Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (12 page)

‘Okay. You drive. I cannot stand your pouting.'

‘I'm not pouting,' I said.

‘Okay, you are not pouting!'

She waited for me to walk round the front of the car and open her door before she would get out.

‘Thank you, Lionel. I remind myself to be patient.'

As soon as she was in the passenger seat she fished around in her bag for her cigarettes. She snatched at the lighter. And when the flame failed she swore in Spanish. She threw the lighter back in her bag. The world was not cooperating today. The view out the window was too still for her, too lacking in stimulation. When a telephone box came in to view she seized on it, sitting up and forward. ‘Here. Stop!' She said she needed to call up the restaurant.

She left the car door open so I was able to listen in to her conversation with Angelo. Much of it was in Spanish except for words such as ‘mains', ‘bottles' and ‘cases', and the names of various waitresses. Though once when Angelo had some good news to pass on she shrilled back with pleased surprise, ‘Fifty-one shrimp cocktails!' The rest was in Spanish. I liked the transporting effect her language had on me. As with the tango lessons, it was as though I had crept into a corner of the country that no one else knew about.

Now I heard her make noises of condolence to Angelo. I heard her say, ‘This country…' accompanied by much head-shaking and sighing. And finally, ‘Ciao, Angelo.' She hung up and got back in the car, slamming the door. ‘One of your rugby teams came in last night. Two of them vomited up Angelo's Steak Argentine. Fortunately it was on the pavement outside the restaurant. But of course Angelo is very upset.'

Your
rugby team, she had said. Like when she said
your
country.
Your
people.

She wound down her window and tossed out her cigarette into
my
countryside.

I said, ‘You shouldn't do that.'

‘What? What have I done now?'

‘You threw your cigarette out the window.'

‘Oh, I see. I throw a cigarette out the window and two of your men vomit outside my restaurant. I did not hear you complain of that. I did not hear any apology. And what about Angelo? Have you any regard for his feelings? How he is feeling at the moment.

You know how he prides himself. Have you any thought for what he endures?'

My eyes closed on the road.

‘Yes,' she said quietly. ‘I know how this country works. One little cigarette for two men's vomit.'

These days a Department of Conservation sign directs foot traffic through the nikaus to a flax-covered headland. From there a track zigzags down to the beach. Once there you can hear the subterranean shift of beach and rock. Every sound bounces off the towering limestone cliffs. Even when it is perfectly still you can sense the experience of huge seas and solitary days lodged in the sober face of the limestone bluffs.

The heavy shingle slowed us. Rosa, especially. It was as though she were climbing stairs. She kept stopping to empty her sneakers. She waved her hands at the sandflies. She didn't complain, though. She never said, ‘Your sandflies.'

There were other people out and about. Thanks to cars and the DoC tracks this area of coast isn't as remote as it was in Louise's day. Older retired men trudged by with expensive camera gear. A young Japanese couple walked with their arms locked around each other. We approached a boy and girl no older than myself coming the other way. Our eyes sought one another out. As we passed we looked away. I found myself thinking about the girl's face, how fresh it was, and wishing that Rosa had gone more lightly with the lipstick.

We climbed the point into the next bay and dropped down to the rock pools where Louise had bathed. We walked on. At a midway point I went ahead. Already I could see the cave entrance. I wonder if it isn't more obvious now than it was in Louise's day. The stench of urine hung around the entrance. Next to rockband graffiti the names ‘Tosh' and ‘Liz' were scrawled inside a large crudely drawn heart.

I waited for Rosa to catch up, then we pushed on through the dark, using the curve of the cave for guidance. Then there was a greyish light and an eyelid view of the ocean.We craned our heads up at the pitched roof. We were in the right cave. This was it; we were there in the story.

To the rear of the cave Rosa began to casually clear sand with the toe of her shoe. Then as she seemed to realise what it was she'd found she got down on all fours to sweep away the sand. I helped her. Once we had exposed the old dance floor we stepped back to admire it. We stepped on to the rock, then, quite naturally, as we might have at a late hour at La Chacra, we began to dance. There were no bold moves. It was more of a shuffle—the kind of thing I imagine Billy Pohl might have favoured. So we shuffled. Slowly. And it was easy because it wasn't really us at all. For that moment at least we were Louise and Schmidt.

Something like a step or a turn brought our faces closer, and without any fuss or hesitation we kissed on the mouth. Rosa's lips tasted of cherry, and they were full—the lipstick did not lie. It truly represented the area of her lips. We parted. Rosa smiled. Then she kissed her fingertip and touched my lip, her face broadening to a new warmth. She took my hand and appeared to be dallying with a thought; then she closed her eyes and pressed my hand against her chest and dragged it slowly down her front. The dumb hand of the shellfish gatherer and the wilfulness of the other.

I might mention here that with Rosa there was never any mistaking her pride when she spoke of her grandfather. When she stood before his photo on the restaurant wall you could see her positioning herself in his history. She was his granddaughter so it was no surprise that the grainy texture of that past should project through her. Once she moved away from the photos, off location as it were, she became herself again, restaurateur, employer, dance instructor, illuminated by lava lamps and nasty brickwork.

In the cave I was witness to another shift as she tried to fit herself in to Louise's life. Was it in order to see her grandfather more clearly? And was the kiss just a bridge? I wasn't sure.

My relationship with Rosa already had so many forms and now we'd just created another. As a result of that kiss I was sure I would find the world a changed place. But how to re-enter this world? How would we leave the cave?

In tango it is the man who initiates and the woman who reacts. I should have known that with Rosa established protocol didn't always prevail, that she would take care to see us out of this moment.

When she had taken my hand she had turned slightly away, her face closed with concentration. There was a rapid breath like the one I had heard from her on the stairs back at the hotel. It was as if she was reaching for something, and then having made contact with it, she gave a contented grunt. Now that she had arrived at that place she had privately wondered about all these years she switched her attention to me. She looked surprised to see me there. ‘Hallo!' she might have said, as though this was an unexpected encounter in the street, or in a supermarket aisle.

She reached up and gave my cheek a playful squeeze. She grunted. So, we had been playing after all. It was safe to leave the cave now. We were back to restaurateur and dishwasher.

On our way back to the car our sides touched and I remembered the Japanese couple. We walked with the same sort of attachment, slowly and contentedly in the shingle, and in the same direction as Billy Pohl, Henry Graham and Louise when they left the cave.

That night she falls backwards on to her bed, the toes of her shoes pointing up at the ceiling. She looks like a small black and white doll. She raises a hand to her forehead. A tired gesture, the kind that a performer might make when at last they find themselves offstage and all alone. She closes her eyes, and when she draws her fingers back through her hair I can see the white flesh and the thick dark hair of her underarm. Now her eyes snap open and I see the whites and blacks of a magpie. She seems to know what I have seen and what I am thinking and feeling. She chuckles and smiles.‘Pasta,' she says. Her eyes, which so often contain a hundred practical restaurant matters, begin to focus on me. She is drifting, I think, between appraisal and a decision, and at the same time covering up that process by pretending to find me amusing. The thing is, I want to kiss her. I want to return to that moment in the cave and by the fastest route possible. She must see that, and as I teeter at that employer-employee threshold, Rosa reaches out to me.

‘Why don't you come here,' she says.

Why don't I? And because I feel the need to say something, anything at all, I say, ‘We could dance.'

That amuses her.

‘Thank you, Pasta, but no.'

She sits up then and begins to scratch at her back for the zipper on her dress. I move across to help her. Kneeling on her bed I run the zipper down her back and as her dress parts a sweet perfume escapes her.

Afterwards, we lay in our separate dark. For some reason I found myself thinking of Brice Johns and his pimply face stuck in one of his economic textbooks. Of course I had moved on. That's what Brice was doing in my thoughts. I had moved on into new territory that Brice could only gape at from afar and wonder. I wished he could see me now. In bed with Rosa. I was exhilarated. Sleep was as far away as ever, a futile mission. At an early hour I heard a train haul through the middle of the hotel. With the peace restored I moved on to my other side, then back again, until I heard Rosa say, ‘For godsakes, Lionel, go to sleep.'

14

I rang my parents at the farm and got my mother Jean. She sounded annoyed with me. She had been expecting me the previous night. She had even rung the bus company to see what time the bus would come by and then driven out to the road to wait for the bus to drop me off at the farm gate. Towards the end of this recitation it occurred to her to ask what I was doing on the Coast?

‘I'll explain later,' I said.

‘Well, what bus will you catch?'

‘I won't be on a bus. I'm driving.'

‘A car?' She sounded puzzled. ‘Whose car?'

I was calling from a phone box and I was aware of Rosa studying me through her sunglasses. She was sitting in the passenger seat.

That was another of the changes that last night's event had racked up. At breakfast she had deferred to me. ‘I think I'll have an orange juice. No, an apple.' She couldn't decide. She said, ‘Lionel, you choose for me while I go upstairs.'

I said to Jean, ‘Just somebody's.You'll meet them soon.'

Them
, I said.

‘When?' she asked.

‘This afternoon.'

‘When this afternoon?'

‘I don't know. Some time.'

I hated it when she tried to pin me down like that. Her need of scheduling. This excitement over my homecoming. It just made me deliberately more vague. I hung up and left the phone box and got back in the car.

‘So, everything is okay?'

‘Yes. Everything is okay.'

‘Do we have time?'

‘Yes,' I said.

We drove round to Louise's boarding house. It had been turned into a backpacker's. We sat outside, glancing up at the windows. We debated whether to go in. I couldn't see much point. Its only unusual feature was that it had two storeys. By Little River's standards I suppose it had a certain structural grandeur. Otherwise its colour regime kept faith with the same flat white that you saw up and down the street.

I trailed Rosa into the reception area. She asked if we could look in the rooms. She didn't say why and she wasn't asked to explain herself. It all seemed perfectly reasonable to everyone concerned except me. A young woman in jeans, the manager, showed none of my embarrassment. She handed Rosa two sets and pointed the way up the stairs.

The house was a shell, stripped back to its fundamentals. Its hallways were used to the bruising and bumping of packs. The carpet was worn down the middle. Rosa opened the door to the end room and made her way to the window. She stood there gathering views. A sense of the boundaries that had locked in Louise's life is what she was after. The dark ranges in the east; the woolly morning cloud that caught on them. She fished in the near view, the house across the road, its sodden clothesline, the windows that were still in shadow.

That's pretty much how the rest of the morning proceeded, with me keeping up some kind of sentinel presence on this mission of Rosa's to feel her way in to Louise's old landscape.

To catch up with Louise's ultimate rejection of it we had to drive up the coast another fifteen kilometres, to the line of old miner's cottages on the beach where Louise had lived with Billy Pohl for a while. All these years later, solo mums from the city had moved in and painted gardens on the weatherboards.You could see the withering effect of the harsh sun and where the petals and flowers had lifted off in the summer humidity. We stopped and parked outside a cottage; its corrugated iron had been painted purple. When we got out of the car Rosa went directly to the letterbox, which blossomed with a large sunflower.

‘How old do you think this letterbox is?' she asked.

Like the house it was a metal box and it perched on the gatepost. ‘As old as the house,' I thought.

This was the kind of confirmation she was after.The letterbox went into her carpet bag of fact and memory.

In the front windows we could see our reflections. It didn't look like anyone lived there. Rosa wanted to go in and look around. Once more she deferred to me.

‘We have time? Yes?'

‘Yes,' I said.

We let ourselves in the gate. I closed it after Rosa. We walked along the side of the cottage to the timeless sound of the sea washing up a shingle beach. Around the back a line of flax separated the ocean from the back door. Rosa sat on the back step and lit a cigarette. She patted a place by her, shifted a little to make room for me. I sat down, our shoulders pressed together. She put her arm around my back and squeezed me towards her. A faint perfume leaked from her woollen jersey.