Fresh Fields

by Peter Kocan

  Anyway, the youth had gone into his room and left the two of them there on their deckchairs on the grass. He’d lain down on his bed and closed his eyes and the delicious tingly feeling had stayed with him for a long while.

  A few mornings later the youth saw a young woman in the yard as he was on his way out. She wore jeans and a white blouse and lace-up black shoes, and her hair was neatly tied back. He thought she must be a new tenant and went to go past her as quickly as possible. Then she turned towards him and he saw it was Delia. She had none of the usual make-up on and none of the bracelets and bangles. She looked like a fresh country girl, but sort of sophisticated with it. Except for the darker hair and the thinner, sharper nose and chin, she looked just like Grace Kelly would have looked in those clothes. The youth’s feelings must have shown in his face.

  “You haven’t seen me looking like this, have you?” she said. “What do you think? Do I scrub up okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not always the Witch of Endor. It’s just that clients expect a karmic practitioner to look the part. I could read their cards perfectly well in jeans and T-shirt, but they wouldn’t feel they’d had their money’s worth.”

  “No.”

  “The trappings do seem to matter in this life.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m heading into town. Are you going towards the bus stop? We could walk together.”

  “I’m not catching the bus.”

  “But you’re walking that way, aren’t you?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Then it won’t hurt you to walk along beside me and be sociable for a minute or two, will it?”

  She gave him a challenging look that seemed to say: I know you want to wriggle out of this, but I won’t let you.

  They went out to the street and walked along. The youth tried to think of something to talk about. Delia was fishing in her leather shoulder bag, making sure she hadn’t forgotten something. Because she was peering down into the bag, he was able to look at her face from the side. All he could think of was how good she looked with her hair tied back, and the contrast of its dark colour with the white of the blouse. There was a Spanish look about her. That was it. Some Spaniards are olive-skinned and some are pale, and Delia was the pale-skinned type. She looked like a Spanish Grace Kelly. She’d look great on a horse, the youth thought, sitting very straight with her chin out and one of those flat-brimmed black hats that Spanish riders wear. Not really arrogant, but knowing how to do that posture with the head back. It was like the way Grace Kelly knew how to do that blue-eyed stare that would destroy you at twenty paces, except that you knew it wasn’t actually hostile but just a look she knows how to do, even when she’s feeling perfectly friendly. And yet there is a scary element in it because you know this is how she’d look at you if she was rejecting you, and so you are always getting a sense of how lucky you are that she isn’t being hostile. Fear and gratitude mixed up together. It was complicated, the youth thought. It was all bound up with the way your feelings were about women. It was about yearning so much for creatures who had the power at their fingertips to hurt you very badly. That must be the meaning of the Tunnel of Love dream. He wished he understood these things better. Perhaps he should get Delia to read his cards.

  It was interesting, he thought, that he’d had feelings about Delia even before today, before he’d seen that there was a Spanish Grace Kelly behind the Witch of Endor. It showed that we know more than we are aware of. We know more than we know. He stored that thought away to reflect on later. Right now he was getting the tingling sensation very strongly.

  It was so good to be walking along with Delia. They had fallen into step and seemed to stay in step without any effort. The shared movement felt wonderful. It was as though his body and Delia’s were joined in the rhythm of their steps, as though the rhythm was a single heartbeat for the two of them, as though they were sharing each other’s body and breath and life. The youth had never felt such a sense of oneness with anyone before. He could go on walking beside Delia forever. Then he realised he was by himself. She’d stopped some distance back to talk to someone over a fence.

  “So, how are things?” she asked when she caught up.

  “Okay,” he replied. The tingling sensation had begun to fade.

  “Do you like being one of our jolly band?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. What do you like about it?”

  “Oh, um, I don’t know,” he muttered.

  “You’d be happier, wouldn’t you, if I gave you that question a week in advance, and in writing, so that you could think it through in ten different ways before having to answer.”

  “I would, yes.”

  “Ah, that’s the Gatekeeper answering.”

  “Who’s the Gatekeeper?”

  “The side of you that deals with other people in all the everyday, practical matters that can’t be evaded or postponed or denied. The side of you that I’m having this conversation with at the purely verbal level.”

  “Is there another side then?”

  “Another side, or another self. The terminology isn’t important. There’s the other you that’s mostly off in its cave, or forest, or fortress, or Arctic tundra, or whatever. That’s the one who just signalled to the Gatekeeper to ‘evade’ or ‘stall.’ That’s the one I’m talking to on the emotional plane. That’s the one that really matters.”

  “And what is this other self like, the one in the Arctic tundra?”

  “I don’t really know,” she said, stopping and looking into his eyes. “But I think it’s significant that you picked up on the ‘Arctic tundra’ rather than something else.”

  “It was the last thing you mentioned, after forest and fortress. I just picked up on the last thing. If you’d said ‘cave’ last, I would’ve picked up on that.”

  “Now the Gatekeeper has orders to procrastinate.”

  “Possibly.”

  “I think you picked up on ‘Arctic tundra’ not because it was the last thing but because it was closest to the truth of your emotional landscape. An Arctic tundra is, let’s see, cold . . . bleak . . . hostile . . . exposed. That landscape is all about a bitter struggle to get survival needs met.” She peered harder into his eyes. “An Arctic waste has powerful symbolic meaning for you, doesn’t it?”

  “I s’pose so.”

  “If you’d picked up on ‘cave’ the implications would be different. A cave can be a place of fear and darkness, but it’s just as likely to signify being snug and safe and hidden. At any rate, a cave-dweller is quite another thing from a figure in an Arctic landscape.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you feel pissed off by all this?”

  “No, I’m enjoying it . . . But of course that might just be the Gatekeeper with orders to lie.”

  “Good on you,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “I knew you had a sense of humour. I told Sunny so.”

  They resumed walking.

  “Does Sunny have a Gatekeeper too?”

  “No doubt. But Sunny is full of spiritual and cultural resonances that elude me, although I catch on to more every day. The archetypes are universal, but a lot of the detail is culturally specific. And Sunny is very steeped in his own culture. He’s a poet. Actually, he’s known at home as the best young poet of his generation. He’s as sensitive as a harp string.”

  “Ah,” said the youth, recalling Mannie Wannie’s Mabuly Wuly.

  “Don’t be fooled by that stuff he listens to on the radio. He’s trying to fathom the vibes of Western culture, that’s all.”

  “I’d never have known.”

  “He and I have talked quite a lot about you. Sunny says you’re . . .” She stopped.

  “Go on.”

  “I’m talking too much, as usual.”

  “You can’t stop now. What does he say about me?” />
  “He says you’re very young and very divided.”

  “Is that all?”

  “He put it more poetically.”

  “How poetically?”

  “He says you don’t know whether to be angry at yourself or at the world.”

  “Is that poetical?”

  “The poetical thing is the simile he used.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He says you’re a young tiger that doesn’t know whether to hide or kill.”

  The youth thought about this. Delia saw her bus coming and fished in her bag again.

  “This is an invitation,” she said, handing him a card. “In writing, and well in advance, to give the Gatekeeper time to get his orders. It’s Sunny’s birthday, and I want to give him a bang-up party. Do come. You don’t have to socialise, if you don’t want to. Just be there for a slice of cake. Okay?”

  The bus came and Delia waved through the window at him as it pulled away.

  Afterwards he marvelled at how well he’d got through the conversation. He’d held his end up like a real person. He’d never had such an interesting talk with anyone, not even the times with Meredith Blackett. How lucky to have met Delia in the yard at that moment. How interesting to know that there was this other version of her who wore jeans and a white blouse and lace-up shoes and neat hair and no bangles or make-up. It made him think again how full of possibility life was. You hear wind-chimes and look up, and you meet a Beautiful Witch with green butterflies for eyelids. You go out of your room at a given moment, and you meet a Spanish Grace Kelly who tells you that you’re like a young tiger that doesn’t know whether to hide or kill.

  The youth knew there was a point to this, an insight that floated just beyond the mind’s reach. Then it darted in and he caught it. It was about the whole Pleasures of India thing. You take it for granted that the thrill is necessarily in far-off exotic places, and that you perceive it—if you ever do—by learning to fathom peculiar signs and signals. You assume that it only comes wrapped in outlandish foreign perfumes and weird foreign music. But the truth is that it is all around you wherever you are, and its thrillingness can be ordinary as well as exotic. Not ordinary in the sense of being humdrum or cheap, but in the sense of being of the common world. It was like flowers, the youth thought. Rare orchids in a hothouse at the Botanical Gardens might be beautiful, but a ragged patch of daisies beside the footpath is no less beautiful. You might even like the daisies better. You start out thinking that the flowers of this world are unapproachable hothouse rarities, and only later do you start to see that they are also simple and friendly things you can come across round the next corner.

  It was enough to lift you right up and make you feel extra happy and optimistic.

  He understood that these insights also related to the rifle in the shop window. You assume an instrument of fate must be wrapped in a special aura, must be sealed off in a protected hush, like a hothouse orchid, when in fact it could be as unpretentious as a daisy, there in a common window among penknives and fishing tackle. The youth hadn’t thought of the rifle as precisely “an instrument of fate” until now, but that’s what it was of course. It was a real advance to have cottoned on to that.

  He strode onto a pedestrian crossing and a car stopped abruptly within a few inches of him and he saw an angry face mouthing words at him through a windscreen. He was in a daze and needed to pull himself together. He was beginning to get the sweaty, headachy sensation and wasn’t entirely sure, now, whether the conversation with Delia had really happened. Maybe he had imagined it, the way he so often imagined Delia lying on his bed with him. He knew that he had many conversations that weren’t exactly real, and that he spent a good deal of time with people who weren’t strictly there. Maybe there wasn’t really any Delia in jeans and a white blouse. He stopped and tried to think what he’d done with the invitation she’d given him—if she had. He searched his pockets, then walked back to the bus stop, examining the ground the whole way. There was no sign of it. He sat down on the bus-stop seat. He was glad there was nobody else there and that no bus came for a long time, and he was able to stare off at the sky.

  He let himself go into the Diestl mood. He made the motion of unslinging the Schmeisser and sat like someone utterly tired and blank and uncaring. When he had let that mood drive everything else out, he could think clearly.

  “All that stuff is shit,” he was able to decide. “Whether she’s in jeans and blouse, or witch’s robes, or a fucking clown-suit, it doesn’t matter. Whether she even exists is beside the point. You know now what the focus is. It’s hanging up in that window, waiting for the practical details to fall into place, waiting for you to see the Assignment clearly.”

  The youth got that vivid image of the city skyline burning and falling.

  HE HAD promised to keep in touch with his mother in the northern town so one evening he called from a phone box near the State Library. The cranky old lady answered and again began to dispute with the operator, but the phone was snatched away from her in mid-sentence. He heard his mother accepting the reverse charge, then asking him to hang on a minute. Then he heard the old lady’s protesting voice fading away.

  “I’ve wheeled her out of the room,” the woman said when she came back to the phone, “so I can have a minute’s peace.”

  She sighed that she was very fed up with the job.

  “She keeps complaining to her daughter about the way I look after her, and the daughter keeps ringing up to query what I’m doing. Mind you, the daughter doesn’t want a bar of the old bat herself, and lives a hundred miles away, but she likes to play the Virtuous by taking the silly old cow’s part against whoever’s doing the actual dirty work.”

  And it was dirty work, the woman went on. The old lady had a palatial house and a solid silver tea-service, but would spit on the floor if she felt like it. That appeared to sum up for her all the unreasonableness of life and the world and other people. Also, the old lady picked on the boy. She had it firmly in mind that the boy was the young former self of her estranged grandson, who was now a man in his forties, and she would rebuke him about his failed marriages and shady business deals. The boy was a kind of phantom to her, and it was a bit eerie, the woman said, because you knew the old lady was at times addressing him as a figure in her mind rather than as someone really standing there. It could be quite funny, she added, but you had to be in the mood for it.

  She asked the youth what he’d been doing with himself, whether he had another job yet, whether he’d made any nice friends. He mumbled evasive replies. She did not press very hard for answers, and he got the feeling she was stalling somehow. There was a long pause.

  “I’ve been in touch with Vladimir,” she said. “Or rather, he got in touch with me, through Georgie, and I wrote back to him.”

  “I see,” said the youth.

  There was another longish pause. Georgie and her husband Earle were the closest things to friends they’d ever had. They’d been the next-door neighbours for a few years. Georgie had made it clear that she didn’t like Vladimir, and if Vladimir was drunk and being a bit scary the woman would whisper to the youth to take his brother and “go to Auntie Georgie’s.” Georgie would sit them down and give them some ice-cream or jelly and then go out to her front gate and keep an ear cocked. A few times she had hurried back in and said to Earle, “Quick, go and show your face in there, love!” Earle was a thin wheezing man on a disabled soldier’s pension, but he’d go straight in through the backyard and into the house via the kitchen. The youth remembered how Earle would come back after a couple of minutes and say, “She reckons she’s alright, and I’m willin’ to take her word for it.” But another time he’d not come back for quite a while. Georgie had called out worriedly across the fence to him and he’d put his head out the kitchen door to let her know he was okay, then he’d gone back in. Later the youth heard his mother telling Georgie how Earle had s
tood between her and Vladimir and said to him, “If you raise a hand, you’ll raise it to me!” While the woman was telling it, Earle was sitting beside Vladimir in the backyard. Vladimir was crying and Earle was patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he was too decent a man to be a standover merchant, specially with a woman, and that it was the grog that was doing it, and that he needed to knock it off. They’d moved from that suburb, and later they heard that Earle had passed away, but the woman had stayed friends with Georgie. She’d got the youth to memorise the phone number and would say, “If anything ever happens, call Georgie.” She never spelt out what she meant by anything happening, but the youth understood it to be something like, “If you ever find me dead on the floor and don’t know what to do.” Even now he could reel the number off by heart, and it sometimes popped into his mind in moments of stress.

  Everything gradually got worse without Georgie and Earle next door. The youth sometimes thought it was because Vladimir no longer had anyone to remind him that he was too decent a man to be a standover merchant.

  So now Vladimir had got a letter to the woman through Georgie. He must’ve sounded sincere, the youth thought, for Georgie to have even given him the time of day.

  “We had a long talk over the phone two nights ago,” the woman said, at the end of the pause.

  “You and him?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t automatically mean anything. I just wanted to tell you that we’ve been talking to each other.”

  “Okay. You’ve told me.”

  “Do you object?”

  “Why should I object?”

  “Well, it concerns all of us.”

  “What does?”

  “The fact that Vladimir and I are communicating. I just want to know how you feel about it.”

  “I’m not in charge of what you do.”