Charades (25 page)

Enigma, working her way through brussel sprouts that had been boiled rather longer than necessary, waited for clarification.

“Not that many of them thank me for it,” Marlow said.

Sefton, seated on the same side of the dinner table as Enigma, swivelled sideways. He watched Enigma with inordinate interest, and translated for his sister. “Marlow is years ahead of her time. She's a genius.”

Yes, it's true, acknowledged the lowered eyelids, the slightly twitching eyelids of Marlow, who was absorbed in mashing her pumpkin with her fork.

Enigma studied her second cousin, the genius, who was gaunt and hollow-cheeked, a little carelessly malnourished, perhaps, in a style that Enigma suspected was thought of as “interesting”. Marlow's abundant hair, of no particular colour, was pinned up very loosely in a topknot. Strands fell about her neck and face, not unbecoming. She wore a man's shirt and a man's trousers, both baggy, bleached to a wan absence of colour, purchased from an exclusive survival-clothing mail-order catalogue (the labels were stitched to the outsides of the pockets). Aggressive Bohemian, Enigma would have called the style. Every few minutes Marlow reached down inside her shirt and scratched. Her feet, which were bare inside handmade sandals, seemed clamorous; look! they demanded: my toenails are ragged and filthy. And I don't give a fuck, they seemed to say (unless you fail to be shocked).

Alicia said brightly: “We saw a lovely Australian film, didn't we, Penny? All those dear little schoolgirls on a rock somewhere. It was terribly sad.”

“I cried and cried,” Penelope admitted.

“Oh
really
.” Sefton put a hand to his brow. (He was dressed in Expensive Bohemian, leathers and velvets.) “Such schmalz, my dear aunts, you can't be serious. Appallingly portentous stuff. We find Beresford, Peter Weir and those chaps rather … infantile, I think is the appropriate word.”

“Absolutely
dreary
',' Marlow said. “Dreary,” she repeated, stifling a yawn. “All that bourgeois symbolist crap.” She reached down her shirt and mopped at something with a damask napkin. “Of course, one can't expect post-colonials to do
radical
work. White post-colonials, that is. They're too busy proving themselves to Mummy Empire.” Sefton emitted a single trumpet note of laughter. Marlow contemplated Enigma as though trying to determine how much translating down she should do. “Sefton and I,” she said, having made an assessment, “are very involved in Third World artistic endeavours.”

Penelope patted Marlow's hand, much as though she were a difficult spoilt child. “Sefton and Marlow were in Australia last year,” she said. “For a film festival. They were showing one of Marlow's films, the one she made in Australia.”

“Oh yes?” Enigma inquired politely. “Which was that?”

Sefton said:
“Fuchsia, labia, and other antipodean flora.
Highly satirical on the Americanisation of your cities.”
He appeared to be memorising the surface of Enigma's skin. Embarrassed, she met his eyes for a moment, but to no avail. He was impervious.

“And on your impossibly primitive men, and the plight of your women,” Marlow said. “We took an avant-garde approach, of course.”

“Not widely understood in Australia.” Sefton shook his head in incredulous memory. “You would scarcely credit some of the questions the press asked Marlow in Sydney.”

“Absolutely
dreary
,” Marlow said.

“But then,” Sefton sighed, “what can you expect in a country that has fish knives?”

They both found this killingly funny.

“Our hostess,” Marlow said, speaking exclusively to her aunts in the manner of an adult discussing unintelligible adult matters over the head of a precocious child, “our hostess in Rushcutters Bay, an unbelievably vulgar woman,
dreadfully
nouveau riche, insisted on serving a fresh fish course absolutely
every
night.” Marlow pulled down her bottom lip and pinched her nose and mimicked a heavily nasal Australian accent. “
Catch of the day,
she would say. We thought we would
die.”

(I
wonder.
Enigma asked herself, if they
think
in italics.)

“With fish knives!” howled Sefton, dabbing at his eyes with a linen serviette. “Oh dear, it was priceless.”

(The tableware theory of moral value, Enigma noted. One of the more profound offshoots of Late English philosophy and Third World artistic involvement.)

“But our little Enigma,” smiled Sefton, leaning archly against her side and rubbing an affectionate second-cousinly hand from thigh to armpit, “wouldn't dream of using fish knives. She has
far
too much good taste.”

“Do you use fish knives?” asked Marlow.

Enigma thought of the trestle table in Bea's kitchen at the edge of the rainforest: the press of grubby little bodies, the laughter, the tussle for the insufficient number of mismatched and battered knives and forks. “No,” she said. “In point of fact, we don't use fish knives.”

“You see.” Sefton raised a Waterford goblet, triumphant. “Blood and good taste will out!” He slid the back of a hand skilfully up the inside of Enigma's sweater and pressed her breast. “Any time you're ready to leave,” he offered, “I'll drive you home.”

“Thank you,” Enigma smiled. “But there's really no need. I can take a cab.”

“What a shame,” Sefton said. “I had so much chatter to pass on from Nicholas.”

Beneath the tablecloth, Enigma pressed her hands tightly together.

“How absolutely dreary,” Marlow said. “Personally, I think the Electra complex was one of Freud's more luridly silly theories. I can't think of a more boring topic than fathers.”

“Perhaps,” Enigma said, “if you're sure it isn't out of your way, Sefton?”

And in the car he said, well it wasn't the kind of thing he could prattle on about while changing gears, but if she would come in for a drink … and if you'd just, he said, outlining particu­lar tastes, bite the nipples, just so … a little harder perhaps, and push your index finger … ah, in there … gently now. He was fastidious. About sex, she should know, he was something of a connoisseur of the more unusual …

Oh Nicholas, yes.

Well, a bit wet in some ways, Sefton was sorry to say. They'd shared a flat for a while and that's how he knew. Nicholas had nightmares and babbled on about things in his sleep. Oh, this and that, and something that happened in Australia. Sefton never could make any sense of it. And then, in his cups you know, where he often was, Nicholas was a compulsive talker, a storyteller — only it was the same story over and over again, a thousand versions. A thousand pseudonyms too: the same story under different names, set in different countries. First in magazines, then in books. A compulsive neurasthenic type. Sefton curled his lip with distaste. Bit of a Lord Jim, he was. Saw himself as a tragic hero, has to be always on the move, have a woman in bed by night, talk or write stories all day to keep the black dogs at bay. She could count herself fortunate, Sefton said, that he'd removed himself from the family in a decent and honourable way.

Now, if she could bite his nipples again, a little harder … ah lovely, lovely.

Dear Mum
,
Charade wrote.

A dead end, as you promised. Except you have to think the best of anyone who escaped from all that. They're enough to make an undertaker laugh. So why am I sitting in the Red Lion getting drunk and feeling depressed?

And Bea wrote back:
What did I tell you? That's what comes of hobnobbing with Poms.

“Bea,” Koenig says. “It's Bea I want to hear more about.”

Charade warns: “I won't be at all reliable.”

“Ah well. Who is?”

Charade closes her eyes in concentration and knocks lightly on her forehead with one fist. “Open sesame,” she says.

“I didn't necessarily mean immediately.” Koenig sets his brandy down. “Another night,” he murmurs as he slides a hand along her thigh.

PART IV

The B Text

1
Rainforest, Scrub Turkeys and the Bower Bird Solution

2
Goodna

3
Jacaranda Time

1

Rainforest, Scrub Turkeys
and the Bower Bird Solution

Scrub turkeys made her think of her dad: all that cocker-doodle-doo for a start; the bright red faces and crests (too much booze in her dad's case, his veins rubbling like cracked bricks); and their silly in-and-out necks
(Say that again, mate, and I'll knock yer block off).
But mainly it was that weird fussing around the nest mounds, gobble gobble, scratch scratch, checking on the eggs that were cooking away while their frumpy little hens buggered off (just as her mum had done) leaving their chicks behind them.

For an hour at a time she could watch.

When Siddie and Charade and Em were still babies, ages two, thirteen months and two months, before the other seven had even been thought of, before she had even realised Em was not quite right, not quite all there, Bea would wake on the spike of the first cry. Blackness was so black then, night was so night, that objects had a blue edge. All the edges touched. She felt her way along the blue lines, there was no need for light. She would feed her nestlings — the sweet little scamps — and settle them back to sleep.

It was quiet — before the sun, before the bird calls, no sound but the deadly funnelweb spiders inspecting traplines. (They hung in ghostly cones, whitish, in the lantana outside her window, and Bea had that kind of hearing. She heard the placing of eyelash legs on the web threads.) Otherwise: outside the window, a thick pelt of hush, pre-dawn, even the cicadas tuckered out. And inside, nothing but the soft snuffle of babies.

Something held Bea; something about the eggshell heads and the frail bleat of their concave pulses. It made her catch her breath and place herself between the cots and the funnelwebs. She would memorise each scribble of blue veins, the nautilus-shell ears, the slow ballet of fingers and the way they moved as spiders move when stepping across damaged webs.

Bea loved the messy world of babies, the slow-turning sloppy- sweet days. She loved all viscous things: dribble, semen, milk oozing from her breasts, mucous ferns under logs, fungi, slick spittle from the scrub turkeys fussing at their mounds. And here they were. First light, first rainforest noises: the gobbledegook of those finicky fathers scratching outside her window.

She tucked mosquito nets, safety nets, around each cot.

Bare feet on the cool lino, she would pad across the kitchen, boil a bit of tankwater in the dented kettle and steep some tea in her tin mug — she drank it strong and black, but with two spoonfuls of sugar — and then she would slip outside. Ah, the bright dense world. Sometimes laughter left her mouth like a bird, astonishing her. It was all hereness, nowness. In the rainforest, nothing was
then.
Her back against the casuarina, ferns at her feet, she watched the turkeys peck sunrise out of the scrub.

Here was dad, cock of the walk, dad the builder: scratching at the ground, paddling, spittling, making nest-paste out of mud and leaves, out of twigs, out of garbage, out of vegetable peels, piling it up, pew! what a smell, what a compost heap, what a beaut oven for eggs. And here was mum, the little slut, shaking her arse feathers, letting whoever wants watch her while she spreads her twiggy lizard-skin thighs, plop plop plop, mails her eggs into the slot and takes off. Gobble gobble gobble, look what I did, flutter flutter, a little dance step, chook step, two-step, aren't I — one, two, three — a clever chick?

Not that dad cared.

“Your mum was a good time girl. A bit of a ratbag.” That was what he'd say when she came looking for him outside the pub. He'd be stinking of booze. “Bea, luvvy,” he'd say. “Come here.” He'd hoist her up on his shoulders (sometimes slipping, sometimes dropping her, depending how many he'd had) and make an announcement. “Here she is, cobbers. Here's the present what Shirl the Ratbag left behind. This is me Honey Bea, the apple of me eye.” And his mates and cobbers and Blue Moon regulars and other assorted drunks would give a wobbly cheer: hip hip hooray for little Bea.

She liked that, being up on his shoulders, men below and all around clamouring to chuck her in the ankle, blow her kisses, put a sixpence in her hand.

But if it was a Sunday afternoon and he was giving her a ride on his bike round the Ringwood lake, his comments were different. Kinder. (She learned that early: men were one way when other blokes were around; another way when they weren't.) Bea would be curled up on the bar of his bicycle, sidesaddle, inside the cave made by his chest and his arms and the handlebars. “Yer mother was what she was, she had an itch,” he'd say tranquilly, rambling on. “I don't hold it against her. I sez to her, Bugger off if you want to, Shirl, I'm not stopping yer. But the moppet is mine. No bloody way yer taking her.” And he'd lower his head and nuzzle Bea's curls as he pedalled.

“Dad,” she'd giggle. “Dad, watch out, we'll have a smash.”

In his fashion, till he couldn't get out of bed any more, he was a good father. When he was coughing up his guts, when she had to hold the milk bottle for him so he could piss in it in bed, he'd get tears in his eyes. “Ah
struth,
Bea,”
he'd
say. “This ain't something a nipper should 'ave to do.” He
'
d go on and on about the shack up the Condamine then, the one he was going to build for the two of them, get a few sheep, have Bea grow up somewhere clean. “I mean
clean,
bush clean, not just no-dirt-clean.” The coughing would get him. He'd spit and slobber and sob a bit. “Honey Bea, promise me something. Marry some bloke who'll get ya out to the bush. A farm or a shack, I don't care, just go bush. Promise me that.”

“Yeah, okay, Dad,” she'd say. “Yeah, I promise.” She was eight at the time, not yet the sister of Kay who'd gone gallivanting off to Brisbane, brainy Kay who read books but knew bugger all about nothing. She could imagine Kay's eyes if Kay could see her now, holding a bottle round her Dad's dick. She missed Kay, she missed having Kay listen with round eyes, she missed holding court.

He died at home, her dad. A week earlier she'd said: “Dad, I'm gonna get a doctor.” Not that she had the faintest idea how to do that, but she reckoned Grandma Llewellyn would know.

He sat up like a bolt of lightning hit him. “You do that,” he roared (cough cough, spitting in a wad of sheet) “and I'll tan yer hide. I didn't get away from the Japs to die in a bloody hospital. No bloody doctor's gonna get his bloody hands on me.”

“Dad,” she said, because Father McEachern had come calling, “what about Father Bob?”

“And no bloody priest either,” he cough-coughed. Though a day later he told her: “You can get Father What's-'is-name, but not a minute before I tell ya.”

No, he said, in ten different and colourful ways. Not today. And not tomorrow either.

On the third day, 7 a.m., she made him his toast and poured his glass of milk
(health piss,
he called it) and went to his room. His mouth and eyes were open and there was a lot of muck on his pillow, blood and phlegm and black stuff and the kind of smell the worst pubs gave off. The sheets stank.

What she did: she climbed on the bed and curled up the way she used to on his bike and put her face against his chest. She sobbed and sobbed at the top of her lungs. The only time ever. Not even Kay knew, not Father What's-'is-name, she never told anyone, not a soul, there wasn't a being alive who could …

Not true. She'd told Nicholas one night. God knew where in the world that secret was holing up. Somewhere safe, that was certain, though he'd tell it and tell it and tell it, put it into different shapes and colours till he wouldn't know which was which himself and no one would believe a bloody word. If you had to tell a secret, tell a tale teller. What a talker, what a golden liar.

And maybe, yes perhaps she'd let something slip to Charade once, when Charade was pestering her for history again. The only way you could get that child off your back was to give her another pellet of the past, then she'd hive off up the mango tree or somewhere and play with it for hours. That child could talk black into blue, but who ever believed a word she said?

And Nicholas. How many versions had he given her about him and that pastry-pale woman, that Ashcan sheila? How many lies about him and Kay? What about the time he arrives on her doorstep, breezes in for his bit of cuddling and smoodging and the rest of it, and then when he's leaving, abracadabra, pulls this snake out of his pocket, this pink coral thing for round her neck.

“What's all this about?” she'd asked him. “What would I want with la-de-da stuff like this?”

“From Green Island, Bea,” he'd told her. “The Barrier Reef.” And as he waved goodbye from his car: “Kay and I both thought it would suit you.”

And then Kay tells her the Green Island story. For Kay's bloody twenty-first, she bloody gets Nicholas. It can still make Bea spit. Yeah, but
what
did Kay get exactly? She still didn't know for sure if they'd ever. Let alone the others, but she didn't give a hoot about them. She didn't even care that much about the Ashcan, that was different, that was weird. It was Kay she couldn't bear to imagine … Ah struth, forget all that, let it go.

(God, she missed Kay sometimes. Sometimes she missed her so bad — the rotten sneaky book-smart Nicholas-chasing ninny — that she could smell their old bedroom, the books, the socks, the cheap perfume Bea herself had swiped from Woolworths, could smell the whole caboodle in the very middle of lawyer cane and staghorns and monsteras and rotting logs. Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph.)

Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she sobbed and sobbed against her dad's stinking shirt until all the sobbing was used up, and then she splashed her face with water in the kitchen and climbed through the back fence and crossed the paddock and the buttercup patch and went and got Grandma Llewellyn.

And now it was scrub turkey time, and the sun was leaking into the Tamborine rainforest. Well Dad, I kept my promise. I got some bloke to give me a house out bush. Not much I can say about Sid but I can say this: he had a bit of land and a shack and he left it behind. Didn't wait for Siddie to be born, even. Just shot through. He went shearing, I reckon, which was in his blood at least three generations deep,
all among the wool, boys, all among the wool, he shore at Burrabogie and he shore at Toganmain.
I lost a few of me blokes that way, they all dreamed that they shore in a shearing shed, and it was a fucking womanless dream of matey joy. What the hell. I had to work in the bar at McGillivray's while I was as big as a blimp with Siddie, and ever since for that matter, not that I'm complaining. I've got by, along with a bit of cleaning and washing at Wentworth's, that kinda thing. And McGillivray's been good to me. He's true blue, that bloke. (Funny thing, we went at it a few times back when, he still carries a torch, maybe — well, sometimes I think that, catching a look — but not one of the Bea-lings is his.) Anyway, Siddie's dad was a decent bloke, leaving me the shack, but he wasn't the scrub turkey kind. Who is? Except you, Dad.

Bea sipped her first tea of the morning and watched the turkey-time show. Here was the fusser. First he stuck his head down his own little homemade volcano — the way nobody alive can ever stop themselves gawking down a mail slot to see if their letter has made it, just in case the law of gravity got changed. Here was red-faced daddy scrub turkey, whose floozy had just feathered off (
Good riddance, Shirl!)
checking to see that her eggs were inside his personal oven. (And where else could they have got to?) Then up went the red crest, out went the breast feathers, cocker-doodle-doo, I got three eggs on the slow bake in here. Blowing his own gobble-gobble trumpet, the show-off, the silly galah.

He was the hatcher, the worrier. What Bea loved was the way he set his head to one side, laid his cheek on the walls of the nest mound, testing, testing. Sometimes he took fright: oh shit, oh struth,
blimey,
mate! temperature not quite right, too hot, too cold, walls not thick enough, the hearts of his tiny not-yet-chicks ticking in some pattern that alarmed him. At any rate, his turkey stethoscope gave Red Alert. (And over there, three trees away, not giving a damn, is his floozy. Shimmying her downy arse and scratching for worms.)

Not your ordinary dad, the scrub turkey. Fair dinkum neurotic he was, the way he'd rush about dabbing on earth and leaves and vegetable scraps, keeping oven temperatures just right on the button. Day after day, year in year out, Bea watched him, silly bugger. She turned around, and there were Siddie and Charade in school. Not Em; Em never went to school; Em's father was that drifter, the Norwegian, the one got beat up that night at McGillivray's. She'd taken him home, dragged him practically, McGillivray helping; put Dettol on his cuts and he'd stayed a month. Took off again. None of her men were scrub turkey fathers.

Bea finished her mug of tea and turned around and there were four, five, six more children in the shack. Seven children, eight children, nine children, ten. Not all of them hers, people said. Some of them were cuckoos in the nest. (Gossip gossip, buzz along the bush telegraph lines, very proper Brisbane girls, ssh, whisper, got themselves into trouble, hush, hush.)

Bea said: It don't matter to me how they got here. Every last one of them's mine.

They all went by the name of Ryan.

Charade was the one who worried her. “Mum,” she'd say. “Why'd you tell people Trev and Liz are yours? I remember how Trev came: you went to Brisbane to see a man about a dog, you said, and the next day there he was. He was one year old already, he was
walking.
Mum. And we just got Liz last year when those people came in their snooty car. Don't tell me not, because I stayed awake that night and hid behind the couch and listened.”

“You got some objection to having Trev as a brother?” Bea asked.