The room was too cold. She fiddled with the air-conditioning. She looked at her itinerary. That night she was to wait at reception for a bus that would take her to a ‘Dinner under the Stars’. She lay on the bed and closed her eyes. She dreamed.
Auckland, a summer Sunday. Tuis squabbling, rosellas flying through the trees. Caro running up the path towards her grandparents’ house, shouting. There’s something important to tell. ‘Per. Per.’ She cranes up, bellowing. Beth puts her head out the window. ‘Come down here,’ Caro demands. The grown-ups not listening but turning away. ‘Uncle Larry’s down here,’ Caro shouts. ‘His eyes are closed and he won’t get up.’
Per at the window, looking at Caro. He is still, his eyes fixed on her. As still as stone.
Something chimed. Emily sat up. The dinner, she thought. I’ve missed the bus. And she thought of Angus, disappointed, shaking his head.
There was the pinging noise again. A voice called from behind the door.
Something bad has happened, she thought, lurching across the room.
But it was only a teenage boy with an envelope addressed to her. He put it in her hand and trotted away down the steps. She opened the package, and there was a fan of tickets to tourist trips, courtesy of the hotel, and a letter hoping she would enjoy her stay.
The pamphlet had said to dress warmly. It said: the temperature in the desert drops substantially at night. The tourists gathered in the foyer, holding their tickets. The bus arrived and Travis jumped down and began ushering people on board. Emily watched him. She thought of the ‘fragile community’ of Aborigines and thought, here is another kind of creature: the predator. He had a hard, watchful face, a cruel mouth. He gripped her arm and looked hard at her as she stepped up into the bus. She blushed.
The sun was setting as they drove away from the hotel, along the highway and onto a rough sandy road, bumping over uneven ground. The light was bronze, and in the distance the rock, Uluru, cast its soft black shadows. Here were the colours she’d seen in Aboriginal paintings, in the illustrations of the Dreamtime. Emily closed her eyes. She saw Caro, her face lit up with red light. And other faces: Per, Larry. Words chimed in her head. Dream time. Desert time. The line of a poem: He who was living is now dead. The bus went over a bump and down into a sharp dip. There were small shrieks from the passengers. Over the intercom, Travis was reciting a spiel: ‘You will see the sun go down over the rock. Something everyone must see, once in their lifetime. It is beautiful, so beautiful you will be struck dumb.’ Emily sat very still, looking. The red rock and the black shadows and the sun on red sand. Twilight. Silence. Long shadows over the land. Behind the rock, the sky in flames.
And behind her a deep man’s voice said, ‘You wanted to see it. You’ve made it. Here it is, mate. Voila.’
Wallah!
They were met by a guide and led to a small hill from which to view the sunset. They were served sparkling wine and nibbles from tables covered in white cloths. A man appeared with a didgeridoo, and blew its eerie drone as the sun went down. The New Zealanders immediately identified the guide and the didgeridoo player as Maori. They started whispering. ‘What a laugh. Where are the Abos? Why are they being played by our people?’ They knew the answer, they felt smug about it: their country had its problems but it was more equal. Maori and Pakeha got on in a way that Aborigines and white Australians didn’t. The poor Abos would be out the back somewhere, hopelessly boozing.
One of the New Zealanders drew the guide into their circle.
‘You’re right, mate,’ the guide said. ‘I’m from Otara.’
A man grabbed his companion by the arm and said, ‘Look mate. God, that’s beautiful.’ His was the voice that had said behind Emily, ‘Voila.’ He stood holding his friend’s arm. He was short and squat, the other man was younger, taller and thinner. Emily thought there was something familiar about them.
The sunset had intensified the colour and deepened the shadows. The rock blazed for a moment, lit up with a sheen of evening light. They stood watching the colours change. In the evening Uluru was vast, ancient and strange. They moved closer together and looked across the high grass and stones, to the flaming sky. The red landscape was darkening now, the colours bleeding out. The air was still and hot, but as the sun sank something changed; a violent squall of wind blew up, whirling the sand around and sending the edges of the tablecloths flapping. The wind caught scatters of dry grass and flung it spinning upwards. The waiters grabbed at the napkins. For a moment the air was full of grit and sticks, and then the great heave of wind subsided, and everything was still. The rock glowed with a last weird brightness, and in the final moment before the sun went down its colours were so intense that it seemed to float above the plain. Long shadows moved across the land and the air began to cool.
Now it was time for the ‘dinner under the stars’. They were led beyond the hill to a space of cleared land. There were huts for preparing and serving food and tables set about, and a big bonfire redly crackling. It was dusk now, and there were lamps rigged up around the tables. There were no lights anywhere near, and soon the sky began to blaze with stars. After the meal, the guide promised, they would be ‘taken on a tour’ of the night sky.
They queued for the first course. Emily sat down with her plate. The New Zealanders had stayed in a group, and had been placed together. She was mostly quiet. After the meal the tables were rowdy. The guide rose and shouted them down. The lamps were switched off.
The only light now came from the bonfire. A woman stood up and began a talk about the night sky. She had a powerful torch, and as she pointed out the constellations she directed the beam, and when they followed its light they could discern clearly which clusters of stars she was talking about. The whole sky was studded with silver light. They could see the Milky Way, the spirals of space dust, the close and distant stars, fixed, glittering, still. And every now and then they saw a satellite, moving busily between the points of light.
The man next to Emily had been talking to people across the table. Now he leaned close and spoke to her: ‘Guess what? The universe we live in is not the only one.’
Emily turned. He said, ‘The universe is a membrane. The Big Bang was caused by the collision of the membrane of our universe and a parallel one.’
Emily tried to make out his face in the dark.
He kept talking: ‘The very beginning of the Big Bang is called the singularity. Before membrane theory scientists couldn’t calculate back to the moment of the singularity. Now they’ve realised there are parallel universes, they can.’
Emily repeated the word. The singularity. The dark, mysterious sound of it. She looked up at the stars. Their stillness was strange to her. That they should be so fixed and unmoving. She turned back to the man.
‘I know you,’ she said.
His voice came out of the darkness. ‘A lot of people know me.’
‘And your friend …’
‘Terry Carstone,’ he said. He was offering his hand. She shook it.
‘Your friend?’
‘He’s Andrew. Andrew Newgate.’
She hadn’t recognised them before. They had faded out of the news back home.
Carstone said, ‘We’re having a holiday. Little break. Travelling round. Andrew wanted to see the Rock. He had a hankering to see it. So I thought, let’s give him the chance.’
Emily said, ‘I’m a journalist.’ Then she wished she hadn’t told him. He wouldn’t want to talk to her. But to her surprise he said, ‘Really? Great. I’ll introduce you to Andrew.’
The woman next to Emily said, ‘Shhh.’ The astronomy lesson was still going on.
‘You working?’ Carstone whispered.
‘I’m doing a travel piece.’
‘Are you here by yourself?’
‘Yes.’
Carstone turned and said, ‘Andrew. Mate, this is …?’
‘Emily Svensson,’ she said.
Terry Carstone and Andrew Newgate. They had been famous for a while back
home. Newgate, a music student, had been convicted of murder and Carstone, a wealthy businessman, had taken an interest in his case, and had campaigned successfully for his retrial. At the retrial Newgate had been acquitted. He and Carstone had appeared in papers and women’s magazines — the victim of a miscarriage of justice and his dashing champion. ‘He’s like a son to me,’ Carstone had said. ‘Together we fought for justice, against the might of the State.’ After the retrial they’d faded from the news, Newgate to start a normal life and Carstone to new business ventures.
Andrew Newgate leaned across. He and Emily found each other’s hand in the dark and shook. His hands were large, dry, rough. His grip was strong. She looked at his silhouette against the stars. The talk finished and table lamps were being lit again, red light on sweaty faces. Andrew looked at her calmly, his glasses reflecting the light. The bonfire was burning down, collapsing in on itself with little showers of sparks, creating black spaces inside the flames. She looked up, into the cold, glittering sky. The dark pressed in around their circle of light. She thought of that word. Singularity.
Terry said, ‘Your paper’s been quite good to us. Not like some other bastards.’
They climbed back into the bus and Terry ushered them down the back. She sat next to the two men. She saw why she hadn’t recognised them earlier. They had been wearing sunglasses and hats, and both had changed. Carstone’s face was lined and he had put on weight. Andrew Newgate was heavier too, and he was losing his hair.
‘Like at school, eh? Down the back of the bus.’ Terry was drunk, voluble. ‘Andrew’s a composer now,’ he said.
Andrew said quietly, ‘I work in a shop. But I’m writing music.’
‘Tell her,’ Terry said.
‘I’m writing a piece called “The Mountain”.’
‘He’s amazing. He works all night sometimes. Just sitting in his room. Let’s find a bar when we get back.’
They went to a bar in the lobby of the hotel next door to theirs. It was crowded. Terry bought drinks. He said, ‘That tour was good. The night sky. I’ve always had a thing for cosmology. The universe. Andrew was telling me this theory… tell her, mate.’
Andrew smiled. ‘There’s a theory that the universe is made of sound.’
‘And the other thing. Prime numbers,’ Terry urged.
‘Oh well.’ Andrew shrugged. ‘She might not be interested, Terry.’
‘I am,’ Emily said.
‘I was telling Terry on the plane. Prime numbers drive mathematicians crazy, because they don’t have a rational sequence. You can’t predict when they’ll occur. But then someone thought, what if they’re a kind of composition, like music.’
‘And the universe is made of sound,’ Emily said.
Terry put his arm around Andrew’s shoulders. ‘He’s a good boy,’ he slurred. ‘Mate, back in a minute.’ He went off to the toilets.
Andrew said, ‘I have this feeling, when I’m writing music, that it’s outside of me. That it’s around me in the air and I bring it in. It’s not coming from inside me — I’m hearing it.’
His voice was deep and polite. There was a kind of stillness about him. He was tall and thin, with a gaunt face. He’d been accused of killing his friend, a music teacher, but as soon as he’d been convicted there’d been an outcry. The case against him was weak, the investigation bungled. And then Terry Carstone had got onto the case, and had campaigned relentlessly. And after that, there’d been an outpouring of public sympathy when he’d been retried and acquitted.
He said, ‘I hear patterns, sequences, and I bring them in. Does that sound strange?’ He shrugged again, charming, whimsical, lowering his eyes.
‘No, it doesn’t sound strange. But if there’s no symmetry to prime numbers, then how can they be a composition?’
‘Maybe the composition’s too big for us to comprehend. And anyway, why does it have to be symmetrical?’
‘Doesn’t beauty equal symmetry?’
He said, ‘The universe is not necessarily beautiful.’
‘So,’ she smiled, feeling drunk, ‘art is an attempt to recreate the universe.’
‘Who knows?’
She said carelessly, ‘You’re hearing the music of the spheres. You’re reeling it in and turning it into your great works. Are your compositions symmetrical?’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘So they don’t echo the universe.’
But she felt, suddenly, he was looking at her in a new way. His mouth was twisted and he was staring, really staring at her.
She put down her glass. The music pulsed around them, loud and frenetic. Terry came back and slung his arm over Andrew’s shoulder. Andrew didn’t move. He was still looking at her.
Emily left them in the bar and walked back to her room. She rang her parents’ house in Auckland. All was well. Beth and Per were reading. Caro was in bed.
She set her alarm clock. The following morning she was to climb Uluru. The start time was early, before the desert got too hot. She was apprehensive about the climb — people had told her it was dangerous, that tourists had fallen to their deaths. And the Aborigines didn’t like you to do it, although they allowed it to happen.
Angus had said, ‘Of course you’ve got to climb the bloody rock.’ And someone else had said, ‘Ooh bad karma. You’ll be cursed for ever if you do.’
She woke too early. A truck drove past on the road, beyond the gum trees. She couldn’t go back to sleep. She made a cup of tea, got Angus’s Chekhov Omnibus out of her bag, and began to read a story called ‘The Black Monk’. She tried to concentrate, dozed, woke and started again.
She read:
A thousand years ago a monk, dressed in black,
wandered about the desert, somewhere in Syria or
Arabia … Some miles from where he was, some
fishermen saw another black monk, who was moving
slowly over the surface of a lake. This second monk
was a mirage. Now forget all the laws of optics, which
the legend seems not to recognise, and listen to the
rest. That mirage cast another mirage, then from that
one a third, so that the image of the black monk began
to be transmitted endlessly from one layer of the
atmosphere to another. So that he was seen at one
time in Africa, at another in Spain, then in Italy, then
in the Far North …
She looked out the window. There were headlights moving across the desert, into the national park. An image of her brother Larry came to her. She saw him walking through the trench of shadow in the reserve behind her parents’ house. His dark eyes, his white face. She had tried to imagine how he’d felt, what he’d seen, in the last hours of his life. She’d imagined a black door, an opening, cut in the sky.
Then he passed out of the atmosphere of the earth, and
now he is wandering all over the universe, still never
coming into conditions in which he might disappear.
Possibly he may be seen now in Mars or in some star of
the Southern Cross. But my dear, the crux of the legend
|is that exactly a thousand years from the day when the
monk walked in the desert the mirage will return to the
atmosphere of the earth again and will appear to men.
And apparently the thousand years is almost up …
According to the legend we can expect the black monk
any day now.
The sun was rising. There were long shadows. She flicked to the notes in the back of the book. The composer Shostakovich was enthralled by ‘The Black Monk’, she read. He believed it was connected to his Fifteenth Symphony. He told his biographer: ‘I am certain that Chekhov constructed ‘The Black Monk’ in sonata form …’
Emily dressed and went over to the dining room for breakfast. A beam of light came over the roof. Alien birds strutted, insects streamed through the morning air, and on the paths the giant ants scurried t
o and fro.
Terry Carstone waved her over. He said to the waitress, ‘Is this trim milk?’
‘Trim?’
‘Skinny. Skeeny.’ He winked at Emily and Andrew. He said, ‘We’re on a fitness kick. Low-fat diet. Running.’
The waitress looked dully at him, turned on her heel and walked away.
Emily sat down and tried to eat. Andrew was working his way through a bowl of cereal. Terry was puffy-eyed. He ate noisily, talking all the time. ‘I’ve been a sportsman all my life but lately, what with the business, I don’t have the time for … It’s all about time these days. What about yourself, Emily? Into your fitness?’
‘I’m going to climb the Rock,’ she offered, and felt apprehensive again. Someone had told her, teasingly, ‘There’s a list of names at the bottom, of people who’ve fallen off.’
Terry said, ‘The Abos don’t want us to do it — bad juju — but it’s the chance of a lifetime.’
‘My editor wants me to,’ Emily told him. She wondered whether Angus would want her to work in a description of the people she’d met at Uluru.
Terry was thinking along the same lines. He pointed his fork. ‘There’s a significance to this place, of course, Emily. Lindy Chamberlain. I mean there was another person basically framed by the State.’
He was talking loudly. People looked over. Andrew calmly worked on his plate.
‘There’s a sort of hook there, for you, isn’t there, Emily. If you wanted to write something about me and Andrew being here. Andrew enjoying normal life, the great outdoors, obviously, but here we are, right next to the camping ground where … what was the kid’s name? Azaria, was snatched by the dingo. And they arrest the mother; they bring her in and more or less construct a case around thin air.’
The waitress walked past. Terry said loudly, ‘Excuse me. Excuse me? Can we have more coffee over here? When you’ve got time?’
‘You’d think lessons would have been learned, Emily. I’m not saying we’re on some kind of weird pilgrimage. Basically, my business partner Russell Cunningham and myself have had a good year. And I’m taking the kid some places. I’ve had a few ups and downs, relationship-wise. We both needed a break. I was set for Cairns, Port Douglas, lounge around in the sun, swim, but things changed, and young Andrew, he wanted to see Ayers Rock. He’s got a bit of time off from his job, so, voila.’
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