Lucas looked up and grinned. ‘I wasn’t studying spirits.’
‘No, he was studying starfish. Starfish and rooting.’ Kristobel pressed herself to Lucas and seized his earlobes. ‘Didn’t yuh? Rooted yourself stupid, didn’t yuh! Didn’t yuh?’ She covered his face with her mouth and grazed moistly.
‘Starfish?’ said Leon.
‘Marine biology,’ said Lucas. He’d turned Kristobel in his arms and was holding her from behind.
‘Gonna go, Leon,’ said Kristobel. She stepped out of Lucas’s embrace and picked up her coat. ‘Get our stuff out the basement, that’s okay?’
‘You’ll come back one day?’
‘Maybe. What about the new van? Flash, hey?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Pinched it in Brissy.’
Leon was startled. ‘Really? No, you mustn’t do that! Black people are jailed so readily, it’s…’
‘Leon! Chill, you moron! I’m joking! Farrk!’
Within ten minutes they were gone, their spruce red van disappearing in the dip then reappearing beyond the creek.
Leon stood staring. He was still staring long after the distant figure of Kristobel had stepped out of the van to open and close the gate. He watched as cars and trucks and then a bus glided past along the highway. Would Daniel come today? With his story of Tess? The disappointment of Kristobel and Lucas staying so briefly sat in his head like drizzle.
He wandered about indoors hoping to find a sanded surface he hadn’t yet covered in script, but there was nothing. It would have to be a tradesman with a sanding machine. He dialled information for the telephone numbers of carpenters in the region and called five without getting any commitment to take the job on. He roamed the house in an agony of frustration and at length fell into a chair with Sandra Perelman’s photocopies.
Traurigkeit, Schuldgefühle und Trostlosigkeit sind die Nachwirkungen dieser Abscheu. Dieser Wunsch Francine tot mit krabbelnden Schnecken auf Ihrer Haut zwischen den Salatblaettern zu sehen ist an sich grausam. Doch woher kommen diese ekelhaften Ausdruecke? Gedanken die ich mein ganzes Leben zu meiden versuchte. Woerter die mir plötzlich einfallen scheinen auf meinen Lippen zu verfaulen also ob sie ganz normal wären. Ich gehe auf einen Spaziergang im Walde des Ostens und meine Gedanken lassen mich nicht in Ruhe und hacken noch weiter auf dieser armen Frau herum. Ich habe sie nackt gesehen. Ich habe das helle Geburtsmal an ihrem Kreuz, ihre langen abgekauten Brustwarzen, und die Falten in ihrer Haut auf der innenseite der Oberarme gesehen. Ich vervielfache jeden einzelnen Makel ohne die Pracht ihrer wahren Schoenheit zu berücksichtigen, die meinem zwanzig Jahre älteren Körper in den Schatten stellt und David mehr bietet als ich ihm jemals geben könnte.
Leon’s German was not as good as Dorothy’s, who had taught him, and Dorothy’s was not as good as Jennifer’s, who had taught her. He struggled from the first word.
Ich verabscheue dieses Gift das innerlich in mir weilt und so schnell zu Munde kommt. Was hat diese arme Frau getan? Sie hat einfach seine Küsse wie sowohl ich als auch Trudy angenommen. Dieser Mann küßt als wäre es sein Beruf. Kein anderer Mann widmet sich mehr dem küssen wie er und es hat auch kein anderer von dieser Gabe so profitiert. Ein stattlicher Gewinn wenn man das Vermögen liebt.
Trudy betet in der Kappelle dafür, dass er die nächsten millionen Jahre noch lebt, ich trage nach der Tat seinen Samen stundenlang auf meinem Körper damit ich den Luxus haben darf, den Moschusgeruch später auf meinen Fingern riechen zu koennen.
Or could he write on the unsanded surfaces of the house with the right sort of pen? Would that be possible? Surely!
He left the photocopies and drove to Yackandandah. It was late afternoon. The shops would be shut within ten or fifteen minutes. On the way he passed a camp being set up on the roadside. He paid no attention.
chapter 25
Homeless
THE PROFESSOR wouldn’t budge, even after an uncomfortable night in the open air. Daanya followed him through the furniture piled on the roadside pleading for a little common sense.
‘People laugh at us!’
‘Laugh?’ said Emmanuel. ‘Oh no. Not laugh. They despise me. You, they adore.’
‘They don’t adore me. They pity me, husband.’
‘Many who are adored ought more to be pitied.’
Daanya was forced to prepare for a long period of perversity. She drove to Carl’s Big Outdoors in Wangaratta and put Carl himself in charge of outfitting her for a week or two weeks or a month on the roadside. She explained the circumstances. Carl said: ‘Shire won’t let you camp there for long, you know that.’ He said he’d fit Daanya out and help her set up and she could bring anything back that wasn’t used.
Then Emmanuel said that he must have television. Daanya wanted to scream but exasperation had made her mute. When her voice returned, she said only, ‘Be reasonable!’ Emmanuel stood with his back to her, gazing at the hills.
‘See if you can find the nail-clippers,’ he said.
The next morning Daanya drove back to Carl’s Big Outdoors and purchased a second-hand Honda three-socket portable generator complete with spools of electrical cable. She set up the television in one of the Black Wolf tents. Reception was a problem—Daanya had forgotten about that. Michael of Andy’s Antennas was not prepared to erect the digital antenna he delivered to the camp site but was prepared to sell Daanya a four-metre length of galvanised pipe, thirty metres of steel cable, eyelet collars, eight metres of coaxial cable, and four steel pegs. Daanya took advice on the tools she would need from the staff at the Wangaratta TruValue and over a period of four hours on a hot afternoon raised the antenna. Emmanuel looked on scornfully.
But at seven in the evening he was sitting in the Black Wolf watching the ABC news. Daanya served him a stubby of the Stella Artois he favoured from the space-age LG, now connected to the generator. She stood in shorts and T-shirt with a stubby of her own, enjoying the satisfaction of a job well done. The galvanised mast of the antenna had been buried to a depth of seventy centimetres, the rock and soil of the excavation pounded back into the hole with an earth ram. The four guy cables ran from the mast to the steel pegs at forty-five degrees, each as taut as a bowstring. Between sips, Daanya tried the steadiness of the mast by gripping it to test for movement. What pleasure there would have been in sharing with her husband her pride in what she’d accomplished. Instead she addressed Joseph and Sofia in a voice too soft to carry to Emmanuel.
‘Your mother, the workhorse,’ she murmured. ‘My darlings, intercede for me in heaven. The patience your father demands—I can’t tell you!’
Before serving dinner, she completed an abbreviated wudu with bottled water and prayed in her work clothes without any sense of violation.
On her way to work the next day, Daanya dropped the professor off in Yackandandah to pick up his car from the Braidwood Street house. She was aware that her husband would make mischief but she had her day’s work at the clinic to worry about. Emmanuel endured a kiss on the cheek and told his wife, without much venom, that he wished her in hell.
chapter 26
Heaven
FATHER BOURKE came to the house the next morning dressed for the outdoors in an Everlast T-shirt, green twill trousers and mid-shin lace-up boots. Joyful had become a destination of the unannounced; like Kristobel and Lucas and Emily, the priest simply walked in and imposed his business without apology.
‘Bourke,’ he said when he came upon Leon writing on the surface of the kitchen table. Leon had heard his visitor’s echoing footfalls and coo-ee but hadn’t bothered to disguise what he was doing.
‘I’d ask if I was interrupting something, but do I want to know?’ said Father Bourke.
‘I’m writing,’ said Leon.
‘I’ll have a cuppa.’ Father Bourke pulled a chair to the table. ‘I was in your shop the other day. Called by to see how you were going. Susie tells me you’re up here playing silly buggers.’
‘You came from Melbourne to tell me that?’
&
nbsp; ‘What? No, no. Passing through. Intend to flick a line about on a creek bit further north. Am I going to get that cuppa?’
Leon put on the kettle, then turned courteously to face his visitor. The priest was not entirely unwelcome. Leon hoped Father Bourke would say, ‘I have seen Tess in heaven. I have that power. I have seen her walking in the morning, surrounded by golden fire.’
‘Joyce, you’re not losing your marbles, are you?’ said Father Bourke. ‘Susie says you could be. Hope not. I can take all the cancers and fuck knows what but I hate to see a brain falling apart. Gives me the heebies.’
Father Bourke spoke in a rich baritone, like the leading actor in a troupe of strolling players. Leon didn’t reply to the question. He put a teabag into a big blue mug he’d purchased at the Beechworth IGA.
‘Have you had much to do with Indigenous people?’ said Leon. He placed the mug of tea before the priest, a teaspoon, a carton of milk, a crumpled bag of raw sugar.
‘A bit. Why?’
‘I have heard that Aborigines can overcome grief in special ways. Do you think that’s true?’
‘No. I think it fucks them over the same as you and me. Why?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not mad.’
‘Yes you are. You’re writing on the floor, writing on the table. That’s mad enough for me.’
Leon said: ‘Do you think Tess is in heaven?’
The priest rolled his eyes in the way Lucas had. Behind Leon, a big porthole window, a strange feature, let in a blurry light coloured by the bright foliage of the hawthorn that pressed against the pane. The light fell across the kitchen table, across Leon’s scrawl, across one side of Father Bourke’s face, dramatising the priest’s good looks even further. He was one of those men who look the perfect age at any age.
‘And you say you’re not mad,’ said Father Bourke.
‘But is she in heaven?’
The priest lifted his hands then let them fall. ‘Is Tess in heaven? Yes, she’s in heaven.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No.’
‘Sometimes I think her spirit’s here. She…she spent time here. With Daniel Mikolajczyk.’
‘That Polish prick?’
‘Yes.’
‘She told me about him. An arsehole for the ages. Listen, Joyce, your wife’s dead. It’s a bastard. There will never be a woman as beautiful as Tess again. I know for a fact you didn’t have sex with her, but it looks like you had the best of her all the same. Better settle for that.’
Father Bourke looked away and down from Leon as he spoke, but at intervals would lift his gaze and exercise the allure of his honey-coloured eyes. Leon guessed he had found this to be the irresistible thing. The offer of capture.
‘Did you love Tess?’ said Leon.
Father Bourke raised his head to look almost at the ceiling. He sipped his tea, still gazing upward. It was as if he’d thought himself done with the visit but had been drawn into a second effort by Leon’s question. On the fitted kitchen shelves behind him sat an ancient set of tin canisters, yellow with red lids. On each canister, the foliage of a pink rose wrapped itself around the name of the contents. ‘Flour’ stood on the shelf directly above the priest’s head.
‘Men adored her. They didn’t love her. I want to say something a bit turdy, unless it upsets you?’
‘No. Please go on.’
‘Tess was a pro bono whore, don’t take it unkindly.’
‘Please go on.’
‘I knew women who loved her, but even that was admiration. You knew her better than I did, Joyce. She wouldn’t talk about her piano playing with me, that whole side of her life. If you got the piano out of her, you got something more generous than sex. I heard her speaking at a Catholic Aid Abroad conference one time. Guest speaker. This was long after I’d first met her. She sparkled. Spoke about beauty in music, beauty in charity. Read something from Aristotle. I never got that from her in private. Was she as flash as they say? As a pianist?’
‘No,’ said Leon, meaning only that she was overrated by those who thought her world class. Then he said, in a voice barely above a whisper, ‘She is in heaven.’
‘What was that?’
‘Nothing,’ said Leon. Then he changed his mind. ‘She is in heaven. If not your heaven, then another.’
‘The heaven of the beautiful?’
‘Yes.’
Father Bourke laughed. ‘Yes, but you see, Joyce, I’m the representative of a faith that takes a dim view of getting into heaven on the basis of your good looks. Mind you, I think exceptions could be made.’
‘The faith you represent? You represent your appetites.’
‘Not at all. Not at all. You have to see past the hooey.’
‘I think you believe what’s convenient.’
‘‘‘Believe?’’’ Father Bourke lifted his chin. ‘I don’t “believe” anything. But I’ll tell you what I know. If Tess takes you in her arms and the first thing that pops into your mind is damnation, there’s a squalid side to your faith. That I can tell you.’
Father Bourke made a coughing sound deep in his throat, like a lion. Leon thought of what Tess had said, that Father Bourke was feared in his order, and feared in Rome.
‘Listen, Joyce. I only give advice once a year. This year, you’re it. Whatever Tess was, she wasn’t the queen of heaven. She doesn’t need you making a saint of her. Leave her alone.’
‘Is that what you’re doing? Leaving her alone?’
‘I pray for her, Joyce. I pray for the repose of her soul. Helping out, if you like.’
‘She was a masterful woman. She never needed help from you or anyone.’
Father Bourke put his hand in his hair and scratched, eyes closed. ‘Joyce, you worry me,’ he said. ‘You knew her for—what?—ten years?’
He opened his eyes to watch Leon say: ‘Nine.’
‘Nine, ten. She wasn’t masterful, Joyce. She was desperate. All her life. All of it.’
Leon didn’t respond. He hadn’t heard anyone say this about Tess before. He had never said it himself. But he had thought it.
‘She hated it, Joyce. But it was there. Black stuff. Horrible. She was just holding it together all her life.’
‘It was…it was something I wondered about,’ said Leon. He had once seen Tess put her fingertips in the flame of a gas hotplate, and hold them there. She hadn’t known he was watching and when he’d shrieked and run to her, she’d turned her back to him. It was a month before she could play the piano again. Nothing was said.
‘Fourteen when her mother died,’ said Father Bourke. ‘Dolly, fine woman, same sort of thing that killed Tess. You never met her father, in the ground before your time. He brought her up, Buster, took her on tour when she wasn’t at Presentation. Big name in the theatre, Buster, put shows on everywhere. Legendary skirt man, tons of charm. Tess adored him. May not have been the healthiest influence. He went bust when Tess was about to marry that hairy Pole, what was his name?’
‘Kasimir,’ said Leon.
‘Kasimir. Buster dug up every penny he could find to pay for the wedding. Tess was away on her honeymoon when he put a bullet in his skull. Tore her to bits.’
Leon said: ‘She never mentioned her father to me. Nor her mother.’
Nothing was spoken for some time. Then: ‘On my way,’ Father Bourke said. He stood.
Leon remained seated.
‘Leave her alone,’ Father Bourke said again. He offered his hand across the kitchen table. It wasn’t accepted.
‘Shake my hand!’ the priest roared. Leon stood and shook the priest’s hand. Once this was accomplished, Father Bourke relented. He pushed a hand through his fair, greying hair.
‘I’m going to offer an apology, Joyce. You loved Tess in your dickless way, I’m sure. I shouldn’t have spoken crudely. Will you forgive me?’
‘Will you concede that Tess deserves a place of honour in your heaven?’
‘Of course she does, Joyce. Of course she does.’
&nbs
p; =
Alone again, Leon returned to his writing. But the coloured markers didn’t give him the satisfaction of writing on floorboards with a ballpoint pen. With nothing to occupy him, he picked up the photocopies once more and settled on the marble steps.
November 17th, 1957
Jesus My Love in Your Heaven My Love my hands are bound to Yours My Love the Blood of Your Wounds My Love runs in my body.
Francine may or may not live, better not, perhaps. She has no face. The flames took everything. I try to keep the shock out of my eyes at her bedside. Her eyelids are seared together except for a small part that allows her to peep out. Little tufts stand up on the scabby red flesh of her scalp. She doesn’t attempt to speak. A hefty policewoman with a birthmark like a big red semicolon on her cheek sits on a chair in the corner with her arms folded. She persists in telling me that Francine won’t say a word. She is under the impression that I am related to Francine and her disgust is intended as much for me as for the prisoner. I imagine she prays for Francine’s survival for the joy of seeing her hanged, but the legal people I’ve retained think that is unlikely. Maurice says that she will spend the rest of her life in an institution for the criminally insane. He is very confident. I have a burns specialist from Adelaide coming to assess Francine tomorrow week. I want her to live but perhaps that’s only because it’s what one does; wishing the opposite is too complicated. The burns man says she will die but wishes to withhold the exclamation mark until he has seen her in person. He said he would keep his ‘personal feelings of revulsion’ under control. I felt like saying, ‘Well, I should jolly well think so!’ Should I be so full of huff? I wished her good and dead a hundred times when I was sharing David with her. I wished her quite completely dead when the news came through those six weeks ago. Each visit I strive to find things to say, and because there is nothing I simply babble. I have said nothing whatever to her about the funerals five weeks past. I started to tell her about Mandrake reclaimed by Catherine, how much I miss him, but then thought better, considering. The subject of my own grief is closed, of course. I feel I know less and less what the use of it is, giving one’s heart such sway in one’s life. Unless it comes from nature and is intended to whip us along into things we would normally avoid—liaisons, marriages, agreements. If that’s true, then the great distress of it seems to me that nature overdoes it. I would offer myself up to a Walter or a David at the behest of approximately one tenth of the urgency nature thinks necessary. Walter is gone, David is gone, I remain drenched with futile longing that has nowhere to go, nothing to do with itself. I’m like the village idiot, laughed at up and down the town with no power to form words, not in public. Would it not better serve if the love and longing fizzled out when the boy or girl is gone? I suppose it does eventually, but eventually is so long!
Joyful Page 22