Katie was in the kitchen with Jonathan’s two sisters, who had been got up in silver and pink for the occasion. She was opening a bag of chips for them.
‘You can watch TV in my bedroom,’ she said to them, and then looked up at me. The sisters dodged past me, giggling, scattering chips.
‘You look nice,’ Katie said, without trying to take the sarcasm out of her voice. Her hair had been caught into French plaits, pearly strands floating around her face, catching the evening sunlight. She looked as though she should be sitting in a casement window in Florence, with Raffaello on his knees beside her. I could not tell if she was wearing make-up, although her blue eyes looked smoky and her lips were the colour of plums. I was wearing make-up that I had applied myself, white and thick like a Noh mask. The kitchen was full of light – good for Katie, bad for me.
‘Come on then,’ said Katie. I stood out of the way so she could pass in front of me. She smelt like flowers.
There were three young couples – Katie and Raffaello, Jonathan and me, and Katie’s best friend, Erin, and Matt Willmott, whose tallness and skinniness had shot out of control, and now looked like it hurt. Jonathan’s parents were there, and Erin’s parents, and Matt’s too, his father also towering painfully above us. There was champagne and a waiter. Raffaello’s parents were not there. Raffaello wore a pale blue tuxedo, buttoned across his thick chest in a way that made me think of a baby in a cardigan. There was fresh acne on his cheeks. The evening sun was vast, white, in the huge upper rooms of Katie’s house, and the smell of the river filled the place, sweet and briny. Katie’s father handed me a flute of champagne. My mother was replacing her first on the waiter’s tray and taking a second.
Jonathan appeared beside me. He was decently dressed in a black tuxedo. He was clearly younger than Matt or Raffaello, his features still fine and light, his shoulders slight and his skin clear. The tuxedo was boxy over his slender body. He took my hand and led me aside to the big windows, and when we were at a distance from the others he said quietly, ‘You look beautiful.’ He had clearly established his persona now. I wouldn’t be seeing the youthful lover again.
I’d had a need, an unignorable need, to dye my hair that morning. I’d suddenly known that without it I was not adequate. I cannot quite explain why it seemed to me that my short spiked hair needed to be purple, but my mother was sympathetic, and when we could not find purple hair dye at the chemist, we’d bought gentian violet. I can tell you that gentian violet will dye your hair purple – and the colour will last – but it has a sheen, an iridescent green, when you turn your head towards the light. Shampoo will not remove this sheen. Do not allow the gentian violet to drip onto your face. Wear gloves.
Jonathan kissed my purple fingers. ‘The most beautiful girl in the world.’
I jerked my hand away and stared out at the water, at the masts of yachts, swinging like metronomes as a ferry went past. I could not say to him that these chivalries felt like insults. It was more humiliating than being ignored or scorned; this pretence that in my T-shirt dress, with my shining green hair and my blistered feet, that I was anything like a real girl, the kind you might say was beautiful.
‘Get me more champagne,’ I said, handing him my glass.
‘We’re only allowed one,’ he said.
‘I never could see the point of an open marriage,’ my mother was saying in a loud voice. ‘I was in one without knowing, of course.’
*
The stretch limousine arrived and the boys handed us in. The parents had come to the top of the drive, my mother with her glass. She was sweating a little.
‘We’ll see you later!’ Frances stood waving. She’d had a little cry as we gathered ourselves to leave, as we stood in the hall shifting about and sighting ourselves in the enormous mirror by the door. The mirror was like a cage, trapping the six of us, animals of the savannah. Matt was the giraffe.
‘We’ll be on board if you need us,’ shouted Keith.
Frances and Keith were hosting the afterparty, too, and were planning to sleep on the yacht in order to be out of the way. The waiter would still be here when we got back from the golf club. I’d seen that the fridge was full of West Coast Coolers.
*
Jonathan fell asleep in the attic bedroom, where he’d dragged me so that we could be like the other couples. I’d pretended I needed another drink and left him sitting expectantly on the sofa bed. When I came back in, having stood on the stairs for several minutes, counting and looking at the ceiling, he had slumped sideways, eyes closed. I stared at him for a minute. I would probably never see him again. He still looked light and fresh and clean, despite the champagne and the Brandivino and my hipflask of Southern Comfort.
I had no money and my mother would be dead asleep, unable to hear the phone. I would have to walk home. My feet hurt, even without my shoes. I would soak them in the pool to cool them down.
I made my way down the sets of stairs, shoes in hand. Katie and Raffaello were in her bedroom, with a sentinel at the door. I came to the pool, which in the dark was like an underground cave of blue light. It was cooler out here, by the river. The yacht was a quiet black shape on the water. Girls sat on the lawn in groups, some weeping drunkenly. I sat down on the pebbled edge, lifted my petticoats and slid my feet into the silky water.
A group of people sat on the other side of the pool, passing a bong around. One was Andrew Johnson, out of whose way I had carefully kept, all night.
‘Hey, it’s Tasha,’ someone said.
‘Look, Andrew, it’s Tasha.’
Andrew lifted his head and stared at me. He was so stoned that his head kept dropping forward, but he focused on me. ‘Ooh, Tasha.’
I looked down at my feet, which were at strange angles in the lighted blue water.
‘I love you, Tasha,’ said Andrew, and the boys around him laughed. ‘You’re so beaudiful. So sexy.’
I kept staring down.
‘I want you Tasha. With honey all over ya cunt.’
Now I stood up, although I knew this would draw more attention to what he was saying. People near us began to stare as he said, ‘But you wouldn’t fuck just anyone. Only Raff.’
In the distance the yacht was rocking, and a figure, a shape emerged from it, and came to stand at the end of the jetty. It was Mrs Schultz, although when she saw me looking she stepped back into the shadows. I had my shoes. I turned away, my feet feeling as soft as if I had just been born, feeling each pebble, the points of the grass, and Andrew shouted after me, ‘Didja get lucky, Tash?’
I went in through the open French doors, up the stairs and through the house. I was aware of my reflected self, escaping the big mirror as I ran out the open front door.
*
When I got home my mother was not asleep but sitting up in bed, reading The Great Gatsby and drinking a glass of wine. She looked relaxed and happy and sleepy, so I took a risk and told her about the Goldsworthys, about Katie’s father and Jonathan’s mother. She smiled in a dreamy sort of way and said, ‘They’re still doing that, are they?’
I looked at her.
‘They all do it,’ she said.
I’d known my father had done it; there was the living proof, his other wife and my half-siblings.
‘There’s always been the question of that boy,’ she said, gazing into the distance. ‘Is he Keith’s, do you think?’
I stared at her.
‘We’ll never know,’ she said.
I thought I’d understood why Katie had made me go to the formal with Jonathan. I’d thought they were not cousins after all, but related because of Keith and Mrs Schultz. Forced into a kind of family by their parents’ sex lives. Jonathan had even talked about holidays together.
But perhaps it was more. Perhaps they were brother and sister.
Or perhaps Katie had just been trying to keep me away from Raffaello. He was the only person I cared about. I’d had one kiss from him at the height of his drunkenness, under the trees behind the golf club. I’d p
ut my face into the hot wall of his chest; I’d smelt him, kissed him, been ready to put my hands where they’d never been, down into his pants, to drag the hard weight of him on top of me, into me. I had not been able to persuade him to leave with me.
It was so lonely, all this hunting, never catching anything.
Moth Sea Fog
Gregory Day
I talk to the moth caught in the car. Driving past heat-mottled dams whiskered with reeds. I tell him about the fog of the day before. It was not just any fog, but a time-fluxing sea fog outrolling the waves, creeping over neap-tide ledges, tickling the glossy anemones with its smoky edges. It made silhouettes of the gods.
The sunlight was a recent memory, I tell him. The physical became metaphysical. He bats the patterns on his wings, letting them whirr against the windscreen.
You know in your guts when you’ve made a friend. And so I tell him more, watching the way his blackwire legs work adhesive, like a dancer in a heavy carpet cape except for the fact that his wings have made a shuffling pact with the light-sheafs of the air.
It rolled in moved in hefted in, a light-changer seeking the convex of the coves. It greybrushed the ocean, narrowing the spectrum from blue green and gold to heron-grey and tint of ash. Yet this was not a creaturely dirge, this wasn’t death or aftermath, this was le temps.
The moth doesn’t speak French and nor do I. But when I’m with the moth all languages, like all the cars on the road, could potentially be ours: those bonnets of steel, we could be in any of those glary glass and steel chariots, they come from the same marketplace, just as the words are all restored to sounds with long histories, joint histories, like the tempest in le temps, the weather in time.
And the fog, I told the moth, was a new moment cast, made visible, a momento that rolled in and would roll out again, or uplift, streak and stretch, or disappear, or dissolve like honey in the teacup of the world, leaving us savouring, remembering, re-imaging.
Every late October I wait for the moths, who come in numbers to thrum on the ocean windows. How many springs is it that I’ve been vigilant? Relative to the time it took to paint those carpet wings, or to the time it took to create those honeyed cliffs which the fog greyscales into, it’s only a few. I tell him that. How the grey sea fog painted the ocean cliffs … and how we were down below on the sand of the cove. The Horseshoe Rock had been veiled, the great tower-stack of Eagle Rock was one of the silhouetted gods. The day had been too hot but now it was antechambered, as the great meteorological shift came in.
As I began to drive out of the farms onto the edge of new suburbs the moth flew in close. And still. It had probably slept between dash and steel armature but was now accustomed to the light. Awake in the daylight. Displaying his totem mirror-wings.
Perhaps the sound of those wings is the musical equivalent of the way the fog crept. My boys and I were going to cool down with a swim until we’d noticed the tumbled uneven tendril-edges of the fog moving silently over the cliffs. We decided to go anyway. For the excitement of new phenomena rather than the cooling down. The invisible air was suddenly visible, as if a billion atoms had clenched into an optical fact, into visible existence.
Things, big things, come unannounced. Like the moths in spring. This little forerunner, companion in the cabin of my ute, did not phone ahead. And before we knew it we were on the path down, the fog’s damp hem tingling our bare skin. We stepped down the steep winding path, moving further under cover, towards the sea-sound, further into the secret.
Another thing I tell the moth is that it was a midweek sea fog. No other human stick-figures materialising out of the spectral air, just us three: me, the eldest, the youngest. We got down to the bottom of the steps, onto the sand of the cove, thrilled to be besieged, so gently besieged by something so much bigger than we are. It too was both old and young. An ancient character freshly, wetly, minted. So it felt like strange kin, a spectacle we were part of, an unannounced visitation both ghost-ish and real, like the moth’s cloud thrumming through each spring. I told him that, as we drove over a bridge: how he reminded me of the fog, how they seem connected.
It’s like someone you meet who you know loves travelling. You talk destinations. Or someone who loves to cook. You talk food, or kitchenware. To a friend of the stars you talk astronomy, myth, astrology. To a friend of the river you talk birds who’ve roosted in the river-trees. So it was with the moth and the fog. Sometimes we have a hunch, a secret message comes travelling through the air between us, and we feel we know. And so we raise a subject however unlikely, as if on a whim. But it’s not a whim. It’s a windlassed knowledge so deep and fast, so multi-sensed, that even the word ‘intuition’, which after all is a nicely sinuous word, doesn’t come close. Feeling is better. As in sensing and seeking at the same time. The fog and the moth would be interested in each other, that’s what I felt, they were like family members. Like we three on the beach.
The water was calm, with small silky blue-grey waves unpeeling under the blue-grey creature. The world was birdless for an hour. The clifftop bristlebirds did not make their quirky twee-wit calls, the gannets did not glide or dive, the cormorants did not bob up or stand as if sermonising on the rocks. We did not ask where they were though, we did not picture them huddled up, holding breath, or overawed. We took this vast mysterious ethereal birdless cove at face value.
The eldest wanted to swim, I told the moth. The youngest wasn’t so sure. He clung to me, as if the fog clung to him. Sometimes in a dream we see the world like this, seldom in reality. Sometimes in a dream we can cross over, as if into other worlds. Perhaps that’s what it reminded the youngest one of. He obviously needed, in this waking hour, for the world, and my presence in it, to be real. Like the moth.
I had life on my dash, one dry stalk of slender velvet-bush, one wizened stalk of lavender. Still with a faint perfume. To be inside the cabin of my ute, its plastic and steel, could have also seemed like a dream to the moth, like the fog could seem. The world as you know it changed. A different, unfamiliar hall. But I’d wound the window down to let the moth out if he so desired. I’d let the window open, both when the car was still and moving. But no, the moth was staying. There was something in those dried stalks, those clefts and crannies of the car, that dam-mottled windscreen, that kept him there. Still, or tiptoeing across the glass, or thrumming his wings like a thinking thought. Something kept him there. So I told him the story.
Once upon a time, on an otherwise ordinary day, insofar as a too-hot day can be ordinary these days, a sea fog rolled in from the endlessness of ocean and gently covered the reefs, the coves, the cliffs and downsloped shoulders and valleys of our town. Every pond was lightly brushed. Every road sign shrouded. One boy went for a swim in the fog, another boy stayed back on the beach with his father. The two on the beach peered through the dimmed light, through a wispy world, at the swimming boy. Until he was gone. Diving obliquely through the ocean’s skin and swimming like a star pulsing under the water. He swam and swam, until he could breathe no more and came to the surface. His hair was plastered wet, he felt that he shone, but they could not see him. He had gone into the fog.
The father yelled, suddenly frightened. The younger boy’s face screwed up in fear. But the water lay still, the impervious waves peeling in with what seemed now like stealth, an awful regularity and silence. The father broke clear of the grip of little hands, moving towards the water. He yelled again, but there was only absence now, erasure, an awful clarity on the sea.
The moth thrummed and whirred before standing still at an angle on the dash. Staring at me, as if accusing. No, I said. No, it wasn’t like that. But that was my fear as the eldest went in. Like a seal in his black wetsuit, but for the short sleeves and leggings. His pale young limbs outstretched. As he slipped under the skin of the water my fear went imagining. Like the CFA alarm used to go sounding over the hills. One day a boy swam into the sea fog and when the fog had passed over he was not there anymore. The sea and sky had merged then unme
rged and he was not there anymore. Nowhere to be seen. As if he’d been abducted by the fog. As if the world had warped for half an hour, as if fate had held the boy’s life between its forefinger and thumb, held it suspended, before dropping it again from its great height. And changing everything.
But this is not how it had gone, I told the moth. It was not like a fable or fairytale. Though it had such an atmosphere. No, he was there, standing there in perfect form, in the water still, in his short wetsuit, overjoyed to be encompassed by this ocean shroud, this magical blue-grey cape, this smoky secret … and me calling.
‘Come in, come in,’ I called, ‘we’ll walk around the point a way.’ Thus forestalling any possibility of what might then be written by the strangeness of the world. Let’s write something else, old moth, I say, young moth, moth both old and young. Let’s write simply of encompassing moments, how small we are in the large world, yet always kindred. Let’s walk the cove – moth, father, eldest, youngest – to the dribble of rocks at the point, over the dribble of rocks, pushing our way through the mystery as if through a blue-grey curtain.
And so we went, the moth and I. Along the ordinary roadway. The boys and I too, around the rocky point to the seaweedy beach on the other side.
I seek the seasons, I told the moth then. I seek your arrival as the last of the wattle has faded, I seek the coming of the snakes. I seek the mutton-birds darkening the sky with a texta smudge, the gum’s lurid flowering, the coming and going of le temps. I seek the new chapter of the budding plums, the wide grassy cast of field freesias, just like I seek new light in the morning and the shading of dusk towards dark. I seek the seasons, the season of rainbows, mushroom seasons, seasons of the nesting kites. Thara. What the men and women like me, the boys and girls like my own, called those nesting kites. Before the white men came like bad weather that would never leave. A fog outside of time. Thara, they said. The black-shouldered kites, we say. Thara, they said. And they knew the seasons, coming on the unbroken loom of le temps.
The Best Australian Stories 2016 Page 3