by Simon Cleary
Events are running away from her, whatever the hell is actually happening. Phelan collapsing, a campaign of some sort being mounted against him. Against them. They’ve got to get ahead of it, whoever’s agenda, whatever campaign. She’s got to understand it, find a way to push back, to somehow quench it before it becomes an inferno no one can stop.
‘Bec,’ she says into the phone, ‘it’s serious. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Come,’ her friend says.
Before Penny leaves she looks at him sitting on the back steps, his head fallen, resting awkwardly on a timber post, a stiffening breeze lifting the collar of his shirt and pressing it against his neck.
‘James,’ she says, coming to him, her hand on his shoulder, ‘I’m going to Bec’s for an hour.’
He doesn’t move, doesn’t respond. She could stay with him, she could. But there’s no time to lose. From the linen cupboard she brings out a silk sheet, wraps it around his shoulders, kisses him.
‘An hour,’ she says. ‘Do you hear me?’
The wind picks up. A thin branch from the Cadagi snaps and falls to the ground, and Phelan stirs. For a long time he looks out at the gathering western dark, listening to the voices in the wind. When he finally rises he is purposeful. He finds the envelope where Penny left it in the kitchen and returns to the back steps with it, and another bottle of Dewar’s. He slugs at the whiskey. The house is dark. Phelan fortifies himself in the moonlight.
The silhouette of the giant Norfolk pine glows strangely in the back of the property, dwarfing him, the house, everything. How the tree sways in the wind. How it strains and whispers. How it bends and does not break. He thinks about the family who had the place before them and how they used to string Christmas lights up the tree every year, the sixty-year-old woman climbing its branches to the very top where she’d fix a great white star, visible for miles.
He takes another slug, but when he goes to put the bottle down he misjudges and it hits the wooden step hard, bounces from his grasp and clatters onto the brick paving. As the liquor bleeds out, filling the channel between two bricks, Phelan lunges towards the bottle but trips and falls drunkenly down the stairs himself. His heart pounds as he sits on his arse on the hard ground. He finds the bottle and grips it fiercely in his hand, grips it till his knuckles begin to ache. He hears magpies quarrelling out in the night, or believes he does, and thinks he sees movement in the pine as it bends and glows in the beautiful moonlight, the stars appearing and disappearing between its wind-whipped branches.
He suddenly remembers the envelope and the photos and Beckett tells him it doesn’t need to be like this. His knees creak as he rises from where he fell, or is that the Norfolk pine shifting in the wind?
He searches for matches in the pantry, feels for them in the dark, before returning to the deck. He squats before the barbecue and turns the wheel of the gas bottle, then the knobs on the burners, one two three. The gas hisses. But what does it say? He doesn’t light it immediately. The gas is cold and smooth against his cheek, surprisingly pleasant. He strains to hear the message in its rushing. Only when he coughs and then gags, does he remember what he needs to do, and he strikes the match and there is a great whoosh of flame. Some part of him burns – the hair on his hands or his eyebrows or the back of his neck. Pah!
He turns the gas up until there are three rushing flames, each pushed sideways by the wind, three tongues leaning in unison, reaching forward, then flicking back, before leaning again, his little dancing fires. He reaches for the envelope and, listening hard, takes out the photos and tosses them onto the flames, one by one, watches them catch and burn. He nods his head, good, then adds the envelope and it too goes up.
But the flames are hungry and so is he. Phelan hurries inside, Beckett no longer directing him now, and into his office. When he returns it is with two boxes in his arms. He lays them beside the barbecue and goes back inside for another load, backwards and forwards, load after load, photos and certificates and letters and manuals. Uniforms and framed degrees. Histories and commentaries.
Phelan feeds them to the flames, piling them, creating a stack, tipping the boxes upside down, nearly smothering the flames. But this is not a night for suffocating, and his teetering pyre takes, and then burns, a great flame rising to the rafters above the covered deck, licking at them. He steps away, driven back by the heat, driven off the deck and down the steps and onto the back lawn where he stands and watches. The embers begin to swirl, flying from the deck into the house itself. Fireworks in the pond. Pages from his military memoirs shriek and catch and blow. The wind is howling now, the fire is howling, his blood is surging, yelping and singing.
He feels water at his ankles and looks down, startled. The water is too dark to see, too cold, but he knows he is in an endless irrigation ditch and feels it sloshing around his feet, rising. It would pull him under. He carries a garden chair to the base of the Norfolk pine, and steps up, reaching for the low branch and swinging his legs up till he stands there, part of the tree, and he climbs, branch by branch, away from the dank water, the drowning ditch.
He is birdman, he is possum, he is ancient cat. Higher he climbs, higher and higher, and when he can climb no further he sits and hugs the trunk, safe from the rising tides, the city and this burning house singing up to him, a lullaby to freedom.
Part Three
Blindfolded
Great Dividing Range, February 2016
The blindofld hurts. He shifts in his seat and stretches his stiffening neck, twisting one way, then the other. Neither of them has spoken for a long time, but it is not quiet and he is not worried – he’s had the car’s engine as company, the constant rumbling of tyres on road, the steady breathing of the Border Collie at his feet, and he is getting better at controlling the anxiety when it comes. If the blindfold hadn’t begun to hurt he’d be almost content.
She stops at a fork in the road. Phelan’s dog raises its head then clambers onto his lap to see where they are, and Phelan reaches involuntarily for the knot at the back of his head. He’s been blindfolded since Brisbane, two hours.
‘Not yet!’ Penny says. ‘It’s not far now. It’ll be worth it when we get there, James. Trust me.’
Phelan inhales quickly, his nostrils flaring like those of his snorting boyhood ponies, before releasing the spent air through his teeth, hissing it. Yes, he thinks, it’s not far to go at all.
‘Left,’ he says to her. ‘Take the left fork, Pen.’
‘All right,’ she says, humouring him. ‘It’s fifty-fifty, and you could be right.’
But he’s not guessing.
Penny pulls the car to the left and takes the graded road as it follows the northern side of the ridge. The dog yelps excitedly and Phelan keeps the window down, his head cocked. The sound of the tyres on the corrugations is regular, soothing. He knows Penny will be concentrating, scrutinising the country on either side for markers, trying to make sense of the directions she’s been given, desperate not to miss the final turn-off.
Phelan is awash in memory. There will be barbed-wire fences accompanying them on either side of the road, the long fence line broken intermittently by timber gates. They will pass a dam in a hollow to the north, its shrinking eye of water dark brown in the midday sun. Further along, on the southern side of the road, he remembers where a farmer used to park his tractor beneath a giant Moreton Bay Fig. He imagines the farmer – older now – sitting beside his tractor, his back leaning against the fig’s trunk, his thermos beside him, inspecting them as they pass by. The road rises gradually as it skirts the northern side of a hill. They pass through the mottled shade of a corridor of gums before the road descends, a little more steeply, to the foot of the next hill.
‘Twin children were murdered by their mother on one of these properties,’ Phelan says, turning his blindfolded face to her, before leaning back out the window.
‘So you think you’ve work
ed it out?’
He doesn’t reply, says instead, ‘On the right-hand side, somewhere around here, there used to be a potter’s workshop.’
Phelan feels the car slow. Waits. Penny reads aloud the name of the studio from the slab of ironbark hanging near the gate. ‘Members of the Public Welcome. No Appointments Necessary’, she finishes. ‘Well then, congratulations. You may as well take off the blindfold.’
‘Not yet,’ he replies. ‘It’s not too far now. On the left, we should come to stockyards.’ He pauses. ‘It’s amazing,’ he says, shaking his head to himself. ‘Nothing has changed.’
But everything has changed.
She used to count her losses. A breast, a house, a husband – the husband she once had anyway – his career, their life. Everything.
There has been so much time for counting losses, so much waiting, thinking. For doctors, for medication to take effect, in hospital wards waiting for him to wake. Or sleep. He’d sit in front of the television at one of their rented houses, and she’d wait for his leg to stop shaking before placing a tray of food in his lap. Or she’d wait until some rage that had come over him blew itself out. Slow her own walking pace to his after forcing him out of the house for fresh air and exercise. Waiting for the clock to run down on a shift at work, sometimes because she was anxious to get home to him, others because she couldn’t bear the shift to end.
For a long time, in conversation with friends or even people she’d just met, she’d talk about ‘before the fire’ and ‘after the fire’, a way of making sense of what was happening to her. Then, after a year or two, more brutally, more honestly, nothing left to protect, she changed it to, ‘Before James’s breakdown’ and ‘Since his breakdown’. Even on her good days, upbeat as she could be, the formula of words was freighted with resignation. On bad days, despair.
It was Bec who suggested rebuilding her library. ‘It’s something the girls want to do for you Penny Love. You just write out the list and then leave it to us!’
Bec bought her a notebook for the task. Partly, of course, it was a project to distract her. Dear Bec, darling Bec.
And it did for a while. She conjured an image of the library in her mind. So much of it was startlingly clear. She could walk along its length in her memory, picturing the spines of the books – the text of the titles, those with designs that wrapped from the front cover around the spine to the back, the undulations in size, the way some books rested snugly against their neighbours while others seemed to lean away. Instinctively she knew the task of cataloguing her collection was not one to rush, and that she’d need to linger over the exercise. She divided the notebook into sections, headings under which she’d record the titles. Years, with sub-headings beneath marking out the events of her life.
The simple act of writing out the name of a title in her notebook was enjoyable, a little moment of careful creation – or recreation – when her swirl of recollection became even more tangible and fell into order. The year her book club read nothing but titles with women’s names, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and Carrie, their various tastes, the pleasure of listing them now. She smiles when she recalls their argument over whether the titularly anonymous The French Lieutenant’s Woman counted. But greater than that enjoyment was what remembering gave and how it allowed you to disappear into other times, transport you to other places. Doubly transported, she thinks – first to the time of reading, then to wherever her memory of the book delivered her. Provincial France, St Petersburg. As far from life after the fire, after James’s breakdown, as she could get.
Yet there were books she’d forgotten, or seemed to have. In her mind’s library she could see the gap on the shelf. It was almost as if someone had taken the unremembered book from its home and not yet returned it. She’d wrack her memory, searching for triggers – dates, events – retrieving her experience of reading the books either side of the forgotten title, trying to step back into a feeling she might have had while starting the next book, attempting to detect an echo of the missing volume. The time she alternated between George Johnston and Charmian Clift, My Brother Jack followed by Clift’s Mermaid Singing then Clean Straw for Nothing and Peel Me a Lotus. But the third of Johnston’s trilogy won’t come to her. She writes down the Clift she read next, Honour’s Mimic, but for the life of her Johnston has disappeared.
‘How’s that list going?’ Bec would ask.
‘Getting there,’ Penny would reply. ‘Getting there.’
Occasionally she could prompt her way back to a lost book. But often, no matter what she tried, she couldn’t retrieve it. At least not immediately. Because that’s not how time and memory work. Sometimes a missing title would return to her as she lay in bed, sometimes in the shower, sometimes triggered by a word she read in a magazine or a patient’s history – nursing a blind man bringing Oedipus Rex back to mind, that sort of thing – and she’d reach for the notebook, and jot it down lest it disappear again.
As upsetting as it was when she was unable to fill a gap in the shelves of her memory, more distressing was realising there were books whose existence she’d forgotten entirely. Books that didn’t even occupy an empty space in her mind’s library, books that had no relationship with the ones before or after, books that had completely disappeared. Of course, she was only aware of this forgetting when one of them suddenly returned to her, unbidden. It was like she’d been struck. Oh, no! Oh, no! Even then – the book revealed, the unreliability of her memory exposed – she often still couldn’t put it into its proper place, couldn’t remember whether it was a birthday gift or read for the book club. It unsettled her that an order she thought existed, didn’t.
How many more such books are there? she thought, how many more she’d never remember? Surely, in the months after her diagnosis, she’d read more than just the three cancer memoirs she’s written into her notebook. Had her own experience of the disease wiped all the others out? So the list stalled, and, ultimately, remained unfinished. Why recall a past if it’s doomed to be incomplete, false? Why continue a futile quest? Start again, she thinks, better just to start again, start from here.
‘That’s crazy, Penny Love,’ Bec said.
‘I’m sorry, Bec. The library was such a lovely idea. Please, don’t be disappointed.’
‘Well come on then,’ Bec said, rising from the café table they were sitting at, taking both their bags.
‘Where?’
‘If you want to start afresh, then let’s start.’
In the bookshop, Bec says, ‘Just one, Penny. Start with one. Just start. Now.’
‘You choose, Bec.’
‘No, Love. You can do it.’
Penny looks around her, the shelves overfull with books jostling against one another, competing for her attention. But it is silence she seeks. Just as she is about to back away it comes to her that a gardening guide is what she needs, and Oakman’s Tropical and Subtropical Gardening is the nearest to her reach.
He is growing impatient now. The sun-bleached railings of the cattle yards must be just ahead, partially camouflaged in the shadows cast by the canopies of two stately gums. Pale grass will be growing high around the outside of the yards.
Sure enough, Penny says, ‘Stockyards ahoy.’
‘The turn-off is to the left,’ Phelan confidently replies, ‘immediately after the yards. It’s a hard left.’
As he feels the car slow and swing north around the stockyards he remembers discovering a wallaby trapped inside the race, and how it had thrashed against the rails, staggering and leaping and crashing its shoulders in great resounding thuds against the timber. He’d tried to comfort the poor creature, but it had misunderstood, and as he neared threw itself against the yards even more violently. How close they’d been, a mere railing between them. Its frothing mouth, its bleeding ear, the way it had looked at him, the terror in its eyes before eventually finding the gate they’d opened for it.
&
nbsp; ‘We’re on a spur now,’ he says, as if she is the blind one. ‘We’re almost there.’
The track deteriorates. Deep corrugations slash diagonally across the roadway where rains or heavy vehicles have worried away the earth. Fallen branches and dry leaf litter fill the crude earthen gutters on either side. They follow the spur north as it rises to a crest up ahead.
‘When we get to the top of the ridge,’ Phelan says, ‘can we stop?’
Penny pulls over as the ridge levels off. Before them the spur falls away and widens into a plateau.
‘Wow,’ she says, ‘wow.’
Phelan lets himself go now. His fingers struggle furiously to untie the knot behind his head, and when finally he manages it, he tears the cloth off and throws it to the floor. The light, after his blind hours, is staggeringly bright, needle-sharp against his eyes. He groans and shades them with his hands and blinks wildly, but still it hurts. Penny takes his sunglasses from the glovebox and hands them to him. He opens the door for the dog, and after composing himself, climbs out and stands looking ahead to the view at the end of the road. It catches in his gut.
To the north and east the plateau falls away over a steep escarpment which is nothing less than the rim of the Great Dividing Range itself, beyond which sky and air and the floors of wide valleys sweep towards the sea 150 kilometres away. On the western edge of the plateau a series of gullies cut into the earth, dropping in ragged terraces before falling out of view into a deeply shaded ravine. On the other side of the ravine is another spur, running parallel to theirs, and beyond that is another, bony fingers of stony earth clawing at the surface of the planet.
Closer, right in front of them, at the end of the road’s final downhill stretch, Phelan sees the roofline of the ‘Big House’ of his childhood, the high pitch and the long sheets of corrugated iron and the three chimneys, the house itself obscured by the row of pencil pines on the garden boundary, shielding it from the southerlies.