Soon

by Lois Murphy

  are defeated

  by the mountain’s endless tune.’

  She adds a few words in Khmer and gives a small bow before slipping back to her seat. I close my eyes. I feel like I’m listening to Li, alive in the vibration of these words. It is a small oasis of peace, the first I’ve felt in all the days since her death.

  Li has already been cremated. After the long drive back we gather in a small group beside her apple orchard, and spread her ashes among the trees. To the left of the site, Blackie’s grave is marked with the tyre lever from the truck. A cold breeze lifts the dust we scatter and carries it to the edges of the west field, where winter growth is already tingeing it a deep green.

  It is 17 May. Ten days ago we should have been an exclusive party of three, celebrating Li’s fifty-sixth birthday with cake and stupid party hats, and delusions of Keith Richards.

  I’ve had nothing but cups of tea all day, and a quick Guinness at the informal wake in the Woodford Arms with those who couldn’t face a six-hour return journey for the scattering of Li’s ashes. Now, as dusk begins to close in, and the Barrys and Sean and Rachael take their leave, Alice produces a bottle of rice wine from her overnight bag. We’d been reluctant to allow her to stay, had refused outright at first, but she’d pointed out that returning to Woodford would have meant an additional two hours on her journey back to Perth the next day. And, to be honest, our rebuttal wasn’t heartfelt anyway: the idea of company, especially today, when loneliness hovers at the side of every conversation, is more than a little intoxicating. And this small woman seems to have the calm strength of a mountain; she is both lively and soothing. Now, with the others gone, we change into comfortable clothes, trackpants and thick socks, and put the first of the huge condolences casseroles in the oven to heat. As the light fades the gathering murmurs outside don’t seem quite so threatening.

  Alice, in her mauve pyjamas, is bashful, but raises a rice wine toast to Li, in Khmer for her uncle and in English for us. In the orchard, as the wind had lifted the dust that was all that remained of our kind, funny friend, she’d pressed her hands together in front of her chest and bowed, deeply and solemnly.

  But despite her dignity, her eyes are candid, and every now and then she forgets herself and erupts into a delighted laugh. At one stage, when she answers a call and murmurs happily into her mobile to someone called Rob, I realise I am more than a little in love. She is everything that Julie has never been, I think with a pang as I watch her stroke Gina’s ears with rhythmic gentleness.

  The noise builds slowly that night. As we fill our plates a hissing starts at the window, vicious and barely audible. Alice looks up from her plate, her face draining.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Milly tells her. ‘We should never have agreed to you staying.’ She darts a glance at me and I look down. I know it was irresponsible, but the company is such a tremendous comfort. I don’t regret it a bit.

  The hissing starts to grow, becoming whispers, a gathering mass of strange words. Gradually it becomes uniform, the voices fall together, forming a lilting chant that is somehow even more disturbing than the usual wailing. Each voice remains distinct; although their chant is like a chorus, they approach it in different tones, and each takes a turn in rising above the others: one mocking, one threatening, one howling, one as if it is in a trance. Even though the words are incomprehensible, the effect is chilling. As it continues to increase in volume I get up to put the television on.

  ‘No, wait!’ It’s Alice, her head raised, listening intently. ‘That’s amazing,’ she tells us. ‘Do you recognise it?’ We stare at her, faces blank. ‘It’s Khmer, Pan Yu’s poem, the one I recited at the service.’ Her face is still pale, but bright with enchantment. ‘It’s unbelievable.’

  The voices reach a crescendo, then subside in tempo back to the whispered hissing, a sinister croon. Alice gets up and moves to the window.

  It’s such an unexpected movement we are slow to react. ‘No!’ calls Milly and I am half out of my chair, the dogs up and alert at Milly’s tone, but already Alice has drawn back a couple of inches of curtain and peered outside.

  ‘Alice,’ Milly says quietly, ‘it’s not safe.’

  The noise outside is dying down, the chanting subsiding, until the last whisper floats into silence. Slowly, the night descends to stillness. Alice pulls back from the window, letting the curtain drop over the dark again. ‘Wow,’ she says. Her face is tranquil rather than horror-struck; she looks almost mesmerised. She remains standing by the window entranced.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask, more to break the mood and bring her back to us. She glances up.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘That was amazing.’ She drifts back to the table. Milly is looking at her intently, worried rather than relieved. Alice hasn’t quite come back to us yet, she remains dreamy, lost elsewhere. ‘I saw the mist,’ she tells us. ‘It was out there.’

  ‘You were very lucky,’ Milly says. ‘Extremely lucky.’

  Alice looks at her, confused. ‘But it was beautiful.’

  We are silent in the face of this. ‘Of course,’ Milly answers eventually. ‘It can be anything it wants to be.’

  ‘It was a sea,’ says Alice, dreamy again. ‘But there were people in it. My uncle was there, and I think the woman must have been Li. They were dancing, reciting as they moved. And then they just dissipated, drifted away. It was immensely peaceful.’

  She looks up at us again, and her expression is almost an accusation. ‘I can’t believe it sang the poem. It was lovely.’

  It is the most frightening thing she could have said to us. Outside it is utterly silent. I get up and put the television on.

  We spend the rest of the night slumped through a terrible movie, Bruce Willis leaping off buildings and sprinting down labyrinthine corridors, blasting people away with an enormous semiautomatic. Piles of corpses line his wake. But that’s fine, there are always hordes more people round the next corner, waiting to be shot. I find myself going back to the poem Alice recited at the ceremony, its simple dignity. It seems a world away from this, the noise and the mayhem, the casual massacre. Another realm.

  I glance over at Alice, where she is curled into one of the armchairs. Her eyes are on the TV, but she is not really watching. Her expression is distant, she is worlds away too.

  It’s then that I realise with a sickening lurch what the mist had been doing.

  It had been calling. The dance, the chant, the poem. It was a seduction.

  The night passes in eerie silence; the mist doesn’t return or resume its usual night-time serenade. It’s unnerving, and I’m sober for the first time in weeks. I sleep badly, tensed against the stillness. I throw the blankets off, then ferret around retrieving them. Ears strained to the night, I hear the dogs moving around the kitchen, their claws scraping on the lino. They are restless too. I think of Alice in the next room, and listen carefully for movement. I’m worried about her expression. The expression of someone enthralled.

  In the kitchen the next morning Alice looks tired. She says she didn’t sleep well either, she was too ‘wired’. From her position by the toaster Milly’s eyes meet mine, they are an echo of my own thoughts. Neither of us likes this choice of word. We bounce words soundlessly across the kitchen at each other, while Alice yawns and pours juice.

  It’s chilly out on the porch, but we never waste the opportunity to be outside. Our toast and eggs are cold almost immediately; we gulp our coffee quickly. In spite of her bad night, Alice is alert and talkative during breakfast. She questions Milly, asking her about the research she did into the mist. Milly doesn’t have many answers to her questions; she ends up sounding evasive. Alice keeps using the word ‘fascinating’.

  When we’ve washed up and showered I take Alice back to Li’s. We load a crate onto the tractor trailer and head to the orchard. When I start the tractor I automatically pause, waiting for Blackie to come bounding, leap onto the seat. I avoid looking over to the house, to the porch steps where Li an
d I would sit, sharing our lunches of egg sandwiches.

  The morning is crisp; Alice eats apple after apple and glows. She laughs and chokes on the fruit flesh, and alternates between giggling and coughing until she has hiccoughs and laughs even more. In her jeans and grey T-shirt she looks far younger than the elegant young woman she was yesterday. Her energy is infectious. I am smitten. I smile at her giggling hiccoughs, the purity of her delight, and can’t help wishing again that this was my daughter.

  As we sit over a last cup of tea and Milly’s special coconut cake, we are prepared for what we suspected might happen.

  ‘You know,’ says Alice, keeping her eyes on the cup that she’s twisting in her hands, ‘I don’t have to rush away.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ I say.

  ‘Really, I could stay longer. It seems a shame to have come all this way for such a short time. And I’ve only just met you guys.’

  Milly has her best schoolmistress voice on. ‘Sorry, Alice. It’s not possible. You shouldn’t even have stayed last night.’

  ‘But it wasn’t that bad, it was fine.’

  ‘That’s what’s worrying.’

  ‘Could it be petering out?’

  I stand up. ‘Get your things together. I’ll escort you to the highway.’

  ‘Ouch! An eviction.’

  ‘You bet. You have most definitely overstayed your welcome.’

  ‘Just cause the rice wine’s finished. I know your type.’

  ‘Too right.’

  At the kitchen door she turns back with a laugh. ‘I’ll do your ironing.’

  ‘Out!’

  She starts gathering her things together while I lean in the doorway. ‘Anyway, ironing’d ruin my naturally crumpled demeanour.’

  Milly nods. ‘Like human puff pastry. Very appealing.’

  ‘Apple pie,’ I say. ‘I haven’t made one for … weeks.’

  ‘Definitely overdue. You might lose your touch.’

  We smile, and I feel for the first time as if we might be coming back. From the bedroom Alice is singing at Gina, about thigh bones connected to knee bones, dem bones dem bones dem bones.

  It’s as good as birdsong.

  I escort her to the town’s boundary and part from her at the highway, her Daihatsu crammed with apples and potatoes and containers of funeral casseroles. Though we tried our best to make it seem less like an expulsion, it clearly is.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say to her through her car’s open window. ‘If we lived anywhere remotely normal I’d say stay as long as you like, move in. Believe me, you’d be more than welcome.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she says. ‘I can’t really afford to miss class tomorrow anyway. Exams start in two weeks.’ She scrapes her hair into a ponytail, securing it for the long drive. ‘Maybe I can come again?’ She peers at me, questioning. ‘After exams?’

  ‘When’ll that be?’

  ‘Mid-June. The twentieth.’

  ‘We’ll be gone by then. I’ll ring you, let you know where we are.’

  She’s eyeing me. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Milly?’

  ‘Milly.’

  ‘I’d be surprised. She doesn’t seem to be planning to leave.’

  ‘She will.’

  ‘I would say she seems determined to stay.’

  ‘And I’m determined to go.’

  ‘Ooh!’ She shudders. ‘Stalemate.’

  ‘I’m getting her out of here if I have to drag her.’

  ‘Reckon you might. Have to. But my money’s on her.’ She sticks out her tongue, raises her sunglasses. ‘You know, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be. It was almost, peaceful.’

  I reach over, gently brush some fluff from the edge of the car door. ‘So peaceful it disembowelled Li.’

  She flinches. ‘It could have been dogs,’ she says, tentative.

  ‘It wasn’t dogs.’

  Her eyes are defiant but uncertain. ‘Are you sure?’ she asks.

  I straighten up. I feel as though she’s hit me. ‘You need to go now.’

  ‘Hey, please don’t be angry, I just meant …’

  ‘You need to go now.’ I’m walking away, back towards the Land Cruiser, but she’s out of the car and has run up behind me. She grabs hold of me around my waist and hugs me hard.

  ‘Pete, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound like that. Please, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry.’ Her embrace makes my skin tingle, my scalp crawls across my head with delight, bristling with sensation. I could swoon with it; I think how long it’s been since anybody hugged me.

  And then I realise. At Li’s funeral everybody hugged me, men and women. Yesterday. Either I am coming back to life, or it’s simply Alice. I could stand with her wrapped round me for days.

  After she’s gone I linger at the side of the road, having a smoke and watching Gina, who’s bored and impatient. When I’m sure that Alice is really gone I look at the empty sky and head for home. I feel as though I’ve already been missing her for hours.

  When I get back Milly has started spring cleaning, cupboards awry. I put the kettle on and she joins me. I notice her noting that I’m having tea, even though it’s well into the afternoon.

  ‘Once I’ve got this place sorted out a bit and you’ve finished moving your stuff, we should start cleaning out Li’s, really,’ she says.

  I grunt. The solicitors had informed us before the funeral that we are Li’s sole beneficiaries. A few thousand dollars in superannuation and savings and the farm. A generous bequest on paper that is a major headache in reality. Li was younger than us, and as much as we both love the farm, we aren’t up to it, and we’d never be able to off-load the produce. Selling the place is an impossibility, and giving it away? To who – Liz? Alice? Trapping someone else within the borders of Nebulah? There was nothing for me at the farm without Li and Blackie.

  ‘The food, anyway,’ Milly continues.

  I nod. ‘Once all the legalities are finalised we can sell the equipment. Shifting the farm won’t be an option, though. We’ll just have to leave it.’

  Milly looks surprised. ‘I thought you’d want to keep it on.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘Well, you always seemed to enjoy working out there, keeping busy.’ There is a pause. ‘It did you good.’ She means that it gave me something to do besides drinking.

  ‘Milly,’ I say, gently, gently. ‘We can’t stay here anymore.’

  Her hands are clasped around her cup. She doesn’t raise her eyes. ‘“Can’t” is an ugly word,’ she says. ‘It implies lack of choice.’

  ‘That’s right. We have no choice.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘We don’t. We. Can’t. Stay. Here.’

  ‘Everything I have is here.’

  ‘Everything I have is here too.’

  ‘But. I. Cannot. Leave.’

  ‘Li is dead,’ I say. She recoils. ‘Li is gone,’ I repeat, ‘because she thought she could stay here, that if she was careful she’d be safe. Then she wasn’t careful and now she’s dead. Do you think if she’d known what was going to happen she’d have stayed?’

  Milly is shaking her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It will get us,’ I push. ‘There’s only two of us now, there’s only us to stalk.’ I think of crocodiles watching campers, lying in wait near their fishing spots, the places they’d take their rubbish. Waiting, learning. ‘It doesn’t matter how careful we are, it will get us.’

  She looks up at me, slowly, sadly. ‘You don’t have to stay.’

  ‘I can’t leave without you.’

  ‘Yes you can.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I don’t ask you to stay, I’ve never asked that.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Then leave.’

  ‘Not without you.’

  ‘Then that,’ she says, hobbling from her seat over to the cupboard, then limping back with the whiskey bottle in her hand. ‘Is your choice.’

&nb
sp; For two more weeks we circle each other, together but separate. The mist is subdued too; instead of the torrent we expected to have unleashed upon us, the nights remain peaceful; only the peculiar chanting accompanies the darkness. We find ourselves getting used to it. It’s almost seductive. Lulling.

  Some nights I think I prefer it to the repetitious circus of American action heroes, pumped up with steroids and clutching weapons the size of small cars, pulverising anything that comes between them and their goal, which is always altruistic, of course. The television isn’t the distraction it used to be.

  Nearly every morning we drive over to Li’s; Milly sorts through the kitchen and store cupboards while I finish harvesting apples from the far row of trees. It’s ages since I last made a pie. I hate to think how long it’s been. I try not to pay attention to the date. The thought of the days that are passing scares me.

  At my abandoned house I dig in the cupboard for my pie dish. Milly has one, of course, but mine is part of my specialty, a territory thing. The pie wouldn’t be the same in another one. As I rinse it at the sink the phone rings three times and stops.

  When it starts ringing again I answer it.

  ‘Where have you been?’ It’s Alex, sounding almost in tears. She’s been ringing for weeks, she says, was on the verge of getting into the car and tracing her steps back over the Nullarbor again.

  I try to defuse her. ‘Always looking for old men, aren’t you?’

  But she’s in no mood for this. Li’s death was in the papers and she’s been worried sick.

  I’m shamed. I should have called her to let her know I was at Milly’s, that I’m all right. But to be honest, the truth is that I didn’t want to. I already knew I didn’t need to hear what she had to say, would say – is now, sure enough, saying.

  ‘For God’s sake, what are you still doing there? You must know how close it is to solstice.’

  ‘It’s been quiet,’ I tell her. ‘Things have really calmed down here.’

  She is sceptical, then exasperated. I am brisk with her as she pleads with me; I think of her fluid green eyes, lined with concern, and it puts me in mind of Alice, small and poised in her watery green dress. I think of all the wonderful, strong, admirable women I have met since my disastrous choice of a wife. I think that in the weeks before winter solstice, I’m unlikely to meet any more.