by Luke Davies
I imagine he feels he could float away now. The Melleril has gone, the alcohol has emptied out all other emotions. I imagine he feels his body beginning to fade. I imagine he imagines himself to be transparent, like a ghost in an old black and white movie. Abbott and Costello in a haunted castle. A cascade of flickering images is passing through him: the accumulated irrelevancies of a lifetime. It is high noon. There is no shadow. He sweats hard as he toils. The gradient steepens.
He registers another curious fact: the complete absence of birdcall out on this tract of Hawaiian desert. He has entered a place where nature focuses on the one thing and the one thing only: this gash in the comfort of the earth, where daylight roils in a vortex, always precariously aware of its proximity not to Night but to Under, this giant sump around which ordinary everyday nature struggles to keep its balance. This place where birds have no business.
The only sound he must be hearing is the crunch of his own shoes on the walking path, the tight puff of his breathing and, from further away, the holiday sounds of the American family. And as he comes closer to the viewing platform, he must hear the hiss of the volcano itself, which will eventually increase to a roar that will drown out all else.
He makes it to the platform an hour after he leaves the car. The American family are small specks hundreds of metres down the trail, slowly following. He leans on the railing and gains his breath. He looks at his watch. It is seven minutes past one. He thinks how this is the last time he will ever see the big hand on seven minutes and the little hand on one hour and is vaguely comforted by the thought.
The crater stretches before him like a jagged stadium, everything skewiff, everything leaning at bad angles, everything impossible to access. A geologists nightmare. Kilauea is categorised as a shield volcano, a large dome-shaped mountain formed by countless eruptions of fluid lava over one hundred thousand years or more. The summit is indented by a cliff-walled caldera, the Halemaumau Crater, formed by inward collapse. This useless information travels in the brochure in Tom Airly’s back pocket.
Far below, three hundred metres down perhaps, is the churning red maelstrom where the lava breaks through the crater. From the viewing platform it looks like a tiny red lake. I picture him putting a coin in the telescope and focusing on the lake. It bubbles and simmers, as promised, with the viscosity of liquid honey. All around, the barren moonscape hisses. The summit is rich in the carbon dioxide that leaks from the magma chamber two miles below the surface. He scans the telescope up the north cliff wall that rises from the lava lake. It’s a sheer cliff of baked basalt and andesite, rising, it seems, hundreds of metres on a smooth vertical; an anomaly, a line so geometrically precise in this profusion of jaggedness. Okay then, he thinks. Final angle of descent. Looking through the telescope, trying to hold it steady, does he have a still flash of memory in which I, Isabelle, nine years old, am running around the backyard wearing welder’s goggles, a white sheet attached to me as a cloak, the coathanger clasped in my hands bent to serve as the joystick of a spaceship, while I repeat in a robotic voice the immortal lines from Star Wars: ‘Stay— on—target! Stay—on—target!’? Does he resist the urge to cry? All decisions have been made. Stay on target. The baked ash-flow plateau which leads to the cliff.
I imagine he is so calm now that he wonders his heart is even beating. He continues, with the aid of the telescope, to trace a path backwards from the final cliff, back towards where he is standing. Finally, with his naked eye, he lines up what appears to be the easiest way of descent.
He can hear the American family now, chirping away as if to make up for the absence of the birds, hidden from view behind a large boulder fifty metres away, but about to emerge around the final bend on the path. He glances at the sign erected by the local tourism authority. ‘Warning: serious injury or death due to heat scalding, burns and toxic gas emissions can result beyond this barricade. It is expressly forbidden, except for members of the U.S. Geological Survey, or other authorized persons, to go beyond this point.’
He climbs over the safety barrier and lowers himself to the ground. He begins picking his way across the boulders and down towards the crater. The ugly angels have followed him all the way from the hotel. Soon they will be beautiful. They pulse all around him in the glare. He begins to hear what sounds like the hissing of steam. The day has dissipated all around him. He has moved into a giant factory, so big it can’t be seen; he is no more than a molecule in one of the bolts in one of the girders, in the far corner, near the smelting chamber.
The dissonance and harmony of nature. He is comforted by the thought that as he moves across the arid terrain, his life is moving away from dissonance and towards harmony. A voice calls from behind him, ‘Hello!’, thirty metres back. Tom stops and turns around. It’s the American lather, standing with his family on the viewing platform. From this point in the story of his death, my mother and I have the American family’s version of events to help piece things together. The gap between his notebook and the hard evidence is bridged.
‘Are you okay there?’
‘I’m sorry,’ calls Tom. ‘Um, I’m sorry. I just…’
‘I can’t hear you!’ the American shouts.
Tom cups his hands over his mouth and calls louder. ‘I’m fine! No problems!’
The American persists. ‘But the sign here! It’s dangerous out there.’
Tom laughs. ‘It’s dangerous everywhere!’
‘What?’
‘I said, I’ll be all right.’
In the wasteland between their cupped hands, words are trailing and flittering like scraps of paper blown about in a vacant lot.
‘But what are you doing?’
‘I’m sorry about this.’
‘Maybe you should come back!’
Tom smiles and shakes his head. ‘Goodbye,’ he calls. ‘Have a nice day!’ He turns and continues his descent. The American, growing alarmed, thinking in his panic he will need proof to show to the authorities, takes a photo—the one he will eventually send to Tess and me—of the tiny figure diminishing in the distance. Two days later the photograph will appear around the world in the more popular newspapers: ‘Descent Into The Underworld: Final Photo Of A Suicide.’ Tom begins to follow the ledge he sighted through the telescope. The red lake is not far now. All his clothes are soaked with sweat. He strips naked, feels the heat of the ground on the soles of his feet, then puts his runners back on. He does not tie the laces. He throws his jeans and T-shirt into the canyon. He turns back to face the American family, spreads his arms and shouts to them:
‘Naked!’
He looks down at the paunch of his belly, his heat-shrivelled penis. The sunlight makes his red pubic hair disappear so that he sees himself as a boy. A boy with the roar of a bull. ‘Naked!’ he shouts again, allowing the sound to rise up from his stomach. Then his soul seems to deflate. He tries to sit down for a minute, to gather his thoughts, but the rock is too hot for his buttocks, and it is getting hard to breathe, and his thoughts are too fast to catch. Oh God, look at me, pity me. I am an old man lost on the rocks. I am a flabby red-haired man whose life has come to nothing. I am a naked man in Reeboks, about to dive into a volcano. Please carry me downwards gently, break my fall.
In all his life Tom Airly has never spoken to God but it feels like the thing to do now.
He is finding it hard to breathe in the heat. He stops to urinate. He watches the liquid flow out for the last time ever, the gold stream glinting in the sun, the urine pooling in rivulets and gathering the dry volcanic dust into its flow before disappearing into a crevice.
The smell of hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide begins to nauseate him. He forces himself to continue. He rounds a bend and looks behind him and the Americans, tiny figures, are jumping up and down and waving frantically in the distance. One of them—is it the mother?— appears to be moving away, running perhaps, back down the path, to raise the alarm.
He turns away from the last humans he will ever see. The lava lake is bu
bbling: huge languid swells that move out from the centre, rolling rather than breaking waves, bigger than the biggest surf he’s ever seen in Sydney. From where he stands now he can see clearly the place where the ledge drops away. From that precise point there will be nothing but air and the sheerness of last things between him and great rest in the molten flow.
There is nothing but a terrifying calm surrounding him now, like silence after bells. The angels all are hushed.
He pushes one foot in front of the other. He feels that his skin is beginning to flake off in the searing heat. Five minutes, surely, and I’ll be there, he says.
But he reaches a bend where the canyon wall becomes very steep and the path he is trying to keep to—or create— is barely a foothold. His Reebok slips on a scree of loose rock and his ankle twists and he loses his footing and begins to slide. There is a ledge that tilts inwards. There is space in the empty air. As his body flips over one full time the sky flashes blue across his vision. In the split second of the consciousness that he is beginning to fall, he makes the final decision of his life: not to try to grab hold of anything. Why panic? his brain, pulling down the security grille, says to his soul, which is already departing the store. It’s the weekend; enjoy yourself. Take it easy. Have a nice day.
So I missed the centre. So? Edge or centre of the volcano, it makes no difference now. He tumbles down the slope, weightless, arms and legs flailing lazily; his neck snaps early in the fall; he comes to rest finally on a large boulder sixty-three metres below where he tripped. A small lake of red begins to form around his head.
That is everything I can possibly imagine, or deduce, or put together. All that is known for certain is this. The American family had noticed him pass them on the trail. A while later a ranger noticed the peculiar placement of his passport on the dashboard. The family became alarmed on seeing Tom climb the barrier. The strange conversation ensued; the father took the photo; the mother went back to raise the alarm and met the ranger coming up the path. By then it was too late. Tom stripped off his clothes, put his shoes back on, sat down for a moment, continued. Then apparently he just slipped on loose rock. Rescue teams reached him just before dusk. The autopsy report said he had died instantly of a broken neck. The awful phone call reached me in Paris and I was moderately drunk on an airplane when the photo was being beamed around the world. At the instant the camera clicked my father is stepping onto a small boulder, his back to the viewer, his face turned sideways, in profile. His right arm appears to be fluttering a small discreet goodbye, but he is probably only holding it out for balance.
Fish That Are Birds of the Ocean
ALL THAT SEEMS LIKE SO MUCH UNREALITY NOW. I HAVE been too much in my head. I am wrapping up the story; it has exhausted its parameters. I must try to keep it simple.
Fact: I had another funeral to get back to. But at least with my father the end was not so unexpected. I had lived with an increasingly heightened sense of the imminent arrival of tragedy in the long years as his mind unravelled. Or perhaps the madness itself was the tragedy. If there is an afterlife I assume he felt an astonished relief to be there.
At the funeral I began to cry, not so much for what had been but for what might have been: he might have been happy. There was so much that seemed good, and so much loss. There was so much we might have shared, in the later years. In the church I was in the front pew with Mum and Uncle Dan and his family, and Dad was three feet to my left in a sealed coffin. Thirty-six inches is not very far in the scheme of things. My chest constricted and I thought it might burst. It is absolutely necessary to believe that the soul has left the body, because the concept of claustrophobia is untenable. I imagined him at rest somewhere, and regret assailed me: he had been going away from us all, for a very long time. Could I have done something to bring him back? I began to weep then; it all poured out. I wept through most of the service and into the afternoon. Mum held my hand, Dan patted me on the back. I wept all night; I cried myself to sleep. He would sit with me in the backyard. I orchestrated tea-parties, for just the two of us. I invented characters for him and he slipped obediently into his role. As the sun set on warm spring evenings and Tess cooked dinner, his patience was infinite. We played hide-and-seek. He really tried hard to hide. After the funeral I wept for weeks. On the edge of athletics fields all over Sydney, he stood and watched me stretching, sprinting, jumping. He stayed long evenings at training: not in the car, not reading a book, but standing, watching me. I glowed in the gaze of his love. From across the lanes of the running track and the sandpit of the long jump, through the jumble of sports bags and equipment, he applauded me, politely, reverently. At the aquarium he held my hand and we admired the stingrays and sharks. In 1978, with the utmost grace and never a complaint, he took me to see Star Wars at least five times. At the funeral it was apparent that he was utterly gone from us. I wept for weeks. He was only fifty-six.
As for the survivors: it was a horrendous blur, Tom’s funeral and the emptiness of the aftermath, the endlessly sorrowful months that followed. During this time I grew closer to my mother than ever before. In the stream of my love I let go of mad Tom Airly and away he floated; I welcomed into myself more easily the memories of Tom the red-haired god.
Morbid though my trip to Hawaii with Tess might have been, it was a catharsis of sorts. We booked into the same hotel as Tom. We shopped and went swimming as if in a dream. On the fourth day we went up to the volcano. In sweltering heat under a viscous grey sky we sat on a flat rock and looked out over the baked lava plain. Wisps of smoke seeped from hidden fissures. I tried to imagine him clambering up the path and over the safety railing.
‘There was something pure about his determination,’ I said.
Tess said: ‘He must have been like a child that day. A little boy.’
The tension was gone. We spoke for hours. Tess opened up her life for me more fully than any other time. She talked of everything, of her own childhood, of Constance, of the early years with Tom. Of Dan. Finally we got around to the affair.
‘It wasn’t—it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t like I thought, Hello, this is a good idea.’
‘Doesn’t matter, Mum. Maybe Dad would still be with us.’
‘We’ll never know that. What happened up here could be genetic. It could be anything.’
‘But you kept going. I can understand how something can just…happen. But you kept going. Didn’t you think there was a right and wrong?’
She sighed. ‘Right and wrong. Of course I did. Of course I did.’
‘And…?’
‘And…and all the other shades as well.’
‘What shades?’
‘You know—right and wrong and all the shades between. It confuses me today as much as it did then. I was younger than you are. Do you feel old?’
‘I still feel eighteen. I always feel eighteen.’
And so did I. When you feel like that, it’s like you can do anything. I adored them both. I only loved your father. But time stood still when I was with Dan.’
‘You mean it went fast with Tom?’
‘I’m fifty-three,’ she said. ‘You know how old I feel?’
‘How old?’
‘Fifty-three. And you know what I want?’
I shrugged.
‘Two things right now. I want to tell you I’m sorry…’ She reached out, held my hand. ‘…And I want you to forgive me.’
I looked at her, no longer young, not really old, and loved her. Despite it all.
Paris is over for the time being. Tom is over, Matt long gone. When Tom dies I take that curve through air again, back around the globe to Sydney and to ocean. I return to Australia, to the diamond light and the sense of space. I still have some of Matt’s insurance money left.
Heaven is in the heart and hell is in the head. If you don’t take notice of the obvious signs then it’s no surprise when you lose your way. Some time after Dad’s funeral I go to Byron Bay for a week or two, to clear my head, to see what it’s like up ther
e these days, to learn how to scuba dive. Why not? There’s an underside to every surface. At Byron Bay there are wild storms. For two whole days and nights the waves are six metres high and television news crews come from Sydney and Brisbane: good visuals. The waves strike the storm barrier at Main Beach and wash over the carpark where once, years earlier, in the summer holidays from art college, I had eaten fish and chips and laughed with Louise. The tourists are pissed off. The surfers, too: the sea has gone beyond ‘awesome’, beyond ‘bitching’, and is now too dangerous to surf. All through the grey days, groups of people gather on the headlands, wrapped in ineffectual windcheaters and buffeted by the colossal winds, to watch the churning ocean, so astonishingly violent. On Cape Byron the air howls with the boom and screech of breakers smashing on the rocks below.
In a loud cafe I sip coffee and write a postcard to Tess.
Dear Mum
Wild weather, bucketing down. Byron Bay wrapped in a gale for three days—cloud ceiling about ten metres; streets awash, gutters running out of control, trees whip-whipping and out the window the sea gone mad—giant white rollers in slo-mo heaving landward from a mile out. Pretty exciting. Hope you are well.
Love Isabelle
‘Calamity!’ the local paper trumpets, in a cover story about the summer tourist dollar lost. I am enlivened by the happy calamity of the weather. On the second night, as the gale reaches its peak, I walk the twenty minutes to Main Beach from the bungalow I’m renting—a ramshackle hippy weatherboard belonging to a friend of a friend. Cosy in my hooded sweatshirt, I sit in a barbecue shelter out of the main force of the wind and watch the scene, the night seething with salt spume. The high street-lights on their space-age metal stilts clatter backwards and forwards, like masts on a ketch about to disintegrate, over the slick deck that is the deserted carpark. The air is thick with white ocean foam, blown in all directions at once. It’s as if a snowstorm has descended on the asphalt carpark and is held there swirling by conflicting gravitational fields. I blow into my cupped hands and imagine in there a peaceful place. After half an hour I go back to the bungalow and curl up in bed. Beneath the sheets is a tiny world of comfort, far from where the wind howls, in which I feel solace. I know the house to be secure, though the wind causes the tin roof to sing.