The Northern Clemency (83 page)

She’d put off her departure back from Zakynthos an extra week—it was at the end of the summer, she’d finished her summer job and wasn’t supposed to start her new, her proper job in the insurance firm until 15 September anyway. It was probably a mistake. She left it until after her flight back had gone to try to change it, and learnt that it was an unchangeable ticket, and she’d have to buy a new one, and at that time of year it wasn’t going to be easy to find anything. Chris, who’d been quite keen on her staying when she’d first suggested it, seemed to lose a little bit of interest when she really did stay. There was one day, too, when he just said in the morning that he was going off with Morgan and Ted, he hadn’t spent any time with them for a week, and she could do what she liked, go and tan her skinny white English arse on the beach. But at the end of the holiday, they’d said goodbye in the right sort of way: on the terrace of the rented apartment he’d hugged her and hugged her, and then he’d fucked her, right there on the tiled balcony, and then he’d hugged her some more and said they’d be seeing each other pretty soon, he reckoned. He was going back to Australia, once they’d gone to Germany, to Munich for the Oktoberfest to get royally pissed, and then he was going to have to start the hard graft to learn the ropes in his father’s garage. She did her best, and actually managed to cry a little bit; she treasured the memory of his face, looking, of all things, aghast, reaching round for anything and having to settle for his salt-encrusted T-shirt to wipe her face. She could remember that better than anything; better than the way his face looked. She only had three or four photographs of him to tell her that.

Back in England, it had been all too easy to work up what, after all, had been only a holiday romance. She loved the word “romance” for it; there’d been no sort of red roses and tables for two, only her bent double over the bed frame, the headboard banging furiously against the wall and the noise of the pair of them hammering and yelping away into the cicada-still Greek night, only a quick and inspirational blowjob behind the rocks in the heat of the day. As for tables for two, there were usually the rat-like Morgan and Ted tucked in there too, whining about the cost, saying it was more expensive than they’d heard. That was her holiday romance, it seemed, but showing the three or four photographs of suddenly very handsome Chris around,
his good white teeth glowing out of the underexposed darkness of his suntan, like an apparition’s, nobody thought it at all unlikely.

Even to her family, she’d kept up the story. She knew it sounded like a holiday romance, she said, but he was a nice guy, and you could meet somebody nice just as easily on holiday as anywhere else, she supposed.

“Did he and Michelle get on all right?” her mother had asked, and Alexandra had had to say—since Michelle was in England and could easily contradict that part of the story—that she hadn’t seen a lot of Michelle after she met Chris.

“That’s awful,” her mother had said. “I hope you didn’t just dump her. Poor Michelle, I’d be furious if I were her.”

But the important thing was that Alexandra had met a man—there’d been men before, but she could see that it was starting to become important that there should be a steady man, even if he was on the other side of the world and in no sense going out with her. It made all sorts of things much easier.

Alexandra hadn’t bothered to find anywhere to live, that summer after she’d finished at Warwick and come home to start her job in a Sheffield insurance company, a good job, a management trainee. She had been planning to find a flat in the week between coming back from Greece and starting work, but as things ended up, there was only a weekend between coming back from Greece and starting work, so she stayed where she was, upstairs in her parents’ house. It was pretty dull. Francis was doing his A levels—he was going to go to Leeds University—and she didn’t have a lot to say to him anyway. The downside of having a half-existent boyfriend in Australia was that you couldn’t bring anyone else home, and if she was going to stay out, she’d have to arrange it in advance with some friend or other, give her a cover story. Which presupposed that there was anyone she wanted to mess about with; anyone she’d know about in advance, that was. In Alexandra’s eyes, to go on beyond a second or a third time was to turn sex into an affair; to push a one-night stand in the direction of marriage. “You’re not from Sheffield, are you?” more than one wide-eyed naïf had said to her, the morning after. For some people, a holiday romance might be an abbreviated thing; for Alexandra, that one was as long as she cared to let any relationship go on, and she counted the length of the relationship not in days or weeks, but in occasions of coupling. She had no real intention of discovering all the bored routine of marriage in what had originally been a chance encounter; and repetition carried the threat of exactly that.

Still, a one-night stand could be done, and after a cautious month or two, she suggested to one of the other girls who had started at the big insurance firm at the same time that they go out on the town on a Friday night.

“I don’t know where to go,” the girl, Sam, said, evidently a little surprised.

“Oh, I know a few places,” Alexandra said. “I grew up here, actually.”

Sam was even more surprised; Alexandra was aloof, hadn’t given much away, only occasionally gave the impression of joining in, as it were. She knew that Sam was living in a flat on her own, bought for her by her home-counties father, and told her parents, though she didn’t say anything to Sam, that she would be spending the night there, it being easier. If it came to nothing, she could always go home and say she had felt tired, had been offered a lift.

It didn’t come to nothing; she went home with a student. It made her laugh, going back to a student hall of residence. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass door of the hall of residence as he fumbled with the key and she fumbled with his crotch. In her little black dress, her slicked-back geometric bob and her slash of red lipstick, she looked like a fabulous beast in these striplit corridors, echoing with inconsiderate rock music at two a.m. She forgot his name; a month later, she went again to Casanova’s with Sam—they’d had a good time. And again she told her parents that was where she’d be staying.

She should, perhaps, have been looking for somewhere to live, which would have made everything much easier. But she hated her job—hated it with a deliberate and instant hostility, and it hated her back, asking her if she was really committed to her profession through a succession of serious mouthpieces within a matter of months. In her head was always the memory of that dry little island in the Greek sea, a line of palm trees planted deliberately behind the beach for shade in place of the native pines, and a lithe hairy Australian banging her head against the headboard for whole quarter-hours. It seemed incredible, insulting to her, that she should have to live in the place she grew up, and incredible that she had been so stupid as to move back there after her chance to get away. Her mind filled with possibilities; she formed an idea of Australia.

Living at home made things easier. By the time she landed in Australia, she had twelve thousand pounds to be going on with. For the first two nights, she had booked a hotel room down by the quay, an
expensive hotel, an international chain. She intended after that to find a cheaper one, and then, if things seemed to be working out, some sort of flat, and then—what? A job. She denied it even to herself, but when she was to look back, she had no doubt that as soon as she bought the one-way ticket for Sydney, she’d always known she would get here and stop here. (The voice in her head, how much of her unused, under-practised Sheffield voice it was!)

That first morning, she knew she would never forget a moment of it. She never knew whether, in fact, she had arrived at six in the morning, or six in the evening; she had either gone to bed and slept for thirteen hours or for twenty-five straight. There seemed no way of ever knowing. But she woke at eight in the morning, and when she opened the curtains what met her dazzled eyes from the nineteenth-floor window was, rushing up to greet her gaze, the great dazzling sweep of the harbour, what was, she knew, the Opera House, so different from almost above, the great bridge and a clean blaze of sun and sea and shining glass like nothing else she could ever have imagined. She had had only the vaguest idea that her room was so high up, she’d been so exhausted when she arrived. But her long sleep had wiped all that quite clean, and she felt like going out and seeing what the city held for her.

She had seen it all so many times in photographs, of course, but it still surprised; the ice-cream scoops of the Opera House so edibly the palest brown and from this position, on foot, not quite the shape you thought it would be. She went on walking, with the shine of the city already deep within her, and smiling quite stupidly at everyone she met, and found herself in a park that ran over a substantial hill. It was a botanical garden, apparently; she looked up into the heavy gloom of the trees, and there were vast fruit hanging there. She wondered if they were breadfruit—jackfruit—but then one moved somewhat, stretching out a membraned wing, and they were—what? Flying foxes, enormous bats? She had no idea. Amazing. And there, most marvellous of all, was a yellowing Greek-pillared building exactly like the old Graves Art Gallery, placed on top of a perfect green hill underneath a perfect blue sky. And it was an art gallery. That was absolutely hilarious. She didn’t go in; she had a lifetime to go in. Over and over again, that beautiful first day, she felt as if she were in a Sheffield which had died and gone to heaven. So many times in Sheffield, toiling up a gloomy Victorian street, she had had the illusion that just over the brow of the hill it would give up its teasing seriousness and show some glorious expanse of sea. She had never known why she had always felt this; it never
made the slightest ounce of sense. And here she was, and it looked so much the same, with its soft yellow and blackened buildings, its ambitious stabs at skyscrapers; but the people made it beautiful, getting around their lives in ways themselves beautiful—transporting themselves with wheeled heels, irresistible tugboats hooting as they set off from one wharf after another. And look—there—like the irruption of festive pleasures into an urban life, like the boys pounding up the hills with their rollerskates on, there was a supercilious white ibis stalking along the waterfront, like a bird that had lived its life among sand, in ancient Egypt, and had now earned its reward; and then—suddenly she was in a different place, and looking all the way across the harbour at the Opera House—quite at once there was, of all things, a parrot, just sitting there, eyeing her, like someone’s escaped pet, a vivid green and red and, as it stretched and shook its wings, a beautiful sunset pink underneath. She stood there, entranced; it took off, and as she followed it with her eye, she saw something perhaps even more marvellous, a scrubbed-clean white hanging railway making its futuristic way through the high sandstone buildings. She looked at it all, from the far glitter of the open sea, the little huddle of cottages on one side of the bay, buried among dense greenery, the whole city, and could not believe that people walked through here looking nothing but happy; could not believe that they did not give way to their daily astonishment. She felt like buying presents, here, for—oh, she didn’t know, but for everyone.

She sat on a wall and watched the people go by. Behind her was the sea; in front of her, a sort of promenade. After a few moments, a boy stopped—he was wearing a vest, a pair of vivid red shorts and, round his ankles, legwarmers. He had glided up on a skateboard, flicked it up with his toes, and now held it to his chest. He smiled as if he couldn’t help it, could do nothing else, and his teeth and eyes shone like the day. “You wanna go?” he said.

“No, that’s fine,” Alexandra said, but smiling in helpless response. She didn’t care whether he stayed or went: he’d contributed enough in three words.

“Suit yourself,” the boy said, but in a perfectly friendly way. “Catch you later,” and he was off.

Her first days in Sydney were just like that, spent wandering around, striking up conversations with any number of people, mostly as short but amiable as that first one—people of any age, they all talked to her, and they talked to her as if she were their oldest friend. She simply
followed her instincts, and one day, down at the harbour front, saw on the board a destination: “Manly,” it said, and it seemed like the continuation of a huge joke that everyone was in on. She bought a ticket, and took a seat at the front of the boat, on a green-painted seat like a park bench. It wasn’t busy; it was the middle of the day in the week, and there were only a dozen or so other people on the boat. It set off, and Alexandra watched the landward sights, the glass palaces downtown, the Opera House, the bridge fall effortlessly into new vistas. A tiny island in the middle of the bay; a pair of scarlet speedboats, apparently racing each other round the harbour in effortless leisure; a yacht with sails of perfect whiteness. She tried to remember that there were sharks here, there were spiders that could kill you, crocodiles in the sea, even, but it all seemed impossible to imagine. There was nothing in this country that could hurt you.

Manly was a thin strip of land, carved up into tiny blocks of brilliant white and glass, and the joke seemed to be continued by its inhabitants; the Manly Grocers, the Manly Fishing Club, the Manly Supermarket. There were few people about, and their smiles seemed to suggest that this was a joke that had never palled. It must, in reality, be ordinary to them; their pleasure must come from a more deeply rooted place. The Manly Fishmongers, even; she enjoyed that. And in a few blocks more, there she was at the real ocean, roaring away. It was winter, she knew that, but the air was as fresh and full of promise as a lovely English May, and there were even surfers in the sea. She couldn’t believe how perfectly all this was living up to her expectations; if she’d known how to draw a picture of an Australian surfer, they would have looked exactly like that. It was nearly one o’clock. Resolutely, she retraced her steps to the Manly Fishmongers, and there she bought a bag of cooked prawns, asked them to open a dozen oysters, and took them, slopping about in their juice in the bottom of a plastic bag, back to the beach, and ate them in sheer pleasure, feeding one every now and again to the shrieking demands of the seagulls. It was all too perfect, and when it was done, and she had wiped her hands by rubbing them in the coarse clean sand, she rewarded herself with a beer.