Refuge

by Richard Rossiter

  ‘Thank you for your kind thoughts, Rock. It seems the city has given you lots of words. And Greta, as you say, is alright. Or I hope so. I worry about her. She won’t talk about what’s happened. With Clive. You heard about that?’

  ‘Yes, you told me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘On the phone.’

  Tinny nodded, hesitantly. ‘Who would have thought he’d really do such a thing?’

  ‘Crazy … She would have been frightened.’

  ‘When do you leave, Rock? What are your plans?’

  ‘Can I just put my stuff inside? Maybe we could have a cup of tea?’

  ‘Of course, of course. This is what happens when I’m by myself for too long. I rehearse conversations.’

  Half an hour later they were sitting at the table and Tinny was looking around him, but not at his son.

  ‘You know, Dad, I’m not leaving because you got sick. I worry about you—hope you’ll be alright. I thought about it a lot when we were staying in the city, when we came to see you in hospital. It was sad, I felt sad, to see you in that bed, with all that stuff hanging off you.’

  ‘All that stuff, as you call it, was keeping me alive. And it was good that you came to see me, you and Skel. Where is the silent one, by the way?’

  ‘He stopped off at Greta’s. I don’t think she was home; he’ll be here in a minute.’

  ‘Okay. I know my illness and hospital and all that was hard for you, both of you—and for me. Rock, let me tell you, you are a good boy in every way. I know you wouldn’t desert me if you thought I needed you but, as you’ve guessed, I don’t. I will miss you, a lot, but that’s not the same thing. I think you’ve made the right decision. Now, when do you leave?’

  ‘Probably near the end of the holidays, so I can start at a new school at the beginning of the year.’

  Fifty-three

  They’d put him in a cell. No bail. He’d told the policeman, Johnston, that Greta was his friend, she was staying with him, and then decided to leave, she’d got sick of the place, not enough comforts around for a woman.

  ‘She wanted to go back to her place—she’d been away for a long time. It’s understandable. I would feel the same way. People don’t like staying in the same place for too long.’

  The policeman had looked at him. ‘She wasn’t away from her place by choice, Clive. She wasn’t on holidays. You realise this is serious? A crime?’

  He told Johnston they became soulmates. That they’d sat around the fire talking, they had a lot in common. Greta understood because the same things had happened to her. ‘You know,’ he’d said, ‘when I first saw her, I could tell. She was different and she understood how I was different. She didn’t think I was odd, or a madman. You only need one person, you know? One person who believes in you, so you know you’re not really the only one. Do you understand that?’

  ‘What I understand, matey, is that what you’ve done is wrong, very wrong. And you’ll have to pay for it. For what you’ve done now and what you did two years ago. You’ll go to jail—you know that?’

  Now he was by himself, locked up. He thought about what the policeman had said. He didn’t seem a bad bloke, Johnston. He knew his family, or knew who they were. Locked up. Not only his body. His mind would become locked, if he couldn’t get out there and walk around, watch the sky, listen to the animals at night, go to the coast. Get up when he wanted to, go to bed when he wanted to, eat when he wanted to. But he could think. For now. He would be able to do that. His mind would be alright, for a little while. Not that he could control that—his thinking. It could get out of hand. He could be thinking someone was good, like Steve or Greta, or even Maia, and then he would start to see things wrong with them. He would remember something they had done, or said to him, or to someone else, and he would feel disappointed; or, stronger than that, he would wonder how they could possibly be the person he thought they were and still do, or say, the things they did. Like Maia calling out to him while he was driving, and he’d turned to shut her up. Then that other car.

  Then he would feel despairing, how he couldn’t get these other people to understand what he was thinking, and then he’d wonder if he was the only person in the world like himself. Well, of course he was, but what he meant was: what did people really have in common, even someone like your wife, or son? When he started to think like this, he would get angry, and he would see his hands, and the soft skin on the throat and the inside of thighs, women and girls, and imagine pressing until his thumbprints showed red, and pressing harder, and the terror. He would reach for his gloves, those big leather gloves, then nothing felt soft, except his fingers inside. Nothing outside. He was safe, and they were safe.

  He touched the walls of his cell, delicately, with his fingertips, and then the blanket, and the pillow, and the skin on his face. He felt his nose and his lips. His lips again. He had no desire to touch his penis, which he knew was very quiet and shrunken. He wanted to stay here, by himself, and never leave. Not for food. Not to wash. Not anything. He did not want to speak to anyone. ‘Just leave me alone’—that’s what he’d say. But of course they wouldn’t. In a proper cell, in the city, they would watch him all the time, and he couldn’t watch them. He couldn’t stand in the trees and see the light, the movement of a body. But they could see him. It would be for a long time; he knew that. There would be other prisoners, evil people, who would crowd around him, make a lot of noise, even harm him, perhaps. He was strong but had no desire to harm another man.

  In the end, he’d stood there and watched Greta approach the couple. He could not hear what she said, but then they’d taken hold of her as if she was going to fall. When she pointed towards him, he’d turned and walked away.

  One good thing had happened to Clive since he’d been locked up: he had rediscovered Jesus as a friend and confidant. Once again he could think about a life that didn’t begin and end within minutes or days or years. If he could step out of his body, he would be alright. His mind could go on, forever. Perhaps that was his soul. It lasted; he knew that. He knew that his body did things his mind did not approve of. They were different.

  He read the Bible that they’d given him when he asked for it. There were many lines full of wisdom: And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into Hell. He wondered which member he would start with. When people got old, you could see it. Sometimes their minds stayed young, the two became disconnected. Body and mind. Then decay and disarray counted for nothing. If you believed this, you would never die. He could do without his body; this he would let them know. He would not grow old to stare, popeyed, into the middle distance. He had exalted himself and now there would be abasement. It did not matter. No one but himself, and God, could see what was within.

  Fifty-four

  All afternoon Skel had been hanging around, wanting to ask her things, wanting to tell her things. Earlier that morning he had taken out the photo of Greta that he’d stolen from her shed. He kept it hidden in a cardboard box where his shoes were stored. He looked at it for a long time and wondered what it would be like if Greta was his mother, and immediately felt embarrassed at the thought and thrust the photo back in an envelope below his smelly sneakers.

  They sat down at the outside table and there was silence.

  ‘Well?’ said Greta.

  He fidgeted, then looked at her, sideways. ‘It’s good that you’re back,’ he said. ‘That you’re safe.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Skel. It’s going to take me some time, but then I’ll look back. Maybe I will see things differently, maybe I won’t. It’s been hard for you, too.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think about it much.’

  ‘It’s a lot. With all that has been going on with Tinny. And Rock. It will all take time. Change has occurred, and will continue. For everybody.’

  There was a long silence and then Skel said to her,
‘I’ve got a story—it’s about a father and a son, and other things. Could I tell you the story? Or, really, read it to you? I’ve written it all down.’

  ‘Of course—I would love to hear it.’

  Skel removed the pad from under his arm, a red one with 96 Pages in large letters on the front. She noticed he’d written his name, Skelly, on the cover. Nothing else. He began to read.

  ‘There was a time, when the tide was very low after a full moon, that the father had taken his son out to fish in the holes on a nearby reef. It was a brilliant day and the water so low that the reef was dry. They had taken their shirts off and were dangling their lines in the holes where water flowed in through cracks in the reef. The boy, Nicholas, was excited. He had caught a banded sweep and two small wrasse. When he pulled in the first one, his father had said, “We’ll keep it. Smoked, it will taste good, not soft. Some people throw them back, but that’s because they don’t know how delicious they can be.”

  ‘There was no one else on the reef on this morning. It was a favourite surfing spot, but the ocean was flat after days of wind from the east. The boy and his father crunched over the reef in their sandshoes as they moved from one hole to another. They spoke only a few words about bait and berley and which spot to try next. Then something happened that was a surprise. They were standing side by side with their rods held just above the surge of the water. The man and the boy could see some brownish-looking fish around their baits, but the fish were not tempted enough to bite. Deeper down, there was a small limestone ledge jutting into the pool.

  ‘ “I wonder what’s under there,” the man said to his son. “Try letting your bait go down a bit further.”

  ‘And so the boy did, and the next moment his rod was bending under the weight of something much bigger than the fish he had caught earlier. “Keep winding,” his father said, “but don’t try to pull it in too fast, or your line will break.” The boy was very excited. “Perhaps it’s a big old buff bream,” his father said. “In which case we’ll have to throw it back.” The boy kept winding. Now he could see the fish near the surface. It was no buffalo bream. He struggled to lift it out of the water, and then lowered it onto the reef. It was the most beautiful fish he had ever seen. A brilliant blue with sparkling spots. It had long, wavy fins and tail, almost as big as its body.

  ‘“Can we take him home—can we keep him? We could get an aquarium.”

  ‘The boy dropped his rod and tried to take hold of the fish in the shallow water that was now beginning to come over the reef. The tide had turned. Eventually he caught it by the gills. The hook had buried itself deep inside the fish’s mouth. “We will have to take it to the beach and try to get the hook out with the pliers,” his father said.

  ‘They carried their rods ashore with the fish struggling in the boy’s hands. They laid it down as carefully as possible on the rocks and his father started to jiggle the hook with the pliers, trying to twist it out of the fish. It would not come. He grabbed it firmly by the gills and twisted harder. The fish started to bleed, red over blue, and then more blood until it was running along its side to the tail. “You’re killing it!” the boy cried out. The father was unhappy because the fish struggled and because of what his son had said to him. And so he gave an almighty yank, and finally out came the hook. The boy ran his fingers along the body of the fish and stared at the blood on his hands. His father grabbed the bucket and scooped up some warm shallow water and gently placed the fish into it. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get it back to the pool—maybe it will be alright.”

  ‘The boy and the man hurried back out onto the reef. The father allowed the bucket to fill with water and then turned it on its side. The fish gave a couple of flicks of its tail, and then all movement stopped. It floated in the bucket. The boy looked like he was going to cry.

  ‘ “I am sorry, Nicholas,” said the father. “We tried our best.” The boy said nothing. “What do you want to do with it?” asked the father.

  ‘In the end Nicholas decided to take the fish home and bury it, even though his father wanted to tip it back into the pool. “I don’t want the other fish to eat it,” the boy said. When they got the fish back to the house, it no longer looked brilliant. Instead the dark blue had turned a dull brown. Later, the boy discovered in an encyclopedia that it was called a western blue devil, and that it was an iconic fish for underwater divers, who wanted to take pictures of it. His father told him that iconic meant a fish that was admired by a lot of people because it was beautiful and reminded them of why they loved the sea and its creatures. It also reminded divers of why they wanted to get into the water in the first place. His father did not know the reason for its name, apart from the colour. It did not look like a devil.

  ‘Three weeks later, Nicholas dug up the fish, which was no longer even brown. With a stick he put the rotting body into a bucket and took it back to the reef and tipped it into the pool which had been its home. When he thought about it, the boy knew it was not his father’s fault that the fish had died. If anyone was to blame, it was himself for catching it in the first place.

  ‘And that’s the end of the story,’ said Skel.

  ‘It’s a beautiful story,’ she said. ‘And it’s quite long. I think Tinny would like it. Have you shown it to him?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  Greta admired Skel’s story, but found it puzzling. In some ways it was a simple story, but also complex. She wondered whether he had read something similar, and also whether it had something to do with Tinny being in hospital and having an operation. Or Rock leaving; that would upset him. Later, she thought that the story did not need a cause, or an explanation; it could just be.

  Fifty-five

  That winter was cold and wet, one grey day after another, and yet Greta was grateful for the simple familiarity of her shed—the security of tin and concrete, a fireplace, her supply of food. But it was not the same. Ever since she had returned from Hamburg, which now seemed a long time ago, the world she thought she knew had changed, or at least the people in it. It was not just the fact that she’d been abducted and imprisoned by a man who’d lost touch with reality; it was the stories he told about himself, or someone like himself—and something similar was happening to Skel, and even Tinny. No longer did they talk directly about themselves, what they saw, or did. They told stories, long, involved stories, dramatised through the use of different voices for the men and women and children, either imagined or true, she couldn’t tell. She wondered whether this was what happened when you stayed in an isolated place for too long, with no one to talk to. Whether this was what Rock needed to leave behind when he decided to go to the city to be with his mother. And yet the stories were not interchangeable, not unrelated to the teller, their singular experience. They would talk about themselves in the third person as if dissociated, a little mad. She didn’t know what to make of it.

  Nor was she free of stories of her own, although she did not hide behind the third person. There was, always, the story of a black man and a white woman. A story that was, even now, shocking. Marvyn and Greta. She could still see him standing there, unevenly, his head tilted to one side. ‘Can you stay a bit longer?’

  She saw herself, a tall, blonde woman who lay down in the red dirt with the finely boned black man. There they were, close and apart, overwhelmed by the business of the night sky. For a long time they did not speak, then Marvyn turned his head towards her. ‘This country, you know, it’s my second skin.’

  She raised her hand towards the startling stars.

  ‘It’s everything,’ he said. ‘All around.’

  She pushed against her swag, wriggled her back, trying to get comfortable. She thought about those words she’d read, about never knowing heart’s ease in a foreign land, and wondered whether there was a place, any place, where she truly belonged.

  ‘I don’t know where my second skin is, or what it is—not now, maybe not ever. You are lucky.’

  He did not reply and she wondered wheth
er her voice was too pleading, abject. And then he said, ‘It’s not luck. There are many second skins, not just country. But country, that’s a hard one for Wedjelas. We’ve got something they can never have. Mebbe that’s why they hate us. We frighten them, like the land.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Not you … because you know.’

  She felt the tension drain out of her into the solid earth beneath, and smiled into the darkness. He’d spoken without rancour, and Greta believed, perhaps irrationally, that one day she would discover the substance behind words, that there would be no gap between the language she used and the self that was coming into being, opening up to the world. She saw their bodies entwined, becoming smaller and smaller, the horizon growing vast. She saw the rocks, the saltbush, the earth, the sky. She was a hungry spiritual being enlarged by intimacy.

  And then he’d turned to her and said, quietly, ‘You’re the same as those other fellas, those wacks, trying too hard.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Those whitefellas, black on the inside. But it’s not the same—not really.’

  ‘I’ve never pretended to be black, inside or out. Just look at me. How can you say that?’

  But he turned away, and she knew that he was, of course, wrong, but also that she was too self-conscious. Secretly, she was pleased that he would grant her any identity that brought her closer to his own.

  They sat by the fire on the cool earth; the sky was black and splendid with stars. Marvyn began a story of a man, Nirunja, who chased women across the desert.

  ‘How does he do that?’ she asked. ‘Is he on foot, or in a four-wheel drive? Is this one of those awful stories?’