Gilgamesh

by Joan London

  He wept as Edith closed Emmeline’s eyes and she left him with her. He found her in the kitchen, boiling a kettle in the grey light before dawn.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ he said.

  ‘It’s too late to sleep. I’ll attend to your aunt, when you’re ready. Then I’ll catch the first bus home.’

  ‘Go to her now. I’ll drive you home, if you’ll let me.’

  Neither was sleepy. The sunrise seemed majestic to them, the gleaming trees rustling a benediction. They drove in Lawrence’s truck along the pearly shoreline and cruised down empty back roads to the property which Emmeline had helped carve out of the bush as a young woman. He showed her over the house, a large stone cottage sprawling with wide verandahs, surrounded by Emmeline’s garden. Flickering early morning sunshine fell into the dusty rooms. It was a peaceful, untidy place, its stillness made poignant through death. He was going to cook her breakfast, but then suddenly there was a cascade of birdcalls outside the windows and he put his arms around her. And then, because death had reduced them to very simple creatures, they fell into his bed.

  On the day of Emmeline’s funeral he was waiting for her in the nursing home carpark when she finished work. It was a shock to see him coming towards her, a dark shambling man again, his guise as a stranger.

  ‘Will you come with me for a drink?’ He smelt of whisky.

  ‘I can’t. I have to go home to my son.’

  He nodded and turned away back to his truck, head down, hands shoved in his pockets.

  A week later he telephoned her at work and asked her to come with him to a party the next night. She supposed this was what the Americans called a date. Her first date. She changed out of her uniform at the nursing home and splashed herself with a patient’s lavender water. It was just a group of old friends getting together to play darts in a pub in Bunbury, he explained as, rather stiffly, they sat together in the truck.

  They were a bright crowd, robust drinkers, with a teasing, romping manner together. Edith gathered that most of them were single, unmarried or divorced, in their thirties or early forties, farmers and teachers, stock agents, nurses, clerks. People who’d been young in the War. War victims, in their own way. Among them Lawrence looked slightly eccentric, with his duffle coat and long hair and friar cheeks.

  The girls, as they were called, were more daring, sharper and noisier than married women. They joked and drank along with the men. There was something too familiar about the way Lawrence clapped them on the shoulders with his broad hand, Edith thought, something coarse about his laugh. And he had brought her to join them! She sat stony-faced, smoking in an armchair at the far end of the room. He came and perched his great bulk on the armrest.

  ‘So, Edith,’ he said, looking down at her, ‘tell me about yourself. What do you do when you’re not playing angel of mercy?’

  ‘I look after my son.’

  ‘But what do you do for yourself? Everyone has to have some pleasure.’ He wouldn’t ask her these questions if he hadn’t been drinking, she knew. Sober, he was guarded and subtle.

  ‘I read. I swim.’ She spoke coldly. Her true pleasures, eating outside with Jim, a room of her own, the last cigarette alone on the verandah, seemed pitiful and thin in this brightness, indistinguishable from routine.

  ‘What sort of life is that for a woman like you?’

  She told him she would like to go home.

  They were silent all the way back. ‘I’ll get down here,’ she said as the Sea House came into view. All she wanted was to be walking alone again through the bush.

  As she climbed out he leaned over the seat to her. ‘Do you always keep yourself the stranger, Edith, everywhere you go?’

  Thank goodness, she thought as she walked down through the Honeymoon Gardens. She had been rescued from the turmoil of the past few days, longing and exposure and defiance, and a strange guilt, as if she had betrayed someone.

  He kept away for a few weeks. Then one spring evening the truck was waiting for her again in the carpark. He asked if he could drive her home. As soon as they were out of sight of the nursing home, he stopped the truck and put his arms around her. Purposeful but with the gleam of a smile, as if ironic even about this, his need for her, he kissed her neck and lap and ran his hands over her breasts. She was taken over by the smell of him, which had to do with the sweat of his hair and the soap of his cheeks, the warm splitting leather of the truck’s seats, and, even deeper, the particular essence of his room in the stone farmhouse.

  ‘You’re different when you drink,’ she whispered. They had crossed over again into that other realm where they could speak as directly as children.

  He started up the truck again and drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding onto her.

  Jim grew used to Edith staying more often at the hospital. ‘I’ll be overnighting,’ she’d tell him as she left in the morning, with instructions for his evening meal.

  As darkness fell he paced the verandah, his arms folded, his heart racing a little. He was master of his own time, he could move at his own imperatives. The house itself seemed changed. The rooms held another aspect as if already they were angled to the future. He didn’t light the lamp for a long time but let himself inhabit twilight spaces where he might live one day. On his desk beneath the window he could just make out the glow of an open page. He approached it and retreated, too restless to sit down. He tested himself outside, walking into the bush until he saw through darkness. He lay down on the earth and fell into the vast rushing space above him.

  She liked to wake in the bedroom of the stone house. It was a treat that she rationed herself because she didn’t like to leave Jim too much alone. She liked the solidity of the walls and the silence. It was milder land here, flatter and less romantic than the Clark block, without the relentless hollow roar of the sea. Cows grazed under silvery peppermint trees, pasture spread in every direction. Everything spoke, not of prosperity, but of self-sufficiency, of decades of patient management, of good sense and work. The light was dappled as a park. Birds dived into Emmeline’s roses, left to themselves now, one, two seasons on, their long necks dipping and entwining beside the verandah, like gangly mating birds.

  She felt different here, carefree and wilful. She liked to run the taps in the deep Ford bath and lie and listen to the sociable sounds of the kitchen, spitting fat and the trumpet call of the morning news. When she wasn’t around, Lawrence listened all the time to the wireless. She knew a little about his life now. Most of his nights he spent alone here. He read journals and newspapers, articles on politics. He voted Labor. The Fords had always been left-wing. She was shocked and a little thrilled when he told her that a branch of the family was Communist.

  He drank when she wasn’t here. Whisky, or crude red wine he bought from Italian neighbours. He didn’t try to hide the line of bottles in the kitchen. She’d telephoned him from the nursing home one night and heard his voice thickened and abrupt, holding himself in check from her. They didn’t speak of this. Nor of his marriage. She didn’t even know the name of his wife.

  While she, right from the start, had felt the need to mention the name Leopold. One night, her elbow propped against his chest, she had yielded to the compulsion to tell him her whole story. She watched his eyes for irony but they were still and grave.

  In daylight, once they detached themselves, they were resolutely unsentimental with each other. He cast a critical eye on everything, including Edith’s life. As he drove her to work he told her that he thought she should leave the nursing home, she was overworked and underpaid. She was quick and smart, she should find another job, something where she could get ahead a bit. A business of her own perhaps. Nunderup was crying out for a post-office store for example.

  ‘Who are you doing penance for? Your mother? This bloke, your cousin?’

  ‘I caused his death.’

  ‘Come on, it was wartime! Syria was crawling with English jeeps. How do you know it was him who was blown up? Why do you belie
ve he’s dead?’

  ‘Because he never wrote!’ It came out as a cry, for the letter that she’d never allowed herself to hope for.

  ‘From what you’ve told me it sounds as if your cousin worked for the Secret Service. You said he spoke fluent Russian. By the end of the war Stalin had become enemy number one to the Brits. Who knows what he was asked to do?’

  ‘He wouldn’t just disappear.’

  ‘Those were times when a lot of people took the chance to do just that.’

  ‘You don’t know Leopold. He wouldn’t do that to us.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of contacting the Red Cross or the British government or something?’ He shook his head at her.

  ‘You’ve done your time, Edith,’ he said.

  She could become angry with him. Then he knew she wouldn’t see him for a few weeks. That was their pattern. She fell back into her solitary ways. Anger took her over, seemed to spread right back to the past. In spite of herself she had let Lawrence’s words do their work and she now felt an obscure resentment towards Leopold. For what? In the end, for nothing but his desertion. The oldest grievance of the living for the dead.

  Lawrence has infected me with his cynicism, she thought.

  Then one morning she would wake up missing him and she knew the truck would be waiting for her in the carpark. Or sometimes he came for her at home, the truck bumping urgently into the clearing. As soon as he had shaken Jim’s hand, he’d ask her to come for a drive with him, a defiant little grin on his face.

  He always came back.

  Jim and Lawrence, face to face, held themselves in neutral. Neither gave anything away. Nor did they speak of each other to Edith. Sometimes Lawrence invited Jim to come along with them to the outdoor picture show in Busselton. The three of them sank deep into their deckchairs, licking icecreams, a silent trio, Edith in the middle. They saw From Here To Eternity, the picture everybody was talking about, famous for its steamy romantic scenes.

  I never knew I could be kissed like this, said Deborah Kerr.

  Edith slapped at mosquitoes in a business-like way. She didn’t want either of them to think she identified with this. Only you. Forever. Did she believe that any more? She lit a cigarette. Men Must Fight and Women Must Weep. That was all in the past. In the Busselton Open-Air Cinema, 1954, she existed on a very different plane.

  ‘Hysterical Yankee patriotism,’ said Lawrence as they drove home.

  Lawrence had no faith, Jim thought, wedged into the cab on the other side of Edith. Not in the War, or God or the Queen, or countries which were good or bad. He hadn’t stood for the National Anthem at the pictures, the only person to stay seated. These were things that he, Jim, didn’t yet know enough about to reject. He studied Lawrence carefully and listened to everything he said. He knew that Lawrence did not wish him or Edith harm—after Sir his senses were always on the alert for this. Lawrence was benign, but what did he believe in?

  He’d felt uncomfortable with them, watching that couple on the screen. As if they were exposed. He knew his mother had a secret, not just her aloneness, which was still there, but a private sheen, a playfulness that she’d never had before.

  It came to him as he watched Lawrence’s competent hands on the wheel, that what Lawrence had put his faith in was Edith. It gave him a strange thrill of loneliness, but also of freedom ahead.

  They were lovers in all seasons. Winter rain on the windows of the cab enclosed them. Afterwards they would wind down the windows and smell the soft air of the bush and the crushed eucalypts where the truck had pulled off from the track. In summer twilight if he picked her up from work, the hazy paddocks smelt of hot earth, and the trees’ shadows falling rhythmically across the windscreen made them dreamily ecstatic.

  One hot night at the farmhouse they left the bed and walked naked around the wide verandahs, splashing each other from the water bag hung to catch the breeze by the back door. The air dried them as they wandered around the yard, past the sheds, around the peppermint trees. He made her laugh, ambling ahead of her, his flat vulnerable buttocks very white in the darkness, his arms and shoulders brown. They were like strange creatures who didn’t really belong here, like ghosts of the original settlers. Is this what they did, those Victorian couples, maddened by heat and isolation, rip off their high-necked clothing and wander naked, past caring whose eyes were watching them from the bush?

  Had her parents ever wandered like this around the clearing while their little girls slept? Her father was too serious and her mother too afraid. Many nights Ada had crept into bed to sleep with her or Frances, from fear. What was it? The fear of death? Or pleasure?

  Sometimes she remembered the room above the nightclub in Yerevan, the curl of Manouk’s cigarette smoke, the princely ruby on his soft hand.

  I shall miss our exchange, wrote Miss Betts on the last of Jim’s Correspondence papers, in her girlish immaculate hand. You’re a gifted student, Jim, and I hope that, after discussion with your mother of course, you will consider going on to further study. There are bursaries available to help country students come to city schools to complete their matriculation. I recommend that, circumstances permitting, you apply for one of these.

  I myself have reached retirement age and am taking Mother on a sea cruise to the Eastern States. So it is time to say goodbye and good luck!

  She never did sign just Letitia.

  ‘You know, Jim,’ Edith said that night on the verandah, ‘your grandfather studied to become a teacher.’

  ‘That’s the last thing in the world I want to be.’

  ‘Leopold studied. He went to university and became an archaeologist.’

  Jim looked out into the bush and didn’t say anything. Leopold’s life was the stuff of myth, of books, and what use was that to him here?

  ‘There is Irina’s money,’ Edith said. ‘It’s put away for you.’

  It wasn’t just that school, or university or any institution was a black hole that didn’t bear thinking about. It was out of the question that he could ever leave Edith alone here, slaving to support him, sending him what little money she had. It was time for him to take his place in the world, but what was he to do? Hire himself out to farmers? He knew nothing about farming. Nor did he want to be a clerk filing cards at the Torville Road Board. He went and lay on his bed. He was nearly seventeen and ashamed as each day passed that he had no job.

  He thought about his future so much it was as if he became detached from the present. It felt strange just to feed the chooks. Everything he did seemed provisional. He slunk into the Sea House kitchen with the eggs and out again without a word. At night the cicadas began to disturb him. He couldn’t concentrate because the creaks of the house were so loud. The summer breeze played its endless game with the curtain above his desk. The curtain had no colour or pattern and like an ancient shroud disintegrated to the touch. It had not been changed since his grandfather built the place.

  His desk was a wasteland, blasted, pathetic. He opened books but the words seemed dead to him. He picked up The Epic of Gilgamesh and studied the photograph of Leopold. He saw the fatherless boy this time, shadowed by mother, burdened by cap, badge, bike. He saw fear in Leopold’s eyes, as if he knew the future would consume him. ‘Oh Gilgamesh, where are you wandering? he read on the open page.’ The life that you seek you will never find …’

  ‘But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full

  enjoy yourself always by day and by night!

  Make merry each day,

  dance and play each night!

  ‘Let your clothes be clean,

  let your head be washed, may you bathe in water!

  Gaze on the child who holds your hand.

  let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!’

  What use was that advice, for a young man? Jim could not eat. He felt sick, as if something terrible was going to happen. He roamed the bush at night and in the day he could see no point in getting up off his bed. His heart beat when a crow called overhead. The days
ground on, week after week.

  One day he dragged himself up to the Sea House, his springy hair damped down with water, his face nicked with shaving cuts. He asked to see Reg.

  ‘What can I do for you, Jim?’ Everything in Reg’s office, the ceiling, the dusty fan, the diamond-paned windows, seemed stained a blurry yellow-brown, like Reg himself.

  ‘I need a job.’ Jim was surprised by his voice, thick and urgent. He had the odd impression that a stranger had taken him over, cruder but more decisive than him, a man of action, and he was curious to see what he’d do next.

  ‘I see. What did you have in mind?’

  ‘Anything. Groundsman. I can chop wood. Or kitchen hand. I know how to cook a bit.’

  ‘Do you now?’ Reg said mildly, his kind, tired eyes blinking at Jim.

  Suddenly there was a series of loud, angry knocks on the ceiling above them. Someone was pounding the floor with a stick.

  Reg jumped up as if he’d been recalled to his senses. ‘Excuse me, Jim, I have to go. I suppose you’ve heard Mrs Tehoe’s had a spot of bother with her health?’

  Smiling, he came around his desk. He put his arm up around Jim’s shoulders and steered him out into the lobby. Jim could see the sad, dandruffy strands draped like seaweed across Reg’s sunburnt head.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no jobs going at the moment, old man.’ His breath was rough and sweet from his afternoon aperitif.

  ‘Then what am I to do?’ Jim said. He’d thought of this as his last hope.

  ‘Go home,’ said Reg, ‘there’s a good lad. Give my regards to your mother.’ He added in a whisper beneath his stained moustache: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Soothing, as to a mad boy. He hobbled urgently up the stairs.

  The late afternoon sun streaming into the hall of the Sea House showed flaky paint, dusty panelling, motheaten carpet. The palace of Jim’s childhood had grown tawdry, it could no longer offer protection. There was death in the air here, Jim could smell it. An era was drawing to an end.