Set into the back door was a stained-glass window arched at the top. It was just wide enough to hold a saint who held a book: in his round hands, it had the look of an object from a star. Bunty said, ‘I couldn’t think where else to put him.’ She was vague about the provenance of the window, but Christabel gathered that Mr Valente had been involved. She would glance up from her book and see the saint, in his deep blue robe, looking down at his. If she turned her gaze to the window above the sink, she would see a tree with a bare trunk and a cylindrical green head, some kind of conifer, sticking straight up in the distance—it was an overgrown, living version of the bottlebrush on the draining board. These doublings sealed the sense of rightness in the room. Christabel wished for nothing more than to look at that saint and that tree for the rest of her life.
They were on their way to the Blue Mountains. When the train started to climb, they were on the wrong side of the carriage for the view. There were hardly any passengers, so they changed seats. Then the track wound around, and once again they found themselves looking into the stony face of a mountain. They changed back to their old places. A man stared. And then—unbelievable!—again the window was full of bare rock. They clung to each other and stumbled across the aisle. Bunty had kept her big, chesty laugh. The man got up and moved to the far end of the carriage. They were as giddy as girls. They had only to look at each other to start up.
Thoughts would pass between them. Also: a comb, socks.
They had brief, heartfelt quarrels. Why did Christabel wait until the train was drawing in to wonder aloud if she had switched off the iron? Why did Bunty wash the eggy plates first?
Bunty kept a second-hand school atlas in the soft room. Studying maps and guidebooks and the brochures of travel agents, she calculated and dreamed. When Christabel learned what was going on, she wanted to go with Bunty, of course. ‘Italy?’ she asked, already placing herself on friendly piazzas. ‘France?’
Bunty had visited those places long ago. She said grandly, ‘I never go back.’
What that meant was that they ended up in countries where the toilet arrangements left a great deal to be desired. It was not the kind of thing Bunty noticed: she had no sense of smell, shovelled down whatever food was put in front of her, snored on stony beds in mosquito-haunted rooms. Delivered to their destination, she took no further interest in the practical. All the detail of itineraries and timetables was left to Christabel. She was also in charge of first aid. It suited them both very well.
The usual things happened: sunsets, pickpockets, gastro. Away from home, reality was ice cream moulded into fantastic shapes: transient, astonishing, quickly devoured. But for a long time after coming across it, they used to remind each other of an ancient threshing floor they had seen on a Greek island, a white marble disc on a dry hill.
They snapped up bargains which, unpacked at home, were magically revealed in all their foulness and quietly, after a decent interval, deposited in charity bins.
Kiki Mack’s latest aerogramme reported kidnappings, communal murder and the price of eggs. Old women Christabel had called Auntie were dying of hunger. She sent Kiki banknotes in an envelope for distribution. Kiki would write, eventually, that it had never arrived.
When she thought of home, Christabel saw a grimy stretch of wall, split by the sun, where lizards ran in and out of the cracks. Pictures like that were always there, running invisibly under her Australian life, appearing now and again like snatches of an old videotape that a later recording had overlaid without entirely erasing.
A girl at work, freshly returned from a holiday, said that Sri Lanka was ‘really welcoming’. Christabel wanted to shout, I used to breathe that air!
Every month, an aerogramme came for Bunty. Christabel peered at the sender’s name: ‘Who’s C. Sedgwick?’
‘Sizzle.’
‘What’s his real name?’
‘Sizzle. C-e-c-i-l.’
It was too late: he was Sizzle. He telephoned Bunty twice a year, at Christmas and on her birthday. When direct dialling came in, his greeting in Christabel’s ear—‘Sizzle Sedgwick here’—was an insect’s tinny hum.
Bunty said, ‘I’m never going back.’ The coldness came over her like a white shadow. She said, ‘I have no use for the past.’
They had a toast: ‘To the buffalo!’ One morning a buffalo had escaped from a stationary train and run amok near their school. A constable was gored. The buffalo yearned to lie down in water and was frightened and crazed. By the time reinforcements arrived, it had vanished—but it was there, somewhere. The headmistress lost her head. Instead of ordering the gates locked, she sent everyone home. Sensible girls sobbed and clung to friends as they were released into the street, but Christabel and Bunty were among those who rushed through the gates. They were joyful and triumphant. ‘To the buffalo!’
Christabel left her first workplace for another almost as dull. When she looked up from her desk, screen after screen of luminous green letters stretched away; the monitors were the grubby beige of old bras.
The new office was in a tower block on the edge of the city, next to a motorway. Cars rolled past Christabel’s ankles as she proactively monitored her competency framework. From a corner of the tinted window that occupied a wall, it was possible to see the stubborn cobweb of the harbour bridge. Freshly recruited, Christabel had liked to stand at that window while eating her lunch. She would imagine herself on a ferry with bright, wet wind around her face. Bunty was with her; it was Sunday, and they were on their way to Manly: ‘Seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care.’ One of their treats was fish and chips from the Corso. They would picnic on the sea wall, their bare feet dangling—it allowed the ozone to work on their corns. The Pacific chuckled softly: it was insane, twinkling away in a violent blue dream.
Opposite Christabel’s concrete and glass cliff stood its twin; within it, prison light shone on men and women stacked above one another and looking into screens. A tiny, spotless white garment, suited to an infant, always hung in a window on the fifteenth floor. Why? How Christabel loved the baffling, marvellous world! Then a man whose desk was near her vantage point complained that she was watching him as he worked; there was also the matter of crumbs. No one was allowed to touch the potted peace lily this man kept on his desk, nor his framed photograph of Torvill and Dean. Fantasies of surveillance—the wish to be of interest—flourished like viruses in the overheated office. On Christabel’s first day there, a girl had followed her into the bathroom to confide that one of her co-workers was monitoring the number of times she took a tampon from her drawer. The fluorescent lighting, pounding all day, ground down nerves. The lily man was quite mad, of course, but only in a normal sort of way, and very popular. Their supervisor got out her high-heeled manner. Christabel ate her sausage roll at her desk after that.
‘We should get a kitten,’ Bunty said. They were picnicking in the disused graveyard at St Peter’s Church, in their favourite corner where the grass was long. Saturday morning had been metallic, but then the day turned glassy and clear. It was too late to take a train to a headland or a bay, but the graveyard, with its stately trees, was only a short walk from home. Children accounted for most of the dead who lay around. They were nameless, numerous, colonial, folkloric. Like children in cautionary tales they had fallen into fireplaces or down wells, or died with feverish scarlet cheeks and white-ringed mouths.
A tribe of cats lived in the wilderness beyond the rectory. Slouching between headstones that tipped in every direction, a long orange beast had provoked Bunty’s remark.
Christabel watched Bunty’s sharp little teeth bite into a crescent of mandarin and release the juice. She said nothing. That meant No.
They could sit at the kitchen table, close and opposite, without speaking to each other. There was no need. The bulb dimmed whenever a plane passed overhead. The sash rattled. A freight train bleated. Wind scraped the house.
‘Body’ was not a word they felt comfortable using, not even to a doct
or.
Making her way to the highway on blurry winter mornings, Christabel could believe that she was walking towards the sea: if the mist lifted, she would see it there, trembling. The old brick-works chimneystacks, looming in the distance, served very well as stand-in masts.
At work, the screen on her desktop had turned black and white. The new technology had already achieved classic status: like print, old photos, old films.
The African violet on her desk flowered once, magnificently, then yielded to the air-conditioning. Her co-workers, too, bloomed and dropped away. Conversations about football, like the pocked grey ceiling tiles, were repeated endlessly. For ten minutes or so towards the end of the day, sunlight sneaked into the windowless photocopying room, having first crawled through the office across the passage. By the time it reached the photocopier the light was the colour of cement. It said, Everything accomplished here is a waste of time.
When she sat down to work each day, Christabel took off her gilt watch and bangle and left them on the edge of her desk. That double golden coil, catching now and then on a corner of her vision, was the assurance of a different life. She accepted, humbly, that it might never exist for her (‘I am ordinary!’), but she needed to know that it was there. It was enormous and astonishing. Sometimes it lay in the future, like an infinitely suspended wave. Sometimes the wave had already broken and receded, leaving only darkly gleaming sand. The work she did was tedious yet required concentration, like a standard-issue dream. And as with a dream, any attempt to describe it sounded implausible and weak. ‘Provide ad hoc clerical assistance and action paperwork arising from financial systems (Oracle).’ That other life, hazy in outline, acquired solidity by comparison. It rose, glittered and sank back.
On their first day in Jakarta, they found a clean room at the back of a thick-walled house. The room had two interior doors. One opened to reveal a cell that contained a toilet and a shower—of course the toilet was a hole in the concrete floor. The second door gave onto another room, hardly bigger than the first, with a heavy beam that ran across the ceiling. All it held was a wooden chair and a dead cockroach. ‘I suppose it’s to put our luggage in,’ said Christabel.
Bunty came and looked over Christabel’s shoulder. She retreated to the main room. ‘We can’t stay here,’ she said.
It was the first time the white shroud had settled over her while they were on holiday.
‘Why can’t we stay?’ Christabel asked, knowing all questions were useless.
They had paid for the first night. Their landlord smiled and smiled and refused to refund their money—reasonably, since they could give no reason for wanting to leave. They dragged their cases along filthy streets. The room with the chair took on a clear outline in Christabel’s mind, as final and defined as an ending. Bunty lumbered ahead, an icy block in the equatorial afternoon.
By the next morning, in their new room, everything was all right.
Bunty was finding sleep elusive. She would get up and change her sheets, carrying the discards silently out of the bedroom to dump in the machine. ‘It’s the change,’ said the GP Christabel consulted after she, too, began waking up slimy with sweat. It was her rostered day off. When she came out of the doctor’s surgery, it was noon. Across the street, a doorway was solid with darkness. In the twelve years since Rob, there had been six men—secretly, Christabel folded down a finger for each. Behind each man was a wife or an ocean or merely reluctance for more intimate engagement. She supposed that all that was over now.
At the end of an evening, after what she thought of as one of her interludes, Christabel had always refused a taxi or a lift. As her train curved towards the midnight suburbs, the city shone like rubble from the Milky Way. Christabel would get off at St Peters and walk up to the main road, past the pub with a rail opposite the door to save drunks from stepping in front of cars. King Street swept off to her left, blank and hungover, beerily illuminated. Even when it was busy with buses and shopping, the southern end of King Street looked bleak and unloved. That was because it led only to a highway. Christabel turned off it as soon as she could, exchanging the flare of headlights for black, empty streets. There were deserted factories with flattened cardboard boxes protruding from bins. She unbuttoned her jacket to that enemy the wind. Her flesh, damp and alive, answered the night with ease. How extraordinary that she should possess this talent for the calm taking of pleasure, the calm leaving of it! Certain streets were so narrow that she passed along them like a pea slipping through a pipe. Leisurely rats crossed in front of her. The night rushed up her sleeves.
Mr Valente was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. He gave up the races at once, hoping to soften God’s heart. It was understood that ‘the races’ meant Bunty. God was in the mood for deals, and Mr Valente went into remission. Bunty came out with the story on the day he was given the all clear. She and Christabel were watching TV with a giant slab of Cadbury’s Rum ’n’ Raisin on the couch between them. Bunty said, ‘Poor Enzo,’ in a disinterested way, never taking her eyes from the French planes flying in formation to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. In the darkened room her calves, propped on a footstool, were thick white boots.
Christabel said, ‘You don’t have to go on working for him.’
‘I have no qualifications. Bookkeeping’s just something I picked up.’
Christabel couldn’t see how bookkeeping was something you ‘picked up’ like the flu. ‘Another thing,’ went on Bunty, ‘is that Enzo lent me the deposit for this house. Interest free. I’d never have been able to afford it if not for him.’
‘But to have to go on seeing him every day!’
‘That will be difficult for him.’
This conversation was taking place around midnight, because after the late news they had stayed up watching a Turkish film; Bunty enjoyed the foreign films on SBS almost as much as westerns. Once she had come down the passage to tell Christabel, ‘If we had been born in Sweden, say, I might have been a filmmaker. You might have written books.’ Christabel made a noise but didn’t look up from her page. What was the point of a dream like that? It was all right to have no use for the past, but it was what they were stuck with.
The Turkish film went on forever. It showed a well on a hillside, the shadow of a leafless tree slanted across a courtyard, a man in a dark suit making his way along a street of houses, workshops and little stores. Bunty ate the last square of chocolate, sucking it noisily. Christabel knew what was coming. Bunty said, ‘Let’s go to Turkey next.’
They went to Turkey and came home again. Now the white shadow often crept over Bunty as she prepared to leave the house for work. She still followed the races on her radio and stopped by the TAB of an afternoon. But alone in the soft room, she no longer sang.
Mr Valente announced that he was going to retire. His son-in-law was to take over the tiling business. Bunty decided that she, too, had had enough. She said of the son-in-law, ‘He makes my teeth itch.’
After Mr Valente and his wife retreated to their house on the Central Coast, the phone started to ring at unusual hours. Bunty and Christabel would hear the pips that signified long-distance; silence followed before the caller hung up. ‘Enzo has always been a consistent person,’ said Bunty when this had been going on for some time. ‘All those awful cakes, year after year.’
A terrible, terrible thing happened to Kiki Mack: she was strangled by a servant, who had only meant to steal her car.
The CEO informed his assembled staff that the company had been taken over by another, which would be moving its operations offshore. At the end of the month they would all be unemployed. By way of compensation they could sign off for the day, although it was only ten past four. A data entry clerk standing next to Christabel began to cry silently, the tears slipping under her glasses and down her cheeks. But in a way the announcement was a relief, decided Christabel on the train home: there had been rumours and redundancies for months. Only a few short years ago, she had thrashed about under the realis
ation that she was growing old—how much more restful, as her sixtieth birthday approached, to be old. The end of her working life would be like that, a release from dread. Underpinning her cheerfulness was the unsquashable sense of reprieve that came from leaving work early. To the buffalo! Christabel overflowed with affection for the cramped, no-pool backyards sliding past under inflamed clouds.
Bunty was in the bedroom cutting her toenails; they grew fast and had been known to rip sheets. She was dressed in one of the velour tracksuits that were more or less all she had worn since giving up work. The coldness was on her—she peered at Christabel as if looking out from an icy hood. After Christabel, too, had changed into comfy clothes, she sat at the kitchen table explaining about the takeover while Bunty boiled potatoes. As Christabel talked, her exuberance dropped away. She was wrung with tenderness for something both immense and touching that was already behind her, for lighted buildings around whose feet a dark stream of workers was hurrying home, and herself a tiny part of all that.
Bunty microwaved fish fingers and slid them onto two plates. They took their dinner and the sauce bottle out to the little patio beyond the kitchen—it was the first mild evening of the spring. The sun having knocked off for the day, what was left was the kind of light that magnifies everything, including the din of a plane. All around the yard, red roofs approached antiquity, even the emerald tiles with which they were studded taking on a subdued glow. It was the magic hour: burdened with human dreams, webbing everything in strangeness. Anything might appear against the sky: an angel, a sniper, King Kong. The bottlebrush tree was holding its breath.
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