My father-in-law says he’ll go and check in, find out about dinner. ‘Stay in the car,’ he says. ‘I’ll sort it out.’ A mistake. He loves the place but his tongue has the biggest nail and his temper is quick. Since the heart problems, he could blow at any time.
We wait. A jet pushes through the clouds above us. A dog yaps briefly on the other side of the wall and is scolded into silence. Glass clinks into a bin. David does not reappear.
The delay crushes the car. I wonder what might come after this morning’s rolling ferry, after miles of tall forests flanking wrong roads. It’s getting dark. Moths begin circling the street lamps, smacking their papery skulls on the metal shades.
‘Go and see what’s happening, Paul, for heaven’s sake,’ Caroline says.
My husband pushes the car door open. He carries a dozen good summers spent in these hills, a throwback geniality bundled in his heart. He is all our best hopes. But he walks towards the hotel with a wary step, as if the flagstones might be mined. Under the lintel, he hesitates, bows his head, vanishes.
We’re alone now. Two women joined in marriage: the mother, the new wife. We’re afraid of each other. There is nothing I can say that will soothe her heart, ease out the barb of forsaking a son, mend the fallacy of gaining a daughter.
‘You know,’ she says, her voice flaring in the silent car like unexpected lightning, ‘we’ve come here every year since we married.’ She looks straight ahead at the ancient wall. I can see her profile projected onto the side window, scrupulous as a mirror. ‘I hate this place,’ she says. Quiet but firm. ‘I simply cannot stand it.’
Her shoulders droop, just for a moment, beneath pale peach cashmere. She does not seem to expect a reply.
I try to imagine the looping shape of forty years. This leather-bound car, this returned-to place. I picture the dim porticos of a thousand churches, bridges, monuments, studded into these hills. And now, perhaps, this final mortification: nowhere to lay out her bones, to let bitterness drain away in thin runnels. My fingers have closed around the door handle. I resist the urge to run into the hopeless blank of a country night.
Father and son are walking towards the car, their same-shaped mouths stretched into nervous smiles. A lost booking, they tell us, leaning on the car door. A conference of actuaries. Insurance, you know. No trace of our name. But there’s a second hotel, owned by the same family. Twins. Imagine! Everything’s fine, they say, almost in unison, as if they’ve rehearsed it in the foyer.
David passes his wife a paper menu where someone has scratched a rough map in red pen. She glances at it, hands it back without a word.
The last of the light has gone. The car chugs into life again. Our headlights rake the dining room as we turn, picking out a family bending over their meals. A teenage girl looks up and watches us go with a blank, chewing face.
Out on the road, the hedges loom. I lean my head on the window, feel the frosty glass against my temple.
‘We shouldn’t be too late to get some dinner,’ my father-in-law says, his hands on the wheel again, his mood rising. He puts the radio back on. Dancing music. The coiffed head beside him does not move.
‘Hopefully not too late,’ my husband says to me.
I watch the dark shapes as we pass by. Marvel at their height.
These Ordinary Nights
Tom’s awake. Muffled footsteps on the carpet, a scrape of chair. He’s walking over our heads, vampire bright. We don’t look at each other, just keep watching the show, the flash and noise of it, that woman who won the car. ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it!’ she yells, tears on her cheeks, the camera up close.
‘That corner cabinet needs a polish, Susan,’ Keith says, while the TV claps and claps. But I know he couldn’t care less about dull wood. He’s been looking over at the photo of Tom again. The smiling one. I should put it away.
‘Goodnight, goodnight,’ they’re chorusing, balloons coming down.
‘We’d best get up to bed, Susan,’ Keith says, every night. He presses the button on the remote. Everything vanishes.
Upstairs, Tom’s stirring his breakfast coffee in the corner of his room. We hear the spoon ringing in his cup, calling through the floor like a delicate bell. I’ll collect the milk jug later, when he’s gone.
In the kitchen, I set his tray by the microwave, leave a meal thawing on the bench. Tom does love his shepherd’s pie. He’s always famished when he gets home, banging about in the first of the light.
We go on up, Keith just ahead, his hand gripping the banister the whole way. A blue glow chills the edge of Tom’s door as we pass. I hear the click of his keyboard. The endless click.
‘Goodnight, son,’ we say, into the wood.
Click, click.
In our room, Keith whispers, ‘Remember last Christmas, Susan? Remember when—’
And I say, ‘Don’t, please. Just don’t.’
We lie together in pantomime sleep, picturing that day. Playing cards by the fire, the scent of pine in the room, all of us picking at the last of the cake. Tom appeared at the door, stepped in, leaned against the edge of the sofa. Gran said, ‘You were always a great little player, Tom,’ and she reached up, with her bracelet of tinsel, and proffered her glass of sherry. Tom bent down and sipped it, like a child. We all laughed in surprise – too high, too loud. I tried not to think of the roll of banknotes, fat as a cigar, that I’d seen the week before, poking from Tom’s pocket. Keith smiled across at me, raised his glass. He’s coming back to us, his eyes said.
We always hear Tom leave. The stones on the driveway are as small and white as milk teeth. We hear the crush of them. Sometimes, objection rises like a thing and presses its weight on the window, staring into the empty street below. Sometimes fear sits on our bed. It scoops a hollow with its bulk that I cannot smooth away.
In the abandoned quiet, memories edge in. Keith in his pyjamas, shouting in the hall. ‘What the hell are you up to, son? We need to know what’s going on.’ And the way he roared, ‘This minute!’ with his voice cracking, his cheeks flocked purple with rage.
And Tom standing there, his coat over his shoulder, no expression on his face. The way his answer came, slow-voiced, precise, his words silting into the carpet. ‘If you don’t like it, I’ll leave for good. Then you’ll never know where I am. Ever.’
And the way he didn’t slam the door like a normal teenager, just shut it very softly. Click, click.
So, these nights – these ordinary nights – disquiet stretches across the bed, fatly tame. In the hush, there is only the slow rasping of unknown things, curling like an abrading tongue on how it came to be like this. And where, exactly, Tom goes in our car.
The Memory Bones
‘Don’t be afraid, Geraldine,’ she said to me.
On land she had a lumbering style, yet her movements could still be delicate. Broad-hipped and big-eyed, she had come, in later life, to seem oddly like her jut-boned cows.
With two quick steps her knees were gone, then she lowered the rest of her body, her swimming mouth forming long before her torso felt the keen slap of water, unexpectedly cold. I wasn’t sure whether the mimed ‘ooh’ of her lips signalled delight or disgust but she swam into the centre with easy movements, her arms pushing out rhythmically, her chin lifted high. She kept her sunhat on, tied down with strips from an old apron. The years of isolation had made my grandmother thrifty. As she swam away, its long ribbons trailed behind her like tame, floral eels.
The dam seemed vast but it was the smallest on the property, in the ‘200’ paddock, close to the house. Two hundred acres of low blanched hills, tinted brown and dusty green. Walled by heat, static as a painting. The French woman who came every Wednesday for cream and jars of relish would turn her sorrowing European eyes towards the bush.
‘It is all so much the same,’ she would murmur, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘So faded.’
&
nbsp; From the dam, we could not see the house, only its thread of woodsmoke lacing through the tallest of the trees. At the back of the old place the land dropped away sharply, past the dipping yards and down into a natural basin of clay and rock. Rain was never wasted here. It coursed along two slim gullies and pooled near a glade of bowing paperbarks. Years before, Mason, that patient old horse, shackled to what looked like a giant sugar scoop, had dragged great mounds of dirt up the slope and away. The water was deep, and permanent. Even in a hard summer, it never went dry. Its hugging wall of earth, and the drooping trees on the other side, cast broad arms of shade across the surface. If a sudden breeze lifted the tendrils from the water, it felt as if something other-worldly had stirred.
William, the oldest of my cousins, his shadow moustache mesmerising us all, had intoned in his half-man voice that the dam was bottomless. ‘Be careful,’ he’d said, his square face looming over us. ‘You’ll never be seen again if you go down too far.’ The water was almost black, and it looked thick, as if you could catch it up and hold it in your hand like a curiosity.
My grandmother’s wrapped head bobbed on the surface. I squatted on a flat rock, worrying about snakes. The last of the strong afternoon sun was sliding a burning finger along the parting of my hair. Soon, I would have to join her. Perhaps there was a snake beneath this rock, tilting its awful Martian head, listening, waiting. I was always worried about snakes, even at home, scared of what might be knotted into the old fig, the compost heap, the unreached end of my bed.
A little tide lapped heavily at my toes. I wondered what made the water so dark. Through the trees, a mob of cattle watched us. Without movement or expression, one animal lifted its tail in a single, hydraulic arc. Manure dropped to the ground with a loud splat. From my rocky perch above the water, the colour looked suspiciously similar.
My grandmother was calling me, sweeping her arms back and forth. She looked a little cold. I wanted to ask her whether she was treading water or just keeping warm. I wanted to know how deep it was. There was no choice. I had to go in. She was only swimming here to keep me happy.
I wasn’t prepared for the bottom. My leg sprang upwards in horror. Not, after all, an infinite drowning pool, but hideous all the same. Not solid, not jagged on town-soft feet, but thick and spongy, almost warm. Like walking on a giant tongue. Better to swim, better to keep feet clear of what might lurk beneath.
My navy one-piece seemed flimsy armour. When I had modelled it for my mother, her mouth gently compressed, her eyes unreadable, the pin-spots and little cut-outs on the sides seemed stylish for town or country. Grown-up. But on that rock I’d seen small circles of my own chicken skin through the peepholes. A creature could get in there, wrap itself around me, pull me down to the unspeakable depths. This much I’d learned: you needed special togs for farms.
Today, we were the only two in the world. The men were long gone, moving out on horseback, looking distracted and important, off to check fences and move stock. The morning’s housework was done. Great sails of washing flapped on the line. The dinner joint sat ready for the oven, daubed in lard and a thick dusting of black pepper, a veil of muslin draped across it like a bride. The old dog watching it with his yellow eyes would not hear the riders returning for many hours.
It was a delicious, still time. Our time. We talked and sipped tea in pretty cups. Sometimes, I’d lie in the sleep-out, thumbing through Reader’s Digests, shelved in their dozens behind an oil-cloth curtain. The afternoon sun shone through the window’s brain-patterned glass, patching the chenille bedspread with stretched squares of pink and green.
‘Would you like to go for a swim?’ my grandmother had said, and I must have stared, because she made a tiny, musical chuckle in her throat. ‘It won’t exactly be what you’re used to, but it will be nice. I used to like swimming when I was your age.’
We’d packed some sandwiches and lemon slice in dented tin boxes and walked together through the spiky grass. She chatted and asked me questions, her head turning occasionally towards the grey spire of mountain at the furthest edge of the property, where the men had gone.
There was a gunshot. One. We both jumped. Silence, then a single high-pitched whoop carried across the valley like a spear of sound. Her mouth shrank in disgust.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just the Courtneys.’
Beyond a wall of trees, a second trail of smoke rose in the distance. Neighbours. It came as a shock that there was anyone nearby.
‘Just ignore it,’ my grandmother said.
We moved on. I kept my head down, watching for a streak of black or killer brown, lowering each foot with infinite care, wary as a tightrope walker.
It was quiet at the dam. Just the sounds of the bush and the peaceful lap of water against the rocks. I’d finally pushed off and was swimming out towards her, feet well clear of the sucking clay.
‘We have to get back,’ she called from the centre, her voice strangely tight.
I thought she was annoyed at waiting so long for me to get in. For a moment we faced each other, white necks bared to the syrupy water. She looked at me, frowning.
‘Your scalp is starting to burn. I should have made you bring your hat. Come on, we need to go.’
With a few deft strokes she was at the edge, thin cords of water winding around her legs as she pulled herself out. She was packing up the picnic basket, the enamel mugs clanging on her hooked fingers like dissonant bells.
‘Could we come again another day?’ I asked. I was confused, trying to interpret her haste. It was so hard with adults, especially the old ones. So tiring.
Her face emerged from inside her heavy cotton shirt, dark patches already blooming on her chest. Her lips ran straight across in a line. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you think there might be snakes in the water, Grandma? Is that why we had to get out?’
She turned her head towards me. She was suddenly very tall, like a horse rearing.
‘You know, Geraldine’ – her voice was high, I could hear the trace of Scots – ‘I get a bit sick of all your silly little fears, at times. They really can seem quite, well, quite childish.’
Childish. It flashed out, bit into me, piercing, like a whip. Like a snake. She had never spoken to me like this. We had proper chats. She’d asked me what I thought of her new dress, whether I liked the colour, which was green. My favourite.
I watched the cows through the trees. They looked back at me, staring and chewing.
She gathered the last of the things, rearranged the brim of her dripping hat and stood waiting. We walked back to the house in silence, the basket knocking between us, my eyes full and stinging. I kept my head down, but the ground blurred up at me.
‘We might go into town tomorrow,’ she said at last. The dog was barking on the verandah. ‘Would you like that?’
I was old enough to know that this was an apology, offered once, wrapped in thin paper. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Town would be nice. I’d like that.’ My voice sounded very small. Childish.
‘We’ll go tomorrow, then,’ she said to me, softly.
She was my grandmother once more. But she kept looking ahead, her jaw clamped, her sensible black shoes crunching hard on the grass.
We never swam there again. By the next school holidays, she was a widow. On a bright morning in a snap-cold winter, men in dustcoats carried furniture and farm equipment into the yard. The sideboard teetered down the stairs, its mysterious drawers emptied and removed, its gap-toothed, brown face looking huge and defeated. An auctioneer in a greasy hat hammered his way through forty years until only the dry land, with its rough fences and its thirsty trees, remained. By the next day, two men in clean boots would be patting each other’s suede shoulders, each levelling a proprietorial eye along the distant line of gums.
Strange how quickly a life can be shut down, closed like a door, or a book. Sh
e bought a small house on the edge of town in a bewildered flurry of loss. The old milk jug, looking suddenly shabby, filled the redundant space for a microwave. The bathroom was papered in black and white, an etching of a bare-breasted Spanish woman, repeating herself, buxomly, up the walls. Motes of sticky red earth walked into every corner, blazoned themselves across a once-hopeful cream carpet. With her cows gone, and the dry brown hill that had risen beyond the verandah lost, now, to strangers, her world shrank to church and pot plants, and muffled disapproval of the street’s single mother.
She had every tree on the block cut down, still afraid of the bushfire that had once roared across the farm and loomed like an ogre at the foot of the back stairs.
Her new house contracted against us all. There could no longer be whole families together, no flat-voiced children giving concerts, no late-night card games for the adults, the generator humming into the empty night, laughter trailing into rooms like a friendly ghost.
I visited again, travelling alone on the bus, just as I had on that first unaccompanied trip. Now a cane field stretched into the horizon. Behind a half-shrugging hill, a highway pulsed. In the muggy air, my grandmother’s house drooped beside its somnolent neighbours. We walked the town’s main street, sheltered by the cool deep of the shops’ overhead verandahs.
‘Whose child is this?’ they’d ask my grandmother in every store, sliding a mint across the age-smoothed counters, or poking in their cash registers for a spare coin to pass to me.
‘This is one of Cynthia’s,’ my grandmother would say.
‘Geraldine,’ I’d tell them, scooping up the sweets and the money.
This Taste for Silence Page 10