by Gail Jones
The woman hardly considered him. No corporate welcome here. She inserted his credit card into a machine and asked him to sign electronically. She handed him a paper receipt and a bundle of keys. That simple. No questions.
‘The red Corolla, bay H10. It can be returned to any of our thirty-three depots across the state.’
‘Thank you.’
Stay polite. Don’t be memorable. Be subdued in this homecoming.
Noah felt something rush inside him like radioactive medicine. The chill of a body overtaken by the green rivulets of depression glass. He saw himself as a system of interior channels and canals, of pipes to and from the heart, of cords and strings and little branches opening into cavities. It might have been this woman who summoned his mother and the memory of depression glass; but her presence could not account for his body imagined in this way, anfractuous, as if in an MRI vision, awash with his liquid fear.
Wasted, that was the word. He felt he was wasted. Martin once used it in the clinic, disposing of his whole life in a druggie cliché, and Noah had argued against him. He’d hugged his son and told him that there is no waste, never, that all we are remains perpetual and potentially art.
Even then he didn’t quite believe it, seeing Martin’s evacuated condition, his muddy stare and slack, incommunicative mouth, and the way he lolled back on the bed, zonked to the eyeballs. But Noah needed to say so. Parental guilt assailed him. He needed to assert pop psychology against his son’s suicidal bullshit. He invented advice and pleas for the meaning of life. He referred to the great traditions of visual art, the seeping down of images that bring with them a tide of wonder. But nothing he said made any difference. Martin turned away. Only when Nina arrived with her plastic dinosaur, which she silently grrrr-ed up and down her father’s arm, did he register any change in attention.
Noah hoisted Eleonora Ragusa, heavier than ever, and dragged his case along concrete paths to the red Corolla. In Australia, now, and almost at home. Nerve-racked, he was at least on the earth and out of the sky. He started the engine and looked around. Signposts in various fonts instructed the way to central Sydney, but in a spontaneously foolish decision he decided he would spend the day and night in the Blue Mountains. He would not go home immediately, but rest hidden and cosy, up high, with a spectacular view.
He turned away from the city, onto the highway. He steered automatically. The bisected road flowed steadily beneath him and the nifty little hire car hummed soporific. Noah was not driving, but in a haze of driving. Only when he swerved like a crazy man, and jerked awake, did he realise he must stop.
Noah pulled over and discovered he’d driven further than he thought: he was near a place called Blackheath. Taking a small track off the highway, turning this way, then that, he found himself in a modest lane of bush. There were houses just visible, roofs at some distance, and mostly high eucalypts and a scraggle of ferns and undergrowth. There was abrupt quiet, the country-style quiet of audible wind, things arustle and the low, proximate squawk of invisible birds. And now, Noah was helpless against almighty sleep. He tilted his chair back and fell in daytime into a velvet night, a sleep so deep and so concentrated that the sense was of whooshing collapse, like being the object vanished in a magic trick.
A passer-by was tapping on the window. Noah woke with a start. A face ruddy as raw meat was leaning close to the glass. It was twilight. He must have slept for eight hours or so, only to wake in the next night of another land. Noah wound down the window.
‘Just checking, mate. I drove past you this morning, taking a kip, but now, on my way back, thought there might be something wrong.’
It was the most straightforward expression of concern.
Noah was touched. ‘I was on a long haul flight,’ he explained. ‘I was in the sky for hours.’
He guessed the man was wondering what the hell he was doing here and why he had mentioned a flight when he was sitting in a car. Noah was also wondering what the hell he was doing here. He felt like an idiot, ending up in the mountains, on an impulse that now seemed to have little logic and purpose.
‘You right for the night?’ the man asked.
Noah realised he must work a little harder to sound plausible. ‘Just heading for Katoomba, a motel. Thanks for asking.’
‘Other way, mate. You’re completely bushed. Back in the other direction, about eleven kays.’
Noah thanked the stranger, who was already heading back to his battered truck, and gave a vigorous, jolly wave as he drove off. There would be a loving wife waiting somewhere, with steak and potatoes, and a row of skinny kids, ranged downwards in several sizes. Without looking, he felt for his secret, wedged in the passenger seat.
He started the ignition, turned a loop and headed towards Katoomba. On the outskirts of the town, now a thin pool of light in the growing dark, he took the turn-off too fast, in a tipping skid. He drove down the steep hill of the main street, but was indecisive, wanting no motel now, but simply to keep on driving. He was hungry, actual and wide-awake. Storefronts, billboards, the regular space-signatures of power poles—all flowed past in a systematic flicker. He could drive forever, he reflected; he could turn again and drive over the mountains, towards the centre.
At a service station Noah bought an overheated meat pie, doused it in sauce and devoured it in a few bites. Then, clearheaded, he knew at once of his folly. Home. Of course, he needed to be home. What had he been thinking? So, in his third night of travel, he reversed his plan and set out for Sydney.
On the winding mountain road he was conscious of increasing cold. Somewhere peaceful he stopped and, stepping out for a piss, found himself looking up at the kite of the Southern Cross. His own bright heaven. There were few houses along this stretch of road, so the darkness was darker, the constellations observable, the pace of his own thoughts slower and expanded. He could smell eucalyptus and his unwashed body. He felt a slight beat in the air as cold hit the side of the mountains and slid in a vapour into clefts and gullies.
After he had reached into the back of the car and retrieved his jacket, he stood a little longer, for no reason at all. Now he knew truly that he was almost at home, and surrounded by what, in the texture of things, felt like real life. He sensed his age, his infirmities and the enduring web of his desires. But he was not yet enfeebled: no. He was not yet pierced by dementia or shuffling in pyjamas along a hospital corridor. He felt the integrity still there, fitting him together as a man. In this huge night, on a mountain, he might have been standing naked before Dora’s gaze.
A few cars sped past, Doppler in their effect and disturbing his peace. They inspired the sensation of time itself retreating. Another wave of cold wind. He pulled his jacket closer, slid back into the driver’s seat and continued his journey.
He’d made love to Katherine in a Ford Prefect not long after they became a couple, surprised she would submit to such an uncomfortable proposition. She smelled of cigarette smoke and lavender, and he had clutched at her shoulders and devised flowery phrases, desperate to make a good impression. He was fumbling, inept, but still she had gasped. Afterwards, she stepped out into the freezing night, and leaned back onto the car, smoking a cigarette between her still gloved fingers. She seemed ironic and distant when he’d hoped for gentleness and to hear her light laugh. He wiped the misty glass with his palm and saw her facing away from him. She seemed unreachable in a world aglitter with frost, lit by the yellowish headlamps.
He remembered staying in the car, unsure what to do. It had seemed forever, waiting for her to finish her cigarette, wondering if she would consent to remain, worrying what she was thinking, and finding her still a stranger.
He thought now of Dora, and missed her. In the hum of the hire car she was a promise and a newly present spirit. He wanted her to materialise and sit beside him as he drove in the darkness.
38
AFTER SO MUCH waiting in the hospital, it was good to walk in the streets, to recover mobile life and the rhythm of ordinary time. Before she s
aw Martin bruised and motionless, prone in a jumble of tubes, hooked to a machine that droned and clicked with registrations of his body, he was like a wilful, younger brother, always in need of counsel. But now he seemed naturally older, and closer to death. They’d been rackety kids, a riddle to their parents, but she’d often considered herself the older one. When she went off the rails in her teenage years, refusing the decorous model of a clever girl from Adelaide, she’d wanted, in a sense, to become immature, to be Martin for a while, sniggering and sulky. And when Martin had taken to heroin, she’d half-wanted that too, to be released into negligence. In the clinic he’d looked like a scolded child. He was gruff, stingy with feeling, and fearless in his self-destruction.
The sun was out but it was not yet warm. A cold snap in Central Europe was to blame for the chill and the unseasonable rain. Like her father, Evie had always been intolerant of cold. She wore a bulky overcoat and a woollen scarf and noticed that locals also disliked the lower temperatures. She thought of the refugees she’d seen on television the night before, how frozen they were, huddled in shiny orange blankets, their eyes enlarged both with fear and with rescue. Syrians, Eritreans, Nigerians, Sudanese. There was a child being lifted upwards, away from surging water, and a man’s stiff arms reaching out to claim her. There was the bucking of a rowboat, hands groping in appeal, and glistening wet faces. There was a woman from Syracuse saying, ‘They are our brothers, they are our sisters.’ Evie had burst into tears.
The city didn’t have the seedy decrepitude Martin had described, but there was a breath of pathos to its ruined spaces. She saw the closed-up churches and palmless trees, and the way everything existed beneath a thin coat of pale dust. She saw slouched beggars and street kids and a man dragging a rubbishy foam mattress. She saw a lingering population who must have come on the boats. They lived in the shadows, regarded as a social nuisance. These were not the suffering outcasts of every city, but the newly dispossessed, incautious in their desperation as their hopes burned to nothing. She hugged her elbows and was tempted to look away.
And there was more—there was something elegiac in the air. Something that contested the sunshine and the tapering clouds and the round loaves of bread she had seen a man selling from the boot of his car. She felt it too, disquieting and close. Could one feel history? Might there be seances of the past, or intimations of antique places? She was more susceptible these days to anti-rationalist suppositions. She was regressing, she thought, to the credulity of a child.
A line of graffiti read: Aprire tutte le gabbie! Open all the cages.
Evie pushed at the heavy wooden door and entered the courtyard to Dora’s apartment, unsure what to expect. Dora had been cordial on the phone, but asked little about Martin. Told of the beating, she simply moved to another subject. Evie thought her attitude aloof, and cold.
She looked around. There was a lemon tree in the centre of the courtyard, hung with the last knobbly fruit of the season, and large ceramic pots of crimson geranium, surely unseasonal, arranged on the perimeter.
Dora waved from her first-floor balcony and called out to come up. From a distance her face looked amiable and familiar. When she opened the door, Evie was struck again by a sense of familiarity, some revenant detail or feature, some mannerism that struck a small flame to see her by. Dora held a black open-weave shawl around her chest, and leaned forward, a sheathed figure, to kiss Evie on both cheeks. ‘I have wanted to meet you,’ she said. ‘Noah spoke often of you and Martin.’
She took Evie’s coat and scarf and led her into the elegant sitting room of old furniture and crammed high bookcases. Papers were on the floor, her reading glasses rested on an overturned book. There was a plate of biscotti on a low table set with two small cups, and Evie could smell fresh coffee.
‘One moment.’ Dora left and returned with a large silver pot.
They sat facing, in that pause of formal interregnum before conversation begins. Dora poured Evie an espresso and proffered the biscotti.
‘So now,’ she said. ‘Now we shall have our little talk. Your father, Noah.’
They were assessing each other. It had only been minutes and Evie knew already that this woman had been her father’s lover. It was nothing she could name, but a conviction came over her, the hands and their openness, the glance, solicitous, the way she smoothed down her dress and squared her shoulders. Martin had not guessed. Caravaggio, he said. She was an expert on Caravaggio. But Evie saw in this short time what Noah had seen, and knew that she was dear to him. Despite Dora’s posture of withdrawal, something in the way her head moved, a slight nod when she said his name, showed intimate contact. The body confides, Evie thought, even when one might sit in silence attending to the Italian ceremony of coffee. She looked down: fine porcelain cups, old silver spoons with a Florentine design on the handles, biscuits newly released from their cellophane and arranged in a fan, just so.
‘Forgive me, I should have asked first about your brother.’
‘Martin is slowly improving. Soon he will be able to travel, and we will return to Australia. But the doctors think he will need a second operation on his hand.’
Dora said nothing. Evie was expecting her to say: how terrible, I was stunned to hear of the attack. Instead she was looking down, preoccupied, pressing a fingertip onto fallen crumbs. Evie realised at once that Dora wanted only to speak of her father, and to hear her speak of him, as a figure of love.
‘Is that it?’ Evie asked. Above a sideboard hung the face of Eleonora Ragusa. The detective had shown them a photograph of the sculpture; this must be the initial sketch. It was more erotic than Evie had remembered, the face receptive to a kiss, the garment falling away, a breast exposed.
‘Apparently the sculpture has been stolen from the museum,’ Dora volunteered, ‘but no one knows by whom. I know what Antonio Dotti has been saying, but the man is delusional and not to be believed.’
Dora spoke as if concluding an argument, with nothing more to say on the subject. She spoke as if dissembling. With a single tilt of the head, she drank her espresso. So it would be like this—the stiffening of conversation into tough declarations. Evasion, façade, the smothering of feeling.
‘You will forgive me, Dora, but my father is dead, and accused, and my brother was attacked. Left for dead.’ She was conscious of her own theatrical plea, wishing to insist on her right to an explanation.
A strain of concern or denial swept over Dora’s face. Her free hand seemed to dangle; her other grasped tighter at her shawl. ‘And my Uncle Vito is also dead,’ she said. ‘I want no more of this matter; I want no more people hurt.’
She rose, moved to the window and lit a cigarette. Evie waited in polite silence while Dora composed herself. Her thoughts were spinning. She was in a rage that she had been banished from truth, and that she would perhaps never know what her father had done in Sicily, or the whole story of what might have involved and killed him. The logic of things was retreating before her, in this art historian’s room, full, like her father’s, of trinkets and souvenirs, foxed prints, reproductions, heavy art books on old masters. Who was this Vito? What role did he play?
‘Forgive me,’ Dora said.
It was an incomprehensible echo. Evie expected a confession or revelation, but nothing followed. In a startling flash she imagined her father sitting where she sat now, looking at this woman standing posed before a square of cold sunlight, the sash a shadowed cross, the apartment opposite just visible, a tiny band of clear sky in the far-right corner. Her mind dithered at the substitution, and at the return of her father’s eyes.
‘We were meant to talk, Noah and I, to arrange our future,’ Dora said. ‘But I had to leave, you understand. I had to find Uncle Vito.’
A tight, wrenched sentence. It was some kind of explanation. Evie heard Dora’s insistence but could not interpret her meaning.
‘Did you love my father?’
‘Yes, I loved your father.’
She was still turned away, blowing smok
e at the half-open window.
‘I was to follow him to Sydney,’ she said. ‘We had a future planned.’
Evie was thinking: Noah didn’t mention you when he returned. Not once. Not once did he mention a woman with whom he might have a future. An Italian woman. But she looked at the black figure, held firm in the shape of her shawl, rigid with the effort not to divulge, and felt overcome by a surge of pity. Dora too was bereaved. She was a woman holding herself in, unable to speak freely, possibly unable to weep.
‘Who is Uncle Vito?’ Evie asked.
Dora turned and stared at her, stricken.
‘Uncle Vito is my father, you might say.’
Again, there was a strict conclusiveness to her tone. The announcement of a special relationship was left in darkness.
‘The lemon tree is looking well,’ Dora announced. ‘So much rain.’
She was unrelaxed and vigilant. She bent and extinguished the cigarette she had just begun. She sat again and leaned forward and poured them both a second coffee, this time with a kind of fidgety agitation, her slender hand ever so slightly atremble. They heard a prolonged howl from a dog somewhere, and a volley of high-pitched yapping.
‘It’s left alone, locked inside,’ Dora explained. ‘There’s a point every day when that dog becomes distressed. I hear it often when I’m working at home.’
They were both quiet then, listening. The sound was piercing and intrusive, impossible to ignore. Evie thought it unbearable. Dora caught her glance, rose and closed the sash window.
‘I hope we will be friends,’ Dora said, as if beginning their conversation afresh. ‘And I would like to come to Australia, need to come to Australia, to see where he lived and breathed, to see his home. It is important to me. Especially now.’
‘Can you tell me what happened?’
‘No, I cannot tell you what happened. Here, in this city, knowledge is dangerous. We are used to guilty silences. I tried to warn Martin, but for some reason he stayed on.’