Vertigo

by Amanda Lohrey

  She sinks onto a chair. Now she is shaking. It’s not that she has seen a snake, it’s that in lifting the sheet she had bent so low, had been so close, had somehow entered into the snake’s zone …

  When after twenty minutes the two men return, she fusses over Gil, making him a cup of tea, stewed the way he likes it, and buttering some muffins she has defrosted in the microwave. ‘Well,’ he says, lighting up a cigarette, though he knows she hates the smell of it in the house, ‘a copperhead. Your first snake. Now you can call yourself a local.’ He winks at Luke, one of those stagey masculine winks that under other circumstances she would find insufferably patronising.

  ‘Bloody wind,’ she says.

  After a while they stop walking altogether and the canoe lies idle under the veranda. September unravels and then October, and still the winds blow and the rains don’t come. In the city the weather is just a backdrop to your day, a painted canvas against which you enact the plot of your life. In the country the weather is the plot. Sometimes it is overcast and she hopes for precipitation, but before long the sky clears. The clouds return and hang around for days, and you wait, and you wait, and the clouds move on. One morning early she wakes to the surprising sound of thunder. It’s coming from the south, and for a long time it rolls on, and on and on in a series of muffled explosions that give rise to hope. Maybe it will move north; maybe at last they will receive the watery benediction they crave. She lies still, hoping to hear something louder, something nearer, but the same remote sound continues on unchanged, rumbling into early dawn to mingle, at last, with the trilling of a blackbird. Then it begins to grow faint and she realises that this dry, hollow thunder is never going to deliver on its promise.

  That morning, in exasperation, she emails her sister, Stephanie, in Hong Kong. ‘It’s hard to describe the effect this weather has on my state of mind,’ she writes. ‘I don’t know if I can stand the drought much longer. I keep wondering if we’ve made a mistake.’

  When she says as much to Luke, he listens patiently. ‘Let’s give it another year,’ he says. ‘Weather goes in cycles. It changes all the time.’ He puts his arm around her waist appeasingly. ‘Come on, Annie, we haven’t given it a chance.’

  It’s alright for him, she thinks; he works with his headphones on, listening to his music, and the rumble of the wind is reduced to mere background noise. Luke always did have a way of blotting out distraction, of drawing the world in around him on his own terms, whereas she seems to bleed out into it, as if she is part of one giant membrane that holds land, sea and sky together. Some days she feels like a fly caught in an invisible web.

  Luke is tired of his wife’s churlishness. He does not want to think about leaving Garra Nalla. Perhaps one day, but not yet. He jokes with her that he has too much reading to do, that it will take him twelve months at least to read his way through the vicar’s books. For a while he has had to put these aside because of a new contract and an overload of work, but tonight he has resumed his acquaintance with Sir Frederick Treves. At last that honest surgeon has arrived in Jerusalem itself: the goal of his pilgrimage, the very heart of his faith. But even here, as elsewhere, he experiences profound disappointment. The famed Via Dolorosa, along which Jesus is said to have carried his cross, is a patent fraud, a ‘dirty and callous street’ constructed by merchants for monetary gain. ‘Along this route the Stations of the Cross are marked by inscribed stones let into the walks or by other insignia. But the Via Dolorosa is a mere fiction of the Christian Church, a lane of lies . . . The magnitude of the deception can be realized if it be remembered that the site of Calvary is not known, that some forty years after the crucifixion of Christ Jerusalem was so utterly destroyed by Titus as to be left a mass of indistinguishable ruins, that it remained a mere heap of stone for sixty years, and that it was not until some three hundred years after the death of Christ, when every trace of the city of His time had been obliterated, that any attempt was made to discover the socalled sacred sites.’

  What an unedifying spectacle it is to see the worshippers along the way, ‘possessed by a delirium of adoration that is morbid and pitiable. They dropped down before the sacred spots like felled cattle. They kissed the stones and moaned and muttered like creatures filled with dread.’

  There is something about Sir Frederick that reminds Luke of his father; that rational scientific mind that wants to believe but is sceptical of everything. He can see his father treading the same path and tut-tutting in the same worldly tone. The well of Mary, the tomb of Lazarus, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; all have been concocted for the coin of the gullible. As time goes on the allpervading squalor of his tour seems to induce in Sir Frederick an increasingly acid disillusionment. This dry, stony country, these wretched towns and villages, these gloomy basilicas and their fake relics: can this be the Promised Land?

  While Luke reads, the television continues to purr into the late night. Anna is watching CNN and a report on the latest casualties in Iraq. On the screen a black soldier is weeping. ‘I just want those guys in Washington to come out and do one day of my rotation with me, one day, do what I do, and I’ll willingly serve another fifteen-month rotation if they do that, just come out, one day …’ There is a burning tank, upended, bodies splayed on the road, billowing smoke … An old Iraqi woman is in her living room, white-haired, in her nightgown, clutching her walking frame and wailing. The American soldiers have dragged a dead civilian in off the road, where they shot him, and onto her small paved terrace, behind a high wall covered in flowering jasmine. Here they are sheltered from snipers, and the old woman is standing bewildered, at her walking frame, surrounded by men in battle dress, one of whom is kneeling over the bloodied civilian corpse and trying frantically to revive it. The camera moves to a close-up of another man sitting on a bench in a shadowy room, to the anguish on the face of this soldier, a captain, handsome, in his late twenties. ‘We have six hours out there,’ he is saying, and there is a quaver in his voice, ‘and six hours off and it’s not enough, not enough to wind down, even when we’re lying down, when we’re supposed to be sleeping, we’re in a state of heightened alertness, like permanent, like we’re never off …’ Now the camera pans to a bloodied Iraqi soldier who is sitting in the middle of the road, his shredded skin flayed from him by the blast of an explosion. Bystanders have been struck by shrapnel, a tall man in white, bloodied all down one side, is carrying a bleeding child … a cameraman darts across the road like a whippet … the soldier in the room again, he is wiping his face with his open hand, over and over. There is nothing on his face to wipe but he keeps on wiping, over and over.

  Anna looks down at the boy, who is playing on the rug with some tennis balls. At least, she tells him, you will never have to be a soldier.

  One Saturday afternoon, when Luke and Alan Watts are clearing gorse from behind the sandhills, Alan asks after the contents of the vicar’s library. ‘Do you reckon any of the vicar’s books are worth anything? Any first editions?’

  ‘Several, though I doubt their value.’ He tells Alan about Sir Frederick, and his fascination with Treves’ account of the Middle East as a torpid terrain on which hardly anything of note ever happens. ‘Can you imagine?’ he says, hacking away at the wretched yellow weed. ‘Look at it now, probably the closest thing ever to a state of permanent war.’

  Alan hesitates, and then surprises him. ‘Has Gil told you he’s got a grandson in Afghanistan?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t.’ Luke is miffed; he thought Gil told him everything. ‘Why wouldn’t Gil mention it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but he doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. Bette found out when his daughter was visiting a few weekends back.’

  ‘How long has his grandson been there?’

  ‘Just a month.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s a commando.’

  ‘Is that like the SAS?’

  ‘Similar, but different. Gil said that the SAS are long-range reconnaissance. They go out in small
units and basically dig a hole in the ground and live there for days or weeks at a time, observing what’s going on around them. If they’re sprung they’re buggered because they’re usually in places where it’s difficult if not impossible to retrieve them. Once they’ve figured out what’s going on, they call in the commandos who do the dirty work.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t Gil talk about it? He’s got strong views about everything else.’

  ‘Bette thinks he’s superstitious. You know, if he doesn’t dwell on it, then nothing will happen to the boy.’

  Luke pauses, his clippers open in mid-air. The boy? He hasn’t thought about the boy for quite some time.

  But then, on the way home with Alan, he thinks he sees someone who looks like the boy, walking along the dusty road ahead, kicking at stones, his slight figure quivering in the heat.

  ‘Look.’

  Alan is standing at the edge of the grassy path, beside the body of a dead swan. It appears to have flown into the wires overhead and been electrocuted, and not all that long ago since there is no sign of it having been set upon by crows. It’s a deflating sight: the twisted black carcass, the slash of white feather down its middle, the broken neck splayed at a right angle, the crimson beak lying bright against the sandy stubble of the track.

  *

  In November the summer heat comes early, and still no sign of rain. Already the days shimmer in the low thirties. Across the paddocks, cracks open in the ground. The air is so dry you can almost hear it crack.

  In the weeks that follow it gets hotter, and drier, and still the winds blow. Bush animals begin to roam into the settlement, looking for water. First a sluggish wombat and then a bewildered echidna come to drink from the bird-bath, a lotusshaped bowl carved from granite. Anna has yet to find a suitable plinth so it rests for now on the ground and this induces her to wonder aloud: if echidnas are on the move, can the snakes be far behind? Any day she expects to look out from across the veranda and see an eastern brown curled around the base of the lotus.

  One evening she ventures the hitherto unsayable: what would it take for them to return to the city? For a few hours the wind has dropped and she is sitting in the shade of the veranda. Luke is standing at its edge with his field-glasses, intent on tracking the glide of a white-bellied sea-eagle above the lagoon. Gil said he had once seen a seaeagle swoop on a black swan, lifting it high into the air in its great talons.

  Anna is following the line of Luke’s gaze and even without glasses she can see the distinctive contour of the raptor’s broad upswept wings. It’s not a bird she likes, but she is trying now to sound playful, as if posing a hypothetical question, something to while away the post-dinner lull on a night when there is nothing much on TV. She wants to catch Luke off guard.

  ‘You know, I don’t think I could live here all my life,’ she says.

  Luke doesn’t reply. He is watching the eagle as it rises to greater and greater heights. It has caught an air current and is circling upwards in a slow, mesmeric spiral. If he is patient he might be able to track it to its nest, at least if the nest is along the cliff face around Rittler’s Point; if it flies home to a tall tree in the hills, then before long it will be lost beyond the range of his fieldglasses.

  Anna tires of waiting for an answer and gets up from her chair in a huff. Though he gives the appearance of being absorbed in the eagle, Luke is alert to her every movement. He hears the soft rasp of the screen door as it slides along its groove and knows that she has given up on him and retreated into the house.

  …

  Luke Worley is not a fool. He can see that his wife is in need of a break. When friends in Randwick ring to say that they are about to travel overseas at short notice and ask if Luke and Anna would be interested in house-sitting, he feigns enthusiasm. ‘Let’s take some time off and go to town,’ he says. ‘We can stock up on things, go to a club, see a few people. You can stay on longer if you like and work on the laptop. Gil will water the garden while we’re away.’

  ‘I wish they had given us more notice,’ she says, but he knows this is only token resistance.

  On the following Friday they pack up and drop the keys into Gil.

  ‘Back to the city, eh?’ he says. ‘Better watch out or you might get caught there.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ says Luke.

  At the turn-off to the freeway he looks back at the windswept headland of Garra Nalla and the glinting roof of what is now their home. This is our Promised Land, he thinks, and we are here to stay.

  On the drive along the coast he is buoyant, and looking forward, even, to the change. But almost from the moment they begin to unpack in the small high-rise apartment in Bondi Junction he is irritable and censorious. ‘At least you’ll be in striking distance of the water,’ his friends had said. Striking distance? What did that mean? An overpopulated Bondi where even the gulls seem brazen and acquisitive?

  ‘Gulls are gulls, Luke,’ says Anna as they stroll along the boulevard on a Sunday morning.

  ‘Not when they’re used to a diet of chips and souvlaki.’ He thinks of the Pacific gulls at home, fossicking at low tide for cockles; how they rise up over the shallows and hover above the reef, the better to drop their prey on the rocks below so that the shells can smash and disgorge their meat.

  Five days in and Luke returns to the coast. The night before his departure they dine with friends in a noisy Thai restaurant in Newtown where he is prickly and distant, complaining of the noise and making a show of not being able to hear anything said to him. On the drive home Anna is silent and in the morning she is relieved to see him go. Nothing pleases him, whereas for her it’s enough to be out of the wind. It’s true that right now it is windy in the city, but there are more interesting places to escape it. Even if the air is fouled with exhaust fumes and the nights are broken with sirens, there is much here that is sensual and exciting, and not all of it in neon. She loves the lurid metropolitan sunsets, and she cannot see how these flushed and burnished skies are infer ior to what they look out on from the veranda at Garra Nalla; indeed, the dark, blockish shapes of the city skyline, the contrast of their sharp-edged silhouettes against a fiery sky, confer on nature an even greater drama.

  But then, somewhere in the middle of the second week she begins to feel claustrophobic. She misses her house, its many rooms; the wide veranda; the great glittering expanse of the lagoon; the feeling of gliding across the water in their canoe. And she misses the she-oaks with their wispy canopies that seem to hum and vibrate in the heat. Damn Luke, damn his stupid ideas. All he has succeeded in doing is creating a situation where she doesn’t feel at home anywhere. Now she belongs in neither place, like some migratory bird that has lost its bearings. But the most disturbing thing is this: here in the city there has been no sign of the boy. At night she wills him to come and lie beside her on the wide, king-sized futon; she wants to stroke her palm along the golden sheen of his forehead, to study the way his dark eyelashes curl against his cheek. She longs to see him in the tiny kitchen of the apartment, sitting up at the table with his spoon clasped at a languid angle as he knocks his foot rhythmically against the leg of his chair. But when she wakes in the dark she is alone; in her mind’s eye she can see him in the old farmhouse, clattering around the veranda or lost in the swinging fold of the hammock. Why, she asks herself, does he always have to side with his father? Or could it be that she is losing her power to summon him? In a panic she realises that it’s been three weeks since he last came to her and now when she thinks of his face it is pale and slightly out of focus.

  On her last day in the city she buys a book on coastal vegetation and sits in the courtyard of a coffee shop in Darlinghurst, sketching a plan for a garden of bush rosemary and casuarinas. Quietly, she has resolved to give it another year in Garra Nalla. This is not too much to ask, it is what they agreed at the outset, after all those nights of debating the move in their Glebe apartment. But secretly she has made up her mind: they must go. One day. In the meantime she will
work on leaving something worthwhile behind. She needs a project, and since the winds are eroding the topsoil of her garden it makes sense to plant more trees. And of all trees, the casuarinas are her favourite. Here, for once, nature is on her side. According to her book, these hardy pines are the great coastal survivors; resistant to salt and wind and minimal in their water needs, they are able to grow fast in poor soils. Better still, they attract the birds. There is a big bush nursery outside of Brockwood and when she returns she will drive there and buy as many varieties as she can find, but especially the Allocasuarina, or weeping she-oak. These are the most seductive trees of all, mysterious trees, like wraiths, with long filaments that resemble quills and a subtle palette of foliage that is neither blue nor green nor grey nor rusty brown but all of these melding into a mystical blur.

  The Allocasuarina, she discovers, has two distinct forms, male and female. The male tree has long reddish tips at the end of its fine, needlelike branches and these pollinate the rust-red globes of flower on the female tree. Sometimes, says her book, the production of pollen can be so prolific that a reddish carpet is strewn around the ground beneath, and she has seen this on her walks along Rittler’s Point. But best of all, she loves the sound of the wind in the she-oaks at night, the way the canopy sways and sings in an eerie whistle that might be unnerving if it were not so beguiling.

  Luke is waiting with Gil to collect her at the Brockwood station. They have been to the hardware store to buy materials for a snake-proof fence and with their wiry bodies and broad-brimmed hats they look like two old stockmen, whiling away time on the platform.

  ‘I wouldn’t plant she-oaks,’ says Gil, when she tells him of her plan.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they burn like buggery. Light up like a Christmas tree. Get a fire in these parts and they’ll endanger your house.’

  ‘So what do you plant?’