Charades (18 page)

Katherine wonders if intensity of wishing could collapse the distance between the picnic table and the foot of Tibrogargan.
I will count to ten, she thinks, and then I will give myself a slight push with my hands against the picnic bench and then I will be standing and it will be logical to saunter off in the direction of …

“What do you think?” the girl persists.

“Ah …” Katherine hedges, turning her hands up to indicate her lack of competence in the topic under discussion.

“But you must have
some
opinion,” the girl says. “Everyone knows you're her prot
é
g
é
e.”

Katherine's eyebrows buckle with surprise. “I am? But we only … it's purely …” She is casting about in her mind for the girl's name. Doesn't it start with M? It's not Mary, not Maureen. She's someone who is vocal in seminars, a rather witty debunking anti-intellectual presence, a sort of devil's advocate for Philistines. Sometimes Katherine has sensed a fizzing antagonism toward Verity; at other times she has felt the girl is desperate to get Verity's attention. Katherine herself cannot bear to hear criticism of someone who … well, who is simply beyond the normal categories of assessment. She says awkwardly, clearing her throat. “About Verity … the war, you know.”

“Oh, bugger that,” the girl says irritably. (Margaret? Miriam? Myra, that's it.) “You're not going to trot out that old story about her parents, surely?” Myra sniffs. “Believe me, I've known her for donkey's years. Even if it's true, big deal. Hell,
my
dad's a TPI, left a leg in New Guinea and gets the shivers twice a week. Doesn't have to turn you into a bloody —”

“Okay,” someone shouts. “Firewood time. We want dry brush and pinecones. If everyone brings …” — and in the general m
ê
l
é
e and dispersal which follow, Katherine finds herself — oh blessed confusing movement — on the far side of the curtain of scrub and ti-tree. She breathes in the sweet harsh smell of Tibrogargan. She climbs, the picnic falling away from her ankles like moulting feathers.

Stones clatter from her feet and ring like little bells against the plates of rock. She listens to them pinging and bouncing, echoing faintly far down, a measurement of freedom. Once or twice her canvas shoes slide suddenly from under her legs, the gravel giving way, and she clutches at tufts of spiky brown grass. Along her forearm, beads of blood appear against white scratch marks. She climbs quickly.

Verity is wrong not to come, she thinks. No. Not wrong to stay away from the group, but wrong to lock her life up inside a library; wrong not to climb the mountain alone, or with Nicholas, or with me. Between the sun and the side of a mountain, there is no room for the past; it vanishes. Life is just this. She turns to look out over the scrub below and flings her arms up toward the sky in an intense spasm of pleasure. If she were to take a dance step out into space, she believes the air would support her.

This is the way it is for Bea all the time, she thinks. The knowledge comes to her like heat through the pores of her skin. In a slight dizziness — from the sun or the swooping drop to the valley floor — she turns back to the flank of the mountain. Ahead and above is a long stretch of rock, dimpled, hot to the fingers, treeless. She finds a ledge and sits and leans back; she can feel the mountain breathing like a heart against her spine. She pushes up the sleeves of her blouse and rolls her jeans up past her knees and turns her face, eyes closed, to the sun. There will never be words for this, she thinks. It will never need words.

She has a sense of herself as a solar whiteness, without shape, without limits in space or time, pulsing with a kind of exaltation whose only analogue might be the dramatic rush of wind at the rainy edge of a cyclone.

If Verity were to climb the Glasshouses, she thinks, her past would become different. The life of Verity-on-the-mountain would have another history altogether.

But is it
possible
for Verity to climb the Glasshouses?

Might there not, in fact, be planes and spheres and tales which can never intersect?

It strikes Katherine that it might indeed be as impossible for Verity to climb Tibrogargan as for the Wanderer or Beowulf to sail their curved ships up inside the Barrier Reef. Is a sense of the tragic possible along a tropical coast? Can it be maintained? Does it have to be imported from Europe?

Energy — from the sun, or from the heady rush of her ideas — pushes her on and up, over the dimpled rocks. Yes, she thinks, both sombre and excited, as though thorny literary problems are solving themselves at last. Verity will always live in Le Raincy, the Wanderer will always sail the North Sea, they can't be translated. But they endure in their original tongues. They
endure.

Trees overshadow her again, a brown stand of gums fingering the rock. Beneath them the underbrush flourishes, and where a trickle of water drips out from between rocks and collects in a hollow, ferns grow thick and deep. It is possible, Katherine thinks, that no one has stepped into that greenness since the world began. From here, looking back, she can see the striped awning and toy people moving around it, and a row like ants threading its way up into the mountain. Above the tattered leaves there is nothing but sky and King Sun. She feels absolutely insignificant and absolutely omnipotent, immortal even, at one and the same time. Hubris moves through the ferns like a kingfisher, she feels the quick little brush of its wings. She tests her power: standing deep in the pool of curling fronds, she closes her eyes and summons up his white shirt, open over brown skin, his cloth hat, the butter-pale curls. She makes a wish:
Nicholas.

“Katherine?”

She swallows and opens her eyes, but it is only the girl from her poetry tutorial, Myra — definitely, yes, that is her name — asking: “Why the hell did you take off like that? Whew.” Myra wipes her sweating forehead with the cloth hat. “We might as well sit and rest a bit, while we wait for the others to catch up.” She throws herself down into the ferns, wriggles a little to gain comfort against twigs and ants, and pulls a bottle opener and a Four-X from her knapsack. She seems to fill the entire space beneath the trees; the deep and endless pool of ferns has dwindled to leprous tufts. She flips the top off a bottle and takes a mouthful. “Yech. Warm bloody beer,” she says. “Already.” Nevertheless she continues to drink, then holds the bottle out toward Katherine whose mind, in slow motion, considers its response. She shakes her head, changes her mind, accepts it as though in a dream.

Myra raises an eyebrow. “The thing about you,” she offers thoughtfully, “is you always just do whatever you decide to do, right? I mean, you don't care what anyone thinks, do you? Like just taking off up the track, back then.”

Katherine stares, amazed, the bottle poised on the way to her lips. Logically, she thinks, I could be as wildly blind about her. Myra laces her hands behind her head and leans back into the ferns. “So how do you do it?” she asks comfortably. “What's the secret? You snap your fingers, so to speak, and Ashkenazy waits for your opinion in the tutorial. Or I have to come chasing you up the mountain. Or Nicholas the Dreamboat himself has to keep sneaking looks in your direction.”

Katherine has the eerie sensation of having taken a wrong turn in a theatre: she has wandered on stage in the middle of a production and now — this is surely an off-kilter dream — both players and audience turn expectantly toward her. But what are her lines?

Myra laughs. “Well, it's certainly not the magic power of your voice, since you're practically mute. Outside seminars, that is. Is that the secret? Why do I have the feeling that you sent for me?” She claps her hands, sits up and bends forward from the waist, a mock genie. “What do you want to know?”

Katherine smiles uncertainly and lifts her shoulders slightly to imply: I'm out of my depth. I don't know what you're talking about. There's nothing I want to know. There are definitely, in fact, many things I do not want to know.

“Funny,” Myra says, rolling over onto her stomach and propping her chin in her hands, “the way everyone has this compulsion to talk about them all the time, isn't it? I guess it's the waste that drives us all crazy. What does he see in her? — apart from the obvious, I mean. Of course she
is
beautiful, you have to concede that, though it's just her face really, isn't it? None of the other standard attributes that we are all led to believe …. But it's not as though he's blind to it elsewhere. Let's face it, as one fallen woman to another, you've got to search a long time to find someone who hasn't at least necked with Nicholas. Damned if I know why we let him get away with it.” She stretches like a cat, purrs, licks the slow circle of her lips with a tongue indulging in memory. “Well, of course I know why,” she sighs. “What I mean is, why do we let
her
do it? Just a twitch on the leash, and whoosh, he's miles away, even when you've still got him between your legs in the back of a car. Just what's she got that we haven't?”

For some reason, in the midst of the sensation of inner lurch (the kind of free fall that dreams can open into) Katherine thinks of Gene the Sailorman at the moment when he turns away to lunge for Bea's sandal.

“There's something manipulative about her,” Myra says. “Always has been. I've known her for ages. Same school.”

Is it possible, Katherine wonders, to go on and on, day after day, making the discovery that you are even more of a fool than you thought you were yesterday? She asks herself savagely: Does he carve notches on a gatepost somewhere?

“You know how I know?” Myra asks. “The way she had to have teachers eating out of her hand. Every grade, these so-called brilliant essays — about her tragic bloody past, ho hum — but one year the teachers compared, and all the stories were different. It was kind of a joke around All Hallows.”

“All Hallows?”

“Yep. Ahead of me, of course, by a good few years, but the stories were still around. And I remember her, sort of. The version that gets me is the parents bombed in the London blitz and all that jazz. She's no more a Pom than I am, and that accent wouldn't fool —”

“Of course she's not a Pom,” Katherine says primly. “She's French and Jewish.”

“What?” Myra hugs herself and rolls in the ferns. “French! Oh that's a good one, I hadn't heard that one. And the Jewish kick: well, that started up in grade twelve, I believe. Before that she had a vocation. The nuns lapped her up, of course, bless their dear little suffering-loving souls. It's a miracle she didn't break out in stigmata.”

Katherine thinks: I have a lunatic on my hands. “Myra,” she says patiently. “Think about it. With a name like
Ashkenazy.”

“Exactly. How come her parents used to be just plain Mick and Thelma Delaney, before her father made a killing on the horses? Believe me, Katherine, my dad used to know Mick Delaney, and he reckons — my dad, that is — that her ladyship was born two blocks away from the Banyo railway station. She was baptised a Mick, and her dad used to drive a truck for Tristram's Drinks.”

“Myra? How can you say these things?”

“How? Because my dad used to drink with Mick Delaney at the RSL, that's how. They were both at Tobruk, which is the closest Miss High-and-Mighty ever got to France, if you ask me. Hey, here come the slowpokes, they've caught up with us. And Jenny Williamson — all over Nicholas still, I see. She thinks she's hit the jackpot, silly fool.”

“I suppose, Charade,” Katherine muses, “that we merged in with the group and got to the top of Tibrogargan.”

Because yes, Katherine remembers how the sweeping view across the Bruce Highway to Bribie Island and the endless Pacific has a bright white flag in one corner: the shirt of Nicholas, open at the neck; the sun on his wheat-pale curls. And she recalls how she pondered the nature of obsession, and the mysterious ways in which we invest objects with power and then wait like vultures for demythologising to set in.

“Though that process is never complete,” she tells Charade. “Never. I'm convinced of that now. What still mystifies me is how it comes about that we confer significance in the first place, and then it clings. Totemic objects can never totally lose their power, not for all the demythologising in the world. Because whenever I think of the Pacific, there's a white sail on it that turns into Nicholas's shirt. And whenever I think of the Glasshouses …  Which is why, I suppose, by quick train of association, I saw him on the side of the Royal Bank.” She frowns and looks uncertainly along Front Street from under the brightly striped awning. “But the curious thing was … Well, I'll get back to that later. First things first.”

Or last things last. Because it is when the group is dispersing again, as dusk falls on the picnic grounds, that Nicholas, shoving a canvas roll of green and white into the back of a van, reaches out and tugs on Katherine's sleeve. “Want to ride back with me in the van?” he asks.

Katherine has many versions of what happened after this. She would like to think that she politely detached his hand and said something like “Thank you, but I came up in Myra's car and I've already told her …” She would like to think she then calmly turned and walked away. She does believe, in all the versions, that she turned a corner that day and began to walk away from her obsession.

But also in all the versions is a certain amount of smoke and mist, and the thudding of her heartbeat, and the clear haunting notes of a recorder. And from somewhere in that time is the knowledge of Nicholas's body, of the star-shaped mole in the hollow of his neck, of his lips on hers, of their legs intertwined — and when could it have been, if not that night? Unless of course it was a few months later, when she was off in north Queensland teaching in a country high school and Nicholas, incredibly, blew into town. Or unless it was the time after that, her twenty-first birthday, when she woke from a dream of him and there he was again on her doorstep.