‘What is a jackaroo?’ the geneticist asked when Daniel had told them his job. The faint slurring of the edges of words that was her accent made her sound gentle, and she looked like someone’s elderly aunt, but Daniel reminded himself not to be taken in by appearances. He knew what a geneticist did.
‘Mess with the business of God, they do,’ Teatree had said wrathfully one night by the campfire when someone had started talking about the sheep they cloned. ‘Scientists think they can do anything. Splitting the atom and cloning Hitler. Growing crops of arms and legs and eyes,’ he had said indignantly.
‘A sort of Australian cowboy,’ the American told the geneticist.
Daniel struggled to think of a question to ask them, because his indifference seemed impolite. A teacher had once written on one of his reports that he had a lazy mind. He didn’t know if that was true or not. The geneticist told the American she had been presenting a paper at a conference in Brisbane on the future of corn and regretted there had been no time to visit the outback. Ouwtbeck, she said. The American teacher said he had been on a short exchange to an Australian Quaker school in Tasmania.
Daniel said he had a meeting in Paris. ‘Not a business meeting,’ he added, to short-circuit the questions.
‘Personal business.’ The geneticist smiled and the teacher fell silent. Abruptly Daniel decided to tell them the truth.
‘I’m going to meet someone in place of a man who died. I promised to go in his place and explain.’
‘How sad,’ the geneticist exclaimed softly. ‘He will come to meet his friend and learn that he is dead.’ Det, she said.
‘It’s a woman,’ he said.
The teacher gave Daniel a look of sober approval. ‘You are a good friend. To go all that way, instead of giving her the news over the telephone.’
I was not his friend, Daniel wanted to protest, but the bus lurched to a halt at a huge roundabout where many streams of cars flowed. It was as if someone had decided to tie a knot in a highway. Horns were sounding, brakes screeched and the noise was such that conversation was impossible.
His two companions were gone by the time Daniel emerged from the bus. There were at least thirty taxis lined up along the kerb and people from the Roissybus and other buses were streaming to join the line at one end and climbing into taxis at the other.
On impulse, Daniel turned on his heel and set off in long, loping strides, determined to find a quiet café and check the map, then walk to the hotel. He was soon deep in a maze of streets hemmed on either side by buildings with ornate facades and a multitude of statues. He was struck by their beauty, but also oppressed by the weight of time they represented. No building in Australia was more than two hundred years old, but some of the buildings around him now looked as if they might have been there for many hundreds of years, especially the ones with crumbling, black-streaked stonework.
He had a sudden sharply painful longing for the simplicity of the flat red landscape outside the bedroom window of his parents’ home. That particular view of what some would call nothing, framed by limp, flowered curtains.
He crossed the street because there was a car parked on the footpath and realised he was panting like a dog, he who had ridden a hundred boundaries in the outback without raising a sweat. It was something to do with the way the heat was pressed between the stone buildings maybe, compressed so that it was almost solid. In the outback, the heat was light, stretched thin.
There was no café in sight, so finally he stopped in the shade of a building and took out the map. He had not bothered with maps in the outback. The country offered its own landmarks and signs to one who had grown up with Murri jackaroos and trackers.
Cities smothered the land, he reckoned, stopping it communicating with the people who lived on it, though maybe it was more that cities reflected people’s desire not to hear the land. Once when the family had come up to the city to plead with the bank to give them more time, his father had said sadly that cities were as confused as the people who lived in them, and that you needed maps for dealing with the people as much as for finding your way around the streets.
A metal sign fixed to the side of a building said Rue Cloche. Daniel took out his map and plotted a course to the street where he would find his hotel, and as he set off again, he looked at his watch and saw that no time had passed since the plane had landed. The watch had stopped, but there was no point in winding it again until he learned the correct local time.
The hotel turned out to be no more than a doorway leading to carpeted stairs, with the name written above a glass door in fancy writing. The bottom floor was a restaurant and, as he climbed the stairs, Daniel smelled coffee. It reminded him of his father so strongly that for a moment he actually seemed to see his father’s hands on the rail instead of his own. Bigger, always bigger, soft-furred with golden hair that caught the sunlight, the huge scarred knuckles and the missing index finger.
Some people coming down the stairs eyed him disapprovingly as they passed him, and Daniel realised they thought he was drunk. He felt as lightheaded as he had the time he got sunstroke as a kid. He still remembered how everything had sagged and tilted when he moved, the heaviness of the shadows and the silky feeling of sickness. An older woman in a fitted green dress and smooth bun examined him with shrewd eyes as he approached the reception desk.
Once he had proffered his passport and filled out the papers, the receptionist pressed the lift button for him and explained breakfast was to be eaten in the restaurant below, he had only to show his key to the waitress.
The room when he reached it was tiny. He bumped his elbows on both walls going to the toilet and was forced to shower with the door open, struggling with a single lever that controlled heat, cold, and the force of the jet. At last he lay full-length on the bed, naked, his feet hanging over the end and his head touching the bedhead.
He had slept for hours on the plane, yet his eyes felt gritty the way they did after a long day of riding in the sun, his body jumpy and tense from lack of exercise. He couldn’t remember when he had done so little yet felt so tired. He needed to walk, he decided.
He was walking through the fields at dusk, and he saw that there was a pool of light on the horizon where there ought to have been nothing but more night.
‘What’s that, Dad?’ he asked and discovered from the sound of his voice that he was a boy again.
‘Circus has come to town,’ his father said, squinting his eyes and peering towards the light. He glanced down at Daniel. ‘Want to go, son? Don’t suppose it’ll be anything special, a couple of clowns and a mangy lion with no teeth. A lot of rigged sideshows to draw your money. But we could take a look-see if you want.’ That slow, kind smile.
Daniel felt an aching burst of love for his father that made him realise that he was dreaming, and he woke to find the room dark and stiflingly hot, the bedclothes wrapping his limbs like bandages. He padded over to open a window, but it was as if he had merely opened it into a larger room.
Leaning out into the still, hot night air, he stared down into the narrow street below and wondered what time it was. The thought brought him a vivid image of the dead man’s watch; the wide silver band and face had matched the overturned silver car and the silvery grey suit the man had worn, which might have been sleek before the crash had hurled him onto the side of the road. The man had seemed as exotic as a metal spaceman, lying there. His eyes had been a light silvery grey too, when they opened.
‘Help me,’ the man said. His accent was thick and heavy, but part of the heaviness was pain.
There were visible head injuries and Daniel knew it could be fatal to move him. ‘There’s a property back about thirty clicks. The Watleys. Tim’ll radio the Flying Doctor.’
The man made a strange rattling noise. Was he laughing? ‘I fear there is only one creature with wings that will come for me in time.’
Daniel began to shake his head, but the man’s blood was puddling in the red dust beneath him, darkening it to black. It l
ooked as if his shadow was swelling around him.
Daniel knelt, but the man’s nearest hand twitched in agitation, the silver watch throwing a knife of light into his eyes with accidental, painful precision.
‘There is a woman,’ he rasped, and Daniel half turned to the crumpled car before he continued. ‘You must tell her what has happened.’
‘The police . . .’ Daniel began.
‘Ssst,’ the man hissed like a snake. ‘Will you help me?’ The pale eyes held Daniel’s with a strength that seemed hypnotic and he found himself nodding.
‘I have . . . have the ticket in my . . . wallet. You must go and meet her in my place. Tell her I was coming. That she was right.’
‘Ticket to where?’ Daniel had asked.
‘Paris,’ gasped the man.
How strange the word had sounded, spoken in the hot air, the end of it caught by the harsh flat arc of a crow’s cry rising in the spare distance. ‘Paris?’ Daniel echoed, relieved, because of course no one could expect him to go to Paris.
‘I was to meet her on July seven.’
‘But you must have a friend who could call to tell her you have had an accident . . .’ Again the rattling laugh, this time with a bleak edge. ‘I could . . . call her,’ Daniel offered at last.
The light eyes fixed on his face. For a moment, Daniel thought there was a radiance behind them, something struggling to blaze out. But perhaps it was no more than a matter of contrasts: the white-hot light and the tanned skin. Even so, he felt the touch of those eyes like a cold draught moving across his face.
When the man answered, the grain of his voice was rougher, as if the smooth surface of it were being sanded away by pain. ‘I do not have a telephone number nor any address for her. Only the date and the name of the café where we were to meet.’
Daniel blinked, feeling as if a genie had appeared to grant three wishes. Only it was one wish, and he must grant it. ‘Maybe she won’t come . . .’
‘She will come,’ the man said. He had begun to shiver slightly like a snake-bit cat Daniel had once seen. ‘We were to meet . . .’ the man whispered, ‘in the café where I first saw her. Such an absurd . . . name – The Smoking Dog – Rue de Gris. July seven, at dusk. I thought she was mad but she said she would be there, and that knowing this, I would have to come. She was right. Tell her that. I would have come to her.’ After a pause he added, ‘The café has . . . had a view of Sacré-Coeur.’
Daniel had looked up the French words in a phonetic dictionary. Rue de Gris merely meant Grey Street, and Sacré-Coeur was probably Sacred Heart Basilica. He had looked up the street on a map of Paris and found that there were seven different Grey Streets, but only one that would afford a view of the basilica.
Somewhere in the hotel a baby began to cry, and Daniel turned away from the window. He felt wide awake because back home it was early afternoon. The thought that his sense of time connected him to Australia reassured him. He heard men’s voices in the street below, the words unintelligible, a hard blat of some other language. Daniel took up the television control on the bedside console, pressed the mute button and channel-surfed. Usually he found it soothing to see people talking silently, gesticulating and laughing, cooking and singing or driving along roads. But tonight – today – for the first time, the images seemed too personal, too full of meanings he did not want to puzzle out.
He lay back and watched the play of light reflected on the wall instead, wondering as he had done before if the dead man and the woman he had promised to meet had been lovers.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ his mother might have said. A tough, stocky, practical little farmer’s wife, she had performed a staggering number of daily duties, her favourite being the care of a small beloved flock of hysterical silkies. Yet Daniel had never seen his mother as a domestic slave. She had been a woman with a sharp edge to her tongue and strong opinions, which she did not hesitate to air, and she had ruled the house with an iron will.
Discipline had been the provenance of his mother, too. She had wielded a willow switch with the same determined efficiency she had applied to cleaning the rugs, as if misbehaviour could be beaten out in much the same way as dust. Age had bent and narrowed his father, faded his blue eyes, but his mother had become more and more solid, without ever being fat, more densely energetic.
David fancied that in another life his father might have been a librarian or a scholar in a university, for he loved to read, but his mother could only ever have been a farmer’s wife. Daniel had loved his father, and respected him, but it had always seemed a waste of time to bother wading through a lot of words written by someone he didn’t know when he could be roaming hills rippling with dry grass, or swimming in the tea-coloured water of the creek. It did not matter to him that he was barely average at school, since he was to inherit and work the farm.
Of course it hadn’t turned out that way. His father had overextended himself to buy some long-overdue farm equipment and then there were a couple of bad drought years, and then a year of floods, and the bank foreclosed. They had gone under with barely a struggle, and Daniel’s mind stuttered to the weeks of packing, to watching his mother crating her beloved silkies for sale. Daniel hated everything about the unit in suburbia to which they had moved, but he knew his parents needed his income to help pay the mortgage.
He had gone to work in a trucking company; then, three months after they had moved into town, his father had a heart attack on the way to church, crashing the ute and killing himself and his wife both. She had died on impact, but his father had lingered three days, though he had never become conscious.
Daniel had been glad it had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly, and that they had died together. But missing them was a deep ache that had never eased. Memories kept jumping at him, forcing him to remind himself that his parents were gone and that he would never see them again, never feel his father’s gentleness or watch him tamp down the tobacco in his pipe, never see his mother’s ferocious energy or taste her golden-syrup dumplings. He had left the city, for the house had been sold up to pay their debts, and so had begun his long drift from job to job, looking for some indefinable thing that would make him feel that same sense of rightness and belonging that he had felt on the old farm. The smell of eggs and bacon on dark winter mornings and the bitter aftertaste of strong sweet tea in the bunkhouse kitchens brought the home breakfasts back to him with such clarity that the present had sometimes seemed a thin, sour dream.
If he was honest, it was his father he missed most, that quiet presence. You never got the feeling he was just waiting for you to finish talking so he could offer advice or an opinion. In fact, he said very little and seldom offered solutions or even suggestions. Mostly he asked mild questions and listened. It seemed little enough, and yet at one time or another practically every one of the neighbours had come to him for advice. People would invariably go away feeling less angry, less desperate, or just plain cheerful. Daniel had consciously modelled himself on his father. He had striven to be patient, gentle, courteous and honest. He was not and never would be his father, yet he believed that he had grown into a man his father would have at least respected.
How many times had he imagined telling his father about seeing the smoke and then the overturned silver Mercedes crumpled against the stand of eucalypts? How many times had he described kneeling beside the big foreigner in his supple steel-dust suit and the strange conversation that followed? The gradual realisation the man was going to die. In his imaginings, as in life, Daniel’s father never once interrupted his tale. Nor, when Daniel stopped, had he offered opinions or advice.
Yet Daniel had come to understand he must go to Paris. And so he had flown across the world, violating time. Was it possible to return after coming so far, he suddenly wondered. The thought was like a kidney punch and he stumbled mentally into a vivid memory of the way the dying man’s eyes had grown more and more pale.
‘It was so hard to trust anyone back then,’ the man had said. ‘You ne
ver knew who would repeat your words, or how they might be used. You could never be high enough to feel safe. That was what made it so extraordinary, that she trusted me. She told me it was because I had offered her an ultimate truth. I do not think you can imagine how rare truth was in that time. I answered that truth was what I wanted from her and she laughed at me. She knew it was a lie. All I told her were lies, but she said that when we met again, she would show me the truth I had shown to her.
‘You must go in my place and tell her she was right when she said I would need her . . .’ He stifled a groan.
There had been something almost military in that iron control, Daniel thought. The man would have been in considerable pain, the ambulance people had told him after they came, explicit because he was a stranger to the dead man. It was a wonder he had been able to talk at all. Even if they had arrived in time, they could not have saved him, they said, except to administer a mind-obliterating dose of morphine, a little death to ease the bigger death that was looming.
It was the police, when he gave his report several days later, who told him the man’s name was Tibor Esterhazy and that he was Hungarian and eighty-five.
Daniel could hardly credit it. He would have taken him for sixty-five at most. The man had been a permanent resident in Australia for over fifty years, and had not once left since his arrival. He had probably been a dissident, given the date of his arrival, a political exile, or so one of the younger police had observed.
Later that same night it had occurred to Daniel that if the man had made an appointment to meet the woman when they had been in Paris, that agreement had to have been made more than fifty years ago; the man would only have been thirty-five. That was the moment when it struck him that the woman might be dead. After all, if she had been thirty when the meeting had been agreed to, she would be eighty now.
The following week, when he had gone into town to sign his deposition, a policeman told him of the ticket found in the man’s coat. The destination was Paris, and the date of departure was July 5, two days before the date upon which the dead man had claimed he was to meet the woman. The ticket was proof that his story had not been delirium.