Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  I reach out to help Harry but instead I clutch wildly at the toddler's hand. His mother looks alarmed.

  'Oh I'm sorry . . .'

  The woman picks up her toddler and they disappear into the next aisle. I pick up the bananas I've dropped and push the trolley towards the check-out counter. Run, run, run. God how I hate queues. The girl at the counter gives me my plastic bags and I head for the plate-glass door, the packages heavy as bricks in my hands. But I've gone to the wrong exit. My forehead crashes against the glass and I leap back, stunned. 'Silly me,' I say merrily to the staring shopgirl, 'I forgot something.' My head is singing with pain, there'll be a lump like an egg on my eyebrow, but I have to return to the fruit and veg. I need to check on things, the woman with the toddler, the mess I left , Harry drowning.

  I rush back but the turnstile hits me in the groin and the bananas and crackers and cheese and bread and biscuits and lite milk and yoghurt brimming with live acidophilus spill onto the floor. 'Fuck!' I yell, crouching among the debris, trying to rescue the split cartons and the spilt milk leaking under the counter and the elusive acidophilus, but everyone knows that the good little bacteria are as small as sperm, impossible to see, so how could you catch them?

  Someone is brushing against me. I can feel the heat of a person's breath on the top of my head. Hands are picking up the bananas and putting them into a bag, methodical, competent. Now they're handling the milk cartons, shaking the drops off before packing them into the bag, upright. Rough, hard hands, weathered and whitened around the nails, a callous inside the knuckle of the third finger, a faint smell of chemicals. One of the hands moves up under my arm. Lift s me up.

  'Rachel, are you all right?'

  Simon Manson hands. A tingle of pleasure runs through me.

  'Are you real?' I ask him. I don't wait for him to answer. I want to believe in him. 'It's too much,' I tell him. 'I thought we would look after each other but he never did. He said will I come first as if it were a competition and I thought he would, yes, but how can you with a baby and now she's gone and all I did was criticise when I only meant to love her and he was disgusted by me all this time, it's there in black and white and Harry isn't being brave either, just desperate like me.'

  Simon nods, as if he agrees with everything I am saying. 'I've got the van outside,' he says. I follow him blindly, one foot after the other.

  Chapter 25

  Ciao mamma,

  The best day – on the back of a vespa! Don't freak out, I'm home safe with all my limbs attached, okay? Roberto took me for a ride into the hills. Che gioia! Russet hills deepening into folds of purple, exploding now and then into halos of flowers from cherry trees.

  Roberto dreams of wilderness and an empty sky but what i love is the touch of HUMANITY here – the landscape so thoroughly tended, a canvas worked and reworked, you could never lose yourself in the horizon with all these loving stitches of human existence – a mustard cottage, a small alter with a candel, the careful embroidery of fields.

  In the hills today, I must have looked like those girls on vespas whizzing past with their boyfriends and now I'm one of them. All the moments of gioia in my life, suddenly notes to reach just this creshendo.

  Hugs from your Clara in love!

  xxx

  Joy! Such gioia at Clara's words, and her sharing them with me.

  When I close my eyes I see her 'russet' hills – such a lovely word. There's her joy but also my fear, and look at it now, staining the russet to blood. 'Vespa' – isn't that just another word for motorbike, a machine offering no protection against crashes or heartbreak? She's riding down foreign valleys, her arms around a man she's falling into, falling in love with . . .

  She's not you, I tell myself. She's not falling, she's feeling. She's not blind, she can see! Just look at her looking around her! I wish she wouldn't feel so much, though – such a long drop from that cliff . What if he doesn't love her back? Her first real love . . . I'm so scared for her. Who is this man, this Roberto?

  If he doesn't last, at least she'll always have those russet hills. She's seen them now, this world outside her skin – she's pinned them down with her words, let them become a part of her.

  Simon said something like that last week after he brought me home from the supermarket. He said when he was young he used to go into the bush with his pencils and sketchbook and draw what he saw. Drawing helped him to see everything more deeply – the hieroglyphics on the scribbly gums, the spider webs spangling between them. He liked the quiet that didn't comment or judge, and the way his thoughts flowed through it. He painted such a calming world for me with his wide open skies and trees that my breathing slowed and the shouting lights of Coles softened into green wells of shadow.

  After we arrived back at my place and Simon helped me put away the groceries, we drank red wine and talked and listened to Joe Cocker. It was an extraordinary event I still can't quite believe in. A smile hijacks my face, incredulous and private, each time I think of it.

  'You need to relax,' he said. 'Will we have a drink? No, stay there, I'll get it.' He poured two generous glasses of wine even though it was only four in the afternoon. We sat on the sofa and looked out at the pool. It glared dully at us in the grey light. Tiny paws of ivy splintered the fence, its wild fronds catching the breeze. The ferns, crowded and brown with lack of water, drooped over weeds growing enthusiastically from the cracks in the concrete around the pool.

  'Lovely garden you have, Rachel. So lush and natural. When I was a boy I loved gardens like this, you could find secret places to explore and pretend. We lived near a river, built cubbies . . .'

  I smiled at him. We were looking out at the same bedraggled scene, neglected plants unravelling over fences and slabs, left to their own devices. How was he able to spot the best in things, in people? I tried to look with his eyes at the thriving lantana and ivy piling over the fence but failed.

  Simon got up and wandered over to the stereo. Long legs in comfortable loose-fitting jeans, faded green shirt. Fine grey-blond hair, a little long, rebellious over his collar. I liked his broad, unselfconscious back. He was different, here in my living room. There was still the checking glance back at me, the shared grin, the usual signs of his considerate self. But he was purposeful. He found the pile of CDs on the cabinet and in a methodical, absorbed manner he picked them up, examining and discarding. He was gentle and assertive. He seemed in possession, quite incisively, of the atmosphere, of himself. Perhaps this was because he had saved me there in the supermarket among the bananas and the acidophilus, and he was aware that he had been of help. 'I like to be useful,' he said quite often.

  'Joe Cocker!' he exclaimed. 'Are you in the mood?'

  He'd put it on before I said anything. Something more reckless than careful in him now.

  He'd got halfway across the living room, heading for the sofa, when the drums came in, driving. He did a wiggle and held out a hand to me. 'Come on, you can't sit down when Joe's singing!' He ducked back to the stereo and turned it up. The gravelly outrage of Joe's voice conquered me and I was flooded with courage. Simon grabbed my hand and pulled me towards him and away, twirling me as easily as a baton. A swoop of joy like flying made me laugh out loud and we jived and whirled and shook up and down the length of the house. After Joe we found Bruce Springsteen's 'Dancing in the Dark', Motown singers Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett , Diana Ross. Every now and then one of us would run back to the coffee table by the sofa and take another swig of wine. He said Joe Cocker had always been one of his favourites – 'All that raw feeling, that's what I call charisma. You know, a person losing themselves on stage, not performing so much as being themselves. Risky. Generous.'

  'Houdini did that!'

  Simon laughed, sitting down suddenly on the edge of the coffee table.

  I sat down next to him. We were both puffing. 'Did you dance with your wife?' I ask.

  He smiled. 'Zuri was a great dancer, played the drums too. She taught the djembe, you know, the drum you sling arou
nd your neck, and the talking drums as well . . . Have you heard them? Used to transmit messages from village to village, like morse code. The way she played them, they sounded just like people talking. I think she would have gone on to do more if . . .'

  Simon was silent. The light in his face went out.

  'Do you want to hear Aretha Franklin?' I ask. 'She always gives me courage.'

  We must have danced and drank and talked for a couple of hours, until the garden outside turned lacy with shadow. It was strange, quite glorious, being suspended in the flood of music. When I closed my eyes the colours were big and wild, almost too intense, like something you shouldn't believe in, a cartoon perhaps, the figures out of control. But then, quite suddenly, the sliding feeling returned and almost tipped me over, or maybe it was the wine, and I had to stop.

  We went back to the sofa and sprawled comfortably among the cushions. I could feel sweat gliding down my neck into my bra. When Simon raised his arm, waving it above his head as he talked, there was a big wet patch. Neither of us cared. It was so comfortable sitting there on the sofa, sweaty and tired and exhilarated. We didn't bother to turn on the lights. Before it got dark I noticed the colour of his eyes: green, flecked with gold and blue and brown. The colour changed with the light like a kaleidoscope when you twirl it around. I mustn't have looked properly before. I'd always thought Simon's eyes were brown. Not that I'd ever thought about it, really.

  The darkness in the room was soft and whispered, encouraging confession. Simon told me more about the river where he'd grown up and how his friend had a radio and they'd bring it down after school and listen. If they were alone they'd try out dance steps and wrestle each other. They caught tadpoles and spent hours looking for cicadas and water dragons. 'We pretended to be Indians running from the cowboys. When I was hiding in the bush, sharpening my arrows, I felt more at home than anywhere else. Like I belonged. Often we ended up camping out so we could get on with the game as soon as the sun rose the next morning. I suppose you couldn't do that now – as a kid I mean. Parents worry too much . . .'

  We both smiled. 'Is that why you went to Africa?' I asked. 'You know, a place with bush and wildlife, not cars and concrete?'

  Simon laughed. 'Yeah, maybe. I liked travelling and I knew how to build and make stuff with my hands. I didn't know much else that I wanted to do.'

  'What about your art, your drawing?'

  'Oh well, that was something I could take with me anywhere – a way of living, seeing the world. Not something I wanted to make a living out of necessarily. Maybe I was too scared to show other people!' He spread his hands wide on his knees. 'Anyway, I got caught up for a few years in Africa. They were wonderful years – then of course Zuri came back with me here, and I had a family to provide for.'

  I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be Zuri, leaving Africa. I failed. Simon was quiet. 'How was it,' I asked, 'when you first got there? Did you love it straight away? Was it hard, you know, dealing with the poverty?'

  Simon nodded. But he didn't say anything. His face had gone still.

  'I can't really imagine . . . ' I fussed with the hem of my skirt. 'Take Zambia for example, life expectancy there is just thirty-seven years old.' I stopped suddenly, feeling the blush start deep in my stomach. To blare on to such a subject, so insensitively. 'Oh, god, well, I mean . . . I'm sorry—'

  Simon stirred, uncrossing his legs. 'When I first arrived in Africa, I felt useless. Overwhelmed, I suppose. So much misery . . . and beauty . . . I sat in a hut and, well, dithered. Thought about going back, and why the hell did I come. Then I met Zuri and she said to me, "Look, we don't have a schoolhouse for these villages. We've got most of the materials, but we need men to build one. You can't fix the whole Tanzanian education system, but you could do that." And so I did.'

  'How was that? I bet you felt good, useful.' I grinned at him.

  He grinned back. 'But it wasn't just a do-gooder thing, I got so much out of it myself. Working with those people, I was living.' He ran a hand through his hair, his face charged with the memory. 'We worked hard and long and ate this kind of maize porridge which I have to say I never got to like, but the bananas were sweet and there was great coffee and sometimes for a feast we'd get a chicken and roast it. Kids ran around fetching and carrying and playing and there was music at night. One guy, Themba, played these incredible instruments, sometimes he even played his own body, used it like a piece of percussion. He taught me a song on the kalimba – a kind of thumb piano, sounds like water trickling, thirst-quenching music . . . One night, he invited me to have dinner with his family – we sat around a fire, there were always big communal fires, like the bonfires we used to have as kids on cracker night – and Themba taught me to play some drums. We never had much music in our house growing up. Music was a foreign language, you know, like being a Brazilian, or an Eskimo. And I knew I'd never be either one! But it was such a great feeling to be suddenly part of a rhythm, playing together in the firelight, keeping back the dark. We found this groove and we stuck to it, we were flying. I never wanted to leave that rhythm.'

  'You lost yourself.'

  'Yeah, or found myself – found bits of me I never knew I had.' His voice was thick.

  It was dark in the living room now, the soft silver glow from the streetlight hushing through the kitchen window.

  I shivered. Simon stirred again, scratched at the pool of streetlight settling on his knee. The rough skin around his fingernail glowed white. 'After Zuri died, everything hurt. Just opening my eyes and seeing the morning sun. She was in everything. I didn't talk to anyone all day. Just the necessities at work: chemicals, stuff you could measure. Didn't even talk to my daughter – well, about anything to do with feelings. I was like a robot. Tried not to feel. Tried not to remember, or imagine – often the same thing, isn't it? Maybe I would have rotted away like that, except that little Sam needed me. And I couldn't sleep. So I started to read. It became such a comfort, reading. I did it to escape and yet it brought me back to myself.'

  'What did you read?'

  'I started with the past – the present seemed too raw, so I read Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. I got so caught up with those characters, I came out of this dark place in my head and started to share the stories with Sam. We read Oliver Twist together when she was eleven – she loved it. At night we sat with the book between us, talking about those lost boys and the injustices done to them and their fear and courage and we faced it, faced each other. I owe so much to books . . .'

  I remember the way Simon smiled then. It was like the expression he'd worn looking at the garden.

  The heat from dancing had evaporated in the cool darkness of the living room. I didn't know if Simon noticed – his eyes were following the flickering beam from car headlights passing on the road outside. I got up to put on a jumper.

  We talked a bit about our daughters then, and what they liked to read. I told him about Clara's performance to 'Unchain My Heart' in sixth class, and the way I couldn't help myself.

  'It's you who wants to be the escape artist,' he laughed. 'There wouldn't be too many female magicians around, come to think of it. Women are the attractive assistants, handing things to the main man.'

  'Yeah, the assistant is the misdirection. And twins are especially valuable – they make transporting illusions so much easier: you know, magician locks girl in cupboard stage left , waves his wand, walks over to cupboard stage right, and there she is! No lock picking, black cloth, no dim light needed, just twins in the right places. Like human props . . .'

  'Way of the world, I guess. But why couldn't you take centre stage? Be the magician instead of the assistant?'

  'Oh, no, I'm way too old.'

  'I reckon it's at this age that we come into our own! It's not so important what people are thinking about you, it's more about what you think, or want.'

  'Yeah, so why don't we have some more Aretha!' I said boldly, and pulled Simon up from the sofa.

  We danced to 'Respect' a
nd 'Freeway to Love' too, and when we came back to the sofa I said, 'I don't meet many men like you. But then I guess I don't meet many men.'

  Simon grinned. I wanted to tell him then how good it was to talk about these things, and how wonderful it would be to live how you feel, at least sometimes, not always having to hide the core of yourself away at the bottom of the fruit bowl like a bad apple. He made me think of Jonny Love, and how different he seemed from the other magicians I'd read about, what with making his female assistant his partner, his equal. There were so many things to say, but it was easier to tell Simon about Jonny, so I did.

  'You see?' grinned Simon. 'Not all men want to make women their slaves.'

  'Mmm.' An excitement was thrumming in my chest. 'And you know what, he's even related to Harry.'