The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  But once inside the corner room that they both now thought of as theirs—where the French doors with their corroding hinges and rusting lock creaked open onto the ocean and the ceaseless light across the road, where the room smelt of the sea and the air seemed to dance, there, where all things seemed possible—she knew she wasn’t. She had arranged some ice and two bottles of beer for him, but in spite of the ferocious heat they were unopened when she arrived.

  Dorrigo Evans pointed to the green Bakelite clock on the mantelpiece. Though the minute hand had at some unknown point disappeared from its face, the hour hand showed he had been waiting there for three hours past the time she had said she would come.

  I had to wait till the day staff were gone, she said. Until it was safe for me to come here unnoticed.

  Who’s left?

  Two barmaids, the head barman, the cook. Milly, the waitress. None of them ever come upstairs.

  There doesn’t seem to be anyone staying here.

  Not tonight. I had all the bookings put in the two floors below so it’s only us up here.

  They went out onto the deep-set verandah and sat on the rusty iron furniture and shared a bottle of beer.

  You’re a great punter, Dorrigo said, acccording to Keith.

  Ha, Amy said. Look at those birds. And she pointed to where sea birds would suddenly drop like dead things into the ocean. She went over to the wrought-iron balustrade; all its paint had long flaked away, leaving only an ochre dust. She ran a hand over its gritty oxide, red as old rock.

  Keith reckoned you’d have the gun tip, Dorrigo said.

  The birds would rise back up, whiting in their beaks. Amy pinched the sandy rust between her fingertips. She turned her gaze to the long beach, which ran for some miles till it reached an ancient eroded headland, bare of all but the hardiest scrub. Her head seemed full of distant things. He went to take her hand but she pulled it away.

  Keith said that?

  He said you always know the track and the field and the weights and the best bet.

  Ha, she said, and went back to her own thoughts. From the street below, the noise of a dog yapping startled her. She looked around uneasily.

  It’s him, she said, and he could hear panic rising in her voice. He’s come back a day early. I have to go, he’s—

  It’s a big dog, said Dorrigo. Listen. A big dog. Not a mutt like Miss Beatrice.

  She went quiet. The barking stopped, a man’s voice—not Keith’s—could be heard speaking to the dog, and then was gone. After a time she spoke up.

  I hate that dog. I mean, I like dogs. But he lets it up on the table after we’ve eaten. With its obscene tongue leaping out like some awful snake.

  Dorrigo laughed.

  And slobbering, panting away, said Amy. A dog on a table? Can you imagine it?

  Every meal?

  Can I tell you something? Just you?

  Of course.

  It’s not about Miss Beatrice—and you can never tell anyone.

  Of course.

  You promise?

  Of course.

  Promise!

  I promise.

  She came back into the shadowed cave of the verandah and sat down. She took a sip of beer, then a long draught, put the glass down, glanced up at him and back at the beaded glass.

  I was pregnant.

  She was looking at her fingers, rubbing the now damp rust sand between their tips.

  To Keith.

  You’re his wife.

  This was before. Before we were married.

  She halted and craned her head around, as if searching for someone else along that long, shadowed verandah. Finally satisfied there was no one, she turned back to him.

  Which is why we married. He just didn’t—this sounds so terrible—he just didn’t think it was right to have a baby out of wedlock. You understand?

  Not exactly. You could have married. You did marry.

  He’s a good man. He is. But—when I got pregnant—he didn’t want to marry. And I did. To protect the baby. I didn’t—

  She halted again.

  Love him. No. I didn’t. Besides.

  Besides what?

  You won’t think me a bad woman?

  Why?

  Wicked? I am not wicked.

  Why? Why would I think such a thing?

  Because I said I was going to Melbourne to see the Cup. I said to people I always went. Well, I was new here, what did they know? But—

  But you didn’t go.

  No. Not that. I went. But I also—

  Her fingers were moving quickly, trying to rub the rust off. Abruptly, she wiped them on the side of her dress, leaving a red smear.

  I also went to see a man—a doctor—in Melbourne that Keith had arranged. Keith said it was the best way to deal with it. It was November. Well. He fixed it.

  A silence opened up that not even the crashing waves could fill.

  I never had a skerrick of interest in horses, said Amy.

  But you picked Old Rowley to win the Cup. One hundred to one. You must know something.

  I picked him because he was one hundred to one. I picked him to lose. I half expected him to be put down at the starting gate. I picked him because I hate the bloody Cup. I hate everything about it.

  She stood back up.

  I don’t want to talk about it out here.

  They went inside and lay on the bed. She rested her head on his chest, but it was too hot and after a time she moved away and they lay side by side with only their fingertips touching.

  He sat there—Keith, I mean. Keith sat there with Miss Beatrice in his lap and said he had arranged a man in Melbourne to look after me. A man. What does that mean? A man?

  For a moment this question seemed to absorb her, then she spoke again.

  And he patted his dog. I never hated anything like I hated that dog. He wouldn’t touch me, but there he was, patting and stroking that dog.

  So what happened?

  Nothing. I went to see a man in Melbourne. He just kept stroking and cooing at his bloody dog.

  20

  THE OCCASIONAL ROAD and beach noises far below were swept up and swirled around by the ceiling fan’s blades as it slowly shucked time. He found he was listening to her breathing, to the waves, to the clock on the mantelpiece. At some point he realised Amy’s head was back on his chest and she had fallen asleep; at another that he too was asleep with her. The curtain yawned in as the late-afternoon sea breeze picked up, and with it the heat fell away and there came puffs of the smoky light of dusk. When next he stirred, he realised it was night and the lamp was on and Amy was awake, looking at him.

  But after that? he whispered.

  After what?

  After the man in Melbourne?

  Oh. Yes, she said, and halted and looked up at the ceiling or perhaps beyond it. It was a look at once of puzzlement and resignation, as though she expected the world to always come back to this mysterious place on the ceiling or in the stars beyond. Yes, she said several more times, still looking up. Finally, she looked back down at him.

  I had to pretend I went to Melbourne for the race. I boned up on horses and betting and the like. Maybe I even got a little interested. It was something to think about, I suppose. And after, I didn’t care. It was like the horses. I just pretended. I don’t know. Anyway, that’s why I have a little flutter now and then.

  And Keith?

  When I came back he was kind. So kind. I suppose he felt guilty. And I was so upset. And he wanted to marry me, even though there was no longer a baby—maybe to make it up. Maybe he was more ashamed than me. I don’t know.

  And you fell in love?

  Just fell. Everything was snow. In my head. Have you ever had that feeling? You have a world and then all your thoughts have turned into snow. Keith was so kind and I was snow. Maybe I was ashamed. Maybe I just thought I was dirt. I did think I was dirt. I know I didn’t want to be a spinster. Maybe I thought we could make it right. Get pregnant again. And this time make it
right. But it was all wrong. I hated him for his kindness. I hated him until he hated me back. He said I’d tricked him into marriage. And somehow that seemed as it should be. He said I tricked him, that I did dreadful things and that’s why the pregnancy. Maybe he doesn’t really think it now. But sometimes things are said and they’re not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence. You tricked me, he said, and that’s why the marriage. There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

  Amy lay on her side as she gazed out towards the sea. Lying at her back, he felt jealous of her pillow. They lay silently together for a long time. With a finger he swept the hairs that fell across her face behind her ear. The shape of its shell always moved him. He felt a terrible vertigo, as if he were being swept into a gigantic maelstrom that had no ending. The green Bakelite clock was reduced to its phosphorescent arm and numbers, a ghostly floating circle that seemed now to hover above them as it ticked away. She rolled into him and he could feel her breath brushing his chest. He saw her eyes open, stare intently across his body as if gazing at something far beyond, and then close.

  Much later, he awoke to the sound of her voice.

  You hear that? she said.

  Through the open window he could hear waves, some men leaving the bar four storeys down, talking about football. Footsteps, the occasional car in the unhurried and largely empty esplanade street, a woman talking to a child, people being together, being allowed to be together.

  The waves, she said, the clock. The waves, the clock.

  He listened again. After a time his ear attuned, the street below fell quiet, and he could hear the slow rise and boom of the beach, the velvet ticking of the clock.

  Sea-time, she said as another wave crashed. Man time, she said as the clock ticked. We run on sea-time, she said and laughed. That’s what I think.

  If he’s so awful, why do you stay?

  He’s not awful, that’s the thing. Maybe I even love him in my way. It’s not us.

  But love is love.

  Is it? Sometimes I think it’s a curse. Or a punishment. And when I am with him I am lonely. When I am sitting opposite him, I am lonely. When I wake in the middle of the night lying next to him, I am so lonely. And I don’t want to be. He loves me and I can’t say . . . It would be too cruel. He pities me, I think, but it’s not enough. Maybe I pity him. Do you understand?

  He didn’t understand and he couldn’t understand. Nor did he understand why if he wanted her, and the more he wanted her, the more he allowed himself to become tied up with Ella. He couldn’t understand how what she had with Keith was love but it only seemed to make her miserable and lonely, yet its bonds were somehow stronger than their love that made her happy. And as she went on talking, it was as if everything that was happening to them could never be decided by them, that they lived in a world of many people and many ties, and that none of it allowed for them to be with each other.

  We’re not just two, he said.

  Of course we’re two, or we’re nothing, Amy said. What do you mean, we’re not two?

  But he didn’t know what he meant. At that moment he felt that he existed in the thoughts and feelings and words of other people. Who he was he had no idea. He didn’t have words or ideas for what they were or what would become of them. It seemed to him that the world simply allowed for some things and punished others, that there was neither reason nor explanation, neither justice nor hope. There was simply now, and it was better just to accept this.

  But still she talked on, trying to decipher an undecipherable world; still she asked of him his intentions, his ideas, his desires; still he felt she was trying to trap him into some expression of commitment that she could then reject outright as impossible. It was as if she wanted him to name whatever it was they had, but if he did that he would kill that very same thing.

  In the dim light he heard her vow—

  One day I’ll go. One day I’ll go and he’ll never find me.

  It was hard to believe her. He said nothing. She was silent. He felt he had to say something.

  Why are you telling me?

  Because I don’t love Keith. Don’t you see?

  And these words struck them both as a new and unsettling revelation.

  For a time they were both silent. Other than the green circle of time that waited opposite them they were in complete darkness in which their bodies dissolved. They found not each other in the dark, but pieces that became a different whole. He felt he might fly apart into a million fragments were it not for her arms and body holding him.

  Listen, she said. We’re sea-time.

  But the sea had died off and the only sound was that of the one-handed Bakelite clock. He knew it was untrue; that when he kissed the shell of her ear she was asleep, and that the only true thing in the universe at that moment was them together in that bed. But he was not at peace.

  21

  THE MORNING AIR was already like an oven before the sun was properly up. She helped Dorrigo make the bed so their disgrace would not be visible to the maid. She watched him washing himself: his hands a wet bowl, his gleamy face falling from them a steaming pudding. It was his arms that she noticed above all, dark-skinned, the way he picked up and held things, the jug of cold water, the shaving brush, the safety razor. With a gentle power, not brute force. His tautness. The difference of him.

  He was leaning down and burying his head in the water basin now, an arm splayed either side like a lamb’s wonky legs. But he was nothing like a lamb—more like a wolf, she thought, holding himself there steady, poised, waiting, a black wolf, his gorgeous black hair in his armpits slicked with soap. His chest. His shoulders as he held up an arm as if stopping something—cars, trains, her heart—and then dropped it as if it were nothing.

  She wanted to bury her face in those armpits there and then and taste them, bite them, shape into them. She wanted to say nothing and just run her face all over him. She wished she wasn’t wearing that print dress—green, such a bad colour, such a cheap dress, so unflattering and her breasts she wanted up and out, not lost and covered up. She watched him, his muscles little hidden animals running across his back, she watched him moving, wanted to kiss that back, those arms, the shoulders, she watched him look up and see her.

  The eyes, the black eyes. Unseeing and seeing.

  She said something to hurry away from that look but she stayed. What he was thinking she never knew. She had once asked; he said he had no idea. Later, she thought he was scared. He was handsome. She didn’t like that about him either. Too sure, she felt, too knowing—one more thing she later realised she had been wrong about. The knowing and the unknowing.

  Him. To a tee.

  When he saw her still staring at him, he looked away and down, his face flushed.

  She longed to know everything about him, to tell him everything about her. But who was she? She had come down from Sydney to visit with a friend who had family in Adelaide and she had ended up staying, getting a job behind the King of Cornwall’s bar. There she met Keith Mulvaney. He was a boring man but kind in his way, things had happened, and who was she? The daughter of a Balmain sign painter who had died when she was thirteen, one of seven children who made their way the best they could. She had never met a man like Dorrigo.

  Is the floor more interesting than me? she said.

  Why on earth did she say that? She was a wicked woman, she was a disgraceful woman; she knew it, and sometimes she didn’t care if the world knew it, she would not regret it if she were on her deathbed now. She regretted nothing. She handed him his shirt.

  No, he said.

  He smiled. His smile, his bicep moving like a ball back and forth under his skin as he took the towel from her and buried his smile in it. Moving and unmoving.

  But she thought he seemed unsure. All men were liars and he was no doubt no different—only one tongue and more tales than the dog pound. She had lived the lot, walked in each and eve
ry direction. She longed to have his lovely cock in her mouth now, in front of them all down in the dining room, that’d put some cream in their coffee.

  Suddenly she wished he would just disappear. She wanted to push him away, and would have but she was terrified of what might happen if she touched him.

  Dorry?

  The asking and the wanting.

  It could not be and it was, and she wondered if it would ever go, this feeling, this knowing, this us.

  Dorry?

  Yes.

  Dorry, would it?

  Would it, what?

  Scare you, Amy said. If I said I love you?

  Dorrigo made no answer and turned away, while Amy searched the blue bedspread for individual cotton strands, plucking at them.

  Oh, she was a wicked woman and she had lied to herself and to Keith, but she regretted nothing if it had all led to this. She did not want love. She wanted them.

  Though it was still morning, they lay back down together on their freshly made bed. His forearm ran over her breasts and his hand formed a nest under her chin. He ran his nose up and down her neck. She shuffled. His lips, open; her neck, rising.

  No, he said.

  When he was asleep she stood up, stumbled, gained her balance, stretched and went out into the shadow of the balcony. A distance up the beach there were some children squealing in the waves. The heat was like a maternal force, demanding she sit down. She sat there a long time, listening to the waves crack and boom. When she felt the shadow shortening on her extended legs she finally went down the three storeys to the rooms where she lived with her husband.

  She smelt Dorrigo everywhere, even after she took a bath. He had scented her world. She lay down on her marital bed and slept there until well after dusk, and when she awoke all she could smell was him.

  22

  HALF DAYS, FULL days, free nights, whatever time off Dorrigo Evans could scrounge for leave he now spent with Amy. He had a new-found mobility in the form of a baby Austin baker’s van. A fellow officer had won it in a card game and, having his own car already, happily lent it to Dorrigo whenever it was wanted. Keith enjoyed Dorrigo’s visits and declared himself glad to have his nephew chaperoning Amy when he was away with his various commitments, which, as summer progressed, seemed to be ever more frequently.