After two hours of such intensity, he stopped, closed and locked his door, and blinked into sunlight. Turned without thinking towards the lunch shed where Jago and his friends ate their fragrant-smelling food, and the locals pretended theirs was superior. The week before, sitting among the men, Jago had been talking about beaches. Urged him to go to Bondi, the most beautiful beach in the world.
White sand, a perfect crescent, he’d said, his hands spread in front of him like a preacher. The sea cool and clean. And women. Women in bikinis. Boys on surfboards. Everyone happy, playing around like kids.
Axel had smiled at his enthusiasm. I like Manly, he’d said, shrugging. The beach is lovely there too, and I can take the ferry.
But it’s famous, my friend!
Coogee. The word rose up, a bit choked, from behind a sandwich. Got it all, the rocks, the cliffs, the pools. If we’re talking beautiful—
Tania Verstack. Low laughter rolled around the room. Someone said, I’d like to visit Tania.
Axel raised his brows, confused, and Jago shook his head. Beauty queen, he said. Miss Australia. Beautiful yes—his hands made an hourglass in the air—but really, she’s Russian.
Born in China. It was one of the Australians sitting among them.
Jago looked at them and grinned. Then you blokes can’t really claim her, he said.
She’s Miss Australia mate, if you haven’t noticed. The man’s friend this time, leaning back with his sandwich, ankles crossed. We grew her.
Jago inclined his head to the man, courteous. Let it go.
But today was Saturday; Jago didn’t often work the weekend shifts. Axel glanced inside the shed. No Jago. But remembering their conversation, he thought about Bondi. Found he was missing the ocean; particularly the push and pull of the surf, the build and collapse of waves, their energy as he entered them and the feeling he emerged with. Scrubbed and new. And despite the argument in the lunch shed he’d decided he would not go to Manly after all. It was too much part of his feelings for Pearl, so often like a rough tide that left him winded, beaten.
He looked up the bus timetable and set out with his towel and an orange and a newspaper in a bag. Bondi after all would give him something to write to Per about, to his mother. Everyone wanted to go to Bondi Beach.
When he finally stood on the steps of the pavilion he perused Jago’s “perfect crescent.” There were people on the beach despite the winter cool, but even the crowd could not dilute the deep colors of sand and sky, and in this soft sun the water was storybook blue. He breathed in salt air and stepped off between the beach umbrellas and oiled bodies on towels. As he reached the water he looked out to the horizon. Its endless promise: his father was out there, just beyond it.
Saturday morning and she’d slept late. Bridget was leaning against the wall near the taxi stand in a pose that said impatient. She twisted her lips and frowned. You could’ve rung, she said. I left a very cozy bed to get here on time. She raised her eyebrows.
Lucky you. Pearl tipped her head in the opposite direction and they fell into step together. Couldn’t ring, Bridge. She told her about the phone tap and Bridget stopped suddenly, forcing two women behind her to stop too. Pearl heard them curse as they maneuvered around.
But Bridget was motionless, staring at her. Shit, Pearl. Why didn’t you tell me? She shook her head slowly, then moved forward once more. Have you been to the cops?
The cops? The words a harsh cough. Pearl glanced around even as she spoke them, then back at her friend. But Bridget’s face was unmoved.
It is the cops! She spoke through pursed lips. Or ASIO spooks. Same thing. That’s what they do, for Christ’s sake. She looked sideways at Bridget. They tap phones, they follow people, they spy. Never, ever, go to the cops.
Bridget was quieter now. My uncle was a sergeant, she said, in the country. Not meeting Pearl’s eye. He was all right.
They’re watching me, Bridge. Listening to everything I say. The words harder than she intended. Pearl watched her friend’s eyes dim and her face flush pink beneath freckles. Just don’t trust coppers, okay? Specially uncles. She reached for her arm, squeezed. Okay?
Bridget shrugged, nodded. As they reached Della’s street and turned towards the house she said: Thanks for telling me. No one tells me anything. Then: I do the posters and fold leaflets and make lunch. But no one asks what I think.
They reached the gate of the terrace and its untended front garden. I hear things though. I’m not stupid. There’s something brewing, isn’t there?
There’s always something brewing. Pearl pushed the door open. It’s why we’re here on Saturday mornings, and not in bed. They inched past a bicycle in the hallway and into the empty kitchen.
I don’t mean the next demo at Central Something bigger.
Pearl pulled a typed page from her satchel and filled the jug. She shrugged. I’ve been lying a bit low, Bridge. Not in the loop.
Well, the boys are talking.
They went through the back door to a ramshackle shed. What are they saying? Inside they could hear Della at the mimeograph machine. Bridget’s hand was already on the doorknob. She shook her head.
All right, later. But remember, don’t call me, not even at work, Pearl said. Unless I tell you to.
Della talked about the new group as they checked the flyers that chugged out of the machine. All women, she said, all middle-aged. Weird, huh? She held a page up to the light, squinting. Gary’s mother, Tony’s.
Why weird? Pearl stacked flyers in boxes, precise. Patted down edges.
I know it’s not a competition, all that. But. Della bit her lip. Don’t want them to mess it up for us, I suppose. Dilute the rhetoric, or something. I mean, they’re housewives. She went back to the flyers. Anyway. They’re calling themselves SOS. Save Our Sons.
Pearl’s hands stilled. She saw rather than heard the words; they hung in the air, waiting to be chosen. Waiting to be plucked down and run with. Make a great story, she said. She would get in touch with Tony, speak to his mother. Offer the interview to the news desk. But Della’s words were like a string jerking, her heart attached. Her own mother would have leapt into that group.
Gary was furious when he told me, Della said.
What’s wrong with it? Pearl pressed the last flyers into the box and pushed it aside. People might listen to them. They’re not listening to us.
Della shrugged. He just said, “Christ, it’s embarrassing, your mother trying to save you. We’re grown men. We’re supposed to be saving them.”
Afterwards Pearl walked to the gardens, unwilling to let the day go. Not ready for dark. Lately the nightmares again, brief, chaotic. The images child-shaped, genderless, returning later as she lifted a facecloth or a pen, as if her body had absorbed them, not visitors but part of her. No matter if her eyes were open or closed, or if she raised her voice to them, no matter if her glass was empty or full. They were there.
She climbed a low rise above the water, lay on the grass in the fading sun. The sky the color of pale cornflowers then, though Pearl could think only of eggshells, the blue at the new edges of the opera house roof. Her father’s eyes.
Her brothers. In her dreams, they have no faces. Sometimes eyelashes, curved like a girl’s over empty sockets; sometimes a shadow of cheekbone. That is all. No mouths, ever. Twice in her sleep she has chased them, a scream caught in her throat. No sound. Her mouth stretched wide on nothing, and though she is running and they are walking just ahead she cannot reach them. They march on oblivious of her, of the horror hung in the air. When she wakes she is emptied, the panic over. Only the sense of urgency she lives with every day now, and pushes down to a place where it might be useful.
Two birds swept past and dropped into the fig tree below. She sat up to watch them, arm to forehead against the angle of the sun. Another bird, then another, arching their elegant wings in unison as they settled. Pearl laughed out loud. The image in her head sudden, startling: the Danish architect, she thought, watches birds.
&n
bsp; Birds, plants. Ships. Clouds. Axel wiped his fingers on a handkerchief, leaned back. He watches everything. On Pearl’s low table, scraps of tomato and melted cheese, the remains of the toast they’d made together in her kitchen. He said: Patterns. The shapes and lines of nature. That’s how he works.
Pearl bit into cold crust, her own fingers shiny with grease. I think he’s a poser, she said as she chewed.
I think he is heroic. He lifted his chin. And really, so do you.
She grinned, brushed crumbs from her hands. She’d never say it, but she liked this about Axel, this way of speaking. Even when he was wrong. He spoke plainly, firmly, but without challenge or spite. In the mouths of some Australian men, the same words would have been insistent, the glove down. But this way of Axel’s forced a civility from her. Or at least, neutralized her anger.
Heroic! she barked. You’ve read too many sagas. This by way of dismissal, but Axel knew. He only smiled and leaned towards her. You must have been a terrible child, he said. Something like happiness flashed in her face. In her eyes.
Her eyes: that’s where she lived, he thought. Behind them, in their depths. Something fierce there, something fugitive. As if she harbored another version of herself beneath the lids, a Pearl unafraid of love, for a building or a man. A girl who was not bombproof, a girl who might at any moment begin to cry, and not stop.
It had been months, and still no sign of her brothers. This had been their glue: her fear and determination. It underscored each encounter and conversation. She’d found simple comfort in his company, he knew, and distraction. Nothing more. Still, their early lovemaking had been intimate and startling. When he remembered, it was not the pulse and slip of foreplay, the electric charge of their bodies fusing—though that had been deeply satisfying. It was her eyes, open on him, locking them together, sealing them tighter than flesh. Later he would see it was not her vulnerability but his own that startled and held him. The plainness of the offer and of the taking, the intent; it was about something more than pleasure. It was not coy. It was as if in opening her body to him she was sharing more than skin and fluid. It was devastating in its honesty, in its lack of agenda, in what it wasn’t.
But it didn’t happen like that often after the first time, and he began to believe he’d dreamed it. Or imagined it in the stupor of desire. After that she always closed her eyes. It didn’t matter. Dream or waking, he knew without question that in the flare of honesty in her eyes, he could see the edge, the cliff, the clear air he fell into. Love. Blind and willing. It gave him enough to withstand this new distance, the brittleness that grew with each dead end, each false lead on her brothers. At some time, he knew, another Pearl would re-emerge, the girl she was before the world intervened. Strong and brave and true. Optimistic. His mother would love that girl.
Tonight there were hints of her. She was softer, and in her movements and her banter he could feel something loosen. She plucked up the oily plates—Tea? she asked—and went to the kitchen. While he waited and looked about, noticing. Newspapers and books, and on a small table sheets of drawing paper, pencils, thumbs of charcoal. Some sheets were blank and others filled with the ordinary: a branch of dry twigs, a leaf in close-up, birds. He leaned in, saw the detail of branch and feather, the pencil’s minute attentions, and was surprised by tenderness.
You draw.
She came towards him, her fingers looped into the handles of two cups. Sat down and pushed the sketches aside, making a puffing sound, dismissive. She held a cup to her lips with two hands. Child’s play, she said behind it. Not like real artists. Not like you.
Axel shrugged. But I draw for work, he said. It’s different. He leafed through the pencil sketches again. And I make pictures on the letters I write to my mother. As you say, things a child might draw. He raised his own cup, smiling behind it. But it always starts with a pencil. Like yours.
They sat quietly. Then Pearl stood and walked to the front windows, drew the blinds. When she turned to him her eyes were steady. She unbuttoned her shirt.
Draw me, she said.
The air turned electric. His stomach unsettled, his hands. But she would not remove her gaze, watching him as she stepped from her skirt. This loosened something in him, and he tipped his head to the side, smiling.
He was unsure what she was asking. It took him a moment. But still he knew it was not Pearl who would be revealed. Nakedness of the body was nothing, he knew that, not compared to the exposure of drawing it. All of his flaws, any residue of fear, any lack of tenderness or compassion or openness. It would be in the lines he made on the paper she had produced and laid in front of him.
He stared at his hand, gripping the pencil, and at the blankness, the whiteness of the paper. As if he was projecting her outline, as if the shape of her was already there. As if he had already failed her.
She stepped around the room adjusting the lamps and let the last of her clothes slip from her.
In the morning he woke early, suddenly sure: he wasn’t the only one. He’d felt it in their lovemaking, a subtle distance, and now he remembered how she was around men, how they were around her. It didn’t matter. He watched her sleeping, at once afraid and drawn by it, this hard knowledge. A moth to the bright flame of her, not just her body but her confidence, the way she tilted her chin to the world, never hesitating.
Who are you? He waited for her answer. Her voice when it came like a dream sound. Though her eyes were still closed he knew she was awake. A muscle in her neck pulsed, subsided.
Alexander the Great.
Silence.
Plato.
She turned her head. Her face open as a girl’s. I was dreaming about Kennedy. The hole in America.
He glanced to the long window. Its peeling white edges framed the ocean, bluer than it could be, as close and alive as Pearl. Here in this bed, he thought, it would be possible to be alone without fear, at least without need. The ocean a body breathing beside you, its tempers almost human.
On the ferry home he watched the opera house approach, its shapes looming against the sky. Leaned back against his seat. For months he had done this: absorbed the movement of air and temperature, the drift and call of language. The shape of desire in the city, in the angle of its streets and the eyes of its people. The way its buildings cut into the sky. Stone, he thought, felt odd in this place, where light fell and tumbled like an acrobat, stretched and played in empty spaces. He began to see the city in terms of its light: the way it captured or held it, bounced it back. The way light was swallowed in the throats of the streets, in alleyways, between buildings. The lemony feel of five o’clock, faces coated by dusk. Light was like glass, it changed the way you saw things.
He wondered about the country outside the city. Beyond harbor and headland to the wide stretches of land behind them. Endless acres where cattle ran, and kangaroos. Deserts. A raw, empty center. He had heard of vast stretches of red sand, and a rock monumental in size, a sacred presence. Was this the equivalent of the temples that erupted from South American jungles? There were Aboriginal people who lived in its shadow, from an ancient culture with story and song and dance at its heart. Then how could this center be described as empty? He sat upright. And how could anyone represent this place in art without reference to its beginnings?
He drank his coffee at a café near the quay. The liquid was barely drinkable but it was too early for Lorenzo’s, and there was little choice. Once more he thought of searching out a coffee pot and bean grinder; Mrs. Jarratt might supply hot water from the kitchen at this hour. But he liked to sit near this busy part of the harbor, to feel the morning stutter and start around him, faces untouched by the coming day and still hopeful. The city itself a blank page, uninscribed.
Except that it wasn’t. Beneath this layer of living, this past two hundred years, were the traces of that older civilization, a thick net of pathways and habitation, the tracks of people and animals. Mogens Prip-Buus, Utzon’s chief associate and friend, had said that the place was “storied.�
� That an entire city had flourished here, different in look and substance—closer to the ground, greener. Look for what isn’t there, his mother had always said, for what is missing. Through the layers of concrete and pavement and bitumen of this city, beneath the brick and tile, even the sweep of gardens and lawn, other lives had been lived. He knew little of them. Where were the marks of the old people then? He automatically looked about him, at the quay and its shops and ferries, the city fanning up and out from the harbor’s original edge. Where were their traces? He had no idea who to ask.
As he rose to leave, his eye caught the open pages of a newspaper on a neighboring table. He paused, despite himself. There was a short piece about the architect; that was no surprise. He looked more closely: another change in arrangements, and quotes from Minister Hughes. A panel of local architects would be appointed to oversee Utzon’s work, and he would not be paid until a task was complete.
He looked around, plucked the paper from the table. Read the story over again as he walked. A straight piece of reporting without any comment from the architect. But surely, they would have to get one: this new arrangement meant nothing could be planned now in advance, because each job had to be complete before funds were released. It was staggeringly, outrageously stupid. And so transparent. No architect could work under those conditions.
How could he possibly know how much each individual thing would cost exactly, or how long the building would take? How could anyone even try to put a value on it? There was nothing like it in the world. Any structure that aspired to myth and dream would look broken as it was built; all art was like this. Clearly, they wanted to break Utzon. The truth of this struck Axel like a blow. They wanted to snap his foreign vision and his hold: as if the architect, some kind of magician, had infused Australians with his own way of seeing, revealed their own vaulting potential. Some latent spirit of inquiry and humility and integrity that his opponents found confronting. Politicians especially.
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