I felt sad when he paid his bill and walked out of the café. He knew about things. He seemed to miss his babies. I supposed he worked long hours. He probably drove his truck at night, as well as the day. It made me think about David. I wondered if he missed his baby too, when he went on his trips. I wondered if he missed me.
ON TUESDAY MORNING I dreamt about the herb cure. In my dream the leaves of the herb were huge, shooting out from the trunk like a giant’s fingers. I didn’t know how I was going to swallow them. I woke up with a bitter taste in my mouth.
I didn’t really understand how the plant cure worked. None of Mum’s books referred to it. Tim said this Jim Shepherd was at ‘the cutting edge’. Of what? I hoped that didn’t mean I was going to be his guinea pig. Or frog. In Year 7 we’d cut one open in science.
I had a shower and put on my uniform. Mum called me for breakfast. Home-made muesli. As Jeremy said, you took about five hundred hours to chew your way through it. We had this kind of breakfast more often when Dad was away. He called it ‘birdseed’.
Only Jeremy would laugh. He liked the way Dad flapped his wings.
Mum had the radio on. I opened my mouth to say something and she put her fingers to her lips. ‘Listen,’ she mouthed. They were doing a story on the Aboriginal stolen children. Mum turned up the volume in the kitchen. She brought her coffee over to the table. They were playing a tape of a grandmother meeting her grown daughter for the first time.
You should have heard their voices. The daughter said when she was little she was taken to a Girls’ Home. It was hundreds of miles away. She was two years old. Girls were groomed there to start work as domestic servants at fifteen. In the beginning, she kept climbing over the fence to look for her mother. After a while she didn’t look any more. The silence between the women made you wait, holding your breath. The loss lay between them, a drowning substance. ‘We are strangers with the same blood,’ the grandmother said. She was weeping.
A government minister came on next. ‘They’re a lot of wimps,’ he declared. ‘All those people saying sorry, falling about crying. They’re in the crying game. We weren’t responsible for those policies. We must put the past behind us.’ His voice was as bland as a yellow plastic toy in the sun.
‘Did he mean Weakly Interacting Massive Particles?’ I asked Mum. ‘Was he using the acronym?’
She just said ‘ssh!’. She looked annoyed. Well, if anyone was interacting weakly, I reckoned it was him.
The reporter said there was going to be a national Sorry Day. You could write ‘sorry’ in a book, and give it to the Aborigines.
‘It’s about understanding,’ an Aboriginal man said. ‘For our people, saying sorry is simply a way of recognising another person’s feelings.’
‘Sports News’ came on then. There was hardly time to hear the ‘s’ in feelings.
I heard Mum telling Jeremy about the stolen children when he was going to clean his teeth. She was following him down the hallway. He said, ‘Well, I’m not saying sorry because I didn’t do it.’ Mum told him he sounded just like the government. Only Jeremy is five. When you’re five you don’t know about history, and how pain is handed down. You don’t know about facing stuff before you go on to the next thing. Jeremy thinks you can just live in brackets, and events that happened in the past are all closed off, like air in a balloon when you tie the knot.
Mum came back to the kitchen and poured me a cup of coffee. Our fingertips met as she handed me the mug. We were both tearful. For a moment we were cocooned together in the same feeling. She stroked my hair. When the program finished, it was like coming back to earth. It had been so riveting, I’d forgotten everything else. The thought of the present, of this day, was like an alarm switching on. Tim was to pick me up at five o’clock. We were going to buy the herb cure.
It was hard to find other things to think about for ten hours.
But I managed. So did Tim. On the way, in his father’s Ford Laser, I tried to tell him about the stolen children report.
‘It’s a damn shame,’ he said, shaking his head. But his fingers started to drum impatiently on the steering wheel. I told him about the silence—how terrible those pauses were on the radio. ‘You know, radio is noise and entertainment,’ I said, ‘with no gaps for reflection. The silence was dreadful, almost shameful, like wearing only your knickers to a black-tie function. I mean, you’re not performing like you’re supposed to. You’re being yourself instead of someone else. It was all so naked somehow. All that inexpressible feeling. I think sometimes it’s the nakedness of things that people can’t deal with. Why do we have to spend so much time painting over things, pretending?’
‘Never mind, you’ve got enough to worry about right now,’ Tim said kindly, patting my knee.
So we talked about swimming training instead. Tim stopped drumming and his face lit up. The other guys who trained with him were awesome, he said.
‘Bob and José shave their legs. They’re that serious, Cal. Even that tiny friction of hairs in the water can slow you down. Do you think I should?’
I nodded. ‘Maybe you could shave your head, too.’
He practically ran us off the road. ‘Are you crazy?’ He says that often. He shook his long golden mane, tucking a piece behind his ear protectively. ‘I wear a cap,’ he explained. That keeps it out of my eyes, and stops the friction. That’s what the coach says.’
He looked so worried, I squeezed his arm. ‘You’ve got to keep these things in perspective,’ I said.
But I knew what he meant. I worried like that about my estrogen deficiency.
The subject of hair kept us involved for the next twenty minutes. We arrived at the office in Kings Cross ten minutes early, but we went in anyway.
‘Good evening, won’t you sit down?’
I was relieved to see a plump, clean-looking man of around thirty. He wore a white coat and a courteous smile. The people in the main drag of the Cross hadn’t looked nearly so polite. I wondered why we had to go to a red-light district to do this thing. All the way along the street there’d been men in bow-ties and greased-down hair standing in the doorways of strip joints. They’d glared at us, flicking their cigarette butts onto the pavement like hand grenades, demanding we come in and ‘see the cutest pussies in the Southern Hemisphere’.
‘The rent is cheap,’ shrugged the clean-looking man, seeing our faces. He was as bald as an egg. Tim flicked back his hair and we shared a quick smile. ‘Jim Shepherd,’ the man said, extending his hand energetically. I saw that he’d shaved his head. There was a blueish-grey shadow around his crown. I wondered if he swam. He had a small silver stud in one ear.
‘Callisto May,’ I whispered.
Mr Shepherd walked over to the desk. He eased himself up onto it, and sat there cheerfully, swinging his legs. I hoped he wouldn’t swing them too high and break all those little glass jars of herb cures beside him.
‘I’ll just be outside, will I?’ Tim said in a rush. He didn’t wait for an answer. He closed the door behind him. I began to sweat all over my top lip.
‘Well, Callisto, what a far-out name you have! Where’s it from? Mongolia, Poland, Tibet?’
‘Galileo,’ I murmured. ‘I’m named after one of his moons.’ I had a weird sinking feeling in my stomach. I wanted to go to the toilet.
‘Cool,’ he nodded, looking puzzled. ‘So, how pregnant are you?’
‘Not very,’ I said hopefully. I told him the date of my last period, and how sick I’d been and my obsession with parsley. I suppose I talked a lot; I do that when I’m nervous. As I talked, I looked all around the room for a plaque. There should have been some sort of certificate with Mr Shepherd’s name on it, followed by some important-looking capitals. A Diploma of Something. There was only a Japanese print and a primitive wood carving of a man with huge dilated nostrils and impossible genitals. I hurriedly looked away.
Mr Shepherd sprang up off the desk, clutching one of the glass bottles in his hand. ‘So, Callisto, I don’t know what
Tim’s told you, but I’ve been working with herbs for years, well, many months anyway, and I’ve had some remarkable successes. You can feel safe with me. Arthritis, schizophrenia, back pain—you name it, I’ve dealt with it. I’ve been all around the world. Next year I’m going to the States to continue my research.’ He held up the glass triumphantly. ‘This particular mixture stimulates female hormones, and brings on a period. I can’t guarantee it will stop the pregnancy, but you never know.’
‘I’m willing to try anything,’ I said eagerly. I smiled at him nicely, to show I wasn’t disappointed.
He poured the herbs into a small bowl, and began grinding them up with a pestle. He put a lot of muscle into it, humming as he pounded. He obviously loved his work. I closed my eyes, picturing my mother making her mixtures in the kitchen. I wondered why I’d come all the way to the Cross to see a deluded stranger without a diploma, when I had one at home.
When he’d finished grinding, he poured some of the fine powder into a glass and filled it with water from the sink. ‘Drink that now,’ he advised, ‘and I’ll give you a packet for tomorrow. It’s best to take it less than twelve hours after the first dose.’
I took a sip. The grains stuck to the roof of my mouth. It was like eating sand. They hadn’t dissolved at all. I started to gag.
‘Drink it all in one gulp,’ Mr Shepherd said. ‘It’s easier that way.’
I smiled at him, to show that I was grateful, even if my body was heaving.
‘Do you have any orange juice, or Pepsi?’ I ventured.
He frowned.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ I said quickly, ‘it was just to disguise the taste, I’ll swallow it now, it’ll be fine.’ I opened my throat and poured the revolting stuff down.
‘Thank you,’ I said, and smiled again. I could feel the olive green sand gritting between my teeth. But I didn’t like to ask for more water. In fact, I didn’t want to open my mouth again, in case I was sick all over his diploma-less office.
‘Good luck!’ he called as I went out.
I made an enthusiastic noise, and waggled my eyebrows at him to show goodwill.
Outside, perched on a chair in the hallway, I found Tim reading a surfing magazine. ‘Look at these tubes, Cal,’ he said, pointing to the long glossy waves on the page. ‘That’s Bob Jamison in the corner, he’s from Hawaii. Man, is he hot.’
‘Mmm,’ I said, and started going down the steps.
‘Hey, wait,’ called Tim. I heard him ask Mr Shepherd if he could take the magazine. Then his feet came clumping down the wooden steps after mine.
The air was warm and smelled of hamburgers. Next to the stripshows were fast-food shops. Men with sweaty hairlines were frying chips and stewing coffee. There were crowds of people on the street now. Some of them looked as if they’d just swallowed Mr Shepherd’s wilder herbs. Others were dressed up like expensive sweets, all shiny and deliciouslooking in their wrappings. The women’s high heels clacked along the pavement.
‘The restaurant is just around the corner,’ said Tim, taking my elbow. A man in a dirty coat asked me for fifty cents. We wove through the crowd, dodging the drunks, the bow ties’ cigarette butts and the swinging handbags.
Around the corner it was different. The pavements were spacious and elegant, with soft lights streaming subtly out of the cafés. Tim steered me into one of the nicest.
There was a candle on our table, and a single rose in a vase. Tim handed the rose to me. I pressed his hand. I didn’t really know what to do with the rose, so I laid it on the table next to my fork. We gazed at each other for a while, until it became embarrassing. We couldn’t keep staring, not saying anything, and my nose was excruciatingly itchy. We both looked away at the same time, which was a relief, and glanced around the room.
The restaurant was almost full. A man and a woman near us leaned toward each other over the starched tablecloth. Their laced hands, pointed skyward, perched like a small cathedral on the white lawn of cloth. The couple murmured together, their lips very close, as if they were praying. It was hard to drag my eyes away from them. I wondered what they had to talk about for so long. Their faces were so close, breathing in each other’s air, hearing each other’s thoughts. The distance between thinking and saying would be nothing, over there on that white lawn.
At the long tables people were celebrating. They made the most noise. I decided that the long-table people must work together—maybe after being cooped up all day saying polite things to the boss they needed to go out and roar like tigers for a while. They were pouring wine into fat glasses and laughing helplessly, clutching onto their neighbours’ arms, shouting into their ear. Tim said something I couldn’t hear. Voices broke like waves against the walls. I smiled and nodded anyway. He pointed to the menu with a questioning glance. I nodded, yes please, anything. I still didn’t want to open my mouth very wide. I had to swallow a lot.
I suppose I should have told Tim I wasn’t hungry. I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat, and it wasn’t as if he had much money. It would be such a waste, me sitting there deaf and dumb with a piled plate costing fifteen dollars. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I felt like a black cloud hovering there amongst all that hilarity. I wished I could remember a good joke to tell. But I only thought of Jeremy and me laughing at Bob Bottom on the TV.
Still, it made my lips twitch. Bob Bottom.
‘That’s better!’ Tim shouted across the table. He was smiling at me, turning his knife over and over on the crisp white table cloth. I felt better for a minute, with Tim smiling and approving of me. I watched him fiddling with the knife. He was probably nervous, too, poor thing. He was probably too shy to ask how it had gone with Mr Shepherd. Even when Tim said ‘period’ he always went red. So did I, for that matter. Well, I’d tell him all about it now, without him having to ask. I’d make it light and funny, show what a woman of the world I was, like those dazzling girls with the loud voices at the next table.
‘That mixture was evil,’ I began, raising my voice over the noise. ‘It was made with snake oil from the deserts of Arizona, a pinch of bat’s blood and a leg of cockroach—’
‘Oh no,’ Tim cut in quickly, ‘don’t be silly. Jim’s a friend of my brother’s. He wouldn’t give you anything poisonous.’
‘I was just joking,’ I said, but he didn’t hear. He looked preoccupied. I wished our meal would arrive. After that we could go. Maybe when we were walking, arm in arm, it would be easier to talk. When we didn’t have to eyeball each other.
Tim started in on the knife again. Over and over. ‘Listen, Cally,’ he said. He paused, testing the point of the knife. I wished he wouldn’t do that. ‘Next week—’
‘Yeah, it’s a long weekend, isn’t it? That’s great!’ I thought of all the time I’d have to lie on my bed. I sneaked another look at the couple. Their dinner had arrived—crabs in their shells, with a biscuity cheese sauce. You could smell it. The woman was picking at the crab delicately. She giggled as the man took one of her fingers and put it in his mouth, together with the crab leg. She licked the sauce off his lip. I figured that must be something you do when you’re at least twenty-five and confident. I looked at the woman again. Her breasts made a soft billowing shelf on the tablecloth. Just as I expected.
‘Yes,’ Tim nodded eagerly. ‘So, the guys are going up north—you know, Bob, José, Phil Jones—there’s a surfing comp on, up at Byron Bay. I said I’d go, ages ago. The guys are counting on me. I hope you don’t mind—you know, after tonight and all …’ His voice trailed away like smoke.
I could smell his eagerness to escape. It drifted out of his skin, burning, acrid. It made the candle glow more brightly. A surfing trip up north—it was his idea of paradise.
‘Do you know about escape velocities?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Well, every massive object has an escape velocity. It measures how fast you have to go to escape the gravitational pull of that object. For instance, to escape from earth in a rocket you have to travel
at 40,000 kilometres an hour. Now, let’s see, I wonder what my escape velocity is?’
‘What are you raving on about?’
‘I’d say it’s minimal—only about a hundred kilometres an hour, about the speed limit on the Pacific Highway going north. Nah, you won’t need a rocket to get away from little old me.’
Tim grinned doubtfully. He shook his head. ‘You’re such a crazy lady,’ he said, ‘that’s why I like you.’
But he didn’t look convinced. He was fiddling with his glass now, until the waitress came over and filled it up. Some sort of claret—at least it wasn’t green ginger. We picked up our glasses and clinked them together. I don’t think anyone ever looked less festive than we did.
Over the chicken cacciatore, I listened to Tim’s plans for his surfing holiday. He was more relaxed now. I wasn’t sure if it was the allure of the surf or the effect of the wine, but he was chewing and talking with gusto. His blue eyes were sparkling, whipped wild with excitement. He flicked back his hair, burnished in the candlelight. He looked like a Greek god sitting there—one of those awesome, athletic types, God of the Waves or something. I knew then, poking the grit around my gums with my tongue, that Tim had always been out of reach. He had done what he could for me. Now he was on to the next thing. I could see him surfing way out deep, where the waves are born. He was moving up and down with the swell, always moving, always further away. I was stuck on the shore like a clam.
I picked at a few olives on my plate. My mother would have been disgusted at the waste. All that good food, and so many children in the world were starving. It was true. But I could still taste the grit.
As I sat gazing at Tim, I realised old Shepherd could have given me chopped-up cow pats, and I’d have swallowed them. ‘Thank you, they’re delicious,’ I’d have said. It’s a terrible thing to conclude about yourself. Borrowers are the pits. We make ourselves sick.
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