Demons (6 page)

I can go away, said Lyall, if the chemicals are bad; actually, you know, I don’t
usually wear this stuff, unless I’ve got something special to go to which I don’t
very much. Serves me right! Elena smiled. Maybe just go back a little way, she said,
on that side over there, so the breeze will take it away.

Elena and Lyall kept talking, once Lyall had moved his chair. Elena’s mention of
her allergies seemed to open up something in him. Like her, he was there to get away.
The city’s no good, goodness has fled the city, said Lyall. When was the last time
you met a good person there or saw an act of goodness or had some goodness done
to you? Lyall explained how he had tried to make the city work for him but how the
city was always conspiring against him and how it was not until he’d left and come
here that he realised that he was actually in a perpetual struggle with the city,
like Jacob with his Angel, he said, and that in fact every day lived in the city
was a struggle
with
the city; there was always a part of you, even a subconscious
part, fighting with it. He explained at great length how since coming in from the
plains and dwelling in houses and suburbs the human species had always been engaged
in this knock-down-all-in fight with the city which, Lyall insisted, it will never
win. The odds are always stacked in Babylon’s favour, he said. We cling to civilisation’s
veneer, the idea that once upon a time in a city somewhere someone painted a picture
or built a beautiful building or made a beautiful piece of music and that therefore
we city dwellers are closer to God, the Almighty. But no. We make paintings and palaces
and symphonies but we also make shampoo and aftershave and petrol and plastic and
pesticides and computers and computer games and pornography and chat rooms.

Elena loved listening to Lyall’s voice, the rise and fall of it, the plaintive rhythm,
like an old train chugging off into the mist. It was not so much the words she was
hearing as the soothing sound they made in the air. She let him go on; to her it
seemed somehow that his voice was tuned to perfectly match their surroundings, that
it was a voice that could as easily have been spoken by the trees, the grass, the
birds, the lake or the waves on the other side of the bar, and it was surely the
voice she had looked for and not found until now. Every other voice she’d heard was
shallow, tinny, screeching; the voices of her friends, the voices on the radio, the
television, the voices coming out of speakers in shopping centres and railway stations.
All that cacophony had faded and here, right up close and at the same time somehow
everywhere, was a voice spoken only for her.

The Lord’s people were desert dwellers, said Lyall, and the Lord gave unto Abraham
all the land he could see to the north and south and east and west so He could make
with Abraham a covenant that far from the cities of the Nile and the Euphrates these
were his lands, the lands of the plain, and they were like unto the dust of the earth
and if you could count the dust of the earth you could count their number and they
were many. And the Lord with His mighty hand smote the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah,
said Lyall, and rained down fire and sulphur on them because the cities bred wickedness
while Abraham’s people walked with God, they were pure and like unto the white lambs
with their shepherd. And no city was spared God’s mighty wrath because in every city
the wickedness of man was manifest. And He saw how it was not those iniquitous people
of the city that were His chosen but those camped in tents under the stars, tending
their flocks and moving across the plains, building stone altars and kneeling in
the dust and bowing down to the Lord in honour and thanks; these were His people
and these would be blessed and the others would be cursed. And when the Lord God’s
only begotten Son came down from Heaven didn’t He too walk in the dust of Abraham
and let the dust of Abraham’s people gather in the hem of His garments and didn’t
He chase the moneylenders from the Temple and say: Woe unto thee Chorazin and Woe
unto thee Bethsaida and Tyre and Sidon and thou Capernaum which shall be brought
down to Hell? Yea verily we must turn our backs on the cities of the plain and not
look behind lest we turn to salt. We must look up and find God, under the stars,
in the trees, the grasses, the crystal water of the lake. Behold the birds of Heaven,
they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin.

So I turned away, said Lyall, from the people of the city, and I did not look back
while behind me, lo, the smoke went up as the smoke of the furnace and I came here,
Elena, to start anew, to be with nature and through her closer to my God. And I didn’t
look back then and don’t look back now—my wife, my children, they are dead to me,
consumed in God’s mighty fire—and nor should you look back, now that you are here.
Those allergies you talk of are the Devil’s work and the marks on your skin his stigmata,
the Devil’s brands. Let Satan be cast behind—Get thee behind me, saith the Lord—so
we might raise our eyes to God and see everywhere His good works.

Lyall visited every morning and every morning he spoke like this. They shared cups
of tea on the chairs out in the sun and sometimes strolled down the grassy slope
and stood looking at the lake. Soon it seemed right that Elena should visit Lyall,
and she did. He drew a map of the path from her house to his and one morning carrying
the oatmeal biscuits she’d baked she followed it around the lake until she came to
the tree with the white mark on it that pointed the way up through the bush.

Lyall’s house was not so much a house as a shack, built in among the trees from rough-sawn
planks, second-hand timbers, odd weatherboards and sheets of ply and scavenged windows
and doors under a corrugated roof. There was a sort of sitting area outside with
an old wooden table and a couple of chairs. Above Lyall’s door a wooden cross was
fixed, and painted on the door itself in one continuous white line—head, body, tail—was
a fish. There was a small dog tied to a stake nearby, a scrawny, mangy thing; it
didn’t bark at Elena’s approach but just whined and squeezed its tail a little harder
between its legs.

Lyall heard Elena coming and stood at the door to greet her. Welcome! he said. Elena
wore her uncle’s clothes on the days her own clothes were drying and on this day
she had on a pair of creased brown trousers rolled up at the cuffs and pulled in
at the waist, and a light blue shirt with vertical white stripes. The day before
she’d cut her hair short with blunt scissors. Sit down! Sit down! said Lyall.

It was peaceful out there in the bush, you could hardly hear the waves but there
were plenty of other sounds: insects, birds, the scuffling and rustling of animals
in the undergrowth, the breeze moving the treetops, the branches creaking. Pretty
soon Lyall was talking again about the train wreck of civilisation and the lemmings
running over the cliff and all the other things he had on his mind and that sound
too soon blended with the others until they became one. Elena’s visits grew more
regular. One day at the table outside his shack while talking about the pestilence
Lyall asked to see Elena’s stigmata and in doing so touched her arm. Elena left it
there, then withdrew. A bird calling out from a tree somewhere up on the hill was
the only thing to break the silence.

Elena grew worried but she wasn’t really sure why. What did she have to fear, here
among the trees, the lake, the sea? Civilisation was the enemy, as Lyall always said.
Uncontrollable Civilisation
. It reaches its black tentacles a little further each
day into all that used to be uncorrupted and pure until poor nature, poor so-called
Uncontrollable Nature
, is herself tamed. Dams are built, rivers rerouted, clouds
seeded. We have brought low the Cherubims at Eden’s east gate, said Lyall, and doused
the flaming sword.

For a little while after that Lyall didn’t come and Elena stayed
away. Then on a warm evening sitting outside she heard footsteps on the track from
the road above the house. It was the boy from the supermarket. He was tall, well
dressed, his hair spiked with gel. Lyall’s not right in the head, he said, you need
to be careful. Elena kept her distance. If you come back without the product, she
said, then maybe we could talk. The next day the boy did and Elena made a cold drink
for them, but they spent more time looking into their glasses than they did at each
other. It’s just that he’s known in town as a crazy, said the boy; it’s a free country,
sure, but when I told my dad I’d seen you talking to him he said I should come down
here to see if you’re okay. He drawled, like his dad, and kept his feet apart. So
you’ve been spying on me, said Elena. The boy blushed and looked at the ground. Elena
blushed too. When they said goodbye that afternoon it was like small balls of electricity
had started popping in the air between them.

What’s your name? said Elena. Aaron, said the boy. He continued on up the road.

When Lyall came by the next day to say hello Elena said sorry, she needed some space.
She was sure he could understand. Aaron came by later with a box of fruit from the
supermarket that would otherwise have been thrown out. He stood there awkwardly,
the box on his shoulder. Has he gone? he said. Elena nodded. When she took the box
from him their fingers touched and again the electricity popped. Before Aaron left
later that day Elena let him kiss her.

These were the last days of summer. Lyall no longer visited. Elena had never felt
particularly uncomfortable with him, aside perhaps from that time he’d touched her
arm; he was an eccentric, sure, but in a sense so was she. She told Aaron all this,
in order to refute him. Aaron didn’t care.

Since their first kiss they’d spent every hour after school and all weekend together,
kissing, touching, and much more. In the bedroom with the curtains drawn they’d take
off each other’s clothes, piece by piece, hesitating and giggling before lying together
in the hammock. Some days they would take the hammock outside and string it between
two trees and lie in it together, staring and reaching out when the feeling took
them to touch. Often in these moments Elena would look down amazed at her own unblemished
body, remembering the times in her bedroom at home in front of the mirror when every
inch of flesh was covered with a red rash, scratch or weal. Sometimes, remembering,
she would stroke her skin with the back of her hand, amazed, even aroused, by its
softness.

On one particularly memorable afternoon the pair dragged the old enamel bath out
of the shed, set it up on rocks, filled it with the hose and lit a fire beneath.
That evening they arranged candles in bottles all around, pushed the coals away,
added saucepans of cold water to temper it, then stripped and got in. Elena lay back
in Aaron’s arms, her white breasts showing above the water. The flickering candlelight
threw shadows on the steam, up onto the house nearby, the bush around, the trees
above. They were happy. Aaron blew out the candles so that for a moment everything
was deep black; when their eyes adjusted there appeared above a sky full of stars
and a flock of white gulls drifting past. Birds called from down on the lake, animals
talked and skittered in the bush, the waves crashed on the shore. Elena shivered,
just for a moment, but Aaron held her tight.

The weather turned, cold wind and rain, and Aaron stopped coming. That had been their
summer of love. One night in her hammock Elena was woken by a noise; she lit a candle
and as the flame rose up on the wick she thought she saw, briefly, Lyall’s face in
the window. But it might have been the shadows.

The next day, with a towel held over her head, she traipsed through the wet bush
to see him; the drops spitting off the leaves, water splashing down the gullies.
The dog whined, but Lyall wasn’t there. She pushed the door and it opened. She looked
into the little kitchen alcove, behind the bedroom curtain. Then she realised where
she was, what she was doing. A black flutter came to her heart. She turned to go
and as she did she heard the crunch of leaves and twigs outside. The dog didn’t whine—in
fact, it seemed all the animals had gone quiet.

Aaron’s father told the police he thought they’d run away. Aaron liked the girl,
he said, and had been spending a lot of time with her. The police recorded them as
missing. But then shortly after a walker found Aaron’s battered body washed up on
the beach out of town. A couple more days’ searching and the cops found Elena’s body
in a shallow grave in the bush. The dead dog was still on its chain, black liquid
oozing from its mouth. It took the police a while to piece it all together and to
track Lyall down to his hideout near Ballina on the northern New South Wales coast.
The autopsy dated Elena’s death to the day, more or less, that an elderly couple
saw Lyall’s old station wagon speeding out of town.

Sorry it was so sad, said Hannah, I’d forgotten how sad it was. It was all that talk
about getting away that made me think of it and then, Lauren, your story—and yours
too, Marshall, about Tilly’s uncle. But I didn’t think through how creepy and sad
it all was.

Did all that really happen? said Evan. What do you mean? said Hannah. She’s told
me that story before, said Leon, unless she made it up then too. It sounded true
to me, said Adam, the bit about the allergist especially. I agree, said Marshall.
I believed it, said Lauren.

Hannah rested the stick on the arm of the chair. Marshall poured the wine.

Should we do another one? he said. Maybe we should leave it till tomorrow, said Lauren.
There’s tiramisu in the fridge, said Hannah. Yum, said Leon. Everyone started stretching
and standing up.

Tilly’s still in the car, said Evan. He was standing at the window, looking down.
Marshall? Tilly’s still in the car. I’ll go and see what she wants to do, said Marshall.
He drank his wine, hitched up his pants.