On Brunswick Ground (7 page)

‘How's Melbourne treating you?' I ask.

‘Not too bad.'

She then tells me her friend's name and calls her over to our table.

‘She was my tutor at university.'

Bernice is good with thresholds. She talks about where you come from and where she comes from, immediately putting land under everyone's feet. Then she moves on to what you share with her – anything from womanhood to liking the coffee. She repeats people's names after her phrases, which anchors them still more. I heard a talk once by a psychologist expert in hostage situations. They use the same procedure. It makes me wonder about Bernice. I somehow feel Mary may have winked at me, but of course I can't be sure.

‘Billie told me her stepmother likes working with you.'

I stop asking myself why she wears this thing and tell her how relieved Mitali and Ian are that Billie is going to be okay. Suddenly, without Sarah, it's easier to talk to her. We end up all having a second coffee. I ask Mary if she's still staying with Sarah.

‘Yeah. We're getting along quite well.'

I gulp my surprise. She volunteers more information.

‘We've been seeing films like maniacs. And I might have a job soon – at
The Monthly
, designing their layout, if I'm lucky.'

Her hands are curled on the table. I stare at them. Surely they can reveal some clue? They are slightly podgy with stubbed fingernails, a bit like a child's hands, except that they seem preternaturally agile. They look
clever
, as if they
knew
things. They act with sudden decision. Full of character and economy of movement, they don't waver or hover around the cup like mine do. I peer into the veil and catch the colour of her eyes for the first time – bright blue. Gosh. Mary doesn't have to have coal dark eyes as if her father were a sheik, but I certainly didn't expect the full force of this Yves Klein statement. I have to stop myself thinking about her burqa again, but my mind keeps returning to it like a dog to its bone.

Bernice is chatting happily to the academic. They both went to the same university. I find myself surprisingly comfortable in Mary's presence. Instead of being busy wondering on which side of my arse I am going to sit or where to park my elbow on the table, I discover we've both read
The Ballad of the Sad Café,
Mollie Panter-Downes and Stefan Zweig – unrelated, unexpected bridges out of the blue. Loving the same book is like finding out that you've travelled to the same remote village, or busy city. Mary and I exchange emails when they get up to leave.

Bernice returns to prams and men. Since I've seen her last, she has set sail towards a series of decisions. They're all aligned in front of us. They feel slightly disembodied but Bernice's enthusiasm blows colour and shape into them. For a moment, they glow; I can nearly see them: the pram, the toys, the cot, the clothes, the school. They all heave into reality, but then she slumps forward on her elbows and sighs.

‘It's so hard to do it alone. I wanted a family. I've always wanted a family.'

We stare at each other as they deflate, the balloons from the party in her mind.

She tosses her fringe.

‘Has Mary been a Muslim for long?'

I say I don't know.

‘It's a bit extreme, isn't it?'

I nod and open my hands in doubt. Maybe we're all extreme, too busy hoping instead of living – Bernice hoping for a husband and child, me for Jack, Sarah to reach her daughter, Jack his memory. Mitali is the only one who's gone beyond hope, just trying to accept what has already happened.

Bernice looks at her tiny watch and jumps to her feet. She has to rush off to her radio station where she will interview people and bring to light every atom of humanity they may possess. They don't see her tiny handbag, her track record with men, or her slightly knock-kneed gait, they don't see her bright lipstick on the bad days or her woebegone dimpled elbows digging into Sarah's bar top, all they hear is her merry laugh and her trusting faith in the Labor Party. Yet intimations of her life will permeate the blandest of her statements. After a few minutes of conversation with her, they won't feel like strangers, loafers, creeps or weirdos anymore – they'll get a glimpse of a shoreline, climb onto the human raft we all share, and start paddling again.

I wave to her as she blitzes through the tables. The café is buzzing. University students are queuing for wraps and salads, carrying takeaway coffees. Each one uses the palette of fashion to draft a rough sketch of their souls and, according to mood, become Goths, Visigoths, abandoned waifs, Jane Austens or mittened grandmothers. Sitting with the empty seat in front of me, I think about my own grandmother as if she were just waiting in the wings for me to be on my own. Her sadness, her longing, her deep, unused, but
available
emotional life, are left behind like a letter for me to read. Surely something happens to people's discoveries and epiphanies when they die – especially when they die suddenly. Where do they leave them? There must be a responsibility to pick up where they left off. Jack used to think so.

The night I met Jack in the rain, I was walking back to the first place where I stayed in Melbourne. I was still on a tourist visa and had no idea what I would be doing. I had somehow landed here in Brunswick – that was about it. I must have tripped on something, and was flat on my face, when I felt a hand on my elbow. I started and looked up into Jack's face. He had a quiet, reassuring smile, as if stumbling, starting women didn't faze him one bit. We walked on, the melaleucas shepherding us forward. Soon I was banging on about my grandmother, not the best way to engage a man, but I wasn't thinking of him as a man – he was simply a human being in the night. Right from the start that lurch of the opposite sex was absent, that fandango people fall into, as if attraction were as coded as a bullfight: olé.

It was raining, it was night, it was under the ghost gums.

‘She's often on the edge of my day, as if she were hanging around waiting for me to understand something.'

I looked at him with a hurried smile.

‘I don't mean she's a ghost or that she's haunting me or anything like that.'

He grinned solemnly.

‘Of course not.'

He was leaning on a white, almost phosphorescent trunk.

‘People leave unfinished business. I'm a musician. I feel it often. Floating stuff, unspent tears, boomerang smiles that haven't come back; the unsaid things that clog the air around us.'

He grinned at me again.

‘Music deals with all that.'

I grinned back.

‘You make it sound like spring cleaning.'

Jack ducked closer under the tree as the rain pelted down. He told me about his own tough, old curmudgeon of a grandfather, who he hadn't spring-cleaned either. As a child, Jack liked to follow him around his yard, breathing the same air.

‘He was grumpy and crotchety, never walked without a stick and snapped at everyone, but it didn't bother me.'

There was something real and convincing about his presence, something that made the world bounce into being for a boy of ten.

‘One day he told me he wanted to show me something. He walked to his car, with a nod to me to follow him, flung his stick in the back, and we took off on the spot.'

Lithgow, the town where he lived, was soon left far behind. They went through endless miles and miles of sparse, flat land. Soon Jack realised dusk was coming on and that he was going to miss a football match on TV.

‘It was no use saying anything, I knew that.'

They drove, and drove, through those dry plains, and still did not get anywhere. Finally, in the middle of nowhere, Jack's grandfather turned off the ignition. He set off on foot and headed towards a small rise, as if he knew the way. Following behind, all Jack could see were anthills and scraggy plants. Suddenly, the old man dived into the bush and disappeared. Jack followed and found himself in a cave next to his grandfather. There they were, side by side in this dark grotto of a place. As his eyes got used to the darkness, Jack noticed how everything was glowing. Every nook and cranny of the rock face glittered and shone like a bit of starlit sky under the earth.

‘Glow-worms,' said his grandfather.

They stood there for a while without saying a word and then he drove them all the way back.

Jack's grandfather was always dreaming of gold mines and later on bought a ghost town for five hundred dollars. In the end, his was an Australian death. One day, he drove off again, into the West Australian desert this time. His body was never found – only his car. I wonder if Jack remembers this now.

A few days later, I am working in a garden with Kim and Mitali, when Mary turns up out of nowhere. She announces that she is moving in with Billie, and asks if they can borrow Mitali's car so that they can move things. I don't say anything, but I think of Sarah. I can see them both sharing films in wordless communication, catching up on common ground, carefully, offhandedly. Of course, the burqa must be off when they are alone at home at night, and Sarah can see her daughter's face at last. But now, after such a short time, Mary will be heading off into the blue again. I hope it's been enough.

We're all standing in the dusk, our tools at our feet. The day is finished. The garden itself looks disturbed in sleep with its newly dug-up beds and pruned bushes. Maybe this quiet place doesn't need three carers, and would benefit from less efficient attention. Suddenly, I see something glitter. I walk towards the tiny light, leaving the three others talking behind me. There's another gleam a bit further on, I follow it and stumble upon two small pieces of quartz, which for a few seconds I thought might be glow-worms.

7

MERRI CREEK

The Merri Creek meanders with a will of its own. The council interferes with it in a half-hearted way, but the Merri is a lazy, obstinate hippie. It won't be changed, it sprawls along, in spite of flats and houses, in spite of bridges and banks, in spite of wire fences dotted with plastic bags – it's a survivor, like Sarah. Yet the simple presence of her daughter can unravel her. The sun is high in the sky, clouds are banking up in enormous white citadels and parapets. Green and scarlet parrots are screeching at each other, the trees alive with their conversation. A fierce wind looms in and out, catches at branches and whooshes us forward, Sarah and I – snatching at us so wantonly, so insistently, as if it wanted to transform us into pillars of salt.

I have never read the Bible, maybe because it sits there, smug and pious, as lordly as Shakespeare – a big hole in my education – yet images of it spring to my mind as if I
had
read it. So maybe I am floating in an amniotic Bible after all. The Three Wise Men travel to Bethlehem following a star, then hang around, waiting to see some baby in a straw cot. I don't know why this image pops up, here along the Merri – perhaps because waiting can feel sacred. Along with my own waiting, I feel a strange waiting in my friend that I can't fathom or put a name to. It keeps me listening to the birds and the wind and the water with a particular attention, as if everything were a clue.

I know that Mary, since a few days ago now, has gone to stay with Billie. Sarah is daughterless again, just when things were getting better between them. The muted sound of her pain reminds me of the mangled echo of a stable door banging through the night in
Wuthering Heights
. Spells suit the Merri. The word ‘spell' is not so old-fashioned here by the creek's tugging waters, which shoulder themselves through today and yesterday, so transparent, so relentless and whispering, snatching at wisdom in gulps and bubbles as the sound of our steps and the rustle of dry grass confirm their warning. It also suits our voiceless understanding to be near the water.

‘I like walking along the Merri. I used to come here when I first arrived from Adelaide,' says Sarah. But her few other desultory attempts at conversation rattle like pebbles in a drum.

Her mind is in another zone and she settles back into silence. You could say Sarah is a mystery woman, but that would be too easy, like saying Jill Meagher's killer is evil – it would reveal only a fraction of the whole. Sarah knows the right moment. She knows how to find silence in the hum of her bar or in the flow of a creek, handling situations like a blacksmith, sparks flying around her face. All this is more inexplicable than mere mystery.

We have been walking nearly half an hour by now – or maybe it is Sarah time and it could be longer, or only a few minutes. When she speaks again, the words fall from her lips almost off-handedly.

‘Mary said she saw you last week.'

‘Yes, I stumbled on her at Green's. She was there with a friend of hers. We got talking. It was nice.'

Hearing about her daughter bares her immediately; she throws me a hungry glance. I look at the Merri carefully before continuing.

‘She told me about the job at
The Monthly
. Would that be good for her?'

Sarah looks up at the sky.

‘It would be perfect for her.'

She takes her jumper off in spite of the wind. We walk on for another ten minutes.

‘I'm glad you get on. Maybe something will happen at Billie's place and the whole blue knot will disentangle itself.'

Our ankles brush the grasses. Each blade seems to have an independent whisper. A cyclist passes us. He's a wiry man in lycra. He turns round to wave at us jeeringly. There is something about lycra – you sometimes their see genitals painfully defined, as if presented for dissection, cyclists trussed up for sacrifice hurrying towards the slaughter. I like the way Sarah doesn't mention his passing.

The Merri has quietened round a bend. The gravitas of Sarah's tread links all these little events in one block. When she takes a deep breath, I slow down without thinking. Sarah's time seems to have come, she tells me what's on her mind at last:

‘Do you know that she's never taken that thing off in front of me, not once, not even in the house at night.'