The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (15 page)

The day is now well advanced, somewhere towards midday judging by the sun, the air very clear. There is a long dip into hills and they ride down into these, and it's when they start to climb again that they see that there is something odd, some change coming. A car coming over the crest of the hill has its headlights on full.

Clarrie flicks his lights on to indicate to the motorist that he has his lights on and the man at the wheel waggles his hands, thank you.

‘Idiot,' says Clarrie, breaking their silence. ‘Wonder how long he's had those on?' But then another car appears and it has its lights on too.

‘Perhaps there's a traffic cop ahead. Radar,' says Aileen.

‘They'd have just flicked them on and off in that case.'

‘Yes, that's what I thought.'

And now they are at the top of the hill themselves and ahead of them there is a strange burnished light. Within moments the image of the sun has blurred. Clarrie and Aileen glance at each other anxiously.

‘How dark it's getting,' she says.

‘Yeah, it's a bit queer.'

‘Sort of a — storm cloud d'you think?'

‘Dunno,' he says trying to assess it. ‘Spreads a long way, looks more like smoke.' He sniffs the wind, leaning his head at the open window. ‘Yeah, that's what it smells like.'

The world is blocking out around them. ‘How strange now,' says Aileen, her voice strained, yet excited. ‘How total. The sun's nearly disappeared.'

‘I expect it's just the desert fires,' he says.

‘What do you mean? What are the desert fires?'

‘Well they have burn-offs, see.' He is relaxed now that he knows what it is,
can explain things rationally. For a moment he has been frightened. It is just the unknown, everybody is scared of the unknown, he tells himself.

‘What for?'

‘What for what?' he says easily.

‘That they burn things. Why do they do it?'

‘I don't know. Must be things in the way. Look, shall we go back? It's not much fun driving into this.'

‘I want to go further,' she says in a fierce tight voice.

‘But it's getting darker and look, all the cars have their lights on now.'

‘Perhaps we're close to the flames.'

‘Is that what you want?'

‘Yes. Yes I do. Ah look, there they are. Pull up Clarrie. Oh please Clarrie pull up.'

He pulls into a cutting at the side of the road, and the flames are indeed close to them, bright darting tongues, apparently unruly yet seeming to know where they are going. An army truck lumbers by and doesn't attempt to shift the travellers on. Clarrie supposes that if they are in any danger they would have been told to move. But the intensity in the air is unnerving. He felt good a moment ago, but now he's not so sure. And he has a curious feeling that maybe this is the unknown destination. He looks at Aileen and her face is strange, set, yet somehow glad.

‘Now we're here,' she says. ‘In the very heart of darkness.'

‘That sounds weird.'

‘Haven't you heard of the heart of darkness?'

Now he knows he is afraid and he tells her. ‘Who are you? You scare me. You're not what you seem to be at all are you?'

‘What do I seem to be Clarrie?'

‘I — I dunno exactly. But it's something, not like anyone else I know.'

‘Mad?'

‘Well …'

‘You said I was, back there.'

‘Maybe.'

‘Am I like you?'

‘I told you, you're not like anyone I know.'

‘But how well do you know yourself?'

‘You are mad,' he says savagely.

‘Ah yes, but then so are you.' It comes out as a flat statement of fact.

‘Here, what the heck —?'

‘You're afraid aren't you? But it doesn't matter any more. Only you can't accept that so you just keep running.'

‘You don't know what it's like to be me. Always a bad time.'

‘I know what it's like to keep on running.'

‘Oh yes, and where did you run from?'

‘People who were cold and distant … self seeking, they only noticed me when they played spiteful games against each other.'

‘Who was that then?'

‘Are. My parents.'

‘I see. So you ran away from your posh boarding school or something and took to the roads.'

‘It wasn't as simple as that. Oh yes there was that too, but that wasn't where I went when I first started to run. No, I ran away into hospitals for mad people. Places where they lock you up. Mental institutions. But you see at least people take notice of you then. Parents and things.'

Clarrie feels his hair start to crawl down the back of his neck. ‘You pretended to be mad?' he asks.

‘Oh no. I was. I am.'

‘Then why did they let you out? Or are you on the run from them?'

‘No. They let me out because I pretended to be sane.'

‘And then?' He looks around them. Perhaps the fire will engulf them in a moment, but it continues to march in tidy lines across the earth. He has a momentary vision of it catching them and the petrol tank exploding. Yes, he would be noticed. He would go to the sky in harness with the sun.

‘They forgot about me again.' Her voice is desolate. ‘So I ran. And I'm still running. But it's good to find someone who's mad too.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘This morning I looked at you and I saw a running man. A mad man. Mad. You were mad.'

‘Yeah, so you made me mad …'

‘No, not like that. Not like being mad at someone, but someone who was mad. Is mad.'

‘I reckon we should be getting back. This smoke's getting to me.'

‘We are in the bowels of the earth. You can only come to the darkest place before you start coming back to the light.'

‘Look at your eyes streaming with all this damn' smoke.' He starts to cough.

‘Why don't you say it?' she says softly.

‘I've never been in no nuthouse,' he says roughly.

She bursts out laughing but he looks at her angrily. He believes they have gone beyond laughter. ‘You're in the world,' she says. ‘That's the biggest nuthouse in the universe.'

‘I'm scared of you,' he whispers.

‘Are you? Are you Clarrie?' Her voice has become an insistent little chord again, getting at him, pushing him. The flames are fanned by a gust of wind, they flare up in an unruly flash, forgetting that they are supposed to be under control, that there is an order designed for their progress. ‘No,' says Clarrie wildly. ‘No, for Christ's sake no. I'm scared of myself. There, are you satisfied, I've said it.'

There is a pause. The flames are retreating as suddenly as they appeared. The dense pall of smoke is lifting its ceiling higher above them. ‘Yeah, I said it,' he says quietly, wonderingly. ‘I'm scared and as nutty as hell.'

‘Isn't it beautiful? The first time you say it.'

‘I dunno. Dunno what to think.'

‘The smoke's hurting my eyes,' says Aileen. ‘Let's go.'

Before, this sudden reversal would have made him angry, but he is not angry. He starts to say that that is what he has been trying to tell her but there doesn't seem any point. He turns the ute around. For a moment he wonders how Margie's getting along without him.

The day has aged Margie. She is limping in her high heels. Her appearance suggests that she has walked all day and her smell is stale with sweat and cheap perfume. She sits out the back of the caf waiting. When she walked in Della had asked her what she thought she was doing, as if she didn't know and Margie said, well it was nearly time for her to come on again and what was wrong with being early. Then dropping her defiance she says, ‘Isn't he here yet?'

‘Not yet,' says Della.

‘Then he's been gone all day.'

‘Margie love, you shouldn't worry yourself about Clarrie.'

‘But I do, don't you see.' And of course Della does see, because Margie wears her heart on her sleeve and is without guile. It is hard to believe that they are much of an age, that long ago they went to school together, even though Della's a few years older than Margie. Margie could be the same sad waif who took such a hammering in the primers all those years ago, until the big kids started looking after her. That's when it all started. Della thought of their fathers working in the bush together and how Margie's father had been a good man and respected for taking care of his kid who was simple. He liked the kid, he wanted her to stay with him when others might have sent her away to an institution. They had a language of their own, not that there was anything simple about him. And give you the shirt off his back, John would. So when the big one fell on him that day in the bush, there were plenty to
keep an eye out for her. She kept their cottage up, and she did better than anyone expected. Margie was a worker, she knew about work all right and anything she'd been trained to do she never forgot. That's why Della had taken her into the caf. So there are a whole lot of them looking out for her and people see to it that no harm comes Margie's way. There will be a smart one now and then come by and try something on with her, but Margie, drifting through life, dressed just the same way as she was the day of the funeral, has had none of it.

But then Margie has never been in love before.

That is the one factor nobody has ever counted on. It has changed
everything
. And they have been saying, amongst themselves, what's to say she couldn't love? She loved her daddy, who are we to say that she won't ever feel anything again? They all know vaguely that they are being faced with some sort of moral dilemma, though they haven't defined it so exactly. They watch Clarrie and wait for him to put a foot wrong but there is nothing he does that you can point out and say that he harms her. They have watched out for him at night near the cottage but he hasn't been near it. He works well in the day and he's good to her in an odd sort of way. There is only one thing they know about him, and Della voices her thoughts now.

‘Some day he'll go away,' she says. ‘Don't you understand that, that people like Clarrie move on?'

‘He wants to do things for me, he said he did,' says Margie stubbornly.

‘Yes, I know he does,' says Della. ‘But Margie, can't you see, you've got people round here who'll do things for you too. There always have been, there always will be. We won't go away.'

‘But not like Clarrie. Clarrie's good and kind. I never knowed anybody like Clarrie, not since my daddy died back … when was it Della?'

‘1957 or thereabouts. Yes, '57, remember it well, I was courting that year, got married the year after. Clarrie's not your daddy Margie.'

‘Oh no. I know that Della.' And she smiles as if it is Della who needs things explained to her and not the other way round. ‘Hey smell me,' she says, ‘I bought some scent.' But Della has already smelt her.

Margie sits quietly, wondering.

There is a deep quiet river that flows back past the burger bar, a bit there before motorists hit the desert. It's clear enough to see the stones at the bottom. There are ropes from the trees that kids swing out from in the summer.

If Margie had kept her eye on the road she might have seen Clarrie's ute sailing up the road past the caf, heading in the direction of the river. Fortunately she has missed it though Clarrie worries whether she has seen
him or not. Aileen has asked that she might find a place to swim and the river seems like the best place to take her. He imagines that in her slender little shoulder bag there will be a bathing suit of some kind but of course there is not. She enters the water neither flaunting nor yet hiding herself, but shooting through the water like a brown dart. Clarrie is pleased to see that she is brown all over. He has not touched her yet. Watching her swimming, he is content to wait. His view of her has changed, she no longer seems scruffy or scrawny. The bones in her face now stand out with clarity as if chiselled, her forehead carefully moulded, and the hair which was lank and matt with dust is floating around her shoulders shiny and slippery with water.

‘Come in Clarrie,' she calls.

‘Someone might see me,' he says, grinning sheepishly.

‘It'd take the smoke away. It's lovely.'

But he sits on the bank drawing on a cigarette. He hasn't smoked much all day, but now the time seems right for it. He is actually enjoying it rather than gasping for it. There is an atmosphere of sheer luxury sitting in the quietly lengthening day watching this girl. He is a plain man, he knows, but it seems there is room for transformation in almost every human being, and he cannot see that he need be an exception. ‘I'll save it for the shower tonight,' he calls.

‘You haven't come as far as me — not yet.'

‘Give me time,' he replies, and he means it. As he sees himself now, he understands that nothing will come quickly, that he will have to work through things one day at a time. But he anticipates each discovery he will make about himself and welcomes a prospect of happiness.

‘It's nice in here,' calls Aileen.

‘It looks it. Yeah, it looks real good.' But a cool brittle wind makes him shiver suddenly, reminding him again that it's autumn. ‘I've gotta get back though.'

‘To the burger place?'

‘Yeah.' He assumes that she will understand his responsibility.

‘Aren't you hungry?' he calls.

Her face lights up. ‘I'll be right out.'

Della calls Reuben to her side. They are both exhausted. The trucks have been as many as predicted in the morning. There have only been one or two lulls through the whole day. The last time Della went out to the back Margie was sitting bolt upright, her feet together, hands clasped tight. Her face is set in harsh lines, the garish earrings are quite still.

The nephew wipes his face with the back of his hand. ‘What a day.'