Ash assured her that the dhal was terrific. ‘Everything is. But I absolutely couldn’t eat another thing.’
Cassie helped herself to wine. Her expression as she drank was particularly aloof. He had disappointed her, Ash saw. But why? Their conversation seemed inoffensive yet at cross-purposes, like her clashing chairs. Cassie had told him the story of her childhood, describing the rainforest and the way it rained. She had been travelling in South America when her parents sold their mudbrick house and the acres in which it stood, and moved to a coastal town. Cassie didn’t say, The minute my back was turned; but Ash understood that betrayal was involved. She had become a visitor in a museum, said Cassie, by which she meant that the near past had turned mythical and remote. Its glassed-off exhibits made up a kingdom that she had imagined would last forever. The name of her museum was Time, but she was still young enough to believe that everything that happened to her was unique. ‘Exhibit A,’ she said, showing Ash a framed photograph of a lush valley bridged with a rainbow. It was nothing like Yukkendrearie. But now, sitting among the ruins of their banquet, Watch out! said Ash to Ash. This pliable girl was a product of the real Australia. There was the heedless way she treated books. No striding up hills in a hat, Ash warned himself. Cassie, too, might prove unimaginable. She might turn out to be nothing like porridge, not even porridge with salt.
Cassie arranged to meet Pippa at a bookshop. She found her in the Australian section, a mazy arrangement in a poorly lit area near the back. Pippa emerged, hissing, ‘They have exactly one copy of my novel. I turned it face out.’
In the place which had the best coffee that side of Parramatta Road, Pippa asked, ‘So how’d you go the other night? Did you make the pumpkin curry in the end?’ Pippa was an amazing cook. She put on dinners for twelve that involved lemons she had preserved. It was Pippa who had recommended the Charmaine Solomon cookbook that Cassie had consulted to prepare her feast.
‘I couldn’t go veggo for anyone,’ went on Pippa. Her sharp little face turned pensive. ‘But I guess you got used to all those chickpeas growing up.’
Pippa and Cassie had met at high school up north. Cassie was one of the few people in Sydney who knew that Pippa had once been called Narelle. Pippa had filed the application to change her name on her eighteenth birthday. She said, ‘No one called Narelle’s ever going to win the Booker.’ Even before that, even when Pippa and Cassie shut themselves into their bedrooms and sobbed because River Phoenix was dead, Pippa had known that she was going to be a writer. The clarity Pippa brought to her objectives was one of the things Cassie envied about her. Cassie was twenty-nine, and the future, as she saw it, remained uncontrollable and vague. She was afraid of being twenty-nine. It was much worse than thirty, the axe hovering before it fell.
She said, ‘I don’t think Ash liked the dhal.’
‘Too salty, maybe? Or not salty enough? Lentils can be tricky,’ said Pippa. The offhand way she spoke told Cassie that Pippa didn’t care for the sound of Ash. As if to confirm it, Pippa asked, ‘So when do I get to meet the great man?’
‘It’s early days still,’ said Cassie. It was three months. Cassie and Ash only saw each other alone, never with other people; Cassie told herself that what they wanted from each other didn’t involve other people. To counter Pippa’s expression, Cassie told her about something that had happened the previous week. Ash and Cassie were heading to the city on a bus. They had risen for their stop when a woman shouted, ‘Speak English, you fucken boat-jumpers!’ This was directed at two African men, an old one and a younger one, talking quietly to each other. Ash and Cassie got off the bus, and Cassie said, ‘How awful. I should have said something. I’m so sorry.’
Ash replied, ‘Oh, that woman was probably afraid that anyone speaking a foreign language was insulting her.’
He was capable of that, of surprising grace. It struck Cassie as such generosity of spirit that it couldn’t fail to impress. However, all Pippa said was, ‘“Boat-jumpers” is pretty good.’ She took a notebook from her bag and wrote down the phrase. Reading upside down, Cassie saw: ‘the possibility of being bold, confident and fun’. Pippa had underlined this twice. She put her notebook away and said, ‘Why don’t you guys come to dinner on Friday?’
‘Ash is at a conference in Canberra this week,’ said Cassie. ‘How’s Matt?’
‘Good. Hey, listen: George. You know he’s back in Melbourne, right? The latest is his mother’s bought him a warehouse apartment in Fitzroy.’
‘That’s nice.’ Cassie wondered if she would have a baby with Ash. She tried to picture the baby’s face—it was beautiful, she knew. If a thirty-eight-year-old man didn’t have children, did that mean he didn’t want them or that he would be eager to become a father without delay?
‘Obviously, I didn’t hear that from George,’ went on Pippa. ‘You know how guarded he is. He calls it “private”. But one of my Melbourne mates told me.’
Cassie stirred herself to ask, ‘How’s the difficult second novel going?’
Soon after Pippa and Cassie moved to Sydney and their respective universities, Pippa had become involved with a guy called Vince. When they broke up, Vince would stand outside her house, crying. Pippa called this ‘stalking’—why couldn’t Vince see that it was over and move on? Dumping Vince was another thing Pippa had known all along that she would do. Cassie wondered what it took to be loved so grandly, so operatically. She helped Pippa load Vince’s paintings into her car; Pippa said she was returning them so that Vince could sell them or reuse the canvases. To fling Vince’s work in his face seemed an ingenious cruelty to Cassie. But when she protested, Pippa said, ‘The alternative is the paintings go out in the rubbish—or do you want them?’ Cassie had to admit that she didn’t. Pippa pulled down her bedroom blind and said, ‘Vince can cry on demand. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s his party trick.’ In that same calm, reasoning tone, she had once told Cassie, ‘Vince is a brilliant kisser.’ Cassie peeped around the edge of the blind and saw Vince in the street, his hair and the trees streaming—the rain, at least, was not any kind of trick. Pippa was quite plain, with no figure to speak of and a mouth crowded with teeth, but Cassie couldn’t persuade herself that any boyfriend of her own would wait in a downpour, without an umbrella, hoping for a glimpse of her. Against her will, it became a standard by which she measured men. Ash wouldn’t do it, she thought, stirring her coffee while Pippa talked about her book. At once she thought of things Ash did do and was shot through with delight. She was almost unnaturally happy that year and she was a girl with a great capacity for joy. When Cassie read of war and suffering and children without enough to eat, she knew that she had no right to happiness and would try to reject the sensation. But it welled up again, natural and persistent, at the sight of clouds chasing each other, or the first wave of scented mock-orange in the street. When that happened, time receded and the world shrank to a rainbow-hung valley that Cassie could frame and keep close. The kelpies vanished and the snakes, and the death-dealing spiders in the toilet. Ash became another version of Cassie’s gentle parents: an older, wiser person whom she scrutinised and loved.
The Ashfield Tamil said, ‘Those Indians are selling frozen paneer cheap. But you can be assured that everything I stock is highly fresh.’ He was following Cassie around the shop because she could never find what she wanted. This was partly because the shelves were stocked according to an elusive logic—why were the dried chillies beside the tinned ghee rather than with the chilli powder?—and partly because Cassie rarely had a specific purchase in mind. When preparing for her Sri Lankan feast, she had shopped according to a list of ingredients copied from Charmaine Solomon, and was still plentifully provided with things like turmeric and cinnamon sticks. On subsequent visits, she allowed herself to be guided by the Ashfield Tamil. ‘Sandalwood soap?’ he would suggest. ‘Desiccated coconut?’ His grey hair, flattened with something like oil, was combed back from his forehead in a style Cassie associated with young men setting off to fight for the S
panish Republic; it brought old, lost causes to mind.
In the far corner of the shop, a door led to the storeroom. A length of reddish cloth banded with gold that might have been sari fabric hung in front of the door. The shopkeeper noticed Cassie looking at it. ‘My wife made the curtain,’ he said. ‘A door without a curtain is like a person without clothes.’ His oiled hair gave off an odour as he stood beside Cassie in the narrow aisle between the shelves. That top note was followed by the smell of his scalp. Cassie was unable to decide whether these scents were unpleasant or exotic.
‘My curry-leaf plant died,’ she said. ‘Do you think I over-watered it?’
‘What to do?’
Relaying this to Ash, Cassie mimicked the gesture that accompanied the Ashfield Tamil’s stock phrase—the wrist twisted sharply, ‘like a spin bowler’. She also said, ‘His shoes don’t go with the rest of him. They’re the kind with Velcro fastenings.’
‘They’re cheaper,’ said Ash. He was too polite to add, Obviously.
The shopkeeper wasn’t a refugee, Cassie told Ash. Two of his children had migrated to Sydney, and he had followed with his wife. ‘So it was quite easy for you to come here?’ Cassie had asked, pleased. She clung to an idea of Australia as a place where kindness prevailed over expediency. It had rarely been true in her lifetime, but was one more creed that had emerged from the rainbow valley, like the belief that the human race would tire of shopping. The Ashfield Tamil repeated, ‘Easy,’ in a neutral tone as if hearing the word for the first time. Cassie remembered something her Viennese grandmother used to say: ‘The worst thing is, we are required to be grateful.’
Cassie always came back from The Spice Mart with another segment of the shopkeeper’s ‘story’—that was what she called it when talking to Ash. The Ashfield Tamil had three sons. The middle one was still in Sri Lanka, although his parents pleaded with him to leave. He was a teacher in a seaside town; in Australia, he would have to drive a taxi or clean hotels like his brothers. ‘What to do?’ asked his father, and Cassie echoed him, twisting her wrist. Whenever she mentioned the Tamil, Ash remembered his dream of the wardrobe. Cassie’s interest in the man mystified him. To Ash, people were not figures in a story but subjects in history. He was familiar with the historical sequence that had brought a Tamil civil servant from Sri Lanka to the counter of a shop in the west of Sydney.
When he said something along these lines, Cassie, postmodernly tutored, replied pertly, ‘Isn’t history just a set of competing stories?’
‘Not really,’ said Ash.
If someone had informed Ash that Cassie thought of him in conjunction with the shopkeeper, he would have been merely incredulous. No brain, however feverish, would ever place Ash in a paddock, not even disguised as furniture and in a dream. Yet the connection persisted in Cassie’s mind, not just because the two men were the only Sri Lankans she knew, but because she secretly believed that they had entered her life to alter its course. Her relations with each had an atmosphere of inevitability. She was aware that these fateful beings were partly her own invention, but that didn’t diminish their power.
As if he had peered into her thoughts, Ash told her, ‘Your Ashfield friend dreams of improvement—all immigrants do. You and I, on the other hand, would like to be more fully what we are. The fulfilment of the will is an old aim, the fulfilment of the heart a modern one.’ The purpose of this lesson was to point out an unbridgeable gulf, as deep as history, with the Tamil on one side and Cassie and Ash on the other.
Cassie said, ‘I’m so happy I was born.’ Ash feared that she had heard only, ‘You and I’ and ‘the fulfilment of the heart’. She lay naked on top of her cold bed. It was past midnight, but Ash was not to join her yet. She said, ‘I want you inside me, but I want to imagine it first.’ That was just silly. Ash felt himself vaguely stirred by the shell-pink lustre between her parted legs, but what remained uppermost in his mind was the meeting he had to attend at nine the next morning. Cassie was an overgrown child whose emptiest make-believe had been labelled ‘creativity’ by her parents. In Ash’s view, that indulgence was directly responsible for Cassie’s grubby habit of bringing home scraps of paper that had been written on and discarded in the street. They were stored in a tin whose germy contents she had spread before Ash like treasure. He read, ‘Tickets. Facial. Jackie—card. Teabags, cheese, stock cubes, matches.’ The list had been trodden on and bore the muddy imprint of a heel. Cassie believed that handwriting was disappearing, and that her gleanings would one day have the status of precious artefacts. She asked Ash, ‘Have you ever seen your little sister’s writing?’ Her chin lifted slightly when she scored a point. Ash was reminded again of his mother. His future didn’t contain Cassie, he was sure of that.
Another thing that grated was her habit of referring to the shopkeeper as ‘the Ashfield Tamil’. Surely the man had a name! Then Ash thought, benevolently, She can’t pronounce it. He remembered his mother’s tongue twisting around Tamil names. Jeyarajasingham. Saravanamuttu. It would be something like that.
Ash didn’t know that on her first visit to the shop, Cassie had said, ‘My name’s Cassie.’ The Ashfield Tamil received this as impartially as if she had said, ‘The chief export of New South Wales is coal,’ or ‘There are ten mammals, four birds and thirteen fish on the list of critically endangered Australian animals.’ As time went on, it was too late to ask his name—it would have embarrassed them both. By then he was greeting Cassie warmly, saying, ‘Welcome! Welcome!’, even though she typically bought only a few inexpensive items. One day, when there was no more of Ash’s favourite mango chutney on the shelf, the Ashfield Tamil produced two jars set aside especially for Cassie, bringing them out from under his counter with a triumphant flourish.
‘A very good brand,’ he said. ‘MD is Marketing Department. Government guaranteed.’
When Cassie reported this to Ash, he said he found it strange that a Tamil would have faith in anything guaranteed by the Sri Lankan government. ‘Other than torture and extermination, that is.’
The shopkeeper confided his anxieties about his rivals to Cassie. The Indians had chosen their location with cunning. There were more pedestrians on the main street, and the Indian shop was also readily visible to drivers stuck in the sluggish river of traffic on Liverpool Road. Once, when Cassie had let three weeks pass before returning to him, the Ashfield Tamil asked, ‘Have you been going there?’ The Indians sold packaged curries, he told her. ‘Highly convenient for young people.’ Cassie took this to mean that he had forgiven her, although no disloyalty had occurred. He was as easily alarmed as a bird. When she stumbled over one of the giant packs of rice on the floor, he cried, ‘Please be careful! What will happen if you fall and break your leg? You will sue me!’ Cassie didn’t take his fears about being ousted by the Indians seriously. Curiosity had taken her to their shop: a pastel-walled, air-conditioned box, where a girl whose plait was thicker than her wrist played with her phone and ignored Cassie. In fact, there was nothing she could have done for a customer, as the stock was brightly lit, rationally arranged and clearly labelled. One shelf held an assortment of incense, but the shop smelled of nothing. Cassie, inclined by nature to hopefulness, felt confident that these antiseptic premises could pose no threat to the Ashfield Tamil’s chaotic, atmospheric cave.
One morning, there was an elaborate geometric pattern on the pavement at the entrance to The Spice Mart. It had been somewhat scuffed by feet. The Ashfield Tamil told Cassie that it was a kolam, drawn in rice flour by his wife. ‘She didn’t lift her hand once,’ he said proudly, as Cassie surveyed the intricate design. A kolam brought prosperity and protected against evil spirits. ‘It also provides food for ants.’
‘But it’s being destroyed,’ protested Cassie, watching a woman wheel a shopping cart over the drawing.
‘That is the way. My wife will make another one.’ But Cassie never saw a kolam outside the shop again.
Cassie claimed that she could read auras. Ash stood against a white
wall like a prisoner about to be shot. His aura was orange tinged with red, said Cassie. He was confident, creative and sexually passionate. Ash smiled. She could also see flickers of grey, she went on. They signified guardedness. ‘A fear of loss.’
Her upbringing had left its mark in other ways. First thing every morning, before eating or drinking, Cassie swilled cold-pressed sesame oil around her mouth for twenty minutes. She said, ‘It’s an ancient ayurvedic practice that draws toxins from the body.’ Ash, child of doctors, believed in antibiotics, vaccinations, flossing. Oil-pulling was a harmless eccentricity, like the olive-leaf extract Cassie gravely spooned into him at the first sign of a sore throat. She spoke mistily and reverently of self-sufficiency and sustainable living—what that amounted to, as far as Ash could see, was no heating and a row of potted, yellowing herbs.
Whenever they left her flat after dinner, to see a film or go for a walk, Cassie would leave the light on in the sunroom. ‘You’ve forgotten to turn off the light,’ Ash’s father said one evening in Ash’s voice.
Cassie said, ‘I know I should,’ but left the light on anyway. When they had walked some way from the house, she placed her palm on Ash’s spine, urging him to turn around. The house stood near the crest of a hill. Ash saw a long, golden rectangle suspended in the darkness. Cassie said that she liked to see it waiting there for her. ‘It reminds me of a ship.’
It clanged with idiocy, even to her ears. It was also only the least part of the truth. Her landlords, elderly Romanians, lived in terror of assassins, informers, vampires and that shadowy, tentacular, punishing entity, the state. Fifty years earlier, a baby had died of hunger, so now no one was granted access to the ground floor of her parents’ house—they might steal all the food. The Romanians’ tenants had to come and go by means of an external wooden staircase that Cassie called Cockroach Mansions, accessed from the rear of the house. The garden there, once a formal square, had got away from the old people: it was shrubby, bird-haunted, wild. Cassie feared it at night and was ashamed of her fear. When she first moved to Sydney, she had seen the security bars on windows and laughed at the cages in which city people lived. Then a girl she knew was raped by an intruder. Cassie no longer dreamed about it, but she turned her rings so that the stones faced inwards and switched on the sunroom light when going out after dark. Why not say all this to Ash as they walked down the hill? She realised that she wanted to appear enamelled, unassailable. She held his arm tightly. They had no past, so she was obliged to look to the future. There she had just come face to face with an Ash who could harm her—it was as if a steel curtain had descended to divide them.
The Life to Come Page 5