by Luke Horton
I remem … he said, finally.
You were very young, darling. You don’t have to remember. What did you watch this time?
No, I remember! he said. Was it Frozen?
That’s a good guess, Jeremy chuckled. It probably bloody was, you know.
No, I know, it was Frozen, Ollie said. I remember, watching and lying on Maman — Mummy — with my head on her lap. She loved Frozen, didn’t you, Maman?
They all looked to Madeleine, as she thought it over.
Oh, darling, yes, of course. I did love it, she said. I loved it very much. And we had a lovely time watching it together, with you sleeping on my lap.
Madeleine was softened. She was sleepy and glad and rocking gently on her hips as she held Ollie to her side, while he cradled the empty coconut.
There was no talk anymore of next year’s holiday, how they’d all meet up here next July and do it all again. No more talk of Tom and Clara getting jobs at European universities and seeing them more often, although they did make plans to see each other one last time, in the morning, before they left.
14
Mexico was the last stop of the trip. Perhaps by then, after nine months away, they were just ready to go home, but they were bored in Mexico. They had been so excited about it for so long that it was a surprise to find themselves bored, but they couldn’t shake it.
When Tom went to England for a couple of months, Clara had gone to another farm in France, where she learnt all about growing corn, and then on to another, where she found that the woman who ran the place had nothing for her to do. So she did a local cooking class, cooked for the woman, and rode around the muddy fields on quad bikes with her teenage boys.
There was little communication between them during that time, but when they met back up in New York, they were happy to see each other, and happy to be there for a few days, staying with a friend of a friend in Queens. Then they caught a Greyhound through DC, Atlanta, Houston, crossed the border at Brownsville to San Luis Potosí, then Zacatecas City — its cluster of flat-roofed, adobe dwellings appearing out of nowhere over a rise, a glittering, tiered horizon punctured only by church spiers — and then on to Mexico City.
In Mexico City, they stayed in a crumbling hotel, walked crumbling streets, drank in crumbling cantinas with crumbling old men, who, when drunk enough, approached Tom to request a dance with Clara. Clara consented the first three times and danced waltzes in front of the jukebox while the men laughed and clapped, and then had to say no for the rest of the night to every man that came in the place. They walked streets lined with dozens of shops that all sold the same thing — a street for jukeboxes, one for lawnmowers, one for pets.
Then they went to the pyramids, and then to the mountains to house-sit a place in a small village at the foot of higher peaks. There, they walked and explored, and that was where the boredom set in. They were bored with being tourists, bored with the serene, hippy theme that ran throughout everything there, bored with themselves, bored with each other.
Then it was the end of the year, and, for New Year’s, they went to a party on a beach a few beaches over from Puerto Escondido. It was their old housemate Trish who had the contact — of course. Some party people she’d met there who could show you a good time. The party consisted of a generator on the beach and speakers pumping out house music, and people doing nangs and other drugs in the sand. They all seemed very young. They found their guy — Louis — who sold them cocaine, and they settled into an evening of smiling back at the dozens of increasingly drunk young Mexican men who introduced themselves and hugged them and tried to get them to dance. There were few girls.
The cocaine wasn’t good, they could tell, but they had bought a lot of it — it was extremely cheap — and, encouraged by Louis, they had it all in one session, in a series of long lines. As moisture vanished from Tom’s throat, he began to feel very good. They went into the water, up to their knees, as the countdown began, and they held each other tightly, and laughed intensely at the ridiculousness of everything. Then the good feeling drained from Tom’s body and nothing was left in its place, and, after looking for Louis and more cocaine and failing to find either, he fell asleep on the sand.
Back in their house-sit, hungover, they were easier with each other, kinder. Clara looked through her notebook and found her cheese-making diagrams from France. She erupted with laughter, and Tom thought he saw tears running down her cheeks. How pointless they were, how stupid, she said. Why had she been so intent on writing it all down, and in such ridiculous amounts of detail?
Who did this? Who is this? she said. What was I thinking?
She looked him.
He didn’t know what to say.
Not long after that, they were home, and not long after that, without either of them knowing it, they broke up, more or less. Clara went to Adelaide for the summer, to visit a friend she’d become friends with mostly on social media and over one drunken weekend in Melbourne. They didn’t have a house yet in Melbourne, so she didn’t feel tethered to anywhere in particular, and she’d dropped out of her arts degree and hadn’t quite decided what to do next. Tom didn’t want to go to Adelaide. He wanted to spend the summer on the beach, and then find a new house — or, now, new room — in Melbourne. So he did that, half-expecting the whole time that Clara would ring at any moment to say she was coming after all or, later, that she would ring to say of course she was still moving in with him. But when she did ring, eventually, it was only to tell him that she was staying on in Adelaide — at least for a few months. She was moving in officially to the share house where she’d been staying with her friend and some other people she seemed almost as excited about as the friend. There was no talk of their relationship during this conversation, but they never talked about it. She was doing this, he was finding a room in Melbourne before the start of semester, and they’d just see each other when she came to visit in a few months’ time.
He was the loneliest he had ever been that year. Most of their friends were really her friends, and he felt embarrassed relying on them for all social contact. When she came for her visit, he allowed himself to feel how much he had missed her, allowed himself to acknowledge his excitement, which very quickly turned to anxiety. So much had been left unsaid that he didn’t really know what was happening. Were they romantically involved, still? Or was she coming to visit all of her friends — of which he was simply one — and merely crashing at his place because that was easiest?
He met her at Flinders Street Station, and they took the No. 1 tram up Lygon Street, and he sat next to her, sweating and barely speaking. It occurred to him, while he squirmed, that they were re-enacting the final scene of The Graduate, when Benjamin and Elaine ride silently side by side on the bus after Benjamin’s grand gesture of love at the wedding — a grand gesture of love for someone who is effectively a stranger to him. Tom felt the same way about Clara. That he didn’t really know her. Not anymore. Or maybe he had never really known her. He felt that his feelings for her were founded on something so nebulous as to be suspicious. She was so quiet so much of the time that she was like a screen onto which he projected all his fears, his paranoia, and, when things were going well, his complacencies.
He was embarrassed. Embarrassed by how much he felt, by how excited he had been to see her — what a fluster the prospect of seeing her had thrown him into — embarrassed now especially because all of this was so painfully obvious, and embarrassed most of all because her lack of interest in small talk meant he could think of nothing to say. He was paralysed. And, rather than do something about this, say something, she, like always, and in that way that always drove him crazy, followed his lead.
And so, for the whole length of Lygon Street, they sat in silence. Other people got off and got on, held conversations, talked on their phones, were polite to their fellow passengers — a woman helped another woman on with a pram — while two people who had not seen each ot
her in two and half months barely spoke to each other.
When they arrived at his house, the spell broke. Things presented themselves to be spoken about — the house, his room, the backyard. He introduced her to his housemates, or the one who was home then, Louise — someone he had nothing in common with and who treated him with the formality of a work colleague. But she was someone they could talk about as soon as she was out of earshot. They slept in the same bed, so they had sex. But it never felt clear, to Tom, what was happening between them.
Then Clara went back to Adelaide, and, over a couple of months, they wrote emails and messages that became more and more infrequent, until one day she told him that she was seeing someone. Not only did she tell him she was seeing someone, she told him all about it, confided in him about it, as if they were merely good friends — which, he concluded, maybe they were. The guy was in a band. The band was good, he played guitar, but there were other girls in the picture, and she was increasingly worried about it — never knowing if he was with someone else when not with her. But sometimes he snuck into her bedroom window — Tom could tell she loved that without her saying as much — and when they were together, it was good. All of which enraged him. He did not respond for several months.
By the following December, however, that was over — the guy was a jerk, after all, and was seemingly moving through all the girls in Adelaide in a certain social circle — and Tom and Clara spent the summer together again, like they used to, and things were back to normal. She moved back to Melbourne, they got their first place together, and she finally started the architecture and planning degree she had been telling Tom and Emily she’d been thinking about doing for a while.
Not long after this, they had their great social flowering, when everything was exciting, and all of a sudden they’d been together, on and off, for ten years. And now, of course, it was fourteen.
But what, in the final analysis, could be said about any of it? Had they ever truly wanted to be together — ever made sacrifices for their relationship? Or was it all just convenience? And how to look at what had happened? Was there a break-up and a second shot or was it all points on a continuum — all part of the same one thing, something that adhered to some principle, even by accident, or by unspoken agreement, or misunderstanding? Or was it just all a symptom of a bad culture? A culture they had initiated by refusing to talk about things and that they’d let deepen and ingrain itself and go on for so long that now neither of them knew how to stop it.
You’ve not been good for my mental health, she’d told him once, elliptically, in an email. That was while she was in Adelaide, he thought, although he couldn’t remember exactly. He knew what she said was true, but only in a vague way, without knowing exactly what she meant. He had generalised guilt over being what he assumed was a pretty taxing person for someone else to be around. Stress, anxiety, moodiness, denial. Emotional withholding. She certainly had a point. He could not argue with it. He was glad he wasn’t like that anymore. Most of the time.
They missed saying goodbye to Madeleine, Jack, and Ollie. They weren’t at breakfast, and when they got back to their room there was a sheet of paper under a rock on their porch. It showed a confusion of figures that seemed to be all of them plus one and the words ‘have a good holiday we miss you’ scrawled over them in a young boy’s hand.
Clara was still quiet. No doubt, she was missing her new friends. Tom let her have the room, let her have her silence, spent most of the day by the pool, and when in the afternoon he returned to the room to find her not there, he went for a walk himself. Over to the turtles again, where he watched them clamber over each other and up the walls of their green tubs towards him in a manner that was either supplicating or aggressive, he couldn’t tell. It was easy to take a place like that for granted. A turtle rescue on the beach. But someone had to actually do it — to tend to the turtles, help heal their wounds, rehabilitate them. Although he didn’t know really what this entailed; they seemed fairly low-maintenance at this point, in the tubs. No one seemed in charge at the turtle rescue. It appeared unmanned. But there were signs about what not to do — touch them, feed them, bang on the sides of the tubs — and they were in shade under tarpaulins and leafy trees. He was sure someone would be back soon.
After that, he visited the Kirschler museum. Through richly coloured fabrics, he passed into a cool, spacious, naturally lit room with sets of large, shutterless windows open at each end. The walls were lined with Kirschlers. The paintings were not bad, technically, he thought, although he claimed no great knowledge or eye for art — influenced by The Blue Rider, he thought, maybe, yet figuratively more conventional — but the treatment of his subjects, almost exclusively the Balinese dancer, and the settings were corny.
In the literature Tom picked up from a stand on a marble desk by the door — the same brochure Clara had brought to their room all those days ago — Kirschler was portrayed, or portrayed himself, as a hopeless romantic: someone devoted to the object of his desire; someone who could not help but endlessly paint her. The word ‘muse’ was used several times.
Tom wondered about the woman and what she thought of this devotion. In the paintings, her expression remained the same. She smiled — serenely or blankly, Tom wasn’t sure which — as she danced, stood in the ocean, sat at a table with high tea arrayed about her. Is this how she received his devotion, too? With serenity? Did she indulge him, or did she, as Tom suspected, find it oppressive, being so mercilessly objectified? And why was Tom so cynical about it? Why couldn’t he be impressed by the power of this love that they shared, be convinced by all this devotion? Why couldn’t he imagine — instead of oppression, resentment, her endurance of this aggressive ownership of her body, the transactional nature of relationships under colonialism — that a deep and abiding love was possible between these people? Maybe she wasn’t in bondage, maybe she didn’t need this man’s money — indeed, she was a celebrated dancer, wasn’t she? — and maybe she hadn’t sold her exoticism, her body, to him in exchange for a life of comfort. Maybe she was happy, indeed proud, to be his muse, and they lived a charmed life together, a life miraculous in its harmony, despite their cultural differences.
No, Tom thought. Even if she professed all that, even if she claimed to feel it deep within her, he would not believe it.
For their last meal in Sanur, they went to a Spanish restaurant. Clara was still not really talking to him, but she assented to going. When he’d asked her where she’d been that afternoon, as they bobbed about, holding on to the sides of the tray of the ute that was taking them to the restaurant, she said she had finally followed the tsunami signs out beyond the tourist strip.
Where did it take you? he asked.
To assembly points, other hotels, she said, dully.
Oh. Right.
There was a pause.
There is no higher ground, she said, eventually. We’d be fucked.
Stepping down from the tray onto a dark street corner, they could see no sign of a restaurant. There was only a scrappy, empty block with a low wall that ran around two sides of the perimeter before crumbling into the dirt. Beyond this were mangroves and more empty blocks. The streetlights of the main street a hundred metres away cast long shadows across pale fields and the tops of trees. Tom checked his phone. The pin suggested they were there.
Maybe down here? Clara said, and she began down a dirt lane towards a weak light emanating from a group of low-lying buildings.
Tom followed, and she was right. A canary-yellow light box that read ‘La Mancha’ in uncertain cursive announced their arrival.
The restaurant was subdued, open-air, a handful of tables on an unsealed concrete slab under a series of brick archways. It was one of several buildings built in the same style: dark-red brick, ornamental archways, adobe roofs.
Only one table was occupied, in the far corner, by a group of middle-aged men who were talking animatedly in Spanish. One of th
em jumped up as they arrived, a stout man with a paunch and a knitted brow, but also a quick smile that he trained on them for an instant. He welcomed them to the restaurant, and, from where he stood, motioned to them to take any of the free tables on the floor.
Tom and Clara hesitated. A young Balinese man in whites came out of the kitchen holding several plates of food. As he passed, Tom asked him quietly if the chef was in tonight. The man apologised, but said no, unfortunately he wasn’t, he had been called down to Denpasar on business.
Furtively, Tom motioned to Clara that they should leave, and they turned to walk back out onto the street. They were halfway back up the drive when the man with the paunch caught up with them.
Is there a problem? he asked.
Tom couldn’t think of what else to say, so he told him the truth: that, since the chef wasn’t in tonight, they thought they might eat somewhere else. And then, stupidly, as if he needed to explain himself further, but in fact only making things worse, that they’d read in reviews that when the chef wasn’t in the dishes were made by young apprentices who simply reheated leftover food.
The man looked annoyed for a moment, and then smiled, laughed falsely. No, no, no. That might have been true once, my friend, but all the people we employ in the kitchen can now cook our dishes, and they are cooked fresh each night. You come back, and I show you.
There didn’t seem any way out of it, and Tom allowed the man to usher them back into the restaurant. He then lavished attention on them in a way that previously, it had been clear, he was not going to bother with.
He brought out menus and talked them through the dishes, even though they were the same basic tapas dishes on all Spanish restaurant menus: chorizo, Manchego, chickpeas, squid. Clara was obviously uncomfortable — she was responding minimally to the man and his entreaties, barely raising a smile for him — but Tom laughed along at everything he said and agreed readily to his suggestions.
