North of Nowhere, South of Loss (22 page)

Alma opens the door of the truck and slides down to the long roadside grass.

She lifts her arms and leans on the air. She dances.

Above her, the purple martins wheel and twist in response, thousands of wings with the mind of a single dance partner, brilliant and daring. The last light goes, dropping like spent shot behind the Interstate, and the dark humming funnel of birds, spinning and swaying, lifts itself, hovers, lifts, and is sucked up into the night.

“They've gone,” Alma says, staring up. “But I can still hear them.”

Later, by the sea wall in Charleston, Zach gives her a keepsake: a photograph of Luanna in flight.

NIGHT TRAIN

Philippa gropes for the sound coming out of the dark. Where is she? The sound is too bright, too hurtling. She is on a night train, that much is clear, there is rush and a grapeshot of rain against the windows. The speed at which she is travelling is so great that her body has come unfastened and slipped off her shoulders like a loose jacket caught in a slipstream. She clutches at it convulsively.

I've got it, Brian says. It's okay, don't panic, I've got it.

I can't breathe, she gasps. Where are we? Where are we rushing?

Into the tunnel, he says. It's the wind effect, the centripetal force. Relax. You get used to it.

The motion of the carriage, the side-to-side rocking peculiar to trains, pitches her about in the upper bunk. The movement is more lullaby than violent. Sometimes she can feel the top of the ladder against her back, sometimes her face touches the panelled oak wall, dark-stained and lacquered, to which the bed is attached. The varnish punches straight to her lungs like cleaning-fluid vapour, and then she remembers: a Queensland train, unmistakable. Fragments reassemble themselves: the station, the farewells, city lights falling off into the dark, Brisbane left behind like lost luggage.

Brian, typically, did not make it in time.

Is it the train whistle, that sound? It could be ocean. It could be surf between sphinctered rocks. The Sunlander is rushing north up the curved coast, she remembers everything now, the Pacific lapping at the lines on one side, the little towns and sugarcane fields on the other. Probably, possibly, by this time, they have passed through Nambour, through Gympie perhaps, maybe Bund-aberg. To the north, there is not a living soul she knows. To the north, beyond another thousand miles of cane and dark, her first teaching position waits, and she thinks of it as a lush plant, like pomegranate, fruited with students and gaudy new experience.

“I'll call,” Brian had promised, “if I don't get to the station in time.”

“I know you won't get there in time.” She had leaned on his front gate, clicking it shut between them. “You won't even try. You're annoyed because I'm leaving first, which means I can't be there to see you off to Melbourne.”

“Your choice,” he said.

“But the difference is, if your train left first, I
would
be there to wave goodbye.”

Brian kept brushing something off his arms. “Brisbane's like a cobweb,” he said. “I can't wait to get it off me. The last thing I want is sticky goodbyes.”

“You're frightened.”

Brian pulled at something invisible on his face and scraped his hands against the fence. The wooden pickets, sun-blistered, needed a fresh coat of paint. Philippa had never noticed this before. Where she touched, the wood was soft and pulpy, and flakes of white came away. She ran her fingers across the four smashed palings where Brian's bike had once come violently to rest. His leg had been reset; the fence had not. The frangipani tree, somewhat damaged at the time, had long since repaired itself and now hung over them like a misshapen umbrella. Between its lowest branch and the fence a funnelweb spider had hung its delicate deadly cone. Brian reached up and pulled at one of the tree's odd, blunt, blossom-crowded fingers. The thickish stalk did not give and he twisted it savagely.

“Ouch" Philippa said.

She wanted it to be two months ago, when they were still arguing and riding the buses out to the university. She wanted the time to be years back: high school, primary school, childhood.

The frangipani stalk cracked and dripped milky sap down Brian's arm. “Damn,” he said, and swiped his stubby flower-crusted wand through the guy wires of the funnelweb. Expertly, he flicked the spider into the street. “Look,” he said with disgust, displaying a shroud of cobweb spindled around the stalk. He stripped it and crushed a handful of flowers in his hand. He shredded petals with his thumbnail, one by one.

“How can you do that?” Philippa asked. The fragrance was extraordinary. Brian let the confetti pieces flutter: chopped satin, a rip of perfume. Philippa felt bruised. “It's like a sermon,” she said mournfully.

“Please.”

“Dearly Beloved, we have come to the parting of the ways. From next week there will be two thousand miles of parallel steel lines between us, and parallel lives never meet.”

“Oh for God's sake, Philippa.”

“Wait! Don't go in. I'll stop. I promise. Are you okay?”

“No,” Brian said. “I feel sick.”

“It's because the world as we know it is ending.”

“It's because of the cobwebs in my head.” Brian raked his fingers through his hair. He drummed the palms of his hands against his skull. “Stuff keeps coming back. I keep remembering this kid in fifth grade.”

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

She opened his gate, and they sat on the mango trunk in the lee of the ferny heave of rootball. Six cyclones back, the tree had been knocked askew and had gone on growing laterally. “I've just noticed,” Philippa said, “how untidy Queensland gardens are. We've raised untidiness in vegetation to the level of high baroque.”

“It's a mess,” Brian said, “since Dad died.”

“It's a rampant luxuriant mess, always galloping back into rainforest. It's magnificent. You don't think about these things, you don't notice them, until you're going away.”

“This kid,” Brian said. “He always rode his brother's bike to school. His older brother's, it was really too big for him. It was held together with wire and electrical tape, a heap of rust.”

“In Melbourne, everything is manicured,” she said. “You'll hate it. You'll be crossing two state borders, three railway gauges. When you change to Victorian gauge, you have to get out at Albury in the middle of the night, did you know? The Victorian trains are
enormous
.”

“There was something about this kid. He never smelled good for one thing, and then his wreck of a bike. And he had bruises everywhere, his face, his arms, his legs. He was the kind of kid that automatically gets picked on. Teachers, other kids, everyone.”

“You know, you could be in Melbourne before I get to Cairns. I'll probably be stuck on the tracks at Tully.”

“But the worst thing, for him I mean, he only had one testicle. On swimming days, the other kids were merciless. I used to sweat for him.”

“The Sunlander's been stuck for three days already, and if Darcy hits, two cyclones just one week apart–”

“His pants were too big, they were his brother's too, everything was his brother's. Nothing belonged to him, ever, not even standard birth equipment. The rumour was that his father and his brother both beat him. Bruiser, we called him. One-ball Bruiser.”

“Bruiser? That kid who used to hitch on the tailgates of trucks?”

“I did it myself a few times. Made fun of him.”

“Wasn't he killed?”

“An outcast from Day One. You know, people get designated that way. Kids get designated, they get marked, and once that happens, it's only a matter of time.”

Philippa stared at the windows of Brian's house. “What is that sound?” she asked.

“His mother. She called me the night of the funeral.”

“No. I mean that sound in your house. Is that a dog? Did you get a dog?”

“She was sobbing. She said she wanted to thank me for being Bruiser's best friend. Albert, she called him.
Albert said you were his best friend.”

Philippa stared at the windows, apprehensive. She closed her eyes. The sound dropped to a whimper then disappeared. “Didn't you hear that?” she asked.

“She couldn't stop crying. And now I can't even remember his last name.” Brian jumped up and paced the length of the slanted trunk, back and forth, agitated. “Can you?”

Philippa listened, but the sound of past names had grown faint. She felt queasy. “I never really knew him. I just remember the accident because it was in the newspapers. When he got pulled under the truck.”

“Albert would have wanted me to tell you
,” Brian said, pacing, pacing. “That's what she said. I was terrified. I'd never even met her. But she knew, she recognised me at the funeral. If you're marked, you give off signals.”

“Brian,” Philippa said quietly. “The only signals you give off are the blips of a high-speed mind in overdrive. Why don't you sit down?”

“I've been designated.” Brian looked at his hands, where the words lay, studying them.

“Sometimes,” Philippa said, “you're a designated pain in the arse, I have to admit it.”

“Is my mind in overdrive? Do you really think that?” He clasped and unclasped his hands. He brushed cobweb off them and rubbed them in the grass. “It's true my dreams are speeding up.”

Philippa counted the broken palings. She saw Brian again, twelve years old: the wild freewheeling swoop down Newmarket Road, the turn into Green Street, the thrill, the legs splayed wide, the crash. No brakes. Brian was still laughing when they reached him. To Philippa, later, he had confessed:
It was worth it.

“Sometimes I'm on a train,” Brian said, “and it's rushing into a tunnel and I can't find the phone in the dark. Sometimes I'm in the locker room when it rings, and I'm laughing at Bruiser when I answer.”

“Brian, everyone's done it. Been a coward some time. Don't torment yourself.”

“They used to flick their towels at his balls. His ball. They'd laugh, he'd laugh. Sometimes I laughed. I always felt sick when I did. The worst thing was, he knew that. He would give me this sad little smile. He understood. He forgave me. I'd go outside and I'd want to hang myself, like Judas. I used to vomit in those bushes outside the school.”

What is that dreadful noise? Phillipa wants to know. What is that shriek? Is it Darcy? Is it the cyclone barrelling down?

It's the tunnel, Brian says. We're going into the tunnel now.

Philippa sits bolt upright in the dark. Brian! she calls, panicked.

I'm sorry, he says. I can't help it. Whenever I hear a phone ringing at night, I black out.

Philippa gropes for the sound.

“Hello?” she says. “What? Who
is
this?”

Philippa wakes. Against her window, the feathery plumes of ripe sugarcane toss and shiver. The moon is not white here, but blood orange, the effect of volcanic ash somewhere off to the east, somewhere out in the thrashing Pacific. She has papers to mark, lessons to prepare, it is still pitch dark, and already the school bell is ringing.

“Hello?” she says, her voice thick with muddle and sleep. “Who? My God, Brian! Where are you?”

“Have you heard the news?”

“What time is it?”

“I don't know. Night time. I can't sleep when I get home from the lab, so I watch the news. I saw it live. President Kennedy's been shot!”

Philippa blinks and fumbles for the bedside lamp. She knocks something over. “Damn,” she says. “Brian, where are you?”

“Melbourne,” he says impatiently. “Where do you think I am? They keep replaying bits. Now they're talking to people who were lining the motorcade route, who saw it happen.”

There. She finds the lamp, the switch. And the clock. “Brian, it's 3 a.m.”

“That's all you have to say? The American president has been shot in Dallas – it's still yesterday there – and all you have to say to me is:
Brian, it's 3 a.m?”

“Let me think,” Philippa says. “No, it's not all I have to say. I have to say you are as oblivious and obnoxious as ever. You promised you'd call, you bastard, if you didn't get to the station when I left.”

“I'm calling.”

“Ten months later! I got your number from your mother, and I've called and called, and you never answer, you pig-headed pig.”

“Because I unplug my phone when I'm working. If I'm interrupted, a whole project could be lost. Listen, a marksman got him with a high-powered rifle, but I don't believe for a second it's a one-man job, do you? The CIA's behind this.”

“Why don't you call the White House and offer your expert advice?” But his news seeps under the foreground haze of sleep and suddenly floods her. “My God,” she says. “The
president?
Shot? Do you mean …?”

“Yes.”

“Shot dead?”

“Killed. Assassinated. In Dallas.”

“Oh my God.”

“They've found the sniper's nest. But there are witnesses who heard other shots from other directions. My bet is the CIA.”

“Oh Brian, there you go again. The whole world is ganging up against the innocent.”

“Against certain designated people, yes. Kennedy was marked.”

“It's probably some crackpot. From what I read, Texas is full of crazies on the far right.”

“You get matrixes,” Brian explains, excited. “Fertile mother-pockets where crystals of hate can form and multiply exponentially and link up with each other to make violent superstrings. Texas would be a matrix. I see parallels with the work I'm doing on proteins. You get these multiplying speeded-up reactions. There are certain protein crystals, the ones I'm working on, that only exist two-dimensionally, you can only examine them in suspension, in solution, so you have to –”

Philippa hears something bearing down from the tunnel of the past, she can feel the disturbing movement of air ahead of it.

“Brian, Brian, slow down. Are you okay?”

“I have to go, Philippa, I'm sorry. I just got an idea, I have to go after it. I'll call you later from the lab.”

“How do you manage it?” Philippa wants to know. “Do you calibrate time zones with malice? How come it's always after midnight at my end?”

“It's you,” Brian says. “You keep moving further into yesterday. You're on the wrong side of the Pacific. It's daytime here.”