by Joan London
The reckless stranger seemed to have deserted him as he made his way home through the Honeymoon Gardens. The kookaburras’ evening chorus filled him with weariness. He heard the whip-whip-whip of the sprinklers like the hum of his self-dislike. Some college boys ran past on their way to the surf, towels flying from their bare shoulders.
He met Gareth on the track along the top of the headland. Gareth was coming back from the sea, barefoot, without shirt or towel, wind-dried, sand and salt stiffening his hair, streaked across his small, strong torso.
They stopped and faced each other in the old way.
‘I’ve just seen your old man,’ Jim said. Why did he say that? It broke their warrior pact of silence.
Gareth shrugged. A cool breeze seemed to blow from his salty body. It was restful standing here with him.
Words came to Jim, filed away over the years. Scraps of Tehoe gossip overheard in the Sea House kitchen. Reg had a brother who was here when war broke out. She fancied him. He’d had to do a runner, joined the Merchant Navy. A few months later, Gareth comes along. Poor old Reg. Reg is laid up with gout, he keeps his distance. Ronnie sends his regards.
Gareth wasn’t a carefree schoolboy like his friends. He always seemed alone, adrift, unattached. His eyes watched Jim with the old, impersonal curiosity. He’d never seemed young to Jim.
Without a father, you had no youth.
What he really wanted to say to Gareth was: When are you going to leave?
But not yet. They nodded and passed on. It occurred to Jim for the first time that for Gareth he must be the dark man, the wild man from the plains.
But he was tired of old men’s myths. He was oppressed by them.
Edith was smoking on the verandah, waiting for him. These days she started work an hour earlier so she could be home before nightfall. Her son was unwell, she said, some sort of night fever. She didn’t do any more overnighting. She didn’t go anywhere with Lawrence.
She watched Jim as he came across the clearing. He’d shaved and put on shoes, but was still sombre, his head lowered. Each evening when she saw him she hoped his mood had changed. These days the quietness between them wasn’t companionable.
He was too much alone. It wasn’t right for a boy to have nobody but his mother to talk to. It wasn’t normal for a healthy young man to be so wretched. She had a fear for him that she found difficult to name.
She stayed up all night while he went roaming. She didn’t know what else to do for him except to wait and keep the lamp burning on the kitchen table. Sometimes she thought of that other Dmitri, Irina’s little brother who had walked off forever into the snow. When Jim came home at dawn and fell into his bed, she dressed and went to work.
Hour after hour she sat on the dark verandah and smoked and searched the past. What if despair was inherited? Was there a darkness to Jim’s grief that went beyond the facts of his own childhood? His Armenian grandparents had been murdered. Aram had seen his mother die. Did Aram’s actions in Armenia amount to suicide? Did he die in despair?
He didn’t feel he really belonged in the world, Leopold had once said of Aram. She would have liked to discuss this now with Leopold. He was the only one she could have shared this vigil with. Once, in moments of need, he would have come back to her, she could conjure up his words, they were a part of her. But some time in the past few years, without knowing she did it, she had let him go, floating into the ether.
And what about her own parents, driven to despair in this clearing? Could melancholy be passed on? She might have escaped, but what use was that to her if Jim bore the burden?
She was too tired to bear such guilt.
How could she save him, this time? There was nobody she could talk to, or ask for advice. She didn’t trust doctors or teachers, or even her own sister. She’d told Lawrence she could not see him for a while. She was alone in this, as always, with Jim.
‘Let him be,’ Lawrence said.
He’d arrived to sit with her on the verandah. ‘Mohammed comes to the mountain,’ he said, jumping out of his truck one night. ‘What’s all this about?’ He was carrying a bottle of wine, and she saw he was already a little bright-eyed.
Jim was in his room. In a low voice Edith said that he was rather down in the dumps. ‘I don’t know what to do for him,’ she said, trying to be casual, lighting another cigarette, refusing to show the relief she felt at seeing Lawrence. She waited for him to say: What he needs is a good kick in the pants.
‘You should have told me sooner, Edith,’ was all he said.
He insisted that a glass of wine would do her good. ‘Got a corkscrew?’ he asked. He lumbered into the kitchen, too big for this house, whistling, somehow happy. She heard him rummaging in the dresser and then knocking on Jim’s door. He went in. After a little while he came out, winked at Edith and set about opening his bottle. Jim came out. Lawrence poured them all a drink and he and Jim sat down at the little table.
Then Lawrence, who usually couldn’t be bothered with chat, started to talk. Of football—he had a cousin playing for Bunbury. Of the latest crazy thing the government had done. Of the unsettled summer weather. Calm and genial, he addressed himself to Jim, without asking for a response. Offered him news of the world.
It touched her, sitting on the steps, to see Lawrence there, his huge shadow hovering over the verandah, his movements curiously tactful. Because he was there she felt able to sit back and let her thoughts race a little with the wine. The night was hot with distant growls of thunder. Moths thumped against the lamp on the table. Jim’s eyes were less sunken and his mouth made the movements of smiling. She studied the two of them together, the solidity of the man, the nervous slenderness of the boy. Lawrence raised his arm to tip the last dregs from the bottle and she saw a dark ring of sweat on his shirt. She could feel his energy, steamy and hidden, like a slow-moving summer river.
‘You’re good for me, Edith,’ he’d said once, after one of their reunions. ‘I’m lazy.’ He was a successful farmer by habit and upbringing, he said, not out of ambition. One day he’d sell up and build a shack on the coast and go fishing. He liked to have no obligations. He found it suited him to be a bachelor.
All the same, he never let her go away too far or for too long.
Strange to be in something like this, with no future, no path leading elsewhere, no distant, ideal destination.
She remembered Lawrence telling her how strict his father was, even by standards of the time, how hard he’d worked him, from very young. She pictured Lawrence as he would have been when he was Jim’s age: the quietness of a boy held too much in check, his secret wildness, his powers of observation.
He leaned his head down to her as she saw him off in the truck. ‘Let him be, Edith,’ he said.
Late that night the black sky above the cliffs cracked open with a gash of light. Thunder rumbled over Jim’s head as he was walking and a fiery scribble lit up the sea’s horizon. He turned back into the bush. Just as he reached the clearing there was a flash of lightning so close that he fell to his knees. The sky flicked on and off above him, and he saw as in a dream the blue dance of the bush, the frail crouching house with its pinpoint of light. And then the obliterating rain.
In autumn a letter came from Frances, inviting them to Albany. I’m sure you’re in need of a holiday, Frances wrote, and now that we’ve got the pigs we could do with a hand from Jim. Edith’s eyes pricked for a moment, in spite of herself. She was indeed tired. She took a week off from the nursing home, and they caught the bus south.
It was raining in the Great Southern. The hills of Albany rose up from the Sound and disappeared into mist, as if they were great mountains. Frances’s world was more than theirs in every way. The farm stretched across acres of scrubby headland. The farmhouse was a large fibro bungalow with a nest of small dark rooms. Striped canvas blinds on the front porch flapped day and night against rope moorings. The wind here was fiercer, blowing straight in from the Antarctic. The Southern Ocean was a colder ocean tha
n the Indian, the coastline more treacherous.
Frances and Lee collected things. You could hardly shut the doors of the little bedrooms, they were so full of what they called antiques, battered preserving pots and horse tackle and rocking chairs that they bought at sales of old houses in the area. Manuals and farming journals were piled up on every surface in the lounge room. The kitchen was so crowded with projects that they lined up their pots and pans along the hall.
It soon became clear that Jim was their latest project. At first light the next morning Frances knocked on his door. He went out with them into the freezing dawn to shovel out pigsties. We’ve been keeping these jobs for you, Jim, they said.
Jim discovered that he hated pigs, their brutal shrewdness, their shocking smell. But worse than that, he knew he was being tested. He sneaked away for long sessions reading in the lavatory. He disappeared for whole afternoons, walking along the headlands and miles of windswept beach. But he knew that sooner or later he must face it, the enormous mystery of work.
Every task must have its rules, he thought, a system, a secret knowledge. Like cricket and football, those endless games some boys seemed born knowing how to play. The shovelling of pig shit. Point one. The correct placement of hands on the handle of the shovel. Point two. The approach. Start at the back of the pen and move outwards?
Jim, Jim, how’re you going? Haven’t you even started yet! …
The work stretched out ahead of him like a series of impossible tasks in a fairytale. All that he could count on was that something would always go wrong, the shovel handle would snap, the pigs would bolt … Jim, what on earth were you thinking about…
He thought about work all day. There wasn’t one job he didn’t try to analyse, that didn’t have its own mystery, its own sort of radiance. It was as if that was his work.
I’m not a farmer, I never wanted to be a bloody farmer, he fantasised saying to Frances. But what did he want? Time and space. For what? To think. To wait for the revelation. But how could he ask for that?
At night as the blinds slapped in the icy wind, he dreamt he saw his father standing in a barren field high above a river gorge. Jim knew the rocky earth, the metal-grey light was Armenia. His father, in a long black coat, was standing with his arms crossed, looking at him. How did he know it was his father? He had the same face as the man among the leaves. A sombre face, his eyes challenging. The message of the dream seemed clear when Jim woke, but a moment later he could not recall it.
They cooked up huge rich meals, stews, steak and kidney pie, liver and bacon. Apple turnover with cream. We’ve got to fatten you up, Edith! Frances was strong and solid now, and her cheeks were rosy. How the two farmers tucked in, how comfortable they seemed! They were beginning to resemble each other. Once they were opposites, Lee voluptuous, chunky, oily-skinned, Frances all dry and bony and ascetic. Their smiles were similar, loyal but slow to trust, and their eyes, deepset farmer’s eyes, watched him in the same way. They insisted Edith should be spoiled and she sat all day with her feet in the oven. The sisters didn’t, seem angry with each other any more. In fact his mother had adopted a girlish persona that he’d never seen before, idle and airy, slightly wicked.
Jim retreated up the draughty pot-lined hall to his room.
He found himself wishing for his table at home, for paper and a pencil. He felt his old need to set down the commentary running through his head.
It was then as Jim lay on his bed and heard their voices in the kitchen, that he realised that these sisters, the Clark girls, beneath all their travails, their air of martyrdom, their touchy pride, had never denied themselves anything that they really wanted. They did what they wanted to do, and always had, and they had a good time, in their own way.
He thought of the generations of nameless dogs in their family, trained to stay home and guard the women.
He had to get away.
He stalked into the kitchen and told them that he was leaving that night, that minute, if they couldn’t give him a lift he would walk. Edith could come or stay, it was up to her. They didn’t try to argue with him, his anger was too pure. It was too late for the bus to Bunbury, but he said he’d catch the night train to Perth. Frances drove them to the station and he saw that she was nervous, she had trouble with the gears. He realised that she still thought he blamed her for Westlea, she didn’t understand that he’d forgiven her from the very beginning. But he said nothing because he’d learnt a long time ago that anger protected him from her.
The night train was half empty and they managed to find a compartment on their own. It seemed like a good omen for the journey: at once their mood changed. As the whistle blew their eyes met and they couldn’t help smiling for a moment at the old exhilaration of escape.
‘Poor old Frances,’ Edith said, as the train slid out of the station. Still, she had Lee to go home to now. Edith pictured them sitting in their cluttered little kitchen, deep in discussion of Frances’s impossible relatives.
‘Why do you say that?’ Jim sat back, his man’s legs stretched out between them, one half of his face lit from the lights of the passing town outside the window, the other half in shadow.
‘Because she meant well. She wanted to help you. I’ve been thinking about her these last few days. How she was as a young girl. She didn’t get enough affection. Our parents were always so preoccupied. And you know, Frances is a person who craves affection.’
He did know. He felt he was on the verge of knowing everything. He closed his eyes and for a moment he saw ‘the world’, as he called it, which for him was always a street at night in the old quarter of a city, the voices coming from the rooms, snatches of music, the smell of food, the soft, red, dangerous lights. One day he would go there and come to know it and write it all down.
‘And there you are,’ Edith was saying, ‘she found it. She got what she really wanted.’
The night was cold and clear. Sometimes the dark bush opened for a moment to reveal a patch of moonlight across a clearing or the surface of a dam.
Why did she feel this way, a lightness, as if a shadow had lifted from them? As if a great wing had brushed over the carriage roof and flapped away into the darkness. She felt free. She had a conviction, without quite knowing why, that whatever Jim did now was out of her hands.
When this train reached Perth they would catch the early train to Bunbury. She would phone Lawrence from the station and he would pick them up in the truck. He’d told her to do this. Lawrence was feeding the dog and the chooks for them, and collecting their mail. He was working on a car for her, Emmeline’s old Hillman that had been lying for years around the farm. She’d do him a favour to take it off the place, he said. He was going to teach her to drive. He’d take a bet, he said, wiping his hands on a rag, slowly, infuriatingly, that they wouldn’t be speaking by the time she passed her test.
They creaked to a stop at every tiny siding. Some were lit by a single kerosene lamp. Sometimes Jim saw men come and go in the shadows, in coats for the cold inland night. Some exchange went on further down the track, the thump of a mail sack, quick voices in the sleeping dark. Sometimes there seemed to be no reason for stopping, nothing moved, there was nothing but the empty platform and silence.
He felt detached, as if this journey was a farewell to his past and also a prologue to all the journeys he was going to make. He didn’t know how yet or where to. He’d tell Edith of his decision when they got home. He’d tell Gareth.
They’d gathered speed, the wheels were rushing them into the night. One day, he thought, he would be older than his father was when he died.
What they didn’t know yet was that there was a letter waiting for them in the kitchen, a mute white rectangle lying on the table as the mice ran across the floor and the birds pecked in the vine over the window. Lawrence had collected it from their mailbox, turned it over, examined the stamp and the confident script, an educated hand, he thought. Someone who had forgotten their full address, yet knew this would be enough to find th
em. Nunderup, Western Australia. He fleetingly considered all it might have survived—theft (the stamp was unusual), fire, shipwreck, the carelessness of a clerk—before he propped it up against the teapot. He knew it was auspicious. He ran his eyes around the battered little kitchen for a moment, locked the door behind him, left.
Strange how one small object could seem to hold all the light in a room. Edith, still in her coat, with the dog winding itself around her legs, saw the letter before anything else.
Jim had gone straight to his room. Lawrence was bent over the stove, lighting the fire he had set.
She recognised the thick black script, had time to think that writing too grew older, sadder.
‘Jim,’ she called, and something in the quietness of her voice made him come at once. Lawrence went outside to fill the kettle. She pointed at the letter. ‘You open it.’ She sank into a chair. ‘Read it out to me.’
Dearest Edith, Dearest Jim, he began, in his young, honest voice, frowning slightly, slightly embarrassed.
I am only now ready to write this letter. His head jerked up and his eyes met Edith’s for a moment. He went on.
I know that long ago you will have learnt to live without me. As I never quite have, without you both. I wonder if you will ever be able to forgive me.
The real war began for me before the official war ended, soon after I left you in Syria. It was a time when ‘one did what was requested of one’, as they used to say. In this spirit I was recruited. But no cause redeems putting yourself above simple moral rules. I made a choice. I have had many years to live with the consequences.
All I can say is that I thought you would be in touch with my mother. I didn’t know how soon she was to die. I was not informed of her death for a long time.
And Aunt Ada? I hardly dare ask. Please give my fondest regards to Frances, wherever she may be.
From the first day of my new life I began to count the cost. In a matter of weeks my hair turned white. I started to see that once in this game, you’re never really out. I was taken over by a futility and desolation of which I will not speak. When finally I managed to resurface, I was in no shape to contact you for quite some years.