Charades (7 page)

I went down to the old track, past the banyan trees and silky oaks, swinging down the dangling roots, all the way down to the curtain fig and the bone man. The bone man was getting smaller and smaller, and some of his parts were missing, his white geometry in disarray. Pilfering possums, dogs perhaps, other children? He seemed to be disappearing line by bleached line — though he hid quietly under dead leaves and ferns that uncurled themselves like the fingers of a baby.

Are there any good fathers? I asked him.

They come good and bad, he said, and everything in between.

Make me a father, I said. A good one. And tell him to me. And this was the bone man's tale, but it's my tale too. I was always inventing fathers.

Once upon a time, in the northern hemisphere, there lived a king who had three sons — well no, not three sons, because the youngest child was a daughter. And behind the king, crouching at the back of his throne, lived a dream, and the dream had the king in its coils. Sleeping and waking, it had him, until he summoned his counsellors to his chambers.

I dream of a land that does not exist, he said. I see deserts, but also small steamy pockets of forest. I see cities that cling to the edges of a dead hot heart as froth clings to the sides of my beer mug. The people who live in this dream have the faces of children. They worship the sun, they do not believe that a world exists beyond their shores, they are full of thoughtless cruelties. As flies rub their legs, these people rub the past from themselves. Interpret this dream for me.

And his counsellors said: This is the dream of Terra Australis, O King, which is like unto the dream of El Dorado.

And they read unto him from the scrolls of the sea captains and cartographers:

But, altho' the remote parts of the southern hemisphere remain undiscovered, we have traces from ancient times, warranted by latter experience, of rich and valuable countries in it … It has been commonly alleged, and perhaps not without good reason, from a consideration of the weight of land to water, that a Continent is wanting on the South of the Equator, to counterpoize the land on the North, and to maintain the equilibrium necessary for the earth's motion …

We read, O King, from
An Account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacific Ocean
, published here in London in this year of our Lord, 1767. This dream, O King, they said, has caused much royal insomnia and the loss of many ships.

And the king said: Send in unto me my three children.

And his counsellors answered: This is no voyage and no country for women, young or old, O King. Shall we not send only your two sons?

But the king, being a rare and compassionate father, knew that his sons would take care of themselves. It was when he looked into the future for his daughter that his heart contracted, and so to all three he offered a riddle and a prize.

Go forth, he said, and seek the kingdom of my dream, which shall go to the finder. And the solver of my riddle will be provided with ships for the voyage.

Here is the riddle, he said. The country of my dream is beautiful and harsh, a man's country according to my counsellors and cartographers and geomancers. A man's country, they insist. A place where women will not be wanted, where it is unlikely that they will survive. When Terra Australis is found, therefore, how shall I people it with women?

And his eldest son answered: O Father, you must send into the dreamland maidens of great beauty and tenderness, whose skills in the making and feathering of nests are legendary. Then the men of that country will learn to desire wives and will protect them.

But his second son answered: O Father, you must cause an itch to fall upon the men of that country, an itch for which the dream of a woman is the only cure.

Then the youngest one, his daughter, spoke. You must ensure that the men of that dreamplace continue to despise and ridicule and underestimate the women, she said. Then the women will learn laughter and independence and they will survive.

And the king was well pleased with his daughter's answer and he commissioned a fleet to sail into the dream in the year of our Lord 1787. And he arranged safe passage on a ship called
Supply
for his youngest child, who stepped ashore on the coast of the dream in January, 1788, and who was — so the bone man told me, says Charade — the great-great-great-grandmother of my mum Bea, the Slut of the Tamborine Rainforest.

9

Nicholas and Verity

The lace curtains stir, ballooning softly and subsiding, as though the windows are breathing, and Charade asks drowsily: “Who's responsible?”

“Radiators,” Koenig says. “Convection currents.”

“No, I meant: Who chose lace curtains for your bedroom?”

“Oh.” Rachel, in a sense, he supposes. He still chooses things with her ghostly presence in mind. “Ah … Joanna, I guess. My housekeeper.”

Charade sighs. “Was this her side? Her pillow?”

He assumes she is not referring to his housekeeper.

Here I am, Charade thinks, lying within the hollow of another woman's life just as my mum floated in the cavity left by Verity Ashkenazy.

“Verity stalks me,” she says. “She and Nicholas Truman, my father, are always there in the middle distance. Before I was born they walked through the rainforest like mirages, dropping crumbs of delirium, and the Tamborine people licked them up and had visions. That's what Michael Donovan told me. Well, not in so many words, but that was the sense of it, and Michael got it from his brother Brian — the one who was paralysed from the waist down after he smashed up his father's truck. And Brian had got it on another occasion, before the accident, from their father when they were on the town in Brisbane and his dad was drunk as a bandicoot and talking. But Michael Donovan's dad had an axe to grind, so
who knows?”

In the loops of silence between sentences, Koenig hears the whisper of Rachel's pen writing and writing her letters. His daughter's voice reproaches him. His son chants with the Moonies.

“Keep talking,” he urges Charade. “What did your father
look like?”

“In the mornings he was golden, and glowed like Apollo. At least, that's what I like to think. Since I've never seen him, I'm free to invent and I picture him hovering over Verity like a sort of god of the forest. He kept her safe. He gave her mangoes to suck, and she dreamed of him every night. My mother Bea and my aunt Kay dreamed of him too. He was one of those men …

“He was like Krishna, you know? On the banks of the Jumna five hundred milkmaids pined for Krishna and each believed she was his one and only love. Each could prove in voluptuous detail that the night of the last full moon had been spent in his arms — even though they all knew that Radha could tie him up in the coils of her sari.

“My father, Nicholas Truman, had powers like that.”

“You're looney,” Koenig says. “You're wonderfully crazy.”

“Very likely,” Charade admits.

But Koenig wonders: do I put words into her mouth? She has such a flickering look, and he does have ulterior motives.

“No, no,” she says. “If anything, it's the other way round.”

“What?” Koenig pivots on one elbow, looking down at her. He is certain, quite certain, that he hasn't spoken aloud. Hasn't even finished a thought.

“First I dream up my man, then I track him down, then he has to hear me through. I was born under the sign of the Darting Tongue when the moon was licking at the Southern Cross. So my mother says. If I stop talking, I'll vanish like camphor.”

“Ah,” he says lightly, “and then where should I look?”

“Looking,” she sighs. “I'm an expert in looking, but not in finding. I've never found my father.”

“Who resembled Apollo,” he says dryly.

“Yes. Though even he was struck dumb by Verity, and I can be specific about her. Well, loosely specific. There's a painting.”

“A painting?”

“Michael Donovan's dad did it. That's something, isn't it? A garbage and slops collector, a feeder of pigs, who painted. He used the sides of old tea chests and it was not a habit he admitted to; he kept it a deathly dark secret, I can promise you, but Michael found his hoard at the back of their shack and showed me. There were also crude likenesses of my mother in clotted ochres and greens, a Honey Bea deep in the wattles.”

“And Verity,” Koenig prompts. “What did she look like?”

“She was tall and pale gold with brown eyes and long, long hair which she wore hanging loose to the waist. It was black and thick as a tree fern's roots. I'll tell you the tale of Nicholas and Verity that Michael Donovan's dad told to Brian, his older son.”

And her voice slid

over the waterfall

at the back of the Donovan

shack and down down down to the
basso
pool at the very bottom of the beer-and-phlegm throat of Michael Donovan's dad, who says, “There's some women just waiting to be bruised. Don't ask me how or why they got that way, but they give off something, you know? They got big dark eyes, set deep, asking to be made to cry — though they don't, they won't cry, these women. They just get silent. They bruise. That Verity woman — the Ashcan, Bea used to call her — she was one of those.”

Mick Donovan could have sworn, so he tells his son, that she had a streak of Abo in her, that she stepped out of the Dreamtime, a ghost lubra with her hair black as sin and that golden body begging to be manhandled and eyes that could set a man to howling like a dingo, except she wasn't even born in Australia. She was from somewhere else. “An Eyetie, maybe,” he says. “Some kind of wop. Foreign, anyway. I dunno where she was from, but wherever it was she shouldn't have left there. Talked with a plum in her mouth.”

He runs his tongue over his lips, licking at the beer mist on his stubble, and his son Brian looks away and winks at a cream- and-molasses barmaid.

“And so did that Nicholas bloke who followed her around, so did he. Talk about plum in the mouth! He musta swallowed a fruit shop, an entire greengrocery,” says Mick Donovan with sudden violence. “Bloody Pommy, bloody fraud. His christly voice come out his mouth wearing corsets and crocheted knickers.”

Brian says: “Keep yer shirt on, Dad. The bloke's been gone for donkey's years.”

“I only met the bastard once,” growls Mick Donovan, “and that was one time too many. He walks into McGillivray's pub on the 26th of January, 1963, not a day I'm likely to forget, the day Bea Ryan turned twenty-one.”

Brian laughs. “Australia Day? Ma Antsy-Pants Ryan born on Oz Day? Pull the other one, Dad.”

Mick Donovan swipes his son across the cheek, Brian lurches, knocks over his chair, a bystander thumps Mick hard on the back saying, “Watch it, mate!” and Brian raises his fists at the bystander: “Keep yer bloody hands off my dad.”

Mick says: “If I ever hear you talk that way about Bea Ryan again, I'll knock yer socks off.”

He drains his glass and calls for two more and gooses the barmaid when she comes.

“I reckon every man-jack of us wanted Bea,” he says, “and the whole of the Tamborine Mountain was gonna dance at her party that night. I dunno what it was about Bea. She already had a kid by then, Sid Andrews' son, and Sid had buggered off to God knows where. But she still drove us crazier than any six virgins.

“So this party is planned and I have to take Maureen — God rest yer mother's soul. Maureen — and every other sheila on the mountain — watches Bea as though Bea is a snake. But twenty-one is twenty-one, and the whole world is gonna drink at this shindig.

“Well, it's January and ninety-six in the shade, and we — the blokes, I mean — are gathering at McGillivray's to wet the whistle before the party starts. We're on the verandah, see, and maybe some of us on the steps, and some others, yeah, I reckon some others are under the trees. There's a sun like a flamin' communion wafer hangin' right against the roof of Wentworth's, struth, I thought it'd set his sign on fire, like a bloody spitball of flame it was, just waiting for the half-dark to gobble it. And you can already see the moon standing by, thin as a piece of shell. We're talking women, we're talking horses, we're talking bets. Bill Stolley, the old fool, has just lost his shirt at yesterday's races and is cadging drinks.

“Then this weird thing happens. Seems like every scrub turkey on the mountain hears someone at McGillivray's call its name. Dozens of them, scores of them, maybe hundreds, cackling and scratching, colliding at the verandah rails, dropping feathers and worse in our beer. Holy shit, it was weird. I heard of it happening two or three other occasions, only when the sun and the moon are changing places in that space between Wentworth's roof and the big blue gum outside of McGillivray's.”

“Dad,” says Brian, “this tale gets taller with every drink.”

“And out of the moon,” says Mick Donovan, “walking in between the birds like — I dunno, like gods or something, comes these two strangers. Jacky Dobson — he's part Aboriginal — he swears he saw them covered with feathers and carrying nets, butterfly nets, bird-catcher nets, people nets. He starts trembling like he's got the DTs. Hey mate, someone says to him, lay off the metho, eh? And Jacky covers his face with his hands and calls out: ‘Watch out for their nets. If their nets come down, you're done for.'

“Those two can hear Jacky, o' course. They stare at him, and then the bloke speaks.

“ ‘We didn't mean to alarm anybody,' he says in his fancy-pantsy voice. ‘We're looking for Bea Ryan. We're friends of Bea's.'

“ ‘And pigs can fly', says I. The whole damn pub is cracking up. We can just see Bea sucking on her words to get them all shipshape, plum juice dribbling out of her mouth. We can just see Bea having friends like these.

“ ‘We've driven up from Brisbane. We have an invitation,' the bloke says in his Pommy voice. He's waving this bit of paper. ‘But I'm afraid it's not very specific about directions. Does anyone here know where Bea lives?'

“Someone says: ‘Every man and his dog knows where Bea lives. Just follow your own divining rod. Beg pardon, ma'am' — because the sheila with the big dark eyes has turned to look at him, and we don't use language in front of women. So there's shuffling, like, and a bit o' coughing and spitting, and someone else says: ‘She'll be right, mate. She's on her way
if you'll hang on a tick. You're
at
the party.'

“But this bloke acts like he don't even know that a voice like his will get him into trouble. ‘Perhaps I'll just go out to meet her,' he says, ‘if you could point me in the right direction.'

“And someone does, see. Point, I mean. And the bloke whispers somethin' to his sheila, and next thing, pouf! he leaves her there on the verandah, leaning right on the doorway of the bar. I watch him moving down between the sun and the moon in that space between McGillivray's and the blue gum.

“Well, this is weird, you know, and everyone looks at everyone else with his eyebrows touching the top of his bloomin' skull. I mean, the shadow of a sheila on a bar, it's bad luck, it ain't legal, it ain't natural. Unless she's a barmaid, that's different.

“Well, his sheila just shades her eyes and stares after her bloke till he disappears, then she turns and looks at us. She's leaning against the door frame, one foot on the verandah and one in the bar, and then she speaks. It's one o' them plummy voices, but low and sexy, like Marlene Dietrich, you know? And we all suck
in our stomachs and take our feet off the verandah rails and watch her.

“ ‘I wonder,' she says, ‘if it would be possible to have a glass of iced pomegranate juice?' ”

“Aw c'mon, Dad,” Brian laughs. “Give us a break.
Pomegranate juice.”

“Swear to God,” Mick Donovan says. “Bloody oath. Well. It's like we're all in a dream. It's like everyone's moving in his sleep. Pomegranate juice? She might as well've asked us for possum milk. Or for that dingo blood that some blokes swear they've seen Jacky Dobson get into, in that cave behind the Springbrook Falls.

“The sun's been swallowed up whole by this, and the moon is on her, on the sheila I mean, and not a man-jack of us breathes. Right then, I'll admit it to ya, Brian, even the thought of Bea went clear out of my head, I couldn't think of nothing at all, but I reckon I woulda killed, right then, to know what a pomegranate looks like and find it and milk it and bring it to that long-haired sheila. Turns out she means a grenadilla, but we don't know that till later.

“We're all watching and no one moves.

“Then Jacky Dobson starts in murmuring and chanting and swaying. He's got two fingers out like snake fangs, warding her off, and he's saying:
Watch out for her net, watch out for her net, or we're goners.

“Maybe it's Jacky that throws her, or maybe just the staring, or maybe we're just all dreaming and the dream turns bad. She puts her hands up in front of her as though she's expecting to be hit, and her eyes get enormous, black as the pit. There's two things I realise I want to do, about equal amounts: one is to have a mouth full of whatever-the-hell-is-pomegranate and to kiss it drip by drip down inside her; and the other is to hurt her, I dunno why. But that's what I say: there's some sheilas born begging for trouble, don't ask me why.

“I know one thing. It feels like I got a live coal fizzing between my legs, it feels like she's pulling me at her on strings, I can't help meself. I got me arms out in front of me, but buggered if I know what I'm going to do when I touch her.

“I figure me hands are an inch from her body — enough to feel the electric shocks coming off it — when she starts shaking. Shaking bad, like an earthquake has her. And she backs away, backwards across the verandah and down the steps and along the path, stumbling backwards, and shaking, and never taking her eyes off all of us, off me in particular. Her eyes have grown bigger than her face, they're like black caves, they're holes to nowhere. Me, I'm paralysed, standing there like a bloody idiot with my arms stuck out like a scarecrow. Funny thing, she's not noisy, not that sort of hysterical, she's quiet as death, but it feels like sirens are dinging in me ears, and she sure smells crazy to us.