The Landing

by Susan Johnson

  ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed young destitute Thai girls and boys are friendly towards old European men too. Poor Thailand. Now the west is outsourcing its old people as well as its sexual services.’ ‘Well, you know, it’s a growing problem, the ageing world population. The only people going at it like rabbits and still popping out babies by the dozen are Mexicans. Oh, and Scarlett.’

  Penny hung up. Fuck Rosemary.

  She was full of fury, she was alive with a raw energy, volatile as electricity. She had to move, she had to walk; she had to get out of the house. She rushed from the room and out the door, banging it on her way out, walking fast down the road. Was it Scarlett? Her mother? Her sister? Which part of her stupid fucking life made her angriest? How dare Rosemary make cracks about Scarlett, as if she, Penny, didn’t have her heart broken over it every single day! She had thought she had accommodated herself to it as best she could, given that Scarlett was alive, breathing, not dead from drugs or a car accident or any of the many dreadful things young people died from. She was not a junkie or an alcoholic, she was a healthy young woman who could still make something worthwhile of her life. How was Penny to know if Scarlett hadn’t already made something worthwhile, if those two babies weren’t equal—or even worth more—than all the other supposedly worthwhile wordly things? How do you weigh a baby? How do you measure value, or success? She walked on, hoping that if she walked far enough or long enough or hard enough she might walk out of the anger that even she knew was a substitute for something else; as if she might walk her way out of the painful riddle of being alive.

  When she had marched so far that her T-shirt was dark with sweat and the hair on the nape of her neck slick and clinging, she had succeeded only in transforming boiling rage into a simmer. It was even faintly amusing—in a sick sort of way—to consider that in one generation the idea of what was valuable in the life of a woman had altered so profoundly. While no doubt certain sections of society still viewed the lives of childless, unmarried women as sad affairs, many more regarded women stuck at home with children and no fulfilling career—or even an unfulfilling one—as pitiable. Oh, Penny knew there was some sort of stand-off going on between mothers who worked and mothers who didn’t, and that American religious fundamentalists and the extreme right had elevated stay-at-home mothers into contemporary saints, but perhaps she had to find a new way of thinking about Scarlett. Perhaps she had to see her daughter as a stranger might. Hello, there’s a beautiful girl. And just look at her beautiful children. Such perfection, she knew; oh, Penny saw, such perfection.

  She realised Giselle was following her. Did no-one care about that damn child? She picked up her pace, growing cross again. But as she marched on, her conscience got the better of her. Should she call the Department of Social Services? That might possibly be worse. She slowed down, allowing the girl to catch up.

  ‘And where are you off to today, young madam?’

  She was barefoot, her feet brown and hard.

  ‘I’m building a cubby,’ Giselle said. ‘Do you want to see it?’

  ‘Not today, sweetheart. I’ve got a million things to do.’

  The child ran off, the long stick she was carrying trailing behind her in the dirt.

  When she got back to the house, Marie was still in her chair, her eyes closed. Penny was pierced by pity, a great knot of it, in the centre of her chest. Her mother was so completely and utterly herself! Her secrets, her vanity, her energy, her formidable will; she was forcefully present, intransigent as weather. She would probably live till she was one hundred and three, really, she might; no-one knew if longevity was in Marie’s genes on her mother’s side, because her mother had died so young.

  She sensed Penny’s presence and opened her eyes. ‘A cup of tea?’ Penny asked.

  ‘I’m awash with tea,’ Marie replied. ‘What time is Wendy’s train?’

  ‘Oh, bugger,’ Penny said, looking around for the car keys. She wouldn’t have time to get changed.

  The poor old thing was waiting at the station, sitting bent over on a bench, her handbag clasped in her lap.

  ‘Hello, Mrs O’Brien,’ Penny said. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’ Penny didn’t address many men or women as ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ but found it ridiculous to call the tiny old woman ‘Wendy’. It was the name of a girl; more specifically, the name of the girl in Peter Pan and—from memory—a name invented by the author himself which became wildly popular on the heels of his book. This Wendy was immaculately dressed, a girl grown old, a girl from another century. Penny had known Mrs O’Brien all her life; her late husband, Ken, a practical joker, was always making her look behind or look up or flicking tea-towels at her legs when he came to stay at one of the units they owned down the coast when she was growing up. He was full of gnomic expressions—the bigger the hat, the smaller the farm and better to be down on your luck than up yourself—and he and Mrs O’Brien couldn’t have kiddies. They’d adopted Shane and Troy, but Shane was a bad ’un, something in the blood, something that led him from a spot of harmless shoplifting and minor burglary directly to armed robbery and jail. Penny hadn’t heard anything of Shane for years but she knew all about Troy and Denise and their three lovely children.

  Mrs O’Brien walked with a stick and took a long while to move off the platform and down the ramp and across to the car. Penny held the door open while she settled herself in. ‘All right?’ she asked, gently closing the door.

  ‘How’s your mother, dear?’ Mrs O’Brien asked when they were finally on the road.

  ‘Oh, you know Marie,’ Penny said. ‘It’ll take more than a spider to bring her down.’

  ‘She’s always been brave. Marie’s the bravest person I know. I’ll never forget her worried little face when we met her off the ship. All that way to the other side of the world, not knowing a soul.’

  Yeah, yeah. Her mother was made of sterner stuff than she was; no question.

  THIRTY

  Love-longing

  He took Janice out. He took Charlotte out. He fell into their beds as if falling into a dream, into sleep, into unconsciousness. He watched his body going through the motions; he watched himself put up a fight with Janice; a man of scruples, a man of principles and, besides, she wasn’t his type. Her lips were wrong, too thin, too straight, her eyes too hard; he couldn’t, after all, close his eyes and think of England. He remembered the crude adolescent jokes about putting a paper bag over their heads and going manfully on, but he found he could not go manfully on. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not you, it’s really not you.’ It was him.

  He was surprised to learn that he was regarded as a mad rooter, a bit of a Jack the lad. Work colleagues thumped him on the back, joking about making hay while the sun shines. He wanted to say do you have any idea what it’s like? It’s so tiring, he wanted to say, it’s so relentless! But he saw the envy in their eyes, the spill of something like wonder. It did not escape him, the paradox of men in possession of love, their eyes yearning, bewitched by the gleam, the dazzling light of unrequited desire. He was swimming in it, drowning in abundance.

  She called him late one afternoon. He was on his way out to a work function, a drinks party for some mining company executives and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, at which he was expected to sniff down work like a tracker dog. ‘It’s Anna,’ she said, in her low, unmistakable voice.

  They met for a late dinner at her hotel. It was one of those new hotels, dark, demurely lit, the decor deep reds and blacks, lots of red velvet like theatre curtains, embellished wallpapers, his idea of a bordello. She wanted to meet in her room; when she opened the door, she kissed him lightly on each cheek, French-style, and immediately returned to the window, where she stood silhouetted, a drink in her hand. Below, across, the city, the jewelled lights of office blocks and apartments. The adolescent reach of towers fighting to be the tallest, Meriton—skinny, elongated—the winner, the tallest child.

  ‘It’s like an Asian city,’ she said. ‘A smaller Hong Kong.’ />
  ‘I suppose it is. It’s hard to see the changes in the city you grew up in.’

  ‘We used to come up to Noosa from Melbourne every Christmas. Oh, and once we came up in the September holidays to go to that world’s fair thing.’

  ‘Expo ’88,’ he said. ‘The official marker of Brisbane’s coming of age.’

  She raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s how Queenslanders date the beginning of modern time, like BC and AD. Expo represents the dividing line between the old Brisbane, the old big-country-town Brisbane, and the new Brisbane, the sophisticated, cosmopolitan city you see before you.’ ‘How pleasant to have one big date instead of the press of a million little histories weighing you down,’ she said. ‘Sometimes in London I feel quite squashed by the past. All those people gone before. All those hopes, all those millions of souls hurrying home down the centuries.’

  He looked out the window, at the bloom of light, at the radiance it suggested.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t offered you a drink. I’ve opened a bottle from the minibar. Indulgent, I know.’ She moved across and poured him a glass.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking a quick fortifying sip. ‘Brisbane’s also home to millions of souls. Who knows how many Aborigines lived here before we arrived? It’s just that they didn’t have streets to hurry down.’

  She smiled. ‘I’m not all that interested in Aborigines.’

  ‘That’s not very PC of you.’

  ‘I’m not very PC. I believe in men being gentlemen and women being ladies. I believe some cultures are superior to other cultures. I’m much more sympathetic to conservative Muslims than my father is. There’s something deeply erotic about the idea of a woman being veiled to everyone in the world except her husband, don’t you think?’

  He looked at her, her excellent body transfigured by the light, her hair cascading.

  They ate in the downstairs restaurant, ham from Spain that came from pigs fattened on walnuts; an excellent burgundy. She spoke in long, meandering paragraphs; her lips were red, swollen, and he watched them as she talked, trying to ascertain if she was a racist, a provocateur, if she was stupid. She had no process, no method, she was all over the place, a mind clearly untrained. It turned out that she had a soft spot for Muslims because she had for some years followed Sufism, a sort of branch of Islam.

  ‘Charles led me to it,’ she said. ‘And now God has led Charles.’ Her eyes filled with sudden tears. She sniffed. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t drink.’

  Jonathan leaned across the table, taking hold of one of her thin, beautiful hands.

  ‘Oh, why are some people chosen to live this life of love-longing, Jonathan? Why did God pick Charles?’

  He didn’t know what she was talking about; he said nothing.

  ‘I suppose some human beings are just branded by God, aren’t they? They can belong to no other. No other relationship can fulfil them, no human lover can take hold of their heart like God can.’

  Still, he said nothing. She was so beautiful. The light in her eyes was vivid, alive; the movement of her red lips, the planes of her face. Her voice was low, thrilling, rendering everything she said enthralling. She seemed to be talking crap, he knew that, some crap about God, but the way she spoke the words was so enticing, so dramatic, so dangerous and strange, he could not bear to stop listening.

  ‘People like Charles can fall in love with a human partner, but something’s always missing. However much the love of a human partner seems to offer, only one thing really matters: the heart’s love affair with God.’

  Her husband had left her for God? He thought that only happened in nineteenth-century novels or to fallen women in Ireland in the early twentieth century. Had Charles entered a Sufi monastery? Did Sufis even have monasteries? He was suddenly listening intently, pulling his eyes away from her swollen mouth.

  She was tired, she was upset, she wanted to sleep. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’

  Did he mind? Did he mind missing out on the fall into the abyss, that long plunge down? He was thankful to be held back from that smashed heart, from the train wreck that was love. Love was an enchantress, a siren singing him towards doom, a fatal cliff with nothing good at the end. He saw a picture of Anna’s elderly, failing husband, inheritor of a castle or some such, some stately pile, silver-haired, frail, ill, called to God because human love was not going to save him, the love of a woman with swollen, inviting lips turned out to be no protection at all. She was alive, so animate, the first woman he had come across to have the spark of life, who seemed as fully human as Sarah; his imagination did not stretch to an elderly man choosing the love of God over her. The husband, Charles, was cutting her off, cutting off her son, giving everything he owned away: the grand house, his money, his goods and chattels. He said she could divorce him if she wished but England still had medieval divorce laws and what fault was she supposed to cite? Bad behaviour? Irreconcilable differences? Adultery? The other party was God. She could not believe it or accept it, so she bought a plane ticket with her credit card and flew all the way to the other side of the earth. She, who had loved Charles with all her heart, cast out onto the street—and by him, who had loved her, and so recently! Hadn’t he loved her all the way through his skin, his flesh, down to his very bones? His skeleton was supposed to open its arms in welcome; he was supposed to keep the earth warm.

  Jonathan, heading home to Southbank in the back of a taxi, thought the whole thing ridiculous; skeletons, renunciation, love beyond death—give me a break. How could ordinary, everyday love live up to its own publicity, to its own myth? He was sick of the unbreachable gap between idealised love and its puny reality. Yet he was moved, impossibly moved, by the mad human striving towards it, by the great stupid streak of hope, the vain, useless tilting. He thought: her husband is mad, and possibly she is mad too. A ghostly, silvery shiver ran over him.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Into her arms

  There was a moment when Marie might have married again. Not in the first few years after Syd’s death, which passed in a blur of grief, when all her grief joined up—her mother, her father, her brother, now Syd—when it took all her effort and will just to rise from the bed some days. She stopped sleeping then, her nights peopled by images of the dead, her mother’s voice speaking to her as clearly as if she was in the room. Who will save me from this misery? Why was I cursed with a daughter such as you? Her father, weeping on the telephone from France, a telegram in his hand informing them of Eric’s death. Eric’s long-dead voice, alive again, the last story he ever told her going around and around in her head: German soldiers boarding his merchant ship at Marseille, impounding it and seizing everyone on board except—by some stroke of luck—him and Maxime Bodhaine, returning together to the ship with a freshly baked loaf of blackmarket bread. Plump, pretty Maxime, frightened, hopeless, and Eric, quick, out, away; Maxime never moving so fast in his life, both of them running down the docks and into the streets of the port, towards what looked like freedom and turned out to be one of the last unbombed ships crossing La Manche, sailing towards England, towards what they thought was safety but of course was not. No-one left! No miracle in the whole of her life except Syd, invincible, exempt from death, as if his leap from the bridge had turned him into another sort of being, one capable of transcending the banal laws of time and space. If Syd hadn’t leaped she would never have been shocked out of whatever morose dream she was living in; they both agreed that his purpose on earth was to land, causing them to see the underpinnings of love and the way it held up existence. Not everyone needed to jump off a bridge to learn that, and not everyone needed to witness a man jumping off a bridge, but they did. It was their truth, the myth they lived by, and it brought them close, throughout the births of their daughters and the death of their son, throughout the years when he taught her the particulars of love, throughout the years when Marie inexplicably felt she might scream if she had to look again at Syd’s smiling face. In the end, she knew she might
scream but also that the face belonged to the only man on earth who jumped for her into the river of love.

  The moment she might have married again came several years later, around the time Penny was attempting a new life in France. Possibly the two were connected; the idea of her daughter returning to that lost country, that place she could never think of without conflicting feelings of loss and shame. It was where her ghosts lived, her sorrows, her secrets; all the while Penny was preparing to leave she felt anxious, filled with a dread foreboding. Why couldn’t the past stay in the past, instead of rising up and filling her blood like an infection? Why couldn’t the dead stay dead?

  She had many admirers. She was admired for her beauty, of course, but she was also admired for her wealth. After the worst of her mourning had passed—and grief never fades utterly but acts like a permanent deep bruise upon the heart, painful when memory presses—she looked around and got back to work. Her gloves were off, so to speak, and she set about learning everything she needed to know about running the business. Shop girls at McAlisters began to fear her arrival, her attention to detail unfortunately extending even to them. She became known in the buying departments of women’s fashion, to the accounts department, to the men in the mailroom. She was a menace to everyone except Mr Stuart Middleton, the head buyer for ladies’ fashion, who insisted Marie join him at special client lunches interstate at the Melbourne Club or in the dining room at Sydney’s swanky Wentworth Hotel. At a function at the Greek consulate in Brisbane, he introduced her to the honorary Greek consul, a tall and handsome bachelor who had never married, who promptly asked later the same evening if she would grant him the privilege of taking her to dinner. She would.