Aden was dry land. By then they were clamouring to get off, to still the incessant tossing of the sea, which had filled their heads like the fluid in a barometer. The first impression they encountered on terra firma was its oddness, the awful solidity of the fixed viewpoint. And the noise of humanity crammed into a small space. They tripped gaily down the gangplank of the Australis, four girls in summer prints clutching their day passes, and melted into the crushed stench of the marketplace. Men and animals jostled on the quay; stallholders ululated as if trading were a form of penance. Their smells intertwined, sweat and spice and shit. In his professional capacity, Bursar Bob had furnished Lil with a set of rules. Don’t drink the water, don’t reveal too much flesh, don’t talk to the natives. The natives moved in droves, haughty and disparaging, or crouched like raptors on the ground throwing dice and hissing.
‘Your Arab,’ Bursar Bob had said, ‘should not be encouraged, particularly by such flowers of Empire.’
‘I love it,’ Lil had whispered, ‘when he talks flowery.’
I am not a flower of anybody’s empire, Anita thought savagely.
They trod daintily through the narrow, arcaded streets and dark alleyways in their floral frocks and strappy sandals in search of civilisation, which Bursar Bob had assured them existed. A troop of soldiers on camels and bearing flagstaffs passed them by; there was a constant traffic of skinny boys on overburdened donkeys, but they ended up dusty, tired and disappointed. Bursar Bob had failed to materialise so Lil had an excuse to be downcast. Anita, Mew and Stasia had less reason, but as happened constantly during their voyage they infected one another with their moods.
They had planned to buy trinkets but there weren’t shops as they knew them; there were small dingy stores, but they sold only household goods and provisions. There were rickety stalls set up on street corners stacked with strange fruit but, schooled as they were in Bursar Bob’s precautionary fear, they didn’t linger long enough anywhere to get engaged. If a stallholder addressed them, they imagined they were being mocked or cursed.
Eventually they found the Crescent Hotel recommended by Bursar Bob (‘The Queen stayed there!’). They flopped gracelessly in the tea rooms, perspiring heavily in their soiled finery. It was a high-ceilinged establishment with tiled floors and cane furniture. Terracotta urns housed spidery ferns, which whispered in the deliciously cool air generated by the snappish whirr of ceiling fans working away like trapped winged creatures. They ordered iced tea and petits fours, fanning themselves with the menu cards while a slippered boy waiter, wearing a fez and starched whites, padded from table to table bearing decorated trays of shivering china. It was a reprieve from the onslaught of sensation − and heat − outside, and they wallowed in it.
Lil was distracted – as ever – by the prospect that Bursar Bob, having recommended the Crescent, might actually turn up there himself, so she kept a beady eye on the revolving doors while Mew and Stasia bickered over the tepid tea and the tots when the bill came. Anita excused herself and went in search of the Ladies’ Room. She hoped it wasn’t going to be one of those holes in the floor that Bursar Bob had warned them about.
A sign with an elaborate curlicued finger pointed downstairs and Anita followed it down one flight of steps and then another, finding herself in a dark brown corridor lined with louvred doors. Like the saloon bars in a Western, she thought. It was warm down here, warm and airless, and she found her forehead beading and her underarms dampening again. She ploughed on to the end of the corridor but it was a dead end. She must have made a wrong turning, or gone too far. She was about to retrace her steps when one of the doors opened and a man stood there, guarding the door with his arm. He wore a high turban-like thing on his head, flecked with black and white, and what looked like a white nightshirt with a pair of pyjamas underneath. His skin was the colour of treacle. He smiled at her quizzically, as if he had lost his way and was about to ask for directions. Instead he made a small, chuckling sound. She noticed the large gap between his front teeth that made his otherwise placid face – steady brown gaze, a flared nose – look comical.
‘I was just …’ she began. But he probably had no English.
She did not want to be rude and simply turn her back on him in case he’d think her haughty. He dropped his arm and pushed the louvred door back. Was he inviting her in, she wondered. Or daring her? She should not go in, she told herself, but out of politeness she found herself stepping into a tiny room more constricted than Cabin C12, even with four girls in it. There were two cots; the bottom one where the man had been lying – sleeping? – showed signs of disarray. It was spitefully hot inside. Hanging from the window frame was a blue uniform like the shadow of another man quenching the white block of light. It had brass buttons and gold epaulettes and a name tag over the breast pocket; she saw he was Mohammed. He closed the door behind her silently and shot a rickety bolt across to lock it. Now she should be panicking, she told herself. Now she should be crying out, screaming Help, Help! – This was exactly the kind of thing the bursar had warned them against. But she didn’t do any of these things. She noticed he was barefoot and this, somehow, made him seem less threatening. Slowly he began to unwind his headgear as if he were unfurling a plait of hair and let it slither to the floor. He gestured to her. She unbuttoned her cardigan and peeled it off. It was like a game of forfeits where the moves had already been decided. He caught the hem of his tunic and whipped it off over his head; she inched down the zip of her dress working blindly behind her back. She lifted it away from her − the bodice of it was stiff and when she dropped it on the floor it stood for a minute or two before surrendering and falling. Standing in her vest and pants, she faced him in his loose pantaloons swathed around his loins. Soon, she thought, he will speak and then I will return to my senses, but he didn’t. He put his hand to her face and crushed her mouth into a buckled rose so that even if she had wanted to speak, his mouth on hers would have prevented it. He led her by that kiss to the crumpled bed and they fell on it together. She thought of the crudest, most knowing thing she could do. She thought of her mother. She opened her legs.
Afterwards, she gathered up her spilled clothes and swiftly dressed. She slid the lock back and looked behind her before she stepped outside. He lay there, spent, but watching her intently. Although he showed no signs of moving, she made a fugitive dash for the stairway and started the climb up into the light, her thighs throbbing, her heart agape. Stasia was standing at the head of the stairs in the lobby of the hotel.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ she asked. ‘We’ve been looking all over for you. Lil and Mew had to go on ahead.’
‘I got lost,’ Anita said.
At Colombo, the Australis moored some way off from the port. Squat white buildings quivered on the horizon; rowing boats jostled in the swell the ship brought. Men stood on the buffeting boats and called up to the towering decks, beads and trinkets threaded through their fingers, while their empty nets trailed disconsolately in the choppy waters. Sahib! From this distance, Anita wasn’t sure if they were even selling anything; they might, with their glossy hair and squinting smiles, have been simply pleading for mercy. Sahib!
A tender ferried passengers ashore but only Mew took up the offer. Lil was having a pig of a period, and Stasia was penning a letter to Frank W. Anita lay out on one of the timbered deckchairs strewn around the pool, like a giant watery eye on A deck, deserted. She felt bereft of curiosity. The floating world of the Australis was her only interest now and, when she allowed herself to remember it, the scalding memory of submitting to the golden man in Aden. It wasn’t that it had been unpleasant; even when he had borne down on her he had not been rough. There was something athletic about the way he had moved whereas she had felt like a burden – a white flour sack – that must be manoeuvred into place. When he’d done – that – an unbearable spear of pleasure ran through her, a piercing sensation followed by a hollow falling. But in the girls’ company, she was smugly silent. She had gone beyond the
m, left them behind with their useless and florid romantic speculations. When she thought about Aden, the secrecy of the encounter gave her more pleasure than the memory.
The entire ship celebrated when the Equator crossed the international dateline. Anita wondered why. These were imaginary lines on a map, but, by that stage of the journey, what had once absorbed their interest – the moody changes of the ocean, the flowery foam of the ship’s wake, even the heartbreaking sweep of alien sunsets − had dimmed. All that could rouse them now was noisy diversion. It was a calm evening, a starry night. On went the summer frocks they had not worn since Aden, though they had to throw on their northern hemisphere coats and woolly cardigans to ward off the chilly southerlies. Lil wore a pair of evening gloves. This was the night she intended to bag Bursar Bob and, sure enough, at some time in the small hours the pair of them slipped away. Mew danced showily with Viktor Varga. He was courtly with her; she was tipsy and broke her heel. At midnight, the ship’s hooter was blown three times, echoing eerily over the night wash of waves, a puny reminder to the elements that they had had been there, a nautical graffito. Later the stewards blacked up and slung grass skirts over their whites and did a high-kicking dance on A deck, as the passengers clapped and hollered, and snaked around the pool, conga-style.
‘C’mon,’ Mew urged her, having abandoned Viktor, but she couldn’t join the raucous carnival; it seemed disloyal.
After the Equator it was all downhill. The blanched decks, even the Brisbane bar, lost their appeal. Their hygiene took a knocking; they took to bathing less; their bars of sugar soap lay unused for days on end. They started to skip meals because they were too lazy to rise and dress. Their lethargy had found its natural home – an ocean-going liner adrift in an endless sea. They dozed on their distressed bunks, abandoned by dreams, sinking deeper into a comradely lassitude, as if even their sleep had become bored with them. In the privacy of the cabin they could no longer face one another; they turned towards the wall and escaped into sleep. When Anita did venture up on deck there were fewer and fewer passengers around. It seemed as if they were losing people overboard.
When they entered Fremantle, they did lose half their number. Mew said goodbye noisily in the cabin. She wept and had to blow her nose a lot. Even her swept-up hair had a distressed look. It looked in danger of imminent collapse as she backed out the door with her beauty bag in tow.
‘I’d sooner stay,’ she said, ‘and go with you girls to Sydney.’
Stasia was disembarking too, though Mr Sheep Farmer was still another day’s journey away.
They waved Mew and Stasia off, then Lil retreated to Bursar Bob’s office on B deck. With the Australis on Antipodean time, the clock was ticking loudly. Where once their association had been impossible, now it was doomed and required a great deal of mournful attention. Anita stayed on deck, looking down at the speck that was Stasia standing on the quay with her two cardboard suitcases, waiting for her trunk to be unloaded. She seemed forlorn standing there, fingering her ringless hand. The sight of Stasia, so tiny and singular, made Anita afraid. She was suddenly overcome with a mesmeric weakness, her breath coming sharp and shallow. The sea sparkled maliciously; the sky sick with cloud. She felt all at once her own invisibility and the terrible asthma of distance as if the world might at any moment inhale and swallow her whole. Viktor Varga came upon her like this.
‘Your Scottish friend? She is gone?’ he asked, meaning Mew.
She made to speak, but when she opened her mouth the wind rushed in and choked her. Viktor fished in his capacious jacket pocket and produced a brown paper bag.
‘Here,’ he commanded gruffly, ‘breathe into this.’
He placed a grounding hand on her shoulder. The crinkled brown paper inflated and crumpled before her eyes, eclipsing all else. Viktor kept time. When her breathing subsided he took the bag away. Then he wrapped his big arms around her.
‘Lento,’ he said, rubbing her back, ‘lento.’
She was glad Mew couldn’t see this; she’d have accused her of moving in on Viktor.
After Fremantle she and Viktor seemed to gravitate towards each other. With the girls gone – and Lil fully occupied – Anita couldn’t bear the silence of the cabin. Viktor, too, came up out of the Brisbane bar. He’d lost much of his audience and the ship itself seemed intent on throwing them together. She would come across him on deck, not gazing out over the water or raising his face to the spitting sun, but bent over, sunk in contemplation, his hands linked prayerfully. Sometimes she thought of telling Viktor about what had happened in Aden. But it would have been too much like confession, appealing to an older man with a benedictory hand. She was done with that; particularly now. So they just stood together, two figures linked by silence, and that other unlikely association – that he had clamped a paper bag over her mouth to save her.
If their departure had been a blizzard of noise, their disembarkation on Circular Quay was stealthy and unmarked by ceremony. The Australis, having embraced a crowd, seemed to want to exhale its passengers one by one. When the time came, Lil was nowhere to be seen, probably off with Bursar Bob, so Anita left Uncle Ambrose’s address scrawled with Lil’s lipstick on the mirror in the cabin.
She was shepherded with the crowd into a large arrivals shed through which they had to be processed. It was there she found Uncle Ambrose, ducking and weaving through the crowd at the far, dim end of the shed, trying to find a free place at the barrier. She felt suddenly shy at the sight of him. But when she finally made it to the barrier he opened wide his arms.
‘There you are!’ he said. ‘Didn’t think I’d recognise you. But sure you haven’t changed a bit.’
Haven’t I? she wanted to ask.
Over Ambrose’s shoulder, Viktor Varga came into view, suitcase in hand. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie askew, damp patches of sweat under his arms. The heat seemed to make a fool of him. She disengaged and Ambrose wheeled around.
‘You must be the uncle,’ Viktor said, stretching out his hand to shake Ambrose’s. Ambrose eyed him warily. ‘Your niece speaks of you.’
‘This is Viktor,’ Anita offered. ‘Viktor Varga.’
‘Good man,’ Ambrose said and began to move away.
Viktor put a restraining hand on his arm.
‘Maybe your boys like to learn the rudiments of music, yes?’
He set down his case and took a battered-looking notebook out of his pocket. Uncle Ambrose grudgingly obliged with his address, then snatched the book from Viktor halfway through because he was having trouble with the dictation.
‘Good man,’ he repeated with a forced heartiness as he scrawled out his phone number. Then, irritated, he tugged on Anita’s arm and bustled her away.
‘Rudiments of music, me arse,’ he muttered as they made their way through the crowds. ‘Has his eye on you, more like. Bloody foreigners!’
Anita stole a glance over her shoulder. The bloody foreigner was standing forlornly between two large hatches of forbidding sun-glare, the entrance where they’d come in from the quay and the exit towards which Ambrose was steering her. Steeped in swampy shadow, Viktor was looking directly at her, appealing, but for what she didn’t know. She considered waving to acknowledge their closeness. Yet what exactly was it but silence, an unspoken complicity? Instead, she turned away, not wanting to acknowledge the small stab of betrayal she felt. Ambrose took her hand and led her towards the light. They stepped into glorious sun-drench.
The great expanse of the harbour opened up before her. The white-capped water shimmered, playful like an ocean on a buried treasure map. The bridge arched in a pocket of blue.
‘Here it is,’ Ambrose declared, pointing towards the scene as if he had painted it himself. ‘The beginning of a new life!’
But despite the rinsed sky and the bracing blueness, Anita didn’t believe it. Her new life had already started. It wasn’t out there; it was growing inside her.
CLODS
Clods hit the coffin lid. It was a country funeral. T
hey didn’t go in for covering up the grave with what looked like a carefully cut sod of golf course.
‘Thanks,’ Louis said.
‘For what?’ Norah tugged at his sleeve playfully as they turned away from the graveside. It was an unruly day of spring, blustery and grey, the new-leaved trees tossed as if by grief. The wind shivered as they led the mourners down the ragged path between the furred gravestones. She wasn’t sure if she should link him. It seemed too proprietorial; he no longer belonged to her, after all. Neither had she been sure of whether to wear black. Would that be laying claim to a grief that didn’t belong to her either? (In the end she chose a Lenten purple.) Norah had not cared much for Louis’s mother but only because she sensed his mother did not care much for her. It had been the first time she had encountered hostility for its own sake. The mere fact of her had been enough. And, of course, she was spiriting away Mrs Plunkett’s only son.
The noonday pub smelled of damp coats and the night before. There was a further round of condolences as neighbours came up and pumped his hand, saying simply ‘Louis’ as if his name were an incantation of mourning. Norah went to sit in a corner under the dartboard. He caught her eye above the knot of people gathered at the bar and cocked an eyebrow, part query, part apology.
‘A hot whiskey,’ she called.
He clapped his thighs in search of his wallet, then hitched up the tails of his overcoat and rummaged in his pockets. If Norah missed anything from her former marriage it was the knowledge of those trademark gestures, so familiar, so typical, so male. These too had once been hers.
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