On Brunswick Ground (15 page)

She stops and I feel her looking at us again.

‘Of course, one fine morning, the princess eventually obeys him, in spite of the warning from the other objects. She kicks off her enchanted slippers and sets off. But before he can lead her to freedom, a storm gathers in the sky, chasing her cloud away, and the princess ends up barefoot in the desert.'

No one says anything, as if the air itself were listening. Because Bea is who she is, and everything seems part of the flow with her, it hasn't crossed my mind to wonder what she thinks of Mary's appearance. But after the story, I am sure that Bea, just like me, is seeing Mary float out of the blue silk eiderdown cover revealing a face we can only both imagine.

I break the spell.

‘She reminds me of a character in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
called Remedios the Beauty. She shakes the bedsheets outside and floats up to heaven.'

Mary chuckles.

‘I liked her, too. Do you remember when she cuts her long hair because it hangs in her soup?'

Bea frowns.

‘Where did you read that story you told us?'

Mary slips a hand under her veil to touch her cheek. It's the first time I've seen her do this, it's the first time I feel her body expressing itself on its own terms. She must be comfortable here.

‘I didn't read it,' she says, ‘my next-door neighbour in Adelaide told it to me before she died of Alzheimer's. She had written it herself.'

Mary lays her hands flat on her lap as if she were holding her knees down.

‘She was the kind of person you never forget.'

Bea frowns again.

‘What sort of person was she?'

Mary concentrates a second before answering.

‘Unexpected. Traditional, but also rebellious. A bit like a nervous hen, always looking over her shoulder, pecking in someone else's yard. But suddenly she would stop and talk to me on the landing and say extraordinary things.'

Bea pours more tea and asks perceptively:

‘Was she my age? The idea of someone young with Alzheimer's is nearly unbearable. If I had to die young, I'd rather have cancer and keep my mind. But when you're old, death can have many faces, death can become more mysterious.'

Mary nods, but her shoulders hunch, as if she were cold.

‘She died like someone younger, like someone not ready. It wasn't a peaceful death. I always thought that story was about her.'

The dog next door has wriggled under the fence and has sidled up to Bea.

‘Hello, Larry.'

Then he sees Mary and starts barking furiously at her. She freezes. He's obviously averse to burqas. I'm relieved when Bea quietly gets up to walk into the garden and he follows her. Mary, I notice, is very still. When Bea returns, she asks me what I've been up to. I find myself telling her about the zoo and the tiger without mentioning Jack. Mary bends forward.

‘Felines seem to be on her mind today.'

Bea takes a chunk out of her biscuit.

‘Animals seem to
know
things that go under our radars, but they're important things.'

I cringe, hoping Mary won't think Larry has ESP about her, but you can see Mary gets Bea's drift. Bea continues blithely.

‘My mother was good with animals. She knew how to be with them. I'm better with plants.'

Mary sighs.

‘I'm good with shapes. I like shapes. Everything has a shape. One tends to forget that. People usually only think in terms of colour and sound.'

Some people get each other from the start and see each other right through the clouds of words. It usually takes me years to realise who the human beings around me really are. I must be staring at them, because they are both staring back at me. I cough and come out with something I don't expect.

‘Do you know the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic? The neurotic knows two and two make four and it makes him unhappy. The psychotic thinks they make five and he's very chuffed.'

Mary lets out a cackle.

‘Who told you that?'

‘A drunk at Sarah's bar, I think that's the way he counts his beers. He told me a guy called Desproges wrote it.'

At that very instant, as if the anecdote heralded him into the room, a handsome young man in tight jeans appears – fair, tall, slim, about thirty-five, with curly hair and a wide-open shirt. He looks like an advertisement. Yet as soon as he opens his mouth, you somehow forget about his looks. He could just as well be fabulously ugly. He crouches near Bea.

‘What's going on here, Bea? What are you up to?'

She smiles at him and the tenderness between them is palpable. In the same kind of way she doesn't bat an eyelid about the burqa and the fact that being in her late seventies has no discernable impact on her behaviour, he, in turn, shows no signs of having an immediate reaction to Mary's get-up. He just sits down next to her. Some people, when put together, change the air, the pictures on the wall, even the shape of the room.

‘What was Larry on about?'

Bea shrugs.

‘Oh, he was in a blue fit because he didn't get his usual snack. I forgot to buy some.'

Then she pours her friend a cup of tea.

‘Philip is sharing my house for a while. He's a painter. Philip Paulson.'

He turns towards Mary.

‘I could paint
you
. It would be a challenge to paint
you
.'

He's obviously a visual freak, living in his eyes, his tone a comment without any agenda. He could have spoken of someone's nose in the same way. For the first time in my experience, I see Mary take a comment personally, nearly irrationally. She shakes her head.

‘I'm not hiding behind this.'

This seems quite untrue to me, even though it's the first time I hear her justify herself, or directly mention her veils to a stranger. No one says anything. Bea and Philip are the types that instinctively know when just breathing is better.

His eyes have kind, reflective irises, as if their colour and texture were infused with a deeper brand of empathy. One which takes no prisoners.

‘Would you mind if I painted you?'

Mary doesn't react straight away. Her blue folds become statuesque and forbidding. Bea sighs.

‘Philip, you can't ask to paint everyone you meet – and that's on top of your being an unregenerate womaniser.'

His eyebrows lift and he points to me.

‘I haven't asked
her
.'

Bea sighs again.

‘But you will. You even asked the postman the other day.'

He grins wickedly:

‘The post
woman
.'

Bea grins back. To change the subject, Mary asks:

‘How's your writing? How's your book going about the grandmother you never knew?'

Philip extends his legs and slides his hands into his jeans pockets.

‘Obsessed by people who aren't there.'

He flashes a smile at me, before adding:

‘I can understand that.'

And he looks at Mary again.

We have polished off the biscuits and the teapot is empty and cold. The room is sitting around us – waiting.

15

MITALI

I like the colour grey. It's gentle, like smoke, mist and donkeys. Like the cat. It's now raining off and on with a southerly wind. A cold autumn day has set its teeth, and people walk briskly. The earth is harder to dig and Mitali's happy. She loves the cold. Her short leather jacket and yellow scarf remind me of
Tintin in Tibet
. They never get any mud on them, however hard she works.

Mitali has just come back from Germany. She and Ian went there to see her dead friend's mother.

‘Olga was the first thing you and I talked about,' I tell her.

She stares at me.

‘Do you always remember the first thing you talk about with people?'

A translucent sheen of rain is on my face.

‘Maybe that first exchange captures something of the whole ensuing relationship.'

Mitali shakes her head.

‘So we're warned if it's going to be a fucking disaster, but we generally carry on anyway. Right?'

I make a face at her. And she laughs suddenly as if I were the one who had said something funny. I realise it's only the second time I have heard her laugh, anything more than a hiccup.

‘You know, if Jill Meagher had not died then, I wouldn't have dealt with Olga's death in the same way. I wouldn't have understood it. I wouldn't have had the balls to meet her mother.'

The way Mitali connects Olga's death to Jill Meagher's shows me how this Brunswick tragedy holds so many other events and feelings in its sway. The suburb has been held hostage because a woman has died, because her pain has touched all those who walk the streets where she walked. And Mitali is, for me, the lightning rod that makes it all the more potent.

She and I are kneeling again as we would in a church. We are planting seeds, laying them down in what seem like tiny graves. Kim is having a wisdom tooth out and will not be overseeing us for a couple of days. I can imagine her, stoic in the chair, looking on unflinchingly at some print of Angkor Wat or Stonehenge as the dentist wrestles with her molars. The pioneer in her won't complain, or ever explain.

Being alone with Mitali is a bonus for me. She's like that man who is called from village to village. He doesn't do anything out of the ordinary. He settles in, carries on with his everyday business, living exactly like the other villagers, but he's the rainmaker – when he is around rain always comes. Maybe it's the very quality of Mitali's sadness or joy, or her potty mouth, which make her my ‘rainmaker.'

Like animals that look at you as if they can hear what you think, Mitali has her eyes on me. She frowns.

‘Apart from Ian, you're the only person I can talk to about my brother. As if some fragment of him had mysteriously reached you. Sometimes, I have the feeling when I see you that he's closer. If I see you, he's not so dead, as if you were the same mob, as if he'd rubbed off on you. Shit. I know it's crazy.'

I bend towards the earth, and I look at it. Our silence is so dense that I can't even feel the air or the rain anymore. I know I mustn't answer. This is voodoo territory. The slightest inappropriate word and our friendship could break like crystal. We continue working in a sparse, newly planted garden. Yet our movements seem to flow from us, and the job gets done without real effort. The plants are a row of Dickensian orphans waiting at the workhouse, but the house is a brazen hussy reeking of paint. I ask Mitali how her trip went. She leans back on her heels, looking straight ahead.

‘Olga's mother turned out to be a poet and a bloody good one. Ian bought me a translation of her work over there. She lives in the country outside Hamburg, near a lake. I liked the air, the trees, even the clouds. It was a different sky, different water, different bird cries, but that didn't explain it. It was the place itself, her place. Did you know that in medieval times people thought hell was a land without birds?'

I smile at her.

'No, Mitali, but, hey, it makes beautiful sense. What are Olga's mother's poems like?'

She turns round to look at me.

‘Light, almost Japanese … They shimmer on the page like those delicate black ink landscapes. But they jump into your heart, smacking of fucking eternity.'

Mitali digs a few more graves.

‘We hardly talked of Olga. It wasn't that she couldn't bring herself to, it was just that somehow being together was enough.
She
knew why I had come.'

‘Had you met her before?' I ask.

Mitali looks at me fiercely, as if my question were inane.

‘No.'

I frown.

‘But …'

She swings round and growls.

‘I'll tell you why we went to see her. I killed her daughter. Good enough reason for you?'

I sit back on my heels. The whole garden feels like a ticking bomb.

‘Yes, it is, Mitali.'

She quietens down after that.

‘I had rented a car. I took Olga for a drive to show her the Great Ocean Road. I was wearing thongs. One got caught in the accelerator. I drove us into a telegraph pole. I didn't have a scratch. She was okay at first, just neck problems, and a headache that wouldn't go away … They did all the tests. She returned to Germany a few days later. But once she got there, after the flight, after the jet lag, after God knows what, she fell into a coma and stayed in it for a year before they turned off the machine.'

She stops and passes the back of her hand over her forehead.

Thank goodness we're in a garden, I think, waiting for a faulty tap of seconds to stop dripping. Mitali seems frozen by her own words. Why did she tell me, I wonder.

‘When she was here as a student, Olga's only real connection was with me. Then she came back to see me, and to meet Ian – not to die, not to be killed here.'

Mitali is sitting on her heels now.

‘I wanted to go and see her in hospital but her mother wrote to me, telling me it would be better if I came when she showed signs of waking up. In the end I did fly over, more than a month after her death.'

‘What was Olga like, Mitali?'

Her face twists round towards me.

‘She was tall …'

Mitali lifts her arm towards the trees.

‘… Oh, so tall. Her eyes were ice-blue slits. She had flat cheekbones, long, skinny fingers with nails bitten to the quick, and she walked proudly though she had no pride.'

Suddenly the image of her friend starts welling out of Mitali and I see Olga amble in the garden, tossing her head, her pale eyes shedding unseeing, impatient glances.

‘Once she came back upset from a trip to the chemist's, saying: “I don't think they like me in that chemist.” Knowing her, I took that to be a fucking understatement. She had gone there to get a German natural remedy. I asked her what happened.'

Mitali grins at the sky, suddenly acquiring a thick German accent.