by Lloyd Jones
That night she falls backwards on to her bed, the toes of her shoes pointing up at the ceiling. She looks like a small black and white doll. She raises a hand to her forehead. A tired gesture, the kind that a performer might make when at last they find themselves offstage and all alone. She closes her eyes, and when she draws her fingers back through her hair I can see the white flesh and the thick dark hair of her underarm. Now her eyes snap open and I see the whites and blacks of a magpie. She seems to know what I have seen and what I am thinking and feeling. She chuckles and smiles.‘Pasta,’ she says. Her eyes, which so often contain a hundred practical restaurant matters, begin to focus on me. She is drifting, I think, between appraisal and a decision, and at the same time covering up that process by pretending to find me amusing. The thing is, I want to kiss her. I want to return to that moment in the cave and by the fastest route possible. She must see that, and as I teeter at that employer-employee threshold, Rosa reaches out to me.
‘Why don’t you come here,’ she says.
Why don’t I? And because I feel the need to say something, anything at all, I say, ‘We could dance.’
That amuses her.
‘Thank you, Pasta, but no.’
She sits up then and begins to scratch at her back for the zipper on her dress. I move across to help her. Kneeling on her bed I run the zipper down her back and as her dress parts a sweet perfume escapes her.
Afterwards, we lay in our separate dark. For some reason I found myself thinking of Brice Johns and his pimply face stuck in one of his economic textbooks. Of course I had moved on. That’s what Brice was doing in my thoughts. I had moved on into new territory that Brice could only gape at from afar and wonder. I wished he could see me now. In bed with Rosa. I was exhilarated. Sleep was as far away as ever, a futile mission. At an early hour I heard a train haul through the middle of the hotel. With the peace restored I moved on to my other side, then back again, until I heard Rosa say, ‘For godsakes, Lionel, go to sleep.’
14
I rang my parents at the farm and got my mother Jean. She sounded annoyed with me. She had been expecting me the previous night. She had even rung the bus company to see what time the bus would come by and then driven out to the road to wait for the bus to drop me off at the farm gate. Towards the end of this recitation it occurred to her to ask what I was doing on the Coast?
‘I’ll explain later,’ I said.
‘Well, what bus will you catch?’
‘I won’t be on a bus. I’m driving.’
‘A car?’ She sounded puzzled. ‘Whose car?’
I was calling from a phone box and I was aware of Rosa studying me through her sunglasses. She was sitting in the passenger seat.
That was another of the changes that last night’s event had racked up. At breakfast she had deferred to me. ‘I think I’ll have an orange juice. No, an apple.’ She couldn’t decide. She said, ‘Lionel, you choose for me while I go upstairs.’
I said to Jean, ‘Just somebody’s.You’ll meet them soon.’
Them, I said.
‘When?’ she asked.
‘This afternoon.’
‘When this afternoon?’
‘I don’t know. Some time.’
I hated it when she tried to pin me down like that. Her need of scheduling. This excitement over my homecoming. It just made me deliberately more vague. I hung up and left the phone box and got back in the car.
‘So, everything is okay?’
‘Yes. Everything is okay.’
‘Do we have time?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
We drove round to Louise’s boarding house. It had been turned into a backpacker’s. We sat outside, glancing up at the windows. We debated whether to go in. I couldn’t see much point. Its only unusual feature was that it had two storeys. By Little River’s standards I suppose it had a certain structural grandeur. Otherwise its colour regime kept faith with the same flat white that you saw up and down the street.
I trailed Rosa into the reception area. She asked if we could look in the rooms. She didn’t say why and she wasn’t asked to explain herself. It all seemed perfectly reasonable to everyone concerned except me. A young woman in jeans, the manager, showed none of my embarrassment. She handed Rosa two sets and pointed the way up the stairs.
The house was a shell, stripped back to its fundamentals. Its hallways were used to the bruising and bumping of packs. The carpet was worn down the middle. Rosa opened the door to the end room and made her way to the window. She stood there gathering views. A sense of the boundaries that had locked in Louise’s life is what she was after. The dark ranges in the east; the woolly morning cloud that caught on them. She fished in the near view, the house across the road, its sodden clothesline, the windows that were still in shadow.
That’s pretty much how the rest of the morning proceeded, with me keeping up some kind of sentinel presence on this mission of Rosa’s to feel her way in to Louise’s old landscape.
To catch up with Louise’s ultimate rejection of it we had to drive up the coast another fifteen kilometres, to the line of old miner’s cottages on the beach where Louise had lived with Billy Pohl for a while. All these years later, solo mums from the city had moved in and painted gardens on the weatherboards.You could see the withering effect of the harsh sun and where the petals and flowers had lifted off in the summer humidity. We stopped and parked outside a cottage; its corrugated iron had been painted purple. When we got out of the car Rosa went directly to the letterbox, which blossomed with a large sunflower.
‘How old do you think this letterbox is?’ she asked.
Like the house it was a metal box and it perched on the gatepost. ‘As old as the house,’ I thought.
This was the kind of confirmation she was after.The letterbox went into her carpet bag of fact and memory.
In the front windows we could see our reflections. It didn’t look like anyone lived there. Rosa wanted to go in and look around. Once more she deferred to me.
‘We have time? Yes?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
We let ourselves in the gate. I closed it after Rosa. We walked along the side of the cottage to the timeless sound of the sea washing up a shingle beach. Around the back a line of flax separated the ocean from the back door. Rosa sat on the back step and lit a cigarette. She patted a place by her, shifted a little to make room for me. I sat down, our shoulders pressed together. She put her arm around my back and squeezed me towards her. A faint perfume leaked from her woollen jersey.
‘You are happy, yes?’
I smiled and nodded.
We sat in silence for a bit.
Then Rosa said, ‘I wonder if this place is for sale?’
‘Would you buy it?’
‘Maybe. Maybe.’ Then just as quickly she decided differently. ‘No. I do not think so. I don’t like other people’s castoffs. Secondhand clothes. Things. This place is like that.’
‘How so?’
She stabbed her cigarette out on the porch and immediately lit another.
‘Let me ask you a question.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Have you ever had a pen pal?’
‘Yes.’
I surprised her with that answer. But my mother used to encourage me and my sister Megan in this area. Jean had a pen pal in Canada she wrote to for years until one day the woman’s husband wrote to say that she had been killed in a car accident. Megan wrote to a girl in Spain and an Australian boy living in Port Moresby.
‘And you?’
‘Jules. He lived in Ottawa.’ He had sent me a photo of himself ice skating and I sent one back of myself on a horse.
‘And this Jules,’ she said. ‘Supposing for the moment it was a Julia who once you had loved. And she asked you to come and live, where did you say, Ottawa, would you drop everything to do that?’
She saw my confusion. ‘Never mind,’ she said. She felt around for her cigarettes. They were in the bag, and she’d left it in the car.
It is 1919. Louise stands by her letterbox looking at her first letter with foreign postmarks. She weighs it in her hand. It is light as a feather. A short letter. The piano tuner acknowledged the point himself. It was just to re-establish contact. He promised a fuller account once he heard back from her.
Immediately she wanted to write to him. She wanted that contact. But then she thought, what’s the point? It would just reopen an old wound. He had hurt her. He must have known that. Besides, an ocean separated them. She screwed up the letter. Within the hour she was searching back through the rubbish to retrieve it. This time she set it alight so Billy wouldn’t find it.
Sweeping up the ashes she regretted the finality of her action. She hadn’t written down Schmidt’s address. She’d left herself without any possibility of a change of heart. And of course, no sooner was Schmidt’s letter a pile of ash than she felt that change of heart. She regretted it the day after, and for weeks after that. Schmidt had given her a rope with a hook to haul in the horizon and she had rejected it.
Another six months had passed when a young man in a suit showed up to her door.
‘Louise? Louise Cunningham?’ he asked.
She went by the name Pohl these days but she nodded.
The young man introduced himself. He was the new piano tuner for the Coast. She could have saved him the trip. She didn’t own a piano any more. She was about to tell him as much when he mentioned Schmidt.
‘Mr Schmidt. Paul Schmidt has written to ask that I give you this.’ It was a letter. As she took it from him he said, ‘Mr Schmidt wasn’t sure you were still at this address and so wrote to the firm asking us to verify.’
Even on the page he was able to gently chide her and make fun of her anger. He managed to do so without raising his voice. He was quick to tell her how much he missed her. He missed their dancing. He missed her eyes, her hair. He missed the feel of her. She had come to fill in that place that he had carried around inside of himself during their time together in the cave. She had usurped a country-sized craving. In Buenos Aires he lived with the constant thought of her. At any time of the day or night she was his companion. And on a more playful note he was happy to report that she was alive and well in Buenos Aires. In fact, he said, she was ‘thriving’. He may have been joking but she felt her face light up when she read that. Schmidt was also anxious to know how her days in the cave had ended. If she would write and tell all he would reply immediately.
She waited a day, then she decided to wait another. In the evening she watched Billy by the fire turn his clothes on the drying rack. He looked so gaunt. It was that hour when his chin turned blue, and the day’s labour left him looking drained. The steam off his clothes brought back the hideous nature of the mine, its cruel procedures and Billy’s role.
That afternoon she had walked up Paradise Valley road to watch the pit ponies dip their heads in the fields; it was their last day after a month in the open air. She had watched Billy fit on their eye pads and lead them back down the hole in the earth. A month earlier she had stood with schoolchildren behind a rope as the poor animals were brought to the surface. A small girl had touched the nearest pony and left a small handprint in the coal dust.
In the morning she sat on the back step to write her first letter to Buenos Aires.
She told Schmidt about falling sick in the cave and how she’d woken up in hospital to the fresh smell of linen, the sound of trolley wheels creaking in the corridor. For several days tubes carrying a saline solution ran into her veins. She was badly dehydrated. She wondered if he remembered the policeman who had come to her house.Well, he had also visited her in hospital. It was the same old Ryan, awkward, officious, uncertain. He leant over her bed with his notebook. He wanted to know if he could ask her some questions. She said he could if Tom Williams was present. He gave her a strange look. She heard him say, ‘Tom Williams is dead.’ Then as he realised he was breaking news to her, he said, ‘Dear Christ, I’m sorry, Louise. Tom suffered a heart attack back in early December.’
She chose not to tell Schmidt she was married. But she mentioned Billy Pohl and Henry Graham in passing. How they had sat out the rest of the war in a camp at the foot of a windblown mountain. She told him of the kind acts she was treated to when she got out of hospital. Neighbours had brought her food. In the Little River Cemetery Jackson had come over with his paper bag of sweets. ‘I saved you a caramel.’ Audrey gave her a hug. She told her, ‘Jackson kept your grass nice and trim.’
Louise’s first letter ended with a request. She asked Schmidt if he would trace out on paper the dance steps he had taught her. She wanted to practise them. She had one other thing to ask. In the future, he should write to her care of the local post office.
Schmidt’s letters filled in another world for her. And of course they supplied her with new dance steps. A Portuguese furniture polisher who lived beneath Schmidt complained of the floorboards creaking above his head. The furniture polisher had the feeling that the world was sneaking up on him. But Schmidt couldn’t put the steps down on paper until he’d traced them out on the floor.
How odd it was to contemplate that bad relations between tenants were all a result of a woman’s requests from the other side of the world. To Louise it was reassuring. Schmidt’s descriptions of his irritable neighbour had her believe that despite all the distance separating them, their lives could still impact on each other.
Schmidt sent photographs of himself. He asked for the same from her. With a pair of scissors she cut Billy out of one of the studio photos and sent that.
For the next few years they exchanged letters. Her relationship with Schmidt continued as it had always done—as something half-realised, a glimpse that strives for more.
In the sitting room Louise rolled back the rug and set about following the latest steps Schmidt had written down. She attached the notes to a broom. It saved her going back to the letter whenever she lost her way. This was adequate for a while, but then she found herself wishing that the broom wasn’t merely a broom, that it offered more presence. More possibility.
One morning down at the beach she happened to spy a ketch; its sails were down and as soon as she saw the cross hatch of the mast and rigging she knew what to do. She hurried back to the cottage and hammered a piece of wood across the top of the broom and hung on it one of Billy’s jackets.
Schmidt possibly never knew the value of his letters or the extent to which they sustained Louise and nurtured in her a capacity for a parallel life. In one letter she asks him to write less frequently. She is afraid of arousing suspicion at the post office. As it is she always watches the postmaster’s face whenever she asks, ‘Anything for me?’ The slightest smile may mean more.
‘Let’s see.Yes. Something from your pen pal, Louise.’ Each time is cause for fresh surprise. Year after year, surprise after surprise. Mail is bounty. It is treasure to be parcelled out. Every new letter she takes to the beach, to a log she snuggles up to. She reads quickly to the end to make sure there were no unwelcome surprises, then she goes back and reads slowly, digesting each morsel. A silken feeling bloomed inside her when she read how much Schmidt missed her.
She stowed the letters, along with the photos of Schmidt, in a cake tin which she hid under the front steps.
She gave Billy no reason to suspect that the piano tuner was still part of her life. She even felt secure enough to buy a map of the world at the church fair, and bold enough to pin it to the wall above the kitchen sink. It was three days before Billy even noticed it.
‘What’s this, then?’ he asked.
‘Just to show where we are in the world,’ she said.
She watched Billy’s eye skate across the pale blue Pacific for South America, then stop and pause before drifting south to the pink and white cap of Antarctica.
At night they lay in bed in wakeful silence. She waited for Billy to raise himself on to his side, and with a big ‘oh well’ sigh reach for her.
He wanted a baby. She kept putting him off without saying why, exactly.
‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’
‘No, Billy, it’s not that.’
She couldn’t say what it was either. It was just a feeling that once she had a baby with Billy her correspondence with Schmidt would have to end. That thread would be severed. She would have responsibilities, loyalties of flesh and blood to consider.
She had come a long way in her private world.The experience of the cave had made her aware of the layers people wove about themselves. She could lie next to Billy and dream of another man. She could cross the floor with a cup of tea for Billy where just an hour earlier she had danced with Schmidt’s stand-in. She could stand idly dreaming before the map of the world and when Billy came up behind her and placed his hands affectionately on her waist he would have no idea where her thoughts were or who her smile was for.
It was an unsatisfactory life, of course. A wallpaper life interweaved with too many bright smiles. She began to feel a disgust. She found herself wishing for the wallpaper to peel away.
One afternoon she deliberately left the dance notes taped to the broom and when Billy turned to ask, ‘What’s this?’ she said, ‘What does it look like, Billy?’
His face appeared stricken for thinking what he did. He started to say something but swallowed that reply.
‘They’re just dance steps, Billy. I’ve got no one to dance with.’
As soon as she said the word ‘dance’ she saw his thoughts rush back to the cave. She saw the same urges rise in him. The wanting. His doubting. For a second she thought they might actually dance. But then the hand holding the broom fell at his side. Billy was simply unable to lead.
Instead he mentioned the name of a woman, the wife of a workmate. Dottie Fearnley.
‘Dot says the curtains are closed here during the day.’
‘That’s because I dance with the broomstick,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t want someone looking in and reporting back to you your wife’s gone mad.’