Where There's Smoke

by Black Inc.

  MRS PORTER AND THE ROCK

  DAVID MALOUF

  The Rock is Ayers Rock, Uluru. Mrs Porter’s son, Donald, has brought her out to look at it. They are at breakfast, on the second day of a three-day tour, in the Desert Rose Room of the Yullara Sheraton. Mrs Porter, sucking voluptuously, is on her third cigarette, while Donald, a born letter-writer who will happily spend half an hour shaping and reshaping a description in his head, or putting a dazzling sheen on an ironical observation, is engaged in one of the airy rockets, all fizz and sparkle and recondite allusions, that he can barely wait, once he is out of town, to launch in the direction of his more discerning friends. In a large, loose, schoolboyish hand, on the Sheraton’s note-paper, he writes:

  To complete the scene, only the sacred river is missing, for this resort is surely inspired by the great tent city of Kubla Khan. Nestling among spinifex dunes, it rises, like a late version of the impossible East, out of the rust-red sands, a postmodern Bedouin encampment, all pink and apricot turrets and slender aluminium poles that hum and twang as they prick the skyline. Over the walkaways and public spaces hover huge, shadow-making sails that are meant to evoke, in those of us for whom deserts create a sense of spiritual unease, the ocean we left two thousand miles back.

  So there you have it. The pitched tents of the modern nomads. That tribe of the internationally restless who have come on here from the Holy Land, or from Taos or Porto Cervo or Nepal, to stare for a bit on an imaginable wonder – when, that is, they can lift their eyes from the spa pool, or in pauses between the Tasmanian salmon and the crème brûlée …

  Mrs Porter is here on sufferance, accepting, with minimal grace, what Donald had intended as a treat. Frankly she’d rather be at Jupiter’s playing the pokies. She takes a good drag on her cigarette, looks up from the plate – as yet untouched – of scrambled egg, baked beans and golden croquettes, and is astonished to find herself confronting, high up on the translucent canopy of the dining-room ceiling, a pair of colossal feet. The fat soles are sloshing about up there in ripples of light. Unnaturally magnified, and with the glare beyond them, diffuse, almost blinding, of the Central Australian sun. She gives a small cry and ducks. And Donald, who keeps a keen eye on her and is responsive to all her jerks and twitches, observing the movement but not for the moment its cause, demands, ‘What? What’s the matter? What is it?’

  Mrs Porter shakes her head. He frowns, subjects her to worried scrutiny – one of his what’s-she-up-to-now looks. She keeps her head down. After a moment, with another wary glance in her direction, he goes back to his letter.

  Mrs Porter throws a swift glance upward.

  Mmm, the feet are still there. Beyond them, distorted by fans of watery light, is the outline of a body, almost transparent – shoulders, a gigantic trunk. Black. This one is black. An enormous black man is up there wielding a length of hose, and the water is red. The big feet are bleeding. Well, that’s a new one.

  Mrs Porter nibbles at her toast. She needs to think about this. Between bites, she takes long, sweet drags on her cigarette. If she ignores this latest apparition, she thinks, maybe it will go away.

  Lately – well, for quite a while now – she’s been getting these visitations – apparitions is how she thinks of them, though they appear at such odd times, and in such unexpected guises, that she wonders if they aren’t in fact revisitations that she herself has called up out of bits and pieces of her past, her now scattered and inconsiderate memory.

  In the beginning she thought they might be messengers – well, to put it more plainly, angels. But their only message seemed to be one she already knew: that the world she found herself in these days was a stranger place than she’d bargained for, and getting stranger.

  She had wondered as well – but this was only at the start – if they might be tormentors, visitors from places she’d never been, like Antarctica, bringing with them a breath of icebergs. But that, she’d decided pretty smartly, was foolish. Dulcie, she told herself, you’re being a fool! She wasn’t the sort of person that anyone out there would want to torment. All her apparitions did was make themselves visible, hang around for a bit, disturbing the afternoon or whatever with a sudden chill, and drift off.

  Ghosts might have been a more common word for them – she believes in ghosts. But if that’s what they are, they’re the ghosts of people she’s never met. And surely, if they were ghosts, her husband Leonard would be one of them.

  Unless he has decided for some reason to give her a miss.

  She finds this possibility distressing. She doesn’t particularly want to see Leonard, but the thought that he could appear to her if he wanted and has chosen not to puts a clamp on her heart, makes her go damp and miserable.

  All this is a puzzle and she would like to ask someone about it, get a few answers, but is afraid of what she might hear. In the meantime she turns her attention to Donald. Let the feet go their own way. Let them just go!

  Donald looks sweet when he is writing. He sits with one shoulder dipped and his arm circling the page, forever worried, like a child, that someone might be looking over his shoulder and trying to copy. His tongue is at the corner of his mouth. Like a sweet-natured forty-three-year-old, very earnest and absorbed, practising pot-hooks.

  Poor Donald, she thinks. He has spent his whole life waiting for her to become a mother of another sort. The sort who’ll take an interest. Well, she is interested. She’s interested, right now, in those feet! But what Donald means is interested in what interests him, and she can’t for the life of her see what all this stuff is that he gets so excited about, and Donald, for all his cleverness, can’t tell her. When she asks, he gets angry. The questions she comes up with are just the ones, it seems, that Donald cannot answer. They’re too simple. He loses his cool – that’s what people say these days – but all that does is make him feel bad, and the next moment he is coming after her with hugs, and little offerings out of the Herald that she could perfectly well read for herself, or out of books! Because she’s made him feel guilty.

  This capacity she appears to possess for making grown men feel guilty – she had the same effect on Donald’s father – surprises her. Guilt is not one of the things she herself suffers from.

  Duty. Responsibility. Guilt. Leonard was very strong on all three. So is Donald. He is very like his father in all sorts of ways, though not physically – Leonard was a very thin man.

  Leonard too would have liked her to take an interest. Only Leonard was kinder, more understanding – she had almost said forgiving. It wasn’t her fault that she’d left school at thirteen – loads of girls did in those days, and clever men married them just the same. Leonard was careful always not to let her see that in this way she had failed him; that in the part of his nature that looked out into the world and was baffled, or which brought him moments of almost boyish elation, she could not join him, he was alone.

  She was sorry for that, but she didn’t feel guilty. People are what they are. Leonard knew that as well as she did.

  Donald’s generation, she has decided, are less willing to make allowances. Less indulgent. Or maybe that is just Donald. Even as a tiny tot he was always imposing what he felt on others. His need to ‘share,’ as he calls it, does have its nice side, she knows that. But it is very consuming. ‘Look at this, Mum,’ he would shout, his whole tiny body in a fury. ‘You’re not looking! Look!’

  In those days it would be a caterpillar, some nasty black thing. An armoured black dragon that she thought of as Japanese-looking and found particularly repulsive. Or a picture of an air battle, all dotted lines that were supposed to be machine-gun bullets, and jagged flame. Later it was books – Proust. She’d had a whole year of that one, that Proust. Now it was this Rock.

  High maintenance, that’s what they called it these days. She got that from her neighbour, Tess Hyland. Donald was high maintenance.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asks now, seeing her dip her shoulder again and flinch. ‘What’s the matter?’

&nbs
p; ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ she snaps back. ‘What’s the matter yourself?’

  She has discovered that the best way of dealing with Donald’s questions is to return them. Backhand. As a girl she was quite a decent tennis player.

  She continues to crouch. There is plenty of space up there under the cantilevered ceiling, no shortage of space; but the fact that twenty feet over your head the splayed toes of some giant black acrobat are sloshing about in blood is not an easy thing to ignore, especially at breakfast. She is reminded of the roofs of some of the cathedrals they’d seen – with Leonard it was cathedrals. They visited seven of them once, seven in a row. But over there the angels existed mostly from the waist up. You were supposed to ignore what existed below. They hung out over the damp aisles blowing trumpets or shaking tambourines. Here, it seems, you did get the lower parts and they were armed with hosepipes. Well, that was logical enough. They were in the southern hemisphere.

  Donald is eyeing her again, though he is pretending not to. They are all at it these days – Donald, Douglas, Shirley. She has become an object of interest. She knows why. They’re on the lookout for some sign that she is losing her marbles.

  ‘Why aren’t you eating your breakfast?’ Donald demands.

  ‘I am,’ she tells him.

  As if in retaliation for all those years when she forced one thing or another into their reluctant mouths – gooey eggs, strips of limp bread and butter, mashed banana, cod-liver oil – they have begun, this last year, to torment her with her unwillingness to do more than pick about at her food. When Donald says, ‘Come on now, just one more mouthful,’ he is reproducing, whether he knows it or not, exactly the coax and whine of her own voice from forty years ago, and so accurately that, with a sickening rush, as if she had missed a step and fallen through four decades, she finds herself back in the dingy, cockroach-infested maisonette at West End that was all Leonard was able to find for them in the Shortage after the war. The linoleum! Except in the corners and under the immoveable sideboard, roses worn to a dishwater brown. A gas heater in the bathroom that when she shut her eyes and put a match to it went off like a bunger and threatened to blast her eyebrows off. Donald in his highchair chucking crusts all over the floor, and Douglas hauling himself up to the open piano, preparing to thump. To get away from that vision she’s willing even to face the feet.

  She glances upward – ah, they’re gone! – then away to where an oversized ranger in a khaki uniform and wide-brimmed Akubra is examining the leaves of a rainforest shrub that goes all the way to the ceiling. For all the world as if he was out in the open somewhere and had just climbed out of a ute or off a horse.

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken all that,’ Donald is saying – she knows this one too – ‘if all you’re going to do is let it sit on your plate.’

  Dear me, she thinks, is he going to go through the whole routine? The poor little children in England? What a pain I must have been!

  In fact, she doesn’t intend to eat any of this stuff. Breakfast is just an excuse, so far as she is concerned, for a cigarette.

  But the buffet table here is a feature. Donald leads her to it each morning as if it was an altar. Leonard too had a weakness for altars.

  This one is garishly and unseasonably festive.

  A big blue Japanese pumpkin is surrounded by several smaller ones, bright orange, with shells like fine bone china and pimpled.

  There are wheatsheaves, loaves of rye and five-grain bread, spilled walnuts, almonds, a couple of hibiscus flowers. It’s hard to know what is for decoration and what is to eat.

  And the effect, whatever was intended, has been ruined because some joker has, without ceremony, unceremoniously, plonked his saddle down right in the middle of it. Its straps all scuffed at the edges, and with worn and frayed stitching, its seat discoloured with sweat, this saddle has simply been plonked down and left among the cereal jars, the plates of cheese, sliced ham and smoked salmon, the bowls of stewed prunes, tinned apricots, orange quarters, crystallised pears …

  But food is of no interest to her. She has helped herself so generously to the hot buffet not because she is hungry and intends to eat any of this stuff but so she’ll have something to look at. Something other than it.

  It is everywhere. The whole place has been designed so that whichever way you turn, it’s there, displaying itself on the horizon. Sitting out there like a great slab of purple-brown liver going off in the sun. No, not liver, something else, she can’t think quite what.

  And then she can. Suddenly she can. That’s why she has been so unwilling to look at it!

  She is seven, maybe eight years old. Along with her friends of that time, Isobel and Betty Olds, she is squatting on her heels on the beach at Etty Bay in front of their discovery, a humpbacked sea creature bigger than any fish they have ever seen, which has been washed up on this familiar bit of beach and is lying stranded on the silvery wet sand. Its one visible eye, as yet unclouded, which is blue like a far-off moon, is open to the sky. It is alive and breathing. You can see the opening and closing of its gills.

  The sea often tosses up flotsam of one kind or another. Big green-glass balls netted with rope. Toadfish that when you roll them with a big toe puff up and puff up till you think they’d burst. But nothing as big and sad-looking as this. You can imagine putting your arms around it like a person. Like a person that has maybe been turned into a fish by a witch’s curse and is unable to tell you that once, not so long ago, it was a princess. It breathes and is silent. Cut off in a silence that makes you aware suddenly of your own breathing, while the gulls rise shrieking overhead.

  They have the beach to themselves. They sit there watching while the tide goes out. No longer swirling and trying to catch your feet, it goes far out, leaving the sand polished like a mirror to a silvery gleam in which the light comes and goes in flashes and the colours of the late-afternoon sky are gaudily reflected.

  And slowly, as they watch, the creature begins to change – the blue-black back, the golden belly. The big fish begins to throw off colours in electric flashes. Mauve, pink, a yellowish pale green, they have never seen anything like it. Slow fireworks. As if, out of its element, in a world where it had no other means of expression, the big fish was trying to reveal to them some vision of what it was and where it had come from, a lost secret they were meant to remember and pass on. Well, maybe the others had grasped it. All she had done was gape and feel the slow wonder spread through her.

  So they had squatted there, all three, and watched the big fish slowly die.

  It was a fish dolphin, a dorado, and it had been dying. That’s what she knew now. The show had been its last. That’s why she didn’t want to look at this Rock. Just as she wouldn’t want to look at the fish dolphin either if it was lying out there now. No matter what sort of performance it put on.

  She finds herself fidgeting. She stubs out the last of her cigarette, takes up a fork.

  ‘My mother,’ Donald writes to his friend Sherman, offering yet another glimpse of a character who never fails to amuse, ‘has for some reason taken against the scenery. Can you imagine? In fact it’s what she’s been doing all her life. If she can’t accommodate a thing, it isn’t there. Grand as it is, not even Ayers Rock stands a chance against her magnificent indifference. She simply chain-smokes and looks the other way. I begin to get an idea, after all these years, of how poor old Leonard must have felt.

  ‘The hotel, on the other hand, has her completely absorbed. She devotes whole mealtimes to the perusal of the menu.

  ‘Not that she deigns to taste more than a bite or two. But she does like to know what is there for the choosing.’

  He pauses and looks up, feeling a twinge at having yet again offered her up as a figure of fun, this woman who has never ceased to puzzle and thwart him but who still commands the largest part of his heart. He knows this is odd. He covers himself by making her appear to his friends as a burden he has taken on that cannot, in all honour, be thrown off; an endless source,
in the meantime, of amusing stories and flat-footed comments and attitudes.

  ‘What would Dulcie think of it?’ his friends Sherman and Jack Anderson say, and try, amid shouts of laughter, to reproduce one of her dead ordinary ways of looking at things, without ever quite catching her tone.

  She eludes them – ‘One for you, Dulcie,’ Donald tells himself – as she has for so long eluded him.

  He watches her now, fork in hand, pushing baked beans about, piling them into modest heaps, then rearranging them in steep hills and ridges, then using the prongs of the fork to redistribute them in lines and circles, and finds himself thinking of the view from the plane window as they flew in from Alice: a panorama of scorched, reddish rock that must have been created, he thinks, in a spirit of wilfulness very like his mother’s as she goes now at the beans.

  He smiles. The idea amuses him. His mother as demiurge.

  He continues to watch, allowing the image to undergo in his head the quiet miracle of transformation, then once again begins to write.

  *

  Mrs Porter sits in the tourist bus and smokes. Smoking isn’t allowed of course, but there is nobody about. She has the bus to herself. She has no qualms about the breaking of rules.

  The bus is parked in the shade but is not cool. Heated air pours in at the open window, bearing flies. She is using the smoke to keep them off. Outside, the earth bakes.

  To her left, country that is flat. Orange-red with clumps of grey-green spiky bushes. It, the Rock, is a little way off to her right. She does not look.

  People, among them Donald, are hauling themselves up it in relays; dark lines of them against the Rock’s glowing red. Occasionally there is a flash as the sun bounces off a watch or a belt buckle, or a camera round someone’s neck. Madness, she thinks. Why would anyone want to do it? But she knows the answer to that one. Because it’s there.

  Except that for most of the time, it hadn’t been – not in her book. And what’s more, she hadn’t missed it, so there! When they drew maps at school they hadn’t even bothered to put it in! She had got through life – dawdling her way past picket fences, barefoot, in a faded frock, pulling cosmos or daisies through the gaps to make bouquets, parsing sentences, getting her teeth drilled, going back and forth to the dairy on Saturday mornings for jugs of cream – with no awareness whatsoever that this great lump of a thing was sitting out here in the middle of nowhere and was considered sacred.