Rose Leopard (7 page)

‘Three o'clock,' he says. ‘In town. Francesca sorted it all out. She's incredibly strong.'

I look outside again, see blue-grey eucalypts, the early lilac light of the bush diffusing as the sun slowly rises.

‘She should be here,' I tell him.

His look is quizzical.

‘She loves this place.' The words tumble from me. ‘She thinks it's really grounded, I know she does. It makes her think of wood and stone and air, all becoming something beautiful.'

He puts his cup on the bench where it rattles then is still.

‘Vince, we can't. There are rules, regulations. Bernice wanted … well, a
normal
funeral she said. That was what she said. ‘‘Normal and dignified, befitting a wonderful daughter—' They were her exact words. So, service at St Marks, then a procession out to the, um, cemetery.'

‘She should be here!'

‘Mate, she can't. We can't.'

He comes to me and we stand together then for a moment, watching the sky lift from salmon-pink to lemon, watching but still blind to a flock of birds as they connect in a perfect vee and brace the curvature of the world.

‘Where is everyone?' I whisper.

‘They're all here,' he says. ‘Come on, I'll show you.'

So we traipse haplessly down the corridor of this farmhouse, the place that drew Kaz and me together and polished us clean, and I see my children asleep in their bedroom. Milo is foetal at the foot of the bed, a single sheet flung over his sturdy limbs. Otis hugs the length of the wall. A shroud of hair protects her face, and the doona — her favourite, moons and stars and mythological faces in a cartoon universe — is clumped about her.

I search for the rise-and-fall then see Bernice, sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, knees hugged to her chest. In her hands she clutches the green velour dressing-gown. As I watch she lifts the gown to her face and rubs its texture against her cheek. She rubs it in small slow ovals then dips her head and cries silently, each tear damping the fabric. She cries and looks at me with an awful, empty uncertainty, says nothing, turns away, scuffs at her eyes, watches the children in their beds.

The door to the guest room is open. There is a double bed within. Francesca and Amelia are both in it, both asleep.

Looking at them, I see that they are quite different. Francesca is elegant, even in sleep. Her hair is dark and luxuriant. Her wide mouth is held in perfect proportion. She has Kaz's hands, slim and sensuous. She lies calmly on her side. She is a resolute blend of serenity and discipline; she even manages to sleep with a sort of military synchrony. But her daughter Amelia is not like this. She is somehow looser. Her arms are flung wide. Her auburn hair looks like it has been thrown carelessly onto the pillow. She sleeps on her back, breathes deeply and loudly. One leg is drawn up; one foot hangs from the side of the bed. Her toenails are painted five different colours. She wears a charm bracelet on her ankle.

Never, I think, have I seen them so close, yet so in opposition.

‘Everyone has been fantastic,' Stu says in a funny, strangled kind of voice but I can't listen to him any more. I feel trapped, claustrophobic, as if the big blank walls, hinged at the base, are angling in towards me. There is a sudden heat, thick and inexplicable, then I am stumbling away, back down the corridor to a door, any door which will take me outside. I gasp, begin to hyperventilate, rip furiously at the handle and am out in a vast space where there is a sharp scent that mixes wet rotting leaves with baked biscuits. The new sun is risen and it smashes into my cheeks. Now I run away from the farmhouse as if I am on the beach of my dream, past the flower garden, past the old gum tree that was forked by lightning years before, across the glistening dew and wild grass and snails on rocks to the barn where the doors are still open and the ladder lies on its side where I threw it and there is a pair of old shears lying in the dirt.

They seem smaller than I remember. Rust smears the blades.

And when my own tears are done I look up to see a spider in its corner busily spinning the silver quadrants and triangles of its new web. I remember sitting in this very spot with Kaz a week or fortnight or month ago, snared in another splash and stare until my eyes hurt, and the shears remain, glazed soils of our disparate, unholy of time. I remember some more but the spider continues to spin by sunlight and dappled by the earth.

Seven

F
rancesca and I are together, in a church. It is unbearably hot, the citruses of her perfume are overpowering and I am drifting into other places, wallowing in splashes of time.

Once upon a time, I remember guiltily, I used to have sex with Francesca. On those occasions her nose flared then narrowed, in sync with the movements of her body. At the time, it made her intensely attractive.

Now we are occupying the same pew and I can smell her.

The last church I entered was in Sussex, two days before Kaz and I flew home from our not-long-married dream-trip to England. We were pottering around a village called Chelting-ham. We bought punnets of strawberries that we chomped by the river, took photos of old crumbling ivy-swept houses then rented two push-bikes and cycled through the narrow, uneven laneways that the English insist are roads. It was nearing dusk when we happened upon the church; small and mossy, it stood alone in a field of unkempt grass and lemon wildflowers.

‘Let's go in.' Kaz had already dismounted, despite my protestations. She strode briskly to the two arched doors, turned a ring-handle and entered the gloom.

Following behind I remember honey-coloured pews, an overly large portrayal of the Crucifixion done in pewter and oak, hymn books flecked with brown spots like an old man's flesh. And the stagnation; as if this compact body of air had rested here for centuries, last breathed by a country congregation at the most holy wedding of a yeoman and his damsel.

I ushered her along. We wandered through a side door into the graveyard where there were elm trees shading the headstones in a thinning daylight. The colours of the flower-tops and grass stems were crisper than in Australia, where everything seems to have been mixed prior to origin with white clay and ochre. We walked slowly and read the inscriptions on the headstones. They were bland, traditional, quietly respectful; runes to the deceased.

‘Look at this one,' Kaz said.
‘Alice Margaret Driscoll, 1878 to 1893. A lamb, safe in the arms of the Lord Our Shepherd.
Poor thing; she was only fifteen. I wonder what happened.'

‘Probably dysentery.' The church had unsettled me; I was feeling gloomy. ‘Or TB. A bad head cold. Fell off a horse. Who cares?'

‘Oh Vince.' Kaz grabbed my arm, snuggled against me. ‘Come on, grumble-bum. You can do better than that. Tell me a story. Come on, tell me what happened to Alice Margaret Driscoll.'

I sighed, looked at her glorious hands on my stained jacket.

We sat together on a grassy knoll beneath the lengthening shadows of the elms.

‘Alice Margaret Driscoll,' I told her, ‘was an unremarkable child in every way except one. She lived in the quaint English village of Cheltingham, her father was a … a shopkeeper with a bad beard, and her mother bottled elderberry jam. She had two brothers named Jack and, um, Eugene, and she went to school and got most of her sums right. All pretty ordinary and predictable.'

‘But?'

‘But she had one remarkable trait. One thing that set her apart from the local yokels, one thing that gave her the chance to rise above the mundane and entirely predictable future that had been mapped out for her at birth.'

‘You're stalling'

‘No, I'm scene-setting. Creating suspense, like a good storyteller should. Now, like all remarkable traits, this gift that Alice had could be used for good — or alternatively, it could be used for evil. It all depended upon her character, the inherent self. This was the
big
question: what sort of person was Alice Margaret Driscoll … really?'

The English sun dipped further into the horizon, created a thin golden line and occasional splatters of amber. Kaz moved closer, sought my body-warmth.

‘What gift, Vince?'

‘Well, when she was young it only happened every so often. She had to teach herself to use the gift, which she did by the time she was … oh, around fourteen or fifteen.'

‘What gift?'

‘Haven't I said yet? Sorry. Alice Margaret Driscoll could see other people's thoughts.'

‘She was a mind-reader.'

‘No — a thought-reader. There's a difference. Kaz, the mind is a vast unintelligible mass of gobbledygook. Mind-readers have a lot of bogus territory to negotiate. They walk through huge swamps to find the key to the castle. Individual thoughts, however, are more tangible, more considered. More dangerous in the wrong hands, methinks.'

‘Okay, point taken. She was a thought-reader. What happened?'

Pause for reflection, a quick pan of the surroundings. Old graveyards, I thought, are delightfully disorganised. Why is it that new graveyards and crematoriums have to be so planned? Rectangular memories, slots for the deceased — economic rationalism, even there?

The random strike of death should always be reflected by disorder.

‘Nothing much, initially.' I leaned my head onto Kaz's shoulder, drank in her aromas like a bee sucking pollen. ‘A little blackmail amongst friends. Did you know that Jean Arthurs likes Peter Ponsonby? Or that Angus Brute wants to do it behind the barn with Jezabel Smithers? Or that Will Hornboy-Taylor has done it behind the barn with a rather accommodating sheep? Pretty harmless stuff — until she thought-read her mother.'

‘And?'

‘And discovered a closet overloaded with skeletons, each one of them vigorously rattling the door.'

Kaz grinned, moved our hands together, locked our fingers.

‘Go on then. Rattle away,' she said.

‘Right. As it happens, Mrs Driscoll was not really Mrs Driscoll. Her real name was Fanny May, former servant to the real Mrs D. When Alice hopped blithely into her mind, she'd been remembering years before — a hotter-than-Hades lustfest with Mr D, a.k.a. Geoffrey Brian.'

‘So Fanny May and Fanny did?'

‘Exactly. Ah, the winsome folly of youth. Anyway, Alice fossicked around Fanny's sick little labyrinth and discovered more. Just after she was born, Alice's mother mysteriously carked and canny Fanny assumed the mantle.'

‘Weren't people suspicious?'

‘No — because the Driscolls had been travelling o.s. for years. Mrs D was an ex-Spanish flamenco dancer who used to entertain African pirates in Byzantine cafés. No one in Cheltingham had ever laid their crusty pus-ridden eyes on her.'

‘She was murdered?'

‘Mm, but not by Fanny or Geoffrey. Turns out that Mrs D was killed by Fanny's ex-boyfriend, a Moroccan hashish dealer named Yumut Kan. He was a jealous type who stalked Fanny, saw her legs-akimbo with old Geoffrey and thought he'd come back that night and do her in with a sapphire-encrusted tungsten scimitar.'

‘Fanny May and Yumut Kan. Lovely.'

‘Notice the sapphires? Your birth-stone. Purely coincidence, of course.'

‘You're a darling.'

‘Thanks. Anyway, when Mr Kan worked out he'd got the wrong bedroom and stabbed the wrong babe, he committed
hara-kiri
by drowning himself in a vat of liquefied dope. With the gendarmes closing in, Fanny and Geoffrey fled to rural England with baby Alice and their secrets. Time passed and everything was dandy (and occasionally randy) until Alice's gift was revealed — and Geoffrey remembered his wife's dying promise that she would be avenged. I will be avenged! — she said.'

‘So Mrs D flamenco'd her deep and dark desires via Alice's mind?'

I grinned, squeezed her thin shoulders.

‘Right again. Very good. All of which scared the pants off Fanny and Geoffrey — who couldn't believe their luck when they found young Alice, dead beside a babbling brook on her fifteenth birthday.'

‘Fell from her horse? Shot by a cross-bow? Head held and mercilessly drowned?'

‘None of the above. Fifteen-year-old Alice Margaret Driscoll had been stabbed through the heart with a sapphire-encrusted tungsten scimitar. Seems that, as well as holding half of ordinary Cheltingham to ransom, she had been blackmailing a new young stable-hand by the name of Mohammed — Mohammed Kan.'

We were silent, cocooned together in the near-darkness. I felt Kaz drop her hand, squeeze my groin a few times like she was siphoning milk from a cow. I was gazing vaguely at the newly arrived stars, trying to find a pattern, play dot-to-dot.

‘Maybe a bit contrived,' she told me eventually.

‘I told you before,' I said. ‘I'm a good writer but a lousy story-teller'

I loved that trip — most of it, anyway. I loved it because we did it for a reason: we were both bewitched by this innate sense of expatriate connectedness that Australians have for England. Perhaps it was socio-biological — a sort of early-twenties version of the midlife crisis — or perhaps a consequence of seeing too many repeat episodes of
The Good Life,
but the mythology of the mother country had cut deeply into us.

‘It's romantic,' Kaz had said, gazing at a brochure picture of a green empty field.

‘And it's not America,' I told her, thinking of sitcoms.

We pored over magazines, books and travel journals; we transported ourselves and imagined another life where we saw and smelled and lived the history of the place. England, we decided, would be thick and aged, as musty as unopened tomes in a monastic library. There would be a depth and saturation of colour, unlike Australia which is so bleached, so drought- and flood- and sun-evaporated. We thought of ourselves becoming participants in Enid Blyton-world, snuggled in fuggy bed-sits, roving the verdant hills and dales, drinking tea and smiling benignly at the ghosts of marauding Normans and Saxons. We would be like adopted children, returning to a long-ago home that they could never recognise and to parents they could never know — but were instinctively drawn to anyway.

‘It's dingy,' Kaz said. Day three, and we were holed up in a pub in southern London. Outside, a thin irritating rain wept into the thin irritating streets. Inside, a group of fat irritating men were dexterously balancing a number of actions: the playing of darts, the yelling of unintelligible obscenities, the chomping of ‘crisps', the offering of opinion on the sexual peccadilloes of someone called Marsha, and the drinking of huge mugs of a brand of bitter ale that looked like sump-oil.

‘Dingy and dense,' she continued. ‘Notice how close everything is. People, buildings, the bloody weather — it all sort of caves in on top of you.'

‘We're in London,' I explained. ‘It's a city. Cities are always dingy and dense.'

‘But this is different,' she insisted. ‘It's closeted. I feel like there's barely enough air for all of us to breathe.'

‘Kaz, there's plenty of air —'

‘I know, I know … but it's like, like we're specks of soil jammed together in a tiny space. Ingrained dirt and no room to move. I feel trapped.'

I crumbled a wedge of Stilton from the lunch-platter that we were sharing. She was right of course. Within the bowels of London, old wet stinky London, everything seemed to fall in and fall apart. There were no clean edges or sharp corners; all had turned to decay.

Days later and more accustomed to the city, we stood within the subdued light of Westminster Abbey, the echoes of our footfall still ringing in our ears. We stared at the vaulted ceiling, were respectfully silent before Henry's Chapel and marvelled at the moon-like phosphorescence that seeped through the clerestory windows and cushioned the architecture. Because I dared not wake the entombed monarchs, I found myself walking on the sides of my feet like I was on hot sand. I kept my body stiff, barely moved my arms for fear of disturbing the venerable air. At one stage I stopped, peered down and realised that I was standing blithely on the grave of some noble bone-bag who had died nearly 592 years before.

‘If there is a God,' Kaz whispered conspiratorially as we passed Elizabeth I's beatific and rather omnipotent smile, ‘then She is definitely here'

‘There's no God,' I told her quickly but she didn't answer. She was too busy looking upwards at the swooping Cupids, angels trumpeting through cumuli-nimbus, gilt-edged gargoyles staring defiantly.

‘Answer me this,' I said later over chips and a kerbside doner kebab. ‘Why were we so quiet in there?'

‘Were we? I didn't notice.'

‘We were funereal. Kaz, it's just a bloody church. Just a tomb for all the dead white males that have ravaged this cold sod of a place. Tell me why we were so quiet?'

‘I don't know.' Kaz scratched her chin then selected the longest saltiest chip.

‘I hate churches,' I told her churlishly. ‘I don't want to see any more.'

Kaz shrugged, waved vaguely at the Abbey door. ‘There's such a weight in there,' she said, chewing pensively. ‘Don't you think? A sort of historical heaviness. It sits on you and then presses you down so much that you don't want to say anything, in case one of those dead white males wakes up and points the finger.'

‘Exactly! That's why I hate churches. They are so full of weight.'

‘Even for you, who doesn't believe?'

‘No — worse for me who doesn't believe. Weightier still. Me going to church is like a vegan going to the butcher. On one hand I'm fascinated that people can be sucked in by a few dodgy stories, nice carvings and some strategically placed coloured glass — but I'm also oppressed. I feel like there's a secret out there and even though it's meaningless pap I still want to know what it is.'

The rain slanted in on us again, blurred London's parade of neon.

‘Have a chip,' Kaz said to me.

‘Thanks,' I said to her.

Meaningless pap, dodgy stories. Someone is telling stories now. I open my eyes, see that it is Stu. B
IG
Stu is telling BIG stories. We are in a church, the first one I have visited since Sussex. I am in the centre of the front pew near citrusy Francesca. Obviously this is a place of some importance. I am a person of some importance. Around me, a gathering stares. I recognise some of its parts: a magazine editor, some cousins, one ex-schoolfriend. (Brianna from St Chrissy's? Still drinking Midori?) I am also flanked by Milo and Otis, Bernice, Amelia. Garten is nearby. None of them touches me. Their faces swim together, become a collage of drained flesh and eyes dead as road stones.