The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  The Ashfield Tamil switched on a light that was dimmer than the glowing day. He told Cassie that his journey to work involved a bus and two changes of train. The second train had stopped for forty-two minutes between stations—a rumour ran through the carriage of a body on the track. ‘What to do?’ he concluded. He asked Cassie how long she had been waiting. Before she could answer, a couple laden with shopping came in, the woman in a blue sari. A conversation began in what Cassie supposed was Tamil: a language as rounded and floaty as bubbles. The Ashfield Tamil tapped his chrome-plated watch. Cassie had a vision of him behind a desk, reprimanding a clerk who had spent too long at lunch. The clerk looked down and shuffled his sandals. The postmaster’s mouth was a thin, violet line that said, ‘Forty-two minutes.’ His aura stood out clearly: its lemony hue announced that he was struggling to maintain control of the situation. The couple left without buying anything, and the Ashfield Tamil told Cassie, ‘They couldn’t wait. They went to the Indians.’

  ‘They came here to tell you that?’

  ‘They come every week,’ he said, as if that explained anything.

  Cassie was after fresh green chillies, pandang leaves and raw cashew nuts. She also wanted palm sugar and cardamom pods. She trailed after the shopkeeper as he located these items for her, one by one. When he reached up to a shelf for the sugar, his sleeve slipped down, exposing the white tufts on his wrist. Cassie was still annoyed about the delay, and the sight increased her irritation—that narrow, womanish wrist looked like a bid for sympathy. The Indians’ prices were cheaper, she reminded herself.

  The Ashfield Tamil stooped and retrieved a small packet that seemed to have slipped between shelves. ‘Muthu samba rice,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve still got heaps of basmati, thanks.’

  ‘This is Sri Lankan rice. Very special.’

  She inspected the white grains. The plastic packaging was slightly greasy to the touch, and some of the lettering had worn off.

  ‘The last packet,’ he said. ‘For your husband.’

  ‘He’s my partner, actually.’

  ‘What to do?’

  On Saturday evening, there was a storm. When Ash was climbing Cockroach Mansions, the first plump drops arrived; he held out his palm to receive them. The whole of Glebe was gardenia-scented. Cassie appeared in the doorway, her toenails painted silver. She had darkened her eyelashes as well, and looked starey and judgmental. Ash said, ‘Warm rain!’ and kissed her—how he adored this weather!

  The lease drawn up by the Romanians forbade their tenants to remove so much as a dead twig from the garden, but Cassie had risen before dawn to steal gardenias from the laden shrubs. They gleamed in tumblers on the table, along the windowsill. Amazingly, the table, set for two, held only flowers, candles and a bowl of pistachios. Cassie poured water from a jug, made of milky green glass and hand-painted with pink roses, in which ice cubes tapped.

  Ash opened the wine he had brought. They clinked glasses as the room darkened, and the wind grew huge. Cassie moved along the louvres, closing them as lightning began its epileptic jig. Thunder and the racket of rain on corrugated iron made conversation difficult. Standing at the window, Cassie and Ash drank wine and ate pistachios. Lightning produced one weirdly lit, arty still after another: the tinsel roof of the shed, the tattered banners of a banana palm. The gale was blowing the rain sideways and breaking it up into millions of tiny droplets, so that a horizontal stream, furious yet fine as mist, flowed past the tops of trees. Ash slipped an encircling arm around Cassie. Part of her face and the candle flames were reflected in the glass—they looked like pieces of heaven. Further along, a branch was hitting against a pane. The scent of gardenias neither increased nor faded but merely drenched.

  Cassie raised her voice over the din: ‘Anyone could be out there, watching.’

  Ash said that he thought it unlikely.

  ‘If I left you,’ shouted Cassie, ‘would you stand in the rain without an umbrella hoping to see me?’

  ‘Are you saying your old boyfriend is out there?’ Ash tried to remember what Cassie had told him about her previous partner; surely she had painted a picture of a smart-arse who laughed at his own jokes, rather than the portrait of a lunatic?

  ‘It was a hypothetical question.’ She wanted to say: I would like to believe you were capable of it, that’s all.

  Ash gestured at the apocalypse. ‘Darling Cassie—it would be suicidal.’

  She said, ‘It’s OK, I know you wouldn’t do it.’

  It was the moment of bafflement that arrived in all Ash’s dealings with women: a crystal filled up with smoke. He moved away from the windows as lightning returned to produce more shivery photographs. Now it was difficult not to imagine how the room would appear to someone looking in. The Ashfield Tamil was outside in the downpour, peering up at a beautiful girl who questioned him about his life as if it mattered—Ash was sure of it, for thirty seconds.

  Cassie asked him—cheerfully, as if their last exchange hadn’t taken place—if he was ready to eat. Left alone, Ash refilled their glasses and gulped the contents of his. Cassie reappeared with a tray of dishes, went away and returned with more. She said, ‘Everything’s still warm but won’t be for much longer. Start helping yourself while I get the rice.’

  Ash set out all the dishes and placed the tray against a wall. He surveyed the banquet, wondering why, from time to time, Cassie lavished so much labour on a meal. Then his mind slid to a period during his own graduate student days in New England when he had smoked spliff after spliff while watching a videoed television drama set in a legal practice in Amsterdam. When the last tape ended, Ash watched the whole series again and then a third time. He was particularly taken with an episode in which one of the barristers defended a man accused of having sexual congress with a hen. The lawyer argued successfully that his client loved the bird, was gentle with it, and that no cruelty had occurred. Why should a man not desire a fowl? That struck Ash as both tender and profound. Weeks passed pleasantly. In the dead of night, he would wake in terror: the mountain of undone work weighed on his chest and it was difficult to breathe. But the next day, nothing was as pressing as the next episode and the next spliff. He concluded that Cassie’s cooking was another kind of displacement scheme elaborated to avoid working on her thesis. For much the same reason, she had recently attended a two-day St John’s Ambulance first-aid course. She had said, ‘I might be able to save a life.’ Ash, who knew that there was more to saving a life than preventing someone from choking on a fishbone, could have predicted Cassie’s fantasy. It was the kind of dream girls with clear, remote eyes could offer themselves because nothing ever happened to test it.

  Cassie returned with a two-handled pan that she stood on a cork mat. She said, ‘It’s special muthu samba rice from Sri Lanka,’ and lifted the lid. A stench that had been born in a sewer rose like a fog. Vanquished, the gardenias retreated. Ash had the presence of mind to hold a napkin to his nose. Cassie, a stricken statue, remained there clutching the lid. ‘It’s special,’ she repeated. ‘From the Ashfield Tamil.’ Her face wore its blind, uncaring look.

  Ash took the lid from Cassie’s lifeless fingers and replaced it on the pot. He opened windows. The gale had died down to a stiff breeze. Cold air filled the room, spreading rather than dispatching the reek. One of the candles succumbed to the draught.

  ‘Does muthu samba rice always smell like that?’ asked Cassie. She sat down—abruptly, as if an invisible intruder had whacked her behind the knees.

  ‘How on earth would I know?’ Ash added, ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Could it have been off? Can rice go off? I thought it just went weevilly.’ Cassie was turning her rings. She closed her hands so that the jewels dug into her folded fingers.

  Ash joined her at the table. They faced each other across a spread of cooling food. The spare chairs looked on like witnesses. Cassie should have made a move: to take the saucepan away, to make a fresh, odourless bowl of rice. She did neither of those things, but aft
er a while began helping herself to curries—she couldn’t help it, she was hungry. She scooped food into her mouth with her eyes lowered over her plate. The tepid dhal was particularly delicious. Ash looked on in wonder. His face said, What is wrong with you Australians? You eat curries without rice, a barbarism. You fear being attacked by people you’ve killed. You stole their land for animals that you slaughter in their millions, when you don’t leave them to die by the side of the road. Your shame-faced paddocks— But Ash couldn’t go on, because another part of him wanted to uncurl in giggles. The candles and flowers, the stink! A dinner party gone wrong: the first-world definition of tragedy.

  Across the table, Cassie’s white forehead was as defenceless as a rib. Controlling a smile, Ash looked away. Her books caught his eye: lined up on shelves, stacked on the floor. There were so many books, safe in a room where gardenias flared and the roof held through a storm. He thought soberly, She has no idea how lucky she is. It wasn’t an accusation but a recognition: Cassie was alone on her side of the gulf. On the other side, Ash stood shoulder to shoulder with the Ashfield Tamil, lashed by rain, transfixed by an enchanted girl whose notion of loss was a real estate deal that had made her a minor heiress.

  Cassie looked up without lifting her head, checking out Ash through her blackened lashes; there was a tiny smear of yellow at the corner of her mouth. Ash knew that he would undress her before the evening ended. He would spend moments savouring the sight of her: the scene loomed plain as pornography, the girl’s pearly flesh, the man’s clothed, formal limbs. Ideally, she would be wearing a red bead necklace to set off her nakedness—there had been a Spanish girl who liked to do just that. Cassie’s hair was falling over her face. Ash scratched his neck. He began to help himself to food, not realising that he was doing it. He saw the rest of his life: the books that would make his name, the solid comforts. He thought, I will die alone.

  In retrospect, Cassie would look on the evening as a watershed, although nothing seemed to change at the time. She went on seeing Ash. It was accepted between them, without discussion, that they would be spending Christmas apart. On Cassie’s last evening in Sydney, Ash gave her an expensive French perfume that smelled like a rainy garden. Cassie gave him a copy of Pippa’s novel. If Ash received any Christmas invitations, he hadn’t accepted them. He said that he intended to spend the next two weeks writing a conference paper undisturbed.

  Cassie looked out at the Pacific from her parents’ terrace in the north, and tears came into her eyes: she had seen Ash working alone in his tower in the hot, empty city. The old professor’s white walls were heartless. All Ash had for consolation was Australian literature. Cassie hunted down her mother’s copy of Pippa’s novel and skimmed it: ‘…kisses me goodnight…my honest forehead…I notice…Caesar salad with free-range eggs…I answer…I am…beautiful, glazed organic carrots…my father…I notice…my honest toes…I whisper…my beautiful brother…I see…I notice…moon rises like sadness…my honest…organic strawberries with balsamic…’ Cassie’s tears flowed down her arms. What were they really for? Having asked the question, she was frightened of the answer. Her suffering was so intense it never occurred to her that Ash might not share it. The possibility that he was indifferent to her absence couldn’t enter her mind—there was nowhere for it to go.

  For the rest of her visit it went on like that: Cassie would be floating on her back, or lying in a hammock with a book, and she would start to cry. The tears dried as suddenly as they started—if anyone tried to talk to Cassie about them, for instance. A cousin with young children came to stay. Cassie’s tears dripped onto the baby’s bald head. The infant of rare, startling beauty she would have had with Ash appeared to her that night: he was a stout child running away across a yellow field. She checked her phone five or six times an hour. But the day before she returned to Sydney, she lost the phone on a beach. She had been back in the city for about a week when Ash emailed to say that he had been texting her. He asked if she would like to have dinner. Cassie discovered that her excessive tears had been pre-emptive: it was as plain as a plate that she didn’t want to see Ash again. She replied to him the next day, saying that she planned to do a lot of work over the summer. She sent him her love.

  One evening some months later, Cassie ran into Ash in King Street; she was wearing a velvet dress the colour of rubies so it must have been after the season turned. The scene came back to her long afterwards, when years had passed. So much had changed since that encounter with Ash that Cassie could no longer remember what they had said to each other or whether she had gone back to his place for the night—it was quite possible, it was a period of idle buccaneering when she counted off men like someone climbing a ladder and keeping a tally of rungs. Ash had come into her thoughts now, as she was driving away from a medical centre, because her car radio was telling her that the Australian government would be returning yet another group of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to their executioners. Cassie felt profoundly ashamed, but not sad: sadness had been impossible from the moment her doctor confirmed what Cassie already knew. She had texted her husband, but he was in a meeting all morning. She wanted to call her parents, but it didn’t seem fair to talk to them first. She was gripped by a longing for the smell of the house in which she had grown up: sandalwood, mildew, bergamot, rooms in which log fires had burned the previous night.

  The news gave way to indie pop, and Cassie’s mind drifted, as of old, from Ash to the Ashfield Tamil. After the muthu samba dinner, she had never returned to The Spice Mart; she bought curries in cardboard boxes at the supermarket now. But presently, arriving at a roundabout, she gave in to a whim.

  It was a roasting summer day, blue booming overhead. Cassie parked under a tree in a side street, and made her way on foot along Liverpool Road. She passed the Indian shop: a girl still sat at the counter, playing with her phone. Cassie went on, past a Thai massage parlour and a Korean butcher, past restaurants proposing pho. She asked herself what story she could offer the Ashfield Tamil to explain her disappearance. She saw him tapping his watch: ‘Nine years,’ he said sternly. She wondered if he would recognise her when she walked in.

  The Spice Mart sign remained in place, but the shop behind it was empty. A ‘For Lease’ notice was stuck to the window. Cassie put her hands on either side of her face and peered through the plate glass: a sheet of plastic packaging and a copy of the local newspaper lay on the floor. Without its curtain, the door to the storeroom looked naked. Cassie thought she could detect traces of a geometric pattern on the concrete, but that might have been only dust.

  There was a travel agency on one side of the shop, and on the other a stair that led to a kickboxing gym. Cassie went into the travel agency, where a woman was speaking Vietnamese on the phone. The young man at the other desk said that The Spice Mart had closed at the end of December—he didn’t know what had become of the owner. His colleague finished her phone call and looked across at Cassie. ‘I think he’s gone to Seven Hills,’ she said. ‘Or maybe Blacktown? Somewhere out west. Cheaper rents.’

  Cassie said, ‘I used to be his customer. A long time ago.’

  The woman nodded. There was nothing else to say. The phone on her colleague’s desk began to ring. She smiled at Cassie and asked, ‘When are you due?’ Startled, Cassie glanced down at her stomach. The travel agent said, ‘You’re not showing yet. But I can usually tell.’

  In the street, Cassie realised, I’ll never know what became of his middle son. A flower of nausea opened and rose within her without warning. She leaned against a tiled wall until it passed. Her phone rang—it was her husband. Cassie answered the call, thinking, I must tell Ash.

  As it happened, a snowstorm over New Jersey brought power outages, and Ash didn’t read Cassie’s email until late the next day. She wrote: ‘The kolam kept his business safe all these years.’ Ash came to the end of her message and smiled: she was still telling him a story about the Ashfield Tamil. Ash and Cassie had kept in touch, emailing each other now and then, and t
here was Facebook, of course. Ash knew that Cassie had given up on Australian literature and now worked as a fundraiser for a conservation group. He knew that her husband wrote speeches for a politician, and that she had cropped her hair—a mistake, judging from the photos on Facebook. He wondered if she still collected scraps of grimy writing and whether she had saved anyone’s life. He said her name aloud: it conjured the ugly stones on her fingers. He pictured her asleep on her continent of gum trees and flies. Why had she stayed there—why did any of them stay? The calm violence with which Cassie had cut herself free of him still had the power to stupefy Ash. Months afterwards, she had come up to him somewhere in one of her bedraggled velvet dresses and flung her arms around his neck. Her eyes were chemical stars. It was plain to Ash that Cassie had always belonged with the Ashfield Tamil on the far side of the gulf: camouflaged, wrenched out of place and thrust into outlandish scenarios, those two would always be identifiably themselves. It had nothing to do with the will or the heart but with a talent for existence. Ash realised that he knew nothing about Cassie that mattered—did she still paint her toenails silver? He opened the folder called ‘Sydney’ on his laptop. He was after a photo of Cassie, but the images were identified only by number. Ash found himself looking at a woman in a stripey T-shirt on the deck of a ferry; her blown hair was a red flag. It took him a minute to recall her name: Leanne. He reread Cassie’s email: he was watching his fingers fumble at a lilac-blue loop. He remembered the cold breath of the houses. Cockroach Mansions returned, and an old car bridal with fallen flowers, and an afternoon when time streamed in reverse.

  Ash hit Reply. He wrote with no corrections and without a pause.

  ‘In August 1977, when I was nine, my father was working in a town in the north-central province of Sri Lanka. He had accepted a temporary appointment at the hospital there. My mother and I stayed in Colombo, where I came down with measles. When I was out of quarantine, I was sent north to convalesce, away from Colombo’s noise and pollution; my mother was to join me in a week or so. My father met me at the station, and we caught a taxi to his house, which was not far from the hospital. As the car passed the hospital compound, I noticed a boy who sat on a patch of grass just outside the gate, selling lottery tickets nailed to a stick. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, and I saw that his legs were twisted below the knee.