Stories Page 2

  He turns away from the fluffy pink balls and waits with his hands in his pockets for me to pay.

  ‘What do you do all day, up here?’ I say on the way home.

  ‘Oh…play bowls. Follow the real estate. I ring up the firms that advertise these flash units and I ask ’em questions. I let ’em lower and lower their price. See how low they’ll go. How many more discounts they can dream up.’ He drives like a farmer in a ute, leaning forward with his arms curved round the wheel, always about to squint up through the windscreen at the sky, checking the weather.

  ‘Don’t they ask your name?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What do you call yourself?’

  ‘Oh, Jackson or anything.’ He flicks a glance at me. We begin to laugh, looking away from each other.

  ‘It’s bloody crook up here,’ he says. ‘Jerry-built. Sad. “Every conceivable luxury”! They can’t get rid of it. They’re desperate. Come on. We’ll go up and you can have a look.’

  The lift in Biarritz is lined with mushroom-coloured carpet. We brace our backs against its wall and it rushes us upwards. The salesman in the display unit has a moustache, several gold bracelets, a beige suit, and a clipboard against his chest. He is engaged with an elderly couple and we are able to slip past him into the living room.

  ‘Did you see that peanut?’ hisses my father.

  ‘A gilded youth,’ I say. ‘“Their eyes are dull, their heads are flat, they have no brains at all.”’

  He looks impressed, as if he thinks I have made it up on the spot. ‘ “The Man from Ironbark”,’ I add.

  ‘I only remember “The Geebung Polo Club”,’ he says. He mimes leaning off a horse and swinging a heavy implement. We snort with laughter. Just inside the living room door stand five Ionic pillars in a half-moon curve. Beyond them, through the glass, are views of a river and some mountains. The river winds in a plain, the mountains are sudden, lumpy and crooked.

  ‘From the other side you can see the sea,’ says my father.

  ‘Would you live up here?’

  ‘Not on your life. Not with those flaming pillars.’

  From the bedroom window he points out another high-rise building closer to the sea. Its name is Chelsea. It is battle-ship grey with a red trim. Its windows face away from the ocean. It is tall and narrow, of mean proportions, almost prison-like. ‘I wouldn’t mind living in that one,’ he says. I look at it in silence. He has unerringly chosen the ugliest one. It is so ugly that I can find nothing to say.

  It is Saturday afternoon. My father is waiting for the Victorian football to start on TV. He rereads the paper.

  ‘Look at this,’ he says. ‘Mum, remember that seminar we went to about investment in diamonds?’

  ‘Up here?’ I say. ‘A seminar?’

  ‘S’posed to be an investment that would double its value in six days. We went along one afternoon. They were obviously con-men. Ooh, setting up a big con, you could tell. They had sherry and sandwiches.’

  ‘That’s all we went for, actually,’ says my mother.

  ‘What sort of people went?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh…people like ourselves,’ says my father.

  ‘Do you think anybody bought any?’

  ‘Sure. Some idiots. Anyway, look at this in today’s Age. “The Diamond Dreamtime. World diamond market plummets.” Haw haw haw.’

  He turns on the TV in time for the bounce. I cast on stitches as instructed by the pattern and begin to knit. My mother and Auntie Lorna, well advanced in complicated garments for my sister’s teenage children, conduct their monologues which cross, coincide and run parallel. My father mumbles advice to the footballers and emits bursts of contemptuous laughter. ‘Bloody idiot,’ he says.

  I go to the room I am to share with Auntie Lorna and come back with the packet of postcards. When I get out my pen and the stamps and set myself up at the table my father looks up and shouts to me over the roar of the crowd, ‘Given up on the knitting?’

  ‘No. Just knocking off a few postcards. People expect a postcard when you go to Queensland.’

  ‘Have to keep up your correspondence, Father,’ says my mother.

  ‘I’ll knit later,’ I say.

  ‘How much have you done?’ asks my father.

  ‘This much.’ I separate thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Dear Philip,’ I write. I make my writing as thin and small as I can: the back of the postcard, not the front, is the art form. ‘Look where I am. A big red setter wet from the surf shambles up the side way of the unit, looking lost and anxious as setters always do. My parents send it packing with curses in an inarticulate tongue. Go orn, get orf, gorn!’

  ‘Dear Philip. THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE BIRDS AND FISHES. My father: “Look at those albatross. They must have eyes that can see for a hundred miles. As soon as one dives, they come from everywhere. Look at ’em dive! Bang! Down they go.” Me: “What sort of fish would they be diving for?” My father: “Whiting. They only eat whiting.” Me: “They do not!” My father: “How the hell would I know what sort of fish they are.”’

  ‘Dear Philip. My father says they are albatross, but my mother (in the bathroom, later) remarks to me that albatross have shorter, more hunched necks.’

  ‘Dear Philip. I share a room with Auntie Lorna. She also is writing postcards and has just asked me how to spell TOO. I like her very much and she likes me. “I’ll keep the stickybeaks in the Woomelang post office guessing,” she says. “I won’t put my name on the back of the envelope.”’

  ‘Dear Philip. OUTSIDE THE POST OFFICE. My father, Auntie Lorna and I wait in the car for my mother to go in and pick up the mail from the locked box. My father: “Gawd, amazing, isn’t it, what people do. See that sign there, ENTER, with the arrow pointing upwards? What sort of a thing is that? Is it a joke, or just some no-hoper foolin’ around? That woman’s been in the phone box for half an hour, I bet. How’d you be, outside the public phone waiting for some silly coot to finish yackin’ on about everything under the sun, while you had something important to say. That happened to us, once, up at—” My mother opens the door and gets in. “Three letters,” she says. “All for me.”’

  Sometimes my little story overflows the available space and I have to run over on to a second postcard. This means I must find a smaller, secondary tale, or some disconnected remark, to fill up card number two.

  ‘Me: (opening cupboard) “Hey! Scrabble! We can have a game of Scrabble after tea!” My father: (with a scornful laugh) “I can’t wait.”’

  ‘Dear Philip. I know you won’t write back. I don’t even know whether you are still at this address.’

  ‘Dear Philip. One Saturday morning I went to Coles and bought a scarf. It cost four and sixpence and I was happy with my purchase. He whisked it out of my hand and looked at the label. “Made in China. Is it real silk? Let’s test it.” He flicked on his cigarette lighter. We all screamed and my mother said, “Don’t bite! He’s only teasing you.”’

  ‘Dear Philip. Once, when I was fourteen, I gave cheek to him at the dinner table. He hit me across the head with his open hand. There was silence. My little brother gave a high, hysterical giggle and I laughed too, in shock. He hit me again. After the washing up I was sent for. He was sitting in an armchair, looking down. “The reason why we don’t get on any more,” he said, “is because we’re so much alike.” This idea filled me with such revulsion that I turned my swollen face away. It was swollen from crying, not from the blows, whose force had been more symbolic than physical.’

  ‘Dear Philip. Years later he read my mail. He found the contraceptive pills. He drove up to Melbourne and found me and made me come home. He told me I was letting men use my body. He told me I ought to see a psychiatrist. I was in the front seat and my mother was in the back. I thought, “If I open the door and jump out, I won’t have to listen to this any more.” My mother tried to stick up for me. He shouted at her. “It’s your fault,” he said. “You were too soft on her. ”’

  ‘Dear Philip. I
know you’ve heard all this before. I also know it’s no worse than anyone else’s story.’

  ‘Dear Philip. And again years later he asked me a personal question. He was driving, I was in the suicide seat. “What went wrong,” he said, “between you and Philip?” Again I turned my face away. “I don’t want to talk about it.” I said. There was silence. He never asked again. And years after that, in a café in Paris on my way to work, far enough away from him to be able to, I thought of that question and began to cry. Dear Philip. I forgive you for everything.’

  Late in the afternoon my mother and Auntie Lorna and I walk along the beach to Surfers. The tide is out: our bare feet scarcely mark the firm sand. Their two voices run on, one high, one low. If I speak they pretend to listen, just as I feign attention to their endless, looping discourses: these are our courtesies: this is love. Everything is spoken, nothing is said. On the way back I point out to them the smoky orange clouds that are massing far out to sea, low over the horizon. Obedient, they stop and face the water. We stand in a row, Auntie Lorna in a pretty frock with sandals dangling from her finger, my mother and I with our trousers rolled up. Once I asked my Brazilian friend a stupid question. He was listening to a conversation between me and a Frenchman about our countries’ electoral systems. He was not speaking and, thinking to include him, I said, ‘And how do people vote chez toi, Rubens?’ He looked at me with a small smile. ‘We don’t have elections,’ he said. Where’s Rio from here? ‘Look at those clouds!’ I say. ‘You’d think there was another city out there, wouldn’t you, burning.’

  Just at dark the air takes on the colour and dampness of the sub-tropics. I walk out the screen door and stand my gin on a fence post. I lean on the fence and look at the ocean. Soon the moon will thrust itself over the line. If I did a painting of a horizon, I think, I would make it look like a row of rocking, inverted Vs, because that’s what I see when I look at it. The flatness of a horizon is intellectual. A cork pops on the first-floor balcony behind me. I glance up. In the half dark two men with moustaches are smiling down at me.

  ‘Drinking champagne tonight?’ I say.

  ‘Wonderful sound, isn’t it,’ says the one holding the bottle.

  I turn back to the moonless horizon. Last year I went camping on the Murray River. I bought the cards at Tocumwal. I had to write fast for the light was dropping and spooky noises were coming from the trees. ‘Dear Dad,’ I wrote. ‘I am up on the Murray, sitting by the camp fire. It’s nearly dark now but earlier it was beautiful, when the sun was going down and the dew was rising.’ Two weeks later, at home, I received a letter from him written in his hard, rapid, slanting hand, each word ending in a sharp upward flick. The letter itself concerned a small financial matter, and consisted of two sentences on half a sheet of quarto, but on the back of the envelope he had dashed off a personal message: ‘P. S. Dew does not rise. It forms.’

  The moon does rise, as fat as an orange, out of the sea straight in front of the unit. A child upstairs sees it too and utters long werewolf howls. My mother makes a meal and we eat it. ‘Going to help Mum with the dishes, are you, Miss?’ says my father from his armchair. My shoulders stiffen. I am, I do. I lie on the couch and read an old Woman’s Day. Princess Caroline of Monaco wears a black dress and a wide white hat. The knitting needles make their mild clicking. Auntie Lorna and my father come from the same town, Hopetoun in the Mallee, and when the news is over they begin again.

  ‘I always remember the cars of people,’ says my father. ‘There was an old four-cylinder Dodge, belonging to Whatsisname. It had—’

  ‘Would that have been one of the O’Lachlans?’ says Auntie Lorna.

  ‘Jim O’Lachlan. It had a great big exhaust pipe coming out the back. And I remember stuffing a potato up it.’

  ‘A potato?’ I say.

  ‘The bloke was a councillor,’ says my father. ‘He came out of the Council chambers and got into the Dodge and started her up. He only got fifty yards up the street when BA—BANG! This damn thing shot out the back—I reckon it’s still going!’ He closes his lips and drops his head back against the couch to hold in his laughter.

  I walk past Biarritz, where globes of light float among shrubbery, and the odd balcony on the half-empty tower holds rich people out into the creamy air. A barefoot man steps out of the take-away food shop with a hamburger in his hand. He leans against the wall to unwrap it, and sees me hesitating at the slot of the letterbox, holding up the postcards and reading them over and over in the weak light from the public phone. ‘Too late to change it now,’ he calls. I look up. He grins and nods and takes his first bite of the hamburger. Beside the letterbox stands a deep rubbish bin with a swing lid. I punch open the bin and drop the postcards in.

  All night I sleep safely in my bed. The waves roar and hiss, and slam like doors. Auntie Lorna snores, but when I tug at the corner of her blanket she sighs and turns over and breathes more quietly. In the morning the rising sun hits the front windows and floods the place with a light so intense that the white curtains can hardly net it. Everything is pink and golden. In the sink a cockroach lurks. I try to swill it down the drain with a cup of water but it resists strongly. The air is bright, is milky with spray. My father is already up: while the kettle boils he stands out on the edge of the grass, the edge of his property, looking at the sea.

  THE DARK, THE LIGHT

  WE HEARD HE was back. We heard he was staying in a swanky hotel. We heard she was American. We washed our hair. We wore what we thought was appropriate. We waited for him to declare himself. We waited for him to call.

  No calls came. We discussed his probable whereabouts, the meaning of his silence, the possibilities of his future.

  We thought we saw him getting into a taxi outside the Rialto, outside the Windsor, outside the Regent, outside the Wentworth, outside the Stock Exchange, outside the Diorama. Was it him? What was he wearing? What did he have on? A tweed jacket, black shoes. Even in summer? His idea of this town is cold. He’s been away. He’s lost the feel of it. He’s been in Europe. He’s been in America. He’s been in the tropics. He’s left. He’s gone. He doesn’t live here any more. He’s only visiting. He’s only passing through. Was his face white? His shirt was white. His hair was longer. Did you see her? She wasn’t there. He was on his own.

  We saw them in a club. We saw her. She was blond. They were both blond. They were together. They were dressed in white, in cream, in gold, in thousands of dollars’ worth of linen and leather. They sat at a table with their backs to the wall. The wall was dark. They were light. Their hair and their garments shone. They knew things we did not know, they owned things we had never heard of. They were from somewhere else. They were not from here. They were from further north, from the sunny place, the blue and yellow place, the sparkling place, the water place. They were from the capital. More than one of us had to be led away weeping. He’s gone. He won’t live here again. He has left us behind. He has gone away and left us in the cold. The music stopped and they got up and left and the door closed. We stood in our dark club in our dark clothes.

  Invitations came, but not many. Hardly any. Very few. Did you get one? Neither did I. Maybe the mail… a strike…a bottleneck at the exchange…There were very few. Only three or four. Will you go? Of course not. It wouldn’t be right. It would hurt, it would be wrong, I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, I would lose friends, I wouldn’t be seen dead, if you don’t I won’t either, it’s a moral issue, I couldn’t possibly.

  What happened up there? Did you go? Did you hear? What was it like? Tell us what happened. It was summer, he was early, she was late, she made an entrance, the bells were ringing, the organ thundered, his hair lay in stiff sculpted curls, she was all in cream, her hair was up, she was choked with pearls, his family was there, the church was packed, he gave her his arm, they stood sides touching. The minister threw back his head and shouted Come into their hearts Lord Jesus! The guests were embarrassed, they fluffed their bobs, they brushed their
shoulders, they read the brass plaques, it was religious, it was low church, it was not what we thought, we imagined something else, it was not his style, it was a bit much, it was over the top, it was a church after all and what did you expect, the guests were clever, they knew better, they were modern, they sat in the pews and sneered.

  And afterwards? Outside? The trees were covered in leaves and threaded with coloured lights, it was night in the garden, the air was warm, the night was tender, French at least we thought, we thought French, we held out our glasses, the waiters twirled among us, the bottles were napkinned, it was local, we had hoped for better, we drank it anyway, we became more grateful, the families stood in line, they shook our hands, they welcomed us, we were ashamed of our ingratitude. We saw him standing alone for a moment under a tree, we stepped quickly towards him to show him we had come, we had come a very long way, we had come to show him we had come, to deliver the compliments, to bring the greetings of the other place, we stepped up, we reached out, our fingers touched his elbow and she came swooping all creamy with pearls, he spun on one heel, his hands opened, he showed us his palms, he smiled, he melted, he was no longer there, he was gone, the trees were covered in leaves, their branches were threaded with coloured lights, our clothes were stiff, our clothes were dark, our clothes came from the other place, and we too came from the other place, we put down our glasses, we turned away, we turned to go back to the other place, we turned and went back to the other place, we went without bitterness, humbly we went away.

  IN PARIS

  THE APARTMENT WAS on the fourth floor. The building had no lift. On his day off the man lay on the mattress that served as a sofa and read, slowly and carefully, all the newspapers of his city. The tall windows were open on to the balcony. Every twenty minutes a bus swerved in to the stop down below, and the curtain puffed past his face. At two o’clock the woman came into the living room with her boots on.