On Brunswick Ground (11 page)

‘How is your mother, your grandmother?' I ask.

The mother and daughter share a glance. Then Sarah smiles into the wind, tossing her chin towards the sky.

‘She could be in that last dash of vigour before death, in remission, or on the rosy road to healthy old age.'

Mary chuckles.

‘I think she's much better. She's back on an ascetic bender.'

Something about Helen's state seems very humorous to them. Maybe this is what is relaxing them – some responsibility lightened, some dread loosened. Helen's grip on them smacks of Greek tragedy – a curse, a belief, maybe some kind of unconscious pact with a nature that seems impervious to both rebellion and docility. The fact she raised them both, in a way, makes them partly sisters. A burden skips a generation, is dumped uniformly on them both, without being sorted out. Mary takes a deep gulp of sea air; her shoulders lift. Suddenly I wish I could have a glimpse of her young face relaxing.

‘I dreamed of Dad last night,' she says, almost offhandedly. ‘He looked well –
in the dream
.'

I have no idea whether the man is alive or dead. He's terra incognita. Sarah walks on pensively, then turns her head towards me.

For a moment she stutters like a telegraph, then I realise her words are being snatched by a fiercer gust of wind.

‘Three summers ago, Mary's father, my ex, drove through the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, right up to Marree, at the end of the road, and disappeared. They found his car there. He and I were divorced two years before that.'

Mary chucks her head back.

‘It was hard for you too, Mum – at the time.'

Because she rarely calls her that, the word seems surprisingly tender.

Sarah stares on straight ahead and her next words come out as if they were walking out of her mouth on their own.

‘I don't know why I've never been able to speak about it. I just don't. Feel guilty, I suppose. But he and I had such a quarrel just before he left.'

For a while, there is only the scrunch of our steps. The sound is like a climax pressing on – the echo of a train in the distance that won't diminish. Mary's reaction is tight-lipped.

‘You never told me that.'

They are on either side of me. I feel my presence becoming more of a buffer by the second. Then she adds:

‘You'd been divorced for two whole years.'

Sarah walks on for a while, before saying:

‘Yeah, right.'

The wind is raging now, but it could be my imagination. I feel them taking turns to look at me, as if I could do something, as if the chosen witness had a transparent, immanent, beneficial power, a bit like a scent, escaping her control, of which she is the simple vehicle. But, again, in spite of searching my mind, no consolations come to me … I look at the clouds – heavy caravels sailing out above the sea. Clouds always seem to have a destination. I knew a man who liked gazing at clouds in the last months of his life. He died suddenly at ninety. One morning, in perfect health, he said, ‘I'm going to die today,' and carried on with his usual business – in the evening it was a done thing. I keep walking towards the clouds. I don't look at Sarah and Mary and I don't think of last night or of Monday morning either. Each step removes me bodily from their tight-lipped silence and from Jack.

Then we reach a nook in the beach, and a busted wall of fallen boulders, as if Edna Walling had pushed them over. A little café is sitting on the other side of a lane. A man on a bicycle comes sailing up; he's wearing a cap, pinstriped pants and a paper-white T-shirt. He waves at us triumphantly. He reminds me of a character in one of Jirí Menzel's films. Dignified, ridiculous, tender, the sheer force of his pedalling hauls us into good humour. He disappears down the street, his arm raised vertically in the air, a pennant of sweetness and trust in the day.

Without conferring, we walk into the café and order coffee and cakes. There are gluten-free hazelnut and persimmon, almond and strawberry, lemon and fig, walnut and broccoli, you name it. A whimsical scale of little cakes – cakes for Noddy and Big Ears, or Harpo and Groucho, cakes for lost souls, cakes for you and me, whoever we are. I can
see
Mary's smile somehow, through the blue, through the revelations on the beach, through the wind and the clouds, through the desert into which her father has vanished.

We sit at a tiny round table, our knees nearly touching but not quite, as if about to consult an ouija board. A boy of about eleven comes to take our orders, then hands over the cakes in dignified silence. His shirt is coming out of his pants, his nails are black and his breath has the faint acidity of autumn apples drying in an attic. A Collingwood cap on his head, he stares at Mary's burqa with the angelic cheek of a Little Lord Fauntleroy. He makes us our coffees with barista expertise and, full of Jeeves-like condescension, sets them out in front of us, then shimmers off into the kitchen – with one last gawk at Mary's blue veils.

The first time we were all together in a café comes back to me. We are now alone in a corner of the room near the sea-light behind the window; it feels as if time travel has landed us here instead of ordinary hours and days. There is no one at the counter, but just as I register that, a tall, slim woman with a smooth beach of a brow comes out from behind a curtain. You know she's Lord Fauntleroy's mother as soon as you clap eyes on her. Her gaunt beauty is not so spectacular as his, but she's a looker. She smiles and starts cleaning the coffee machine. Her movements have a hypnotic effect on me and I have to drag my eyes away. We are tucked in a corner by the bay window. It would be easy for us to talk to each other even though she can probably hear us, but we don't say anything. A fly is buzzing near the glass. The noise of a tap comes on and off, on and off.

Sarah's last quarrel with Mary's father is there, hanging. I wait for Mary to say something, but she doesn't. Her hand is slowly stirring as I sip my coffee and fiddle with my cake. I think of horses drinking from a river, to take my mind off things. Horses sip, too; you can't hear the water coming through their big teeth. Anything I'd say at this point would be meddling. The tables are formica and the chairs have sixties metallic frames and plastic cushiony seats. There's a pale wooden tallboy with jams and chutneys and plates in their slots and cups hanging from their hooks. In the corner, a standard lamp has a dowdy hat as a lampshade. The whole atmosphere seems to be one of waiting.

I glance at the owner. Her hands wipe the machine with a perfunctory gusto, but her personality must change in contact with water because she rinses the cloth with more than thorough gentleness. One feels her smile before one starts noticing it. There is something sad and understanding in her eyes. Like many people in this line of business, she's probably intuitive about people. An infinitesimal nod of her head seems to say,
Don't worry, there are some things you can do nothing about
.

Just at that minute Sarah chooses to sigh and, taking a swig of coffee, looks straight at her blue daughter.

‘We were getting back together, Mary. And we … ah …'

Mary puts her spoon down in the saucer and cuts into her mother's phrase like a cricketer hitting a ball through the covers:

‘ … And … you quarrelled again?'

Sarah throws a glance at me before answering.

‘Yes, we were quarrelling again about my work. I was finishing a sculpture and I wanted him to help me move it but your father wouldn't.'

A shadow passes in her green eyes and I wait for her next intake of air.

‘What he wanted was for us to go to the desert together. I had this exhibition on, you see. Really all I asked was for him to wait for a week and help out. But he wouldn't. He said he needed me to choose
him
– just this once.'

She looks down at her hands.

‘And I didn't.'

The woman behind the counter is staring at her; we are all staring at her.

11

ODD SPOT

I know a boy called Lewis who reads the Odd Spot in
The Age
every day. He's fourteen and looks right through you when he talks to you, but he doesn't make you feel like the classroom windowpane. He's sparse with words and slow with movements, except when he's playing tennis, or when a smile bursts out of him. Then his eyes brim with a dark, holy light. Maybe that light in his eyes is so dark and holy because, for me, it sees beyond his years and mine, it knows and understands beyond all the smoky columns of spiralling words, beyond all the
hellos
and
goodbyes
, all the
thank-yous
and
how are yous
we keep tossing at each other. I suppose I am surrounded with dark and holy people, Sarah, Mary, Mitali … They swim around Brunswick in strange shoals and I must be in the middle of one of those shoals. I admitted as much to Mitali the other day. She pulled a leaf out of her hair and said: ‘Yeah, like you're Little fucking Nemo.'

Whenever I look at the Odd Spot, I think of Lewis. He lives with his parents and his sister in the same street as me and sometimes we have a chat on his way back from school. He always stands without leaning on anything or putting his hands in his pockets and often says a word or two about Jack – Jack who has forgotten both of us now. I don't know why it is easy to speak of Jack with Lewis, but that is the case. Lewis has become a kind of witness for me – maybe because we can both feel his childhood seeping out of him. I am making a subterranean bet on Jack remembering us before Lewis forgets about his childhood altogether. This I also reported to Mitali in a moment of weakness.

‘Good job you're not religious, you'd be taking everybody for a fucking bodhisattva.'

She always makes me feel better. There is something in her tone that frees you from your fucking self.

It's peak time in Sarah's bar. Mary and I are sitting in a booth. We have
The Age
open between us. We are checking out the Odd Spot together.

A Soviet soldier reported missing during the fighting in Afghanistan 33 years ago has been found living as a healer in the Afghan province of Herat. He has adopted the local dress and profession of the healer who nursed him back to health
.

We are facing each other above the tabloid that was once a broadsheet. People can't hide behind their newspapers anymore; they have to read this skimpy thing. Mary lifts her hand.

‘I always loved those stories of Japanese soldiers lost in the jungle still thinking the war was on twenty years later.'

She points to the Odd Spot.

‘It's strange reading this after Sarah's revelations at the beach, isn't it?'

‘I knooooowww,' I moan.

Mary shakes her head.

‘When he disappeared, it was tough. You can't do anything about somebody going away and vanishing. You can't move around it. It's worse than an absence; it's a dead presence, an anti-presence, a black hole.'

Then she jerks her head as if she wants to swallow her words. Suddenly, she puts her hand on mine. She probably thinks she has reminded me of Jack. It's a surprise because, like her mother, she's not into touching people. Then she straightens up and faces me. I can no longer imagine her expression.

‘You've never said one word about my burqa. Thanks for that. I can't tell you what a relief it is. People are constantly banging on about it. I have no desire to explain it to anyone. It just is. And it's here to stay.'

Her tone hardens a smidgen. Mary's a living mystery on the edge of my common sense. I don't even know why it bugs me so much. I haven't known her that long. Maybe she has come to represent all I haven't got a grasp on. Sometimes I dream of her. Now I put her burqa in the same bag with my grandmother and Jack's memory – the bag where things float, invisible and pending, with no resolution. They may vary in intensity, but they all belong to the same mysterious genus. Like walking around with a drip. You can't tear it off or walk away from it. It has to stay there with your breathing, near your heart.

From where we are sitting, we can see a bit of Sarah, her elbow or the swish of her dark hair, a bit like details of a painting. Now we can see her sad, laughing eyes giving back some change over the counter. Mary never helps at the bar. Everyone knows she's Sarah's daughter, but her get-up isn't exactly conducive to the selling of pints of beer and glasses of wine. Out of the blue, a question pops out of me.

‘Do you ever hear from your ex, Mary?'

I could kick myself for asking, but it's too late – Mary flinches.

‘I hear from him. We're good friends actually. He's a pretty decent bloke.'

This is so different from what I expected. I nearly splutter, but instead I end up with a lame, ‘Oh.'

Mary continues musingly.

‘Sarah can't stand him. She thinks he's a bastard. He isn't really. He was for a while – it's true – at least in front of her and when we were trying to have a kid. That messed up everything. We both wanted one, you see. In fact, he found out that he couldn't either, quite recently, and phoned to tell me. Pretty fair and square on his part, I thought.'

She stops and sighs again.

‘Yeah, I think we'll be friends now. It's funny – over time he's been my best friend and my worst enemy.'

A little silence floats away like a summer cloud.

‘He really helped me out once. I'll never forget that,' she adds.

Her eyes fall on the Odd Spot again.

‘Did you know my father's a landscape architect?'

I shake my head, noticing the present tense. When do you consider someone dead when there is no corpse?

‘My parents did
big
things. When I was a kid, I made a drawing of them. Sarah still has it. I drew them both with these giant hands, much bigger than their bodies. At one point, Dad put gardens on rooftops and created parks. He worked in Germany a few times. They love his stuff over there. When he disappeared, there was an obituary of sorts in
Der Spiegel
.'