Rose Leopard (14 page)

She takes a too-loud breath, rolls her lips inwards. ‘I just wondered what you really think. About death, I mean. And what happens to us all … afterwards.'

‘Ah.'

‘Sorry, I didn't mean to —'

‘Afterwards? You want to know about afterwards?'

But what to say? I can hardly bluff, can hardly say that I haven't really considered. She's perceptive enough to know that I have done, ceaselessly. That's one reason she's asking the question; re-phrased it might become
What have you been thinking these past few months?
So — is this a time for truth, or is it a time for stalling? Is it a time for directness, or for pleading uncertainty and retreat?

A large single drop of rain flicks my knee.

‘I'm sorry.' Amelia has finished her wine too quickly. ‘I shouldn't … I should know when to keep my big mouth shut. Like Mum always says: you're old enough to know social graces, Amelia.'

‘It's fine.' I reach out, retrieve the bottle, pour her another half-glass. ‘Because I don't really know what I think, so I can't answer the question.'

‘Oh.' Her disappointment is obvious.

‘I can tell you this, though.' And instantly the thoughts are upon me, circling like autumn leaves fallen into an eddy. When I speak my words shoot out rapidly, without poise or consideration.

‘I don't believe in any Heaven or Hell or any sort of Purgatorial waiting-room because that's Christian and I reckon Christianity is narrative humbug.'

‘Humbug?'

‘Another word for crap.'

‘Oh.'

‘I don't believe in any of the Eastern stuff, like passing from this life to the next, or being reincarnated as a fruit-bat or something. I don't believe in ghosts or spirits seeking redemption. I think that's the same: it's all fictional blarney and it's made a lot of writers and film-makers richer than they deserve to be. See, I don't believe in any of that stuff.'

She nods, draws her knees up to her chest.

‘However,' I rattle on, ‘now that I've seen a body dying and everything inside a person crumbling and her life receding and her skin drying and shrinking, I can think — fuck, there has to be more to it than this. Um, sorry, my language —'

‘I don't mind.'

‘Sorry. Anyway, I suppose what I'm saying is that I do believe in something besides a body, something more than just physically living and I know that some people see fit to call this a soul but I don't like that word; it's too Christian for me, too patronising and convenient. This whatever-it-is … it can't be touched but it can be felt, and it's not always directly in your mind but it is always there or thereabouts, circling like a bird looking for a good branch.'

‘That's lovely.'

‘It's like … like a story, I suppose — and everyone has a story, don't they? I mean, everyone has a batch of stories and that's what we are, I think — a batch of stories. Our bodies crumple and disintegrate but our stories remain and … well, hopefully they'll live on forever because they're our legacy, I guess — they're what makes it all worthwhile, don't you think? The stories are what really matter?'

It is a long speech and I feel quite exhausted at the end. Amelia says nothing, just stares out at the layered accumulation of storm-cloud and keeps lifting wine to her lips. I look again at the jutting shape of her, think how much it reminds me of Francesca, all those years ago, squatted primly on the edge of the bed while I lay spreadeagled, still leaking, bathed in an unfamiliar stink, warmed by guilt.

‘Can I put some music on?' Amelia asks eventually.

‘Real music — or that caterwauling that you listen to?'

‘Real music?' she scoffs lightly. ‘You call eighties LPs real music?'

‘Hey! I'm wide-ranging you know — Mendelssohn and Meatloaf, Boy George and Bach.'

‘Sorry, but they
all
suck.'

‘Well, well. Not so eclectic after all. Actually, Kaz always made me play Classical FM in the car. She said it kept me pacified and prevented at least thirty daily instances of road-rage.'

Amelia grins then disappears into the living-room. Moments later I hear the ominous, prescient beginnings of Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata.

‘How's this?' she gently mocks as she reappears with another bottle of wine. She tosses her hair back and binds it momentarily with deft fingers. ‘I found it at the back of the collection. Pretty cool music for a storm, hey?'

So we sit and we drink, my fifteen-year-old niece and I, and we wait for the shards of lightning to spear closer and fresh sheets of rain to smack their symphonies upon the roof, pucker the soil, rip petals from flowers. And as we drink, the music and heat take me elsewhere, to another time and place, when I was a boy, cosseted within our house in Chapel Hill, watching my father working. It was night-time, I was lying on a floor of cold hard boards that smelled of old polish, peering through the gap between the study door and its jamb. A slice of thin yellow light cut across my face; my arms and legs were as stiff as the timber they lay on. I watched him for a long time and he didn't move, save for the brush of his wrist across paper as he wrote. Then, without warning I remember, he let the pen fall and leaned back, scraped absently at his scalp with his index fingers. I turned away briefly and then his body was blocking the light and I had to answer to a huge, lumbering shadow.

‘What're you doing up?'

‘Nothing. I was just … I was watching you work.'

As a son watches a father, I think now: intrigued by this snapshot of the future, the potentiality of what the boy might become, how he might grow, how his clean mobile face may one day settle and his soft bones may harden to a more familiar shape.

‘Go to bed,' he said, not unkindly. ‘So I'm working. It's not exciting.'

‘Working what?' I asked.

He sighed, pushed on the door and made it creak.

‘Writing stuff, instructions. Plans. Lots of meaningless words, so that other people can pretend to know what to do. Okay? Now, go to bed.'

He watched me drift towards the stairs then turned away and I know he missed my hushed return, missed me watching him back at his desk, leaning and scratching, then pushing forward and unlocking the top drawer, extracting a thick black heavy pistol. Weighing it in his writing hand, smoothing his fingers over the gleaming barrel, tapping it with his hard red knuckles and clicking the safety catch. Pointing the pistol with great deliberation about the room, at an old landscape, at a china vase filled with dried flowers, at curtains that were shuddering in the breeze. Weighing it again, then placing it slowly and surely against his right temple, screwing the barrel tight to his flesh. Holding it tight, holding it for an age, then tightening his thin lips and raising his soft sad eyes to the ceiling above.

‘Bang!' he whispered then stared at the pistol before he returned it to the desk, safety catch untouched, locked the drawer and resumed writing page after page in that curiously motionless, controlled fashion that had taken him, presumably, years to develop.

My father did not shoot himself. He was electrocuted when he touched a live wire in his basement workshop. Music blaring, hole in the ceiling, pockets of swear-words flung up the stairs. He had been trying to install an extractor fan. My mother had begged him to ring for an electrician but he had refused. He was not, he said huffily, the sort of man to be quelled or defeated by the installation of an extractor fan. Like son, like father: he hated the specialists too.

My mother died less than a year later. The cause of death was recorded as stomach cancer but I knew better than that. She died because the last time she saw her husband alive, they had argued over a phone-call to an electrician.

‘What kind of life is it,' she asked me once, tears straining her tiny voice, ‘when your last memory of the person you loved and held for so long, is a stupid argument over an electrician? Where's the decency in that?'

Six months after I had buried my mother I saw those slim, white hands caressing a cigarette in the University refectory. A few weeks later, in Kaz's apartment, we had coaxed and explored the intoxicating newness of each other's bodies while the
presto agitato
of the
Moonlight Sonata
scampered merrily in the background.

I never told Kaz that my father had been listening to that exact same piece when his finger, wet from licking, had sought the live wire. Tired of life, I suppose. Or maybe just careless. He never actually told me.

* *

‘Just one more question,' Amelia pleads. Beethoven is off; we have opted for the less orchestrated sounds of the night.

‘Okay, but only because we're related, even if it is by marriage.'

‘Everyone leaves their story,' she says carefully. ‘I can see that. But, how do we know them?'

‘Huh?'

‘I mean, what if you die before you've had the chance to leave your story? How will people know about who you are?'

I sense a disruption here.

‘Who tells the story?' she persists. ‘Who keeps each story alive?'

And then it is all about me, too grandiose to be real: the buffeting winds, screeching rains, a huge voluminous darkness; the descent of the heavens.

Amelia leans forwards, stares out into the turbulence.

She says, ‘It must be us, mustn't it? It must be our responsibility.'

Now the thickening rain has cut the light to a consumptive nothingness.

‘Yes,' I tell her. ‘I suppose it must.'

And there is an overpowering fragrance and wetness that cocoons us. I cannot see, can hear only the timpani drums in the skies. Walls of noise shudder, cave in. We are reduced, we are shrunken, humbled …

Later, after the storm has passed, I look at Amelia in the recovering light, this ancient, eerie, bush light.

Something, I think, is oddly familiar about her.

Seven

S
aturday morning. It is still and oppressive, already hot but the view has been freshened and cleaned of debris, the colours sharpened by last night's rain. There is more definition to the lines and angles of our landscape, as if a rough sketch has been underscored, more deftly pencilled. I make two brief phone-calls then we pack — four soft bags and a plastic crate filled with plastic good guys and bad guys, books, puzzles and Gameboys, all crammed into the boot of our small blue car. The children are excited — it's an outing, after all — but Amelia is subdued.

‘Hung-over?' I ask, a little sheepishly. Fifteen-year-olds probably shouldn't be allowed to drink that much wine.

‘I'm fine,' she insists. Then, every word stamped with a nervous tightness: ‘What if Mum wants me to stay longer than just overnight?'

‘She won't' I pick up the bags but she remains where she is, caught in the emptiness between the kitchen and the lounge.

‘What if she wants me back home, permanently?'

‘She won't' I lug the bags into a pile near the front door. ‘I can pretty much guarantee that.'

As I load the car I think about the previous evening. We all have the capacity to be occasionally granted a certain clarity; it is to do with connectedness. During this moment, previously separated ideas and thoughts, memories, people and events, sensations, opinions and even intuitions begin to close in on each other, touch at the periphery then link, merge like puddles on a road. Often-times, a narrative is formed — in my case it is a narrative that has been staring at me for some time, but which I have been too obtuse to recognise.

The highway south to the Sunshine Coast has improved greatly over the past few years. There is the usual glut of traffic — southerners towing monolithic caravans, Mr and Mrs Fat & Arrogant in their bumper-hugging V6 sedan, a flower-powered Kombi crawling along at 70 k.p.h. We laugh at the juxtaposition of two stickers on the rear window —
Magic Happens!, We Visited Cunnamulla
— buzz along, flick through radio channels and deplore the tatty, melodramatic billboards that line the highway. After nearly two hours I swoop through the Noosa Heads turn-off, negotiate a succession of roundabouts and head along the coast towards Peregian Beach. Amelia is still quiet but it is impossible not to enjoy the sight of the ocean, a rolling shifting mass of gunmetal that reflects every cloud pattern in the sky. Soon we turn into leafy Windsor Court, then find number fifteen: the palatial residence of Terrence and Francesca Connors, one a highly remunerated number-cruncher, the other my snooty sister-in-law, dryly dispassionate ex-lover and, I am thinking as the car rolls into their stamped-concrete driveway, long-time concealer of the truth.

Terrence answers the door, nods at me, pats Amelia on the head. It is an awkward gesture, done as if he has just selected a new pet from the pound for lost and discarded animals.

‘How's things, Terry?' Like Francesca he hates the abbreviated form but I persist with it anyway. Terrence is a twisted bowel; he desperately needs loosening, a thorough hose-out. If he were a ball of string, I would delight in unravelling him.

‘I'm well, Vince.' He is a small man, slight with a minor stoop, bespectacled, cartoonish in dress shorts, a collared Rayon shirt, tan $l80 Florsheims that he probably calls casual. His legs are white and hairless from years of office-work, he has thin spidery arms, greying hair cut short and precise, a face that is pinched, concentrated.

‘Coming in?' he asks.

‘No. I told Francesca I'd be back a bit later. I thought you two might like to see your daughter first, you know, catch up on things.'

‘Right then.' Terrence rarely asks questions. For him, family affairs belong in a single, rather insignificant brain-compart-ment, visited only when necessary. ‘I doubt that I'll be here. Got a meeting — new client. Bit of a pain on the weekend but they're a big corporation, messy accounts. You know how it is.'

I don't but we shake hands anyway. As I turn the car away from Amelia's dispirited wave and point it in the direction of the northern suburbs of Brisbane, I reflect on how little I know of Terrence. And of him and Francesca, together: the formation of their habits, their topics of conversation, any words and phrases that they have made their own, how and when they touch, intimacies that might occur between them. I have always thought of Francesca as I know and knew her without really considering the possibility of another, perhaps warmer, perhaps more fulfilling, existence for her elsewhere.

Brisbane is sticky and depressing. I turn the air-conditioning to high and stay in the slow left-lane. Soon we see Bernice, standing on the steps of the Georgian monstrosity. She is pretending to nurture a pot-plant but I know that she is waiting for us, and probably has been since I rang. Milo winds down his car window and waves frantically.

‘Gramma!' yells Otis. ‘We're here!'

They tumble up the steps, fall into a hug and the customary cooing about how tall they've grown, how well they look, what wonderful grandchildren they will always be.

I lift their bags and the plastic crate, drag them into the foyer.

‘Only one night?' Bernice releases my children, smiles benevolently as they skip across acres of terracotta into the distant games room. ‘Where will you be?'

‘I'm not sure — yet.'

‘Surely the children could stay longer. I see so little of them.'

I gaze after them, hear the inexpert tinkling of a piano, squeals of ‘it's my turn … give me a go!'

‘Bernice,' I say, ‘is there somewhere private where we can talk?'

She knows then — I am sure of it. Initially her eyebrows rise, then I see her nipping at her bottom lip and turning away because a faint flush has bloomed in her cheeks.

‘You'd better come into the study,' she says.

Of course, it's absurd to call this room a
study
… A study is a place dedicated to creation: dreams unfurl, ideas form like drops of blood, spread and soak, are committed to paper or the ever-cluttered hard-drive. But this room is sedentary, a mausoleum of walls lined with unread books and teak furniture that is too polished to be comfortable. Despite its stylishness the desk, an oblong of soft green leather and brass trimmings, is as bare as a disused warehouse.

Bernice stands away from me near a heavily sashed window. As usual I feel as if I am diseased, an infection thrust unhappily into her antiseptic world.

‘Well?' Her tone is brisk. ‘This should be private enough.' And I am certain. I am certain that I am right and that she has known all along. She has known and willingly kept it from me — and I am on the verge of confronting her with her conspiracy.

Without prompting she says, ‘I'm guessing that this is about Amelia.'

I lean against the desk.

‘Yes.' My voice sounds distant, forced. ‘Yes, it is.'

She sighs, surveys the room as though she has never looked at it before.

‘You know,' she says, ‘there's been a lot of disappointments in my life. No point in denying them now — I'm too old and frankly I can't be bothered. But that business with Francesca, when I found out, it was my greatest disappointment. After Frank died, after I'd worked so hard to make things go the right way, it was wrong that anything else should happen. Wrong that it should intrude.'

A manipulation, I am thinking. A scheme, played out around me — to protect Kaz from me.

‘Hence your disapproval of our marriage.'

‘Well — yes. To be honest, I had hoped you'd somehow go away. You always seemed like you would, one day. It would've made things so much easier. We — the family — could've got back to some sort of normality.'

‘I loved her, Bernice. I was never going to leave.'

‘Yes,' she sniffed. ‘I suppose I knew that, really. I just … I didn't want to admit it.'

Silence; pause for reflection. Time to consider: shall I go softly-softly or play hard-ball?

Softly-softly always works better — if you can stand to do it.

‘Amelia, she's a great person — fantastic.'

Bernice's response is immediate.

‘Yes, she is. Which in a way vindicates our decision. You do realise that, don't you? That it was
our
decision. And not taken lightly, I might add.'

‘What about Leo?' The jigsaw is not yet complete.

She shrugs as the years fly past, bats fleeing an old dank cave.

‘Leo was a kind man, long-time friend of the family. My husband's solicitor for years, completely involved in his career, never had the time or inclination to marry. He was happy enough to support our decision.'

‘Did you pay him?'

‘Certainly not. That is a monstrous suggestion.'

Time for hard-ball. I plunge in further.

‘So, why didn't you ever tell me? Bernice, I've been part of this family for fifteen, nearly sixteen years now — despite your wishes. Surely I deserved to know!'

‘Yes' she says, surprising me. ‘Yes, you probably did.'

‘Then why didn't you tell me?'

‘Because of Katherine' She turns to me and I see a great weariness in her, an ageing that I have never seen before. ‘Think about that, Vince. How do you think Katherine would have reacted to the news that you — her beloved husband, the free spirit who tells great stories — you fathered her niece?'

It is between us now, immutable.

Amelia is my daughter.

Bernice moves closer to the window, stares out at a tight line of pink azaleas.

‘We did it for Katherine,' she continues quietly. ‘Actually, in a way, for both of you — to keep you together. She loved you dearly! No matter what I thought, there was no mistaking her feelings and I knew I could never change those. Nor would I want to, not in my heart of hearts. See, I'm not quite the deranged, insensitive old bitch that you think me to be. I loved my daughter too, Vince — fiercely and without question. I loved her more than my own wasted life —'

She grips the curtain hard. A stifled sob escapes her; when she lifts her face to me I see wetness coating each bright rheumy eye.

‘You're a parent,' she says, more subdued but still brittle beneath. ‘You know how much we desire to protect our children, how over-riding that desire can become. That's how I justified — continue to justify — our decision. I was protecting my daughter! And to my last moment on God's earth, I will never regret that. I will grant you that I could have acted differently — but I will never regret what we did. Never.'

Conversations, Kaz told me once, have natural end-points. Someone speaks, or remains silent, and you know instinctively that it's over. No more needs to be said. She also remarked: ‘You — Vincent Benjamin Daley — you need to learn to recognise these end-points.' (It was after an office Christmas party where I'd made an abject fool of myself by telling a top-notch Government Auditor that God had played a cruel joke and swapped his brain for his sphincter). ‘You — Vincent Benjamin Daley — tend to go that one step too far. People find this off-putting, confronting, aggravating. Learn to recognise the end-points. Cut the dialogue, gather ye wits while ye may and move on with grace.'

Fair enough, but not this time.

‘It's amazing, isn't it?' I tell Bernice.

‘What is?'

‘You and Frannie — the pair of you, scheming and colluding like a couple of bloody-minded old biddies. Did you ever wonder if Kaz actually needed protecting? Eh? You took it upon yourselves to hide the truth from her. Why? Was she so fragile? So in need of protection?'

‘Yes she was.'

‘Oh bullshit, Bernice! Bullshit! You … you toyed with her life! With both of our lives! You withheld the truth then congratulated yourselves that you'd done the right thing and it would never come out anyway. How naïve was that? How unfair?'

She looks at me then and there is a blankness in her eyes that is sadder than any expression of anger.

‘Did you ever tell her?' she asks, strangely calm. ‘Did you? Did you tell Katherine that you'd been having sex with her sister behind her back?'

There is no need for me to answer.

‘Of course not,' she whispers. ‘Because you loved her too. You loved her like us, and that meant more than truth itself.'

Back onto the shimmering highway, this time alone, join the centipede of resigned lunch-time traffic, pause at McDonald's in Aspley for something called a Beach Burger Special — why does adding a slice of tinned pineapple to any take-away render it Beachy? — then up the highway, take the Caloundra turn-off, whiz along Nicklin Way courtesy of a succession of green lights, cruise the Sunshine Motorway until I near Peregian. It's funny, I should feel different but I don't. A little cleaner perhaps, like the bush after rain. Less complicated. Still pissed off that they could conspire like that but sort of glad beneath it all.
Amelia, she's a great person
—
fantastic
.

* *

Frannie is alone in the kitchen, lighting a menthol cigarette.

‘I didn't know you smoked.' I drop my bag on the floor, open the fridge, pour a glass of iced water. ‘How does old Terry-towelling feel about that?'

‘Please don't call him that stupid name.' She sucks the cigarette in small staccato gasps that remind me of a woman in labour. ‘Anyway, he doesn't know.'

‘Frannie! Another lie. What a complex life you lead.'

She ignores the jibe.

‘You might remember that Terrence has no sense of smell,' she informs me regally. ‘As long as I clean my teeth regularly, he doesn't need to know.'

‘So what would he do, Frannie? Withdraw all conjugal rights? Cut you out of the million-dollar inheritance?'

She stares at me balefully then smacks the cigarette butt into the sink.

‘He's a good man,' she says quickly, still mashing the butt. ‘Oh, he's not unpredictable like the great Vincent Daley, not a story-teller, not funny or exciting — but he's good to me, looks after me, looks after Amelia. It's enough.'