The box was heavy and it was a long way back to the house but with the sun setting over the lake and the sky full of seabirds squawking and the air so clean and clear that you could actually feel it pushing the bad air out, Elena didn’t feel the weight; or rather, felt it as a good thing, and the walk home through that alive and raucous twilight as the start of something good. Back at the house she prepared to settle in; she lit the beeswax candles, then the stove, and cooked herself an omelette with some vegetables cut into it. She couldn’t sleep on the bed with its nylon mattress so she took a candle out to the shed and found the rope hammock she and her brother used to lie in under the tree and strung it across the lounge room, anchored at either end by tying a knot and closing the window on it. She put the cotton and duck-down sleeping-bag on it for a mattress, and a cotton sheet and woollen blanket from the linen cupboard over that. She blew out the candles about nine.
In that small house in that faraway town Elena settled into a new routine that took its cue from nature. She woke early, ate a bowl of yoghurt or oats with warm milk, sitting on a kitchen chair in the sun, then she tidied the house and dug the garden. At around three each afternoon she would take a nap in the hammock in the lounge room, letting herself drift through mostly innocuous dreams until a bit after four when she would start thinking about dinner. The meal was always simple, made from the stuff she picked from the garden or had bought at the supermarket. While the evenings were still warm and the days long she ate outside at the little fold-up table on the veranda that looked down the grassy slope towards the lake. She always brought a couple of candles out there, stuck into her uncle’s old empty beer bottles, and would often stay until the sky darkened and the birds went crazy and the clumps of tea-tree and the grassy slope and the mountain range beyond turned ink black and all that was left was the glow from the lake. Then she would sit out there by candlelight, looking and listening for mosquitoes, slapping her skin and holding her hand up to see what she’d got (she couldn’t use repellent and had thrown the can out when she cleaned the shed), doing little else except occasionally looking out across the lake where on the nights when there were no clouds and a decent moon a silver sheen spread like sheet metal, broken only by the occasional fish breaching the surface or a bird paddling past or by a ripple from the breeze.
She wasn’t happy, that would be a strange thing to say, but she’d found a way to be content. She didn’t know how long this contentment would last, though compared to her moodiness, anger and confusion back in the city this might be as close to happiness as she’d get. She knew they’d come looking for her eventually, all those people who wouldn’t have missed her before, who wouldn’t have even known she existed. But she was a whole day’s travel away, had got almost to the border; if she kept her head down she’d be okay for a while. Maybe, she thought, she could take some of this good health back to the city with her? Maybe tell others what she’d found? You can’t preach for one life over another but you could always show by example.
So that was it, those were her days. Most mornings early she would take the old rod and reel from the shed and the bucket of sandworms she’d pumped at low tide and fish off the jetty below the house until she caught something for dinner. (At first the reel didn’t work; she took it apart, piece by piece, then cleaned and lubricated it with oil.) There were mussels, too, out on the rocks, and crabs in the estuary shallows. On moonless nights the prawns would run from the lake to the sea on the tide and all you had to do was stand near the entrance, look out for their frightened phosphorescent eyes and scoop them up in your net.
One morning when she was sitting outside drinking tea at the table a figure appeared at the bottom of the grassy slope where the track wound its way around the lake. She’d sometimes see fishermen walking that way, their rods glinting in the early light, but this figure didn’t have a rod and had now started to walk up the slope towards her. He pushed his way through the tea-tree and stopped at the fence.
Hello there! he said. Beautiful morning! I’m Lyall from around the corner. It was awkward. Elena sort of half smiled and waved. There was an excruciating pause before Lyall returned the wave and said: Well, have a nice day! Then he headed off back around the track.
The next morning at the same time he was there again, waving, calling out, and this time crawling through the wire and walking a few metres up the slope. You’re new, aren’t you? he said. Did you buy Peter’s place off him? Elena told him Peter was her uncle, he wasn’t well; then she left a long pause so Lyall might get the hint to go. Instead he walked a few more metres up. If you ever need a hand with anything, he said, just give us a yell, I’m only around the corner. For the first time Elena got a good look at him: a small-town bogan, early thirties, maybe older, with wiry hair cut into a mullet and a salt and pepper goatee beard. Even from that distance Elena could see the missing teeth.
One day Lyall didn’t come from the track but appeared suddenly from around the corner of the house. Elena was just finishing her breakfast, staring at the lake which on that morning held a soft green sheen. Lyall’s hair was wet and his goatee trimmed and he smelled of shampoo and aftershave. Good morning, he said, bouncing on his heels. You keep saying you’ll let me do things around the house for you but you never invite me up, so I’ve invited myself up anyway. After that there was a heavy silence. Look, I’m just being a good neighbour, said Lyall, glancing around for a chair to sit on; it’s a small town and pretty well everyone knows everyone so it’s best we know each other too. I’m Elena, said Elena, and she stood up to shake his hand. It was hard and callused, like an old man’s hand. I’ll get you a chair, she said. She went inside and came back out with a chair and set it down beside the table for him. Lyall sat on the very edge with his knees splayed and his hands gripping his thighs. So what’s your story? he said. Everyone here’s got a story. You don’t end up miles from anywhere like this unless you’re running away from something. Me, it was a bad marriage and then just badness generally. What about you?
Elena told him. She told him about the situation at home then how she fell sick and dropped out of school and didn’t know what was wrong with her. She told him about O’Breen and described what went on in his room in great detail. She listed her allergies and the symptoms of each. I’m allergic to the modern world, she said; not enough to kill me but enough to stop me and the modern world getting on. Even your aftershave, now, she said, and your shampoo; they’re making me feel not quite right. So I jumped on a bus and came here. Maybe it’s temporary, I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet.
I can go away, said Lyall, if the chemicals are bad; actually, you know, I don’t usually wear this stuff, unless I’ve got something special to go to which I don’t very much. Serves me right! Elena smiled. Maybe just go back a little way, she said, on that side over there, so the breeze will take it away.
Elena and Lyall kept talking, once Lyall had moved his chair. Elena’s mention of her allergies seemed to open up something in him. Like her, he was there to get away. The city’s no good, goodness has fled the city, said Lyall. When was the last time you met a good person there or saw an act of goodness or had some goodness done to you? Lyall explained how he had tried to make the city work for him but how the city was always conspiring against him and how it was not until he’d left and come here that he realised that he was actually in a perpetual struggle with the city, like Jacob with his Angel, he said, and that in fact every day lived in the ci
ty was a struggle with the city; there was always a part of you, even a subconscious part, fighting with it. He explained at great length how since coming in from the plains and dwelling in houses and suburbs the human species had always been engaged in this knock-down-all-in fight with the city which, Lyall insisted, it will never win. The odds are always stacked in Babylon’s favour, he said. We cling to civilisation’s veneer, the idea that once upon a time in a city somewhere someone painted a picture or built a beautiful building or made a beautiful piece of music and that therefore we city dwellers are closer to God, the Almighty. But no. We make paintings and palaces and symphonies but we also make shampoo and aftershave and petrol and plastic and pesticides and computers and computer games and pornography and chat rooms.
Elena loved listening to Lyall’s voice, the rise and fall of it, the plaintive rhythm, like an old train chugging off into the mist. It was not so much the words she was hearing as the soothing sound they made in the air. She let him go on; to her it seemed somehow that his voice was tuned to perfectly match their surroundings, that it was a voice that could as easily have been spoken by the trees, the grass, the birds, the lake or the waves on the other side of the bar, and it was surely the voice she had looked for and not found until now. Every other voice she’d heard was shallow, tinny, screeching; the voices of her friends, the voices on the radio, the television, the voices coming out of speakers in shopping centres and railway stations. All that cacophony had faded and here, right up close and at the same time somehow everywhere, was a voice spoken only for her.
The Lord’s people were desert dwellers, said Lyall, and the Lord gave unto Abraham all the land he could see to the north and south and east and west so He could make with Abraham a covenant that far from the cities of the Nile and the Euphrates these were his lands, the lands of the plain, and they were like unto the dust of the earth and if you could count the dust of the earth you could count their number and they were many. And the Lord with His mighty hand smote the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, said Lyall, and rained down fire and sulphur on them because the cities bred wickedness while Abraham’s people walked with God, they were pure and like unto the white lambs with their shepherd. And no city was spared God’s mighty wrath because in every city the wickedness of man was manifest. And He saw how it was not those iniquitous people of the city that were His chosen but those camped in tents under the stars, tending their flocks and moving across the plains, building stone altars and kneeling in the dust and bowing down to the Lord in honour and thanks; these were His people and these would be blessed and the others would be cursed. And when the Lord God’s only begotten Son came down from Heaven didn’t He too walk in the dust of Abraham and let the dust of Abraham’s people gather in the hem of His garments and didn’t He chase the moneylenders from the Temple and say: Woe unto thee Chorazin and Woe unto thee Bethsaida and Tyre and Sidon and thou Capernaum which shall be brought down to Hell? Yea verily we must turn our backs on the cities of the plain and not look behind lest we turn to salt. We must look up and find God, under the stars, in the trees, the grasses, the crystal water of the lake. Behold the birds of Heaven, they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin.
So I turned away, said Lyall, from the people of the city, and I did not look back while behind me, lo, the smoke went up as the smoke of the furnace and I came here, Elena, to start anew, to be with nature and through her closer to my God. And I didn’t look back then and don’t look back now—my wife, my children, they are dead to me, consumed in God’s mighty fire—and nor should you look back, now that you are here. Those allergies you talk of are the Devil’s work and the marks on your skin his stigmata, the Devil’s brands. Let Satan be cast behind—Get thee behind me, saith the Lord—so we might raise our eyes to God and see everywhere His good works.
Lyall visited every morning and every morning he spoke like this. They shared cups of tea on the chairs out in the sun and sometimes strolled down the grassy slope and stood looking at the lake. Soon it seemed right that Elena should visit Lyall, and she did. He drew a map of the path from her house to his and one morning carrying the oatmeal biscuits she’d baked she followed it around the lake until she came to the tree with the white mark on it that pointed the way up through the bush.
Lyall’s house was not so much a house as a shack, built in among the trees from rough-sawn planks, second-hand timbers, odd weatherboards and sheets of ply and scavenged windows and doors under a corrugated roof. There was a sort of sitting area outside with an old wooden table and a couple of chairs. Above Lyall’s door a wooden cross was fixed, and painted on the door itself in one continuous white line—head, body, tail—was a fish. There was a small dog tied to a stake nearby, a scrawny, mangy thing; it didn’t bark at Elena’s approach but just whined and squeezed its tail a little harder between its legs.
Lyall heard Elena coming and stood at the door to greet her. Welcome! he said. Elena wore her uncle’s clothes on the days her own clothes were drying and on this day she had on a pair of creased brown trousers rolled up at the cuffs and pulled in at the waist, and a light blue shirt with vertical white stripes. The day before she’d cut her hair short with blunt scissors. Sit down! Sit down! said Lyall.
It was peaceful out there in the bush, you could hardly hear the waves but there were plenty of other sounds: insects, birds, the scuffling and rustling of animals in the undergrowth, the breeze moving the treetops, the branches creaking. Pretty soon Lyall was talking again about the train wreck of civilisation and the lemmings running over the cliff and all the other things he had on his mind and that sound too soon blended with the others until they became one. Elena’s visits grew more regular. One day at the table outside his shack while talking about the pestilence Lyall asked to see Elena’s stigmata and in doing so touched her arm. Elena left it there, then withdrew. A bird calling out from a tree somewhere up on the hill was the only thing to break the silence.
Elena grew worried but she wasn’t really sure why. What did she have to fear, here among the trees, the lake, the sea? Civilisation was the enemy, as Lyall always said. Uncontrollable Civilisation. It reaches its black tentacles a little further each day into all that used to be uncorrupted and pure until poor nature, poor so-called Uncontrollable Nature, is herself tamed. Dams are built, rivers rerouted, clouds seeded. We have brought low the Cherubims at Eden’s east gate, said Lyall, and doused the flaming sword.
For a little while after that Lyall didn’t come and Elena stayed away. Then on a warm evening sitting outside she heard footsteps on the track from the road above the house. It was the boy from the supermarket. He was tall, well dressed, his hair spiked with gel. Lyall’s not right in the head, he said, you need to be careful. Elena kept her distance. If you come back without the product, she said, then maybe we could talk. The next day the boy did and Elena made a cold drink for them, but they spent more time looking into their glasses than they did at each other. It’s just that he’s known in town as a crazy, said the boy; it’s a free country, sure, but when I told my dad I’d seen you talking to him he said I should come down here to see if you’re okay. He drawled, like his dad, and kept his feet apart. So you’ve been spying on me, said Elena. The boy blushed and looked at the ground. Elena blushed too. When they said goodbye that afternoon it was like small balls of electricity had started popping in the air between them.
What’s your name? said Elena. Aaron, said the boy. He continued on up the road.
When Lyall came by the next day to say hello Elena said sorry, she needed some space. She was sure he could understand. Aaron came by later with a box of fruit from the supermarket that would otherwise have been thrown out. He stood there awkwardly, the box on his shoulder. Has he gone? he said. Elena nodded. When she took the box from him their fingers touched and again the electricity popped. Before Aaron left later that day Elena let him kiss her.
These were the last days of summer. Lyall no longer visited. Elena had never felt particularly uncomfortable with him, aside perhaps from that time he’d touched her arm; he was an eccentric, sure, but in a sense so was she. She told Aaron all this, in order to refute him. Aaron didn’t care.
Since their first kiss they’d spent every hour after school and all weekend together, kissing, touching, and much more. In the bedroom with the curtains drawn they’d take off each other’s clothes, piece by piece, hesitating and giggling before lying together in the hammock. Some days they would take the hammock outside and string it between two trees and lie in it together, staring and reaching out when the feeling took them to touch. Often in these moments Elena would look down amazed at her own unblemished body, remembering the times in her bedroom at home in front of the mirror when every inch of flesh was covered with a red rash, scratch or weal. Sometimes, remembering, she would stroke her skin with the back of her hand, amazed, even aroused, by its softness.
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