At home I walked in circles saying over and over, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what the fuck more I can do.’ Frances was magnificent. She kept saying it wasn’t my fault. I had tried. Done my best. She bundled me into the car and we drove up Paradise Valley. There is a ghost town up there with lofty views out to sea. Here and there a gate swings on a broken latch. It swings until the long grass catches it, holds it briefly, then lets go. Once upon a time five thousand people lived up here. Main Street marched from A to B, gathering and collecting lives. My God, elections were held up here. Here, in the long wavering grass of Main Street, people in Paradise Valley voted for a smartly turned out fellow. His promises were made in a particular register. There were no visible signs of distress in his face when he said, ‘All this here in Paradise Valley, this here is our children’s future.’ Brave words, and yet on the other hand the future is always gilded with promise. It is the trophy on the mantelpiece with our name on it. The future is waiting for us to step up. All of us will be there when the roll-call takes place. Who would not vote for a man who spoke so ably about the future? And now, now that the future has been reined in, what do we find? Another experiment in living. Traces here and there. Scattered evidence. The Historical Society has been active. You can tramp around in the long fairy grass and stumble over the foundations where once there stood a Bank of Australasia, a drapery, a colliery, a school, a church; forget-me-nots still come up each spring faithfully tracing the plots of the dead. Once upon a time people had been happy to be buried there. Here and there photo displays are posted across the paddocks—put up by the Historical Society—of dolls, toys, clothes of an abandoned wardrobe. Traces of life lived. Offcuts of material and shadow.
When Frances and I got out of the car and wandered around, me in my benumbed state, we stopped by a photo of a woman dressed top to toe in black on the steps of a store and in her eyes I saw the look that had plagued us from Day One—life is elsewhere. Life is always elsewhere. I could see it in the woman’s eyes, there, scored against the dead walls of her eyes the thought that in the morning she will break the news to the man who is taking her photograph that she is leaving this place. You can see by the backs of her eyes that she has already left. She is planning her way out of Paradise. She has seen the future. Tomorrow morning, when she wakes up she will break the news to her husband.
I found myself unusually affected by this woman’s face and its pessimism. So much so that when Frances sat me down on the grass and stroked my knee and proposed, ‘You know, Harry, we could always leave,’ I heard myself say, ‘Nope. I’m staying.’
Frances, bless her, kissed me on the cheek.
Late the next morning I caught up with Guy on the matter of the polar bear. As soon as he shambled in the door I knew he’d driven here with the bear on his mind and how he would explain it to Harry. Now he circled defensively, saying, ‘It seemed like a good buy,’ and although my intention was to be patient, since I had woken up in that kind of mood, I found myself asking the obvious question, ‘And what do you suppose is a good price for a stuffed polar bear?’
Guy shrugged and looked hurt. He said he thought I would be pleased. And why would that be? Because, he said, as far as he knew and I should correct him if this wasn’t the case, there had never been a stuffed polar bear in Pre-Loved Furnishings & Other Curios.
He was correct. There hadn’t been a polar bear and soon, I hoped, there would be none. I told him he’d have to phone up the owner of the bear and get them to come in and pick it up. I saw him inwardly wince at the thought of having to disappoint someone. I had no idea what he could have been thinking. A polar bear for Christsakes. But then I wouldn’t be the first to notice he hadn’t been the same since Caloundra fell through, and I’d heard it from Kath that for a while after their setback he started daydreaming again and rekindling the old idea to manufacture children’s footwear.
Despite the business with the bear and Guy, I was in a good mood as I drove out to pick up Alma. This morning he was waiting at the bottom of his drive for me. As soon as he got in the car he handed me a photocopy of a sketch. He said, ‘I saw this and immediately thought of you.’ It was Schiele’s The Artist and His Model.
In the sketch there are three elements—a mirror, the model and the artist, Schiele, himself, looking on with vampiric interest at the naked upright figure of his model. Schiele has the rear view. The mirror has the front view. In the mirror we see the perky tuft of pubic hair, a look of high disdain on the model’s face, and further back the artist sitting on an apple box, a sketchpad on his knee. ‘The artist,’ explained Alma now, ‘sometimes finds himself divided between the woman on his left and the one on his right, the one who is sitting for him, and the other one that is emerging on paper. There is a third woman which is really of no use to anyone. It is the one in the artist’s mind. The idealised woman. She neither breathes nor speaks. She does not live except in his mind. So it is useful when you draw to keep your eyes and full attention on the subject before you.’
I had to smile and yet at the same time I didn’t feel like explaining Ophelia, how we met, or confessing to the thinly grounded experience from which her substance had grown to preoccupy me. I did tell him about trying to draw Frances the previous night, and he asked me if she’d demanded to see it. Looking straight at the road, and older than Methuselah, Alma said, ‘They always do that.’
There are times when all the years he’s lived congregate in his face and his eyes blink impatiently at what is before him. Out at the Eliots’ there was another moment like that when we found Violet tiptoeing around the cottage with a raised broom ready to strike. She explained she’d seen a rat. Alma’s shoulders appeared to stoop and his head advance on this ancient information, and again there was that concentration of years in his face, a complexion like white dust, red-eyed, crumbled skin.
For the second time in a row the modelling session was far from satisfactory. In anticipation of our arrival Violet had put down the twins. The cottage was quieter too, quieter for our nervous whispering. And we spent a few minutes rearranging where she would sit and playing with the light. But we couldn’t get Violet to sink fully into herself and properly relax. Her head was cocked ready for distraction and even when asked to look directly ahead, her eyes appeared to turn corners.
Her expectations were duly met. The cries of Jackson and Crystal travelled up the hall. Their mother groaned and slapped the floor. She started to get up but Alma rather curtly told her to stay put. The look was still there, although it was in danger of drawing attention to itself. Child and adult swilled back and forth in Violet’s face.
She made a move to get up and again Alma told her to be still. There was just the dashing sound of pencil and paper and the enraged cries of Violet’s babies from the hall. Poor Violet looked more and more distressed. And when Alma flipped a page over and held up a hand to show he wasn’t finished she looked to me for help.
I got up and walked down the hall to the bedroom. When they saw me the bundled red faces stopped their bawling and gaped up at the stranger’s face. I had two to three seconds in which to do something. I picked up a music box and wound on the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’. They listened to that, their black eyes glistening up at me. ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’ finished and I wound it up again. This was easy enough. The Eliot twins listened. The third time I began winding they started to twist inside their bundled nappies and cry. In
a few seconds I heard running feet. Violet came in and scooped them up.
In the sitting room Alma was packing his gear. He put his money under a saucer and I put mine there as well. I poked my head into the hall and called out, ‘We’re off!’ Alma was already out the door. As we went down the side of the house Violet came to the window with her babies, one pressed against each shoulder. She looked scared so I gave her a reassuring wink.
Alma was already in the car, strapped in, sullen. When I got in he said, ‘This isn’t working. You’re going to have to find that Dean kid. Get him to babysit. Otherwise we’re wasting our time.’
17
Dean had got into the habit of sitting in the Garden of Memories. He liked it there, surrounded by flowerbeds, and it was amazing how often someone would turn up and come and sit next to him. If you sat there still enough, the world would wash up and share itself in unexpected ways. And he had to admit it beat lying inside that wheel-less house truck; for all the painted landscape it didn’t really do much for him. It didn’t talk back. He didn’t come away from it better for the experience.
Yesterday he’d been sitting there in the same seat as he sat now, when a man of indeterminate age had wandered through the gates. A hawklike face had poked into different corners of the gardens and then, on seeing him, had set off in his direction, an old-fashioned leather bag swinging at his side. At a distance the man’s clothes had been deceptive. They had made Dean think the man was younger than he turned out to be. He wore a white cheesecloth shirt with loose coloured threads of the kind that hang from sails of yachts to measure wind speed, a black jerkin, glossy bits of it catching and shining in the sun, black jeans and black boots. His hair was jet black. Too black to be real, he saw as the man came nearer, and then, a deeply wrinkled neck, a turtle’s neck, heavily tanned, a face the same colour, sun-split and crossed a hundred different ways.
He pointed to the space next to Dean just as that other fellow Dougie had, and because that meeting had led to a job Dean thought, hell, this could be another opportunity. So he moved over for the man to sit down.
It was only as he lowered himself that Dean was able to see that the man was a whole lot older than he first had thought, and that probably he didn’t have loose coinage in those tight frayed pockets anyway, but again what the hell, he had committed to this end of the bench.
The man felt the slats under him and only then did he risk the rest of his skinny body and lean back to allow the park bench to collect him fully. His beaky face made another investigation and glancing around, said how much everything had changed; it was deader than he remembered. It was smaller too; he had been expecting that since he’d been living in Queensland all these years and he’d still be there but for a death in the family.
Dean said he was sorry and asked who. The man’s gums trembled a bit when he said it was his stepson, Dean, strictly speaking. And Dean had thought, no, this was like hearing he was dead. This was like getting late news of one’s own death. And he’d blurted out halfway through the man explaining who this Dean was, blurted out that his own name was Dean. At which point the man turned and stared at him a full minute, at the end of which he said, ‘No kidding.’ And, ‘How many Deans do you reckon there are in the world, Dean?’ He dropped his eyes to his thighs. He said his Dean had no legs, and more sarcastically, ‘So you must be all right. You must be alive, Dean.’
Eventually after that unpromising start they had warmed to each other. He asked how come this Dean, the man’s Dean, this half-son of his, this stepson, had no legs, and the man told him it had happened in the war, though he didn’t say much about that. He said, ‘He was lucky to have lived as long as he did given the amount he drank and smoked.’ At this point the man had extended his hand and said, ‘My name’s George, by the way.’ And Dean had seen no point in repeating what was already known but did so to be friendly.
‘I’m Dean,’ he said, and the man said, ‘Still?’ And they had a laugh over that.
That’s when he’d pointed down at George’s bag and asked him what he had in there and George said, ‘Oh, I’m collecting stories of human daring and folly. The whole shooting works in there.’ And he tapped the top of his bag.
‘Like what?’
‘Like what?’ the man repeated as if it was an obvious question but one he’d put up with in the interests of friendship. ‘Well, let’s see, like whatever you want to hear. Whatever you’d like to capture.’
That seemed a strange thing to say. Whatever you’d like to capture.
Not everything had fur and feathers or scales on it. Dean had to think about it, but after a while he’d gone with it and asked, ‘Capture anything?’
‘Anything. Sure.’
‘Absolutely anything?’
‘Try me.’
Warming to his task, Dean had glanced up at the landscape and said the first thing that came to mind.
‘A hill.’
‘A hill. That’s a good one. Well, in total I have in this bag about fifty descriptions of how to capture a hill.’ The man closed his eyes while he thought for a moment. ‘Okay, here we go. The first thing is and this is important…’
‘Yeah,’ said Dean.
‘…first, turn your back. Don’t let it know that you are interested.’
‘Well, that makes sense,’ Dean said, playing along.
‘Next,’ said the man. ‘In due course follow the track to the summit and keep climbing to where the mountain narrows to a point no larger but small enough to enclose your arms around it. Make sure your fingers touch—you don’t want the damn thing slipping out and making a fool of you.’
‘Hell no,’ said Dean. He could have laughed at that point but something in the man’s manner prevented him.
‘And be sure to use your legs when standing up. No point putting your back out.’
‘Right again,’ he said.
‘Mountain safety is everything. For example, you’re at the top, scratching your head, it’s getting late in the day and you’re liable to think, bugger me. What I want to say is this. Stay calm. Do not panic. Remember you are the one with the brain. You are the adult in this situation. The hill will still be there in the morning.’
Now Dean had to laugh and the man he was relieved to see didn’t take it personally. Not at all. He had a way of laughing and nodding himself.
‘What else?’
‘Well, there is a mountain in a northern country that stands on the edge of a plain. Think of a man lying on his back, his head raised high enough to see his big toe. The mountain can see you coming when you’re still a day’s walk away. Its gaze is said to be unendurable. Of all the hill stories I have collected I have to say this is the one I like least. My favourite hill stories tend towards the heroic end of things, or ease the pain.’
‘Like?’
‘Like,’ he said, closing his eyes to think. ‘Perhaps this will do. When Dean, our Dean, was hit by leukemia he lay in bed dreaming to see a hill again. He’d decided in his final days that he wanted to look upon a hill. It was a special request. He wanted me to bring a hill to his bedside window. Not an ordinary request, granted, but there is a history to do with this that I won’t go into. Anyway, within a day I had it worked out. In the
morning I came into his room and told him I’d done what he’d asked. I told him, “I only got it as far as the drive. But this afternoon, by four or five, you will see its shadow cast in your window.” So later that day I got my wife Victoria to switch on the Holden headlights to high beam and train them on a big triangular-shaped piece of ply. With some juggling and manoeuvring of ply and headlight eventually we got the distance right and the shadow of the hill settled into the bedroom window of my crippled war veteran stepson.’
Dean replied, ‘That’s a sad one,’ and the man thought for a moment.
‘There’s sad and then there is sad. I’ve got one, a true story, as it happens, where the capture of a hill was passed off as a grand gesture of love. But I don’t have time to tell that one.’ With that he glanced at his watch and stood up in that way of the elderly, as if they have forgotten how. And after the man had gone Dean sat there a while thinking that this was one way of experiencing new things, one way of feeling the world in all its changing texture and behaviour, to have it come up and rub against you in all its many guises. And best of all you could do that just by sitting still and silly as a tulip.