When Klara and I were eleven, her family moved to a small farm in the country. The next summer holiday, I went to spend a week at their new place. They lived in a fibro house, and the property ended on the boundary of a flat scrubby national park. In the heat of the day Klara and I walked together through the straggly bush and sat with our legs dangling in the creek. Or we lounged on her bed in her bedroom, batting away mosquitoes in the dense air and slurping fast-melting blocks of flavoured ice.
Klara sat with her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin resting on her knees. Sometimes she held her pillow like a shield, pulled tight against her shins. She was so thin and could make herself so small that the pillow almost hid her from my view when I lay on the other end of the bed. When she was hidden away like that, she told me some of the dark thoughts that occupied her mind.
‘I picture myself dead. Like I’m dreaming, it’s so clear. My body lying bleeding on the floor, my head smashed in. My stomach split open like a supermarket bag. Do you ever have those dreams?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Dieter will kill me one day. I know it.’
She turned the jam biscuit she had been holding for fifteen minutes around and around in the palm of her hand and finally nibbled the jam that had oozed out the side of the biscuit. A red spot stuck to the corner of her mouth.
‘I think he’s insane,’ she said.
Since she’d moved away Klara had sent me notes and cards. We’d talked on the phone but she had never mentioned Dieter.
‘I haven’t thought about him all year,’ I replied. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’s been staying at a friend’s place. He’s back tonight. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want him to live here,’ she whispered.
‘Neither would I,’ I said.
We were silent for a moment. I picked at a mosquito bite on my shin and from the crater a drop of blood welled up. I blotted it with my hanky.
That night Dieter arrived. The car dropping him off pulled up so fast at the front of the house that pebbles from the driveway flew up and pinged against the lounge room window. The car door slammed and the car backed away, tyres spinning and crunching on the gravel.
‘Let’s go to my room,’ Klara said hurriedly. She took my hand and pulled me out of the lounge room and along the hall to her room. Behind us, the front door opened and a gust of wind burned along the hallway.
On my last day at their house I woke late. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of Klara’s room. The night before, we had set the alarm to twelve for a secret midnight feast of chips and chocolate we’d been hoarding all week. Everything tasted extra salty and extra sweet by torchlight. We stifled our laughter by stuffing the sheets against our mouths and fell asleep again at two.
‘I think she’s in the shed, darling,’ her mother said when I came into the kitchen after my shower, so I skipped to the shed and pushed open the big door. Dieter and Klara were both inside in the gloom.
‘Hi,’ I said, unable to see them properly, ‘what’s happening?’
Dieter giggled his squeaky unnatural giggle. My stomach leaped inside my ribcage and my skin prickled. As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I saw Klara standing against the wall, her arms held out horizontally, her face turned away from Dieter, who was standing a few metres back from the wall. Below her hemline Klara’s legs were glistening, and there was a puddle in the dust at her feet.
‘Ready?’ Dieter cried, and he giggled again.
Klara pressed her face back further against the wall as Dieter drew back his arm and flung a knife in her direction. The knife thudded into the wall above her left arm before clattering to the floor. Another was embedded in the wall near her face.
I tried to scream but no sound came out. Dieter was staring at me and giggling with such hysteria that he sounded like a neighing horse. I ran toward him and shoved as hard as I could, and he lurched back, dropping his handful of mismatched kitchen knives on the dirt floor. His laughter stopped. Instead, I could hear the furious rasping of his breath. He grabbed my arms and forced me backward until I slammed into the shed door and it swung shut. The only light came in through the green translucent sheeting on the roof. Dieter’s face above mine shone green like his eyes. Even his teeth, bared in a crazy grin, looked pale green. He forced me to the floor and started to pull at my jeans.
‘Klara.’ My voice came out like a long, high sigh.
Dieter pressed his forearm on my throat and leaned down hard while he wrestled with my jeans with his other hand. I was choking. I punched him with my fists until he slapped my face so hard I thought my head would fly off my body. As I lay stunned with my head in the dirt, he rocked back onto his heels. He took hold of my jeans and wrenched them off, dragging my sandals along with them. Then he pulled open his own jeans. Now I screamed. His hand came down so fast to cover my mouth that only a peep escaped.
He was too strong for me. I tried to throw myself to the side, but with one hand still over my mouth he caught my wrists and pinned them to the ground above my head. He used his knees to prise apart my thighs and he pushed and pushed and pushed until something broke and he was inside me. The pain split me in two. His green face was inches away from mine, sweaty and grimacing. His teeth, still bared, were tipped with foamy saliva like a dog’s fangs.
As everything slowed down in my mind I rolled my eyes from side to side, trying to escape the face leering above me. When my eyes reached their lowest point of vision I saw Klara’s corduroy sneakers. I looked up. She stood, with her arms hanging at her side, watching. She was watching me, my face, and she stared and stared and I stared back, our eyes locked, expressionless, as Dieter pounded into me, grunting and panting. Finally he shrieked and let go of my mouth and my hands. He pushed himself off me, stood up and walked out of the shed, doing up his jeans. The shed door stayed open a crack and suddenly nothing was green anymore, just dull grey, back to dull grey.
Klara stood above me and held out her hand to help me up, but I turned my face away from her.
‘Go away,’ I whispered, the tears starting. Pain in my face, my throat, between my legs, my wrists. Moisture dribbling from inside me onto the dirt floor. I felt the cold on my bare thighs, the goosebumps rising, the hairs standing on end.
Klara moved slowly to the door of the shed. She hesitated there, her hand curled around the edge of the door.
‘Get out,’ I whispered. My throat seemed to have closed. Words could barely escape.
She waited a few seconds more. Then she pulled open the shed door and the light savaged my naked skin.
‘If you tell,’ Klara said in a scratchy voice like an old vinyl record, ‘he’ll kill me. You know he will.’ She pulled the door shut behind her.
Twenty years later, that scratchy voice spoke behind me.
‘There are seats here.’
A slim hand beside me pointed to a bench at my table, which was littered with chip packets and a dozen glasses – half empty, ringed with dried foam, lipsticked and smeared with oily fingerprints – from the crowd that had headed out to the beer garden. The funeral was over. Everyone had moved on to the informal wake at the pub and the drinking and shouting was getting harder and louder.
‘Natalie?’ the voice said into my ear. Her fingers touched my wrist, light as fairy dust, and twenty years vanished. I was flung back to the days of Klara, the hot sunshine and tickly grass, our special jokes and the purse full of lucky white stones we collected from each corner of the playground, chanting as we went.
When I turned I half expected to see the old Klara, her earnest eyes gazing into mine, reedy brown hair wound into the tight plaits that boys at school felt compelled to twitch and pull at every opportunity. Instead, there stood a woman with a blonde bob and smooth made-up skin. She shook her head and the hair followed in a perfect feathery swing.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said.
> My chair rocked on its wobbly legs. Klara gave me some answer about a connection to my cousin’s funeral as I tried to steady myself with my feet but found them jarring against the stubby carpet. A waiter came to collect the glasses and litter from the table. Once he had left, glasses in a ladder up his arm, the surface was still tacky with spilled beer and wine so that the underside of my arm peeled away from the table’s veneer like a strip of contact.
‘Natalie and I were at primary school together,’ Klara explained to her husband. ‘But my family moved to the country and we lost touch.’
I stared at her.
‘We used to be best friends,’ Klara said.
‘I came to visit you after you moved.’ I had to raise my voice against the clamour of the mourners. My glass was empty. Acid biting into my gut.
‘Did you? I’d forgotten,’ she said, tilting her head, still alert and birdy. She leaned sideways so that her shoulder rested against her husband’s chest. ‘Natalie was one of the smart ones at school. She’s probably a doctor now, or a lawyer or something.’
‘I stayed at your house for a week.’
She shook her head as if this was unbelievable to her. ‘I’ve got a terrible memory,’ she said. ‘Haven’t I, darling?’
‘You always remember where the credit card lives,’ her husband answered.
‘That’s because you let it live in my purse,’ she replied smartly and laughed.
Of course she couldn’t be like the old Klara. The discord was a kind of relief. This was not Klara. This person wouldn’t know the answer to the elephant riddle that used to make us laugh until we got a stitch. She wouldn’t know anything about us, or what happened.
On my last day at Klara’s house when we were twelve I eventually made my way back to the house. As I stumbled through the hot dry kitchen Klara’s mother asked me what had happened. ‘I fell over,’ I told her, and she asked if I was hurt and I said no, just a bruise. ‘Are you sure, sweetheart?’ she asked me. I said yes I was sure. She told me I should change my clothes and have another shower because I had dirt all down my back and in my hair and she didn’t want my mother thinking they hadn’t taken care of me. The hot water of the shower hurt me in every place. Afterwards I sat on the bed in Klara’s bedroom, wet hair dripping onto the eiderdown, waiting for my mother to arrive and take me home. Klara came and sat beside me. I was too exhausted to push her away. Klara’s mother put her head around the doorway and saw us sitting there side by side.
‘Oh, you darling girls are like a pair of beautiful dolls,’ she exclaimed.
Until that day I’d thought Klara was like a doll made of porcelain, that she was the one who would be easily broken.
‘I’m going to get another drink,’ I said to Klara and her husband.
I wouldn’t come back to the table. I would pretend to fall into conversation with someone on the way to the bar, then slip away home to try to gather everything close again.
‘I’ll have a G and T. Give Natalie some money, darling.’
‘No!’ I said too loudly. I pushed myself out of my seat and rushed into the crowd of people roaring and jostling elbows around the serving counter. Once I was surrounded by other people, I began to feel better. At the bar I ordered a shot of whisky and downed it on the spot. Above me, the racks of glasses jittered in time with the jukebox bass. I ordered another whisky and moved further along the bar, out of Klara’s line of vision, holding on to the counter with my fingers resting on its damp sticky towel because my legs were still shaking.
‘Natalie!’ A man in a grey suit with his tie loosened and his sleeves pushed up emerged from the crowd. He leaned across the bar and ordered himself a beer and me another whisky. He looked me up and down as if he was appraising my value, as if I was a piece of real estate.
‘You’re looking good,’ he said. He rigged his sleeves higher up his arms. Rolled his neck before he picked up his beer and drained the glass. He knew I was a likely chance.
Klara and her husband were waiting at the other end of the room for me to reappear with a gin and tonic and amnesia. My cousin was burning to ash and bone in the crematorium. As the noise around me pulsed in shouts and raucous laughter I sucked in fast desperate breaths, giddy with the unreality of it all. The only reality was Klara, sitting at a table in that room. Klara wearing peach silk. Klara all grown up. I didn’t want her to be Klara, but she was.
On my way back from the bar with a gin and tonic and another whisky, the muscles in my neck tingled and released. The third shot was fanning through my bloodstream.
‘We thought you’d run off,’ Klara said, glancing at her husband.
I raised my fourth shot to my lips and swallowed. ‘Not this time. How is everyone, anyway?’ My voice rode the hubbub, a punchy voice filled with green light and dust.
‘We’ve left Rhiannon with a babysitter. We hate parents who take their children to every inappropriate event, don’t we, Squidge?’
Squidge, as she obviously called the husband she had introduced as Lawrence, nodded. He was nursing the same glass of wine he had first brought to the table. Klara nestled up to him again. He smiled as she turned back to me and lifted her glass. The straw bobbed up and down in the fizzy tonic and she followed it with her pursed lips like a baby seeking a nipple. At last she caught the straw between her lips and I saw the old Klara for a moment, focused intently on her drink, frowning. I would have recognised her anywhere, but I was surprised she had recognised me – it was as if she’d left little Klara behind on that dusty property.
‘I meant the people I knew. Your family.’
Her face rippled, almost imperceptibly. It was the second sign of the Klara who had been my best friend so many years ago. I used to see that deep quiver when Dieter walked by, or when we heard his voice from another room.
‘Oh, Mum and Dad have moved to Queensland. Dieter’s married. Has his own salon now. Helen’s still teaching.’ Her eyes blinked, empty, while her hand travelled around her husband’s lap like an animal searching for somewhere to hide. ‘What about your family? I can’t remember – did you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘Salon?’ I said. Did Klara remember our pretend salon? I would lie on the bed while she smeared my face with yoghurt and stained my lips purple with the juice of a cherry.
‘He’s a barber. He likes to call his shop a “salon”.’
A laugh hacked out of my chest. ‘They let him near people with a razor? Does he still throw knives? I hope he got better at it if he does.’
Klara and Squidge stared at me. Then Klara dropped her gaze. She picked up her purse and began sorting through its contents.
‘Sorry?’ Squidge said, speaking directly to me for the first time.
‘Dieter loved to throw things at people. Sharp things. Didn’t he, Klara?’
She pressed her lips together and shook her head slowly, looking down at the table. Her blonde hair flared in the light. Both her hands had delved inside her purse now.
‘Did he? He was a terrible teenager, I suppose. I told you I had a shocking memory.’ She looked up at Squidge. ‘Didn’t I?’
‘Dreadful,’ he answered. ‘Completely vague.’
I had to close my eyes because I couldn’t stop staring at Klara’s features, trying to find the girl I had loved so deeply. We used to lie beside each other on the spongy surface of the playground and count each other’s freckles. I would watch as Klara’s bottom lip pressed briefly under her top teeth before she spoke. I thought it made her look like a mouse, a sweet, hesitant mouse. Sometimes I stood in front of the mirror trying it myself, but it never worked for me. I looked like a dumb rabbit. It was the shape of Klara’s face and her mouth that had made her so loveable and vulnerable.
I rubbed my eyes till they stung, trying to superimpose one Klara on the other.
‘I should get you home,’ Squidge said to Klara.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’
When I opened my left eye she was looking back at me. The blue of her eyes was like the sky shuddering behind a copse of wind-torn trees.
When I opened my right eye she was looking back at her lap.
I touched her arm. Her thin white arm.
‘Klara,’ I said. I didn’t know what else needed to be said anymore. I tried our old call sign, one of the secret codes we used together. ‘Time flies like an arrow.’
‘Very nice to see you, Natalie,’ she replied. She was supposed to say, Fruit flies like a banana.
Squidge stood and stretched, the bones in his back cracking.
I took Klara’s hand in mine. I wanted to have the sensation of our damp childish hands clasped together under the desk one more time. But her hand was dry. Under the skin I could feel the tremor of her bones and muscles, a tremor that probably never left her.
‘I’m glad you made it,’ I told her softly, so her husband didn’t hear, so there was one good thing left between us.
She stood. Her husband held out his hand to help her and she took her hand from mine and gave it to him like a princess taking the hand of the groom from the carriage step.
‘Bye,’ I said.
‘Bye,’ she answered.
Once, we were like sisters. But we were not sisters. She has a real sister and a brother and they are her family. And she owes me nothing.
Deja Vu
One wall of the room with the sulphur spa was glass, and Anthony arrived early each morning so that he could slip into the warm water right next to the window wall and look out, down the hill, at the view of the small French village of Llo and its surrounding mountains. If he came late there would already be a cluster of crepe-paper old men in the bath, snorting and complaining and arguing as if they were drinking Pernod around a table in a cafe, not undergoing a cure at a medicinal hot spring. At the height of their gesticulations, the old men’s hand slaps landed crack on the water, creating little tidal waves that lapped over the rim of the pool and spread across the red tiled floor. But if Anthony arrived early enough, only he and another man, a quiet old man, used the pool. They sat and watched the mist rise off the silver fields on the mountains opposite, and the people hurrying to work in the village below, and they kept the silence.
Peripheral Vision Page 9