Loud bird cries started up in the trees around us. Ben pinched out his cigarette and took out the block of paper and a pen. He started to draw.
‘I’ve been thinking of doing an engraving of this nostalgic old township as seen from up here. I could sell them around the place as a stopgap. In pubs, streets—anywhere.’
‘Good idea. Do you need money that badly?’
‘Yes, my love, I do. My old lady doesn’t earn that much. Paints and that are bloody expensive. How are you and James getting on?’
‘All right, I suppose.’
‘Good old James. You don’t have to worry about him. Fortunately he has little of the self-destructive in his being. Or he manages to channel it.’
‘I don’t worry about him.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
‘Well, I don’t.’
‘It’s a drag, all this worrying about people. Just another word for interference. Let’s get on. I’m not in the mood for this today. I need to be by myself to think about it properly.’
‘I’m sorry if I disturb you.’
‘Jesus. We can do without all this fish-and-chips-for-the-lady false humility. Let’s go.’
We went on.
Birds screamed up in the trees. I looked up and saw they were large and black. Dislodged bits of dry twig, and showers of shrivelled leaves, fell on our heads as the birds crashed from tree to tree. A big group of them seemed to be moving up the hill with us. The bush grew thicker. We zig-zagged to avoid the pieces of tough old growth that scraped at the bare skin above our waists.
And then we stepped out of it, onto the small area of clear rocky land at the top. The grass was short, greyish-green and springy, the rocks large, sandy-brown and warm, lying on the ground like butchers’ blocks. Ben slung down the rucksack, kicked off his desert boots and unzipped his jeans, signalling that I do the same. He crossed to one of the largest stones and stood beside it naked, his arms folded across his narrow chest, his hat tilted forward to shade his eyes, chewing the leather chin strap, watching me. I undressed, crossed to the stone and lay down on it, flat on my back, staring into the sun—until he towered darkly over me in the best romantic tradition and blotted it out.
‘What about the view?’ I murmured.
‘Fuck the view,’ he murmured back, as if he were insulting it.
Sometimes I wondered, but now was not the time to question his attitudes. His chosen stone was slightly hollowed out at the centre. It set us into a curious rocking motion as we moved together on top of it. The day came and went. Little flashes of light and dark.
Time passed, well spent. The sun moved in the sky. Ben’s hat fell off. Perhaps the earth moved under us. We simmered gently in our hot rock crucible, slippery with patchouli oil and sweat. We slept. Waking simultaneously, we stared into each others eyes, put our noses together, screwed our eyes back shut, opened them again at the same time and wondered at the one enormous super-eye that looked back. We unpeeled ourselves and sat up. Ben fetched the water and the bag of biscuits. He rolled us an extravagant joint to finish up the picnic. He waved the empty pouch in the direction of everything else.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘you may look at the view. Since that’s what you came for.’
I knelt up on the rock and looked at it. But not for long. The land below bled away in a runny blur of colours. Rainbows slowly dripped at the edges of the visible world. I was trying to see through some bars that had appeared in front of my eyes. I recognised my eyelashes.
I woke up alone. It was very quiet and very hot. My jeans lay carefully folded at my feet, shoes on top, toe to toe. A roll of paper stuck out of one shoe, with a message written in back-sloping capitals: MEET YOU AT THE TREE TRUNK. HURRY UP.
I hurried to dress, scared of being alone so close to the sky in the silent heat of mid-afternoon, and raced back down the hill. I had a feeling of being watched, of being followed. As twigs snapped under my feet, so twigs snapped behind me, echoes under someone else’s feet. They snapped off to one side. Then the other. I was surrounded—escorted, it seemed, off the hill. I stopped, and so did the snapping sounds. Looking up, I saw the birds—silent, dull black and dusty, watching. Narrow shapes flickered in the green light between the tree trunks. I shouted in terror and they were gone. My terror called back to me, rebounding through the trees, carrying the memory of the sinister flounder-fishermen at the beach, the pictures in the museum—the squashy white figures, the staring Aborigines. But there were no Aborigines left in this state. They were dead—the last a woman who ended life as a fashionable pet in all the better drawing rooms of Hobart Town. Alone on the hill I knew I was being watched—being willed away, by a people who no longer existed. I ran. Young growth slapped and wound itself round my arms, breasts and back in stinging tendrils. Trees grew faces and laughed, stretching out their roots as traps to trip me—the fleeing figure in a Disney wood.
I reached the log. Ben was sitting astride it, hunched over, drawing. I sat on the ground and leaned against it. It made a shield between me and the hill. I concentrated on breathing slowly. My mind cleared. My trembling ceased.
‘Feeling better?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I got frightened up there alone. I ran down too fast.’
‘Yes. I would have stayed. But you were so asleep I thought I’d come down and make a start on this. You sleep a lot, don’t you? Always falling asleep. We’d better be getting back. They’ll be home soon.’
I sat and waited while he packed up his things. I didn’t tell him about being watched and driven from the hill.
Something was happening down below at his house.
Little black-and-white cars with blue lights on top were turning up the narrow dirt track that led round the side. One car stopped at the front corner and the other went on round into the back yard. Four tiny dark-blue uniformed figures got out. Two went round towards the front door, and two crossed the yard and disappeared into the shadow of the verandah.
Ben stopped. ‘Jesus Christ. What’s happening down there? It’s the fuzz. Those are cop cars, aren’t they? Oh no, not again. What’ve I done this time?’
As we watched, the two sets of figures came from the back and front of the house and held a meeting in the yard.
‘The bastards stopped me yesterday. I came up to town last night, trying to score some stuff. Heard there was some about. A little bit of cool inspiration for sale.’ He laughed. ‘They stopped me in the street. Asked what I was doing in the city. Playing silly buggers. Asked me if I didn’t think I was a bit young to be wandering about after dark. Didn’t search me though. Lucky for me. I suppose they’ve come out here now to turn the place over.’
‘Will they find anything?’ I hoped we had smoked it all.
‘No. They’re not that smart. They’ll never find it. Besides there’s nobody home. Can’t bust their way in, can they? It’s against the law. We’ll just sit up here and wait till they go. Shouldn’t be long, they’re just having a little chat about it. The bastards hate to give up. What are they doing now?’
They were splitting up again—two round the front, two round the back. We waited. This time they didn’t reappear.
‘Jeez. They’ve gone in. They must’ve gone inside. The buggers have broken into my house.’
He ran, and I followed without thought, over the long-grassed lower slopes, through the large brown paddock thick with thistles, not looking where I was going, praying hard: Our Father Who Art in Heaven, don’t let there be a fuss—please. My ankles turned on the hard rutted dirt of the paddock.
The prickly clump, wearing my T-shirt and the hat, flapped in the corner of my eye, an absurd scare crow. I stopped to collect the things. There was no hurry, I thought. This was nothing to do with me. Better to wait until it was sorted out. The police needn’t know I was here. If they did, they would only ask questions. perhaps start watching me, making life difficult. So I waited, sitting in the paddock under a little cloud of tiny sticky flies, until the sound of slamming car doors reache
d me.
I walked slowly back to the house and went round the back. It was quiet. The chickens had fled.
I entered the kitchen. Just inside the door a vase of dried grasses was lying smashed on the flagstones. Jars of herbs had been emptied out on to the floor; their fragrance hung in the air. The old Chinese tea canister had been upended on the table, and as I watched, it slowly rolled to the edge and clattered to the floor. I walked over to pick it up. Bright orange dried lentils scrunched noisily underfoot. I noticed that the red-and-gold lacquer on the tea canister was badly scratched. I found the lid and put it back on the shelf. Shredded cigarettes clogged the sink. Every container in the kitchen had been emptied. The contents of a box of soap powder lay over everything, an unseasonal snow. There wasn’t a sound. I was too scared to call out, thinking of death. I saw his body lying tangled in a heap of bright old clothes, his tall lizard-skin boots standing empty nearby. A blaze of distorted sound flared through the serving hatch. It adjusted itself, the volume settling down to an electronic roar. Not sunny. Not nice.
Do you, Mr Jones?
The cracked voice crept and threatened round the walls, sliming them with menace. I went into the room. Records and books were thrown everywhere. Beautiful cushions had been cut to pieces; their creamy stuffing made earthbound clouds on the floor. He was sitting on the rug in front of the large empty fireplace, curled over, his arms cuddling his knees. I sat beside him. He lifted his face. A purpling knuckle graze spread from the corner of his mouth up over his left cheekbone. Tiny horseshoe-shaped tooth marks welled with scarlet along his lower lip. His nose ran, and he wiped it on the back of his hand. He sniffed and spoke. He said they had taken some dried basil away in a plastic bag. It was going to the laboratory to be analysed. They were sure when they found it that they’d got him this time. He started to laugh, making his lip bleed. Bright blood clung in thick strands across his teeth as his lips drew back in laughter. I said I was sorry this had happened. He asked what it had to do with me. He was worried about the effect it would have on his wife. As he spoke, the old blue station wagon pulled up outside.
I stood at the window as Gloria walked round, neat in her school-teacher clothes, to the child’s side of the car. She opened the door, and the boy climbed out clutching a spilling armful of his bright school paintings. They turned hand in hand towards the house. Seeing me through the window, they smiled and waved. I ran to the back door to try to tell them what had happened before they walked in and found it. I met her. The boy was dawdling behind, searching under the bushes for the chickens, calling to them to come to him, his paintings falling forgotten in the dust.
‘The police have been here,’ I said. ‘They were searching for drugs. They found nothing, but they made a mess looking. We’ll clear it up quickly. It won’t take long.’
I ushered her in like a guest. She walked across to the table and stood trickling handfuls of spilt tea through her fingers as she looked round the kitchen. The boy came in. He said nothing, but started a kind of flat-footed shuffle over the crunchy mess on the floor, enjoying the noise it made under his shoes, swaying to the music from the next room.
‘Is he here?’
‘He’s next door.’
She went out. The boy and I stood staring at each other. The record stopped. The needle scratched loudly across its surface.
‘Ouch,’ said the boy. ‘Daddy gets cross if I do that.’
Angry voices were coming through the hatch. I shut it. The boy sat, head bent, at the table, tracing patterns in the tea leaves with his finger. He said he was hungry. I got him a glass of milk and picked some untrampled biscuits up from the floor for him. When he had finished I asked him where the broom was kept. We fetched it together. I swept everything on the floor into a heap while he cleared the table, carefully adding his small hands of tea-leaves to the debris on the floor—he frowned with concentration, as if constructing a house of cards. We swept everything into a cardboard box and carried it out to the incinerator.
We came back inside—someone was crying in the next room. I put all the empty jars and containers back in their places and the boy ran the water hard to unclog the sink. He didn’t ask why the place was in such a mess. We were just finishing, and I was wondering what to do with him now when there was a loud crash of breaking glass from the next room. The child shrieked in fright and ran towards the sound. He was wearing long grey socks, with narrow blue bands round the tops, and incredibly English-looking brown leather sandals. The backs of his knees looked golden-brown and very vulnerable. That is what I thought. I stood in the kitchen thinking it over and over, until outside the station wagon started up. ‘Daddy’s gone, daddy’s gone,’ wailed the child from the next room. I went in.
They were both standing gazing through the shattered window. She turned to me.
‘He’s gone to see his sister. To tell her how awful, how bourgeois we all are, I suppose. It’s a shame he had to leave through the window.’ The child’s wails became louder. She picked him up, told him not to mind. ‘Daddy will be back. You’ll see.’
‘When will he come back?’
‘I don’t know when exactly. But he will come. Perhaps tomorrow. He’ll probably sleep at Aunty’s tonight.’
She dropped him still sobbing into a chair and searched through the records on the floor, picking one up and putting it on. It was a child’s record with stories and music. A cheerful song about a pirate with a wooden leg who sailed on the deep blue sea filled the room. The child stood next to it, chewing his thumb, still sniffing. After listening for a minute or two, he shuffled off to his room, returning with scissors and a pile of old magazines to cut up.
‘Somebody’s been in my room too. It’s all messed up. The bed’s all thrown on the floor. Has someone been sleeping in it today?’
‘You sound like the three bears,’ said his mother. They both laughed.
‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ he shouted, deep-voiced as any father bear.
‘Now you stay here and we’ll fix everything up nicely again.’ As she spoke she started putting the records back in their sleeves, not looking to see which record belonged in which cover. I gathered up the ruined cushions and carried them outside to join the cardboard box. The room was quickly made tidy again—neat and empty—but the broken window remained. It was important to fix it. Hot days. Cold nights.
Gloria went into her husband’s workroom and came back with a large strip of unprimed canvas.
‘He won’t like us doing this. Serves him right. There’s a horrible mess in there. Lots of drawings torn up for some reason. I’d better not touch anything. He must be feeling bad about it, but it’s his own fault. He didn’t say where he was going last night but it was pretty obvious. I said there would be trouble. He said he didn’t care. But he cares now all right.’
I felt close to her and happy. I saw him as a ridiculous figure, capering off somewhere, on the horizon.
We nailed the canvas over the window area. The late afternoon sun filtered through, and the room became pale as oatmeal. Next we went into the bedroom. Two mattresses lay on the floor. Unsuccessful efforts had been made to rip one open. The loose floorboards had been taken up, exposing Ben’s old clothes collection. Gloria sat pulling them out. She picked up a crêpe de Chine dress, covered in a seed-packet print of sweet peas in bloom—one of his favourites, his World War Two tart’s dress: we had invented street lamps for him to stand under in it, singing the chorus of ‘Lili Marlene’. She held it against herself and strutted across the room. She pirouetted, waved a grotesquely limp wrist and shrieked ‘Bloody hell. What next? My husband the transvestite. Look at all this stuff.’
She scrabbled among it. Stray garments wheeled over her shoulder and draped themselves over the furniture. ‘Look at this. It’s unbelievable. Where did he get all this stuff from? He’s mad. Everyone’s right. He’s bloody mad.’
She rushed over to her clothes chest. She jerked open the lid. She put back her head and wailed. ‘He’s b
een interfering with my clothes. He’s been in here making them all crumpled and dirty. Look at the marks on this.’ She waved the old pink velour at me like an overambitious matador. ‘I’ll never get them out. It’s all spoilt.’
She wept. She swore. She hammered the wall with her fists. She thought of her son nearby and stopped. She gathered an armful of things and ran through the house with them, out to the incinerator. I collected those that remained. We fed the bright things to the flames and stood side by side in sisterly concern and watched them burn. I left her, standing still and tearstained, the chief mourner at the cremation. Back in the house I finished clearing up. The boy helped me with his room. Patiently he pinned back the pictures that had been torn from his wall and returned his books to the shelf, singing and talking to himself all the time. I put his bed back together and made it. Underneath it I found his teddy bear, decapitated in a pool of stuffing. He didn’t notice as I held it behind my back, edged over to the window, and threw it out, praying that he wouldn’t miss it until I was gone. Together we went out to fetch his mother. She prepared a meal, which we all ate together at the kitchen table. The child grew tired. He whined throughout the meal at the lack of salt. His mother took him to his bed. He took a long time to settle down, calling her back over and over to read him just one more story, to kiss him, to tuck him up. Finally he slept and his mother and I sat on the rug in front of the fireplace.
She apologised that there was no coffee to drink. ‘Ben doesn’t like it. He says it’s bad for you. I keep a jar of it in the staff room at school. It’s the first thing I do each morning when I get there, make a cup of coffee. Such bliss. One of life’s little pleasures.’ She laughed.
She asked me if I had to leave that night when the bus came by, saying that if I was there she wouldn’t have to think about things seriously until tomorrow. I wondered what things. I said it was all right, that I didn’t have to go, that I didn’t want to go.
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