The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (20 page)

like seaweed.

Swim to me

so that I can open my jaws

like a shark.

But I love you

and would not bite.

Please write, Emily, please write so I won't drown. I cannot tell you about the screams that come like shock-waves through the water, and the loneliness. It is a cave very deep down without light.

Emily, Emily, Emily,

How does your baby grow?

With silver bells, and cocks and shells,

And men waiting all in a row.

The young man in Montreal does not sleep well, dreaming of you. Please write. Love, Tory.

Somewhere beyond the mountains and west of Forbes, the little plane came down bumpily on a dust strip hummocky with grass tussocks. Instinctively, Emily had turned to Dave. It seemed natural. He had offered friendship and rural retreats.

“I just need a few days,” she said. “I'm extremely grateful to you.”

“It's not quite like a country weekend in Massachusetts or Quebec, you know. You may go off riding only on condition that one of my stockmen goes with you.”

She gave a mock salute. “Yes, sir.”

“I'm not kidding. The bush is littered with unfound skeletons — last year's campers as well as escaped convicts dead nearly two hundred years. Why do you want to do this?”

“I love the emptiness. It's just … I came straight from the Montreal season, and before that New York, and now even the ferries seem crowded and the harbour small as a teacup.” She laughed awkwardly. “I'm not making sense. Perhaps it's delayed culture shock. I just want not to have to see anyone for a few days, not to get phone calls or mail …”

“You'd have to drive to Forbes for mail. I'll show you how to operate the radio in case you need help. You can reach the neighbours. Or me in Sydney.”

An advancing cloud of red dust turned into a jeep and Dave's chief stockman held open a door.

“So the little Yank wants to rough it?” he asked cheerily. “Welcome to the bush, love.”

“Oh, look!” Emily stared at the triangular-winged butterfly quivering on the jeep's windshield. “What an incredible colour!”

“Blue Wanderer,” the stockman said.

Dave held out one upturned hand — a trusting child waiting for a present — and stillness settled on the three people like a spell. Never quite motionless, the brilliant turquoise wings with their velvet tracery of black trembled like a pulse of the sun. The butterfly moved, paused above one headlight, alighted for three seconds on the branch of an ironbark. Then it was gone.

Released from a spell, Dave dropped his hand. Grinned at Emily in a lopsided sheepish way.

“One of my idiosyncrasies. When I was a kid, a Blue Wanderer landed on the palm of my hand and stayed there for about five seconds. I'm always waiting for it to happen again.”

Back in Sydney there was a letter waiting from Tory. Emily could not bring herself to read it and she could not destroy it. She put it in a box and offered certain obsequies: a fragrant bunch of dried gum leaves, a green ribbon tied around the box. She bought a postcard of the harbour and scrawled across the back:
Dearest Tory: I do miss you. When I come back I will take you to some place where there are no fences. Love, Emily.

She bought another, the bridge and the Opera House against blueness, and wrote on the back:
Dear Sergei: Having a wonderful time.
She did not mail it.

September.

Dawn.

Air full of the soft sounds of sleeping.

Emily stepped gingerly around a maze of camp cots — evidence of a weekend-long party at Dave's Sydney house — walked out into sunrise and down the wooden steps to the beach.

Shading her eyes against the sun — a great burnished ingot emerging from the ocean like salvaged treasure — she could see in the extraordinary distance the curve of earth's spine, the Pacific crawling up and down hill, clinging crab-like to the ocean floor.

I am hanging by my feet on the underside of the globe, my head dangling into the cosmos. Behind me, two million city people are dreaming or reaching for alarm clocks or making coffee. In front, there is not a soul between me and fishermen hauling nets on the shores of Chile. What time is it there? … Still last night? They are sleeping in huts scattered like driftwood around Valparaiso.

She took off her sandals and the white sand was cool with early morning. She thought of taking off her light cotton dress, but perhaps others would come down to the beach early too. At the water's edge she walked along the foam line, breakers expending their last energy around her ankles. Every fifth or sixth breaker was especially virile and would thrash against her thighs and foam up inside her skirt. Then the undertow would go rushing off towards South America so that she would have to brace her heels against it, her drenched skirt plastered to her body.

“You should come in.”

She gasped. Ahead of her was an area of white blindness, a glittering pathway to the sun that burned on the water. She shaded her eyes and squinted and saw Dave, naked as Neptune, diamonds of water glinting off his brown-gold hair at head, chest, genitals, and thighs. He stood smiling at her, his hands on his hips, with no trace either of embarrassment or of sexual suggestion.

“Come on in,” he repeated, extending his hand.

“All right.”

She tossed her sandals far up the beach and took his hand and followed him back into the waves. As the water lapped higher, her dress billowed out like heavy sails, an impediment.

“Are you sure you want to keep it on?” Dave asked.

“It is a nuisance. I'll go back and take it off.”

“Just let it go. The tide will take it in.”

And she let the cotton garment and her underwear relay themselves toward the line of rocks, little flagships of recklessness.

Surf was new to her. When the first big breaker came, she was hurled in unceremonious cartwheels into the shallows, strafed with shell grit, lungs full of brine. She coughed and spat, humiliated.

“Not that way.” He administered a salutary backslap or two and lifted her seaweed hair from her eyes. “Are you a decent swimmer?”

“Average, I guess.”

“We'll go beyond the breakers then. it's another world.”

He took her hand and showed her how to ride the waves, how to glide up the glass-green cave wall to the crest, to toss oneself over it buoyantly as a cork, to coast down the far slope. Beyond the breakers, they were atoms suspended in the earth's womb-fluids, insignificant life-matter under the vast sky.

Emily trod water, enjoying, Narcissus-like, the ghostly pearled glow of her own breasts, the swell of the growing child mooning up through the green lens of ocean. Rock-a-bye baby, in the sea's heart. In all her orifices, the water was cool and astringent.

She floated on her back, thinking of the Aztecs and Akhenaton, history's sun worshippers, and wondering how Australians had managed to cling to European traditions and churches when their dreams must have been flooded with pagan urges to deify the sun.

I am hanging on to a skein of water with my back, strapped to the downside of the wheeling world, my breasts and belly gilded with light, an offering to the burning eye of the void that drops away beneath me.

I should drag you,” Dave said, surfacing fish-silkily beside her, “to my cave on the ocean floor while I have the chance.”

She smiled lazily, liking his nearness, but lost in her sun trance.

“You are extraordinarily beautiful,” he said. He rested his large brown hand gently on her belly. As if in benediction. “And also pregnant.”

“Nearly five months. I thought no one realised yet.”

“I didn't till now. Though it explains things.”

“What things?”

“Your … abstraction. Your self-sufficiency. A baby and a man back there to absorb you.”

“No. No man.”

“Ah.” His pleasure did not escape her, but he added dryly: “An immaculate conception.”

“Practically. For all intents and purposes.”

Without being particularly conscious of it, she put one of her hands over his, but only momentarily. Her balance in the water was threatened and she spread her arms again, lazy fins. Since she made no resistance he moved his fingers lightly over her body, caressing softly as sea water: her breasts, her throat, her face, her breasts again, her belly, the wet tuft of hair, the soft space between her legs. She had thought she would never feel sexual desire again. She would have panicked if it were not for the narcotic of ocean and sun.

He kissed the curve of flesh that covered the child and asked: “When is it due?”

“First week in February.”

“Aquarius. The water-bearer.”

He swam in slow circles around her, surfaced just behind her head, his hands on her shoulders, his body floating up towards her like a life raft on which she could lean. “May I make love to you?”

“Dave.” She trod water, facing him. “Don't. I don't want to be disturbed. I feel complete now. The baby is all I need.”

“I'll wait.”

“I mean, now and always.”

“You're forswearing man?”

“I think so. Not your company of course. Not your friendship. I love being with you. You don't…
crowd
me.”

“Massive self-restraint on my part. I've been lost since the first day I met you at Ian's.”

“I didn't know.”

“I didn't want to scare you off. It's my Blue Wanderer technique. I thought if I kept perfectly still for long enough, you might settle into the palm of my hand. Like this.”

She felt the smooth current of his fingers brushing her inner thighs and was suddenly buoyant, pivoting on his wrist, her crotch in the hollow of his hand. Swayed there, her eyes closed, caught in a primitive tide of desire.

She kissed him. “My body seems to have a mind of it's own.”

Afterwards she lay on her back and he pulled her shorewards, his body curving below hers like a safety net.

“My sea mammal,” he teased. “My beautiful whale. I consider myself to have contributed something of prenatal significance. I claim half the pregnancy.”

“Dave,” she warned, reaching below her, caressing his body to soften the words. “Don't expect anything.”

“That's all right. I was married once, a good way back. It took me a long time too.”

“It's not a matter of getting over someone. It's a matter of escaping unscathed and wanting to stay that way.”

“I'll let you. But this is Sydney and I'm offering you respectability plus private freedom.”

“I'm indifferent to respectability.”

“Just the same, I'm staking a birthright claim.”

“How can it matter to you? Someone else's child?”

“I'm very persistent when I know what I want. You'll see.”

About them the line of breakers heaved and frothed.

“Ride them in!” he called. “Like this.”

And they flew like porpoises in to the sand.

By December the green-ribboned box was filled with Tory's unopened letters. Because it was Christmas, because Sydney was fragrant with frangipani and the slick of suntan oil and beer and watermelon, because it was a time of sun-courage and goodwill and impending birth, Emily opened the letter that came in mid-December.

She skimmed it, her eyes darting to the poetry.

I saw three ships sail away from me

On Christmas Day on Christmas Day.

The young man, the baby and Emily

On Christmas Day in the morning.

Jason will take me therefor Christmas Dinner and Father will try so hard to be kind he will lose his temper.

She did not want to read any more, she folded the letter quickly and put it in the box. There was always such terrible penance to pay for happiness.

“What is it?” Dave asked, finding her staring out the window at the ocean. He kissed the nape of her neck, linking his arms around her large belly.

“My family.” She showed him the letter.

And heard the little catches of breath as he read it.

“When you said her letters were frightening … We could fly over and spend Christmas with them.”

“No! That's the last thing I want. I haven't been home for Christmas since I left Ashville for New York. I couldn't bear it. I don't know how Jason does.”

“Have you told them about me?”

“No. I don't intend to. Well, I'll probably tell Jason eventually. And Mother, I suppose.”

When it's all over, she did not add.

“Emily.” His eyes reproached her.

“At least I write to them now. I'm far enough away that I can do that.”

“How will you explain the baby?”

“I won't.”

“But Tory already knows.”

“No,” Emily said. “Sometimes she's right by accident. She's been like this almost as far back as I can remember. It's probably inherited. One of mother's uncles killed himself when he was thirty. He was said to be schizophrenic.”

“Couldn't we make her happier? If she lived with family?”

“No. Yes. One day, I always promise myself. Oh her life is awful, but you don't know … We tried for years. She lived at home but once she feels all right she won't take the medication and the paranoia starts and the accusations and the fears … you don't know … all my adolescence I was hostage to her. The trouble is it's not possible to love her
enough
, nothing makes her feel safe. I had to get away to survive. How do I know it won't surface in
me?
If I stay around Father and Tory, I feel I'm doing nothing but incubating madness.”

Dave held her and stroked her hair. “Poor Emily. Poor Tory.”

His eyes, as he looked into hers, were sombre. She was to see the same look six weeks later when, unable to speak, he held newborn Adam in his large hands, and she forbade him to phone her parents.

“It's not their affair,” she said. “It has nothing to do with them.” His eyes clouded with the same stunned distress.