‘Mercy, no!’ she hears Donny yell. ‘Run for it, Mercy, run!’
But the car is trundling sluggishly now, and Mercy can afford to let it go, and she springs up, and sprints alongside it and wrestles with the door handle and scrambles in. She is halfway down the drive, she can see her mother and Sarah on the verandah. She pushes the gear lever into reverse, and roars back out the gates. She swerves past Donny and presses her foot to the floor. Donny’s car turns in a skirl of dust and chases her. She is heading for nowhere. She is heading west, where nothingness is. Fifty, sixty, eighty, one hundred kilometres per hour. Donny’s car is gaining all the time. One hundred and twenty. One hundred and twenty-five.
She feels a wild and utterly fearless elation, and for the first time in her life understands the lure of stubby races, those outback death-meets where drivers guzzle an entire slab of beer stubbies while racing (right hand on the wheel, left hand holding the stubby, foot to the floor). The hummocky tufts of saltbush and the spiky bushes send the cars into orbit.
There are no tracks on the way to nowhere.
Anyone who reaches the finish line alive is a winner.
Have Donny and Tim been drinking? She cannot remember noticing if she smelt anything on Donny’s breath. They are closing in on her, drawing alongside. Are they going to ram her? She’s just ahead again, she can feel the hot breath of their car engine on her neck. At one hundred and thirty, she opens the door, hunches her shoulders, and hurls herself from the car. She rolls and rolls. She feels sandblasted. She feels as though someone has set her body on fire and is smashing her head with rocks.
She is dimly aware of a massive explosion, then another, and of a great ball of fire. Her ears sing a long high sustained note. Blackness comes up out of the earth to meet her.
Wednesday
Pointillism, Mercy thinks. That might be the right word for the pinprick swirls of dried blood. She has an earth rash on all exposed surfaces and on many unexposed ones, and touches herself gingerly, but each point of contact feels like a branding iron. Her thoughts swirl like smashed embers and scorch where they fall.
She keeps wishing again for the blank space that swallowed her one second after the explosion. There was no pain in that place, and no thinking. It was like black water. She longs to return there; she leans into the sweet currents of nothingness; she feels dizziness, nausea, a great racking wave of grief welling up. But just as she is gratefully swooning under, it passes. She is high and dry, stuck with consciousness.
Pointillism, she thinks fiercely, and for a moment the burning sensation that she wears like a body glove is soothed, but only for as long as she can hold the vowels inside her mouth. This is a word that invites exploration, a melodic word that wants to be sung as a brief falling phrase with sharp consonantal tips, though she is not at all sure of the pronunciation which is not explained in Dictionary of Great Paintings of the Western World, one of Miss Rover’s books. The illustrations in the Dictionary are not large and the paragraph on each painting is sometimes puzzling, as, for example: La Baignade by Georges Seurat (l859–l891). Mercy can see the heading, but has to turn pages in her mind to read off the entry, second from the top right-hand side.
One of the best known works of pointillism; that is, of the application of thousands of small dots of colour to the canvas. Looked at closely, the small dots of paint are apparent. From a distance, they blend to convey luminosity.
Mercy holds her arm at a distance and squints until the dots of dried blood blend. From this angle, blurred through her lashes, her arm is undeniably shimmering, her arm has a certain . . . how would she describe it? . . . she would have to say her arm has a certain luminosity, yes – another word she so rarely has a chance to use in Outer Maroo. But suppose she had been born somewhere else? Some place where Oyster had never closed everyone in on their shameful secrets? – in Brisbane, say; or in Boston; or in a village in Greece like Nick; and such hitherto unthought-of possibilities now tease and absorb her: the puzzle of where people happen to get born, and the difference this makes to their lives, and to the way they think. And what of the pointillist spikes of Mercy’s thoughts about yesterday? Mercy’s thoughts about yesterday do not bear thinking about, and she will not think them.
There are places where people think only in colour, in Paris, for instance, where Seurat and the Pointillists lived. Mercy imagines the pleasure of talking to painters, painters, and she has to pause and let her mind veer into a detour of amazement to ponder the idea of people who might say in Beresford’s, over the fencing wire: ‘Well, yeah, I’m a painter actually, been painting since the drought got serious,’ and might say it quite casually, in the way that other people said, ‘I’m a drover, mate; been taking cattle from the Top End to the Brisbane Yards since before the Year of the Flood.’
Mercy believes she would be more at ease in a world of people who think in colour. She tries to imagine Seurat and his friends in a pub in Paris. Mercy is there surreptitiously, out of sight, drying the glasses for Jess, keeping well below the windowline in case Mr Prophet or one of the elders passes by. She can see Seurat leaning on the bar with his foot on the rail, which happens to be the spitting brass image of the foot-rail in Bernie’s.
Seurat is talking to Jess, ‘. . . working on several studies,’ Mercy hears him say, ‘at the moment,’ he says, and he is watching the way the light falls amberly through his beer, ‘of the Sea of Null,’ he explains. He does not talk with motionless lips, as people in Outer Maroo talk, nor with a heavy nasal drag. Far from it. Mercy knows exactly how he would speak because she has heard on Miss Rover’s radio, and on Jess’s radio, the kind of voice that painters have. Seurat speaks beautifully, the way announcers do on the BBC World Service, except of course in French, ‘. . . hope to capture the luminosity of salt pans,’ he says, ‘with grains of white.’ He has flecks of light in his eyes, and the white-hot sun, which pushes itself like peppershot through Bernie’s blinds: ‘. . . why I’m salting my canvas with spots,’ he explains, ‘though one can never truly pinpoint light.’
Jess smiles and says nothing, and Mercy floats, the golden light bears her up, and Monet is there too, a little like Nick perhaps, and he leans across the bar from the facing page of the Dictionary. ‘For luminosity,’ he says, and he is pushing his empty stubby across the bar, ‘I find smudging works better. You’ll never capture the haze,’ he says, ‘and you’ll never capture mirages with your method.’
They are both of them, Seurat and Monet, washed in mauve and gold light, and through the windows of the pub, through the translucent parchment of the blinds, the red earth is strangely thick with wild poppies that have bloomed in the wake of a cyclone, and inside, where the light is softest, waterlilies float in the puddles of beer on the floor, and the face of Donny Becker floats there too, reflected and golden (not yet erupting into soot and rockets of flame), but when Bernie comes out of the back room and takes more stubbies from the fridge, Mercy finds that she cannot stop Ma’s Bill from butting in with some stupid smart-alec remark. Hey, Seurat, he will say (Mercy knows he will have to put his tuppence-ha’penny-worth in), hey, Seurat, you’re dotty, mate!
That is the trouble with Outer Maroo.
‘A real painting,’ Miss Rover said, back in classroom days, back when Mercy mooned over her books after school, back when Miss Rover was still there to answer questions, ‘is as different from those postage-stamp prints as a real kiss is different from reading about one.’
‘Oh,’ Mercy said, thinking of Donny Becker’s hand on her leg in prayer meeting.
‘Most of those paintings, for example,’ Miss Rover said, ‘are huge. They are not done on flat paper, but on canvas stretched tight on a wooden frame. An actual painting is vibrant with texture. You can’t just look at it passively. It grabs you by the scruff of the neck.’
From memory, Mercy projects the little square of La Baignade, enlarged, on to the canvas of her mind. The boy on the green bank, in red swimming trunks, dangles his legs in the wate
r. He is full of sharp points and spaces. He turns and looks at Mercy in a particular way, a luminous way, so vibrant that she cannot resist the urge to touch him and finds herself caressing the blue bolt of cloth from which Alice Godwin’s mother ordered ten metres. She presses her lips against Ma Beresford’s cash register. She sees that the boy has Donny Becker’s eyes and lopsided mouth, and also his freckles. I am fishing for lizards, he says. If I catch one, I’ll give it to you. She can feel his hand on her breast, but when he grabs her by the scruff of the neck and kisses her, he has the eyes of Gideon and of Nick. The moment his lips touch hers, he goes up in flames. Seurat was right, Mercy thinks, breathless. People are full of flashbulb spots and blank spaces.
According to the book that smoulders away in Aladdin’s Rush, Seurat’s painting hangs in its full size, as its real and dot-dotted self, on a wall in Europe somewhere. It is difficult to believe in Europe, but Mercy makes an effort to take the continent’s existence on faith. After all, it requires just as much effort to sustain her belief in Aladdin’s Rush these days, and everyone knows that Aladdin’s Rush exists, everyone knows where it is, though no one dares to go there any more, and undoubtedly it has grown more fabulous since visits became too dangerous. Mercy embroiders it, perhaps. Perhaps she has added books to its secret store. The world is made of shifting points of sand which blow about and regroup themselves.
Seurat was right.
At Beresford’s, no one asks Mercy what happened to her face. No one comments on the pointillism of her arms and legs. No one mentions that the phone lines are dead. No one mentions Donny Becker or Tim Doolan. When someone disappears, Mercy has noticed, they drop from Outer Maroo as a star falls through space. They leave no mark. The air closes over them. You are never quite sure if something happened or if you imagined it or if everyone imagined it at once.
She closes her eyes and sees Donny’s bronzed arm on the door of the car. She remembers she thought of lurching forward a little, so that she might accidentally brush his arm with her lips, and now it seems to her that she can remember the taste of his skin. She can see his swollen veins, the way they run from elbow to wrist like the Macdonnell Ranges or like the Olgas on a relief map, and she can see the soft rust-gold pelt that she once felt against her own skin in the very shadow of the prayers of the faithful. Perhaps Donny twisted towards her, brushing aside the points of light, and whispered something in her ear. Maybe he said: We could have one hell of a bang, Mercy. Or possibly: I’m delivering sparklers. I’ve got a long one especially for you. The luminosity has to be seen to be believed.
She has his voice in her ear like a trapped mosquito: Mercy, I’m sorry! . . . Run for it, Mercy. Run.
Ten times an hour she hears him behind her. G’day, Mercy, he says, and grins. But when she turns around it is someone else. How is it possible, she asks herself, for people so suddenly to cease to be? It is not logical, it is not possible. How is it possible for people to do things you cannot believe they will do, that they themselves, perhaps, cannot believe they are doing or would ever do? We only know a few pinpoints of someone, Mercy thinks. We don’t know the spaces in between.
The spaces in between make Mercy dizzy. She is falling again, there is no bottom to this fall, there is nothing to hold her up.
She turns pages frantically in her mind.
The Pointillists studied refraction. They made a precise distinction between an object’s intrinsic colour and the colour it acquired from the light. They studied the interplay of one upon the other.
Donny Becker grows brighter and brighter, but where did his white light come from? Who painted him shamefaced in front of the congregation? As God is my witness, he said, I gave her a lizard but I wanted to touch her. I had impure thoughts in my heart.
Who painted him into a car with a target address?
Who watched all his intrinsic colour disappear into radiance and into shooting oranges and reds?
Mercy leans on the counter at Ma Beresford’s and sees herself reflected in its dull sheen as scarlet flypaper. She unfurls her sticky self to the world, she hangs from the ceiling by her bloodied, blackened feet. She draws flies to herself and when they touch her, pouff!, all their private colour goes up in smoke, and she is hurtling through dust again, she is crawling back, dragging herself, limping along towards her house . . .
She sees her mother again, she sees Sarah, she sees the verandah bucking about her like a kite, she is crawling back into yesterday, her hair singed, her body blackened, her ears behaving strangely and singing a long single high note that hums on and on and on . . . She is sitting in a deckchair and the world is Seurat-spotted, the world is a Monet fog of ochre and blue, the world floats about her like a dream.
‘This is shock, Mercy,’ Sarah says (that was yesterday; yesterday, late afternoon). Sarah is dabbing iodine on her skin. ‘Believe me, I recognise it, this unnatural calm, and this drifting off into another world. This is just the first stage.’
Was that only yesterday?
It is strange, Mercy thinks, the way time can behave like the Indiarubber Man, the way it can stretch itself out to infinity, the way it can shrink. Yesterday . . .
Clipping the singed ends from Mercy’s hair, Sarah talks on and on, as though she is afraid of silences, as though questions without answers might loom up through any of the gaps in her voice. It could mean, Mercy thinks, that Sarah is in a different stage of shock. You have to brace yourself, Sarah says, for the next stage, which is rage. And then there’ll be shame, and the sense of yourself as evil because you never meant to kill them. And there’ll be times of total panic, the panic you postponed. It’ll come back and swamp you, Sarah says. You’ll hardly be able to breathe.
‘I know about this,’ she says. ‘Believe me, I know. It’ll help if you tell us what happened.’
‘It was an accident,’ Mercy assures Sarah and her mother. ‘It was a stubby race, and they dared me, that’s all. It was the speed and the hot sun. It made the petrol tank explode.’
It could have been that, Mercy thinks. It could have been, it could have been. She would prefer this explanation. She thinks it must have been an accident. She begins to embroider this theory, she begins to make it her own.
To her father, hours later, she says nothing when they stand side by side, silent, alone, on the verandah in the dark. The planets dip by them. They stare at millions of stars.
‘That was a brave thing,’ he says gruffly.
The Milky Way wheels overhead.
‘There’s the Southern Cross,’ he says.
She knows that he means: the sign of the cross watches over us, all this is in the palm of His hand, His ways are inscrutable.
She wants to pound against his chest with her fists in exasperation almost as much as she wants to protect him from threat. He seems to her now like someone in a paper boat in the middle of floodwaters. Only his belief in the boat keeps him from certain inundation. Mercy cannot bring herself truly to want to argue the illusion out from under him, because what would happen to him then?
‘I found the dogs, Mercy,’ he says very quietly. ‘Both dead. Hit by a car. Don’t tell your mother.’
‘No. I won’t.’
‘I fear,’ he says quietly, ‘there’ll be more . . . accidents.’
The silence seems deafening to Mercy, and thick and soft like a blanket. It stretches itself out and flaps around them, muffling thoughts that neither of them want to hear. She keeps feeling dizzy. She keeps feeling blood seeping wetly from her limbs. Her skin is still on fire. The painkillers are like cottonwool packed around her ears.
‘I think,’ he says, clearing his throat, ‘that it would have been seen as a . . . as a further provocation on our part, inviting Mrs Cohen here.’
Of course, it would have been, it would have been. By everyone. I wanted to provoke Mr Prophet. The sudden awareness of reckless criminal intention winds Mercy, shocks her. But just the same . . . he is a sad kind of man, Mr Prophet; a man twisted out of shape by the pull
of his own barbed-wire beliefs. But is it possible that Mr Prophet . . . ? No. Mercy cannot seriously believe this. Mercy cannot seriously believe that any one human being could wish to engineer the death of any other, she cannot seriously believe that Donny Becker . . . No one’ll get hurt, Mercy . . . Run for it, Mercy, run . . . Mercy has no idea what to believe. Deaths must emanate, mysteriously, from the Old Fuckatoo, yes, that must be it; or from evil thinking, from Mercy herself, for example, who has carelessly wished to provoke; from heedless, reckless, provocative, whorish, Jezebel-ish Mercy, who harbours sinful thoughts in her heart.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ she says, in anguish. ‘I should have thought of you and Mum.’
‘No, no, no. It was the right thing to do. I didn’t mean that at all.’ He gestures up at the stars. ‘Our comfort and our strength, Mercy, is that we are each accountable only to God for our actions, and after that, whatever is going to happen is His will.’
Mercy has to hang on to the verandah rail. She closes her eyes, giddy, and waits for the buffeting torrent of irritation to pass. She asks in a low bitter voice, almost steady: ‘Everything that has happened has been God’s will? All of it?’
‘Evil comes from man’s failures, Mercy. Not God’s.’
‘Dad, I still feel dizzy – I have to sit down.’
‘Yes, oh, of course –’ And she leans on him until they reach the wicker chairs. His touch feels like glue. His God feels like a vast viscous stickiness. Wherever you step, God is already there. Mercy scrapes her feet, one at a time, against the rung of the chair. Around her, desert creatures make their ticking night sounds. Do they all find tracks that make sense? Mercy wonders: Does the sticky sap of desert grass hobble them? Do they burrow through the red dust in fear and trembling, always afraid of being lost, of being crazy, of being guilty of doing nothing, of being guilty of rash and heedless acts that breed death? Do their thoughts go round in useless circles?
‘I blame my own failures in particular,’ her father says heavily, ‘for what has happened in Outer Maroo.’
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