It was an absurd question, but one I had considered many times myself. Robert and I had even discussed it years ago, before he clammed up completely. In my imagination, my mother’s afterlife was somehow tied up with the lake – not necessarily that the lake was the site of her death, but was her resting place, her hereafter. Of all of us, she had enjoyed the water the most and it was mainly due to her love of the lake that my father moved here when my brother was born. But I didn’t answer Leonora Bloom.
‘We used to place our dead in boats that would then be set on fire.’ She waved one hand out over the lake. ‘A burning boat drifting on the river in heavy fog. Imagine that.’
By we I gathered she meant the Vikings. I stared over the lake and out there, with late sunlight smashing off its surface, it was not hard to conjure such a scene. Yes. The flames gnawing on the timber, smoke, the craft sizzling as it capsized into the water. ‘But why did they burn everything?’
She seemed annoyed at such a prosaic query. ‘It helps the person get to heaven, of course. To the halls of Valhalla. You put all their really valuable stuff in it with them. You know, their swords and axes and armour and stuff. It’s a mark of respect. Eases the way. Maybe it’s also good for the relatives to get rid of all their stuff. All the reminders of them, I guess.’ She stared at me for a long while. ‘He was right about you. It’s almost like . . . I don’t know, like you have too much blood in you. You know, this is a . . . nasty little town. There are much better places. You should come with us when we move on.’
‘Go with you? Really?’
‘Sure. But you’d have to pass our test first. Like an initiation.’
‘What would I have to do?’
‘We can’t tell you unless you agree to it first.’
‘That’s stupid.’
‘Well. That’s the law. Our law.’
‘Is it hard?’
‘The test? Of course it’s hard. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a test, would it?’
I was excited by the invitation, off-hand as it was, and although I understood she wouldn’t divulge anything further about this initiation, I didn’t want the conversation to end yet; it was a rare moment of intimacy. ‘Where are you going anyway? After here, I mean.’
She stood up and turned to go, then hesitated. With a throw of her chin she indicated our house on the other side of the lake. ‘You still got some of your mother’s things over there? Like clothes and stuff. Jewellery? Anything like that?’
I nodded.
‘Cos we could do the burning boat thing with just her things, you know. As long as there’s a photo of the person. That’s still pretty useful. Why don’t you bring her stuff over here tomorrow.’
I immediately saw the rightness of this proposal, without question, as if an ill-shaped peg had finally, after many attempts, found its very own ill-shaped slot.
‘Is there anything ’specially valuable,’ she went on, ‘like rings or anything? Necklaces? Gold, of course. Anything made of gold is really good.’
But all I could manage to do was nod, for by this time I was crying so hard I was unable to speak.
Even in my half-sleep I knew that my father had entered my room, so when I opened my eyes, it was no surprise to find him sitting there in the darkness. He was sitting on my desk chair, which was much too small for him, so that he was hunched over, his body a tight little knot. A cigarette burned between the fingers of one hand and when he raised it to inhale, momentarily illuminating his features, he resembled a monster from a story book: frightening, pitiful, misunderstood. I could make out his beaky nose, his bruised eyes, the gleam of his high forehead and the silver streak in his fringe.
I remained silent, as if sleeping, but I longed to tell him something to relieve his anguish – but what? That I loved him? That Alice would be coming back, that she wouldn’t? That I was here – right here! – only a metre away from him, breathing in and out? Alive. How was a family supposed to be? Were they all like ours, bound by such darkness? In town I had observed other people’s families, fascinated at how they interacted, and it seemed so distant from my own experience that I might have been watching through my father’s binoculars; indeed, my own family members were like wild animals each living in their own habitats, occasionally crossing paths before slinking further away into the bush, as if ashamed of each other.
Idly, he picked up a piece of Lego from my desk and stared at it intently. My father took great interest in the world and could often be found inspecting an insect or flower in the garden, totally absorbed and yet alert to anyone’s approach, whereupon he might launch into an enthusiastic little speech: Fascinating, the way the bee moves. There. See that. You know they have a complicated social system whereby . . . And so, although very late, I half expected him to embark on a disquisition on the history of Lego as he sat at my desk turning over a little red brick in his hand. But he said nothing and I must have fallen asleep, for then it was morning.
We have come to a point in history, my father used to say, where expertise is no longer of the slightest use to us. Imagination is really what we need.
4
After school I went into my father’s bedroom and sat on the end of the bed. My brother was elsewhere. My father was at work. It was silent. Spooky and comforting. The bedsheets were very cold.
I thought about the counsellor I’d seen at school a few years ago, called Susan, who talked about closure and things like that. There had been nothing to mark my mother’s departure, and this was something Susan occasionally returned to over the course of our sessions; in fact, she had suggested our family perform some little ritual as a way of honouring her memory and hoping for the best. Like a prayer, I guess. I was noncommittal but said I would bring it up with my father and brother, although I never did; prayer, after all, is a kind of coal one hopes to coax into flame, but our coals had long ago turned to dust. In any case, we were unaccustomed to asking anyone, let alone God, for anything. Susan was pretty and I liked spending time with her, but I was never sure if I understood what she was talking about. She told me that things might make sense when I was older. Once, I asked her where she thought my mother might be and she sort of sagged in her seat before clearing her throat and straightening up. ‘Hmm. Where do you think she might be?’
Our mother disappeared when I was four years old and my recollections of her had faded almost to the point of invisibility, like the tiny spot on the TV screen that glowed long after it was turned off. At the edge of memory, I sometimes glimpsed a cigarette held out glamorously to the side of her mouth; cracked lips; I occasionally detected the bitter perfume of her hairspray. This was wishful thinking, of course. Police divers had dragged the lake, photos of her were stapled to lampposts, bulletins issued. Nothing. My father was initially a suspect – as husbands invariably are – and was still regarded with great suspicion among sections of the town.
We assumed she was dead or had run off with another man, that she was living in New Zealand or had simply walked into the forest until she collapsed – each of which seemed equally possible. After all, your parents have vast lives that you know nothing about, don’t they? At night, when you’re asleep, they might transform into lions or mermaids; perhaps they met travellers under the stars to exchange antique manuscripts? In any case our story was hardly unique; people disappeared all the time.
Some of my mother’s things were left as they were when she disappeared. Most of her clothes had been thrown out or given to charity, but a few items remained in the wardrobe. Dresses, blouses, several pairs of shoes. My mother took pride in her appearance; my parents’ bedroom still possessed the vague, chalky scent of her old cosmetics. Eyeliner, tweezers, a hair clip, each item furred with dust.
From the wardrobe I gathered her dresses and shoes and shoved them into a cardboard box. On the bedside table was a framed black-and-white photo of my mother taken in Paris in the late 1950s. I placed that in t
he box, too. Among the bits and pieces on the dresser was a jewellery box containing a pearl necklace she was wearing in the photograph, along with three rings that had belonged to her. I sorted through them. I chose carefully. Gold was best, the girl had said.
Hurrying now, as I feared my brother or father would return home at any minute and try to stop me, I put the box of my mother’s things into the bottom of the rowboat and set off for the other side of the lake.
Leonora Bloom must have seen me coming across because she was waiting for me on the far shore. She helped me beach the little boat and began rummaging through the box of my mother’s possessions, holding up clothes for inspection and tipping the jewellery out onto her palm. She rubbed the pearls of the necklace against her teeth, grunted with approval and put them back into the jewellery box.
‘This is pretty good. You’ve done well.’
I felt myself blush with pleasure. ‘There’s this, too. For the fire.’ I lifted a small, red can of kerosene from the boat and plonked it on the muddy beach.
Leonora Bloom approached me, placed a hand on each of my shoulders and looked down into my face. Her helmet was dented and one of the horns was askew but, rather than diminish her authority, it only served, in my eyes, to heighten it; in that moment she resembled a warrior, a goddess, a saviour. I believed in her utterly. She smiled at me so warmly that I feared I might cry again.
‘Leave these things with me,’ she said. ‘But come back tomorrow with the boat and we’ll do the ritual.’
‘But why not today? Now?’
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Today is not quite right. Come back tomorrow. Five o’clock. But not before then. I’ll have to get everything ready. Okay? Okay?’
Eventually I nodded. With her hands still upon my shoulders, she spun me around, steered me back to the boat, waited until I had climbed back in, and shoved me off. With my back to home as I rowed, I watched her grow smaller and less distinct. Then, when I was halfway across the lake she waved – almost wistfully, it seemed – turned and disappeared into the arboreal shadows with the box of my mother’s things.
5
Of course, Leonora Bloom wasn’t waiting for me when I returned the following day and although I knew searching would be fruitless, I nonetheless went through the demoralising little pantomime of making my way past the abandoned Datsun to the ramshackle settlement where she and Jesus and the others had been staying. There was no trace of anyone, merely signs they had once been there: empty soft-drink cans, old mattresses, cold ashes, a busted sandshoe. The cabins were empty of people and had acquired a sinister air of abandonment. I was relieved to scramble back to my boat by the lake. A light came on in my house on the opposite shore. My father was probably frying sausages and idly wondering where I was while my brother was lying stomach-down on his bed reading Asterix. In that moment, they seemed so far away they might have been mere memories.
I climbed into the moored boat and, with no one around to comfort or chastise me, I wept freely and for so long that when I was returned to myself it was almost dark. I felt hollowed out, as if my unshed tears had been my only sustenance. The trees and bushes on the other side of the lake had become indistinct. Insects fluttered about my face and frogs creaked in the nearby reeds. All those tears, I thought when I had finished. All my beautiful tears.
I was preparing to shove the boat back into the water and row homeward when something in the gloom caught my eye. It was the cardboard box in which I’d carried my mother’s stuff across. It was on its side beneath a pine tree. There were a few things still inside it. A green dress, a pair of red shoes and the photo of her in Paris, now crumpled and loose from its metal frame. Next to the battered box was the red canister of kerosene. It sloshed when I picked it up. Still full. At least they hadn’t taken that.
6
I found a lighter jammed down the back of one of the old couches at the camp site and scattered the few remaining items of my mother’s in the boat. Then I shook kerosene over it all. The smell was exciting, so strong and sweet and full of possibilities. I tossed my mother’s photo into the boat and then stood there for a long time, my face damp with tears and my jeans splashed with kerosene, before flicking the lighter’s wheel and setting its yellow spark to the fuel, which immediately exploded into flames.
The fire took hold of the boat and it wasn’t long before it had darted maniacally through the bushes and trees, growing larger, hemming me in against the shore until I was forced to retreat into the lake shallows for safety. Trees crackled and popped, bushes bloomed with fire and heat. I flinched, became disoriented, then slipped on the slimy rocks by the shore and fell into the water. Soon my toes couldn’t touch the bottom. My mouth filled with muddy water and I flailed and cried out but soon grew tired and it was with strange relief that I began to fall beneath the waters, as if I were being gradually drawn earthwards from a great height.
Overhead, flames shimmered on the lake’s surface, across that vast and blazing firmament, and soon I was floating among fish who eyed me curiously, this stranger in their realm, drawing right up to my face before flickering away. There were yabbies and eels suspended in the green and aqueous air, bits of plastic and paper, Coke cans, a figurine of a soldier on his knees firing a rifle. I drifted through the ruins of the old town, over its tiled roofs, the very tops of skeletal trees and old poles. I was no longer afraid. And it was then that I saw, or remembered seeing, my mother, walking dreamily, swinging her arms, her hair untidy as it almost always was. She looks more beautiful and more relaxed than I recall seeing before. I call out and try to reach her but any progress is difficult. There’s the current, the breeze. Finally she notices me, but her expression is not of gladness, as I might have hoped and expected but, rather, a sort of awkwardness, as if I had disturbed a private reverie. I hesitate, but eventually she smiles gamely. I wave and make to approach but sense my presence is not entirely welcome. Then my mother blows me a kiss, turns and continues serenely on her way. Soon she disappears. I am confused and dismayed. Around me the world is swirling. Dark the water, so deep the night. Bubbles and drift, the flavours of rust and mud in my mouth. I float aimlessly through the submerged town, past the bakery, a wheelbarrow, a bike on its side next to the bank. I see Mrs Jones in a tree, a girl playing with her doll, an elderly man wiping his nose. But then I sense my father’s hand in my own, his arm about my waist, and although I am unsure if we are swimming or flying, he drags me from that haunted town, its steeples and trees barely visible through the thick water, until I was borne, out of the flames, across the water, towards our home on that distant shore.
Where There’s Smoke
Incredible what you find without even looking. When I was about nine years old, I was kicking a football around in the back garden late in the afternoon. I was alone, as usual – or thought I was – and the day was nearly over. It was late autumn. The air was still blue and smoky from the piles of burning leaves in the neighbourhood gutters. Shooting for goal from an impossible angle, I watched my football bounce into a tangle of bushes beside the high wooden fence that bordered our neighbour’s house, and when I crawled in to retrieve it I discovered a woman crouching there, damp leaves stuck to her hair like a crown. She clutched her knees, which were bare and knobbly where her dress had ridden up. I was too stunned to say a word.
‘You must be Tom,’ she said.
I nodded. My scuffed football was on the ground behind her. ‘How did you know?’ I said when at last I found my voice.
She glanced up at the old house, at the lit lounge room window, warm as a lozenge in the gloom. Soon one of my sisters would draw the curtains and the house would be absorbed into the falling night, safe and sound against the cold and dark. Realising I was clearly not the sort of child to run screaming and tell everyone about finding a stranger in his backyard, she took a few seconds to adjust her position, which must have been quite uncomfortable. ‘Oh, I know lots of interesti
ng things about you.’
I heard Mrs Thomson singing to herself in her kitchen next door, the chink of cutlery being taken from a drawer. Having stopped running around, I was getting cold, and a graze on my elbow, from when I had fallen over on the bricks, began to sting.
‘I know that you love football,’ the woman went on, looking around as if assembling the information from the nearby air. ‘Aaaaand that you love Star Wars, that you’ve got lots of Star Wars toys and things. Little figurines, I guess you’d call them.’
This was true. I’d seen Star Wars four times, once with my dad and then with my friend Shaun and then twice at other kids’ birthday parties. In addition, I had a book of Star Wars, a model of an X-wing fighter, comics and several posters on my wall. The distant planet of Tatooine – with its twin suns, where Luke Skywalker had grown up – was more real to me than Darwin or the Amazon River.
I inspected the stranger more closely. She was pretty, with long hair, and freckles across her nose. She wasn’t as old as my mum, but maybe a bit older than my teacher at school, Miss Dillinger. It didn’t seem right that this woman was sneaking about in our garden and I was preparing to say something to that effect when she leaned forward, whispering, her red mouth suddenly so close I felt her breath on my ear. ‘I also know that it was you who broke Mr Anderson’s window last month.’
A chill seeped through me. Several weeks ago, Shaun and I were hitting a tennis ball around in his grassy garden when we discovered a much more interesting game: by employing the tennis racquets we could launch small, unripe lemons vast distances. Ones the size of golf balls were the best and, if struck correctly, would travel across several houses – maybe even as far as a kilometre, or so we imagined. With no one around we amused ourselves in this fashion until the predictable happened and we heard the smash of a distant window, followed by furious shouting that went on for several minutes. Terrified, only then cognisant of the possible outcomes of our game, we stashed the tennis racquets back in the shed, cleaned up the lemons and scurried inside to watch television and listen out for sirens or the blunt knock of a policeman at the front door. We heard later that the police were indeed summoned, but no one thought to question us about the damage because it happened so far from our houses and who would have dreamed we could throw lemons so far? Nothing was ever proven and he vehemently denied any involvement, but blame was sheeted home to an older kid called Glen Taylor, who lived closer to the Andersons and was known to be a troublemaker. This apparent escape didn’t stop me from dwelling on our crime most days, however, and even now, weeks later, the sight of a police car filled me with dread, with terrifying visions of handcuffs and juvenile detention.
A Lovely and Terrible Thing Page 11