The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  It was windy on the crest of Mateusz’s hill, and soil and seeds blew onto roofs. In her first spring there, Pippa would look up and see pink poppies against the sky. The yard put out a white embroidery: arums, daisies, and something like moonlight, which climbed and shone and claimed everything in its path.

  Eva and Keith came to lunch. His children claimed that if Keith was obliged to venture west of the city, he stocked up on water-purification tablets and checked that his tetanus shot was up to date. His map of Sydney was a densely cross-hatched eastern suburbs ghetto surrounded by a trackless steppe. Neighbourhoods that had been ruthlessly gentrifying for two generations were cancelled with an indelible stamp: ‘Slum’. Keith told Pippa, ‘When I was growing up, my mother told me never to stray south of Foy’s. I’ve stuck to that, pretty much.’ He had been born, educated, employed, married, had raised a family and would no doubt be buried within the space of the same few square miles. Pippa delighted him by asking, ‘What’s Foy’s?’, demonstrating the witlessness of the young.

  When Pippa opened the door, Keith handed her a bottle and asked whether the sea breeze penetrated as far as Glebe. Mateusz had been something of a recluse, and it was Keith’s first visit to the house in years. He walked through the shabby rooms, his eyes bright and hard; like his measured voice, they were made for summing up. Noticing the absence of insect screens, he told Pippa, ‘In summer, you’ll have butterflies in every room.’

  If Keith filled the role of a pet, Eva was a child. She wore her hair like an old-fashioned girl, drawn back from her brow without a parting and fastened behind her head. Her children teased her lovingly—it was quite different from the mild disdain Keith called forth.

  When Pippa dropped a spoon one day, Eva announced, ‘We will have an unexpected visitor.’

  ‘And remind me, please, what it means if my nose itches,’ said Ronnie. ‘Will a man with no teeth ask for my hand in marriage or is a ghost present?’

  ‘No, the toothless guy is if your forehead itches, isn’t that right, Eva?’ asked Tess. She was the architect, back from Chicago on holiday. ‘An itchy nose means you’ll drink currant-leaf vodka on Wednesday. But only if it itches on the right side. On the left, you will find fulfilment with a three-legged cow on a collectivised turnip farm. But do you remember what you must never do on any account?’

  ‘Place your handbag on the floor!’ chorused Eva’s children.

  ‘That’s right, make fun of your old mother,’ said Eva placidly. She knew she was unassailable, the keeper of the castle.

  Like a child, Eva was permitted to say what others only thought. On that first visit to Matt and Pippa in Glebe, she paused on the veranda as she was leaving: ‘It’s a perfect house for children.’ The remark hung about, like the smell of stale oil, sliding into Pippa’s consciousness at intervals.

  Ronnie and her new partner, Siobhan, dropped by. There was a potted bay tree in Ronnie’s blue arms. They were arms that travestied and honoured the blue jewels on her mother’s fingers. ‘Bay keeps witches away,’ said Ronnie, presenting Pippa with the pot, ‘so with luck Eva won’t visit too often.’ It was one of those golden July afternoons stolen from spring, and they sat outside in T-shirts drinking beer. Ronnie was telling Siobhan about Mateusz’s succession of male ‘tenants’—Ronnie’s fingers made scare quotes—the last of whom had died not long before Mateusz.

  ‘That generation.’ Siobhan shook her head. Briefly, they were all contemplative. They were looking at the past: a cavernous hall filled with light like gravy, where all the furniture was ugly or broken, people got around with embarrassing hair, and a violent, senseless film with a soundtrack by Bread played on a flickering screen. Silently, they gave thanks for their escape.

  The way Pippa saw it, Eva was to blame for Rashida. Eva, who had a scoliotic spine, swore by an osteopath in Surry Hills. Rashida practised at the same clinic, and Eva met her when she was filling in for Joe one day. It was inevitable that Eva would befriend Rashida. At one time or another, her collection of ethnically diverse people included a Balinese interior decorator, an Aboriginal photographer, a Timorese nurse, an Iraqi house-painter, a Korean cardiologist. The Jesuit brought her some of these specimens; others, Eva fossicked out for herself. They were deployed at parties, like her tribal jewellery, and served to impress in conversation: ‘According to Tony, my Indigenous friend…’ For two happy years, Eva was able to say, ‘Anh, Tess’s Vietnamese partner…’ Anh—buzz cut, sleek-toothed—exhibited his ethnicity in the largest photo on the grand piano. Then he and Tess split up. ‘It’s not something I like admitting about my own daughter,’ said Eva, ‘but Tess has always been intolerant.’

  ‘The guy was a douchebag, Eva. He was dating someone else on the side.’

  ‘Your sister is so inflexible. In any relationship, there has to be give and take.’

  Rashida turned up for the first time at the Elkinsons’ not long after French Lessons, the novel Pippa had written in Paris, was accepted for publication. That was the occasion the lunch was supposed to mark, but Eva kept the conversation focused on her new guest. She urged Caroline, who had strained her back activating her core at Pilates, to visit the clinic where Rashida worked. ‘Joe’s known all over the country. Rashida moved up from Melbourne just to work with him. They practise such a gentle form of osteopathy. There’s none of that terrible crunching of joints. The osteopath simply holds the injured part, supporting it.’

  ‘And it works?’ asked Pippa.

  Rashida looked at her. When Rashida’s grey eyes shifted, light ran in her face.

  Eva told Pippa, ‘Rashida is a Muslim.’ Her tone was reproachful, as if Pippa’s question could be construed as anti-Islam. ‘Her family emigrated from Mumbai when she was eight.’

  Keith informed Rashida, ‘You prefer it here, of course.’

  ‘Keith and I honeymooned in India,’ said Eva. ‘It was the most wonderful experience. Transformative.’

  ‘Marvellous people. Remember our driver? Straight as a die.’

  ‘We went back with the children when they were little. Early exposure to other cultures is so important. And there’s such spirituality in that country.’

  ‘I had the most amazing diarrhoea,’ said Ronnie. ‘Seven days straight.’ She asked Rashida, ‘Why did your family leave?’

  ‘My parents thought that India wasn’t the best place for Muslims,’ said Rashida. ‘I love these potato pancakes, Eva. Could I have the recipe?’

  ‘Were you persecuted for your faith?’ asked Eva, hushed and hopeful.

  ‘Not really.’

  Keith said, ‘So you were privileged migrants.’

  Rashida said nothing. She seemed to be turning the sentence over in her mind, trying to work out its shape.

  Eva didn’t attend the launch party for Pippa’s third novel, but Rashida came. Keith was there, too, with a giant, funereal bouquet that he handed to Pippa when the speeches were done. Pippa didn’t think that white flowers were the most beautiful—that had to be Eva’s joyless aesthetic at work—but submitted gracefully to Keith’s strict embrace.

  ‘You’re showing me up, Dad,’ said Matt. He cast his sly smile in Pippa’s direction, and she blazed at him in return. Required to describe their marriage that night, each would have thought of a mirror: a bright steadiness at the centre of their lives.

  Everyone was looking at Pippa, from her flowery arms to her beautiful shoes. Rashida’s look said, Those shoes are stupid. They’re wrecking your feet and your back. Rashida was wearing chunky black ankle boots scuffed across the toes, and a loose grey shift that reached halfway down her shins: she looked like an extra in a period drama about a TB sanitorium. Personally, Pippa couldn’t see the point of a dress-up dress that wasn’t sexy. She loved her launch parties: sometimes she wondered if they were the real reason she wrote books. Gloria always whispered, ‘Is a launch really necessary? You know Parrett & Wezel will say their marketing spend doesn’t run to one’—although she showed up, of course, and put away litre
s of Pippa’s booze. Pippa gladly paid for the parties herself. Each time, she treated herself to a new dress and shoes. Before setting out that evening, she had been standing in front of the mirror admiring her outfit when Matt came into the bedroom. He put his arms around her from behind, saying, ‘You’re gorgeous.’ He lifted the clingy fabric of her dress and slipped his other hand down the front of her panties. Afterwards, Pippa had to change them. She felt so sorry for Rashida, standing there in her daggy clothes, clutching her signed copy of French Lessons. ‘You’re looking gorgeous, lovey,’ said Pippa. ‘Have you had something to eat? Half the rice balls are vegetarian.’

  One morning Pippa heard Matt break off in the middle of a piece. That was unprecedented. She found him in their dingy kitchen, his face quenched. He said, ‘I couldn’t manage a fingered octave. It’s happened before, when you were in Paris. I was never good enough and I’m getting worse.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve always said the stuff that’s tied to what you can do physically is only a surface thing—that music is in the structure of a piece, not in showmanship.’

  ‘The surface doesn’t matter if you’re up to it. If you’re not, it’s everything.’

  Pippa put her arms around him. He stood inside them, as rigid as a stake. He spoke softly: ‘I’m an instant closer to death.’ What frightened her was that he hadn’t said ‘we’. It was useless to ask him to abandon his daily ritual. Under his friable surface ran a vein of adamant. It had transferred itself to his music—it was the clenched-teeth music of someone hanging on. A little flame of scorn shone blue in the pit of Pippa’s mind. Of course his playing was falling off—what did he expect? Art wasn’t a half-hour diversion; it defined your life or it was nothing. In Rome, Matt had told her, ‘I knew that if I kept up my playing, we would have a baby.’ That was what music represented to him now: a bargain he had sought with fate. In a less anaemic age, he would have sacrificed virgins or immaculate lambs.

  Matt often complained of pain and stiffness in his neck: the violinist’s ailment. When his osteopath moved to the Gold Coast, he decided to try the clinic to which Eva went. ‘It was pretty amazing,’ he told Pippa that evening. ‘Totally worth the schlep to Surry Hills. Joe just sort of held my head between his hands, and now my neck doesn’t hurt any more.’ He added, ‘It’s probably psychological as much as anything. Everyone just wants to be held.’

  Some months later, Matt’s shoulder was giving him trouble. He went back to Joe, who suggested he try the Alexander Technique and referred him to Rashida, who taught it. Matt told Pippa, ‘One of my teachers at the Con taught AT as well. There were people I knew who had lessons with her.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘That Alexander crowd—’ Matt said, ‘They weren’t my tribe.’ He meant that he hadn’t wanted to sleep with the girls.

  He came home from his first Alexander lesson and said, ‘Rashida says the way I hold my neck compresses it, and that’s why the pain keeps coming back. We did a visualisation exercise: I thought about my vertebrae and imagined inserting a little cushion of air between each one. It was amazing—I could feel the tension easing off and my spine growing longer. You should try it. Rashida says it’s a great exercise for anyone who spends a lot of time sitting.’

  Matt stood against the frame of a door and asked Pippa to mark off his height with a pencil. On the internet, there were people who claimed to have grown taller as a result of the Technique. After his second session with Rashida, the pain snarled under Matt’s shoulderblade went away and didn’t return. He bought a yoga mat and lay on it on his back every day for fifteen minutes, with his knees drawn up and a book under his head.

  One day he brought his phone into the kitchen. ‘Have a listen to this.’

  Pippa looked up from the salmon steaks she was marinating. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Rashida recorded me during our lesson.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  He said, ‘Oh, Pips, it sounds so beautiful. I’m playing with such ease.’ His voice was shaky. ‘How is it possible? She knows nothing about music. The first time I took my violin in, she called the bow a cue.’ He repeated, ‘How is it possible for someone like that to release this music in me?’

  Words like ‘release’, ‘lightness’ and ‘ease’ recurred when Matt spoke about Rashida. Pippa reminded herself that he was talking about the Technique.

  Rashida told Pippa, ‘Eva’s so kind. She knows I miss my family and she invites me over for lunch with you guys all the time.’ Pippa didn’t think that kindness came into it. A recent poll had announced that ‘Most Australians are anti-Islam’, and Pippa guessed that Eva wanted to display ‘my Muslim friend, Rashida’—the Iraqi house-painter having melted out of view.

  Eva asked Rashida why she didn’t wear the hijab. ‘Those soft folds frame a face so beautifully.’

  ‘My mum doesn’t wear it. No one does in my family. I don’t want to get involved in religious stuff.’

  ‘Of course, it could make you a target for anti-Islam feeling.’ Eva said, ‘I am so ashamed of this country these days.’ Her eyes were darkly dreamy. She had taken to appearing in a salwar kameez and silky, embroidered shoes. Pippa thought, Eva would love to be taken for a Muslim. For the first time, she saw the glamour of oppression. Eva would always be that small girl on whom suffering had conferred distinction. Now she thirsted for it in its pure form, wrapped in a free-floating, decorative orientalism unhampered by history and geography alike.

  Pippa asked Matt if Rashida had a partner. ‘Wouldn’t have a clue,’ he answered. ‘When we talk, it’s about AT.’ He would come home from a lesson with advice on how to breathe—‘Picture your lungs as balloons, gently filling and lifting sideways in your chest’—or how to get up from a chair—‘Let the neck be free. Allow the head to lead the body into length.’ He told Pippa to keep her feet flat on the floor when she was sitting down and to resist crossing her legs. Watching TV, he pointed out the tense angle of an actor’s head. It got irritating pretty fast.

  Pippa probed Eva for information. ‘That sweet girl!’ replied Eva. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with men—she’s hardly overweight at all. But they only look at the surface.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with the surface,’ said Matt.

  ‘Swipe right!’ called Ronnie from the next room, where she was picking out something bluesy on the piano.

  ‘I know she wants a family. She loves children.’ Eva said, ‘It’s hut-breaking.’

  All the Elkinsons had a thing for Rashida, it seemed. When Eva was describing a new rug, woven in Afghanistan, that she was thinking of buying, Ronnie said, ‘Well, I hope no children went blind weaving it.’

  ‘This is nitpicky, but technically those carpet-slave kids don’t go blind from weaving,’ said Rashida. ‘It’s malnutrition that causes them to lose their sight.’

  ‘Exactly right!’ said Keith. ‘Optic neuropathy brought about by a deficiency of B12. A point I didn’t succeed in getting across to my own children, as you see.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Rashida. ‘Next month, this guy’s giving a talk on how the Alexander Technique can improve eyesight. I wondered if you’d be interested, Keith?’

  ‘I daresay it wouldn’t do any harm.’

  There he sat, all smiley indulgence. Pippa thought, Oh, Keith—even you! She had believed that he reserved a certain kind of approval for her.

  At Eva’s one Sunday, a conversation arose about what people were reading. Rashida, who had never said a word about French Lessons, announced that she loved George Meshaw’s latest book. ‘There’s this really great bit where one of the characters wonders what happened to squash. And where all the courts went.’

  ‘I’ve read that book,’ said Caroline. ‘I liked the bit where he describes the sound made by a Polaroid camera shutter: Cuh-chunk-click.’

  Eva murmured, ‘Once you have read Gombrowicz…’

  Matt told Rashida, ‘George is an old friend of Pippa’s.’

  ‘Really? Cool
. I listened to a podcast of him talking about that book the other day—it was great.’ Rashida asked Pippa, ‘Have you heard that interview?’

  ‘Not sure,’ said Pippa. ‘Yeah, he’s very smart.’ She remembered the interview perfectly. When George was asked why his protagonist was referred to only as ‘the man’, he had replied that it linked the character to the millions of nameless animals delivered up for slaughter. George, who was the biggest carnivore since T. rex.

  ‘I bought two more of his books after reading that one,’ went on Rashida.

  ‘I’m not sure I totally loved it,’ said Pippa. ‘I mean, didn’t you think the way he wrote about the Indian guy was a bit racist?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Right there was the problem with Rashida: that unshakeable assurance. There was a whisper in Pippa’s brain, like a subdued, left-hand accompaniment to her thoughts, and this whisper was of the opinion that Rashida should be grateful that white people overlooked the double handicap of her religion and her race. The whisper said that Rashida should be a little bit sort of humble. It lived in a folded, reptilian corner of Pippa’s brain, and she was scarcely aware of its existence. She was always for the underdog and would leap to protect. What caused turmoil were underdogs who failed to respect their allotted rank. Then the whisper thundered like an ancestor roaring out of a muffled past.

  ‘That was classic with Rashida, wasn’t it?’ Pippa said to Matt on their way home from Bellevue Hill. ‘Doesn’t know the first thing about literature but she knows what she likes.’

  ‘She’s a pretty big reader, actually.’ Matt added, ‘Her mum was a poet in India. She works in a carpet showroom now.’