The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  George fell asleep. When he woke, Pippa was there on the end of the bed, unbuckling her sandals. She flexed her toes, then sat sideways and swung her feet up. They were small, chunky feet, George noticed, and her toenails were painted blue. Katrina passed down the corridor, saying something about her menstrual cycle. George wondered what she was majoring in. Gender Studies? Performance Art? Obstetrics?

  ‘Communications,’ said Pippa. She was drinking bubbly; it was the late 1990s, so people still called it champagne. The soft white plastic cup dimpled under her fingers, and Pippa remarked that she was stuck. The house would shortly be reclaimed by Katrina’s aunt, who was returning from Singapore. Another house had been found for the girls—Katrina’s family had several at their disposal—but it wasn’t available before the beginning of March. Katrina was moving home for the summer, but there were reasons why that wasn’t an option for Pippa. George told a lie about the purple painting and learned that it was the work of Pippa’s boyfriend, Vince. ‘He’s back at his folks’ place in Mudgee, to save money so we can go travelling next year.’ She spoke of ‘Asia’, of ‘Europe’, collapsing civilisations in the sweeping Australian way.

  In Marrickville, over Vegemite toast one morning, Pippa asked whether the barking wasn’t getting to George. He hadn’t noticed it but now heard the high, repetitive protest that went on and on. ‘He’s lonely, poor love,’ said Pippa. ‘And bored. Stuck in a yard by himself with nothing to do for hours.’

  ‘Greeks,’ said George. ‘They don’t like animals indoors. It’s a Mediterranean thing. The Arab influence.’

  Pippa said that in Mudgee they were exactly the same. ‘And no one in Vince’s family’s ever been outside New South Wales. No way do they know any Arabs, either.’

  A few days later, she told George that the dog’s name was Bruce. He belonged to ‘a hippie dipstick’ called Rhiannon, who was renting on the cheaper, landward side of the street. Pippa had grown up in a country town and still talked easily to strangers. Bruce was a kelpie cross, George learned. ‘Twelve months old. Rhiannon got him from the RSPCA. She drives him to an off-leash park when she’s got time, but she works in some mall up in Chatswood, so she’s got this huge commute. And then Tuesday night’s the ashram, Friday night’s the pub. She’s not a bad person, she just hasn’t got a clue. You should see her yard: she’s bought Bruce all these toys, like a dog’s a child.’

  Pippa had offered to walk Bruce when Rhiannon was busy. ‘He’s a working dog, he needs exercise. Guess what she said? “Dogs should run free. It’s demeaning for an animal to walk on a lead. It does really confusing things to their auras.”’

  It was good of Pippa to have tried to help, said George.

  ‘I just feel so sorry for that poor dog.’

  She said the same thing a few evenings later. Bruce was barking again. George heard him all the time now. It was difficult not to hold Pippa responsible. ‘I love animals,’ she went on.

  ‘That must be why you eat so many of them,’ said George. He didn’t intend unkindness but was opposed to illogic. Pippa’s fondness for broad, blurry statements twitched his nerves. ‘I love India,’ she once announced, after watching a documentary on TV. She had never been there. George, who had, most certainly did not love India. He could also see that these declarations weren’t really about animals or India but about Pippa: what they proclaimed was her largeness of heart.

  She was saying that she had considered being a vegetarian. ‘But the thing with personal food restrictions is they make eating with other people really difficult. They destroy conviviality.’ She brought out ‘conviviality’ in the way people had once said ‘England’ or ‘Communist’: as if it settled all discussion. George detected a borrowing: Pippa had come across the word somewhere and been impressed.

  George looked on cooking as time stolen from books. When he invited Pippa to move in for the summer he hadn’t thought about arrangements for food. He would have been content to go on as usual, defrosting a pizza or grilling a chop. But the day after she moved in, Pippa said, ‘I’m going through a Thai phase. You can’t cook Thai food for one.’ The cold, white, murderous kitchen filled with the scent of coriander and lemongrass pounded to a paste. George kept the fridge stocked with riesling and beer. Pippa stir-fried fish with spring onions and purple basil. She served a salad that combined ginger and pork.

  With nothing said, they had divided the house between them. There were three empty bedrooms on the upper floor, but Pippa installed herself in a room off the hall. She liked to lie reading on a divan that stood under an aluminium-framed window. There was nothing else in what must have been the old man’s living room; he had dotted cumbersome furniture throughout the house. Any one of his rooms would have done as the set of a European play—the forbidding, minimalist kind.

  Paperback novels accumulated around the divan. George looked them over one day when Pippa was out. Most were second-hand, and all had been published in the past twenty years. Pippa read nothing older, nothing in translation and very little that didn’t concern women’s lives. Her knowledge of history was cloudy. Referring to a biography of Joan of Arc that she planned to read, she placed its heroine in the Napoleonic Wars. George’s own novel sang inside him. He was taking apart everything he knew and putting it back together differently in ruled A4 notebooks. He used a laptop for his thesis, but his novel had woken an instinct that mingled superstition and veneration, and he was writing the first draft by hand.

  Summer intensified. George and Pippa ate mangoes for dessert. Their flesh was the same colour as the wall behind George’s mother on that long-ago day with the phone. The memory of that scene kept following George around. It said so much about his parents: for a start, the invasive way his father played records full blast so that he could hear them no matter where he was in the house. And why hadn’t his mother turned down the volume before answering the phone? Think first! George wanted to shout. She often remarked that women of her generation had been deceived. He knew that this meant, I was deceived. It was her way of alluding to his father’s girlfriends. She had left when she could no longer ignore them; the latest one had turned up on Christmas morning with a present for George. But the reason George and his mother ended up in Melbourne was a man she had met at a party. He lasted two years, just long enough for her divorce to come through, then scampered home to his wife.

  Pippa produced a dish of bananas prepared with turmeric and cream. That was the evening two boys came to the door in search of the old man. They looked like teenage real estate agents, with ties and short, waxed hair, but suggested melodrama because they arrived during a storm. Lightning turned the sky biblical behind them. For a blazing, vertiginous instant, the iron veranda post was a cross. The boys shouted at each other in Vietnamese, over the downpour, and everyone shouted in English. At last, George wrote down the address of the nursing home, and the boys plunged back into the rain.

  It rained for three days. George went on with his novel at night. The river rose, ran across the road and stopped the cars. Long after the sun came back, and the traffic resumed, the path beside the river stayed treacherous with mud. George slept naked in the swampy afternoons; there was air-conditioning in the rooms upstairs. Pippa wore shorts and a lime-green bikini top; she was pretty much flat-chested. She rubbed ice cubes on her wrists and went barefoot on the tiles. George noticed her feet again. They were nuggety and rectangular, like a young child’s feet—even the sparkly turquoise nail polish belonged to a child. He wondered if Pippa bothered with right and left shoes.

  George’s father taught computer science at a technical college on the North Shore. Two or three times a year, he met up with his son over a drink in the city; what followed was a conversation between strangers. George had left his new number on his father’s answering machine, but it was his mother who called. She was in Lausanne, where an expert had declared that the Bonnard was a fake. ‘A good fake, mind you,’ said George’s mother. He could hear her breathing in Switzerland. ‘I guess
I’ll be hanging on to the day job for a while.’

  The phone often rang. George took down messages from Pippa’s friends. The friends dropped in. They stayed for meals. George and Pippa moved a table out to the strip of concrete that passed for a yard. They strung fairy lights over the back door, and set the table with blue and white plates; Pippa had found a cupboard full of old china. ‘I love pretty plates,’ she said, giving them a wipe with a tea towel. She asked if George was sure he wouldn’t change his mind about dinner. George said again that he really needed to work.

  One night, he stretched his arms, cracked his spine, left his desk. Standing on the loggia, he identified Katrina: her voice floated up, describing the mole between her breasts. He had retained a distinct mental image of her breasts, George discovered. As a change from Thai, Pippa was serving small, sweet prawns with lemon juice, brown bread and butter. George had seen her tip the prawn heads into the bin—they would stink like anything for the rest of the week.

  He was returning from his walk one morning when eggs for breakfast passed from an idea into a need. He went up to the shop on Illawarra Road. The eggs had just hit the pan when Pippa came into the kitchen; there were tiny grains of sleep in the corners of her eyes. George watched her arrange the remaining eggs in a green majolica dish. She picked up the empty carton. ‘These are cage,’ she said. ‘You should get free range.’

  George replied that free-range chickens, too, were killed.

  ‘But there’s no unnecessary suffering.’

  George picked up a metal spatula. He almost said, Ah! So that’s OK, then. He said nothing: he had remembered, just in time, that he was talking to someone whose idea of ethics was a dinner party. Besides, his eggs had started to brown.

  In February, a heat wave struck. The air-conditioning gave out. At night, after Pippa came home from the dinner shift, George would light mosquito coils and a lantern. They sat on the loggia drinking mojitos; Katrina and her boyfriend had left a present of a bottle of rum. George asked one or two questions about Katrina. There was room for a character like her—a minor figure—in his novel.

  Pippa said, ‘That’s a relationship where the names say it all.’ George looked at her. Her eyes were bright with dislike. ‘The Kat and the Matt,’ said Pippa. There was mint and sugar on her breath.

  On one of the mojito nights, the inevitable happened: Pippa grew confessional. She wanted to be a writer, she told George. When she got back from overseas, she intended to enrol in a creative writing course. George thought back to her essays: a stew of passionate opinion, mangled argument, atrocities of usage and grammar; that Credit had been the purest largesse on his part. He remembered her hanging back one day, as the other students were dispersing, to say, ‘I love English.’

  ‘In that case, I suggest you learn to write it,’ answered George.

  Pippa was talking about her travels now: they were to provide her with raw material, experiences. George, whose novel was set in Heidelberg, where he had spent a day at the age of nineteen, said that literature and the world were two different things. Pippa grappled with this, slitting her eyes. She said, ‘You mean, look in thy heart and write?’ George meant nothing of the kind: girls like Pippa understood ‘heart’ as a licence to gush. But coming from her, the quotation so astonished him that he merely grunted. He divided what was left of the cocktail between them, and ran his finger round the rim of the jug.

  They were eating strawberries; Pippa had brought a big, soft bag of them home from work. Passing along the loggia the next morning, George saw a cut-glass bowl of miniature Father Christmases. Overnight, each berry had grown a mouldy white beard.

  Day and night, bushfires burned in the mountains. Sitting out on the loggia, George and Pippa could smell the smoke. But there was no longer the high, intolerable sound of barking: Pippa had persuaded Rhiannon to give her a key. Bruce tore up and down the yard, chasing the ball Pippa threw for him; he slept, content and exhausted, for hours. Sometimes she sneaked the dog out and took him for a walk along the river. She invited George to go with them, but he explained that he was allergic to pets. He was conscious of a fresh danger: Rhiannon’s landlord wanted his house back, and she was having difficulty finding a rental place that would let her keep a dog. It looked as if she might have to return Bruce to the pound. The way Pippa relayed all this, George got the distinct impression that she was putting out feelers. So when she said, ‘I thought it was cats people were allergic to?’, he answered firmly, ‘Dogs, too.’ There was no point raising anyone’s hopes.

  Autumn came, and George’s father died. A classic end, a cliché really: lobbing a ball into a net one minute, a massive coronary the next. He was between girlfriends, as it turned out, so it fell to George to pack up his flat.

  The flat was only a couple of streets away from the Meshaws’ old house. George hadn’t been in that part of Paddington for twenty-three years. The last time he saw his father, they had eaten big, juicy kangaroo steaks—George remembered the blood slobbering out across their plates. Running lightly up the stairs, he dreaded entering the flat. But it was as impersonal as a showroom. His father had never been a hoarder; even the piano seat held only a cardboard wallet filled with dull documents. One of them was a birth certificate. George knew and always forgot that Meshaw wasn’t his father’s real name. Syllables had been trimmed, vowels altered, consonants suppressed to create something that could fit into Australian mouths. His father was a product of the old world, and his vices, like his virtues, had been old-fashioned: wine, women, music, an unshakeable faith in the rational mind.

  The last item in the wallet was a yellow envelope. George hesitated, afraid of embarrassment, of pornography—there had been a packet of condoms beside the bed—but at last he looked inside. The envelope held twenty or so Polaroids. They were photographs of George’s mother, angled, arty shots, many of them out of focus—one showed only a blurry fan of fingers. George crouched, moved his hand, spread the images over the floor. The instant before he examined the last one, he already knew what he would see: his mother, bending forward from the waist, a wavy cord trailing to the phone. Everything in the photo was exactly as George had remembered—the orange wall, his mother’s bright, dark-centred hair—although the image had taken on a brownish-yellow tinge. What memory had blanked from the scene was his father’s presence: he must have been there, in that room full of jazz, aiming the camera at his wife. The pieces in the puzzle of George’s parents shifted, acquired new angles. All the Polaroids showed that yellow discoloration; the chemicals were breaking down from exposure to light. George pictured his father handling the photos, laying them out like data along the lid of the piano. He studied the images again: unstable proofs of tenderness, the only photos in the flat.

  That evening, he called his mother. She hadn’t come up for the funeral, merely saying, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ George told her about finding the Polaroids. What he was really saying was, Do you understand now? Admit you were wrong to leave him! He started to describe the photo with the phone and the orange wall.

  His mother cut him short, saying that she remembered the picture. ‘The one where you can see my roots have grown out? It’s so typical of your father to have kept that. I never liked it—I didn’t like you poking that camera at me ever.’

  ‘Wait,’ said George. ‘I took that picture?’

  ‘All of them. Don’t you remember?’ She said, ‘An idiot girl gave you a Polaroid camera. It became your favourite thing. You loved watching the colours change as the image developed. When you ran out of film a second time, your father told you the camera was broken. He knew that seeing you with it upset me.’

  With the change of season, it was cool at night. George stood on the loggia, inspecting the loose shapes of trees. There was only ugly furniture around him and big, tiled, silent rooms. Pippa was living in Stanmore, in a house with Katrina. Bruce was barking—he had been barking for hours; Rhiannon must have talked her way into staying on, after all. George had just finis
hed the first draft of his novel. It was called Necessary Suffering. At least for now; that was one of the things George wanted to think about. But first he had to put together the puzzle of his parents. Sometimes the reason his father saved the Polaroids was George’s mother and sometimes it was George—sometimes even the idiot girl was involved. George’s brain wouldn’t stop showing him the photo with the telephone. He saw his mother folded in two with her back to the wall. Something like a smudge kept dancing on the edge of his mind. To study it calmly, George turned it into a sentence written out in black on the white frame of the Polaroid: Maybe she was trying to get away from me.

  The sun rose over the misty park: an autumn sun, a flat red disc that had strayed from a Japanese print. Later that day, George closed the door of his father’s flat for the last time and went for a walk. It was a bright afternoon, but the street where the Meshaws had lived was black with shadows. Tall plane trees arched over it; the leaves remained thick overhead but were starting to change colour and fall. George saw what he had known, what he had forgotten: the row of houses, with their wooden balconies, looked into the face of a sandstone escarpment. He came to a gate where he had stood on a summer morning: looking back at the house where he had always lived, looking out at the waiting taxi. The escarpment and the trees kept the sun from the street. What was coming was a life in which his father was a stranger. George looked from his father, barefoot on the veranda, to his mother, sitting in the taxi with her face turned away. Who was the cat and who was the mat? George’s father said, ‘If you stop crying, you can keep anything that falls out of my pockets.’ Then he stood on his hands.