On Brunswick Ground (13 page)

I have not returned to the farm without Jack. Jim and Roberta sense that being remembered and not being remembered separates us more surely than being in another country. They write encouraging, kind letters to me, informing me of Jack's sporadic visits and wishing me well. We are separated by a purgatory, a desert we cannot cross – Jack's memory. I send them back cards with photographs of trees, living things rather than words.

Cars go by sporadically. I look at the light flickering on the windows of the bus. We are encapsulated and transported in a shimmering shell of exploded sunlight. The highway is dotted with houses, then turns into a dusty, sun-drenched road in sparse bushland, as if the bitumen had swallowed the sun itself – it's nowhere to be seen in the sky, there are just yards and yards of pure blue canvas overhead. It fits, as if you suddenly found yourself on an African savannah. Then the upside-down skeleton of a dinosaur looms – presumably the entrance of the zoo – and the bus winds down in front of it. I buy my ticket and instead of going in through the tourniquet, sit at a table outside under an umbrella and order a vegetable juice. I take out my book at last and prepare to wait. I could ask for him, but instead I stay in front of my juice like a sitting duck. My book is a Barbara Pym, carefully chosen for her soothing, whimsical wryness. You can't despair with a Barbara Pym in your hands; you can have a discreet tear, but it seeps through your system like summer rain.

I am not making much progress with Pym. Now I am here, yesterday swarms over me. Sarah was quietly adamant.

‘Don't go, you'll only burn yourself.'

I shook my head. Sarah asked, ‘What did Mary say?' and her face was suddenly naked – all you could see were her eyes, as if her other features had fallen off.

‘Maybe you think I should go to Marree and look for Gerald myself.'

I shook my head again.

‘No, I only know
I'm
going to Werribee.'

She became very still.

‘I feel I've been playing pick-up sticks, piling up the matches, the architecture becoming more and more insane, and now – never mind going to Marree – I'm afraid even to breathe.'

I stared at her with what I could feel was a lopsided expression. Then, for the first time, she took my hands in both of hers. ‘Good luck,' she whispered to me.

I sit and I sit. And suddenly Jack is there, standing in front of me. He's a dark outline etched against the light. I can hardly see his face before he asks:

‘What are you doing here?'

His abrupt question is a change from his usual courtesy to me since the accident. I make a clumsy movement with my hands as if I were trying to find an answer in the air and ask him if we could take a walk.

‘You've come here to take a walk? We can't walk around here, only drive in a protected jeep. But we could take a stroll just behind this place.'

Now he is sitting, I see his dark blond hair has acquired a few greys, and his hazel eyes have lost their thorough, searching quality. Suddenly, in spite of the lurch in my stomach at seeing him, I feel like going away. This is some mistake, this is not Jack – this is a doppelganger. He pays for my juice, waving me aside, and takes my arm, nearly pulling me towards the tourniquet. We walk into the smell of animals.

His hand still on my arm, he leads us straight to a tiger pacing in a thicket, separated from three chubby, juicy children by a thick pane of glass.

‘This fellow is being watched by the vets.'

We stand next to the kids. As we stare, the tiger shifts into a barrister-like pacing, back and forth, back and forth to convince his jury of five. There's a slight wind; it moves Jack's hair over the familiar skin of his brow. I wait; words rust in my throat. I concentrate on the tiger, who looks at me with old, tired eyes. He and I are in the same boat – locked away from our reality by a sheet of glass. Jack sighs as if he were giving in to something in himself.

‘He always makes me think of my memory. They should be letting him out soon, back to his old turf,' he says, throwing me a shadow of his old smile.

Then he swings right round and grabs my arms near the shoulders.

‘But there is
no
going back for me,
nothing
is coming back, not even a glimmer, not even a flicker of what we had together.
Nothing
. I'm building a new life for myself. You should give it up. I'm someone else. I'm not the guy you knew. Get yourself another life. I have tried and tried, believe me. There is nothing left of what I was with you – not even an ember.'

His face is etched against the sky. I feel his fingers biting into my arms. I don't ask him the obvious question:
Have you met someone else?
My mind is a blank. He sighs and shakes me a little:

‘What is it about this that you don't understand?'

And just as suddenly he kisses me smack on the lips. I don't react, as if he's slapped me. He's still holding me.

‘Don't you see? There's nothing there.'

His hands drop from my arms.

The Australian sky engulfs us. The tiger stops in his tracks. Now his three-course breakfast has vanished; only the two solid meals are left behind. His eyes stare out. Their pupils extend and swell, moving like a room on the wrong side of a lens. They both devour and reassure me, before they snap, shuttering back into themselves and pushing me out. The tiger then resumes his pacing.

‘I think I'm going to go now,' I say. ‘You're right, Jack, it was a silly idea to come here.'

I look at the tiger again as if I were taking my cue from him. He halts and looks straight back at me. Instead of my feeling like a possible luncheon, something happens, not in time, nor in emotion, nor in fear. It slides, it moves through the thick glass – a nameless gift. After that, I touch Jack's hand and move away. The whole lumbering expedition is over.

‘Right,' I hear.

Jack has moved fast too, so fast that for a moment I think the tiger has come out of his thicket.

‘Let's go for that walk,' he says.

He takes my arm again. I follow like an automaton. There's a clump of trees a little further out. Near these trees something in Jack seems to quieten. I don't say anything. Any word could make my presence froth like milk boiling over. We stand under three ghost gums. I wait. Time has become this trickle. It's not grinding what's left of our lives anymore. I have stepped out of its picture. Jack, or whoever Jack is now, has crossed his arms.

‘You bug me,' he says slowly.

Because I don't know what to do, I sit on a dead tree trunk. The one thing that reassures me is that he's not trying to do small talk. I finger the bark I am sitting on and he leans against a tree with his arms crossed.

‘I understand that this must be pretty rough on you.'

I don't answer and ask him instead if there are glowworms in his zoo. He shakes his head and smiles.

‘No … They're a bit like the stars of the earth, aren't they?'

His feeling for glow-worms is still there, even if his grandfather is one of the people he can't remember. I, on the other hand,
do
remember my grandmother. What awaits me if ever I finish writing about her is the fact she died burned alive – alone in the country in winter, her long scarf catching fire because she was standing too near a potbelly stove. When she ran to a tap, the pipes were frozen. She was eventually found and a doctor was called but her whole body had third- and fourth-degree burns and he couldn't do anything. As I stare at Jack, my mind is with her, alone, waiting for help that came too late. Her life had finished its course. I can only focus on that – her end, her death.

When he shakes my hand at the tourniquet I remember, as I go through it, that it's not called a tourniquet, but a
turnstile
. I walk away in a daze, focusing on my mistake. I even stop to google ‘tourniquet' on my phone: ‘a device for stopping the flow of blood through an artery by twisting a bar in a ligature or a bandage.' The words swim in my head as I leave Jack behind and wait for the bus.

13

WARBURTON

The day feels quite old now, as if it had to catch its breath. My footsteps seem to be following me. Even the trees seem to hesitate. Places must attract certain categories of sadness and joy, just as they attract certain kinds of undergrowth, bees, snakes, rivers or stagnant waters. I'd certainly be contributing my bit as one of the stagnant waters right now. At the bus stop, I look hard at the Werribee sky and bushland and then stare at another big ghost gum standing at an intersection, as if my life depended on it. Its strength is eerie and solid at the same time, feeding itself from both earth and sky. I catch the bus and the train home out of a kind of muscle memory. At one point there is a buzz in my backpack. It's a text from Sarah: ‘Where r u?' My finger answers: ‘On the way back.'

When I step out of Jewel station into Brunswick again, she's there, in her car, her wry smile set firmly on her face. She winds her window down.

‘Good job you're all packed. Jump in.'

I don't even think, and sit with my backpack on my knees as I did on the bus, on the train. The images floating out of the window don't seem to gel. My sense of place has completely disappeared. Soon I am so far gone I don't feel I'm in Australia anymore. Even Sarah's driving has lost its edge for me. I am fast asleep.

I dream of a dentist's waiting room. The place feels frozen in time. The dentist may as well be away on a holiday – stale magazines are fanned out on a table, the electric light is yellow and stingy, pillars of dust motes stand in the window's wide shaft of light, though it's a window that's always closed, even in summer. Deep down from the courtyard of the building, one can hear laughter, but these echoes seem to float up from a distant planet. The patients waiting for their turn do not feel real. They all sit next to each other in unearthly silence until the dentist's disembodied voice calls their name from another room. When they walk into his surgery, the chair is a gaping jaw. With hardly a word, the dentist bends over them, his movements swimmingly slow. He looks like a lawyer or a businessman; you'd never take him for a dentist. The fact he is dressed in white is vaguely disturbing, as if he were involved in some sort of organ traffic. When he does talk, his eyes narrow to gauge his patient's fear. And he always hurts, even for the simplest procedure. They get out of there finally and start walking under the tall plane trees of the busy avenue at the foot of his building. But their beings have lost their consistency – they might as well be that car, that bus or that sparrow. I wake up with a jerk; Sarah has honked her horn at a kangaroo on the road. I ask her how long I dozed off.

‘An hour and a bit,' she says and throws me a glance. ‘I could have taken you all the way to Marree if I'd wanted, couldn't I?'

I look at her.

‘Is that the plan?'

But we don't go that far. Sarah drives until suburbs are blotted out by green hills, then she parks on the side of a field. Soon we are roaming along a country lane.

‘Look, this is the Great Dividing Range, which begins out west of Melbourne, peters out to the north of the city, picks up again around here in the mountains to the north of the Yarra Valley, and then stretches all the way to north Queensland,' she informs me with a grand gesture.

Her sense of direction suits the swing in her step and the power of her sculptures.

‘But where are we right now?' I bleat.

‘Warburton.'

Farms are dotted here and there. Lazy acres of land well up to meet a prairie of blue sky and a few sheepish clouds. We walk and walk. Pleasantly sweaty and tired, I find myself floating beside her without effort. The blue fields of sky are tumbling into a patchwork of intertwining hills. Somehow it reminds me of Ian McEwan's
Enduring Love
with its terrible balloon, floating off – something disastrous could happen any minute. There is no emotion anywhere: the air is sucked out of the landscape and only helium remains. Everything is high on helium, the trees, the grass, the odd wombat, the odd wallaby, and the two women, Sarah and I. I breathe in disaster, as I didn't when we were walking by the creek and were really in danger. Suddenly Jack's memory, or lack of it, has turned into a torrential emptiness eating away at everything I look at. Instead of the bronze statues of strutting conquerors, absence is celebrated in Australia's cities. This is the land of disappearance and oblivion, of Burke and Wills setting off and vanishing, of heroes never to return.

When we walk back to the car, Sarah drives till she finds a bed and breakfast. It's an eco-friendly place with three cabins, each with a small wooden verandah, a fireplace and one or two bedrooms. The owner, who lives in the largest house, is a taciturn woman with sandy-grey hair, curt to the point of rudeness. Sarah can do taciturn too and they gear into a sort of negative sympathy. We sort things out, wrestle a key from her reluctant grasp, and walk to our allotted cabin. Sarah opens the door and looks around as if she were checking out a saloon.

‘She probably thought we were lesbians.'

Plonking her bag on the table, she pulls out a bottle of wine and puts a match to the paper, kindling and logs in the fireplace. It may be summer, but in the mountains the night air is crisp. I lean my backpack against the sofa and hang around while she produces cheese, olives, bread, ham and grapes.

Half an hour later, the wine is flowing through my system without affecting me in any way. Maybe I'm still too high on helium. Sarah is sitting close to the fire with her arms around her knees. I'm on the floor too, leaning against the sofa. The flames are doing the talking, the whispering, the promising. We only share a desultory word here and there, in between the crackle and the spark. The crispness in the room mingles with the fire, making warmth a precious, living thing. Outside, the shadows of the trees seem to be crowding nearer to look inside. I don't recognise the night up here, its texture is so unlike that of Melbourne. It comes on more like a presence, instead of plain darkness.
My daughter, Night, my wide-coated daughter
…, an old man had whispered to a dark train window sliding through a tunnel. I can't remember where or when I saw and heard this whispering stranger, but my memory of him is sharper than my last glimpse of Jack. Could that be the last time I will ever see him? I push the idea away, breathing air instead of helium into my lungs.