‘It’s not a joke, Pa!’ said Anna, beginning to cry. ‘I feel as if I’m dying of sadness.’
‘Aye, darlin’, I know, I know,’ said Gordie in his terrible, corny accent.
As he walked home, Jonathan had a picture in his head of Anna’s slim back, the full breasts on the elegant frame. He was conscious, too, of a great rope of hair snaking down her back like Rapunzel’s, but dark, not golden. She had just flown all the way from London, which—as far as fleeing wrecked marriages goes—was as dramatic a gesture as you could get. Why hadn’t she gone to a friend or a nearby hotel? Clearly she was not that sort of woman. She had a son at a posh boarding school somewhere, Winchester or Westminster, not quite Eton, but one of those schools in which the British ruling class perpetuates its rights of succession. Four husbands! How could anyone man up a second time, let alone a third and a fourth? Jonathan’s heart recoiled from love as if from a striking snake; his once fulsome heart cowered in his chest. He recalled one of the last exchanges he’d had with Sarah, just before she left to set up house with Cath; he had been away, in Cairns, and he sent what he thought was an affectionate email, telling her of everything he had been doing. He signed off fondest regards, and it was this she had flung back in his face. ‘Fondest regards? Who signs off an email to their wife fondest regards? You are unbelievable!’ She said he was tone deaf when it came to love and, furthermore, he no idea what intimacy was. ‘Who are you, Jonathan? What moves you? What scares you? I have no idea.’ Of course she knew who he was! She was being ridiculous, yet everything she said struck him like an arrow: he had a sensation of being under physical bombardment, as if cowering from attack. He loved her! If the right words for love were dumb on his tongue, his love was everywhere manifest, in the life they had built together, in the children they had made. How had he failed to notice the moment when emotive womanly feelings became the benchmark of everything good, replacing the restrained, chin-up blokeish moral code he had grown up with? Now, men like him who had failed to become feminised males were regarded with suspicion, considered buttoned-up, secretive, repressed. Surely Sarah knew that everyone was filled—to an astonishing degree—with what they could never say? What words could ever possibly hope to speak the dimensions of love? He didn’t know what Sarah wanted, not really; what she wanted him to do, what she wanted him to say or to be. How had he failed to notice how unhappy she must have been?
Walking along, his head down, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the endless exercises demanded by love, its interminable arm-wrestling. He was overcome by pity, a great unending pool of useless pity, for himself, for Sarah, for Anna, for old Gordie, for every man and woman who had ever tried to master love and failed.
He had experienced erotic adventures since Sarah’s departure, of course, many of them happy; he could still conjure in his mind’s eye the gleaming haunches of the young black woman from Nigeria straddling him, joyfully drawing his orgasm from him. He remembered Donna, hot-headed young Donna, who for a time he believed he might love, until he recognised that she did not care for intellectual debate or, like him, see life as a test of courage. Donna had no capacity for commiseration.
To distract himself from memory he went through the ever-expanding list of barbecue guests as he walked: Rosanna; Penny, and now her mother, Marie, who had apparently turned up like a bad penny; Gordie and his attractive daughter, Anna; that miserable bastard PP, ex-husband of Penny, and Cheryl from the rental agency, who PP shared a house with; and Glen and Celia Quinn, his immediate neighbours. That made ten, counting him. He hadn’t asked Penny’s daughter, Scarlett, and Paul Raymond, but maybe he should have. He walked on, faster. He had thirty or even forty years left to him; he had plenty of time, and yet he felt as if time were running out. Two years since Sarah left, more; he was practically divorced! Enough, mate, enough.
PART
II
NINE
Banishment
On a hot Brisbane night in February 1955, Marie made her way home, accompanied by two overexcited policemen. The first policeman, the one from the bridge, kept swivelling around in the front seat of the police car, asking her questions.
‘How’re you liking Australia, dear? I bet Brisbane’s a nice change, eh? The place is looking pretty spruce these days.’
She refused to talk to him. She had just watched a man jump to his death. She stood unveiled, exposed, contaminated once more by the imprint of death. She could not halt the throb of grief; her teeth had set up a shivering in her skull, as if it were cold, cold, cold, like the dismal nights in London she endured without heat, that perishing flat in a bad street in Primrose Hill, the eerie lines of the bombed house next door through the bedroom window, as if it were still cold and she was not now sticking to the upholstery, miserably hot. Was there to be no escape?
How did she even end up in Australia? She should have gone to Canada instead of being beguilded by Wendy McCann’s romantic nonsense about Brisbane. How random her existence, how haphazard! She had once had a mother and a father and a brother named Eric—an entire life. She had once been her father’s favourite, sitting on a high stool in his warm office watching him work, her kind moustachioed father, a prosperous manufacturer of leather goods, her mother unfit for anything, forever locking herself in the bathroom and threatening to kill herself or else packing her bags, screaming that she was leaving, because she was so unloved in her own home. Marie had once been thirteen years old, begging her father to let her go to boarding school in England not because she wanted to benefit from an English education, as she told him, but because her mother was cruel, depressed and overly dramatic. And while Marie was in England the war began and her old life disappeared, pouf: the elegant apartment, the hysterical mother, the kindly father, the brother named Eric—the miserable family dynamics—all of it, gone.
‘Your English is very good, dear,’ the policeman said. ‘Bonza, as we say in Brisso.’
‘My English is superior to yours,’ she said. ‘Australian is barely even English.’ She hated him. Would he never stop talking? She kept her eyes turned to the window.
‘Well, excuse me, Lady Muck.’
The other policeman, the one driving, tried to shush his colleague. ‘For Pete’s sake, lay off. She’s in shock.’
Marie had tried to tell him that she did not require assistance and, in particular, she most especially did not want to arrive home in a police car. She had attempted to march off but the chatterbox policeman restrained her by the arm as if she were under arrest. All the questions, all the questions, the throb in her chest, the hand on her arm, she was being marshalled, questioned, sitting in her English class, fifteen years old, an elderly, red-faced policeman arriving at the classroom door. Could she please accompany him to the headmistress’s office? Her heart stopped, every eye upon her, her hands sweated, she did not want to go to the headmistress’s office to be told whatever dreadful thing she was going to be told. Trembling, Marie said yes, yes, to the policeman asking her questions now, agreed to accompany him to a police car to shut him up, to stop him asking questions, to prevent attracting even more attention to herself than she already had. She longed to disappear into the crowd, to be indistinguishable, the same as the rest, not singular, picked out by her losses. She was not grateful.
Of course everyone came rushing from the house as soon as the police car drew up. Mrs McCann, Mr McCann—clearly in the midst of his tea, a napkin fluttering from the collar of his shirt—Wendy McCann, Terry McCann, with his withered polio leg, and Lance McCann, who had recently been in hospital with the gastric.
‘Oh, dear God, what has happened?’ Mrs McCann cried.
‘Mother! Language!’ said Mr McCann, unaccustomed to hearing his wife take the Lord’s name in vain. The McCanns were Catholics, with many more children absent from the house, but still willing to drive Marie to the hot wooden box that was All Saints’ Church of England, Chermside, every Sunday. The McCanns, tumbling down the front stairs of the wooden house on wooden posts, twelv
e feet in the air, spilling onto the treeless expanse of their front lawn, flinging up their hands. Not a tree in sight! Nothing, not a leaf, not a branch, not a flower, not a skerrick of blessed leafy relief from the humid air, thick and wet and smothering as the festering air of Asia, from the blast of the antipodean sun boiling in the sky, a great, molten, unblinking eye, glaring down. Roasted alive she was, sweating in her skin, day after merciless day.
Marie stepped now from the police car, shading her eyes against the glare coming off the house, still, the sun already retreated.
‘A cup of tea,’ said Mrs McCann. ‘Wendy, a slice of seed-cake for the officers.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ said Wendy, scooting fast up the front stairs. Safe little Wendy McCann, with her matching luggage, her good set of pearls from FW Nissen and her rosary, once a teacher with Marie for the overcrowded classes at Princess Road Junior Mixed and Infants School, Primrose Hill, London. Marie, at the beginning of her long disappearance, eating almost nothing, barely sleeping, and Wendy, a shadowless Australian girl, who soon had the room of scared four-year-olds entranced by her story of what had happened when she was four years old, just like them, accidentally dropping something through the front stairs of a house far away, in Queensland, Australia, and getting her head stuck. ‘What did you drop, Miss?’ a grimy boy asked.
‘Well, you know what,’ said Wendy. ‘I can’t even remember! I think it might have been my dolly, but at any rate I was trying to get whatever it was that had fallen through, sticking my hand down first, and then my arm, and finally squeezing my head and shoulders between the steps. But then I couldn’t pull my head out again!’
By now Marie, introducing Miss McCann to her new classroom, was listening as hard as the children. ‘What happened, Miss? What happened?’ the children said, shouting, laughing, leaping from their seats.
‘Well, I called to my mother and our neighbour, who had become such a close friend of my mother’s that we called her Aunty Bee. They were having a cup of tea in the kitchen and they rushed out to try to free me but, after several goes at trying to get me out, it was clear I was well and truly stuck. I was wedged right in.’
The children stared. ‘Aunty Bee said, “I’ll go and phone the fire brigade. They’ll have to come and saw through the steps.” Well, I don’t know which of the words it was—“fire brigade” or “saw”—but my head came straight out, pop, just like that!’
And now here was Marie, delivered to her future in the Commonwealth of Australia via a free passage courtesy of the government. Australian citizens did not even exist before 1949—she would have been a British subject if she’d arrived before then—and here she was, reborn, an Australian citizen walking up the head-swallowing steps.
She did not see Syd McAlister that week, or the next. The news came that he was alive, direct from his sister, Evelyn McAlister, the grade five teacher with whom Marie taught at Chermy, Chermside State School. ‘It’s a miracle,’ said Evelyn as they walked to the tram stop on Gympie Road. Seeing a tram coming, they made a run for it. The tram was open on both sides, and rain and wind blew in. ‘Oh, my hair!’ said Evelyn, reaching into her handbag for her scarf. Marie was not thinking of her hair but recalling the stumble of yes upon her tongue, of being the ruinous catalyst for Syd McAlister’s terrible ascent.
She heard her daughter now, moving around the kitchen. She would buy Penny a copy of that new diet book she had read about, a diet supposedly followed by cavemen or at least by hunter-gatherers, men and women who feasted when they had food and fasted when they did not. Penny was a child of fortune, untested, a woman who spent too much of her time worrying about love. The thought of her daughter’s good fortune did not make Marie happy, not exactly. Her thoughts drifted instead to a new idea, how she could easily convert the large garage area beneath Penny’s house into a granny flat. She added granny flat to the words diet book in the large invisible ledger she kept in her brilliant, vigorous old head. The lump near her eye was getting bigger.
TEN
Radio Sylvia
Onions! He’d forgotten onions. Bad temper threatened for a moment but, as always, Jonathan remembered his foul-tempered father who made everyone’s life a misery, so he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through his mouth. His father, a suburban solicitor, found everything trying: a broken tap, tax returns, driving, children who failed to be anything other than children, forgotten onions. No matter, Jonathan thought, I’ll nick down to the shop. He whipped off the apron featuring Escoffier’s recipe for soufflé which Sarah had given him when he had been going through his French cooking phase. Men cooking was something Sarah approved of, one of the many things about him she liked: theirs was not a disharmonious marriage or one filled with strife. They rarely argued about the mechanics of daily life, or about anything else; he had supposed them to be living together companionably, affectionately, side by side, worn into each other like weathered rocks. He flung the apron on the bench.
Bites was waiting when he opened the door. ‘You wee darling!’ he said, trying to sound like Gordie. She leaped up. ‘Come on, let’s go and see Sylv.’ He had no internet connection or mobile reception at the house, a radical thing, a deliberate choice to cast off into speechless space. He felt oddly disembodied, and reflexively picked up his mobile and put it in his back pocket, hopeful it might pick up a signal somewhere along the way. Occasionally his mobile inexplicably picked up reception, but it was unpredictable, random. He wasn’t expecting anything in particular anyway but text messages, like email, had come to seem to him a modern cargo cult, in which unspecified good fortune might at any moment be delivered to him by supernatural forces. At work, he checked his emails as constantly as a teenage girl.
The wind had dropped and birdsong was sweeping the air, scented now with flowers from the two big old frangipani trees by the side of the road, rosy halos of flowers arranged like bouquets among its leaves. The light was going from the sky, which had a soft bruised quality; parakeets jewelled the trees, bright reds and greens, a flash of orange. Scrub turkeys rooted around in the undergrowth; a couple of bats swung overhead, the translucent cut of their dark wings outlined against the deepening early evening. Close by, bats in the trees squabbled, the thwack of their wings as loud as a wet dog shaking itself down, its ears slapping. The birds, the scrub turkeys, the noisy bats, the lake spread out before his eyes, the ruffle of the air contrived to soothe him as he walked: nature’s grace, bestowed. Jonathan had once been a religious boy, his heart called to Jesus by a particularly beguiling priest at his Anglican boys’ school, a charismatic, who blazed with the spirit of the wondrous God capable of seeing through walls and witnessing everything that a masturbating thirteen-year-old boy did in the privacy of his own bed. Jonathan hadn’t been a believer for years, but he still had what he thought of as a deep streak of religiosity, a heart shaped for praising, a willingness to believe in the numinous cloud of unknowing.
Ahead, he saw a small girl drawing on the road in bright pink chalk. Straight away he knew it was the child, Giselle, who declared herself her Giselleness in the hopscotch drawing outside the new toilet block. Dare he say hello? It was so hard these days; cameras banned from school concerts and sports days because of paedophiles, or the fear of them. He still hadn’t decided whether to say hello or not when the child looked up, startled, quickly gathered up her chalks and ran away.
He watched her scuttling through the bushes and into the dark backyard of one of Gordie’s two rental properties. She was a tiny scrap of a thing, no bigger than thruppence, as Gordie might say. When he reached the spot where she had been drawing on the road, he looked down.
This is my class, 2A, he read. My best frend is ban. There was a picture of Ban (Ban? Perhaps he or she was Vietnamese?) with the same alarming curly hair as depicted on her own head. Do you lik my drawing?
She had drawn two crooked boxes, one containing the letter Y and the other containing the letter N, and beneath them, two further boxes, empty, with a pointing arrow and
a misspelled word, Ansa. Jonathan looked around for any remaining chalk but there was none. He kicked his sandal among the stones and little rocks, looking for a soft one, so that he might write his answer. The first he picked up was no good, nor the second, but finally he came upon a small rock of gluey, orangey clay.
Kneeling, he scratched a big fat tick under the box for Y. For good measure, he wrote out the word YES in large letters underneath, followed by three exclamation marks. He hoped it would be visible in the morning.
Sylv, stranded unsmiling behind the counter of the shop, watched him come in. She was not about to show that she was impressed by anyone or anything, and especially not by him. Rich, was he? Good-looking? Hadn’t his wife left him for a woman? He must be hopeless in the sack. She felt an agreeable prick of schadenfreude: ever since Jonathan had tried to charge her for using his empty house she had known him for exactly what he was. Besides, she knew something he didn’t know, and when he found out, he was not going to be happy.
‘No dogs allowed in the shop,’ she said.
‘And hello to you too, Sylv,’ he said. ‘Can’t you make an exception for Bites?’
‘No exceptions,’ she said, like the high-season rental charge on your bloody house.
He led the dog outside, telling her to wait. She may or may not be there when he came outside again.
‘Excellent work on the toilet block,’ he said. ‘Now where are you hiding the onions?’
‘Where they always are,’ she said.
He decided against making a crack about their price, found them, and took them to the counter. Two large onions might cost the best part of ten bucks and possibly more; Phil and Sylv held the village to ransom, knowing full well they were the sole traders everyone was forced to go to in an emergency. Sylv put them on the weighing machine, a fascinating exercise in the genius of human engineering; her chair placed just so, within reach of the swing of her huge right arm with its drooping sack of flesh, swinging, like a filled bag of sand. He was mesmerised.