to store things for which there had been no room anywhere else. There was a skylight: that was new. A bed against the wall with a tattered-looking teddy propped against the pillow, a few children’s books, a pair of rollerskates tucked away in one corner, a lugubrious-looking painting of the Sacred Heart. It should have meant nothing to him at all, the mute record of a life in which he had never had any part, yet he found tears in his eyes.

  To die, so young, and for nothing … To be deprived of any share in his child’s existence … It was more than unfair; it was wrong, as though the worth of all the world had been brought to nothing, as the child herself had been brought to nothing.

  TWENTY-TWO

  1

  Deirdre remained with them all evening.

  ‘You never thought she was yours, did you?’

  The question could have been confrontational but was not. Neither was Charlie’s reply.

  ‘Before she was born, I wondered. Never afterwards. The likeness was too strong.’

  Silence for a minute, while Linda considered his answer.

  ‘I wasn’t sure, either,’ she said at length. ‘Not beforehand.’

  There. For the first time their doubts were in the open.

  ‘Was that why you were so keen for us to get married?’

  Again the question was non-confrontational, simply the seeking of the truth that, even at this stage, might offer healing.

  Linda managed a lopsided smile. ‘This rate I’ll have no secrets left.’

  After all that had passed between them, all the years of separation, it was surprising how much it still hurt to know that he had been used.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘You do not see. That was only part of it. I had a baby coming. I thought it was yours; hoped it was, if you can believe that. But I couldn’t be sure. Randall seemed to mesmerise me. It only happened once, but that’s all it takes, isn’t it? So I couldn’t be sure. But I would never have married him, not in a million years. It was you I wanted, from the first.’

  The odd thing was that he believed her. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you were steady, maybe. Docile, too.’

  ‘Docile?’ It sounded like an insult.

  ‘I certainly never sussed you out as a bloke man enough to walk out on me.’ A dry laugh. ‘Got that wrong, didn’t I?’

  ‘You asked for it.’

  ‘I know. Even at the time I knew, but I didn’t seem able to stop myself.’ Again the rueful laugh, a signal of amusement or perhaps pain. ‘Public servants get used to pushing people about. I suppose I never got out of the habit.’

  They sat in silence in the little room that had seen so much anger and pain in their earlier life here, and the memories were without the power to wound either of them any longer.

  ‘You seeing anyone else?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. You?’

  ‘Only the horses.’

  ‘Would you —’ And was silent.

  ‘Would I what?’

  ‘I’ve never been to a
race meeting.’

  ‘Like to try it?’

  ‘Do you think I should? Some would say it wasn’t right. Too soon after …’

  Again her words faded, as though she were seeking her way through mist and was uncertain of the path.

  ‘Moping won’t bring her back to life.’

  ‘Give me a couple of weeks. Then I’ll tell you.’

  2

  There was the painting of a woman.

  There was an exhibition, commemorating some artist Charlie had never heard of. She’d been a big deal, apparently, had died not that long before, but the interesting thing about her was that Hoss claimed her as some sort of relly.

  ‘You? Related to a famous artist?’

  A three-legged nag winning the Melbourne Cup would have seemed more likely.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ Hoss seemed willing to be punchy about it, then smiled, and winked, and scowled. ‘Not a real relly, maybe.’

  ‘What you on about, then?’

  Charlie knew damn-all about Hoss’s family or background. He’d never asked and Hoss had volunteered nothing. Now he discovered that Hoss was vaguely connected with the Widdecombe family that owned vast acreages somewhere in the Hunter Valley.

  ‘No dough on my side of the family, mind.’

  Which came as no surprise.

  ‘How does this artist woman come into it?’

  It seemed that the artist’s sister, or aunt, or someone had married one of the Widdecombes, back in the last century. ‘Dunno much about it, really. Thought you might, though.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Had some Frog name, didn’t she? Hang on a sec …’ He ferreted through a pile of old newspapers, eventually flourished one triumphantly. ‘Here you go …’

  Charlie’s curiosity was aroused. He looked at the item advertising the exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

  ‘A Retrospective …’

  Whatever the hell that meant. And then the artist’s name: Marie Desmoulins.

  ‘French name, sure enough. What was she doing in Australia?’