'So, how come you got to be such a dab hand at this?'
The two men stood over the fire, drinks in hand. Smoky aromas of sizzling fish and herbs swirled around their heads.
Mischa said,'I had expert teaching.It gives Gigi a break and I like it.'
Tony watched him turning the food and prodding the fire. He said, 'I'm trying to understand the kind of person she is, and I'm finding it unexpectedly hard. How would you describe her?'
'I wouldn't,' Mischa said promptly.
'But you of all people must know her really well.'
'I don't know her really well at all.'
An asparagus spear rolled over and threatened to fall in the fire. Mischa retrieved it smartly with tongs. Tony was about to ask a follow-up question when Mischa added, 'I know what she shows me.She is a mystery in other areas.That is a good quality in a person,Tony.You should look for it.'
'You and she do seem to be very different people.'
This produced a broad grin.'Ah, you've noticed. She is a woman. Luckily for me.'
'And from the way you got together, a woman of strong feelings, I guess.'
This emboldened statement produced a full-on laugh. 'A piece of luck for me again,Tony.' He moved the fish to a quieter corner. 'And she makes very good vino, which is third time lucky.'
When they brought up the trays of food and seated themselves at the table Greer told their guest,'Barbecues are almost the only time he ever cooks, and I love it.' She passed him a plate.
'It's a bit of a male thing, I guess, being outside and grilling food on an open fire,'Tony said cautiously.
'Oh yes, very he-manly. So it's OK to say he does it very well.' She laughed across at Mischa.
'And he tells me he was shown the ropes by an expert?' Tony helped himself to the grilled baby artichokes and asparagus, and the salad of broad beans, tomatoes and wild radicchio. He had waited to raise this question with her, she noticed. He was a fast learner, although he needn't have bothered to wait in this case.
Mischa's eyes were on his plate, but Greer knew that this was one moment in his past he would neither dismiss nor fail to acknowledge. It was part of a set of incidents, a seminal group of memories whose afterglow helped to define their relationship, even to this day. She had always felt it was a key determinant of their survival, their continuing narrative as a couple.
Tony should have some small inkling of this. She said, 'Yes, it was on the drive between Brisbane and Port Douglas.We met some people who invited us to their place for a barbecue. Beer, barbecues and blokes, it's a religious ritual in country Australia, so Mischa was press-ganged into doing his bit.They found he was rather good at fires, in fact, I seem to remember they put him in charge.'
All the same, she was surprised when Mischa expanded on this. 'We made friends with them at a New Year's Eve party in a pub.'
And both of them stopped eating when Tony said,'Well, guess what. I met with some of those people and they send their regards.They remember you very fondly.'
Almost immediately after Josie's arrival in Sydney, as soon as the next day, Mischa had flung his painting materials and Greer's trunk into the car and the pair of them had embarked on the first leg of the long drive up the east coast to the tropics of Far North Queensland. They had an unspoken need to put as much physical distance as possible between themselves and the site of recent past events.
Unlike the mad dash from Melbourne to Sydney five months previously, on this occasion they had kept inside the speed limit.And,unlike that previous drive,this was a sober journey with no singing, and precious little talking either. Which was scarcely surprising. Both of them were in a state of something not far removed from post-traumatic shock.
On 30 December they had motored down the main drag of a Queensland country town in the sluggish afternoon and passed a run-down pub that looked like a picture on a postcard. In its heyday it had been a handsome three-storey hotel built in the gold rush of the last century, with wide wraparound verandahs on two levels. It seemed quite natural for Mischa,without saying anything,to stop,reverse fast down the empty street and park under a tree. They had climbed, silent and tired, out of the dusty station wagon and booked a room. It was an airy bedroom on the top floor, basic but clean, with double doors opening on to the humid verandah.
Their own silence was challenged at once.They found they had stepped into a hive of activity.The hotel had been bought by ambitious new owners and preparations for tomorrow, New Year's Eve, the biggest night of the year, were in full swing. They opted to stay on for it, more through inertia than any anticipation of fun. It turned out to be a wise decision.
The old year yielded to the new in the hotel's lush, overgrown beer garden, crowded with local merrymakers. It was a night of stifling heat that became, somehow, anything but enervating. There were streamers and fireworks, a jazz band in pork-pie hats with a groovy black sax player, a seafood buffet, beer, champagne, the works. The night was intoxicating, in every sense of the word.
In later years, just a languorous whiff of frangipani was enough to transport Greer back to that garden and that particular New Year's Eve.The flowering shrubs seemed to float in the air in the gathering dusk; the creamy yellows of the frangipani and the purple bougainvillea, and the saffron and shocking-pink hibiscus. And the heavy foliage of the trees, draped with tendrils of tiny star-shaped lights.
They had found themselves drawn, or rather coerced – no refusal brooked – on to a family table of nine spanning three extrovert generations. As the evening wore on they had exchanged names, taken puffs of the odd joint that was being openly passed around and told stories that verged on the indiscreet.
They ventured on to the dance floor when the band slowed down, with Greer leaning against Mischa for support and her face glued to his chest. To sensuous renderings of 'When I Fall in Love' and 'The Way You Look Tonight',they had clasped each other tightly for the first time in months.
A TV was wheeled out and they watched the festivities in the state capital cities. They had counted down the seconds until the new year, and whooped and whistled along with everyone else. Then they'd kissed each other hard, embraced their new mates and countless uproarious others, and sung 'Auld Lang Syne' holding the hands of strangers in a circle that swayed and lurched.
Greer hadn't drunk alcohol or smoked anything at all for ages. The unaccustomed effects combined to mask her exhaustion and remnant aches and pains. She had even for a time found herself co-opted with Mischa into the conga line, snaking through the pub and out into the road under the lid of the velvet night, weaving between the worn verandah posts of the town. The rhythmic chants and the rise and fall of their footsteps were almost drowned out by the hypnotic buzz of cicadas.
These protracted revels supplied the blast of normality needed to melt the ice that had come between them. Sometime in the early hours of the new year, after stumbling upstairs to their room that looked out on to the drowsy street they had recently conga'd along, in spite of being pickled and physically and emotionally drained, they had managed to make love.
Mischa had approached this milestone slowly, and with a tenderness that unlocked Greer's constricted heart. After they hauled themselves out of bed late the following afternoon, with him safely down the hall in the shower, she wrote in her diary. It was the first entry she had made for quite some time and, in fact, the last one she would make for a quarter of a century.
New Year's Day 1980
We're back together. Permanently and irrevocably. It has to be symbolic that this, the first day of the new year, is for Mischa and me the day of our reconciliation.
I feel flooded with relief and profound thankfulness, quite unlike anything before in my life.This feeling is like a spiritual experience, although I know it's horrendously sacrilegious to say so. Under the circumstances.
We were both on an unbelievable high last night, in spite of being (or maybe because of being) knackered and sloshed (totally, times two).The high lasted the whole night & we have
n't come down from it yet.We had the best time.We met some surprisingly nice people too, or they seemed nice. In the state we were in we probably would've liked Stalin or Charles Manson.We're going to see some of them again tonight.
After the party we came to bed. In the aforementioned blotto state we hardly knew what we were doing, but that was a good thing – it made us forge ahead oblivious.We just...I was going to say, threw caution out of the window, but that's not how it was at all. It was, though, utterly different from before.
M. was so sweet & gentle with me, so tentative at first and controlled. He whispered at one stage he felt as if I was a virgin, and it was true, that was how it did feel. He let me guide him. In a way it was as if this was the first time for him too, although his restraint and self-control could only have come about from experience. It was not explosive like before, but gradual and infinitely more delicate.
I will never forget how tender he was. Never.
It didn't hurt but afterwards I cried, I couldn't help it.That made him cry too. It hit me then what all this has been like for him. Not that I haven't been aware of Mischa and his feelings for every moment of every day of the past five terrible months. But I saw it with a new clarity.
We didn't even fall asleep straight afterwards but lay in bed, watching the sunrise through the wide-open verandah doors and talking.We spoke a bit about sex & jealousy.We know we've each had plenty of previous experiences, we just don't want to hear anything more about them. Charlie, Elsa & the rest, they're simply meaningless names to us now.
And I want to hereby put the past, and I mean the immediate past, out of my mind. I intend to banish it.
If you don't make a point of remembering a thing, it doesn't lodge in your psyche. It does not become a memory. Eventually, it fades away.That is what this will do.
After the barbecue Tony was keen to make a start on collating Mischa's library of musicals. Greer left them with brandy and the soundtrack of Crazy for You. From her study she could hear Tony singing a few bars of 'Nice Work ifYou Can Get It'. He had a light tenor not dissimilar to Fred Astaire's.
She sat with her arms clasped across her chest, the steady light of two candles glowing on the desk.There was no draught.The flames burnt without a flicker. She remembered very well the complicated tears she had shed. They were uncontrollable. It had been like a pent-up dam bursting and flooding over.
Had that confident method of erasing a memory worked out according to plan?
She thought, I am sitting here in candlelight as my predecessors must have sat, in a room in a stone house that is part of an isolated hamlet.What would you see if you were to put this little group of buildings, where four people live in close proximity, under a microscope? You would see an organism, a complete ecosystem detached from the outside world.
Detached, yes, but also dependent on it in countless ways.
If you extended the breadth of the magnification, the surrounding countryside would enter the picture, and you would see how the wider world connects with this hamlet. Extend it further, much further still, and you might fit first the country and eventually the whole planet under an overarching lens.
Did I deliberately set out to put the world at a distance? That is what everyone does, in a small way, when they construct walls around rooms inside their own houses. But I have gone beyond that, haven't I? I have tried to barricade myself against my own past.
You could see craters on the moon through Guy's telescope, or on a good day the stones of the distant watchtower astride the ridge on the horizon. Through high-powered telescopes astronomers could leave the boundaries of their small world and venture out into the universe.They could write stories of the birth of galaxies and witness the fallout from events that had happened billions of human years ago.
And you didn't even have to be an astronomer. Everyone on the planet could do this, in a more limited fashion. Every inhabitant in the world had a telescope, their own built-in, individual version, and it was more versatile than a conventional model.Through it they might try to visualise the future, but with no guarantee of success.They could also revisit the past.
The mind was a miniature observatory, with the added capacity to look backwards in time. Greer saw this clearly. Each mind was autonomous, able to construct and deconstruct, write and rewrite the narratives of individual lives.
Your personal observatory, though, was restricted. It was subjective.It could only operate on a limited scale,your own private frequency, constrained by your existence as a human being.To believe you could barricade yourself in perpetuity against the fallout you had generated – well, that had to be a delusion.
If she were to steal a fearful glance through her own telescope Greer knew already and only too well what she would see out there. A mass of prowling, indistinct shapes. But there was something she had not realised until this night, sitting in candlelight in her study. It felt like a momentous scientific discovery, a moment of pure illumination.
Whether she looked backwards in time or whether she tried to look forwards, it made no difference. From either end of the telescope, the view was the same.
If you don't make a point of remembering a thing it doesn't lodge in your psyche. It does not become a memory. Eventually, it fades away.That is what this will do.
If she focused the lens of her mind's eye it could bring those shapes into sharp, into hardcore relief. Even though she had not done it, and could not bear the thought of doing it, she knew that this was true. It proved that the writer of those words was mistaken.
No matter how well you succeeded in banishing them from your mind, certain memories did not fade away.They might retreat. They might lie in wait. It was as if they had minds of their own.
It has been a long dark night of the soul.Thanks, you up there, whoever you are, for letting Mischa and me make it through against the odds.Thank you Lord,thank you God,Jesus,Allah, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Confucius, and all the spirits of the Dreamtime, the Wandjina, and especially you,Venus, the goddess of love.
And my fairy godmother, the tooth fairy, and anyone else I've forgotten to thank.
At this moment in time, in this wondrous new year, let it be recorded: I am truly happy.
Oh yes, Greer could see that in the writing.The words fairly danced off the page, with their euphoric loops and whorls.
She deciphered them with a sense of wonder.The entry read like an overheated acceptance speech at the Oscars. Effusive thanks for making it through, dished out to every deity that sprang to mind, but no mention of those at whose expense she had made it.
Had there been any residual scruples? There was no evidence of them here, no acknowledgement of what had taken place less than a week earlier. No vestige of a qualm. Just an oblique reference to 'the immediate past'.The writer had stuck to her guns, maintained her stance of selectivity to the last.
The writing was oversized in its exuberance and the entry ran over a double page. It could easily be torn out. Greer held the two sheets of writing between her fingers. How light and fragile the pages were, and how combustible. She sat at her desk, staring at the pages as if to erase or nullify the words by force of will.
She looked at the walls of her study, shadowy and mysterious in the candlelight. She imagined those who had come before, tried to locate their phantom imprints in the air, to pin them down. What had been the nature of their transgressions? This room had not always been a study.What had it been?
It was a small space. It had probably been a child's bedroom.
Ripping out those pages would be a cowardly act. Such vandalism would not destroy the past. And it was an insult even to think of trying to explain, or excuse.Why was she trying to explain it anyway?
At this moment in time, in this wondrous new year, let it be recorded: I am truly happy.
What could you say to that? She laid down her pen and locked the notebook back in the drawer.
17
Greer and Mischa had stayed on in the country town hotel for two more
days. They were recovering, and not just from the aftermath of New Year's Eve. Both evenings they ate with people they had met that night, first in a big group in a local pizzeria and then at a smaller backyard barbecue. It was an intense pleasure to sit at a table and eat and drink, talk and laugh with ordinary people. It had all the freshness and charm of a new experience.
'They remembered you very well,'Tony had repeated at dinner. 'I got the feeling they'd reminisced about meeting the two of you a lot over the years.They were taken up with the romance of it all, how you were on the run from past lives and lovers.' He turned to Mischa.'They followed your later career with great interest.'
Part of the enjoyment had been the knowledge that the two of them were passing through and would never see these nice people with whom, to be honest, they hadn't much in common, again in their lives.
'How on earth did you find them?' Greer had asked in amazement. Mischa seemed to have moved on. He was intent on making a wavy line of cracked pepper on his plate with the blade of his knife.
'Ah.They found me. One of their kids, who wasn't even born back then, was a student at a Sydney art school. He saw my website and then his dad emailed me.'
Greer was not worried. Neither she nor Mischa would have let slip anything incriminating about the immediate past in Sydney. Neither of them could face thinking about that, let alone speaking of it.
Tony went on,'They said you'd had some pretty riotous times together.'
Greer said,'Oh, we did. It was quite wild and woolly. So much so that I can't remember too much about it.'
Mischa looked up from his plate and engaged her in the eye. 'I remember all about it. It involved mainly drinking. They said when the revolution comes and all painters are banned, at least I can make survival food on a fire.'
For the five months preceding that barbecue Mischa and Greer had lived like a couple of hermits in the city. They were closeted together: Mischa working at a manic pace that seemed to Greer increasingly violent and disturbed, and Greer growing more distraught. They had occupied the same tiny flat, but they hardly, it seemed in retrospect, exchanged more than a few words each day.
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