Charades (28 page)

Who can remember anything at all about the commotion itself? But those two creases, that creamy V, can swim up from wherever it is that memory lurks and she will have to catch hold of something, will have to press the back of her hand against her lips.

(Jesus, Bea thinks, nearly twenty-five years later. What sense does this make?)

All this takes a very long time, so long that it is possible the party is over without her, the guests all gone home. (Though next week Mick Donovan, in a drunken fury, will say:
Christ, you must have gone at it like dogs, you fucking overheated bitch.)
In Bea's bedroom, the clock runs slow. After years and years and years, when the fit has subsided and there is nothing she can do to stop the lock from unlocking itself, when his cock leaves her with a quiet little slurp of goodbye, with a sucking sigh, when they are lying very wet and very exhausted, Nicholas says: “We could live like this, Bea.”

Over them, like a dome, is their own post-thunderstorm weather of damp peace. Nicholas gestures into it. “We could — I don't know — farm silky oak and walnut and ash. Breed orchids. I could read Proust and write poetry, you could spin cloth of gold.”

The crazy Pommy, the silly galah.

“In the Bea-loud glade,” he says, and she watches as his voice builds a life, watches a Nicholas-and-Bea world take shape: minarets, caravans, banners of silk. He claps his hands and the Slave of the Ring appears. Deck the Queen Bea with jasmine and honey, he commands. Cover her with cinnamon and cloves. Loony Nicholas, the golden talker with tales on his breath.

And then

“Bea,” he says, leaning on his elbows, kissing her on the lips. “We'd better go. I left Verity at that pub down the road. You don't mind, do you?”

You don't mind, do you?
Her mind grapples with a translation of those words in the vacuum where the eye of the storm is passing, and then hailstones large and sudden as boulders come pelting down, a cyclone is ripping an illusion to shreds.

“I had the dickens of a time convincing her to come,” he says. “You know what she's like. You have to help me, Bea. She's getting worse.” He buries his face in her breasts. “Help her, Bea. I want you to save her.”

The details of shock are no clearer than those of euphoria. Buttons are buttoned, limbs move, smiles get fastened into place. Who expects it to make sense? Who was there when the morning stars sang together? Who watched when the sea was hemmed with sand?

“Sometimes, Bea,” he is saying, “I wonder if you yourself realise. I wouldn't want to make extravagant metaphysical claims, but you do have … 
something.
A touch. You could hardly not be aware of it, could you? Best not analysed, I suppose you would say?”

What the bloody hell is he talking about? She is watching for the spaces between words (those treacherous rocks), feeling her way. That is where she must swim. Take it slowly, move this foot, then this one, grope with hands turned clumsy as flippers. Ah, and the chill, the black water. She cannot remember a January that has been so cold.

Do they cross the verandah, collect Siddie, go down the steps? Apparently. And at McGillivray's there is something going on, there is one hell of a hubbub, a general commotion, a bunch of yobbos making catcalls and jokes. Bea can smell the same sort of ghastly thing you smell when a lamb is snagged on barbed wire and dingoes are gathering.

God Almighty.

She runs blindly but for some reason the sense of barbed wire is so strong that she runs with her hands in front of her face. She could as easily abandon her dad in his stink and his sodden sheets as watch this. She doesn't remember much: the stumbling up the steps, shouting, a certain amount of cuffing ears, lashing around with her tongue, letting them have it. Then (she thinks) there was a long embarrassed silence, the men sheepish, Verity shaking like a sick dog, Bea herself drained and shaking (the bloody infectious shivers going the rounds like the wind through shivery-grass), and Nicholas … ah well, let that go.

Over his shoulder Bea and Verity are eye to eye. Endlessly, endlessly Bea has replayed that look; or rather, Bea has never disengaged herself from that moment whose meaning will forever tantalise her: there is the image of barbed wire and a creature snagged; that translation is always present. There is another thing, a black black black thing, but where does it come from? From Verity's eyes? Or from Bea's thoughts? It is the black gleam of an ace trumped.

Someone lurches and drops a glass.

“
Struth
,” Bea says, her eyes flashing. “Ya bloody pack of dingoes. Can't ya bloody behave yerselves with me guests at me own bloody party?”

Aw shucks, Bea, nobody meant …

“Well,” she says, climbing onto the bar and holding high a glass of beer, flinging up her arm so that foam flecks fall like confetti. “It's me twenty-first birthday, dammit. Who's gonna dance?”

Twenty-one. Kay's twenty-first, November 1963. Of course Bea remembered it. She had Mick Donovan drive her down to Been- leigh in his truck, she bought a card that had pink satin balloons on it, real satin, very fancy, with cushiony stuff glued under the satin so that you could press a finger into each balloon. She mailed it off to north Queensland where Kay was teaching.

And Kay wrote back.

You will never believe who showed up at my door on my birthday. I have trouble believing it myself. It was an absolute fluke, but he's been a visiting tutor this year, they have to visit all the external students. We never know when they're going to drop in, he's been a couple of times, actually. The first time was nearly a year ago (just after your twenty-first). He told me he'd been to your party. But this time was an incredible fluke, it was just sheer good luck, he hadn't even known it was my birthday. We went to Green Island again.

Anyway, see you in December. Lots to tell.

Hah, Bea thought. I'll bet.

And what took place in the kiosk of the Botanical Gardens, at the foot of George Street in Brisbane, on a steamy December day in 1963, just one hour after Bea had shown Kay's letter to Babs, just six weeks after the birth of Charade, and just two weeks from the assassination of John F. Kennedy — an event which seemed to hold some relevance for Kay and none whatsoever for Bea?

According to Babs McGinnis, who knows as much as anyone (which is not much) about that meeting, it was briefer than either of the parties intended.

(“But Babs is something of a problem,” Charade tells Koenig. “In the long run, nothing she says is reliable. If there was something Mum didn't want me to know, Babs would back her up.
I have to take her with a grain of salt. And getting anything from Aunt Kay — other than JFK talk — was like trying to get blood from a stone.”)

So: Babs McGinnis, not under sworn oath, maintained that Bea had planned to go straight from the rendezvous at the Gardens to the 6 p.m. Beenleigh bus; and that instead she had appeared, just a little after 3 p.m. and with Charade in her arms, at Babs's West End flat.

“Didn't she turn up?” Babs asked, surprised.

“Yeah,” Bea said. “She turned up.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” Bea said. “Can you drive me back in for the six o'clock bus?”

“Sure. You want a drink? Beer? Whad'ja talk about?”

“About the bloody American president getting his bloody head shot off,” Bea snapped.

Bea is at the kiosk first. She sits on one of the benches and leans back against the lattice, with Charade in her arms, in such a way that she can watch the path winding in from the George Street gates. She wants a few moments to accustom herself to the sight of Kay again before she hears whatever Kay has to tell.

It is as she feared. There is a radiance to Kay, and so Bea knows. She can feel a pain beginning behind her forehead and opening downward and through her like a rift valley. Verity is one thing. This is another.

“Bea!” Kay calls. “Oh Bea.” Running, laughing, hugging, dangerous happiness slopping in all directions so that people turn and feel a pang of envy, you can see it in their eyes. “Oh my God, a baby, another one? You never even told me! Oh how gorgeous … He or she? Oh, she's adorable, what's her name?”

“Charade,” Bea says, waiting (that's what this is all right, a bloody charade), waiting, swaying, poised, watchful, ready to snake away or strike.

“Charade?” Kay's eyebrows go up, she laughs. “Charade as in …?” There's a second's awkward pause, a feeling for context. “I like it, Bea. It's got class.” Kay is not full of awe, or shock, or anything but her own excitement. “Bea,” she says, “I can't wait to tell you. I've won a scholarship, I'm going to America, can you believe it?
America.”

These meaningless words eddy past Bea like yesterday's tram tickets. City flotsam.

“America!”
Kay says again. “And at such a time, an assassination. It's like being catapulted from the outer suburbs of history to the core of … of … I don't know … My God, Bea, it's like …” — Kay is shredding bougainvillea leaves with a fingernail; Bea is waiting for the real reason for all this frazzle — “it's like having your whole life suddenly
translated
 … Who will I become, over there? There'll be, there would have to be, it stands to reason, a sort of quantum difference. Unpredictable changes. I mean, it's inconceivable here, isn't it? Can you imagine a Prime Minister shot?” She sits down momentarily beside Bea, bounces up again. “Well, can you, Bea?”

“What?”

“Shot. Can you?”

“Yes,” Bea says.

“What? You can? Are you serious? How can you think something like that?”

“Like what? What the bloody hell are you going on about?”

“About President Kennedy, about the assassination. Oh
Bea
.” Kay gestures with good-natured exasperation. “I'm leaving the first week in January,” she says. “I'll go straight into … listen to this: the winter semester, that's what they call it.”

Bea shifts position and adjusts Charade in her lap.

“Actually,” Kay says — she cannot keep still — “it was Nicholas's idea.” Bea leans forward slightly, listening for the under­current. “He encouraged me to apply. As a matter of fact —”

Bea strikes.

“Yes,” she says. “He told me.”

Kay lurches. (The thought does not come to Bea in the shape of that particular word, but that is her judgment.) Kay puts the back of her hand against her mouth. Bea, waiting, counts seven full seconds before more words make a rush on the silence. “Bea …?” Kay stumbles. “Is Charade …? Is Charade …?”

“Yes,” Bea says.

“That's one of my versions,” Charade says. Koenig is stroking her hair. All night they have lain naked together, she is still in his arms. “But it doesn't quite work, there are too many gaps.”

“It's all right,” he murmurs. “We learn to live with whatever we have to live with.” He brushes her cheek with his lips. “After a fashion.”

“I used to lie awake at nights,” Charade says, “inventing the event. I was
there,
that's what's weird. Somewhere” — she knocks on her forehead with her fist — “there must be neurons and synapses that store it.”

“Yes,” he says. “And others whose job it is to screen it.”

She leans on one elbow to look down at him. “You think I
do,
in some sense, know what happened?”

“I think it's possible.”

“God,” she says, digesting this. She burrows back down into his arms, the wiry pelt on his chest against her cheek. “The thing is, my mum and Kay, you can feel the connection still, God you can
feel
it. So why, for nearly twenty-five years, haven't they …?
Why?”

“There's no theory elegant enough to answer that,” Koenig says. “Maybe after particle physics, after the
Theory of Everything
is cut and dried …”

“And Nicholas, my father, my
father.
Not so much as a sign. Why doesn't he … 
Why?”
She pummels the pillow with her fists.

“Ah,” Koenig sighs. “That's easier to understand.”

“When will he come?”

“Perhaps he has. Perhaps he's watching all the time.”

“Well,” she says, “I make him watch. My Nicholas, I mean, the one I've made. I make him watch me all the time.”

The one you've made, Koenig thinks, can be calculated to strike terror in the other's heart. Who can compete with his own mythology? He strokes Charade's belly, the tuft of hair, the soft flesh between her thighs, not to arouse either of them, they are too sated for that; but to indicate protection, sustenance, solace. On her skin, he draws a frail blueprint of hope.

“I have another version,” Charade says. “You see, there's Green Island to think about. And this version came to me entire, in a split second, the day I rang Aunt Kay's doorbell in the house beside the lake outside Toronto. It was the way she looked at me, the shock in her eyes. I look like Nicholas, I know that, Mum says it, Babs says it, Michael Donovan's dad has said it. And that would be enough, I suppose, to explain … But I don't know, I just had the feeling there was something else, something more, in that look.

“So here's my second version.”

Kay was first at the kiosk in the Brisbane Gardens, and when Bea arrived it was Bea who had to lean against the lattice in shock.

“Well, whad'ya you know?” she said. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, who'd have thought? You been home?”

“How could I?” Kay asked. “They think I'm not arriving back until next week.” Kay sank onto the bench and faced her. “Bea?” It was a desperate and convoluted plea.

“What?”

“It's Mum and Dad, you know what this would … So I can't …”