The Wilful Eye

by Isobelle Carmody

  It must be hard for most kids to lose a parent, to have a father or mother somehow tumble away, over and over, out of their lives. As for me, I felt a true piece of myself had died along with my father. Part of me had gone, and would never be part of me again. And even if you get a replacement it doesn’t help much. Actually, it can seem as if some sort of treachery is at work. You can even feel a bit treacherous yourself for going along with it.

  Brook, my mother’s new husband (I can’t really think of him as any sort of father), was kind enough to me – kind enough to everyone – and there were times when I even liked him, though always in that puzzled, careful way. Back then I couldn’t work out why I felt so cautious about him, but I think I knew from the beginning that he wasn’t driven by love. He was driven by a sort of calculation, and I felt that I was being assessed all the time. He was working me out in terms of profit or loss. Mum too! His assessment of Mum somehow ran beneath all the kindness he showed her, and it reduced her to a piece in some game he was playing. I felt she had become a bit less of a person than she had been . . . had become a voice babbling away in the background, loving me or loathing me according to Brook’s instructions. I knew Brook felt I wasn’t necessary, that I was some sort of leftover intruding into his well-regulated life with my mother. He was certainly mathematical about people, no doubt about it. I often caught him watching Mum and me as if we were numbers that he was trying to add up, and sometimes, when he was being particularly nice to me, or to my old gran (who lived, these days, in a special granny flat connected to our house), I got the strange feeling that he was playing a game of chess with us all, shifting us around on some secret board that only he could see . . . frowning over our places and trying to move us in ways that meant he would win whatever game was being played. Of course I couldn’t help believing it must be something to do with money. Gran had all that money tucked away . . . invested, Gran would say in rather an impressive voice, which always made me imagine that her money (which could have been spinning out wild and free, and getting itself spent) was caught in a cage guarded by armed accountants.

  ‘You should spend some of that money on yourself,’ I heard Brook say to Gran. ‘Live it up a bit – have a good time.’ (Just what I had been thinking, funnily enough.)

  ‘It’s for my granddaughter,’ she told him. ‘Some day soon, when she wants to settle down and marry,’ she added, and it sounded as if she were locking an invisible gate on all her wild cash, and in a way on me too. A few years ago she had wanted me to get out into the world and have adventures, but after her stroke, the world alarmed her. These days she wanted me to marry someone reliable . . . wanted me to be looked after . . . to settle down . . . to hold still in the one place forever. Me!

  Well, I thought Gran’s accountants would need to guard her investments for a long time, because I still went along with her old ideas. I wanted to wander around, to visit a lot of places and have surprises and adventures before I even thought of settling down. Of course if I hadn’t existed, then that money would have gone to some other relatives, prob- ably my cousins in Canada. Of course she might have left a bit to my mother, which meant, these days, that it would go to Brook. I was sure Brook thought about that money a great deal, though I had no proof . . . I just felt I could read it as a sort of concentrated interest – a secret obsession – printed out in tiny letters somewhere behind his eyes, flashing on and off at times when he looked at me.

  Anyhow, there we were, Ivan and I, bending towards each other across our coffees, gossiping on . . . gossiping on. It was astonishing how easy I felt with him, though we hadn’t seen one another for such a long time.

  ‘Another coffee?’ he asked, which we both knew was just a way of stretching out our time together. Then he frowned. ‘Blast! No cash!’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘Never mind. Come up to my place.’

  It felt so natural to invite him, and I think it felt natural for him to accept. Back a bit we’d sometimes gone to one another’s places, even though we lived a long way apart. I knew his parents a little bit, and he knew my mother, though I wondered if he’d recognise her now bossy Brook had taken over. She’d become a bit of a shadow.

  The outside air had been transformed by deepening twilight, and though we were walking up streets in a town we had once shared, and were sharing again, it seemed as if the world was mysteriously remaking itself around us. Gardens and front lawns seemed to be disguising something dark tucked in behind them. Familiar gateways suddenly looked as if they might lead to totally strange countries, none of which would have names. I saw a cat skimming across a lawn, and believed it might be a tiger in some Lilliput land. Suddenly, walking there with Ivan, I felt the world around us panting with fantasy. I don’t know about him, but right then, up high on the town hills, I felt fantastic, as if I were the one changing the light in the sky, and ordering evening around. But evening can do that to you . . . change an ordinary world into something shifting and remarkable. I half-enjoyed that twilit strangeness, even though it also made me a little cautious, rather as if the world might suddenly spring at me.

  But at last we turned in at my gate, and ordinary life came bounding to meet us, jaws stretched wide to swallow me up again. We climbed the four steps to the verandah, then stepped across it to the back door, which opened just as I was about to open it myself. There was Brook – that new man of the house – waiting to welcome us, holding the doorhandle with one hand, extending the other as if he were guiding us in from a storm. My mother was doing what she did so often these days, hovering a little behind him, smiling a smile as much like Brook’s own smile as she could make it, unconsciously copying his gestures of welcome.

  ‘I’m glad you’re home at last,’ she said to me. ‘Brook and I were worried about you.’ Her expression changed. ‘Goodness! Is that you, Ivan?’

  ‘Sure is,’ said Ivan.

  ‘I asked him up for a cup of coffee,’ I explained. ‘We’ve both run out of money.’

  In the end there were five of us. Mum and Ivan and I sat at the table, and my grandmother, lured out of hiding, cuddled herself into a corner of the couch. Once she would have marched around telling everyone what to do, but those days were gone. Brook carried in coffee and biscuits on a tray – he’s a wonderful man about the house. It could have been an easygoing, just-before-dinner sort of coffee . . . that’s what I had had in mind . . . but for some reason I felt self-conscious, uneasy. Brook left most of the talking to Mum and Gran, who both asked Ivan what he was doing these days, both looking impressed when he mentioned university. But though he wasn’t saying much, Brook watched us all intently, his eyes moving from me, to Ivan, then back to me and on to Gran. Once again, it was as if he were trying to nut out a problem, even though there was nothing to work out. After all, what was going on? A friend was visiting me, that was all. Big deal! A visiting friend was pretty normal, even though I hadn’t had a chance to catch up with many friends since we’d been home.

  ‘I’d better be getting along,’ said Ivan at last. ‘The crowd back at my place will think the Headloppers have got me.’

  The Headloppers were a gang – a dangerous gang – famous for howling like a pack of wolves as they skulked around the dark places of town. And they were suspected of murdering an old layabout, as well as a girl who had been walking home after her car broke down, but nothing had ever been proved against them. Ivan, frowning to himself, said, ‘Hey, is there a bank machine anywhere around here? I’ve run out of cash.’

  ‘There’s one down the hill in the Woodlands Mall,’ said Brook. ‘I’ll give you a lift down if you like.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Ivan said. ‘I can find my way. At least it’s downhill from here.’

  ‘What about the Headloppers?’ said Brook. ‘The bottom of this hill is real Headlopper territory. Let’s be careful.’

  I was surprised Brook had offered Ivan a lift quite so quickly. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d have expected him to do. He turned towards me. ‘Com
e along with us,’ he suggested. ‘Have a Friday night walk on the wild side of town.’

  I was really taken aback. It wasn’t like Brook to make such a kindly offer. And people making kindly offers don’t usually wear such sharp expressions. Then our eyes met and a warm smile wiped almost all of the sharpness away. Even so, though his face smiled, his eyes remained cool and calculating, as if there were some secret riddle which he just had to answer – as if some plan were forming somewhere in behind them.

  Wherever you go in cities like ours you find that rich people colonise the hills. After all, rich people like a view and they don’t have to walk up those hills carrying their shopping, do they? Not if they don’t want to. They just point their sleek, well-behaved cars upwards, and vrooom! There they are, high above the rest of the world, able to look out and over and down. Because, of course, once they get onto those hilltops they have wonderful views . . . the city itself, to begin with, then other hills, and sand and sea, if the city is on the coast. I was living in a hilltop home in a street that was never totally taken over by darkness. On fine nights at my house there were stars and sometimes a moon overhead (all very decorative and cheap to run), while down below lay a glittering network of streets pushing light upwards. Of course there were streetlights at our gates, and light shone from certain big windows of the houses around us across hedges and around garden trees, so what with our lights, the stars above and those other lights far below, being able to see at night was something we naturally took for granted. And in the daytime we could look out over a whole patchwork of roofs stitched together with roads, and then further on to the rolling farmland that embraced our particular city, and miles beyond that again to the mountains. I’d grown up with that view, and I suppose there were a lot of times when I didn’t particularly notice it. It was there – just there – day after day after day. All the same, though the mountains were unchanging, their peaks, like a distant scribble of darker blue against the blue of the sky, seemed to hold secret significance; sometimes they seemed to be sending me a message I couldn’t read. Afterwards I would think that perhaps the mountains had been saying, ‘Beware Babe! Keep out of the wild woods!’

  Once upon a time our hill had been covered in trees. Once upon a time there had been acres of bush – ferns and trees tangled together – along the creek in the gully at the bottom of our hill. But when our town was becoming ambitious, stretching itself out and turning itself into a city, the trees had been felled to make way for yet more houses and shops, and those shops had certainly taken over. Nowadays, once you drove down from the gardens and lawns stretching themselves out over the hills, there wasn’t a tree in sight, until you reached the town parks away to the south. For all that, the straggling suburb down below us, old and battered these days, was still called ‘Woodlands’.

  Woodlands was a hard part of town to enjoy, houses crowded together, crippled buildings holding each other up. And ‘Woodlands’, well, it sounded all open and sunny, a place with groves of beautiful trees, and maybe it had been like that once upon a time. But no longer. Now there was nothing but those tumbling houses, tacky shops and tangled dangerous streets. Walls all mumbling with graffiti, corners alive with violent possibilities. Haunted, of course, by that gang the Headloppers . . . the wild wolves of Woodlands, suspected of two casual murders, though nothing had ever been proved. Anyhow Woodlands was the part of the city I was supposed to keep away from, though there were times we used to zoom down there to the supermarket . . . well, there are always times when you run out of something, and the Woodlands Mall supermarket was easily the closest to us. Besides, the Headloppers chose to be creatures of darkness. They were supposed to hang out in derelict buildings, or shadowy pub doorways, or side streets where the lighting had failed, ignoring the bright invitation of the mall, so we felt safe enough.

  Anyhow Ivan and I followed Brook out to the car that had once been my father’s, and he drove us down into Woodlands. He seemed to enjoy owning that sleek silver car, and turned it with a flourish into the car park at the back of the Woodlands Mall.

  ‘The shops will be closing,’ he said, pointing to the back doors of the mall, ‘but you should be able to get to the money machines without any trouble. I’ll meet you round at the front.’

  Ivan and I scrambled out of the car, and slid in through the back entrance.

  Transformation. It was like leaving one world behind us and immediately finding ourselves in another . . . still a real world, I suppose, yet somehow insubstantial. I felt, instantly, that I had stepped into a dream that was only partly mine. Something else – something vast and formless – was dreaming along with me, and the dream was springing to life, becoming something more than a dream, becoming something powerful that was able to take charge of everything it touched upon.

  It wasn’t a late night for shopping, so most of the mall shops were shutting – even that commanding supermarket was on the point of closing down. For all that the mall itself was lit up and there were still a few people walking about, the people seemed to me to be like phantoms. However, there, sure enough, in the heart of the mall, like islands of fantastic promise, were two money machines.

  When I had previously come to that supermarket it had always been during the day when there were crowds of people around, which is no doubt why I found it so altered . . . so suddenly strange being there under the spell of night. It was a different place. The mall had become an echoing cave – a tunnel – a strange connection between the real world, left behind us in the car park, and an entirely different world – Woodlands, which had somehow suddenly became mythological. Usually there was some sort of music playing in the mall, but at this time of night it was silent. My shoes squeaked as if they were complaining about what I was putting them through.

  ‘It’s like a different world,’ said Ivan, which is more or less what I had been thinking. ‘We’ve walked into another dimension.’

  I nodded. ‘At any moment it’s going to dissolve, and maybe we’ll dissolve too. We’ll become a pattern of atoms spinning in space.’

  ‘That’s almost what we are anyway,’ said Ivan, looking around rather cautiously. ‘It’s just that a time like this makes us think of what mysteries we are.’

  It was as if he were speaking the thoughts that ran through my mind, and yet I was a mystery, even to myself . . . such a different person from the one I had been . . . both self and a stranger to self.

  The few people walking past us seemed to be moving dreamily as if they were going nowhere in particular, as if they were lost people vaguely searching for some unseen door that would open and allow them to escape. Unfamiliar and haunting echoes rang out in the air around us. A man marched by, striding boldly towards the car park, and for a moment his footsteps sounded to me like cloven hooves striking a floor of stone. Usually there were so many people weaving backwards and forwards that individual steps were lost in the general noise of the crowd, but at this time of night every small sound took on singular significance.

  Ivan went up to one of the money machines and fed it his card. It hummed and clicked a little and then money slid out. I’d seen this happen often enough, but at this time of night, at this particular place and in the mood that was overtaking me, I felt that some sort of magic was involved in such obedience and generosity. Those machines seemed more than mere machines, they had become fantastic creatures, mythological beasts under a spell, forced to give up riches when a particular magic password was given, or a secret name uttered. This mood that had been haunting me ever since I came back home to a city alive with memories of my father. There was no actual ghost drifting at my elbow, changing the world as I looked out at it, but for all that I did feel a continual ghostly disturbance deep within myself. Ivan folded the money and put it into a thin brown wallet with his card, then slid the wallet into his jeans pocket.

  ‘Right, let’s get going,’ he said. ‘Your old man – I mean Brook – will be waiting for us.’

  ‘He’s not my father,’ I s
aid. ‘But we’d better hurry. He hates hanging around.’ Even so, I couldn’t help pausing by a bookshop and checking the bestsellers arranged in the windows.

  ‘Come on!’ said Ivan. ‘There’s a second-hand bookshop a street or two down, and it’s a lot more interesting than that one. Not that we’ve got time to look now. We’d better not keep him waiting.’

  It seemed to me that Ivan had picked up something odd about Brook, something that was making him anxious.

  ‘Don’t you reckon he had a funny expression on his face when he offered to bring us down here?’ I said suddenly.

  Ivan looked at me but just shrugged.

  We came out of the mall, and at once Woodlands seemed to rush towards us . . . a hungry suburb, eager to swallow us up, eager to digest us. The Woodlands lights and sounds belonged to a different dimension again from those we had just left behind in the mall. I reminded myself sternly that they were simply the usual lights and noises that an impatient city makes, as it works its way into the night. Cars and a couple of buses were on the move, murmuring past. Traffic lights blinked monotonously. Just what one would expect. So why couldn’t I shake the feeling that the ordinary city had been transformed into a mythical place, run according to different rules from the rules of daylight? Everyday reality had dissolved into some wild and unreliable state. It was crazy, I know, but I suddenly believed that the street I stood on was haunted – haunted, perhaps, by the forest that had once possessed the land, dormant these days, sealed under concrete and tar but somehow still there. The shadows that bridged the street seemed tangled – the shadows of great trees rather than of buildings. I half-imagined we were setting out into the ominous forest of fairytale.