by Kim Scott
Soon after, I happened upon the death notice, not believing it was Simon until I checked the birth date. Devoted husband of thirty-nine years, father of four, adored by his grandchildren. He died at home, I read, his long battle with cancer over.
I found the number in the book and phoned to offer my condolences. ‘Of course,’ his wife said kindly when I explained who I was. ‘Simon spoke of you.’
I wondered what he’d said. ‘Did he continue with his art?’
‘With framing,’ she said as if to correct me. ‘Simon did beautiful work.’ She told me he had run the business until the last few weeks. ‘Determined to get every last order finished. That was Simon.’
A picture framer. I felt the adoration in her pride. In Simon’s courage. ‘Did he paint?’ I asked again.
‘Oh, he knew about art. And he recognised talent when he saw it. He was always encouraging the young ones coming through.’
I wouldn’t have pushed but I wanted to understand. ‘But he never returned to his own painting? His own work?’
I waited for her to speak. Finally: ‘He never did, no.’
She sounded odd. The realisation jolted me as it must have her. His own wife, and she hadn’t known he’d painted. He must have given it away before they’d even met. I caught myself in time. But how tempting to say, what a shame, let her admission of lack be my shirking of blame, assign that fragile part of Simon I’d crushed so long ago to her neglect. Instead I said my sorries and she thanked me.
I carried Simon’s painting to the living room. Sunlight streamed in. The mahogany frame lustred. Night Duty. It transported me to another time, a half-forgotten world, our old town’s winter gloom, nights where I’d hurry, tight with cold, to and from the bus stop. My quaint nurse’s cap, the lining of my cape given by a single, masterful brushstroke of vermilion. The girl I was then thudded in my throat.
Westerly
The Cat
Ashley Hay
She was not his girlfriend. He had to keep telling himself that. All the favours he did for her, all the small tasks and tiny services, they were the sorts of things he would do for anyone – any friend, he thought – and in this case they were only the actions of a kind-hearted and disinterested neighbour.
She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, small, and slight, so that it seemed impossible that she contained a whole skeleton, or that her thin fingers might have enough power to bear the weight of any load, or ease open anything closed. He came from a mottled family of Anglophiles, all Celtic blood and sunburned skin, busy with freckles and blemishes. His mother called his hair ginger, although he knew it only shone if the sun caught it at the right angle, and that most of the time it was a drab sort of blond. He knew this because an ex-girlfriend had told him. ‘The way you hold yourself, you’d think you were the hottest thing in the room,’ when she very clearly didn’t think he was – or didn’t think he was anymore.
But her hair, Michiko’s hair, was rich and dark, long and silky – he’d seen her once sitting in the sun on the back verandah and unwinding it, wet, from a towel. He’d understood, in that instant, everything about David and Bathsheba that had seemed dubious and unforgivable in Sunday School, decades before. Her hair was so luscious he found himself reaching towards it – even though he was a hundred metres away from her, and coming across the park. He flicked the gesture into a wave – ‘good morning’ – and made as if to walk by.
‘Good morning, Adam,’ she’d called back. ‘Thank you for the grass,’ making her own gesture in turn towards the long line he mowed across the local park – for her, only for her – every single weekend. ‘It grows so fast in the summer, and it’s so itchy to walk through. I do thank you for it.’ She was winding her hair as she spoke, and settled its orb on the top of her head, stabbing it through with a pen.
The ease of this; its grace.
‘It’s no trouble, no trouble at all,’ Adam had replied. ‘And everyone uses it, after all.’ A public service, he told himself. All he was doing was providing a public service.
‘Australian men, they’re so thoughtful,’ Michiko had said then, leaning towards him over the railing of the verandah, its relative height making her look even more like a child. ‘No one tells me this, before I come here. No one tells me how generous and thoughtful the gentlemen will be.’
When Adam himself was a schoolboy, his principal called his group ‘gentlemen’ in such a sneering way – the hat-wearing boys of privileged homes, ready to step into their careers in law, in medicine, in brokerage. It was the only time he’d ever heard the word used; now, from Michiko, he hears its gentleness, and it washes over the principal’s voice, supplanting it, erasing it. It’s all right to be privileged if you end up a good and altruistic person, he tells himself. And isn’t that, after all, why he’s in the final year of his veterinary training, and working double shifts and all-nighters at the animal hospital up the hill? Because I am a gentleman – doing good deeds, and tending, he thinks. His father had been disappointed when he didn’t make the marks for medicine, but he’s already picked out the fancy German car he’ll buy when he’s done. It’s still ministering, after all. It’s still doing good.
‘If there’s anything else you need?’ he had called then, and waved, and walked on, across the road and through his front gate to climb the steep verge of his front yard, and on, up his front steps.
Where he had sat, safely invisible in his front room, staring down at Michiko’s low-set house through the tilted venetian blind, hoping he might see her.
Her cat, its fur as silkily black as its owner’s hair, sat on the windowsill, staring back. Knowing, thought Adam, one hand beginning to worry at himself while his teeth clenched. He hated cats, distrusted them, although of course he took care of Michiko’s pet – ‘Could you feed Sakura for me this weekend? I’ll be away for one night only’ – whenever she asked.
He had cleaned up his mess with a tea towel, his nose closing against its musty, fleshy smell before he threw it into the washing machine and cranked the temperature up as high as it would go.
No, she was not his girlfriend, but she was the only person about whom his fantasies – usually – took a more domestic shape. He’d watched the woman from the other end of the street; Lucy, her name was, a name he had thought belonged only in books. He’d watched as Lucy walked up the hill past his house each afternoon, her smile wide, her body cool in shorts, a loose shirt, her feet in the thinnest web of sandal. In a pouch on her chest sat her incrementally increasing baby, attached first so its nose nuzzled her chest, then turned around so it could see where it was going, and then – by the time he knew that the baby, a boy, was called Tam – strapped neatly into a pram. He’d looked after Tam a couple of times, coming into a quiet house when the boy was already sleeping, and sitting with whatever assignments, whatever reading, through the couple of hours it took for Lucy and her husband to go and see a movie.
What he would have done, had Tam woken, he was never entirely sure, although Lucy always ran through a protocol of patting and milk and singing a small, soft song.
Now, that was his fantasy: Michiko, dwarfed by an exotic cross-breed of a baby, pale skin, like hers, and her beautiful almond eyes, but his hair, he thought, only properly ginger; Michiko walking every afternoon to the park.
He’d never had such a thought before. It convinced him of the purity of his passion, the rightness of this relationship, unrealised though it was, at the moment. But in time.
‘Well there is a girl I like – I’m just waiting for the right moment.’ He imagined himself saying this to his mother – not that he had conversations like this with her. ‘Mr Close to the Chest,’ she called him. She’d only learned about his last girlfriend, the one who thought his hair drab, after the relationship had ended. ‘There is this girl I like – she lives across the road. She’s a designer; she makes dresses, necklac
es, that sort of thing.’ Imagining that his mother, who favoured expensively simple linen shirts and the kinds of shoes one should wear on yachts, would be impressed, and perhaps a little cowed, by such creativity, such industry.
Adam and Michiko and – they would call the baby something strong but beautiful in Japanese: Sachiko, child of happiness; Horiko, magnanimous child. Adam and Michiko and the baby and Sakura. Because the cat would be in the picture too, whatever reservations Adam had about it.
Later, standing in front of his bathroom mirror, Adam had towelled his hair dry, ready for work. He was close to the end of his time as apprentice, the last days before all this learning and training and waiting to be ticked off and registered was over. When he could think of himself as properly qualified, he would say something to Michiko. He would ask her out for dinner. He would proffer flowers. He would pick her up in his new car. He would take her somewhere elegant that served light, delicate food, like her.
She would say: ‘That is very sweet, Adam, and very gentlemanly.’ She would say, ‘Thank you, I would love to.’
He rubbed the last streaks of steam away from the mirror, preparing to shave. It was so hot, so hot and humid – it had been raining for weeks, he realised. His neighbour Lucy, walking up the hill, went not lightly in sandals and shorts, but draped around with a heavy plastic poncho, her feet like bright boats in the kind of plastic shoes the vet nurses wore. He’d seen the little boy poking its hands, its tongue out in the rain – his, his. Mothers had this thing about people referring to their children as an object. He’d learned that at his nephew’s christening.
Patting the sweet peaks of shaving foam onto his face, he began to scrape away – it aroused him, always, the edge of the blade on his cheek. The threat of it, or the promise.
*
He had come to Brisbane as a student, using his dad’s collateral to rent a cheap house that was miles from the veterinary school but close to the university’s other campuses, filling its rooms with any other students – architects, engineers, doctors, a girl who was trying to write an entire thesis in haiku, but always struggled to remember if the correct meter was five-seven-five, or seven-five-seven. She’d dropped out before the end of her second month, but she was the reason he’d met Michiko, the reason he’d been able to start talking to her at last, rather than simply watching her work in her garden, or run towards the bus, or struggle with a relatively small bag of shopping across the expanse of the park.
‘I was thinking I might ask that nice Japanese girl across the road for the kanji for colours,’ said the girl who was forgetful about haiku. ‘I could divide the thesis into chapters, like a rainbow, a chapter for each. I bet indigo’s a good word in Japanese; I bet indigo’s something lovely.’ She was the kind of girl who talked, always, and nervously. But it had given Adam his opening line.
‘Hello?’ he’d called to Michiko the next time he saw her bending to plant seedlings along her fence line. ‘Sorry, I’m Adam, from across the road’ – waving up at his house, perched high on its stilts – ‘I’ve been meaning to introduce myself for ages. But now my housemate wants to know – she’s writing something about haiku, and she wanted to ask you what the Japanese word for indigo was.’
The first time he heard her voice properly; the first time he felt it inside his chest.
‘It’s ai,’ she said, very softly, very simply. ‘Aizome, if she wants to talk about indigo dye. But the colour, just ai. Like this:’ and she scratched the character, so complex with its boxes and hats and broad sweeping flecks, into the dirt at her feet.
‘All of that for ai?’ He blushed as he said it, for his stupidity.
‘All of that. It’s a lot of colour, indigo. My favourite, perhaps. I am Michiko – I’ve seen you running for the bus, and in the park sometimes. It’s nice to meet you, for this word.’ And she bent down to her punnets, folding herself into smallness in front of the fence, and struggling somehow with the delicate little pots.
‘Would you like a hand with that?’ he’d asked. ‘I’m quite good with delicate work – training to be a vet, you know – I operated on somebody’s dog the other day.’
Now, he was the only student left in the house, and as for the haiku girl, he couldn’t even remember her name. The lease rolled round, his dad signed, and Adam stayed.
‘You should think of getting somewhere a little … nicer,’ his mother had commented, ‘when you’re finished all your studies.’
‘I like it here,’ Adam had said. He always assumed, until the flood came, that he and Michiko would be there forever.
*
It took less than a day for her house to be completely submerged. Adam, watching from the safe height of his own verandah, saw the water creep around the foundations in the mid-afternoon, saw the top step disappear in the early evening, saw the gutters go sometime in the early hours of the morning. There was no sign of Michiko – she had gone, crying that this was impossible, crying about her fabrics, her beads, her trimmings, crying that this did not happen in the civilised cities of the world. Lucy, from up the hill, had stood with her a while, trying to calm her, talking about how much might be moved – ‘if we start now; we can get quite a lot if we start now’ – and then, when Michiko had left, doing the heaving and pulling herself, bolts of material, boxes of notions, walking them up the street in the rain to her own higher-set place.
‘If Adam was here, if I could ask Adam,’ he had heard Michiko say, and more than once. But he stayed back, tucked into the shadow of the balcony. He would not help, and he would not go. Not now. Not after the last weekend when he’d walked over in the brief respite from the rain to help with the lawn, as usual – and to mow Michiko’s path through the long, scratchy paspalum in the park – and had met, coming out of her gate, the man she introduced as Robert, ‘my boyfriend, a proper doctor.’
A tall man with pale skin and properly ginger hair.
He’d almost hit her on the spot. But instead he’d pushed the mower through the chokingly wet grass, his fists gripping the handle too tightly and his teeth grinding so close together that his jaw ached. Fuck her. Fuck her. Fuck her. Which had, of course, been the point.
‘I wondered if you could feed Sakura tonight?’ Michiko had asked. ‘I am away just one night – Robert is taking me to the coast.’
Well, what could you do? What could you say? And it hadn’t taken much to kill the cat – he’d brought something home from his shift at work and injected it quickly, before he had time to think. It was quite quick and peaceful; breath, breath, breath then no breath, although the fur remained silky, and the warmth stayed in the body a surprisingly long time. He wrapped the body in the length of indigo fabric that Michiko had positioned to stop the rain blowing in through the gap between her threshold and her back door. And he threw the dead weight into his own rubbish bin.
‘I knew this week would be terrible,’ he had heard Michiko calling to Lucy as the rain poured down, heavier and heavier, as the water reclaimed the park, the road, the entire extent of Michiko’s backyard. ‘Sakura has disappeared somewhere – she has taken herself to safety. She always knows when things will be bad.’
‘What about your boyfriend,’ Lucy had said then. ‘Do you have somewhere to go?’
And Michiko had nodded; Adam watched her mouth shape that name. ‘Robert.’
‘Then take a bag – just take your papers and things, and go now. Alex and I will do what we can here. And perhaps it will stop before it reaches the floor. The predictions are all over the place at the moment.’ Along the lower end of the street, people were helping each other to strip their houses, depositing furniture, clothes, books, saucepans, haphazard, into the back of hastily procured pantechnicons.
Neighbourly, thought Adam. Michiko and her tears were gone within ten minutes. And he stood and kept watch over the consumption of her house.
In the morning
, when the sun rose for the first time in weeks, he looked out over the water that had lapped into his yard and turned his tiptoe-house into an island. The sky was an extraordinarily bright blue, and the shadows of the trees in the park had turned the water around Michiko’s roof, around Adam’s yard, into an indigo lake.
It was lunchtime before she came, tiptoeing in at the top end of the street – the high and dry end – and creeping down to the water’s edge. Lucy was with her, holding her hand. ‘We got some of your fabric, some boxes, and some garments. I got most of the pictures on your walls, and some china; it was so beautiful. We did as much as we could.’
The space above the indigo lake was silent.
‘They say the water should have run out again by tomorrow – you’ll probably be able to walk inside then,’ said Lucy, but Adam, leaning out as far as he could to see, to hear, saw Michiko shake her head.
‘Throw it all in the bin. I want nothing so tainted. I will not come back here. I think maybe Sakura is gone; so should I.’
Lucy put her arm around the tiny girl. ‘You don’t have to think about it now,’ she said. ‘See how you feel tomorrow. We can go in for you, if you like. We can see about trying to clean up.’
‘It doesn’t look like a home anymore, just the top of the roof poking up like that. It doesn’t look like it could be part of a house.’
When the water went down, when Lucy and her husband, Alex, came to start the sorting, the cleaning, the clearing, Adam waded through the slimy mud to join them. There was something exquisite about sorting through her things, handling them indiscriminately, intimately, breaking the delicate tea mugs, pummelling the dandelion cushions, kicking at the piles of books. He didn’t notice her arriving until she was standing next to him, leaning against him, and his arm was slipping around her. The comfort of a friend.
‘It’s all right, we’ll get it sorted – it was good that Lucy could get so much out. Where did you go? And where’s Robert?’