The Boundless Sublime

by Lili Wilkinson

  Daddy? What was he, five? ‘And your mum?’

  ‘I don’t have a mother.’ He said it simply, matter-of-fact.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘You weren’t prying,’ said Fox. ‘Being truly alive means being completely honest with everyone. Including yourself.’

  I had a million questions, and no idea where to start. Fox was like a box of puzzle pieces, with no picture on the lid to guide me.

  ‘Are you being completely honest with yourself, Ruby?’

  The question caught me off-guard. My mind searched for something to say to distract him, change the flow of conversation, but my mouth betrayed me and told the truth.

  ‘No.’

  Fox waited, watching me with patient eyes.

  I twisted a serviette in my hands. Could I tell him? Could I say the words out loud? Would the world end? Would Fox turn his beautiful face away in disgust?

  I glanced around the café. About half the tables were occupied – pensioners enjoying an afternoon coffee, a few truant schoolkids. A man in a taxi-driver’s uniform. The waitress glanced over at our table. My throat jammed closed. I couldn’t.

  Fox pushed his chair back and stood, tugging me up with him. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘I know somewhere.’

  I nodded. He headed for the door.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘We have to pay.’

  Fox blinked. ‘Oh,’ he said, and his cheeks coloured. ‘I don’t— I didn’t think …’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll get it.’

  Fox followed me to the counter, where I pulled out my wallet and handed the waitress a twenty-dollar note. She counted out the change, as Fox watched, fascinated.

  ‘May I?’

  I handed him the ten-dollar note and a few coins. He rubbed them all with his fingers, held them up to the light, smelled them. The waitress glanced at me and made a That guy is nuts face. I felt a weird surge of protectiveness, and steered Fox out of the café.

  ‘I thought it would be different,’ he said quietly, staring at the money. ‘More beautiful. More dangerous. But it’s so … mundane.’

  He handed me back the note and coins.

  ‘Fox,’ I said. ‘Was that the first time you’ve handled money?’

  ‘It’s strange,’ he said, his brow creasing. ‘That people suffer so much, do such ugly things, all because of something so trivial.’

  He laced his fingers in mine, and led me down the street to the park.

  It was a grey, desolate day, and the icy wind was keeping all but the keenest dog walkers and joggers from the park. The trees were bare and the grass was trampled and muddy underfoot. Fox led me to the pond, an artificial mini-lake populated with straggly reeds and a few ducks. We sat down on a park bench that faced the water.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Fox asked, his eyes shining. ‘I feel so in love when I come here.’

  I swallowed. ‘In love?’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘Who are you in love with?’

  He looked at me, his eyes thoughtful. ‘It depends,’ he said. ‘On what I’m thinking about. Sometimes I come here and I feel totally and utterly in love with ducks. Sometimes I feel as if I’m in love with all of humanity. Sometimes I’m in love with a single leaf or flower. But today … Today, Ruby, I feel like I’m in love with you.’

  For a moment, the darkness fell away, leaving me pink and exposed. My heart pounded and my mouth turned dry.

  ‘My little brother died,’ I blurted out. ‘And it’s my fault.’

  Fox didn’t say anything.

  ‘I was supposed to pick him up from soccer practice. Mum was working, and Dad had been on night shift. I was supposed to pick Anton up at six. But I didn’t. I forgot. I was with my friends. We hung around talking after school and I lost track of time. There was a guy there I liked – Ali. I was trying to impress him. He offered me a drag of his cigarette and I took one, even though I never smoke. I nearly choked, and he laughed at me. I didn’t hear my phone ring.’ I took a deep breath. ‘When Anton couldn’t get in touch with me, he called Dad. Except Dad wasn’t home. He was at the pub, with some of the guys from his work. He’d been drinking all day – since he clocked off work that morning.’

  I felt my chest starting to heave, and struggled to draw breath.

  ‘Anton went running over when he saw Dad’s car pulling up. But Dad was driving too fast. He tried to swerve …’

  Fox still didn’t say anything. Did he hate me, now that he knew the truth?

  ‘They wanted to let Dad out on bail until the trial, but he refused. He said he didn’t deserve to be out in the world. He’s in a remand centre now. I don’t know exactly where. Mum sort of fell apart. It’s like she’s been sleepwalking ever since. My family is broken, and it’s my fault. All because I wanted to show off to some stupid boy.’

  I took a deep breath and stole a look at Fox. He was staring out across the pond. He certainly didn’t look revolted.

  ‘What do you see, when you look out here?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Um.’ I looked around. Wasn’t Fox going to say anything about what I’d told him? ‘The pond, I guess. Trees.’

  ‘What do you notice about the trees?’

  I squirmed. ‘They have no leaves. It’s winter, so everything looks dead.’

  I turned back to Fox and saw the hint of a smile tweak the corner of his mouth. ‘Look again,’ he said. ‘Look closer.’

  I did. And I realised that the trees weren’t all bare at all. There were pink and green buds starting to swell on every branch. Winter was nearly over. Beneath the trees, green spears were pushing through the soil, spears that would soon become crocuses and daffodils.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, softly.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Fox asked. ‘Do you feel different, now that you’ve told me?’

  ‘I—’ I took another deep breath. ‘I feel … better. Sort of cleaner, like I’ve opened a window to let stale air out.’

  ‘See?’ said Fox. ‘Honesty. Honesty will free you from the weights that tether you to your sadness.’

  ‘But that doesn’t change what I did.’

  ‘You can’t change that. No matter how bad you feel.’

  ‘I don’t think Mum will ever forgive me,’ I said, my voice barely more than a whisper.

  Fox reached over and brushed my cheek with his fingers, delivering a pulse of electricity. ‘Then you’ll have to forgive yourself instead.’

  If anyone else had said that, I would have dismissed it as impossible. But with Fox … with Fox, everything seemed possible.

  ‘Come and have dinner with us,’ said Fox. ‘I want you to meet my family.’

  Dinner. Making small talk with strangers. Questions. More questions. Being polite and normal and human. Smiling and passing the butter. The thought of it was suffocating. I shook my head, but couldn’t quite bring myself to refuse. To see where Fox lived … to puzzle together the pieces of his mysterious life. Could I really turn that chance down?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Fox. ‘You don’t have to talk. You can just listen. Nobody will pressure you. We don’t work that way.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘And I’ll be there with you, the whole time,’ said Fox. ‘I won’t leave your side. Please.’

  I swallowed my terror. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll come.’

  3

  ‘You live here?’ I said, staring up at the house.

  It was old and huge, built of stately red brick with lacy fringes of white Victorian latticework. High walls surrounded a dense jungle of garden. It looked like a house out of a fairytale.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Fox, leading me up a winding, overgrown path towards the verandah.

  ‘I can’t believe I’ve never noticed this place before,’ I said. It was only a ten-minute walk from my house.

  ‘You can’t see much from the footpath because of the wall,’ said Fox. ‘Welling says we should take it down and put up something more welcomin
g, but Lib doesn’t want to.’

  Who were Lib and Welling? I’d find out soon enough. My heart was hammering as we climbed the steps to the green front door. It was slightly ajar. Fox pushed it wide open and led me in.

  The house was even more beautiful inside. I’d expected it to be posh and opulent, but instead everything seemed simple, clean and calm. The walls were painted white, and pale floorboards were lined with rugs made of some natural fibre. White linen curtains fell in front of the windows, and candles glowed on mantelpieces and side-tables. It was like a day spa. I half expected to be handed a glass of cucumber water and a terry-towelling robe.

  But there was a warmth to it. The house was lived in. This was a home.

  I thought of Mum sitting grey on our couch, a burning cigarette dangling from her inert fingers. I thought of Aunty Cath, with her jingling bracelets and bright clothes. I thought of my piano, silent under a layer of dust. It all felt a million miles away from this tranquil oasis.

  ‘Come on,’ said Fox. ‘I’ll introduce you to everyone.’

  He led me through a serene living room and down a hallway to an enormous gleaming kitchen, full of afternoon sun glinting on copper bowls.

  I counted five people in the kitchen, all adults. They were working at various chores – peeling and chopping vegetables, mixing a dough-like substance, measuring out spoonfuls of something that looked like powdered stock. Everyone had a job to do, and everyone seemed … content. Nobody was stressed or rushing or bossing the others around. They all wore similar clothes, loose-fitting shirts or tunics in neutral shades of cream, grey and beige, and dark trousers. I couldn’t see any brand names or labels anywhere.

  One or two of them glanced up as Fox guided me forward.

  ‘Everyone, this is Ruby. She’s staying for dinner.’

  Five pairs of eyes turned on me, and I wanted to burrow down into the ground like a blind rodent. I’d spent months trying to move unseen, keeping my head down. If I could slip past everyone, maybe nobody would notice the parts of me that were missing.

  A grey-haired woman dried her hands on a tea towel and took a step towards us. She was tall and thin and had clearly once been very beautiful. Her face was rumpled into deep lines, her cheeks and eyes slightly sunken. Her brown eyes had lit up when she saw Fox, but her smile faltered when he introduced me. But then she was beaming again, and I wondered if I’d imagined the fleeting look of sadness. She stepped forward and enveloped me in a hug – a real hug, not the feeble, chestless embraces I’d had from relatives and awkward fellow teens. She smelled faintly of sweat and vegetables and something else, something sweet and natural. I resisted for a moment, but it was nice to be held, and against my will my body relaxed.

  She pulled back, still holding me by the shoulders, and stared down into my face. She held me there for a moment, considering me, the smile still firmly in place. ‘Welcome,’ she said at last.

  Her name was Lib, and she seemed to be the matriarch of the house. She introduced me to the others. I shook hands with a brown-skinned, good-looking man in his thirties called Welling, and received another hug from Stan, a wiry old guy with white hair in a long ponytail. Maggie was short and Asian – she was in her early twenties, and the way she grinned at me immediately reminded me of Minah. The last was Val, a giant, pale man with a scarred face, who ducked his head when Lib said his name and didn’t make eye contact with me.

  Stan winked at me. ‘Ruby, we were discussing the relationship between the mind and the body, yeah?’

  I looked to Fox for help.

  Fox tilted his head. ‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The mind has no physical form. You can’t see it, or weigh it, or measure it with a ruler. So what is it? How does it interact with the physical world?’

  ‘Ahah! There is no physical world,’ said Stan, pointing at Fox with his kitchen knife. ‘Everything we experience is a fabrication of the mind. Who says the things I see and feel and taste are the same things that you see and feel and taste?’

  ‘Of course there’s a physical world,’ said Maggie, rolling her eyes. ‘It’s pretty arrogant to assume that everything exists only for you. That if you stopped breathing, the whole world would just puff out of existence.’

  ‘If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it,’ I heard myself say, ‘does it make a sound?’

  I felt my cheeks burn red. What a stupid thing to say. The biggest philosophical cliché in the book.

  ‘Ruby,’ said Fox, frowning, ‘that’s an amazing question.’ His face broke into a proud grin as he turned to the others. ‘Isn’t it?’

  He’d never heard it before. The others nodded and smiled, a little indulgently. The question obviously wasn’t new to them, so they weren’t all as sheltered as Fox. I looked around at each face. It didn’t seem like any of them were related. A little piece of the Fox puzzle clicked into place. It was a commune. Fox lived in a commune. One of those hippy places where everyone meditated and the kids were home-schooled. That explained a lot. I wondered if they were some sort of New-Age Christians.

  The conversation flowed on to other topics, and I kept my mouth shut, afraid of embarrassing myself further. Lib handed me a knife to chop up celery. Fox was sent to set the table, and I listened as the others debated big ideas. Stan was talking about atoms and particles and how they behaved in predictable ways.

  ‘They follow rules,’ he said. ‘They’re probabilistic.’

  ‘So?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘So if we’re made up of atoms, and atoms obey the rules of nature, can we really be said to have free will?

  Welling chuckled. ‘People are more than atoms and particles.’

  ‘Are they?’ replied Stan. ‘What else is there?’

  And they all laughed, as if Stan had said something hilarious. I smiled – the laughter was contagious. But I had no idea what had been so funny.

  Fox came back in, his eyes going straight to me, his brows quirking a little to check that I was okay. I smiled at him and gave a little nod. I saw Lib’s eyes dart from Fox to me and back to Fox.

  ‘Dinnertime!’ she said, a little too brightly, and I wondered what she thought of me. Did she think I wasn’t good enough for Fox? She was probably right. Nobody was good enough for Fox.

  We filed into the dining room and gathered around a large wooden table. Candles twinkled over an iron fireplace, and the room was warm and cheerful. Bowls and platters of vegetables were placed on the table, and Lib gestured for me to take a seat.

  Fox walked around the table with a large jug, pouring water into everyone’s glass. The water looked slightly cloudy. When he got to me, he paused and glanced over at Lib.

  ‘Bottled water for Ruby, I think,’ she said.

  Fox nodded, put the jug down and left the room, returning with one of the plastic bottles of water they handed out. I looked at him.

  ‘We drink a kind of mineral water,’ explained Stan. ‘Somewhat of an acquired taste. We don’t want to scare you off when we’ve only just met you!’

  The meal was wholesome and tasty. Raw spinach and almond rissoles were drizzled with sage-infused oil. There were two kinds of salads topped with nuts and seeds, and artichokes stuffed with avocado puree. Everything tasted a little over-salted. I remembered Fox adding salt to his apple juice at the café, and wondered why such seemingly healthy people consumed so much salt. Probably a weird commune theory that sodium cured cancer or something.

  The conversation stayed philosophical, and I listened intently as they discussed systems of morality, whether it was possible to be truly objective, and the definition of reality. The only people who didn’t contribute were me and Val, who spent the meal mechanically shovelling food into his mouth, rarely looking up from his plate. Every now and then, Fox pressed his knee against mine under the table and we’d glance at each other, sharing secret smiles.

  ‘Well, Ruby?’ asked Lib, once the meal was over and Welling and Val were clearing away the dishes. ‘What would you like to kno
w?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I asked.

  Lib smiled. ‘We’re sure you have lots of questions for us.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘Anything,’ said Lib. ‘You’ll find only honesty here.’

  ‘Are you Christians?’ I asked.

  Stan laughed. Lib shook her head. ‘No, Ruby,’ she said. ‘We’re not religious at all.’

  ‘Religion is for the weak,’ said Stan. ‘We’re not interested in make-believe gods floating around on clouds. We believe in science. The science of possibility.’

  Hippies then, I guessed. They were probably into yoga and homeopathy. I thought of Helena and her healing amber beads. She’d claimed they were validated by science, too.

  ‘What about the water bottles?’ I asked. ‘Why do you hand them out?’

  ‘People get thirsty,’ said Lib. ‘Water is better than some awful sugary soft drink.’

  ‘You’re trying to convince people to be healthier?’

  Lib nodded.

  ‘Imagine how much better the world would be if everyone wasn’t so muddled by the poisons they consume daily,’ said Stan.

  I frowned. ‘So … why isn’t there any other information on the label? About your message? Or a link to a website?’

  ‘What’s a website?’ asked Fox.

  I glanced at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.

  ‘We aren’t a charity,’ said Stan with a shrug. ‘If people aren’t actively searching for the truth, there’s no website that’s gonna help them.’

  ‘But then why hand out the water bottles?’

  ‘People get thirsty.’

  The whole thing made no sense to me, but I didn’t want to be rude. Instead I offered to help clean up, and Maggie and I were sent into the kitchen to wash the dishes. Maggie filled the sink with cold water – no detergent – and swirled plates and bowls around in it, handing them to me once they were clean to be dried. I thought of Aunty Cath stacking our dishwasher at home, filling the dispensers with detergent and rinse-aid. Cold water seemed to do the job just fine.

  ‘So,’ said Maggie, giving me an evaluating look that reminded me even more of Minah. ‘What do you think?’