The Narrow Road to the Deep North (11 page)

Nakamura could feel the shabu sharpening his senses, giving him strength where he had felt weak, certainty where he was so often assailed by doubt. Shabu eliminated fear. It gave him a necessary distance from his actions. It kept him bright and hard.

And if the machines are seizing up, Nakamura said, if they only can be made to work with the constant application of force—well then, use that force.

The ticks, he realised, had finally stopped biting.

THE MAN WALKING
towards him appeared as a vast outline of nothingness, a silhouette, and to that nothingness Dorrigo Evans now held out his hand in greeting.

You must be Uncle Keith.

In the full intensity of the midday sun, his bulky body blocking the light and head hidden in the bitumen shade thrown by his Akubra, he looked little more than forty and not without menace. He had the presence of a precarious telegraph pole. But nothing was what it seemed and everything looked as if glimpsed through an old window pane—bending, bowing, shuddering in the heat waves rippling the bitumen road and cement kerbing, the dust of the Warradale parade ground, the tin-tubed Nissen huts at the front of which Dorrigo Evans had been waiting.

Once in his uncle’s car, a late-model Ford Cabriolet, Dorrigo Evans could see just how big a man his Uncle Keith was, and how his face was more that of someone perhaps fifty. With him was a very small dog, a Jack Russell terrier he called Miss Beatrice, which seemed to exist to emphasise the largeness of Keith Mulvaney—his broad back, his wide thighs and great feet behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois.

It was too hot to smoke but he smoked his pipe anyway. The smoke wreathed a strange smile that Dorrigo later came to realise was fixed, determined to find the world cheery in spite of all the evidence life produced to the contrary. It all might have been intimidating were it not that Keith’s voice was slightly high-pitched and reminded Dorrigo of that of a teenage boy. And of that voice there was no more end than there was of the intolerable Adelaide heat. It became clear to Dorrigo Evans that Keith Mulvaney’s world was his own, self-contained, and that it circled three suns—his hotel, his seat as an alderman on the local council, and his wife.

As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most.
The motorists
, he would say with a sighing sibilant
s
, had been the making and unmaking of him.
The
motoristsss
, what with their whingeing about toilets and meals, turning up in a party of eighty one day, all expecting to be fed, while the next Sunday you might be lucky to sell tuppence ha’penny of Afghan biscuits; always whingeing,
the motoristsss
, to their automobile associations and royal bloody automobile clubs about the state of the bathrooms and the dirty soap. Always whining, the motoring crowd. The only thing worse are the travelling salesmen. Why, today a traveller wanted to rent a room as an office to dispense bromides and aspirins, but I suspect the sex thing going on.

The sex thing?

You know, things to do with the women’s plumbing and the births and not having babies, French letters and English freethinking pamphlets; you know the drum.

Yes, his nephew said in a sufficiently uncertain way that his uncle felt the need to establish that whatever others thought the King of Cornwall might be, a moral vortex it was not.

Well, I am a broad-minded man, Dorrigo, Keith Mulvaney continued, but I don’t want the King of Cornwall to be advertised through the Melbourne
Truth
and the Adelaide law courts as
the
place of assignation in Adelaide. I am not a prude; I am not like those American hotels, insisting on guests leaving their door open if a lady other than the guest’s wife is in the room.

You know, he suddenly said, warming to the theme of adultery and hotel accommodation, in America you risk having an advertisement placed in your home town saying
To whom it may concern, Mr X had been requested to leave the Wisteria in Watstoria for entertaining in his room a lady not his wife
. Can you imagine? I mean, they allow people to meet in their rooms, and then blackmail them with the threat of such advertisements. They run hotels there like Stalin runs the damn USSR.

He went on to talk about Dorrigo’s family, but his knowledge—gleaned from what little Tom had written in his Christmas cards—was mostly out of date and only Miss Beatrice nearly falling out of the window while biting at the rushing air saved them from his embarrassment on discovering that Dorrigo’s mother was dead. He sat leaning forward in the car, strewn over the steering wheel like a gale-fallen tree trunk, his big hands moving incessantly up and down the wheel as if it were a fortune teller’s crystal ball and he was forever searching the long, straight, flat roads of Adelaide for something, an illusion that might help him live.

But there was little other traffic, and nothing other than the straightness and flatness and the heat waves rising up in distortions. Keith Mulvaney talked continuously, as if afraid of what silence might hold or what Dorrigo might ask, asking questions of Dorrigo that he immediately answered himself. His conversation returned frequently to a running battle he was having as an alderman on the local council over a proposal by the mayor to introduce a sewerage system. Dorrigo ended up staring out of his window, running his wet hand in the breeze while Keith talked, oblivious to this lack of interest, asking questions he would immediately answer, and every answer concluding with a smile that seemed to brook no disagreement. Like an occasional clarinet solo would come a periodic mention of Amy.

A modern woman. Very modern. Out and about. She does a terrific job. The war, though. Everything’s different now. It dissolves everything, this war. You never saw such things before the war. Did you?

Well—

No, I think not. It’s not just London being blitzed. No. Things that were a scandal a year ago no one thinks twice of anymore. I am a modern man. But I am so grateful to have some family to keep her in decent company.

Despite his fixed smile, he seemed utterly miserable.

The other night she was with a redheaded woman called Tippy. Can’t stand her.

Tippy?

Tippy, yes—you know her?

Well—

I ask you? It’s a name for a budgerigar. And I have this damn municipal conference and have to be gone for the night. In Gawler, hours away. Tonight. I am so sorry I can’t be with you. Unexpected—the mayor needs me to represent us. Why?

I suppose—

I have no idea why. Anyway, Amy will look after you. And, to be frank, I’m happy you’ll be looking after Amy. You don’t mind?

Answering was not the point and Dorrigo finally gave up trying.

Well, I am sure you’ll get some rest, anyway, said Keith Mulvaney. And a good bed, rather than an army bunk.

At the King of Cornwall Keith took Dorrigo to a room on the fourth floor. As they made their way up the grand staircase with its threadbare runner, they met Amy coming down, carrying a bag of dirty linen. Dorrigo felt a strange elation that was as inappropriate as it was undeniable. She glanced at her husband, a look in which Dorrigo glimpsed a complex mud of intimacies copyrightly invisible to the world—the shared sleep, scents, sounds, the habits endearing and frustrating, the pleasures and sadnesses, small and large—the plain mortar that finally renders two as one.

Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, ruby-gold in the atrium light. As he was introduced, complicity took hold before anything complicit had happened. In a glance he saw her face unnaturally glowing, a loose lock of hair landing like a trout fly in front of her right ear, and he understood that they had silently agreed to say nothing at that moment of the bookshop.

Well, Amy, said Keith, I hope you have some entertainment arranged for our guest.

She shrugged, and he was conscious of the slight roll of her breasts in her cornflower blue blouse.

Do you like Vivien Leigh? asked Amy. There’s a new Vivien Leigh movie in the city called
Waterloo Bridge
. Would you like to—

I’ve seen it, said Dorrigo, who had done no such thing and suddenly thought what a nasty man he was, his mind abuzz. Was he frightened of being with her? Was he trying to prove his power over her?

That’s a shame, said Keith. But I’m sure it’s not the only movie.

Dorrigo no longer understood himself, nor why he said such things. But he had said it, and then, equally unexpectedly, he heard himself say:

But I’d love to see it again.

Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.

Amy shrugged once more, and Dorrigo Evans forced his eyes away from her and down the staircase until she re-entered his vision a floor below, the fingers of her extended hand running along the varnished bannister. His gaze followed her ponytail bobbing as she continued stepping down into the void.

OF THE MANY
things Dorrigo Evans expected to happen that evening, he did not expect to be taken to a nightclub off Hindley Street. She said if he had already seen the movie, he would know what was going to happen next, and that would ruin everything. He was in uniform, she in an apricot oriental shirt and baggy black silk trousers. The effect was of something liquid. Her body seemed to him so definite and strong; when she moved, she glided.

The point is in never knowing, Amy said. Don’t you think?

He didn’t think. He didn’t know. The nightclub was a large room, low lit with the blackout curtains all up, full of shadows and uniforms. Dorrigo noticed a yeasty odour, the slightly drunk smell of spring weeds. They drank martinis as a swing orchestra played. There was a strange excitement in the air. After a time, the house lights were turned down, each band member lit candles on their music stands, and waiters lit candles on the tables.

Why the candles? asked Dorrigo.

You’ll see, said Amy.

She talked about herself. She was twenty-four, three years younger than him. She had moved a few years before from Sydney, where she had worked in department stores, and had met Keith through her work as a barmaid at the King of Cornwall. He told her about Ella, and every word sounded both a defence against what he truly felt and a betrayal of all that he was. And then he dismissed such feelings.

Dorrigo told himself that the divide between him and Amy was absolute. Theirs was a friendship buttressed on one side by the pillar of her husband, his uncle, and on the other by his prospective engagement with Ella. And there was in this a great security for him that led him to relax with Amy perhaps more than he might have otherwise.

He found himself feeling unaccountably happy with her in a way he could not remember being for a very long time. He watched as the candlelight shadows leapt over a face that made him ever more curious. It was so strange that when he had first met her in the bookshop, it was not her looks that had made such an impression on him. But now he could not conceive of a more beautiful woman. He enjoyed his proximity to Amy, even the way other men looked enviously, covetously, at the woman who so wrongly seemed to be his. Of course, he told himself, she wasn’t his, but the sensation wasn’t unpleasant. He was flattered.

They ended up talking with some naval officers, who later drifted away to the far end of the table and other conversations, leaving the couple alone. Amy leant across and put her hand over his. He looked down, unsure what it meant. He felt extremely awkward. But he did not take his hand away.

What’s this? Dorrigo asked.

He realised that she was looking at their hands too.

Nothing, she said.

Her touch electrified him, paralysed him, and amidst the noise and smoke and bustle that touch was the only thing he knew. The universe and the world, his life and his body, all reduced to that one electric point of contact. He stared with her at their hands. Yet he presumed it all meant nothing. Because it had to mean nothing. Her hand on his. His in hers. Because to believe anything else was a mistake. Come tomorrow, he would once more be her nephew, soon to be engaged, and she his uncle’s wife. But it must mean something, he desperately wished to think—

Nothing? he heard himself repeating.

He tried to relax, but he could not stop the excitement he felt at her touch. She ran her index finger over the back of his hand.

I am Keith’s, she said.

She continued to gaze absent-mindedly down at his hand.

Yes, he said.

But she was not really listening. She was watching her finger, its long shadow, and he was watching her, knowing she was not really listening.

Yes, he said.

He was feeling her touching him, and the feeling ran through his entire body and he could think of nothing else.

And you, she said, you’re mine.

He looked up, startled. For a second time she had taken him completely unawares. And for a second time, he felt oddly fearful, as he very slowly came to realise that far from mocking him, she was genuine in her strange frankness. And all that this meant terrified him. But she was still looking at her finger, at their hands between their half-empty glasses, at the circles she traced.

What?

And only then did she look up.

I mean, she said, I mean you’re Ella’s. But tonight. Tonight you’re mine.

She laughed lightly, as though it all meant nothing.

As a companion.

Lifting her hand, she waved it behind her ear in a gesture of dismissal.

You
know
what I mean.

But he didn’t. He had no idea at all. And he felt both excited and frightened, that what she said meant nothing, that it meant everything. She was elusive. He was lost.

As the table candles were extinguished by the waiters, the band struck up with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as a swing waltz. It was a memory being made of coming together and separating, circles forming only to be torn apart. At the end of every few bars another musician would reach forward and snuff out the candle in front of him.