Rose Leopard (15 page)

‘Is it?'

She moves quickly and is suddenly hard up against me; hot red cheeks and flash-eyes, an overpowering stench of the same citrus perfume that she has always worn, the same citrus perfume that brings images I would rather forget creeping back into my mind.

‘Oh you're odious, aren't you? A nasty little self-centred tyke … always were.' I can feel her sour breath punching into my face. ‘What do you want me to say, Vince? That Terrence is boring? Dull? A drudge? Will that do?' Her voice lifts to a harsh crescendo. ‘Oh, and I suppose you'd like to know about our sex life too. That's seems to be a primary interest of yours. What do I say to satisfy you, Vincent? That we have sex once a week, same time, same position, same miserable forgettable result! That I haven't come in a decade? That you were better than him? There — are you happy with that? You were better! Does that make you happy? Does it? Does it!'

I return her glare, remain emotionless. Eventually she stops panting, musters her dignity, walks around me to a stool on the other side of the breakfast bar.

‘How did you find out?' she asks quietly.

But I didn't answer straightaway. I couldn't, because I wasn't exactly sure. Something had just clarified; the look of the girl in profile, the way she spoke — wavy, curious. Outside on that veranda last night was, for me, like waking up after years of impenetrable sleep. It was like finding a cracked blackened mirror, staring into it and seeing a reflection, familiar, knowable but not recognisably your own.

‘It all connected,' I tell Francesca, not expecting her to understand, but she nods, takes another cigarette, lights it with her carved pewter lighter.

‘We didn't have any option,' she says. ‘Besides, I had always intended to tell you one day. Mum wouldn't hear of it but I … I thought differently.'

‘Oh come on!'

‘Well, don't believe me. That's your choice, I suppose. You know, you could always try looking at events from my point of view for a change. You kid yourself that you're a writer, supposedly well-versed in exploring other people's emotions. Try mine for once.'

‘Do you have any?'

‘Can't help yourself, can you? Nasty, flippant: it's the easy solution for you.'

‘Okay, Frannie, okay. Let's play it your way. Let me think about how you felt at the time. I would imagine … initially pretty pleased with yourself for putting one over your vivacious, intelligent little sister by carrying on with her boyfriend.'

‘You too!' she sneers. ‘Don't forget that, Vincent — you were part of it too.'

It is more convenient for me to ignore her outburst.

‘Then, when you found out you were pregnant? Horror, I suppose. Totally appalled; the wicked toad had given the Ice Queen an unwanted child. Evil lineage, moral disgrace. What to do, oh what to do?'

She leaves the stool then, walks away from me, glides her fingers along the edge of the dustless wooden blinds.

‘You really have no idea, do you?' She turns and faces me once again. ‘I felt ashamed, you know that? Absolutely ashamed. Up until then it had all been a game — and yes, it was a chance to have something over Katherine because she was always the one. Jesus, wasn't she the one! Effortless straight-A student, brilliant career written all over her, “potential” stamped indelibly on her life's passport. And me? I had none of that. I was the older sister, nothing else. Passably attractive, fair conversationalist, ear-marked for an early marriage to an up-and-comer. But the pregnancy changed all that. My future was shot. The game had turned serious.'

‘It was always serious, Frannie.'

‘Whatever. I was pregnant to my sister's boyfriend and that made me feel ashamed. I've carried that shame ever since. Don't get me wrong: I love my daughter, always will. But the past can only temper so much, can't it? Time is a filter but I don't know anyone who can look objectively at what they've done and maintain an unsullied conscience.'

Somewhere in the distance, in another world, a clock strikes.

‘Does Amelia know?' I ask her.

Slowly, she shakes her head.

‘God, no. The whole thing's too difficult as it is. Besides, what purpose would be served by telling her? Honestly? Sometimes … sometimes I think that sleeping dogs need not just lie — they should be buried unmarked and left untouchable.'

We both hear it then, the enthusiastic clatter of footsteps coming down the hallway. Francesca closes in on me a last time.

‘One more thing,' she breathes. ‘Despite it all, I loved her too, okay? And I miss her, God how I miss her! Grief for Katherine: it's not exclusively yours. You need to remember that.'

Amelia throws open the door, surveys the scene.

‘What's going on?' she asks.

Francesca, as always, is quicker.

‘Uncle Vincent is going to stay the night,' she says, returning to the smoothly cultivated tone that is exclusively hers. ‘Then I've agreed that you can go back to the farmhouse, with him and the children, tomorrow. Is that okay?'

The look of pleasure on my daughter's face — an intense, child-like gratification — suggests that it is.

One

A
long time ago — many flashes, many snapshots — Stu and I were sitting on a jetty. The three o'clock sun blasted our backs and the water was clear enough for us to see schools of javelin-thin garfish darting beneath our bare feet. The old cracked timber pylons wheezed and snarled. Teenagers lolled dangerously on a nearby beach. Minutes drifted alongside the smears of cirrus overhead. Throughout the afternoon an old lady wearing a dirty sweatsuit fished silently. I remember watching the old lady intently because the writerly part of me wanted to slip into the dark lonely labyrinth of her mind — maybe discover a litany of lost loves, the yawning schisms of too many unfulfilled friendships, time-bleached images of an earlier, less complicated life. But another, more pressing business beckoned.

‘Okay,' I said to the traitorous sod on my left. ‘Let's suppose you're right. Let's suppose that I am a good writer but a lousy story-teller. That's the theory, isn't it … you, you intellectual Philistine!'

‘Vince, don't beat yourself up about this. It's just a perception thing. Remember, I'm trying to help you —'

I held up both hands, flexed, tensed, cannoned his placatory drivel back into his BIG fat gob where it belonged.

‘That's the theory. Now, let's examine this a little closer. Let's — scrutinise!'

‘Geez, Vince — geez I hate it when you get like this! Look, the facts are these. It's hard work getting published. Bloody hard work. And it doesn't matter a pinch of you-know-what how nice your work sounds. That lyric fluency … the music is an afterthought. Publishers want effective, connected stories — period.'

‘Nice? You think I write nicely? Nice? Wow, powerful adjective, BABY !'

He sighed, tossed a rusted nail out into the sluggish ocean. It landed too near the old lady's line so she frosted him with a quick glance.

‘Klutz. You just re-emptied Mother Hubbard's cupboard.'

He ignored that, interlocked his fingers and held them to his chest like a priest on the verge of an impassioned didacticism.

‘Come on, Vince, it's all a matter of angle. A matter of approach. You need to get the process right.'

‘Ah, the process! What process?'

‘The way you write.' He grimaced, rubbed at a nub of inflamed skin on his chin. ‘Your method. It's too reversed. You write a line, write a paragraph, labour over it, make it sound fantastic, bleed your thesaurus dry.'

‘It's in my head, you bastard. I have never used, will never use, a fucking thesaurus.'

He ignored me.

‘Line after line, sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, keep doing that same thing. Beautiful, rich, invigorating prose — and none of it connected. None of it.'

‘Ladies and gentlemen, take a peek at the world's first and only illiterate literary agent!'

‘Stop carrying on. Look, all of the successful authors on my books —'

‘The world's first zero-quantity survey.'

‘Shut up and listen, will you —'

‘Commissioned by the world's leading etymological dullard.'

‘Shut up!' This time he screeched loudly enough for the world to lurch a little from its axis. Gulls flapped elsewhere, The Teenagers desisted momentarily from The Grope. Further along, the old fisher-lady looked disapprovingly across, mimed a shush in our direction.

Stu held up his hands, breathed deeply, in-out in-out rise-and-fall, three or four times.

‘Okay,' he mumbled. ‘Okay. Vince, all of my … consistently published authors agree on at least one major part of the process — that the story must come first. No serious writing until the story is at least semi-established. Gloss up the style later: refine it, polish it, gilt-edge it, wrap it in silver-foil, do what you like. But not at the expense of the story. That's what publishers want to publish, and that's what the market wants to read. Stories, Vince. Plain and simple.'

‘You don't get it, do you? I'm a
writer,
not a
story-teller.
Besides, any buffoon can tell you that well-written prose is the foundation —'

‘For Chrissakes, who cares about
well-written?
Critics maybe? People who go to Book Club every Tuesday? English teachers — and other professional wannabes? Put them together and they constitute about point triple-o-five per cent of the book-reading population. Besides, if you're talking award-winning literature, well … let's be honest here, Vince. No one, repeat no one, who starts reading that sort of tripe ever actually finishes it.'

‘Oh, garbage!'

‘No, truth. It's Booker boredom, too much hard work for the reader. You spend your day dealing with office bullshit and last week's deadlines, you come home to a bitching spouse, three moronic kids, a lump of cat-shit on your favourite chair and a stranglehold mortgage, you want to escape, not figuratively ponder the world's injustices. Vince, people don't want to have to think too hard. They don't want some high-brow diatribe on man's inhumanity to man. What they do want is to read stories that are clear and accessible — twenty minutes per night, an hour on the beach every Sunday.'

‘You are ripping my heart out, you know that?'

‘And your melodrama is becoming tedious. If you're serious about writing, you'll pay attention to what I'm saying — for once.'

I knew he was right, indefatigably so, but pride, as the old proverb says, is the mask of one's own faults. So, rather than admit his argument I stayed petulant, tried to brush his words away and look unconcerned, as carefree as a child catching butterflies in a meadow.

‘When I went to school,' Stu said to the discordant sounds of my mock-groaning, ‘I hated Maths. Couldn't do it, didn't like it. Then I got this new teacher, a Mr Petty. Big bloke with boggly eyes. We're going to do geometry, he said. Might as well do Ancient Urdu, I thought. Then he taught us all about Euclid and Ancient Greece. Told us how Euclid had discovered planes and solids, how he'd worked it all out. How he'd been thinking about numbers one day and come up with the idea that primes are infinite. Made old Euclid sound like a pretty reasonable guy, serious sort of knob but with a dry sense of humour. And I learned to understand geometry, remember it all to this day. Know why?'

A pelican glided overhead, its wind-smoothed belly like the undercarriage of a small plane.

‘Because he humanised it,' I answered wearily, accepting defeat. ‘Professor Boggly-Eyes made a story out of geometry, right?'

‘Right. Finally. See, they're powerful things, stories. Much more memorable, much more able to move men and mountains, than a fancy phrase or a scintillating sentence.'

Further down the jetty there was a buzz-flap-splash. I looked across, watched as the old lady reeled in a plump, gleaming bream with practised efficiency.

‘I hate fishing,' I said to the ocean.

I've been thinking about stories ever since that conversation, thinking about how everything we do and have done is transmitted via story. Humans are best at understanding mythically; best when science is not science but a self-perpetuating gridlock of stories about inventions and discoveries, breakthroughs, relentless human endeavour, people in triumph (Madame Curie: ‘Ah … zis must be radium!') and people in tragedy (Pierre Curie: ‘Ah … zat was a horse!'). And what is history if not a conscious choosing of stories that suit our various agendas? From the gazillions of narratives at our disposal, we elevate a chosen few and bundle them together as the history of the state, or of the nation, or of the nation-state. Jokes, anecdotes, family gossip, hearsay, legend, the retelling of famous occasions in our lives, whispers in the corner, newspaper articles, back-fence banter, TV shows and the Hollywood movie conveyer-belt … we live like bewildered possums in the bright light of story-surround. Little wonder that stories are so powerful, for they are the individual majesty in our lives and the lives of others, the secret, unique-as-DNA charts of our psychologies. And it is vital that they be experienced, told and retold to our children and then to their children too.

Our family's story now includes returning from Brisbane and Peregian Beach. There is a refreshing calmness inside the car as we motor sedately north. We count overpasses, guess the colour of the next oncoming vehicle, listen to what Kaz used to call ‘sheep-shagger' radio, watch the bitumen paddle dreamily within a mirage of heat. Soon we are sliding through the valley — deep implacable greenness, cockatoos settled like improbable snowflakes on distant trees — turning up the pot-holed dirt road, rejoicing when the farmhouse comes into view. I watch my children as they open the front door, open windows, open up rooms, open an airflow, let the sunshine splash on the kitchen tiles, blink at motes of dust dancing like tiny seahorses in the new light. Then together we strive: unpacking, rekindling, replacing, shouting instructions through the hallways and passages, making coffee, finding biscuits, returning, resettling.

It is late afternoon. The children are playing rules-free Monopoly with Daniel, Samantha, Jamie and poor Hortense. Otis is winning. Her business acumen is ruthless and she seems about to launch some sort of corporate takeover bid. Amelia is gravitating between refereeing the children and beginning a new canvas.

‘It's called
Kaleidoscope
,' she tells me. ‘Blank grey canvas with four touching circles — each one representing Child, Teenager, Adult, Aged — with changing shapes and colours inside. Neat, hey.'

‘Neat,' I say obligingly, thinking: foul American word — we are being culturally subsumed. Since yesterday's revelations I have tried not to stare at her in a father-daughter kind of way but it's been difficult. It's been difficult not to take note of the shape and dimensions of her: fine limbs, pale freckly skin, a slightly upturned nose that seems to turn away from her impish face. It's been difficult not to search for the shared genetic imprint and it's been difficult not to want to dive headlong into her mind, seek all that she has inherited, hope that her way of seeing things is somehow akin to mine.

It's been difficult because I feel like the parent of a new-born: awestruck, recent witness to a miracle, wanting to hold her high above my head and bellow hallelujahs to a genuflecting world.

But I don't. Instead, I somehow drift into my study. There I find piles of paper, some blank, some defaced by an unintelligible scrawl, some blocked with words — the beginnings of since-forgotten plots, once-familiar characters in momentary conflict, a love scene that I know I must have written but which now seems foreign, the contrived work of a stranger. Cut-outs from magazines, curly-cornered pictures of people who might one day have been ordained as characters, spilled boxes of paper clips, pens, broken pencils, thick patches of dust on the computer, a dictionary open to
Egyptology
|
elaborate,
an unthumbed Roget (it was a birthday gift from Bernice) supporting an orange glass paperweight — all evidence that someone once worked here, but that person has long since departed.

And none of it connected. None of it.

Knowing what I must do, I find an old packing carton, tape one end, plonk it in the centre of the study. I spend a glorious hour tossing stuff into the carton — all the useless paper (screwed to cricket-ball size), all the busted stationery, the dried-up pens, rusty clips, all the random, disconnected ideas — everything that was left by the previous occupant. Then I drag the carton outside and return with cloth and polish. Soon the computer shines, the desk gleams, the shelves smarten, the window-sill changes hue. I pull the curtains, shove the window upwards, spray some air-freshener, vacuum the carpet, punch and puff the cushions. And as I do all this, the man who used to sit in here, the man who used to slump down and contemplate and swear and perspire and jab the keyboard like it was his most malicious enemy, gradually, silently, like a whisper in a crowd, that man leaves … without comment, without fuss. Me — I keep doing what I'm doing because I don't need to see him go. I can sense the new delicious emptiness of the room on the back of my neck, in my expanding chest, within my nostrils. Then the room is a void, newer and more promising than it ever used to be, and all my innards feel like they've been turned upside-down but they're still more peaceful, like lake-water on a windless day.

And so I take his place, mould my back to the chair.

In the first drawer of the desk there are manila folders full of story scraps, fulsome words, semi-written poems which have stalled in their futile search for rhythm and meaning.

In the second drawer I see the original draft of
Pears Amid Paradisio,
corrections marked with broad, angry slashes of pencil.

In the third drawer there are many packets of photographs.

‘Holiday job,' Kaz had insisted. ‘We'll go through all our photos, chuck out what we don't want and put the rest in albums.'

‘Good idea. Better for them to be organised and never-looked-at, than disorganised and never-looked-at.'

‘Cynic. No, we have to do it. There must be at least five hundred of them stuffed in there. It's a mess. They probably date back to when we first started seeing each other.'

I grinned, tickled beneath her breasts.

‘Ah, the grand euphemism. I just adore it when people say
seeing
each other when all the time they mean
bonking
each other.'

She pushed my hands away.

‘Are you helping or molesting? No, don't answer that. Look, we'll lay them all out, chuck what we don't want, put the rest in chronological order. Actually, I might buy some of those sticky labels.'

‘Later Kaz. It's too hot. The bio-rhythms are wrong.'

‘Honestly, Vince, you're so … so —'

‘Magnificently unpredictable?'

‘Predictably painful!'

‘Sorry. But remember, despite it all, I love you … love you … love you … '