Cassie always wore two rings, a garnet and a square-cut emerald in old-fashioned claw settings, which had belonged to her grandmother. Her friend Pippa had told her, casually, ‘You’ll be murdered for those one day.’ People often remarked that Pippa and Cassie were like sisters. That was quite true in the sense that each girl kept track of, rejected and coveted whatever belonged to the other.
In the winter break, not long after Ash met Cassie, a colleague invited him to his family’s sheep station in western New South Wales. ‘It’s the real Australia out there,’ said Lachlan, as if Sydney were a collective hallucination. The real Australia was called Yukkendrearie, or so Lachlan said—it wasn’t so very different from the name on the map. Ash and Lachlan crossed mountains blue with menace. A distant viaduct had the look of all out-of-place objects, sinister and forlorn. Then the mountains were behind them, and there were the carpet rucks of threadbare hills. All this was disappointingly familiar: sheep, hills making waves.
Ash asked, ‘Will we see real Australians?’ It was a joke, but not wholly. He was keen to encounter the outlandish, to be enlarged or overwhelmed.
‘Bound to. Strong, silent types. Famous for self-reliance and endurance. Hard-working and practical. Stoic.’
‘So the real Australian is a Victorian Englishman?’
‘All archetypes are fossils.’
Ash didn’t say, Shame to have a borrowed one, though.
Lachlan sent a text message whenever they stopped to stretch their legs. His partner of eleven years had recently left him and wasn’t returning his calls. Zipping up his jeans beside an empty highway, Ash saw a row of canaries in a windbreak. But it was only an arrangement of light.
In the afternoon, the scenery drained away. What was left was flatness and sky. There was no end to either, and a peculiar light. All that space might have been restful but scraped Ash’s nerves instead. Like reality TV, it was both harrowing and dull. How did Sydneysiders trim their children’s fingernails or buy stuff from the Apple store or sign up for Fun Runs with this enormity breathing down their necks? Ash wondered what word might apply to what they were moving through: certainly not ‘landscape’. It was a presence that spoke of absence; it brought to mind the desolation left by a plundering army—which wasn’t, after all, very far from the mark. Half a cow lay near a fence, its head twisted away from the ivory basket of its ribs. It was only a stray splinter from the coffin of pastoral romance—that had perished here long ago. Ash had pictured himself striding up a hill in a borrowed Akubra. What lay around was less disconcerting than the magnitude of his mistake.
‘See that signpost?’ said Lachlan as they flashed past. ‘Bony Track. Half a dozen Aborigines were tied up and shot there in the 1830s. Plenty of those colourful local names all over the country. We’ve a Butcher’s Creek ourselves. Stone dry.’
‘What happened there?’
‘My forebears were much too canny to keep a record.’
In a far paddock, a broken feather was stuck into the ground: some weirdo had neglected to cut down a tree. The Subaru rushed at the dead, discarded distance. A hawk appeared, strung up in the white air.
Lachlan said, ‘Not much further now, couple of hundred k. We’ll be there in time for tea.’
He said, ‘Dinner, I mean.’
He said, ‘Since Dad died, Mum likes to have tea on the table as soon as it gets dark.’
‘It’s dark at five,’ said Ash.
‘Yes.’
An email had not been sent or had not been read or had failed to arrive. The fragrance of dead lamb enveloped them as they drew up before the sprawling timber house. But food was irrelevant—on getting out of the car, Ash discovered that he was ill. A light-eyed dog stood a little way off and barked at him. The wind came and slapped everyone. Ash spent the three days of his visit in bed.
Plastic ring binders filled a fireless fireplace in his room. A massive wardrobe, sturdy and somewhat scarred, loomed against one wall. Ash looked inside, hoping for something useful like extra blankets, but found only a wire coat hanger and an emery board. He spread his coat over his bed and climbed in. Pressed-metal walls tightened around his dreams.
His door opened. It was hinged in such a way that from his bed Ash couldn’t see who was standing there. After a while, a child with a dirty face edged around. The farm was run by Lachlan’s sister, Bob. Presumably the child belonged to her. A hard brown arm connected the door to the child. The arm was paler on the inside, like the limbs of the yellow-eyed creature he had seen on arrival. Ash concluded that it was Bob’s child who had barked at him—it made perfect sense.
A second door gave on to a side veranda shared with Lachlan’s room. The wind shouted at the English elms, and Lachlan shouted at his phone: ‘You can have the Eames recliner.’ ‘No, I never said Glen could come and get it.’ ‘Well, what I mean is, we’ll say it’s yours.’ ‘That’s right, it’ll stay in our lounge room. But now you’ll be the one who sits in it.’ ‘Well, if I say Glen can have it, will you come back?’ ‘What do you mean that’s bloody typical?’ ‘No, you can leave the Thermomix out of it.’ ‘No, Glen can’t have it either.’ ‘That’s right, one or the other.’ ‘What do you mean, typically binary?’
Sometimes Ash woke to hear Lachlan’s keyboard. Lachlan had a major research grant and was writing two books at once. Meanwhile, Ash shivered unproductively. He wore a cashmere sweater, a Christmas present from his mother, over his pyjamas. He struggled into his coat and scarf, and tottered along a passage that struck icy through his slippers. There was the sound of splashing behind the bathroom door and someone—Bob?—bawled, ‘Afternoon delight! Afternoon delight! Ah-ah…’
On the last day of Ash’s stay, his mother brought him a piece of toast as he lay in bed. She said, ‘Are you sure you couldn’t manage a boiled egg? Or a beer?’ She wasn’t Ash’s mother, of course, but Lachlan’s: they had the same voice, echt Aberdeen. Margaret’s straight, short hair, the delectable pewter of pencil shading, was parted on one side like a child’s and fastened with a child’s flowered clip. She picked up Ash’s coat and hung it in the wardrobe. Ash felt shivery again and decided to risk a cup of coffee. Lachlan brought it to him in a mug that said ‘Farmers Do It in the Dirt’—it was excellent coffee, frothy and strong.
Lachlan said, ‘Feel up to a tour? Shame to have to leave without seeing the old place.’ He was wearing only a woollen vest over his red RB Sellars shirt, so Ash was too abashed to retrieve his coat from the wardrobe. He lifted his scarf from the hook on the door, and Lachlan peered at him, saying in an incredulous way, ‘Not feeling cold are you?’ as if Ash had taken it into his head to challenge an unassailable proposition in logic.
Ash trailed his host in and out of big rooms with empty fireplaces. They were like rich people’s rooms anywhere, only colder. Lachlan said things like ‘1869’ and ‘the Twenties’ and ‘1976’; Ash gathered that the original homestead had been added to or remodelled at these dates. He was shown the former telephone room—larger than his study in the tower—and a room that had once contained the family silver. There was also a ballroom with stained-glass windows built to impress a duke, who sent a last-minute telegram in his place.
They crossed the ballroom, emerged onto yet another veranda and went back into the house by a different entrance. Ash remarked on the number of doors.
‘Fifteen external ones,’ said Lachlan. ‘I counted them once. Handy for Bob’s boyfriends—always an escape hatch somewhere. I’d look out of my window and see the latest bloke running away.’ ‘Does your bedroom door open in such a way that you can’t see who’s standing there?’
‘They all do in the old part of the house. Very practical, the ancestors: you can give the maid her instructions without having to look at her.’
A wonderful surprise waited in the kitchen: it was warm. Margaret sat by the Aga, peeling potatoes onto a sheet of newspaper. ‘We’re having mash for our tea,’ she told Ash. ‘With Thai green curry.’
Ash offered to peel p
otatoes—it would be a reason to linger in the warmth. When his offer was refused, he said firmly that he felt too weak to continue and sat at the table anyway.
‘Have you shown your friend the gun slits?’
‘His name’s Ash, Mum.’
‘I know that.’ Margaret turned to Ash. ‘My children think my mind’s going because of my old woman.’
Ash looked polite. Lachlan said, ‘Mum!’
‘When I wake up these days, there’s an old Aboriginal woman waiting,’ explained Margaret. ‘She gave me a scare the first time, but I look out for her now.’
‘It’s called hypnopompic hallucination,’ said Lachlan. ‘A kind of dream that carries over into waking.’
‘That’s what you say. But I spotted my old lady outside the bank last week when Bob took me into town. She was wearing a blue tracksuit.’ Margaret added the last pale potato to the bowl and dipped her fingers in the earthy water, saying, ‘Well? Are you going to show him the gun slits?’ She told Ash, ‘They’re in the old cold-storage room. It’s Bob’s office now. You should take a look before it gets dark.’
‘I’m not sure I’m up to that,’ said Ash. The phrase ‘cold storage’ had filled him with dread.
‘They’re just slits in the walls,’ said Lachlan. ‘For shooting at marauders. In case there were escaped convicts about. Or blackfellas.’
Ash said, ‘I thought Butcher’s Creek had taken care of one of those problems.’
‘Oh, you know about that? Well, you see, a shepherd was found speared,’ said Margaret. ‘So whole families were slaughtered at the creek in retaliation.’
‘You know there’s no actual historical record of a massacre, Mum.’
‘My husband’s grandfather was alive when I first came here,’ said Margaret to Ash. ‘He told me all about it. It was spoken about openly when he was a boy. Mind you, I always thought there was Aboriginal blood in my husband’s family. You’ve only to look at Lachlan.’
Ash looked at Lachlan: milk and ginger, sanitary blue eyes.
Standing behind his mother, Lachlan tapped the side of his head. He opened the fridge and peered inside, saying, ‘Is it too early for a beer? Do you want one, Ash?’
‘I think that’s what my old woman comes to tell me. You can say she’s a dream. But another word for a dream that recurs is truth.’
‘Bob still hard at it?’ asked Lachlan, pulling the ring off a can. He told Ash, ‘There’s a downward spiral of genetic selection on most family farms. The smart kid goes away, the dumb one stays home and manages the property. Luckily, it happened the other way around with us.’
Margaret said, ‘This kitchen was the front room in the original homestead. If you go over to that window and look out, you’ll see Bob’s office. Of course the gun slits are on the other side.’
Ash felt obliged to comply. A low building with a hipped roof stood across the yard. The old glass in the kitchen window was faintly rippled. The child who had appeared at Ash’s door strolled across this cockeyed view. Ash saw Margaret at ten: the straight hair chopped off at the tip of the ears, the triangular face. The eyes were different: not the grandmother’s hooded blue but a shallow, creaturely yellow. They looked directly at Ash. The child was holding something—an apple? an iced bun? a cricket ball?—that Ash couldn’t quite identify. It displayed a semicircular white scar. Ash thought that he had never seen anything as unnerving as the conjunction of that mauled missile and the small brown hand.
After dinner, Lachlan came to Ash’s bedroom to take away his tray. He said, ‘I can remember when it became fashionable to have a convict in the family tree. All the amateur genealogists hoped to find one. Now you get people who dream up an Aboriginal ancestor. Is it progress? Or another kind of stealing to persuade ourselves we’re legit?’
They were driving back through the not-landscape when Ash saw the wardrobe from his room. It stood in a paddock, upright and empirical and empty: a survivor. What was horrible was that the wardrobe was the Ashfield Tamil. No one else knew this, only Ash, and he was not allowed to tell. He woke to a delirious magpie and a distant shout: ‘Man up, Stevie!’ That would be Bob, calling encouragement to her daughter or her dog.
The first thing Ash had bought in Sydney was a heater. Three or four times a week, Cassie and Ash would have dinner in a restaurant before going back to Ash’s warm flat. There was a smell there—also detectable on the stairs—that was very strong in the built-in cupboards: a musty smell, but pleasant, like old apples and loam. Ash and Cassie would drink vodka in bed, tell jokes, show off a little to each other. These hours were dedicated to the business of bodies but strayed easily into myth. The flat became their castle, the city was transformed into a forest, the preserve of bears; a stranger arrived with urgent messages from the emperor and was turned away at the gate. At different moments of their affair, each of them felt it: the sense of timelessness and fate that underwrites old tales.
In the morning, Cassie liked to climb the stair to the tower. She claimed it was for the view, trying to conceal her fascination with the room: the books, the journals, the printouts, the piles of student essays. The framed Constructivist prints on the wall were of no interest, as they belonged to the old professor. On Ash’s desk, an upturned lid held paperclips and a staple-remover. Cassie swivelled slowly on an ergonomic chair. There was something here that held the key to Ash—something more intimate and revealing than the splint he wore to keep from grinding his teeth in his sleep. She carried a book stuck with markers downstairs. ‘Why are some of the Post-its yellow and others orange?’ she asked.
‘I ran out of yellow ones,’ said Ash, just out of the shower.
At that moment Cassie came close to seeing that he was only an instrument in her quest, which was really for a system and an answer. How was she to live? The riddle was crucial and therefore hard to unlock. She believed that Ash had it under control—this had to do with the white split of his grin.
Spring came like a wind in sudden warm gusts. Underneath the air remained cool. ‘The bottom of the air is fresh,’ said Ash, remembering a phrase acquired on a school trip to France. How pleasing to find life fitting itself so smoothly to words! On a hot October Sunday, he brunched beside the ocean—its pomp and flash!—and risked a swim at Coogee; the sunny Pacific, too, harboured cold depths.
With the improvement in the weather came evenings when Ash walked up the hill to Cassie’s place in Glebe. But draughts and chilly lino weren’t all that he had to contend with there. Cassie rented two second-storey rooms at the back of a Victorian house. One of them was really a wide balcony that had been enclosed to make a sunroom. That was where Cassie and Ash ate, on mismatched chairs at a table by a row of clear-paned louvres that sliced up the view. The sunroom was Cassie’s study: her laptop was always open on the table, beside a pile of books. When Cassie served a meal, she never bothered to clear the table, but simply pushed the paraphernalia of work to one side. The resulting juxtaposition of food and books worked on Ash like a stray lash floating in an eye. One day Cassie had left a hefty volume propped spine-up like a tent. Ash hadn’t treated a book like that since the age of seven. Coming upon it, his father had shouted, ‘You will break its spine!’ as if Ash were torturing a kitten. His father’s anger was always connected to the idea of waste. It could be traced to an austere past when a light shining in an empty room was a bill mounting up, books were for the lucky and no one left anything on their plate. His father would often remark that when he was a boy, whatever food there was in the house was kept locked up—once it was half a packet of biscuits.
Cassie usually made pasta and a salad for dinner, but one evening she produced a feast. A recessed space at the top of the interior staircase had been fitted out as a kitchen that Cassie shared with the other first-floor tenant. She went to and fro between this dingy nook and the sunroom, returning twice with a laden tray. She laughed at Ash’s amazement—she had been cooking for days, she said. Surely, thought Ash, it would have been a simple matter to clea
r the table first? Vegetable curries, a bowl of dhal, an array of pickles and glutinous chutneys encroached on the streamlined laptop, the right-angled books—they threatened knowledge with stickiness and slop. Ash wouldn’t allow himself to remark on this; he believed in the separation of powers. He had intense, almost violent feelings about Cassie’s body, which he entered every few days. But he wouldn’t ask her to tidy her table, or make a move to clear it himself—he would not be masculinist or proprietorial. And it had to be said that the change from pasta to lentils and vegetables was a relief. It was obvious that Cassie could eat whatever she wanted without affecting the hollows under her hip bones, but Ash had begun to count calories of late. When he had first seen his baby sister, Ash had fleetingly wondered how many more siblings there would be. His stepmother was still in her thirties and had hips like a Soviet peasant—a Soviet peasant was what she had been born, after all. Ash saw his inheritance dwindle with the appearance of each new little Fernando: he envisaged a procession of them, all with serene, Madonna faces and backsides like sideboards. The baby couldn’t possibly have guessed what was on Ash’s mind but began to scream anyway. She was twelve now, and Ash’s inalienable paternal inheritance had finally come down to him intact: the makings of a pot belly.
When his plate was empty, Ash said, ‘Wow! That was absolutely delicious!’
‘Have more—there’s heaps.’
About to help himself, Ash recoiled before the aptitude of dhal to splash. The bowl that held the curried lentils was a shallow one; already, the table around it was flecked. Ash’s hand hovered, brown as a hawk. Then he chose fried eggplant as a safer bet.
‘Don’t you like the dhal?’ asked Cassie. She slid the dish forward, to Ash’s alarm. ‘I followed the recipe exactly. But obviously leaving out the Maldive fish.’
The Life to Come Page 4