‘What?’ he said, after waiting too long for her to speak.
‘Okay. Shut up.’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘You did. You said everything with your eyes.’
‘With my eyes, hey?’ he replied. He didn’t look at her. He watched the Nikes on the feet of someone sitting next to them and he smiled because she was obviously still uncomfortable about the guy who came out of her bedroom. This shit was funny but he knew that he wasn’t permitted to laugh.
‘I don’t care, Clare. I don’t care about that guy and whatever you do, you know, to entertain yourself in your own spare time.’
‘He’s not…’ Clare began to say and then dropped it.
‘He’s whatever. I don’t care. I really don’t. I am kind of jealous you pick up more than me though.’
She ran her hand through her hair and slouched back into her chair like she could relax now that topic of conversation was over.
‘Guess you’ve got bigger things to worry about, living in that house.’
‘It’s your house too. They’re your fucked-up parents too.’
‘Yeah. Guess so.’ She looked tired. Distracted.
He waited for her to have more to offer but that was it. Her mobile phone rang and she said, ‘Sorry, I’ve got to get this.’
She answered the phone, broke into a smile and a pepped-up voice like she was putting on a show for the person who couldn’t see her at the other end of the line, then walked off to the opposite side of the bar so she could have her conversation away from him.
Left on his own, he drank his drink and then hers, ate all the tacos and then went to the bar for another round. He wanted real drinks in real beer bottles and he had to wait too long to order them so he started looking at the posters behind the bar where Buffy the Vampire Slayer was saying ‘Once More With Feeling!’ according to the speech bubble that hung out of her mouth. The place sucked.
When he was finally in possession of two beers he found himself back at their table alone again. He watched his sister flick her hair in the corner and laugh into the phone and he wondered if she gave two shits about everything that was happening.
When she finally returned to the table he had finished his beer and started in on the one he had bought for her. She was laughing quietly to herself when she put her phone back in her bag and finally looked at him again like he had missed out on some great joke.
‘Sorry, sorry. Just a work thing. You know.’
By this time the alcohol had got stuck into him and he didn’t feel like being so gentle anymore. ‘And where do you work?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Where do you work? Dad went down to your school to visit you the other day and you weren’t there. None of us can work out what you’re doing. You haven’t even told us.’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Why? What’s so complicated? Dad’s complicated, Mum’s complicated. Changing jobs is not so complicated. He’s pissed, you know, that you’ve shut him out. Shut everyone out. Do you even know what it’s like in that place? You just show up and tell Mum what to do and then you piss off in some guy’s van. Dad’s completely lost it. He’s high on morphine, or he’s got dementia or he’s just batshit crazy or maybe he’s just like a really hurt, pathetic human being, or maybe a scarier thought – he knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s doing it anyway. I don’t know and there’s these guys that keep coming around, they’re even crazier than him and they’re using him as some sort of poster boy for their cause. And where are you, Clare? Where are you?’
He watched her take a deep breath, watched her thinking of the right words. Then she said in a slow, steady voice,
‘I do. I do care. It’s just hard…’
He drank the rest of the second beer in three big mouthfuls and looked her straight in the eyes before walking out.
‘Once more with feeling, Clare. Once more with feeling.’
25.
Once again, Clare returned to her childhood home and there were strangers on her lawn. When Paul found somewhere three blocks away to park, they realised there was the problem of what to do with the paint. Clare turned around in the front seat and looked at it sitting there in the back of the van, all four two-litre cans of white.
‘You can’t exactly just wander down the street holding so much paint can you?’ She hadn’t thought about that part, about how ridiculous it would look, and she certainly hadn’t thought about the people who would be there to witness it.
‘Yeah, actually, it’s all a bit too obvious looking.’ Paul ran his hands in quiet contemplation through the hair hanging over his forehead. ‘What if someone tries to stop us, like that crazy guy with the megaphone.’
‘I don’t know.’ Clare was thinking more about such a public act of shaming. Of course, she’d had disagreements with her father before, but throwing paint on the front yard of his house in front of so many people suddenly felt like something from The Scarlet Letter, as if she were the moral police, there to cast him out of the community.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘how about we just walk over, without the paint, see how things are?’
They got out of the van and walked up to where the people were milling around on the footpath. This time the crowd was split in two. On one side, a grey-haired man with a megaphone and his crowd of neatly dressed middle-aged people and skinheads. On the other side were scruffy young white kids who looked like clichéd versions of university students, and a few of the local boys Clare recognised from around the way. Not doing the best job of holding the two sides apart were two police officers, who narrated what was going on over their walkie-talkies as though the people they were talking about couldn’t understand what they were saying. Both sides hung back, away from each other, except for the smallest of the skinheads and the largest of the local boys.
One of the skinheads grabbed the megaphone from where the grey-haired man had momentarily left it on the ground to take a sip of water. He rushed at one of the local boys, a massive Pasifika guy. Clare had seen this man heaps over the years. He must have been maybe mid- to late-twenties. Clare used to see him with his mates at the park watching the sun set from the park bench. She remembered him mostly because he always looked so much like he was content to just be where he was, enjoying things with his friends. Maybe his name was Pat. That’s how he’d introduced himself to her once when they’d been stuck on a bus together and he’d recognised her from the neighbourhood.
The skinhead rushed at him with this megaphone, shoved it right up near his face and yelled, ‘We have the right to decide who comes to this country. We have the right.’
But before he could go on, Pat grabbed that megaphone back off him. He fell over and Pat stood over him, not touching him. Pat was huge in comparison to the skinhead, darker. Pat leant down closer, closer, with the megaphone held up to his mouth and Clare noticed that the skinhead had black tears tattooed down the right side of his face.
‘Look at you – you little anorexic fuck,’ Pat spat into the microphone. ‘You fucking dog, you’re the hard man in the crew, are ya?’
And then the police were on him, grabbing at the megaphone, but Pat made sure that he got the last word in, ‘Look at me. Look at me! Welcome to the future!’ he yelled.
The police grabbed at him and he stretched his big black arms into the air and shook them like he was in the audience at a Beastie Boys concert, and the uni students clapped and the row of elderly gentlemen standing off in the foreground held their Pauline Hanson posters higher up in solidarity with the skinhead’s plight.
In the front window she could see her father peeking out through the venetians like he did when they were children, and there was an unexpected noise on the street. She felt Paul standing too close to her as they leaned against the fence, and she thought of Francis at the pub, when he had asked her where she worked now. She felt her father’s gaze on her skin.
‘It’ll be dark soon. We could come back then. Maybe then there won’t be so ma
ny people. Maybe we could paint it over in the dark.’
Paul was staring hard at the image of the boat. ‘I didn’t think…I don’t think, looking at it now, that I expected to find it so, you know, like an accusation against me personally or something…I don’t know, I feel like I can’t look up, like people are staring at me.’
Clare scanned the crowd. On both sides there looked like there were people who weren’t exactly white. No one appeared to be staring at Paul, but maybe she just couldn’t see what he saw, standing there in a different skin.
‘Why don’t we go for a walk? It’ll be dark soon. We could get something to eat, walk along the river or something. Come back when it’s dark.’
Paul nodded his head but didn’t move. He looked like he was fixed in the boat’s gaze. She gave his elbow a little squeeze and started to walk out ahead of him, down the hill towards the river. A misty kind of rain began to fall. Away from the house, the streets felt still and quiet. Paul walked looking down at his feet.
‘My first protest,’ he said. ‘And I bowed out pretty quickly.’
‘Your first? What do they do with you at university these days?’ she said in a mocking tone that wasn’t at all convincing. Her head was off somewhere else. ‘Don’t think I did much at uni, besides read books and go to protests.’
‘Really? Can’t imagine it. You being like that. You seem so not willing to fight now.’
She started again, ‘I was like crazy busy with self-invention. I joined all those anti-nuclear marches and spent the night chained to a chair inside the Vice Chancellor’s office. I got kind of stuck in this vortex of radicalism. It sucks you in. Mostly, the social side of it. I was just like awkward and bookish and I didn’t know how to talk to people, so it worked for me. You know, people shouting slogans all the time. I didn’t have to talk and nobody noticed me, but I got to be in this big crowd of people. I could convince myself that I was never lonely, but I was always alone. I’m not sure if anyone really even knew I existed.’
Richard had shown her that she really did exist back then, ten years ago when they had more of a relationship than just having sex at her place. These days, when she and Richard were lying in bed, she’d think about him back then, when he had seemed to take up so much more space. One day when they were in university she had run into Richard in Newtown, and he had abruptly held up his paint-stained palms in front of her and ordered her to stop, and because she was so drawn to the frantic face he made sometimes, she had done as she was told.
‘You’ve got to come back to my house,’ Richard had said, and she’d thought he wanted to do the same things to her that he’d done after they’d drunk too much the previous week, but when she got there, there were half a dozen people in his backyard with tubs of paint and rolls of cloth and shirts and a screen printing contraption. The grass was freckled in all the primary colours. There were large posters hanging on the back fence that said things like ‘Every Race Is Equal – Blainey’ and ‘I’m not swamped by Asians’. Richard had stopped the radio that was playing in the boom box in the middle of the lawn and put in a tape of a man who was speaking in an animated voice about extremes. ‘You cannot go from being all white to being all Asian. It’s too extreme – we’ve opened the floodgates.’
Richard spoke over the top, ‘You’ve heard of this man? Professor Racist Blainey?’
She had, vaguely, but she hadn’t gotten her head around it yet. She’d just gotten her head around the anti-nuclear movement, all that stuff about land rights and nuclear war and vegetables near Chernobyl that glowed in the dark when you pulled them from the ground, and now she saw that everything was changing, that the new issues were all about identity and who had the right to belong. She was caught off guard, but she’d agreed to go to the protest he was planning anyway. Something about Richard inspired patronage, as if by helping him you were helping a multitude of other people who really wanted to be saved, just by him. That she’d never ended up going to the protest somehow mattered a lot less to her in retrospect.
And now, in the present, Paul was shaking his head and saying, ‘I can’t really see you being that way.’
‘Different life. No use to me now.’
They walked, and things between them became quiet again, but in a way that felt comfortable to Clare, quiet in a way that said that maybe they were thinking about things they were not entirely secure with, but they were safe with each other, just walking past all those houses with their weatherboard and sandstone and brick. The houses were painted the colours of suburban kitchens: eggshell, beige, pale yellow.
Now, they’d come to the upper part of the Parramatta River and were walking towards the asylum. It was starting to get dark and with the soft rain the landscape was turning into one of those kinds of evenings here that she missed, now that she lived in the city. On evenings like this, the mist rolled out over the river and covered everything. It formed on the east side up the hill where she grew up, and then it swept its way through the mangroves and past the early evening joggers along the riverside.
She imagined the fog moving through the mangroves and out over the place where the salt water met the fresh water of the Parramatta River and those early explorers could take their boats no further. She could see it moving over images of the Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy who chased all those invaders and their boats back out towards the ocean, and could picture it drifting its way under Lennox Bridge past the moss-covered hulls and petrified wooden rudders of boats that got stranded here two hundred years ago, then squeezing itself between the squat rectangles of ’60s brick apartment blocks where it bothered the bats that hung there all day, lifeless in the trees. Now she watched as it picked itself up again until it got to the end of the river, where it laid its opaque hands over the buildings where so many people had been locked up or had gone insane, not necessarily in that order. This was why that mist was Parramatta and why Parramatta was the nation, because there were so many things hidden out there on the water.
And now that mist was hiding Clare and Paul, and a question about paint was hanging unsaid between them. She looked up and saw the bats upside down in the trees like fruit gone dark and rotten. There were people who lived in the bushes below the trees who came out at night, like the bats, and then there were the ghosts that locals, from time to time, would claim to see as well – the translucent girls in the pinafores they had made them wear in the home for girls, the body of a man in chains floating down the river.
And then it popped from Clare’s mouth before she had a chance to stop it, ‘You’re the only person I can be myself with.’
‘Why?’ He seemed startled.
‘I don’t know. I guess I don’t worry what you think about me.’
‘Maybe you should.’
She looked at Paul. She wasn’t sure what he meant by delivering a statement so matter-of-factly but she knew that he was thinking by the way he looked away.
‘Maybe,’ she said.
They kept walking up to the grounds of the old asylum. Paul read the new signs on all the old buildings as they passed without expression: Methadone Clinic I, Methadone Clinic II, Youth Rehabilitation, Women’s Services, Multicultural Addiction Services. She’d always loved the asylum. Always. In a romantic kind of way, because it made her feel as though she was wandering through a Gothic novel, all that crumbling sandstone and the untrimmed vines creeping across abandoned chapels, that feeling of menace everywhere as though someone might leap out from one of the buildings at any moment and crawl into your body.
Clare looked at the roof tiles of the main building, the Female Factory, where they locked up all those women. The tiles in the entranceway to the building always brought her back to the facts of the place as it really was. She had seen a woman talk once in a festival at Parramatta Park. She’d been put into the girl’s home there, and she talked about how, some time in the 1960s, she and a bunch of primary school-aged girls who were in there too had climbed up onto the roof and torn the roof tiles off one by o
ne, throwing them at the guards on the ground because no one listened to them. And then, the woman explained, they’d been made to sleep under that roof with its missing tiles all winter, fat streams of water pouring in through the holes of the roof. The girls were told the roof would not be fixed until they agreed to apologise, but they had refused. They got wet. That’s what a protest was.
She was about to tell Paul this story but he spoke first.
‘We don’t say anything.’ It sounded like a statement he’d been considering for a long time.
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘No not you. Us. Our generation of boat people, about these boat people. Actually you too, everyone. You don’t say anything either. I’m not even sure if you care at all, other than finding the whole thing a nuisance. You know my community, we were refugees too. But, you know, not like them, as my mother would say.’
Clare was looking at the roof of the old Female Factory where the bats had begun to fly overhead. The setting sun behind the old asylum made it light up like it was on fire behind the mist.
She had something she’d considered too. ‘What if nobody owes anybody anything?’ She said it to the fog.
26.
Her mother hadn’t wanted her to hang out with ‘those Surry Hills girls’, so she’d stayed in the terrace most of the time, behind that window she was standing in front of now, the house someone had painted in tasteful blues and greens. Back when Rose’s mother rented the front room, she’d spent her days as a teenager sitting on the edge of the bed they shared, looking out into the grey of the street.
She’d come to Surry Hills to see Clare, but she hadn’t made it to her house. Rose loved her daughter, but sometimes she didn’t like her very much. She was always telling Rose what to do, not listening, just talking. It was like this with everyone in Rose’s life, always, even way back then, she thought, as she stared through the window to where someone had arranged old floral china plates on the wall in some fashion she supposed was meant to be tasteful, in the way that young people these days found old things at the Salvos interesting.
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