Charades (9 page)

11

On Bea-particles and
the Relativity of Scone Making

“When you disappear,” Charade asks Koenig, “where do you go?”

“Oh, here and there,” he says vaguely “Conferences.”

“Six nights. You were gone six nights without a word.”

He frowns. Hadn't he told her? Perhaps not. When the compulsion strikes, he simply goes. “It was reading week,” he says, as though this explained everything.

“You go to Toronto, don't you?”

He doesn't answer.

“You see,” she says, “I understand about that. The way you worry about your ex-wife. It's the way Nicholas was about Verity. Do you see your son and daughter too?”

“Not my son,” he says, the knife turning inside.

“Sometimes,” Charade says dreamily, “I pretend Nicholas does that too. That he, you know, keeps tabs on me. Sometimes I feel absolutely certain that he's walking just behind me and that if I turned suddenly … but of course I don't turn because that wouldn't be fair.”

A long silence drifts across them. They fall asleep in each other's arms. Koenig dreams he is at La Guardia airport and his son is just ahead of him, turning a corner. Koenig quickens his step, he breaks into a run. Charade dreams that someone is about to tap her on the shoulder. They both cry out, waking, reaching for each other.

“Say something,” Koenig says urgently. “Tell me another story. Tell me about your mother.”

“All right,” Charade says. “I was always trying to make her talk about Nicholas and Verity, but I had to trick her, I had to get to them via Aunt Kay, I had to …”

“Kay and me,” Bea says. “We were peas in a pod to start with, and then we were chalk and cheese. Never figured each other out and couldn't do a thing apart. Then one day we just didn't have anything in common. Well, those two came between us, that's what did it. That was the beginning of the end.”

“What two?”

Bea is rolling scone dough, her wrists flip and snap. Ritual is important: the forward roll, vehement, involving shoulders; the pause, the lift, the backward arc; and the dough fanning out like a flood plain from the confluence of Bea's thighs and the table.

“What two?” Charade persists.

Bea frowns, pulls in all the dimples and valleys of Bea-flesh for an instant, tightens some knot of muscle-nerve-sinew in the top of her head.

“What two?”

“Your father and that Ashkenazy woman.”

“See …” Absentmindedly Charade trails her fingers down Koenig's body. “A moment like that, it felt like D-Day. If I could just make her
say
it. It felt like chipping away at some great … some vast mountain of rubble.

“Your father and the Ashkenazy woman.
Tap, tap: they were inside there somewhere, under the rubble, still faintly alive, still sending out signals, still waiting to be dug out.

“Seems like I spent half my childhood thinking up ways to catch Mum out. I used to keep score, I used to … I would ask her about Aunt Kay, it was bait, it was my decoy, because all the stories led back to Nicholas and to Verity Ashkenazy. And so Aunt Kay … but how can I explain Aunt Kay?”

“Isn't this where we came in?”

“What?”

Koenig closes his eyes. In the beginning was the hologram, then the girl in his bedroom and … “Something about your Aunt Kay, that's where you began. Katherine to me, you said. It seems ages, weeks, since you mentioned her.”

“Yes, well.” She frowns. “You're the one who's been away.”

Something has been evoked that bothers her. She seems to remember a need for caution. She slides away from his arms and huddles in his armchair again.

“Aunt Kay …” she says, and he has to wait out another lengthy silence. If he moves when she is in these suspended states, she may take fright and leave. He waits.

“What I'm doing here, you know,” she says, “is stalling … hanging on to you as though … and talking, talking … Of course I'll have to go back eventually —”

“Go back?” He has a sudden queasy fantasy of a green twister sucking her into mathematical blips, and then darkness. Loss swamps him and he half stumbles across the room and draws her against himself, tongue and hands convulsive, geographies interlocking. “Ahh, thank God, you're so …” His mouth closes hungrily over hers. Not an abstract flavour, not a hint of the dry burn of mathematics or theory, which are, no question about it, acquired tastes.
Matter
, he thinks with enormous relief. Sweet vulgar heavy Newtonian mass.
Substance.

“What's wrong? What's the matter?”

“Oh nothing,” he says, relaxing a little, but holding her so that her lips are against the crook of his neck, her cheek on his shoulder. “I just had a silly … a fleeting nightmare.” He strokes her hair. “It's nothing.” The irony of this strikes him and he laughs. “Or rather, it's
not
nothing. Luckily. It's
matter.”

“Ah,” she says. “Matter. One of our most persistent illusions, so you told me. Koenig …?”

“Mmm?”

“These … these
nights
 … We're just, you know it's only …”

“Yes, yes.” He doesn't want to know what it is.

“Eventually I'll have to go home. I'm just stalling, you know, staving off the … The truth is, I can't bear to think I've checked out the last clue and not found him. Nicholas, I mean. My father. That's why in Toronto I was afraid —”

“Afraid in Toronto.” He laughs a little, letting her glide out of his arms and hunch up in his chair again. Images come to him: of swept curbs and decorum, of tea and buttered shortbread, of clean subways, safe streets, tacit curfews.

“Aunt Kay … Katherine … lives outside of Toronto. Sort of nowhere, really, in the middle of woods and on a lake. But she
was in Toronto when she saw Nicholas again. Or thought
she saw.”

“Saw your father?”

“Well, thought she saw …” He watches an uneasy laugh pulse up like alpha rays. “With Aunt Kay it's difficult to … Now I know what it's like, for her and Mum.” Getting queasy at certain names. Picking a path through memories that might blow up in the face. “I used to watch how Mum …”

She used to watch, she watched, she was watching,

past tense imperfect,

she was watching the curvature of time.

It's now, Charade, and then; it's only now and then; sing a song of Einstein, a perfect circle full of time. She watches, she does watch, she is watching …

Charade watches everything: the way Siddie, her older brother, stiffens at certain bird calls, the ones that come McGillivray- throated, rising from the lips of the publican's daughter; the way spittle hangs in bright stalactites on the slack chin of Em, sweet Em, the vacant third-born, her younger sister; the way Michael Donovan rubs one bare foot against the other, flylike, when he comes for his dad. But most of all, she studies her mother. What fascinates her is this: there are three strings which can pull her mother's easy body to sudden tautness.

They are making scones together, Charade and Bea, scones that will swell thickly and stickily into the little pinched stomachs of the Bea-lings, that happy-go-lucky multi-fathered Ryan tribe. Bea makes the plain and solid kind of scone: flour and lard, a few raisins, a pinch of soda, a half-cup of milk. Flour dusts her arms, her hair, and hangs above her, shot through with the morning sun. Em, threading buttons to keep the littlest ones amused, laughs with excitement to see the way gold rides through the room on white scone-smoke.

Charade plumps dough into a square for cutting and says carefully: “Are these as good as the scones Aunt Kay's grandma used to make?”

And there it is: a quick tightening of Bea's fingers on the ends of the rolling pin; a ripple that crosses her cheekbones and moves on down through the beads of sweat on her breasts where they rise like oven-ready dough from her shift. It crosses her large and languid thighs and buttocks so that they suck themselves in and shiver slightly — the way horses' flanks do to shake off flies. Charade watches the calf muscles hum like telegraph wires, the toes clench in their worn sandals, the current moving on to the floor where she sees it dispersing itself in points of light across the cheap linoleum.

“What would you know,” grumbles Bea, “about Grandma Llewellyn's scones?”

“You told me.” Charade's innocent eyes go wide. “You said they were the best ever made in Australia.”

“Well, so they were.” Bea crosses herself with a floury hand. Bits of religion cling to Bea here and there like fluff from a patchwork quilt.

“Wrong way, Mum.”

“What?”

“You did it wrong. It's this way, see, forehead to belly button, left to right.” She ducks from a floury slap. “Why do you always do that when you talk about Aunt Kay's grandma?”

“Because.” Bea thumps away at the dough.

“Because why?”

“Because she was grandma to everyone, me included, God rest 'er soul. Nobody that knew her didn't love her.”

“And you and Kay?”

“Me and Kay, back then, we were like two peas in a pod. Seven years, eight was it? we were sisters in the self-same house.” She sighs and looks into the middle distance. “But Kay,” she says, “she was a gallivanter, right from the start. And me, I'm happy stuck in mud. Always gallivanting round, Kay was, round the countryside, round the world. She could be in Timbuctoo now. Prob'ly is, for all I know.”

“Why'd she gallivant around?”

“I dunno. Started, I reckon, when her family lit out for Brisbane. Nah. Before that, when we were kids in Melbourne. That was before we were sisters, we were just kids who lived near Ringwood station. Let's hide on a train, she'd say. Let's go to the Dandenongs. We thought the Dandenongs were the edge of the world. Nah, I'd say, let's play in the paddock and roll in the buttercup patch.

“Back then,” Bea laughs, “I was boss. I was older. What I said went.” She laughs again. “We were both born the same year, me in January, her in November, but I've always been years and years older.”

She wipes the back of a floury arm across her face, breathes deep. “Funny thing, I think about Kay, I always smell grass and the buttercups.

“Melbourne,” she says. “I reckon that's mostly what I remember. The railway line and Ringwood station and the paddock behind our two houses and the buttercup patch.” She squeezes her eyes tight shut, concentrates. “And the war and black paint on the windows and no fathers but all those other men, Yanks, hanging round watching the girls, and some of them feeling
up the little ones, 'specially me. And then after the war …

“I remember the year Kay wasn't there, before they sent for me, after they'd gone to Brisbane. Seems like me dad coughed all year, that whole year, coughed his guts up. This stuff, this
phlegm,
would come up. That's the war, he'd say. I'm getting it out of my system. In the end I had to wash him and all, he hated that, and hold a bottle, you know, for his pee.

“It's funny, can't remember when my mum shot through. Can't even remember my mum. Everyone said she was a bad one, a floozy, I reckon I took after her. I reckon I would've liked her. Well, my dad was a TPI after the war, he didn't last long. Got his TPI badge somewhere, I'll give that to you, Charade, when I'm gone. My dad was one of the Rats of Tobruk, got that badge somewhere too. He was a hero. But his lungs gave out or something, he coughed himself away.

“Kay's mum and dad came down from Brisbane for the funeral and took me back. We weren't any kind of relation but I reckon they felt they ought to, or maybe Kay missed me. And yeah, Grandma Llewellyn, she stayed on in Melbourne, I reckon she would've taken me in but they thought she was too old to cope. With me, I mean. I was what people called a handful.” She shrugs. “Or maybe Kay asked them, I don't know.

“But I reckon I got a bit of my mum's blood in my veins, Charade. ‘A bad lot' people said about her, and about me too. So what? I said. I was always going off in the bush with boys, running away. Struth, what can you do if it's in your blood? Took them a long time to give up on me, though. They couldn't help themselves when souls were around to be saved, it was an itch they had, the way other blokes go for beer. They were holy rollers, don't get that wrong, they were okay and I reckon I loved them. But all that praying and stuff, it didn't agree with my constitution. I'm not cut out for it, like. You know, there was a magnet inside me or something, and something
pulling.
It was like there was this thing inside me always knew I had to go bush and have men and kids, lots of both. I reckon I've had a good life, Charade.

“But Kay. Blimey. She must've been born on a Sunday, between the first and second hymn, she had Bible-milk in her highchair. Still, I reckon it didn't agree with her either, in the long run, holy rolling. Maybe that's why she went gallivanting off. I just ran off to the bush, but she ran off to the world and kept on running.

“Praying. I tell you, they were barmy about it. Start of the day, middle of the day, end of the day. You couldn't sit down to eat or get up from the table or set foot in the door or try to leave without somebody telling you to close your eyes for a word of prayer. There were daily mercies and travelling mercies and eventide mercies, we prayed for them all, we gave thanks for them all, amen. Mind you, back then, even Kay prayed like mad, even I had a go, we were always dragging God around like a swag on our backs, we always had Him tagging along. I reckon Him and me hit it off all right, we come to an understanding. Listen, God, I said to him, you give me a bit more rope, I won't say a word about my dad and the war and all that.”

Bea crosses herself, wrong way again. “That's for my dad,” she says. “He was a Catholic, not the fancy kind, he never went to church. Grandma Llewellyn used to be one, back when, till the Gospel Hall got her and she switched. Just the same, I saw her cross herself once or twice, when she didn't think anyone was watching.”