by Fiona Capp
Ned walks out into the garden, blinded by the dazzle of the cut-glass light bouncing off the water that stretches all the way to the city and the shadowy hills off to his right.
‘Beautiful as ever,’ Mai says, almost bored. ‘What kept you?’
Ned imagines what it would have looked like millennia ago, before the last ice age, when the bay was a grassy plain. The spacious solitude of it. He remembers how happy he was as a teenager, sitting down there on the jetty, not caring if he caught anything or not. The possibility of it was what mattered, the sense of being perched on the rim of some great mystery about to unfold. The impossible innocence of it all.
They cross the lawn towards Millionaires Walk. When they reach the gate, something makes him glance over his shoulder at the house. Morrow is upstairs on the veranda, leaning on the wrought-iron railing, watching them go, looking for all the world like one of the nineteenth-century paintings hanging on the walls inside. A portrait of a man who has everything. Except for what he most desires.
Even as he turns away, he knows Morrow’s eyes are still following them. But what if Angela does love Morrow? What if she does want to be with him but has convinced herself, as Morrow suggests, that she doesn’t belong in his world? Wouldn’t that justify bringing her back to him? It’s a thought so nakedly self-serving it almost makes him retch. A desperate bid to salve his conscience and save his skin.
With a rotting seaweedy gust from the bay comes the memory of that whale washed up on the far side of the headland, its flensed body deathly white in the moonlight and the invisible cloud of its stench. It’s a reek he can’t seem to escape, that follows him everywhere, trapped in his nostrils, his flesh, his hair. He would swear it has seeped into his bones.
25.
As usual, she is behind her desk, her scarlet pashmina thrown over her shoulders, hands at rest on her lap. Through the lounge-room window, she can see a storm front approaching. A band of dense, gun-metal cloud trailing a tattered skirt that has brought on a counterfeit dusk. As she watches, the first drops of rain spatter the path leading up to the door.
Storms make her think of Matthew and his dream now. He always had a love of wild weather: the electricity in the air, the drum roll of thunder, the sense of something chaotic unleashed. But when you no longer have a roof over your head it’s surely another matter. She’s heard that he is sleeping rough again. Thinking about him is painful. But she can’t pretend he doesn’t exist. She has to accept they will always be entangled.
She remembers one evening at the Anchorage sitting with Richard on the lawn overlooking the bay, the sky a crazed porcelain of orange and pink as the sun went down. In the fading light, with so much beauty at her feet, she had a sudden vision of Matthew hunched on an unmade bed in a bleak little room in a boarding house, gripping his hair, as if trying to wrench the thoughts from his skull. The image came out of nowhere and winded her, made her gasp out loud. Richard asked what was wrong, but all she could do was shake her head. The two men’s lives were too far apart.
The voice from the couch murmurs on. Her eyes go to the window once more. Nothing changes, except for the weather. People go on repeating themselves, digging the groove deeper, while deluding themselves they are on a new path. The best she can do is make her patients conscious of the patterns that rule them, help them accept that to be alive is to be in a state of disquiet from which they can never be free. Peace of mind is a chimera, a furphy. Freud was right and she wishes he wasn’t. Only pessimists face up to the truth, to the way things are. Everything else is a dream.
She has lost track of what her patient is saying. His words can’t compete with her thoughts. She has never allowed this to happen before. But what does it matter, really, if she listens? She has heard it all. As long as she makes encouraging noises to let him know she hasn’t fallen asleep, let him know she is there. He still reminds her of Matthew, but she can’t seem to let him go. In spite of everything, she still hopes she can help him. All he needs is her presence, another human being in the room. In the end it’s up to him to overhear himself. If he can’t, then nothing will change. Except for the weather.
It was always sunny on Millionaires Walk. In all her memories of her days there, the sky is eternally blue. And the bay even bluer. Everything sparkles. Even the words they spoke to each other ripple and gleam. Angela swallows an involuntary moan. Her patient stops, his head tilted to one side. He is waiting for her to say something. The rain is pelting down now, lacquering the glass. She struggles to compose herself then finally whispers, Go on.
She thinks of that boy on the flickering film in the dark theatre below the Anchorage, of the way he looked at his parents, the longing for what could never be. In front of her on her desk lies the latest letter from the man that boy became, still quoting Shakespeare, as if it might yet cast the right spell. Still pleading with her to reconsider. She sometimes thinks he wants her because she resists him, because she is symbolic of all he can’t have. And he’s a man used to getting his way. If she cannot bring herself to see him, he says, then at least they can write to each other, give sorrow words, and maybe sometime in the future she will change her mind.
Her patient has stopped again. He is waiting, probably wondering what her silence means. A door slams in the flat above. There is laughter as feet race down the stairs, the front door opens. A woman emerges into the garden, pulling her coat around her as she surges forward, head down, into the rain.
By late afternoon, you wouldn’t know it was the same day. The rain clouds have stormed off to the west, leaving the sky scoured clean. Steam rises from the roads. The air is rich with the smell of the earth.
Angela telephones Ned. ‘It’s going to happen tonight, I’m sure of it. Do you and Mai want to come over? We can watch it together.’
Ned has no idea what she’s talking about. An eclipse? A comet? Something on TV? ‘Love to, Ange. But what exactly will we be watching?’
‘The cactus. It’s ready to flower.’
He arrives with pizza and a bottle of wine and they set up a table and chair out in the garden. When she asks about Mai, Ned mumbles that she has something else on. In truth, what he has to say to his sister is not for Mai’s ears. Thankfully, Angela doesn’t notice his discomfort; she is busy worrying that the garden lights might be too bright, might give the impression of daylight. Can a cactus get confused? The sense of occasion has made her uncharacteristically skittish.
As the first stars appear, Angela and Ned turn their attention to the large dark bud halfway up the spiky column, watching for signs of life. Ned sets up the tripod and fusses over his camera, getting the settings right for a time-lapse sequence. Peering through the view-finder, he casually mentions his visit to the Anchorage for the open house. It helps that he doesn’t have to look at her. He hasn’t prepared what he’ll say. It would feel too premeditated, like yet another crime. He tells her about the garden, how it has been transformed into something you might find in the English countryside, and describes the interior: the period furniture, the embossed wallpaper, the sumptuous Victorian clutter.
‘Morrow has clearly thrown himself into it. It’s pretty amazing, what he’s done.’
When his virtual tour reaches the kitchen, he mentions that the old dumb waiter has been turned into a lift.
Her eyes are immediately alert.
‘Was he there?’
Ned nods.
‘You spoke to him?’
‘I did.’
She lifts her chin. ‘And how is he?’
‘Seems fine, I guess.’
‘You guess?’
Ned tosses back the last of his wine. ‘He misses you, Ange. Badly. He’s sure you still love him.’
Angela blinks rapidly as she tries to fathom what lies beneath his words. Richard’s feelings are no surprise. He has told her as much in his letters. But why is Ned telling her this? And so bluntly, as if he agrees? When she broke off the relationship with Richard, neither Ned nor Mai questioned her about it, or urged her to rec
onsider. She took their silence as a tacit acknowledgement that she had made the right decision. That the whole thing had been a folly, doomed from the start. That it was just a matter of time before their differences became irreconcilable. And not just because of his people, his world. It went deeper than that. She couldn’t believe that Richard wouldn’t weary of her, that she wouldn’t become an embarrassment to him, or a burden.
‘Ange?’
Already, Ned can see her resolve weakening, his words taking root in her mind. And it sickens him that he should be doing this, playing these games with her heart.
Suddenly Angela points to the cactus. The spidery fingers of the dark outer casing have started to tremble and crack, like an egg about to hatch. The birth is dreamily slow: twitch by agonising twitch, the fingers draw back from the bud to reveal the pearly petal-flesh within. It takes what feels like forever and Ned wishes he could hit fast forward. Patience has never been one of his strengths.
Angela, though, couldn’t look away if she wanted to. The petals, too, are stirring now, beginning to yawn. Already a line of ants is travelling up the tall column, heading for the flower. As the mouth of the bloom opens wider, she can see the pollen-heavy stamens inside. They quiver as they separate, one from the other, and seem to grope for the moon, exposed to the world for the first and last time. Seen from below, the flower floats in the air like a lotus on a night-blue pond.
Her lips open in delight as she watches. The flower’s moment has come. It has until dawn, the briefest of lives, but who is to say it’s not fully lived? How many people go through a lifetime and never bloom at all? Or keep waiting for their moment to arrive only to miss it because they’re afraid or too busy or looking away or holding out for something better? How many chances do you get?
She stares at her brother, mystified, as if he might be able to explain why she has imposed this sentence on herself. ‘I’ve been a complete idiot, Ned. Richard is right.’
Ned’s jaw feels like iron as he forces a smile. ‘All I want is for you to be happy, Ange. If he can make you happy, I’m happy for you. It’s as simple as that.’
It is midnight. Above them, the cactus flower is blazing like the noonday sun.
You can see her for miles around, the gold Our Lady lit up from below, floating above the twilit suburbs. As they head towards the church, Mai tells Angela how the statue atop the tower was recently gilded, almost one hundred years after it was carved and first covered in gold leaf. They have only just taken the scaffolding down.
From the footpath out the front, they look up at the larger-than-life figure of Mary holding baby Jesus, both mother and child wearing crowns. Draped in the voluminous folds of her golden gown, her sceptre in hand, she reminds Angela of Queen Victoria with one of her nine children in her arms.
A steep concrete ramp takes them down to the hall beneath the church in the bowels of an old clay quarry. Small groups of people, mostly in their twenties and thirties, are standing around the paved courtyard. Some of them are casually limbering up, shaking their bodies and twirling as if energised by the deeper darkness waiting for them inside. Angela wonders what she is doing here. No one else is in a chair.
As if reading her mind, Mai takes out her phone. ‘I’ve been meaning to show you this.’ She taps it a few times and hands it to Angela.
The screen is alight with whirling figures on a dance floor, the women in sequined, figure-hugging dresses, the men in black tails. They are doing the tango to Spanish guitars, their movements precise and assured, and half of them are in wheelchairs. Everything flows as it should, each pair a perfect unit, a world unto themselves, gliding and rolling for the sheer pleasure of bodies in motion in a state of absolute trust. Angela has always found competition dancing too stagey, too much about following rules. But she can see in the dancers’ radiant faces a form of release and a controlled passion she now understands.
The doors open and they file in. Her eyes adjust to the darkness. There are rows of chairs that have been pushed to the walls and a stage with a drawn curtain up one end that makes her think of the theatre beneath the Anchorage and the flickering image of Richard as a boy. Soon the dance floor disappears beneath the milling bodies veiled by the cave-like gloom.
When the music starts, Angela smiles. It is a perfect choice to warm up with, a Madonna number, boppy but not too fast. Clearly in her element, Mai threads herself gracefully through the other bodies and the rhythms of the music and Angela is reminded of how she used to feel when she dived into the sea, of that liquid bliss. She told Mai she would sit the first track out in order to get in the mood. But already she’s got the urge to move, to find out what she can do with her chair, the freedom it might offer that she has failed to grasp. She thinks of the gold Our Lady on her tower looking out over the city, exposed to the wind and the rain, removed and alone. And how good it is to be down here in the thick of things, where everything is heaving and sweaty and alive.
The next track is a catchy combination samba and rap. Angela wheels herself on to the dance floor and finds a space with enough room to move. She rolls her chair back and forth with the beat and when the moment is right, spins all the way around. She hasn’t done this to music before and didn’t realise it could feel so good. When Mai dances towards her, their smiles flash in the darkness and Angela throws back her head and shimmies her shoulders and stretches out her arms to her friend. If she wasn’t strapped in, she might just levitate straight out of her chair.
Mai takes her hands and draws her forward, neatly side stepping the chair and then sashays back. As the tempo accelerates, Mai raises her arm and, as if every move has been choreographed, Angela glides under and whirls around to the sound of a triumphant whoop from her friend.
The parade of songs continues. Angela and Mai jive, they samba, they even do something vaguely resembling the Charleston. Angela has never tried half these dances before and yet her body seems to know what to do. Not only knows, but yearns for it. She spins herself around and around like a ballerina doing a full throttle pirouette, her cheeks aching from smiling so much. She had almost forgotten how it felt to let go, how head-spinningly, deliriously good. She had been right to hold out hope. The old joy is still there.
26.
On a bare stage, a man and a woman are facing each other, eyes locked. At first glance, they appear to be naked. They stand stock-still, as if challenging the other to flinch, to blink, to look away. It has been going on for some minutes now. An invisible bubble seems to contain them, shutting everyone out. People shift in their seats, glance at those next to them. What’s going on? They have come for dance, for acrobatic grace, not to watch two people trying to out-stare each other. Where’s the skill, the spectacle in that? Mai can’t help enjoying the general discomfort of the audience, the bamboozled frowns. This is how it should be, she thinks. Unsettling. Everyone hanging on what comes next. But do they have the patience for this glacial pace?
Since graduating, Mai has been writing occasional reviews for one of those giveaway papers that get handed out on trams and trains. She struggles to even remember the paper’s name and is sure everyone else does too. It’s the kind of rag people skim and leave behind on the seat or throw on the floor. She gets paid but it’s not what she wants. She’s starting to wonder if these opening nights are as close to being part of a professional production as she’ll ever get.
At her side, Angela is perfectly still, eyes fixed on the two figures on the stage, wondering why she has the feeling she’s seen the dancers before. It strikes her what a strange business this is: an auditorium full of people sitting in the dark, as paralysed as she is, waiting for two people in the spotlight to move. And all of them hoping to be uplifted or stirred or transported, to be moved by the performers’ movement, whenever it finally occurs.
There is a subtle change in the hypnotic beat of the music, and with it, a flicker from the dancers, a raised eyebrow, the twitch of a smile. Angela knows nothing about modern dance or ballet – this is
supposed to be a combination of the two – and wasn’t sure it would be her thing, but it’s starting to draw her in. The dancers are stalking each other now, repelled one moment, attracted the next. An invisible thread seems to connect them and the more they whirl, the more tangled they get. Soon, she has completely forgotten herself. Drawn in by their atomic motion, she is whirling with them: ducking and weaving, pushing and pulling, falling and catching, hiding and seeking. It’s a story as old as life itself.
Just before the lights go up at interval, Angela notices the profile of a man three rows in front. An electric thrill runs through her. She knows the shape of that head, the aquiline nose. When she and Mai emerge from the lift into the foyer, she can see the elegant back of him, barely two arm’s lengths away. He turns, as if sensing her presence, and his tall, slender body surges towards her even before he takes a step.
‘Angela.’ His deep voice rumbles with pleasure as he utters her name.
She turns to Mai at her side. Her heart so loud in her ears she can hardly hear herself think. ‘Could you give us a moment? Get some drinks, perhaps?’
Mai hesitates. It feels like an ambush. Since when has Morrow been interested in dance? At the bar she is hemmed in by the crowd and loses sight of them. On her way back, she sees him taking Angela’s hands and raising them to his lips. How did this happen so fast? They seem to be in a play that has skipped a few acts. When she arrives with their drinks, they look up at her, dazed.
Mai hovers at an acceptable distance, straining to catch their words while pretending to read the program. Each time she glances their way, their faces seem to be closer, their voices lower and more urgent. What happens to the sex in your head, Mai wonders, when your body can’t obey? Clearly it doesn’t go away. The bells ring, the foyer slowly empties. But neither Morrow nor Angela notice or show any inclination to move. Mai is going to have to hurry them up. She hears Morrow say something about his apartment. He wants them to leave, straight away.
