‘No, they probably didn’t,’ I said. ‘Never mind, though. At least you did something. Did she mention me at all?’
‘No she didn’t,’ said Ben. ‘Not once. After the school episode I didn’t try to talk to her much. She just looked after the boy and I shut myself in the workroom and got on with things. Her mother came over the other day. She spent the best part of one night screaming at me. Said I wasn’t fit to be a father. She said a lot of things. Next day she upped and took the boy away with her. I didn’t try and stop her. Didn’t really know how. I mean, she’s probably right. I’ve got no bread. No nothing. All I want to do is paint. It’ll be better now. A nice easy life. I won’t need to bother about him. He’ll be better off with her. Without me. She’s got bags of money—big house, all that. One more fatherless kid in the world’s not going to make any difference to anything.’
James honked the car horn. He sat peering through the rain at us as we huddled under the tree.
I offered Ben a lift back to town. To his home. To anywhere he wanted to go. He refused. He didn’t wish to go anywhere yet.
James started the car.
I urged Ben to phone me if there was anything I could do.
He didn’t speak, and I kissed the fine line of his unmoved wet mouth.
I got into the warm steamy car next to James. He put his hand on my thigh and squeezed hard.
‘I’ll take you to lunch,’ he said.
We went to Jonathan’s restaurant.
I hadn’t been there since his disappearance. A new manager had been brought over from Melbourne.
A Catholic priest perched on a stool. He slid the head of a long glass of cold beer into his mouth and wiped his lips slowly with the back of his hand. We sat at the other end of the bar and drank white wine. The priest watched us for a time and then leaned toward us and said: ‘You are looking so very sad. Are you in trouble?’ We didn’t reply. James looked embarrassed, and the priest repeated his question.
‘A friend of ours has died and we have just been to the funeral,’ said James. ‘We are just having a drink to cheer ourselves up.’
‘And some lunch,’ I added.
‘That’s the ticket,’ said the priest. ‘A car crash, was it? A terrible lot of the young people get taken that way in this country, so I’m told.’
‘No. It was suicide.’
‘Well, God bless the poor soul anyway. Have another drink. Have it on me.’
‘Actually, she was a Hindu. We burnt her. So her soul could get out of her body properly.’
‘Ah well, that’s a good thing then. Drink that up and have another.’
He went with us to our table. We shared a bottle of wine, and he told us he was thinking of giving up the priesthood and going into journalism. He ate no food and left when all the wine was gone.
Coming up into the street we found the rain had stopped. James returned to work. I returned home to the afternoon silence. I sat in a chair under the window and read my library book. Details lodged in my mind like grit. In following days they dug deep and irritated.
In the early hours of the day after the funeral I got up and went down through the darkness to the beach. There was no moon to see. The night sky was thick with clouds. The swing was mended. I sat on it, my toes touched the ground, and I swung slowly back and forth. The sensation was pleasant in the warm close night. The swing sighed in the air. Waves broke on the sand and withdrew, whispering quietly. The swing swung higher. A wind blew harder round my head. Sounds started in the night. Clear sharp cries blew about on the wind. One by one they were muffled under heavy sound-proofing thuds. A muted moaning shivered last of all along the dark curve of the beach.
I recognised these sounds. I now knew of the dead dramas being given a nightly run-through along the edge of the low surf. I swung high above the action as black women were pursued and clubbed to the sand by white men. Their menfolk hesitated, confused and powerless. They were killed. Bits of them hacked away. The lost pieces lay rotting for days buried under a weight of tiny carnivorous crabs. By then the women were gone; taken off in boats; tormented and tortured round campfires in nightly cabaret; put to work luring the abundant seals to their doom. The women were made to lie at the sea’s edge, their brown skins glistening under sun and moon, beckoning the seals in from the deep waters of the bay with the sinuous flipper actions of their arms and the deep siren-songs in their throats. The seals swam in. They foundered, land-clumsy on the beach. The waiting men clubbed their heads to bubbling pulp, scattering crimson drops on the golden sand.
Dawn came. The show was over. The swing returned to earth.
It was in the days that followed that I killed my neighbour, Mrs Olive Stacey—Ollie to her friends. Exactly when I did it is difficult to tell—I became worse at handling time. I passed my days behind the blinds. I left the house only in darkness. James came home and left again. It seemed he came more often now. Perhaps he worried about me. Perhaps he was happy at home. He bought me magazines and chocolates, sometimes tiny bottles of perfume. I lined them up on the mantelpiece. I wondered if he thought me ill. He bought me treats as though I were in a hospital—flowers sometimes. Each night when he slept I left him.
During the day I stayed dreaming behind the blinds. Green dreams of the secret pulses, the unexplored places on this heart-shaped island. Lurid orange-tinged dreams of the far-off dead red heart of the continent.
‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ cackled Call-me-Ollie. She had come calling, bringing the Avon Lady with her. The coloured dreams swirled in my mind, reforming themselves in a halo round my neigh.bour‘fs unsuspecting blue-rinsed head. She had come, she explained, to take me out of myself.
‘What you need is cheering up,’ said Ollie, ‘and Edna here is just the girl to do it. Besides, pet,’ she confided, ‘it just doesn’t do to let yourself go like this. The menfolk don’t like it. Can’t says I blame them either.’
The Avon Lady smiled. Her lips were slick with shiny pink grease. Her lipstick was running round her pursed-up mouth in the heat of the afternoon, making tiny rivers in the wrinkles. She beckoned me closer. Her breath smelled of dead violets. She spoke softly to me of moisturisers, indispensible in a climate so harsh to women’s skins. She suggested a green cream made from cucumbers. I heard myself ordering many things, entranced by their pastel colours, the smooth plastic containers, their artificial fragrance.
Ollie looked pleased. She said she was glad to see me back on the right track. I wondered what track and where to, but it was too late to ask.
Ollie and the Avon Lady saw themselves out. The fly-wire door shut behind them, eerily silent.
I stayed behind the blinds. Sometimes I would part two plastic slats between two fingers and peer about.
I watched my neighbour supervise her grass. I watched the afternoon cavalcade to the beach. It kept track of passing days. James’s mother called in often to see Angelica. Sometimes she took the baby out with her. One afternoon she came in with a packet of biscuits. She made us tea and sat me down for a chat. ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘You know I don’t want to interfere. But have you thought of seeing a doctor? I do so worry about you. And I know poor James does too—though he wouldn’t say as much to me, of course. But I can tell.’
‘I have seen the doctor, ages ago. He gave me a prescription for some tablets.’
‘Oh, that’s good. I’m glad you’re being sensible. Are they doing you any good?’
‘Well, I don’t know yet. I haven’t been to the chemists to get them.’
‘Why ever not, you silly girl?’ She smiled kindly. ‘Well, you just give me that prescription. Go and get it now. I’ll go straight off and get it done. I had no idea. You only had to ask, you know. I would have got them for you gladly.’
I pulled the prescription out of the vase. Underneath it I saw the stone. I smoothed out the crumpled paper and handed it to Mother-in-law. She took it down to the chemist.
I took the tea things into the kitchen and washed
them up. I went back and took the vase from the mantelpiece. The weapon fell out into my palm. It seemed familiar. I knew its shape, felt its sharp sides. Green paint still showed on the cutting edge. I put it in my pocket.
James’s mother came back with the tablets and a teething ring for Angelica. She told me she hadn’t been able to resist it, they made such pretty and clever things for babies these days. She fetched a glass of water and watched closely as I swallowed one tablet.
‘Now don’t you forget to take them,’ she instructed. ‘These things just don’t work if you don’t follow the instructions. Three times a day, it says on the bottle.’
I watched, waved and smiled as she drove away, blowing kisses at her retreating form. Back in the house, I stood looking down at Angelica. She lay immobile on a bright rug inside her lobster-pot playpen. I wrapped my fingers tight about my stone—tight as I could stand it. I had it with me all the time. I kept the bottle in the vase.
Three times a day I tipped it out and swallowed one of the little blue pills. They left my body calm and still. My mind raced round inside it, looking for the way out. My thoughts settled down. They slowed themselves and drew far off. The scattered strands blended into a still calm voice somewhere close up under my skull. I found that I was falling asleep with James and not waking until morning.
‘Surprise, surprise,’ said James waking up on the first morning to find me there. He got straight up and made me tea. He let me read the paper first, whistling as he got ready for work.
Day after day I lay watching him dress. The seven dwarfs trooped in technicolour behind my eyelids as they whistled off to work. One morning, as I lay giggling to see Snow White waving them goodbye, James bent over the bed.
‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ he murmured, kissing me goodbye. ‘I’ll be early tonight. I’m getting myself better organised. Learning not to waste my time.’ He tiptoed out quietly, so as not to wake Angelica. I dreamed on.
It was very hot, getting towards noon. Angelica fretted, neglected in her stuffy room. I felt she had used up all the air in the house, and I was driven into the open. I wanted to see the beach under the empty noon-time blaze.
My neighbour was not out front, and I had nearly passed the house when the voice came.
‘Gooday, stranger. Long time no see, like they say.’
I turned to smile at her. She lugged the lawnmower towards me through small ripples of heat. Further up, the road surface boiled and shimmered in liquid illusion.
‘Just thought I’d give it a quick going over,’ she said. ‘Been getting a bit unruly lately.’ She unwound the flex and plugged it in just inside her front door. She came back and switched it on with her foot. Above the noise she called to me: ‘I’ll give it a good soaking tonight. These water restrictions are very rough on us gardeners, I must say. No rain all summer. Not a drop. Everything’s so brown and scorched. Gets on your nerves.’
I closed my eyes and saw the straight grey lines of rain behind my lids falling down on the funeral. I opened them again and watched the woman torturing the patch of earth. The metal blades bit into the reeling grass. My teeth ached with the whine of the mower, and the sound bounced back from every scorching surface.
My fingers curled round the stone—for comfort. Squeezing my eyes back shut, I again saw the straight lines of rain. Now they were falling on the small area of scrubby native growth I had once been able to see by looking out of the right windows. I opened my eyes. It was still there. It grew all around us, stubborn and messy, a heat-inspired trick of eyesight and anger. The stone was out of my pocket, tight in my hand, so tight it hurt. I raised my hand, opened my cut fingers and let the stone go. It turned slowly in the air and fell to the ground in front of the mower—a sudden flash and the poor dear just lay there, her little blue face gazing skywards, straight into the noonday sun.
There was a brief fuss in the street.
The balance of my mind was disturbed. Not that I need bother with excuses, because nobody is going to know. They didn’t suspect a crime, and they still don’t. She was killed by her own electric lawnmower—a freak accident. It had short-circuited of course; that was what they said. The smooth detective from the Hobart CID had taken the trouble to call in and tell me so, bending his knees to get himself down to my little woman’s level.
‘Something caught in the blades and the bloody thing blew up, pardon my French. Terrible thing to happen. Nice place you’ve got here—I only hope this nasty business next door hasn’t upset you too much.’
He squeezed my hand reassuringly, admired my breakfast bar, and left.
My neighbours were equally sympathetic.
‘She took every precaution,’ they said, over and over. ‘Just shows you can’t be too careful.’
That’s true.
COMING SOON FROM TEXT PUBLISHING
Jack and Jill
Helen Hodgman’s acclaimed second novel
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET
MAUGHAM AWARD
‘Ferociously funny to the very end. Immensely
stimulating, like a small dose of strychnine.’
The Times
textpublishing.com.au
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION : THE HARSH LIGHT OF DAY
Blue Skies Page 11