On River Road

by Chris Else

  Larry and Sylvia’s. The room with the white walls, the paintings, the bookshelves, the ranchsliders that opened, on a summer’s day, to a terrace and the garden. Shut now, shadowy reflection, like a ghost out there of the world in here. There were three leather sofas and two chairs around a big low table, bottles and glasses and nibbles on the wooden surface. Colin and Heidi were here already, on opposite sides. Larry sitting in his usual spot, in the chair with his back to the windows, long legs stretched out, a whisky in his left fist.

  Smiles and greetings as they came in, words like pats of reassurance. Ward felt a wrench in his chest, a little stab of happiness. His friends, warm and welcoming and all together, coming together, to the centre, which was this place tonight although it could have been anywhere that everyone agreed on. He would risk a lot for the chance of this, even the possibility of facing his own conscience. He stood at the table, looking down at the bottles. Help yourself. That was the rule.

  A passable Aussie red and a white of some kind stuck in a plastic wine-cooler. The Gar Valley Sauvignon. Not too chilled? Beads of water on the green glass. He poured for Maddy, one for himself, felt the little flush of expectation around the root of his tongue. Maddy was sitting in the sofa, facing the ranchsliders, with Sylvia in the chair to her right. He lowered himself down beside her, gave her her glass, and then he lifted his own, sniffed at it, nostrils wide, huffing up a big dollop of the freshness. Sipped, rolled the liquid round his mouth. Nice and clean, lime pushing up against the gooseberry. Let it slide down. Long, smooth finish. Smacked his lips. Not bad. Yummy.

  ‘So how are things with you?’ Maddy said, looking round the room. She turned to Sylvia. ‘How’s Josie?’

  ‘Oh, God!’ Sylvia said.

  ‘She is sick?’ Heidi looked worried.

  ‘She’s a clever little minx,’ Larry said.

  Sylvia started explaining to Heidi, something about a praying mantis.

  ‘We’ve just concluded a negotiation,’ Larry went on. ‘A hundred dollars’ compensation and a lock on her room.’

  ‘Maybe she should be a lawyer.’ Ward was half listening to Sylvia, trying to get the gist.

  ‘Ha!’ Larry raised his voice. ‘Ward reckons she should be a lawyer, Syl.’

  ‘God no. One in the family’s enough.’

  ‘Keeps you in the manner to which you refuse to become accustomed.’ He turned to Colin. ‘Are women less corruptible than men? Or is it a class thing? I mean, here I am, a ragged-arse from South Shields, and as soon as I get a sniff of money I’m into it like a randy ape, whereas Sylvia, who’s your average upper-middle-class doctor’s daughter, born to privilege, gets desperately embarrassed because she has to drive a BMW.’ Larry leaned forward, picked up the bottle of Scotch, sloshed another measure into his glass, reached out for the water jug, just a touch to cut the spirit. Good old Larry. Face and bald head flushed already, gluey look in his eyes.

  Ward sipped his wine and let his mind drift off into a vague contentment. Hazy images and blurred connections, something indistinct beneath the fuzz of satisfaction, something about his schooldays in the third form at Winston Grammar when he had first met the boy from South Shields, a thin kid with a floppy mop of blond hair, skinny legs and knees like cricket balls, an accent so thick you couldn’t tell if he was swearing or not but you guessed he was, most of the time. Ward, the stumble-foot, the lumpy boy, had spotted a fellow outcast and taken his chance. And the two of them teamed up, against the world. A perfect pair. A pair of opposites. Fat and thin, slow and quick, dumb and smart. But it worked somehow. And then Colin came along and they were three. And it wasn’t a crowd. Oh, no. It was better than ever. How had it happened?

  He leaned forward to the table, to the little bowls of food there. Nuts and crackers and dips and olives. Corn chips and guacamole. Sylvia’s guacamole? Ah! A scoop of a chip into the green paste, lifting to his mouth, the scrunch, the cold, the slide and sharp taste, smooth of avocado, twist of garlic, feather of paprika. That was it, maybe, the flick of paprika on the end of the vinegar. He should talk to Maddy about that.

  ‘Justice?’ Larry was in full flight, waving his drink-free arm. ‘Justice is a ritual, that’s all. It’s like getting married. Blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah. I now pronounce you guilty of murder.’

  ‘That can’t be right,’ Heidi said.

  ‘Why not?’

  The doorbell rang. Tom and Lisa. Ward felt a sudden panic. But no, it was all right. It would be perfectly all right.

  Sylvia put her glass down on the table, stood up, started moving towards the door.

  ‘He’s just being cynical,’ she said over her shoulder.

  ‘If I wasn’t a cynic, I’d have to be a fool,’ Larry called, grinning, supping his whisky, a lip-smacking sup.

  ‘But for truth?’ Heidi gave a kind of shrug, like it was obvious.

  Larry laughed. ‘There’s no truth in a court of law. There’s only evidence. And evidence is a story told by a witness.’

  ‘Forensic fiction,’ Colin said.

  ‘That’s right, my friend. The Law is literature.’

  Through the door came Lisa, tall, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Casual and confident and sexy in a rangy sort of way. Ward stood up to greet her, wondered, as always, quite how things would work with Colin and Heidi here in the same room, whether anything would happen.

  ‘Hi,’ Lisa said, scanning the group.

  The greeting was for everybody, and Ward felt a bit foolish because he was the only person on his feet. But that was for a reason, of course. His awkwardness. He wanted forgiveness. But how could they forgive him if they didn’t know what he’d done? Tom, coming in behind Lisa, making it worse. ‘Good to see you,’ Ward said, stepping forward. ‘Great to see you.’ Offering his hand, his bad hand. What else could he do? And everything in the room seemed to disappear except Tom’s eyes.

  Tom shook the hand carefully, a considerate touch, but there was still a little flare in the flesh, all the same.

  ‘Ward, how’s it going?’

  ‘Good, good.’ Ward found it hard to look at him but he managed it. Tom’s eyes were difficult. They seemed to stare right into you and Ward had to remind himself that Tom couldn’t really do that. He couldn’t see and he wouldn’t know.

  Lisa was sitting down beside Maddy in the place Ward had left. Of course. She wouldn’t sit next to Colin or Heidi. And Tom and Colin couldn’t sit together. Ward picked up his glass from the table and moved around, lowered himself down beside Colin. ‘How’s it going?’ he said.

  ‘Lovely, mate. Just lovely.’ A grin, a sarcastic sort of grin, that Ward didn’t really understand. Colin and Heidi were sitting on opposite sides. As far apart as possible? A tiff there? Heidi was wearing a white blouse and black pants, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. Severe-looking. Serious. Ward didn’t like the thought of the two of them fighting.

  Tom and Heidi were sitting together, carefully not touching and not talking, although neither of them was conscious of the care they took. They were the odd ones out here, the interlopers, the Johnny-and-the-Jenny-come-lately, so it was perhaps appropriate, or ironic, that the two of them should be paired, however awkwardly, and listening now, as Colin told a joke.

  It was a joke he had picked up from the Internet and he was telling it with the natural skill of a raconteur who found himself the centre of a group: the words coming easily, the tone rising and falling to match the rhythm of his story and the voices of his protagonists, his eyes flicking round his audience without actually seeing them, just touching their attention, feeling their attention, as a dog might stretch itself in the nourishing warmth of a fire. He was drunk by now, of course, his face flushed with wine. The flop of hair that he combed over his bald spot had begun to come awry. He was comfortable, confident. A creature in its element.

  ‘So, the blonde in question goes into a shop and asks the shopkeeper if she can use the phone because she wants to call her mother urgently.

  ‘“Fine,�
�� says the shopkeeper. “But it’ll cost you five dollars.” He is a grasping little swine, you see.

  ‘“Oh, dear,” says the blonde. “I’ve got no money and I really need to call my mother.”

  ‘But the shopkeeper insists.

  ‘“I’ll do anything,” says the blonde, “only just let me make the call.”

  ‘“Anything?” says the shopkeeper.

  ‘“Anything at all.”

  ‘So the shopkeeper locks his door, puts a Gone-to-Lunch sign in his window and takes the blonde into the back room.

  ‘“Kneel down,” he says.

  ‘So she kneels down.

  ‘“Unzip my fly,” he says.

  ‘So she unzips his fly.

  ‘“Take it out,” he says.

  ‘So she takes it out.

  ‘“Now do it,” he says.

  ‘“Do it?” The blonde looks at him a bit puzzled.

  ‘“Yes. Do it!”

  ‘So the blonde leans forward and she says, “Hello, Mother, are you there?”’

  Laughter. They all laughed, even Sylvia, who had precipitated the joke by claiming that nothing could be dirty or prejudiced and, at the same time, funny. They all laughed except Heidi. And Tom. Tom had begun to laugh but then he sensed the tension next to him, the coolness. Was it physical, that shift in temperature? He turned his head a little to take in Heidi’s profile. Her face was still, blank. No angry compression in the lips, no knot of tension over the bridge of her nose. The smooth cap of her golden hair gleamed in the light.

  After a joke there is always silence, a second or two of silence, no more, because a joke is a story, like a trial, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and after an end you must pick yourself up and start again. At the stretch of this particular silence Tom turned to Heidi more obviously and said, ‘What are your plans?’

  She did not answer immediately, didn’t move. The pause was long enough for him to look where she was looking. At Colin. But Colin was oblivious. He was leaning towards Larry, bending his head to catch a whisper. He was grinning. He seemed pleased with himself.

  ‘Plans?’ she said then, turning to Tom.

  ‘How’re the dahlias?’ He was not sure why he had used the word ‘plans’.

  ‘I am not so busy at the moment. But I think I start lifting next week.’

  A bit early? Perhaps.

  ‘I can take more this year,’ he said. ‘If you have them.’

  ‘That’s good. You want them like last time? In the pots, when they bloom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We will talk about it. Colours etcetera.’

  He noticed her eyes, how blue they were, and the length of her lashes. When she blinked they were like little golden awnings coming down. He was struck by her strangeness — not the fact that she was foreign but the sense of her being, warm and conscious and alive, as if the scent of her reached out and curled around him.

  ‘I think I have a good one,’ she went on. ‘A semi-cactus. Red. Very big. Very dark.’

  ‘I like the semi-cactus best. I always think they are the true dahlia.’

  ‘It’s not for sale this year because I don’t know if it can divide. It’s a wonderful colour, like blood. Of course, I can’t show you. It is just a tuber right now.’ A shrug of her shoulders, right hunched higher than the left.

  ‘A baby.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘To the baby.’ He lifted his glass and she followed suit, a little clink, barely audible. She was grinning and he felt a quick touch of sadness, just the stroke of a feather. Was it hers or his own? He wanted to lean over and kiss her there, where the dimples showed at the corners of her mouth, the double-curl in the flesh at the side like quotation marks at the end of her smile.

  ‘I have a photo,’ she said. ‘You can come and see my photo, if you wish.’

  ‘I wish.’

  ‘And I must thank you. I’m grateful that you take my stuff. It makes me feel like a professional grower.’

  ‘You will be one day.’

  ‘Of course. My Empire of the Flowers.’

  This is the circle, these people around this table. If you look at it from the outside, you can see it for what it is, but from the inside, if you’re a member of it, you know only the others filling your field of vision. Take Lisa, for instance. Right now, she looks across at Larry, grinning with his loopy grin and a mad glint in his eye, and at Colin, leaning towards him, eager with the urge of his own wit. She sees (does she notice?) that the top of Colin’s polo-neck is not rolled properly. There is a diagonal ruck in the black fabric along the side of his throat. In the old days, she might have fixed that, perhaps as they stood in the hall before they went out. She might have reached up and straightened it, and maybe he would have put his hand on her shoulder as she did it. Maybe he would have said, ‘Where would I be without you?’ or something equally meaningless. Well, they both know the answer to that one now, although Lisa doesn’t think it out consciously. Not at this moment. She sees but she isn’t aware. She feels a kind of sadness but she doesn’t know why. What she misses, in some part of her, is the right to touch. Not sex but the little moments that came with living close, the intimacy. These days she can kiss anyone in the room, except Colin.

  The feelings play within the circle. The bonds have settled in over the years. None of it is realised but all of it is real. Lisa’s relationship with Larry, for example. Way back then, when they were eighteen, they were in the same English tutorial and he asked her out. He was tall and narrow, like a reed, with shoulder-length blond hair and that same wicked grin, ironic and self-effacing, designed to draw you in and hold you off against the chance you might reject him. Black leather jacket and blue jeans tight on his pipe-cleaner legs. And a motorbike. She didn’t like the bike. It was too big, too fast, too much like giving up control. But she went to the movies with him, clinging on behind him like a monkey. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. No memory of it now. No memory much of anything, even the kiss goodnight, his lips cold and smoky. Could there ever have been more to it, if she’d wanted to pursue it, if it hadn’t been for her best friend Sylvia, wide-eyed and eager? My boyfriend? No, he’s not my boyfriend. You can have him. But don’t forget that I introduced you to him. Just as I won’t forget that he introduced me to his best mate, Colin Wyte, who had a car, let me tell you. A Daimler Dart. Always a touch of class, our Colin.

  But she wasn’t thinking of such things. She didn’t feel them even. They were no more than the murmur in the background of her everyday, the fabric of her mind, the tone of consciousness. Because even at the tender age of forty-three we forget more than we remember.

  She sipped her wine and realised that Ward was looking at her, watching with that mournful way of his. He brightened up when she met his eyes and grinned at her hopefully, wanting attention in his usual way — a little obligation that drew her to him automatically. She leaned over towards him and he to her, his elbow jutting over the arm of the sofa, his scarred right hand resting stiff wristed on the leather, the last two fingers knuckled tight. She didn’t really think about the hand, hardly saw it these days.

  ‘Front page,’ she said. ‘With luck.’ The sounds she made tasted strange, thin and sour, like a lie.

  ‘Great!’

  ‘I hope it’ll help.’

  ‘Oh, yes. For sure.’ He nodded and swallowed, his larynx crawling upwards into the flab beneath his chin. He was pleased. She could tell he was pleased, but she did not know whether pleasing him was something she cared about.

  ‘The police made a recommendation,’ she said, because it seemed she had to go on speaking. ‘In their report on the accident. A 50 k limit, all the way to Nick’s Creek.’

  ‘Did they? Who told you that? Your cop friend?’

  ‘My cop friend.’ Stan Andreissen. Was he a friend? She remembered his chuckle when she told him what she wanted, because he knew that she knew that even if the information wasn’t exactly classified it was against policy to reveal anythin
g at all except through official channels, in the proper form and wording. But Stan, of course, had the instincts of a spin-doctor. No other cop she knew could be quite so judiciously indiscreet in a good cause. And he was in love with her. She was aware of that, although she never could have said it, even to herself.

  ‘Deep throat, eh?’ Ward said.

  And because of what she never could have said, she took offence, feeling an innuendo, something sleazy there. But, of course, that couldn’t be right. This was Ward, the harmless one who never had a nasty thought, so decent you always felt obliged to him. The ambiguity brought a hesitation that stretched into awkwardness and the awkwardness into a need to pull away.

  ‘So,’ she said, sitting back. ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Yes.’ A little hurt look on his face, as if she’d rejected him.

  How could such a bumbling man be so sensitive? She didn’t understand him or herself at this moment and it didn’t matter. Or it wouldn’t matter, in the long run, because all these little ripples in the force field of their feelings were without importance. Or, at least, without an ultimate significance. They were like weather in this tiny microclimate.

  Larry was holding forth: ‘… but you don’t need any deep psychology to figure it out. Booze and linguistic poverty are at the root of most of it.’

  ‘Linguistic poverty? What is this?’ Heidi asked.

  ‘Inability to express your feelings. I had somebody lose it with me the other week. Total apoplectic rage. What does he start screaming? “Fuck the fuck you fucking fucker. Fuck your fucking fuck, I’ll fuck your fuck to fuck.” And, believe me, this bloke’s articulate compared to some of them.’

  ‘This is like animals,’ Heidi said.

  ‘Well, that’s right, Madam.’ Larry grinning. ‘Whip ’em into shape. Get ’em under control.’