Then the room went quiet. People cocked their heads to listen. Egg put his glass down. He heard the horn far out in the night.
‘That’s for me,’ he said, going to the door. The man with the spoons saluted him. As Egg stepped out into the dark, the fat man who had presided over the ceremony put a hand on his shoulder and pushed a lump of rainbow cake into his hands.
‘See you again, soldier.’
‘Where?’ The man shrugged.
Egg nodded.
Moving out across the paddock, Egg looked up to see the lantern away to his left, high up, miles away, it seemed, and to him it looked like a star descended from the night sky, from that darkness in his dream at the end of the staircase where he had never yet ventured. The locked fingers of his ribcage relaxed. He was not afraid. He stuffed rainbow cake into his pockets and began to run.
Thomas Awkner Floats
1
ALTHOUGH he had never been in an aeroplane before, Thomas Awkner was not a complete stranger to flight. His earliest memory was of the day the swing on the back verandah propelled him across the yard and into the fence. The ground rushed beneath him. Borer holes in the wooden paling became mineshafts. Impact was devastating. A loose picket pinched his earlobe and held him captive and screaming until his father could be hounded away from his incinerator behind the shed. Now, as the big jet staggered through the turbulence out over the desert, he twisted that earlobe between his fingers and sweated. He did not like to fly. His own height gave him vertigo.
Flight attendants lurched up the aisles. Drinks spilled. The FASTEN SEATBELTS sign chimed on and off. The thirty seats ahead of him were occupied by what seemed to be a delegation from the Deaf Society. These men and women wore blazers and little berets, and for most of the flight they had been engaged in an informal celebration, creating a disconcertingly visual babble. Words ruffled up by the handful and faces stretched with laughter, impatience, urgency. All Thomas Awkner could hear was the chink of glasses, but for the Deaf Society, he decided, it must have been a rowdy affair. Watching them gave him a thirst. He pushed the button for a flight attendant.
While he waited, he swabbed the sweat from his palms and smiled at the men on either side of him. It was a desperate grin, starched with fear, but it went unnoticed. From up ahead came a sharp, solitary belch. None of the partyers in the aisle seemed embarrassed for a moment.
A flight attendant came, but fear had knotted Awkner’s throat so that he found it difficult to speak. The woman raised her sculptured eyebrows at him. Awkner’s lips moved, but his voice seemed to be parked somewhere back down in his throat.
‘Are you well?’ the fat man next to him asked.
‘The poor man is deaf, sir,’ the flight attendant said. She began to mime eating and drinking. Thomas Awkner flinched.
The fat man scowled. ‘I don’t think he is. He’s not wearing a blazer, or even a beret.’
‘For God’s sake, man,’ the triangular man on Awkner’s right protested, ‘a man doesn’t need a blazer and a beret to be deaf and dumb. He’s probably freelance.’
‘Rubbish,’ the fat man said, ‘he’s listening to us now.’
‘They lip-read, sir,’ said the flight attendant.
‘Could I have a beer, please?’ Thomas Awkner managed to say at last.
‘See? He talks.’
‘So what?’
‘Sir, honestly, it doesn’t mean a thing!’
‘Emu Bitter, if I could.’
The flight attendant beamed at him and went to get the drink. Neither man spoke to him. He felt as though he had upset them terribly. He wedged himself between their anger and their outsized bodies, and thought about his two hours in Melbourne. Right across the continent, he mused, long enough to deliver a manila envelope and board another plane home.
Since he was five years old, Thomas Awkner had been running family errands, taking small boxes to strange doors, relaying single words through holes in fibro walls, passing notes to men in grey hats in windy harbourside streets. The Awkners took for granted his apparent idiocy and he did nothing, as he grew older, to unsettle their assumption for fear of losing his only measure of importance in the Awkner web. An idiot, they thought, was the best courier possible. Understanding could be a risk. So the young Thomas Awkner cultivated complete incuriosity; he ignored message or parcel and concentrated on the trip, feasting on the world outside the asbestos house with its smoke and secret talk. But the trip always ended with a return home where nothing more was expected of him. At home, therefore, he did nothing.
He was flying. His father had never flown: that fact made him feel sophisticated. His father was a memory associated with the endlessly smouldering incinerator behind the back shed. Boxes of shredded paper were often brought through the house at every hour of the night. He recalled that long, grey face with its seedy moustache and perennial white stubble. His father died ten years before. An aerosol can had exploded as he peered into the incinerator. Uncle Dubbo appeared out of nowhere to attend the cremation service.
His beer arrived. He drank it quickly and immediately his bladder demanded relief. Lurching down the aisle toward the rear of the plane, he felt as though he was swinging across a ravine on a rope bridge. The turbulence was frightening. He fought against it in the chrome cubicle but he emerged with one hot, wet trouser leg, regardless. Grabbing at coatsleeves and the occasional head of hair for support, he found his way back to his seat and wedged himself between his large fellow-travellers. The two men wrinkled their noses and glanced knowingly at one another, and Thomas Awkner was spared no shame.
All across the continent he sweated. It took time for him to realize that it wasn’t only flying that had put fear into him: it was his own curiosity that frightened him. Never before had Thomas Awkner, the courier, experienced the slightest interest in the messages, the mysteries, he bore. What was in the envelope? What did it mean? Why fly across Australia to deliver it in a public place? He longed to take it out of his pocket, hold it to a window, sniff it, rattle it, but these things would draw attention. Whose attention? His newfound curiosity brought fresh fears. Could this mission be dangerous? He sweated.
All he had to do was deliver something and come back as always, as though a rubber cord anchored him firmly to that asbestos house in the coastal suburbs. But suddenly it seemed difficult. His filtering process was breaking down. When he went back would he still be able to absent himself from the workings of the family? He had learnt that skill early on, from the year Aunt Dilly and Aunt Celia had dossed in his room with him. Their snoring, their belches and mutterings, their stockings hanging like jungle snakes and their stares across the curtain as he dressed – these things he taught himself to ignore, and fairly soon all the machinations of the Awkner family happened on the grey, outer limits of his awareness. He did not question the prolonged absences of his brothers and his Uncle Dubbo. He never wondered about the huge unmarked containers their milk arrived in, or the boxes of unstamped eggs, the sudden appearance of a television set. Conspiratorial laughter broke through the asbestos walls like cricket balls, and all those years Thomas Awkner studied the discipline of inertia: he watched little, listened little, said little, did little. His schooling was not superb. He had no friends. And when, quite suddenly, the Awkners left town for Melbourne, he found himself alone with his mother.
2
The airport terminal was confusing: so many escalators and shops and purposeful people, and it was difficult to make headway, always casting looks over one’s shoulder. He walked into the women’s toilets, had to pay for a box of doughnuts he knocked to the floor, and was dragged from a Singapore Airlines queue and interrogated by customs officers. All he wanted was a taxi, and when he did find the taxi rank, the city of Melbourne seemed short of taxis.
After a wait in the sun, a cab eased up to the kerb beside him. He got in.
Pulling away from the rank, the driver asked him where he wanted to go.
‘The gallery,’ Thomas Awkner said.
‘What gallery?’
‘The art gallery.’
‘Which one?’ asked the driver, getting a good look at him in the mirror. Thomas Awkner was not a settling sight. His fine blonde hair stood up like wheat to the sun; he had not shaved; the flight had left his clothes rumpled. He stank of urine. ‘Which art gallery, mate?’
‘The proper one.’ He was confused; he hadn’t expected this.
The driver shrugged and took a punt and a left turn. ‘How long you in town for?’
‘Two hours.’
The driver settled lower in his seat. After all, what kind of man stays in a town for two hours? Not the kind of man you told knock-knock jokes to. He drove faster. Thomas Awkner skated about on the seat of his pants, smitten by the strangeness of the place. The buildings were half buried in trees, their lines were soft and their textures aged. It reminded him of Fremantle where he was born: houses standing shoulder to shoulder, old men walking in narrow streets. It charmed him. It flooded him with memories of walking to the wharf with his father. They lived in Fremantle to make it more convenient to visit relatives in prison. The air was full of gulls and the stench of sheep ships and harbour scum. Some days, Thomas walked with his father to the wharf where they would meet strange men and his father would whisper with them in the shadows of hawsers and derricks. The shimmer of the water’s surface tantalized him. He always wanted to dive in. He begged his father to let him paddle at the little beach behind the mole, but there was never time and his father mentioned sunburn and rips and sharks.
‘You’ll sink like a stone,’ his father said. They were the only words he remembered from his father.
The taxi stopped with such suddenness that Thomas cracked his chin on the ashtray of the seat in front. It cleared his head for a moment. He paid and got out into the disarming sunshine. He had an hour and a half left. He was to meet Uncle Dubbo here beside the dormant fountain in fifty minutes. It was hot in the sun. The sight of water running down glass attracted him to the building. He went in.
An atmosphere of sanctity was in the place. Tiny lights from heights. A brooding quiet. He decided to wait in there out of the heat until it was time to deliver. He saw his startled face in glass cabinets full of obscure artifacts; he recognized his hooked nose on a Roman bust and his doe-eyes in a Dutch oil painting. He saw pieces of himself everywhere. Normally he could not even bear to see his own reflection in a mirror.
It was thirty minutes before he saw the ceiling and when he did, the oddest sensation touched him. Stained glass – acres of it, it seemed. Fremantle. The old church. He remembered. On the way home from the wharf sometimes, he had followed his father into the old church where the sailors went, and he would be left to stand at the back near the door while his father went down towards the sanctuary to speak to men dressed in grey suits with hats in their hands. Often they would come away with little parcels which his father took out to the incinerator later in the day, but while they were speaking, Thomas was mesmerized by the scenes in stained glass at either side of the church. Every candle seemed to point towards the strange characters and their animals. On the way home, Thomas would dawdle behind his father, heavy with wonder.
In the middle of the gallery, Thomas Awkner took off his coat and lay on the carpet, looking up at the canopy of colours. Time passed beyond him as the panels of coloured light transported him back. He had forgotten wonder long ago and had replaced it with a dejected kind of bewilderment with which he armed himself to fight off the world from the slit-trench of his unmade bed. In those days of wonder, he had not been repulsed by his own image, he had not been afraid of his own height.
A man stooped and touched him on the shoulder.
‘Uncle Dubbo?’ If it is Uncle Dubbo, he thought, taking in the man’s neatly pressed trousers and blazer and the well organized face above them, then the plastic surgeons have done a first class job.
‘Sir, you can’t lie here all day. There are vagrancy laws in the state of Victoria.’
‘Oh.’
When he got up he saw that he’d left a wet patch of sweat on the carpet in the shape of a man, and by the time he had reached the door of the men’s toilet people were noticing it. In the glittering hall of the toilet, Thomas Awkner splashed his face with water and looked at himself brazenly in the vast mirror. He was tall. His thin blonde hair was matted but not entirely disgraceful. His face was lean and his features thin and (perhaps, he thought, it’s the heat) even vaguely elegant. The sight drilled him with that odd sensation again.
He heard a shifting sound in the cubicle behind and was suddenly afraid. He touched the manila envelope inside his shirt. He was a courier. A curious courier. Whatever it was he was carrying, he knew, it was important enough to be wanted by someone else. Perhaps everyone else. Thomas Awkner fled the toilet and walked quickly back to the entrance of the gallery, telling himself with fervour: ‘I’ve got a mission.’
Out under the blinding sun, gelato vans had parked beneath the roadside trees. People sat around the perimeter of the fountain pool. A hot wind stirred deciduous leaves along the pavements and traffic passed, fuming. No sign of Uncle Dubbo. Twenty minutes left, yet. He wondered what he would say to him. A year had passed since he’d seen his Uncle Dubbo, and yet, in all the years through which his uncle had come and gone, in and out of his life, he had never really looked hard at him. Uncle Dubbo never engaged him in conversation. Maybe he’d put the old man through a few conversational hoops before delivery. How bad did he want this envelope? What would he do to get it? What was Uncle Dubbo really like? What did he do all these years? What about those grey ghosts, his own brothers? He could barely remember them. Maybe, he thought, a few questions might be the price of delivery, this time. Was it really an aerosol can that blew the old man’s head off? What does it all mean? What’s my life honestly been about, for God’s sake?
Thomas took out his return ticket and turned it over. Stuffing it back in his pocket, he bought an icecream and sat at the edge of the pool. Two small boys tugged their shirts off and made shallow dives into the water, stirring up a sediment of leaves and potato-chip bags as they skimmed along the bottom and came up gasping beneath the NO WADING sign. People clucked in disapproval. Thomas watched the boys, envious. He had put his jacket on again to cover the bulge of the envelope, and the heat was unpleasant. He watched as the boys duck-dived and came up with coins. A woman next to him, long breasted, long faced, crinkled her shopping bags and rattled her tongue.
‘Decent people throw their money in there. To make wishes.’
He looked at her. Reflected light from the water was unkind to her face. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. A moment later he came out with it anyway, grinning like a clergyman.
‘Well, so will they when they grow old and stupid.’
She cut him with a stare and turned away. With their hands full of coins, the two boys ran across the pavement to the icecream vans, footsteps evaporating behind them. When they came back with dripping cones and smeared faces, Thomas Awkner was untying his shoelaces. The woman turned to stare at him. He returned her stare and without taking his eyes from hers slipped sideways into the water. She screamed, brushing drops from her dress, while Thomas Awkner struck out across the mucky pool, icecream cone in hand, to the cheers of the boys. Cool water rushed through his clothing and he felt like singing. His head cleared and he remembered his father’s words. Resting at the end of the pool, he watched the boys finish their icecreams and churn across to where he floated in the shade of the gallery. Behind them he saw the sports jacket and feather-duster moustache of Uncle Dubbo. Thomas lay on his back. He spouted like a whale. He had not been seen. Uncle Dubbo had black eyes. His fists opened and closed as though he might lash out with them at any moment. Thomas recalled suffocating clouds of cigarette smoke, toneless instructions, a plate thrown.
He patted the soggy lump in his shirt. The boys dived around him and he felt the rumour of a laugh in him. The strange city rang
in his ears: sound and sight limitless. Uncle Dubbo paced, fists in his pockets. Thomas Awkner floated.
Wilderness
FOR FIVE days and five nights the man and woman had been in the wilderness. The last good stand of karri was hours behind on the bluish hills against the sky. In the mist of early morning the scrub and rock of the coastal hills were the same steel-grey, and each footfall resounded, steady and unambiguous. They could not see the ocean but they knew it was less than an hour away. They had not come to see it. Marsupial droppings flattened moistly underfoot. Their packs had not yet begun to weigh heavily upon them; it was early.
He waited for her to catch up. It was unnecessary but it gave him an illusion of leadership. She read her bird identification book as she walked. Even as he watched she stumbled on a stump and fell to one knee, driven to the ground by the weight of her pack. He waited. She turned the page. Clouds skated in from the south. They were at the end of the continent. After the ocean there was only the half world of the Antarctic.
‘You shouldn’t read while you walk,’ he said.
‘It’s a skill worth having,’ she murmured.
‘Well don’t break a leg acquiring it. I couldn’t carry you out.’