The Other Side of the World

by Stephanie Bishop

  * * *

  In the morning she opens the flyscreen door, stands on the ­veranda, and calls out. The feeling of the dream is still with her. She sees Henry moving amid the trees. She wants to be rid of the dream, she thinks, watching as Henry and the leaves shift in different directions. Green, white, white-green. Wind fluttering the leaves. The birds wake him at daybreak and so he goes out to the garden. She can see his bright shirt moving behind the branches, his arms deep in the foliage, checking for signs of disease, for leaf curl and black spot. Perhaps he didn’t hear her. She calls again, her voice carrying. Henry, He-nry. There is always the new hope of morning. Today she has made him eggs for breakfast. Eggs and fried bread. She wants, like him, to believe that her homesickness will pass. It is such a strange feeling. She does not feel sad so much as unearthed, unreal. Unexistent. But there is always more hope in the morning. The hope of change and betterment. Of something new. By evening she’ll have given up and will want to go back, will do anything to go back. For a moment, she thinks she catches the sound of a blackbird. The call is soft, scarcely ­audible through the din of cicadas. It is easier when Henry is here, she thinks. It is easier when he is near her. As if his continuing presence were proof of her own. A stronger gust of wind lifts her skirt and the bird stops. The air is cool, from elsewhere, the clouds higher up in the sky today. They must call this autumn, she thinks. The morning smells of damp eucalyptus and fresh-mown grass. “Coming,” Henry calls.

  Later that day she does as Henry suggests and takes the girls to the local playgroup by the river.

  “Come on, darling, go play with the other children,” Charlotte says to Lucie. The child shakes her head and stares, clinging to her mother’s leg. There is a piano at the far end of the hall, a fat woman sitting at it, belting out tunes: “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “Ring a Ring o’ Roses,” “Incy Wincy Spider.” The children are meant to join in and sing along, but nobody pays the music any attention and it becomes just another booming, clanking noise in the general cacophony of boys making engine sounds or banging drums made from old biscuit tins and babies crying and small girls whining for their mothers, who now sit in three neat lines along the edge of the hall, sipping scalding tea from tiny china cups and shuffling uncomfortably on the small wooden school chairs. Some talk over the noise.

  “And which is yours?”

  “How many did you say?”

  “Lovely weather,” says the woman beside Charlotte. But for the most part the women do not look at each other. They watch their children, and every now and then cast a nervous glance at an adult face, smile quickly, then look away. They are all unused to the company of grown-ups. They spend their days talking to small children in the strange language that small children understand. Charlotte remembers how, after Lucie was born, she spent hour upon hour lying on the bed with the baby and making gooing noises. It was a surprise to see Henry at the end of the day. She remembers looking at his head and thinking, My, what a big face you have. How foolishly large adults seemed then, how odd-looking they became—almost monstrous—with their sprouting tufts of hair and yellowed eyes and slabs of flesh and creases.

  Next to her, three women lean in towards one another, gossiping. Two friends confiding in the third. The first woman says, “She looked like a prostitute, didn’t she, love?” All three guffaw.

  Then the second woman. “She was dressed like that to pick the kid up and she goes to me, ‘Does little Bertie want to come and play? We’ve got a new tarantula.’ ”

  “She must have been joking—” says the third woman.

  “No!” The first again now. “She tells us, ‘Don’t worry, it’s in a glass case and everything.’ ”

  “Then we saw her, didn’t we,” continues the second, “later that afternoon, getting her shopping out of the boot, still wearing those silver stilettos, with those boobs. She looked like a prostitute, didn’t she?”

  “I just have to look at those shoes and I get a nosebleed.”

  “She used to be a hairdresser.”

  “You’d never know from the look of her.”

  “Looks like she’s got a cat on her head.”

  A small child in bright red trousers runs up to Charlotte. “I’m a boy,” he says. “My name’s Michael.” Then he runs off again and disappears into the throng of toddlers. She realizes that she doesn’t know how to make friends. She came to the playgroup to make friends, but now that she is here she doesn’t know what to say, what to do. Who is she now? There must be something she can tell them. The mothers who know each other talk about their children. They exchange facts concerning the hours their children sleep, what they will or won’t eat, and swap advice on remedies for colds or stomachache. Or they gossip, cruelly, like this, about the women who don’t fit in. Charlotte doesn’t want to talk about her girls. She knows no one is really interested in hearing about them and that the other women share anecdotes as a way of boasting about their offspring, not because they are genuinely interested in other people’s children. Besides, when she speaks people look at her uncertainly. They pause in conversation, then say, “You’re not from around here, are you?” And Charlotte explains, her exclusion immediate, her status as an outsider everlasting. “Are you English, or just educated Australians?” asked the man from the nursery when he came to deliver three poplar saplings for Henry to plant by the back fence.

  Across the room a boy slips on a toy truck and crashes down hard on his face. There is an awful silence as his mother gathers the limp, quiet child into her arms, then the air cracks open with a loud, breathless wail like the one you wait for when a child first slithers into the world.

  “Is there blood?”

  “He won’t let me look.”

  “I’ll fetch ice.”

  The child starts to roar. Charlotte hears the way his voice ­catches against the soft wet membrane of his throat. In the meantime the fat pianist begins telling a story and the other children gather around on the cold wooden floor. Two teddy bears travel on a boat to a desert island. In the bottom of the boat they find a map with an X marking the place of buried treasure. They follow the map past a volcano, past a very tall tree, past a swamp, and find the treasure ­buried on a far beach. The bears dig and dig until out of the hole comes a jeweled box. “What do you think is in it?” the fat woman asks.

  “Gold!” cries one boy, leaping up and down with his hand in the air.

  “Alligators!” says another.

  “Lollies!” yells a girl whose face is laced with the white crust of dried snot.

  “Hair clips!” calls a skinny child decked out in a pink party dress.

  Charlotte is watching this when a woman comes up to her and holds out a hand. “I’m Carol,” she says. “I’ve seen you before. I think we live on the same street.”

  * * *

  The two women walk home by the river. It is windy there and the brown water rushes back and forth in long muscled ridges. The water throbs and the sun is sucked into its depths. They stop at one of the small jetties and peer in. Carol has two small boys who jump and yelp and tackle each other like demented puppies. They climb the wooden railings of the jetty and look down. The color changes as the water deepens: tea gold in the shallows, brown, then greeny black far below. Purple-hued jellyfish hover close to shore, and the sand is littered with their flat, transparent bodies. The women walk along the narrow beach, and Lucie pokes the dead jellyfish with a stick, then crouches to stroke them with the palm of her hand. Charlotte bends down with May and listens to the small waves hissing at the ground.

  Around them the boys run and squeal, leaping from sand to rock to sand until one of them stubs a toe and cries, so Carol hoists him onto her back and carries him. It is quieter then. The women talk a little, of places they’ve visited, the difficulty of gardening in this heat, whether or not there are to be more children. Carol’s husband works in real estate, away often on weekends. All those open house
s and auctions. She doesn’t mind, she says. She’s learning the piano and he doesn’t always like to hear her practice.

  “Do you play anything else?” Charlotte asks.

  “Just the radio,” Carol says. The two women laugh. “But I’m good at that.”

  Charlotte tells Carol about her painting. Or what used to be her painting. She should at least find the paints, get the box out of the shed. They walk further, then stop for the children, walk a little more, then stop again. The path snakes its way through river grass and dips beneath the tall limbs of the gums. Charlotte thought the trees terribly ugly when she arrived, with their asymmetrical branches and scraggly clutches of dull, tough leaves. But she sees now that they are beginning to change—how she sees them is beginning to change. Lucie scratches at the base of their trunks, gathering thin white shells. Charlotte crouches down to help her and sees the trees from below. Their marbled skin circles the trunk and spirals upwards, round and round, higher and higher, moving from the roots out to the tips of the branches as though they were something much more than trees, something much stranger, as though the trees were the final manifestation of a force erupting from deep inside the earth, and the limbs, the branches, all twisted and wrung, mangled in fierce torsion, are the accidental shape taken on by a molten substance when it sprang up into colder air and froze. They seem not trees as she knows them but the residue of something ancient and explosive and long gone. Carol tells her the names of things: river red gum, banksia, swishbush, and swamp paperbark. Charlotte tries to remember so that later she can tell Henry.

  It is heading into afternoon by the time they reach Charlotte’s house, and she invites Carol in for tea. “No,” Carol says, “I’d love to but can’t. I have people coming over for dinner.” Then she says, quickly, “Would you and Henry like to come? Please do. Please.”

  * * *

  Carol lives at the far end of the long street, over the hill and close to the sea. They drive there, the children in the back. A white bungalow, leadlight windows. The front garden full of ­frangipani. Who else is there? Another married couple, Sarah and James. Sarah with the arched, bony nose. James with the jowls. And an old friend, Nicholas. “You two should meet,” says Carol, ushering Charlotte and this man together. Seven in total. Three couples, plus Nicholas. Four children, all combined. The children play on the floor in the living room with an overflowing basket of toys and a wooden train track. There is chicken for the adults, a platter of green beans, carrots, roast potatoes. There is red wine. Later there will be trifle with custard and cream, decorated with blanched almonds and slices of kiwifruit.

  Carol talks about her boys, the things she does not understand about boys. The smell of the toilet. (“They cannot aim! Adam, I said, please teach them to aim!”) Other things that Charlotte does not understand either, because she does not have boys. “Like wild little animals!” Carol says, laughing, as if this is both the thing that alarms her and the thing she loves. The talk shifts, dips, rises. People want Henry to tell stories about his childhood in India, and he obliges, giving a dry history of his family. All nod, feigning interest, although hoping for something more exotic. The monkeys. The silks. The ancient ruins.

  “We’re taking a cruise soon,” says Sarah. “Port Said, Athens, Venice—all over really.” Some Women’s Weekly thing, she says. “It was a promotion a few months back—the one with the cover picture of the poodle in the yellow life jacket.”

  In the garden, crickets hold the beat of night. From the table the guests can hear the surf. Huge waves, high tide. Water smashing down on the sand. Charlotte sits next to Nicholas. Conversations have started up on either side of them and he leans forwards to hear her better. He wears a pale blue shirt open at the neck and a pair of dark-framed glasses. They are fancy glasses—the frames are shiny, and shaped to suit his face. She wonders what kind of car he drives—something dark and glossy to match his glasses, although she doesn’t know why she thinks this because she doesn’t generally care for cars or for the relationship between men and cars. There are brown flecks in the blue of his eyes. He moves slowly, Charlotte notices, when cutting his meat, for example, or lifting a glass to his mouth.

  She says something then that amuses him and is surprised by his laugh, deep and soft. He looks at her, she realizes, more with his left eye than with his right: a slight tilt of the face, left side forwards. He holds her gaze when he laughs, encouraging her.

  In the background she can hear Henry. “The second rule,” he says, “is that life isn’t like that because—” She knows his rules by heart. There are five of them: keep your chin up; better the devil you know; don’t fix what isn’t broken; waste not, want not; and the last one, which seemed to cancel out the ones before it, nothing ventured, nothing gained. He calls them rules, but they are not rules exactly, more a hodgepodge of proverbs that he randomly adheres to and expects others to adopt.

  She hears Sarah then: “My mother said the woman would have been very beautiful when she was younger. I didn’t know what she meant. How could she tell? The woman was old.”

  “You swim, don’t you? You used to swim,” says Adam, Carol’s husband.

  “Used to,” Sarah replies.

  “Do you miss it—England, I mean?” Carol asks Charlotte.

  Henry hears this and cuts in before Charlotte can reply. “We hated the weather. Awful weather,” he says, meeting Charlotte’s eye as if in challenge. He does not like her to contradict him, and this—the weather—has become the official reason for their leaving. “The winters, the summers. Just awful.”

  Charlotte can’t decide if he sounds ungrateful—if he sounds like he’s whining—or if it is a sign of burgeoning patriotism towards his new country. She stares at her plate; she will neither confirm nor deny his claim.

  Carol nods, sympathetic, then changes the subject. “Tell her,” she calls to Nicholas across the table. “He’s a great patron,” she says to Charlotte. “Quite a collector. You two must talk.”

  The table is soon cleared and the party migrates towards the living room, to the turntable and the sofas. Henry stands in the corner, talking to Adam. He thinks Charlotte is beside him. He can feel the warmth of her hand there, on his arm. She has such hot hands, and they sweat terribly when she’s nervous. He can feel her damp palm pressing into his shirt. He and Adam are talking house prices, land, whether Henry will or will not buy property. “We’d like to, wouldn’t we, Charlotte. We’ve been thinking—” He turns his head towards her, but she isn’t where he thinks she is. “Oh,” he says, “she was right here, she—” Then he hears her laugh, high and light and unmistakable. It is like clear water falling into a deep pool. She’s standing by the fireplace talking to Nicholas.

  She fiddles with her earring and flicks loose hair back from her face. Henry sees Nicholas lean closer. Charlotte is flushed, her eyes bright. She is stunning to look at. The sharp cheekbones and the big eyes—her skin so fine that when she throws back her head and laughs he can see the delicate blue ribbing of her throat. He wants, instinctively, to put his hand to it. The frame of her body is small, birdlike, but she holds herself so straight that she seems regal. She reaches out and puts her hand on Nicholas’s arm. He touches the gold locket that hangs on a chain at her neck. They are drawing attention: Carol is looking their way. Henry wants to put an end to the flirtation and take Charlotte home but cannot do so without making a scene.

  * * *

  “You should come for lunch,” Nicholas says. “There are views of the ocean, and the cool of the living room is like the shade beneath a giant birch tree.”

  He smiles at her as though he’s known her for a long time, and she can’t help but smile back. He has a wide face and dark hair worn a little long. It is not a neat face, but it is handsome, the nose slightly off center, the eyes large and deep-set. When he talks his left eyebrow lifts and when he laughs it tends to twitch. The asymmetry of his features makes them seem in consta
nt motion even when they are still.

  “You’re from London?” she asks, catching the lilt in his voice.

  “Yes, I am, although that was a long time ago. And you?” he asks, tipping his head back and finishing his drink. “What are you doing here?” He shrugs his shoulders as he says this and casts a quick glance about the room. “Please. I want to know,” he says.

  Charlotte stares into her empty glass. “It was my husband’s idea,” she says.

  “And how are you finding it?” Nicholas asks.

  “It’s not quite what I expected.”

  “No, I’d think not. How long have you been here?”

  “Three, four months.”

  “A drop in the ocean.”

  “Long enough.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a painter—or was, it feels now.”

  Nicholas cocks his head to the side. For a moment she forgets what she’s saying, distracted by the way he looks at her. She’s ­never seen a man listen like this before, as though he were waiting to give her something, or waiting for her to ask him for something, to make a request or beg a favor, anything, anything at all that might mean he could be of service. He smiles as he listens, but with lips closed and eyebrows slightly raised. He nods. “Yes, yes—of course, of course,” he says to things he might not understand, to things he perhaps has no experience of. He seems certain that if she says this is what such a thing is like, then it surely must be. He makes her feel that he believes her completely, trusts her every word.