by Gail Jones
Now he stood at his sister’s side, holding the coffee. She’d fallen asleep and commenced a meek, female version of a snore. How depleted she appeared. Her eyelids were cyan blue, her blotched skin was pasty, and she seemed thinner, a heap of bones, even since yesterday. In a slight distortion, her face was creased against the cushion. The two French brothers must have looked at their father in this way. They must have seen this combination of the meagre and indestructible. He would tell Evie about them—as children they told each other everything—but not yet, not until this time had passed, with its heavy silences and evaded questions. Instead, he sat at his desk with paper and pencil and sketched a few ideas, pleased to discover that he was still alert and intact, and content to be artfully moving his hand.
When Martin looked up, it was dark beyond the radius of his lamp. This was the lip of the night, the black mouth he might fall into. Leaving his art-absorption, becoming aware of his body at the desk, silent and alone, he recalled his father drinking sherry in semi-dark at the kitchen table, the night after the funeral service for his mother. It must have been an illicit childhood glimpse. The brown bottle, his head bent, the woeful stare. The way lamplight made an ellipse that contained only him. It had been like a sentimental painting, theatrical and touching: The Widower Alone, or Portrait of Grief. But there was something ample in this memory that seized and undermined him. It was a wrench to childhood, elsewhere, and a sliding away. The past that held his father was like that now, threatening to intercept him. Martin must be equal to Noah’s self-composure.
About eight he pushed back his chair, rose and padded through the unlit house, careful not to disturb his sister. He used his mobile phone as a weak torch. The rooms seemed immensely still and vague. The hum of the day had gone, and the golden light. All around were ordinary things, his possessions, his furniture, translated to block shapes and shadowy presences. The night spoke to him in the language of child sensations retrieved: a clock that might have been a face, the taste of warm milk at bedtime, the secret lives of keys and cupboards and windows and paintings, a head resting on a pillow, the strange menace of hanging clothes. To this property of abstraction he added the faint sounds of the outside, a scrape, a trace of voice, the sigh of a slow rising wind. The house in darkness remade him; here, where nothing was happening, where he was listening to his sister’s snore.
Martin didn’t switch on the light in the kitchen but opened the refrigerator door. Something in its small wing of lemon glow sinking into the darkness gave him pause. He saw half-empty shelves of inedible leftovers, he saw incompetent living, waste, indulgence. He stood like an idiot staring down at the wedge of light across his shoes.
Yes, he thought, my father was a lovely boy.
The fridge emitted a frail animal rumble. Beyond this lit space, the night was fearsome and huge. He felt a wave—was it a wave?—pull him down and under. Martin buckled to the floor. He let out a moan, a heartsick release, and then he wept.
2
EVIE WOKE TO discover she’d been asleep for almost thirteen hours.
She had fallen into the skull-space of her own drunk mourning, and found an annihilation there that soothed and calmed her. Six a.m. To be nothing for thirteen hours: what sweet relief it had been.
Martin must still be asleep. Evie sat on the edge of his couch for a minute or two, stalled by the unfamiliar household. She lifted herself stiffly and tiptoed on bare feet to the toilet, and then to the kitchen. The refrigerator door was open and a pool of water glistened on the floor. There was the fecund scent of spoiled food, or of something organic unfreezing. She bent and wiped up the mess, relieved to perform a domestic chore. Then she made herself coffee, using the pot their father had given each of them as teenagers, insisting it was essential to the civilised life. Evie filled the water chamber, spooned the grounds into the filter, screwed on the top and set it upon the low gas flame: the small ritual of making coffee was part of her inheritance. After death, one summarises. Noah’s concluded life was now a story running backwards. He had already become inherent in objects, and in words, and in the wide-scattered emblems of her father-memory. Like God, she thought cynically, the dead are everywhere and nowhere. Here was her father, eternal, in these small movements of her hands, in the way she lifted the lid to check, in the careful pouring.
The funeral: he would have approved her choice of music, how Angela had spoken to her and not to Martin, how Martin had not wept, or made a scene, as he did in the restaurant. He had seemed, in fact, rather like Noah; he had seemed self-contained, even preoccupied, in the ceremony of loss, as if his training to see the world converted to art was a handy displacement on public occasions. When the mourners filed away, Martin looked older; she saw him in the future, slightly greyer, slightly bent, and with a caution in his movements that betrayed arthritic knees and stuck joints. He was vain and would hate to be imagined like this by his sister.
As if she had summoned him, Martin appeared. He stood aslant at the kitchen door. Her sense was correct: future age hung over him. He looked ragged and infirm. Two days of solid drinking and little food had taken its toll.
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘One sugar, no milk.’
And then he sloped away, crashing onto the over-cushioned couch. He was not quite ready to join the world of the fully awake. No ‘good morning, how did you sleep?’ They might have been students in a share house, comfortably sloppy and accustomed to acting on the barest instructions.
Evie looked at her bony wrist turning off the gas flame. She would not allow herself to be irritated, but would take her time. She would practise forbearance in dealing with her brother. She poured the coffee carefully into two small cups and found a tray, tucked behind plates, and a few dry biscuits. She watched her own hands fluttering, making her spirit behave as if busy.
Martin was huddled on the couch, staring between his feet. Like her, he was wearing yesterday’s clothes. No jacket, but he still wore the black tie, loose and askew, and it seemed pitiably inappropriate so early in the morning. How like Martin—and how forgetful to have slept in a tie. She saw that he hadn’t yet shaved, and then remembered her own unkemptness.
‘Who’s de Saussure?’ he asked her abruptly.
‘Linguist or Neptunist?’ She always enjoyed these tests he set for her. It was their mode of exchange; she was the brainy one dealing with his curiosity, his histrionics, his bouts of depression.
‘Fuck, is there anything you don’t know? Some connection to the Alps.’
‘That would be the Neptunist. Eighteenth-century scientist. Climbed Mont Blanc. Believed the Alps had been formed by the oceans, hence Neptunist.’
Evie handed her brother his coffee and placed two biscuits in his lap. They drank in silence. Martin devoured the biscuits. Evie wondered where the de Saussure question had come from, but knew not to inquire. She hoped he’d ask about the linguist.
‘The police want to talk to us,’ Martin said. ‘There was a phone message, the day before the funeral.’
‘And you didn’t tell me?’ Evie was filled with dismay by his casual withholding. ‘What about? Didn’t the coroner say heart attack, “natural causes”? Isn’t that why he released the body?’
She felt a chill overtake her, as when she heard of her father’s death for the first time. Noah had just returned from a holiday in Italy; he had new theories, he said, and new ideas. He had rung her to say: visit me. I miss you. Come up to Sydney and see me. Let’s speak more of these things. Only a week ago she had heard his voice on the telephone.
Martin looked up at her. ‘They didn’t say. They just asked that we come in after the funeral. Detective somebody or other. We could go today.’
Evie searched his face for more information, but found none. He was as ignorant as she. As worn out by grief. Both still existed in the below-zero world of the newly numb, those for whom everyday tasks were necessary, but scarcely real.
From beyond the wall came the muffled sound of a neighbourly bump. They glanced
at each other, as if both had childishly thought ghost.
Martin attempted a smile. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing. A formality. There are probably more papers to sign.’
He opened his arms. Evie accepted the implicit invitation for a hug. Abbracci, she thought. Martin enclosed her in his stale funereal clothes, holding her firm.
‘A formality,’ he repeated.
And they stayed like that, listening to the sounds of the morning. Evie noted this time the state of the house: Nina’s toys all over the floor, a pile of sketches on the table, dirty plates and cups, old newspapers, empty bottles. Beneath the windowsill stood a dead pot plant, still holding aloft its parched leaves. On the walls were paintings by fellow artists, mostly gifts in exchange, she guessed, and in one corner of the room his guitar, leaning upright. The paintings were wildly mixed in subject and style: a neo-surrealist figurative next to a few minimalist smears of red, a landscape—central Australia—that must have been done in the fifties, a portrait of Martin—how could she not have noticed this before?—large and grotesque enough to be entered for a prize. The Archibald, surely. Evie wondered how Martin could live with this outsized image of himself, staring back with orange eyes and the drippy brushstrokes of a face. Narcissist, she told herself. Martin is a narcissist.
‘We should eat,’ she said.
Martin roused, loosened his embrace. ‘Yes, take care of me, Mama.’ He included a moan.
Evie made a fist and gave him a sharp punch to the arm, as they did when they were children. He had no idea how much this joking upset her.
We have just endured, she thought, the funeral of our father and my brother is still as he was, negligent, self-centred, without a clue. He is still the cocksure adolescent bound for fame and glory, still contesting his father’s authority. They were so alike, father and son, that they had loved each other in self-confirmation. The equation of what they were was a tangled knot. They had mirrored each other’s expressions, taste in women, in food, an admiration for all things Italian and for stories of miracles and saints. How they talked about human frailty (superciliously); how they ate (omnivorously); how they walked (comically), leaning forward like mime artists, as if battling a high wind.
Evie looked up at her brother. She would need to stop thinking in this way, seeing her father undead in the person of her brother. If she was to lay Noah to rest, she had to break them apart. If she was to go on, and to be strong, she had to love Martin separately. She understood what it was she was feeling, a kind of resentment that Martin had been more loved. It surprised her to name it for the first time. Martin had been more loved. She trembled her hands over her frowsy hair, and patted it pet-like, to reassemble herself. She rose with the tray, playing Mama, and returned to the kitchen.
‘There’s eggs,’ he called to her.
And so there were. Evie fried four eggs in butter in a small pan and they sat eating them together. There was salt, nothing more. How could he live like this? She looked into her brother’s face. With rapt inattention he was staring down at his greasy plate.
‘If we’re going to see your detective, we should get ready,’ Evie said. It would be her role to defeat the torpor that threatened them both. ‘I’ll return to the guesthouse to shower and change. Take your time, I’ll come back, and we can walk into town from here.’
The love of walking: this was one thing they shared. In this confusing time she was looking for reliable connections.
She thought back to the funeral. The moment of greatest difficulty had been the solemn singing of the hymn. Her heart was in the coffin with her father; she had to pause until it returned to her. She would not even pretend to join in, but the words unwound themselves inside her atheist mind, following the furrowed track Noah had made for her, years ago. She was an ungrateful daughter, refusing his beliefs, but she could not resist the beauty of the word ‘abide’, or the congregation of others, conscientiously in tune, each engaged in a private elevation. Some no doubt believed. Some were strengthened against the golden curtains and the slide into flames. Some offered up their voices in a piercing purity. She could hear both their commitment and their self-satisfaction. And it had amazed her, disconcerted her, that Martin was among those singing.
As she closed the door behind her, Evie felt the reviving beauty of the Sydney morning. She’d been in Melbourne five years, loving her relocation, but had forgotten this electric sky and buzzy soundtrack, the slight savage edge. Traffic at a distance, joggers on the street, a terrace door slamming; these notations seemed the hoot of a more confident life.
Walking quickly, she skirted an oval-shaped park. So much energy here, Evie thought, so much extroversion. Not her city at all. Dogs in friendly clusters were tossing themselves upwards. Birdsong rang out. The massive canopies of fig trees gave a dense looming shade. A watery aspect to the sky foretold imminent rain. There was vivacity everywhere, people starting the new day, streaming to work in cars and trains. Somewhere, further away, the harbour glittered.
Perhaps this too was grief, she thought, this omnipresent liveliness, marking one’s own exclusion.
3
IT WAS MID-MORNING before Martin recalled what it was about de Saussure: he invented the cyanometer, a little pie chart to estimate the shade of blue of the sky. In a circle he had painted graded slices of blue, all derived from carefully diluted tinctures of Prussian, so that the sky itself submitted to the calculations of science. How blue is the sky? Today it is this blue. Today it is blue number twenty-seven, a fraction darker than twenty-six, a fraction lighter than twenty-eight. He must have come across the name when he read of the brothers of Chamonix. Or perhaps, reading of the cyanometer, he discovered the story of the two brothers. Perhaps there was no connection at all; there just happened to be a colourist in the same location as the dead father and this sudden recollection had been entirely coincidental. Martin glanced out the window. How false was European knowledge. No Prussian tint out there: the sky was cerulean. A different pigment entirely, its blue verging not to grey or darkness, grizzled and leaden, but to elements of gold.
Martin and Evie set off under the southern sky and walked all the way to the Central Police Station. It was strenuous exercise in the humid air, and with the queasy after-effects of a hangover and eggs. But each felt the release of movement, the way the body wishes to walk. To be still is death, Martin told Angela, when she revealed she had taken up meditation.
He’d been a fuckwit; he was arrogant. She’d been right to leave him, he reflected.
It had always been a mystery to her why he strode around his studio, why he danced by himself, with the radio tuned to eighties hits, why he went for long walks, hours long, with no purpose or explanation. He felt warm now, even hot, as if he’d dispelled the chill of the father-corpse; and the reeking fumes from the buses in City Road made him aware of his own lungs and tight breathing. There was a moment he took Evie’s hand—they were crossing the busy intersection at George Street and a car had swerved towards them—and Evie clenched his grip, startled, or in sudden gratitude. He liked having her by his side. He liked holding her hand. They should talk more, or travel together, or work on some project or other.
Cerulean was leaving the sky and rain clouds were massing to the east. There was the faint green tint that often preceded rain. Martin looked skywards and hoped that the cloudburst would catch them.
By the time they made the shortcut through Chinatown, striding up Dixon Street between the red façades and gilt lettering of competing restaurants, the concrete lions, the menu handbills, the oriental bunting aflutter above temple shapes and archways, both were bright with sweat. Their clothes were clinging to their bodies. Evie bought bottles of water from a squinting old lady who held the dollars up to her face, as if to check they were real. They drank under a canvas sign that advertised Aussie-Chinese New Year.
Chinese Sydney. He enjoyed its collision of images—characters, pinyin, a dragon banner, murky aquariums in the glaze of mirrored restaurants, f
aceted silk lanterns alongside blatant fluorescence. This was a zone of riddled mingling, and a dream of artistic connection.
As they arrived at the police station, rain began to fall in emphatic drops. Dark coins appeared on the shoulders and bodice of Evie’s dress. Martin had always adored these sudden transformations. He might incorporate this vision into his Piero-Barbie artwork; he might depict his father as a saint, spotted with lustrous drops and made mystical by rainfall. Or he might simply admire his sister, who still resembled him.
Chinese bunting, saintly rain. He was having trouble staying focused. Wrecked by the last few days, he needed to pull the world in, to make it resourceful. He must remember that his artwork gave him purpose. Noah had known this. It was Noah who had taught him how attention could be arrested and pattern made. Noah understood the everyday tussle of images, that we select what we see and are made into selves by our selection. ‘Perseverance is all’: Martin remembered that much. He’d been a junkie when Noah first taught him this slogan, sitting beside him in a cane chair, speaking in kindly tones, touching the back of his hand. This was the true accomplishment of his father, that he had helped his son stay alive.
~
The young constable at the front desk called the detective, Frank Malone, whom Martin and Evie agreed later was a gloomy fellow. He had a long, ghoulish face in permanent shadow, and his deep voice seemed to portend dark disclosures. They stared at him, disturbed by so distinctive a face. The news, Martin decided, could only be bad. They all shook hands. With barely a greeting the detective turned and led them to a regulation grey office, devoid of ornamentation but for a large clock in the centre of the wall. It featured Roman numerals and the legend Glasgow 1910. It was encircled by oak. The detective’s face, together with the touching legend, made Martin confused. He glanced at Evie and knew she too had seen these ill-fitting omens, this overlap of arbitrary signs.