She’s over by Stan’s house now, jigging Asher in his pram. Tess can no longer see her father. After three attempts to rouse her, Nora had finally clambered out from behind the stage and began to berate June, then run about wildly searching. The crowd stood and then dispersed, gathering children and refilling glasses and forming clusters of threes and fours, heads bent, discussing. The police car has gone. They’ve taken him in for questioning, Tom had said to Marta. They say it is my brother. It was then Tess realised: the stranger was her father, as if conjured in a reverse vanish by June. Maybe it’s a relief, Marta said, for a person who’s been hiding for so long. The city girls gather closer to Tess as ash falls on her damp cheeks, and drifts across the fields.
4
Sometimes, in the middle of some austerity, Jim will begin to hallucinate. A sea of honey, cascading down a mountain. When the honey tide’s just metres off, he runs. He’s wearing his mother’s gown and army boots. The boots feel leaden and the flimsy robe snags on twigs and thorny branches. As he runs, he knows he’s ruining it and he begins to cry for the things he’s damaged by trying to save himself, in his struggle to escape. He’s destroying it all, this relic of his mother that retains in its folds a vestige of her scent.
This scene will float up on a Forest Day at Hammer Wood where, on weekends, he helps clear the paths of invasive plants. It will amass in his mind during meditation vigil and he’ll bid it gone so he might continue to reach for emptiness. In the shadowy forest the bhikkhus pass him with muted steps. They’re forbidden to clear the weeds but will come to gather the chopped branches of sweet chestnut to burn for heat in the monastery. He walks behind, their skulls so naked beneath their stubbled scalps, their feet hidden under long robes so they appear to glide across the forest. In the shadowy copses, en masse, they seem very vulnerable, and he feels oddly protective towards them. Later, in the crisp light of the hall, scratching their itches, barking at a wayward acolyte, dog-earing a Marks and Spencer Christmas catalogue, they fall to earth, newly human.
On weekdays he crosses Clapham Common to Brigham Private through heavy, crusted snow. For his class of twenty-one boys he broadens his ocker inflections, embellishes stories of towns where native animals mix freely with the locals. The boys tell him of their own fauna, of badger culling and the moles that have excavated ancient ruins – unwitting archaeologists, ploughing up the British earth.
In London winter the world is slate-coloured and hard and glimmering with hoar frost. It is statuary and occasional cobbled roads on which some old Roman once ambled by, cursed and shat and spat, Jim thinks. When he compares it, Sydney seems so illusory. Its faux-gothic cathedrals, colonnaded verandas, the slate roofs, lancet windows, gables and buttresses. His memories centre on that broad swathe of land from the Art Gallery to the Quay. His particular Sydney, alien to Sylvie whose suburban childhood steered her imagery in other directions: bushy tracts of development land, air-con shopping malls, main streets with fluoro signage. He thinks of the Moreton Bay figs under which he spent so many hours. He tells the boys how these can sprout in a host tree, their adventitious roots trailing towards the earth. From advenire, he says, to come or be superadded.
A queer feeling to be here then, at the heart of a mental Britishness construed from convict histories and Captain Cookery, from his mother’s sun-bleached photos of pastoral East Sussex. It all comes back: her tales of school dinner ladies presiding over liver and kidney, of the fountain pens the children refilled at large metal sinks so her young fingers were always blue-tipped, of carolling in the snow and being bitten by a neighbour’s dog whose chair she’d dared sit on, a dog called Rex she’d say, laughing and showing the scar, and boy was he fucking royal on his Regency chair! All of those stories, imported, diluted, make fresh sense now he’s at the source of Veronica’s lore.
On weekends he takes the train from Euston station to Berkhamsted, then a taxi past Hoo Wood and Hill Wood and St Margaret’s Copse to the Amaravati gates. As he passes grids of farmland he remembers Veronica’s final reveries. In the hospice she’d described a school public-safety film. Six children killed, one by one, in gruesome farm accidents: drowned in slurry, crushed by a tractor and a gate, poisoned by weedkiller. It was called Apaches. This last death had especially disturbed, because the girl seemed so unscathed after swigging the poison. But later, she said, you saw the light go on in a room of a house in a village just like mine, and then the child’s agonising scream. In the hospice Veronica would not talk about her own death; she talked again and again about Apaches and its spiteful, B-grade editing. Jim had not recognised the story as a parable of her own terror, only that in dying there was no quietening. The world will go on, she said, in a moment of lucidity, of trying to comfort. It will go on without me.
Back in Australia, before leaving Bidgalong, he’d driven up to St Catherine’s Hospital. Three hours on a monotony highway, window down, elbow out, yelling in the Mack truck tailwind, I’m gone again, I’m out of here. He decided, then later resigned from the River Primary.
At the hospital, three flights up, Maternity. He crossed mopped linoleum, gleaming and stippled as a lake. There she was by the window, feeding. And there was the boy, dark-haired, a grizzled old-man face when he was shifted from right breast to left. Evangeline wore an expression he had no name for. A glazy look that reminded him of Veronica, so he thought such contentment must surely belong to the Endone, some other analgesic. But no, Evangeline glanced up, her eyes swimming with new intensity. She was off the pain relief and healing well.
That’s good, he said. I’m glad.
He was stripped to such banality in the face of her new radiance, at the sight of the baby, blindly groping the air at her breast. He was and wasn’t happy for her. He had a childish fancy for her suffering to return because she’d needed him once in the thick of it, but now it seemed she did not.
Here he is, our nameless new boy, she said.
And he was struck with a terrible injuring emotion in the second he took her our to mean his. Rain rapped the window, and the scene outside, so eternal, dragged at him. This lush, drizzly region; its people with their own unfathomable weather. He’d thought of Tess’s journal and had an urge to ask for it back because it had given him hope to see what had thrived from the Müllers’ losses; a girl, unspeaking, but writing, it seemed to him, for her life.
In England he’s seriously considering signing up for the year’s Buddhist training. But first must become an anagarika, a homeless one. He must shave his head and devote a year to the Eight Precepts. He’s given up dope, alcohol. His mind cobwebbed for six weeks and then, walking by the filthy Thames, he glimpsed a clearing, an intermittent spaciousness recalled from some dim untrammelled corner of boyhood. This clarity helps him face his delusions about what such training will bring. The delusion of peace, for example, which he knows can elude till your last breath. Still, the idea of it drives him out of the city and past the lambing fields to join the ranks of sober, cross-legged devotees.
Now he seals the envelope and crosses Clapham Common in grimy snow to post it. The fading day. As he returns, the lights come on in all the houses and the snow turns pristine, as if lit from within. His footsteps are still visible. He fits his feet inside them like he’d done years back, trying out his mother’s shoes.
At home, five new canvases, a study in simultaneous time. Each painted object enfolding past, present, future, illusion. One night reading, Jim had leapt up, then rummaged madly for a paintbrush, suddenly knowing the style and tone, the composition. The next day, he bought the fresh canvas.
He tried to capture how folded paper had done away with time, the attenuated moments on his mother’s bed before her death, the feeling of being borne away, a chancy, adrenalin river. He saw very starkly, as he painted, how fateful that meeting, in a clearing, by the water and that he knows barely a thing about Evangeline. She’d just steered him back towards who he’d lost.
He has mailed it, his proper goodbye – Rilke’s first
elegy – to Evangeline.
Perhaps there remains
some tree on a slope, that we can see
again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,
and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit
that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.
Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of space
wears out our faces – whom would she not stay for,
the longed-for, gentle, disappointing one, whom the solitary heart
with difficulty stands before.
5
The Year She Went Missing
I said, ‘I’ll write it. Maybe telling will help you remember.’ We were sitting under the laurel magnolia. It was the summer I turned seventeen. The tree was full of creamy flowers and at night those glowing petals looked like sheaves of paper blown in a squall. ‘All right,’ my mother said, ‘I’ll tell it and you will write it.’
Inside the house our bags were packed. The next day, we were leaving.
‘I’ll begin with Peter Tucker,’ she said. And I knew he was the source of my mother’s forgetting and also the source of myself. I looked at her translucent scar from back then. It ran from her temple and crossed her right eyebrow, causing the hair to grow more finely there. It did not detract from her loveliness, though, which wasn’t the regular kind of handsome but something enlivened by asymmetry. She crossed her legs and folded her arms as if gathering herself, shivering even though the breeze through those magnolias was breath-warm.
‘You were just three months old when we moved here, you were happy, an easy child. You did not even crawl, you went from dragging yourself to upright in a day,’ she said. ‘This house was new to us all so it didn’t matter that I still couldn’t remember other places from before; the Repentance River, say, or the Goat Walk from The Hive to the cliff. Or even further back, when I lived in town with your Grandma Anita and I’d be sent to visit my grandfather twice a year and help in the stables. All this came back to me later when I retraced my steps, the names and places lighting up, except for where those boys took me on the day of the fire.’
‘Boys,’ I said. ‘You mean Peter and his friend? You mean my father.’
‘He came to The Hive saying I had something of his. It was time, he said, to give it back.’
‘What was it?’ I asked.
‘It was you,’ she said.
Peter and Angus drove her to the falls. They put her on the edge of the viewing platform so she could hear the treacherous water and she tried to guess what they had planned for her in that place, on the edge of a cliff. The two-hundred-metre drop; the cairn below full of jagged rocks and fern. She wondered if it was some kids’ game, and worried that she’d missed the rules for such a game, which other children growing up normal, she said, might have known, but she, raised in the commune, did not. When they reached the place with horses she was not as scared as she might have been if she’d been left completely alone. If the men were with her she knew I was safe at The Hive. ‘Back then,’ she said, ‘I did not know what women had to fear when taken by vengeful men. I was never told about the Lincoln boys and the Jepherson incident. Hodgins didn’t let us read the paper, hear the radio or TV; he didn’t like the world coming into the commune to despoil.’
My mother thought maybe those boys were under orders from elsewhere. Maybe from the Beauforts, who’d been so angry when she’d refused to give me up. Or Jack Hodgins who’d lost his parcel of valley land when the adoption fell through. Still, she said that Peter cared.
Cared was a funny word, I thought, for someone who’d kidnapped her in a van and blindfolded her. But was it a true kidnapping if a person you knew had taken you? If it was someone you’d had a child with, maybe then it was a kind of game. ‘I did not know, even then, what kidnapping was,’ she said, as if guessing my thoughts. ‘I thought they were playing around, they never seemed the type for menace.’
‘They drove me into some forest. We were quite near the commune, but I could not see and was disorientated. When they let me out I tried fighting back. But they pushed me. I hit my head, lost a tooth. After that I had only one weapon left to use.’
I asked her what it was.
Small enough to hide in a pocket, she said. It was a lighter.
I remembered those articles she’d sliced from the paper and tucked within her crossword folder, each a story of things that men had done to girls so that after I’d read them all one thundery afternoon I had to fill the bath and lie still till I thawed out. I floated under the lip of water. I held my breath and counted my way back into my body. It had been news to me how much and in what unthinkable ways some women suffered and that it was usually the men who claimed to love them that unleashed all the violence.
At first she’d reported her incident. But then changed her mind. He was my father. What if, in revenge, he made some claim for me? And there were troubling gaps in her story. By then she was in hospital because of the burns and the head injury and the doctors needled her pain away and soon she recalled very little, and for a long time, she remembered nothing of that incident at all.
‘In the new house, in the new town, it was easy except when I had to believe, for your father’s sake, that he was decent. My mother visited, just once, before she moved away. She ran to Stefan in the bee field and hugged him. In the kitchen she patted his hair and said, “Good man.” That’s what she’d called him. She wasn’t afraid to leave town now he was in my life. I saw her relief, I saw that she was palming me off. But she trusted him. Stefan came over then and put his hand on my cheek. And I thought, OK, he is gentle.
‘Later, he told me what he could about The Hive and how he’d fallen in love with me there. He told me what I used to be like, which is really a myth, I mean how he says it, as if I was some virgin birthed in a forest, when he knows I was damaged. He didn’t speak of Peter and so I had to piece him together myself. Walking helped – it seemed to unlock my memories. And whenever I saw horses some shadowy parts of my mind would clear.
‘Through all of this there was little you! You kept me in each moment so my past didn’t seem important. I knew you were mine, no question. That was simple and bone true. You were asleep or awake, your world was unfolding. Cup, Mum, book and chair. Your first words. Horse and crow. Moon, cow, tree! I started painting again. It was like dreaming. A simple colour could just … realign my thinking. Sometimes I couldn’t even get the brush to the canvas. I just liked to mix on the palette. Phthalo Blue, Aureolin. You’d watch from a mat on the floor. Red, you’d say. Green.’
She paused then as my father and Asher came out of the house, both in bee suits. Through Asher’s veil I could see his toy rabbit, Kaninchen, coming along for the walk to the hives. He was learning already how to handle the bees, how to identify the mama bien, and the papa bien, as he called them. We waved and watched them cross the fields together, my father shortening his stride to stay aligned, Asher gesturing to the sky, to trees, and cows. And then remembering me, she turned.
‘When you slept in the pram I took the furthest roads on the edge of town. I didn’t realise I was searching. I thought I was just walking,’ she said. ‘But when I saw those horses in Peterson’s field, their breath of broken hay, the lonely sound of their tails, I realised this was where the boys had taken me. It began to rain and I remembered then all the names they’d called me. Names about my ruin, about my so-called reputation in and outside The Hive. All because I had not chosen Peter, but I had chosen you.’
‘But you said he cared!’ I told her. And she looked up, saying, ‘He wanted you in his life.’ His childhood was difficult. He had a true longing for love. ‘Tess, you can make a life from the few good things you have. Besides, some of us don’t get choices,’ she said, her voice smoother now. And I knew that some of us included Pip.
She said she’d been lost twice. But it wasn’t the boys who damaged her most, she said. After Pip, she wasn’t sure she’d ever return to herself. I said she sounded very w
ise, and her laugh was unsmiling. ‘You should know,’ she said, ‘I’m unschooled and still learning. Full of fault and unruly impulse, something like that,’ she said as if quoting some other person even now, with me. ‘And you’re still the kid on the mat, watching me paint and naming everything you could see. Red, red!’ and there was a sharp snag in her throat.
When she finished her largest canvas, I was surprised to see its new backdrop. But I soon realised that fire had always been part of the picture. In the narrow river at the bottom of the canvas, she’d painted reflected flames. They’d been there all along, but none of us had ever noticed.
I looked at the house. Inside, our bags, packed with sketchbooks and charcoal, our masks, suits and towels. It would be our first trip together. She wanted to see the world further north, before it disappeared, she said, or turned completely white as it had already in many parts. She wanted to look down on the glowing gardens, the rippled turbinarias, the staghorns that make up the reef’s construction force, the destructive Crown of Thorns. We’d all thought she’d choose overseas – anywhere you like, my father had said, Meg and I will hold the fort, and Asher spun the globe then slapped one small hand on Zimbabwe. But she chose the Barrier Reef, with its drifting seahorses. ‘Where, where?’ Asher asked and Meg pointed north, which was skyward. ‘Up there. You can swim right through it,’ Meg said, her arms winnowing through the kitchen where bread was cooling on the table. ‘It’s an underworld,’ Meg told him, ‘a whole other world beneath us.’ Twelve loaves, one for every day we’ll be away, my mother had said, and I recognised her labouring with that dough as love.
I look at her now, the wide band of grey in her chopped hair, the way she sits very straight with her face tilted away, and I try to imagine how she must have been, years ago, hair to her waist, her gaze fixed on some other scene while I was forming my words. Turn around, I will her, as she looks beyond the magnolia, past the bee field with its abandoned huts, the insects stricken with collapse disorder, with rapture, with disappearing disease or spring dwindle, past the knot of cows and the dark stand of pines that walls our property off from wilderness, and further, towards the Ghost Mountains. ‘So much has gone,’ she says.
The World Without Us Page 23