‘Do you have a lighter?’ he asked Mikolajczyk, and was handed an orange Bic.
‘Mrs Williams, do you relinquish all your memories of Teresa Joyce in the flames of this fire?’
Emily, head on her chest, muttered something that didn’t carry.
‘Mrs Williams,’ Leon repeated, ‘do you relinquish all your memories of Teresa Joyce in the flames of this fire, according to the terms of our agreement?’
Emily lifted her head. ‘I told you he’d go back to Poland!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I told you he’d go back to Poland! I begged you, Leon, absolutely begged you! He’s going back to Poland. He already has his ticket.’
‘It’s true, Porpoise,’ said Mikolajczyk. ‘So what?’
Leon hoisted himself upright from his kneeling position.
‘Mrs Williams, my only concern at this moment is your agreement. Do I have your agreement?’
‘Just do it, love,’ said Gareth.
‘What’s the point?’ said Emily. She thrust her face at Leon, one hand raised imploringly. ‘How can you burn memories? They’re still in my head, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Mrs Williams,’ said Leon, finding patience, ‘when you accept money for memories, you have alienated yourself from any moral right to them. I ask again, do you relinquish all your memories of Teresa Joyce in the flames of this fire, according to the terms of our agreement?’
Without waiting for Emily’s answer, Mikolajczyk lunged across the bed of ashes, seized her by the throat with one hand and lifted her almost off her feet. Her face turned brick-red; her eyes grew huge.
‘Mister Leon asks you a question, Missus!’
‘Yeth! Yeth!’
Mikolajczyk released her, brushing away Gareth’s hand raised in tentative intervention.
‘She says yes, Porpoise.’
Drawing painful breaths between coughs, Emily nodded her head with as much confirmation as she could convey.
‘This has to be of your own free will, Mrs Williams,’ said Leon.
‘Porpoise, burn her fucking story, she hasn’t got free will! Fuck me!’
Leon knelt and put the flame of the lighter to Emily’s story. A small breeze spread the fire in a paroxysm of hunger. The crumpled sheets of A4 opened in their agony; what was white blackened. Leon remained on his knees, waiting for satisfaction. It came, but as a dribble, not a flood.
Gareth’s story had to be ripped in bunched pages from the wire spine of the notebook. Leon made a teepee of the sheets then asked Gareth if he relinquished his memories of Tess. Gareth said that he did, and Leon put the lighter’s flame to the base of the teepee. The pages were consumed within the space of a minute.
‘Hey, Mister,’ said Mikolajczyk, wild with glee, ‘in your life one good fuck, now you sold it to Porpoise!’
Gareth half smiled, then said quietly: ‘This doesn’t stop me remembering Tess.’
‘No? You want I tell you something, Mister? You take Mister Leon’s money, your fuck is finished. What do you think? Tessie is watching you in heaven sell your fuck to Leon and she thinks, “No problem”? She pisses on you, Mister!’
Emily asked if she could sit in the car. She was feeling ill, she said. Mikolajczyk gave his consent, and told Gareth to go too.
‘Now, Porpoise, this is our turn. How you want to do this?’
‘I need some sticks,’ said Leon.
‘Good. Good, Porpoise. Some sticks, big fire.’
Together, Leon and Mikolajczyk gathered twigs from under the ironbarks, then more twigs, then bigger branches. The fuel stood waist-high before Leon signalled his satisfaction. He crumpled pages of the poem and worked them into the pile. He wanted the fire to be burning fiercely before he added the bulk of the seventy pages.
‘Okay now?’ said Mikolajczyk.
‘Yes, I’m ready now.’
‘Wait, Porpoise.’
Mikolajczyk hurried to the Enchanted station wagon and returned with a bottle of vodka. He worked the screwcap loose and offered the bottle to Leon.
‘Polish vodka, Porpoise, not Russian vodka. You know what Russian vodka is for? For your girlfriend’s arse. Drink, Porpoise!’
Leon swallowed deeply. A thirst had been growing in him since he’d woken on the driveway. It was possible that he was now an alcoholic and might soon be dead. He passed the bottle back to Mikolajczyk just as a crowd of white cockatoos exploded from an ungainly larch behind the ironbarks and rose shrieking above the house. They settled again not in the one tree but in a number: in the laurels and the dogwoods to the south of the driveway, in the chestnuts overshadowing the Enchanted station wagon. With their winged white bodies and flash of gold above their heads, they seemed a host of raucous angels gathered at an arena.
‘Do you,’ said Leon, ‘relinquish all your memories of Teresa Joyce in the flames of this fire, according to the terms of our agreement?’
‘I do, Porpoise my friend.’
Leon lit the crumpled pages to start the blaze. The flames licked at the dry twigs; the fire began to build. Soon the heat was strong enough to force Leon and Mikolajczyk a step back from the flames. Leon reached forward to throw pages in complements of five onto the fire. The fire reached for them as they fell.
‘Porpoise, this is for me the best thing in my life. The best, Porpoise!’
‘So you said.’
In fact, there was no reason to doubt Mikolajczyk’s sincerity. Tears were running down his cheeks.
‘You know something, Porpoise? This is my poem. Not writing it, no. Burning it. This is the poem. I love you for this, Porpoise. For this, I love you forever.’
Now and again a half-burnt page would wing away from the fire in the updraft. Leon gathered each one from where it had landed and returned it to the blaze. Mikolajczyk meanwhile stood weeping in his ecstatic transport. Emily and Gareth Williams watched silently from the station wagon. The birds at intervals raised their voices.
With the last of the pages consigned to the flames, Leon still could not say that his great project of purgation had ended with success. He stared across the diminishing bed of fire at Mikolajczyk and saw all the man’s vileness glowing as vividly as ever. He imagined Tess’s spirit standing here at the fireside. Would she wish for her life back—for her heart to beat again, for her blood to flow, for her form to cast a shadow? And if she were to live again, knowing what she did of heaven and hell, having gazed on the face of God, would she stand beside Mikolajczyk, or beside him?
chapter 29
Complaints
A POLICE car stopped on the roadside by Emmanuel’s camp. Emmanuel was reunited with his friend, Senior Constable Cuff, who advanced with an expression of practised patience.
‘Complaints, Mr Delli.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. You’ll have to pack up. This isn’t a declared camping site. Is Mrs Delli around?’
‘Alas, no.’
‘I doubt she knows what you’re up to with your sign.’
‘The Angel of Wangaratta? No, no—she wouldn’t approve.’
‘Nor do I, frankly. I’ll give you until after Christmas, Mr Delli. If you’re still here, I’ve got Reg Cruikshank from Rutherglen on standby.’
‘And Mr Cruikshank is?’
‘He’s a carrier. He’ll take your stuff to his depot.’
‘I see.’
‘I don’t like to do this, Mr Delli. I hope you understand that.’
‘It’s a blot on our friendship, certainly.’
‘And I’ll have to ask you to take down your sign, if you would.’
‘I am temperamentally unable to accept dictation from policemen, unfortunately. I swore a sacred oath after my experiences in Baghdad.’
Cuff removed the sign himself, not roughly, and stowed it in the boot of his vehicle. Emmanuel made a new sign, identical to the one confiscated, and sat himself in his chair once more. He gave some thought to eating a piece of fruit, or if not fruit a Mars Bar, but the moment passed. He
required so little to sustain him these days. The vigour of his loathing fed itself on air. Gazing across the paddocks to the hills and the ragged skyline, he thought of the images of fire he’d watched in rapture on television the previous evening. Questions were being asked in an arena of enquiry about the conduct of responsible bodies during the bushfire catastrophe earlier in the year. Viewers were shown the flames of that period, the heaps of ash and twisted iron that had once been dwellings. People had died, a great many, the life scorched from their bodies. Emmanuel had paid no attention at the time of the fires in February; not even to those that had broken out to the east of Beechworth. But now he wished he had. Fireballs had cartwheeled through the superheated air. Hell itself had come striding across the earth, monstrous in its appetite. He wished for its return. He would stand in its path, smiling. As the clothing on his body, the hair on his head turned to fire, pray God he had the strength to keep standing so that at the last moment he could spread his bare arms and embrace it. Hell had swallowed his son and daughter. What death could be sweeter than to face its malice with naked contempt?
chapter 30
Goldy
HIS DAYS and nights Leon spent sanding. The frosting of dust on his hair, his face, his bare arms became a crust. His most urgent fear was that he would run out of sanding belts. A trip to Wangaratta seemed impossible. All the steps involved—how did any human manage that?—finding the car keys, finding one’s shirt.
The roar of the sander concealed a type of music, an aural patterning. At times when he was resting from his task he’d turn on the sander just to fill his ears with that sound. The machine was the closest thing he had to a friend: pathetic, but acceptable. Talking to it would be going too far. He should stay alert for developments of that sort. He had no interest in madness as a destination. Except for the ultimate madness of death when, he supposed, one’s mind embraced suddenly, finally, every crazy idea in the universe.
The great burning of a week ago had been a failure. Nothing was gained. He was sane enough to admit it. He wandered through the house, stopping to read what he’d written in past days and weeks on walls and floorboards, on windowsills. In the smaller of the downstairs kitchens he surprised a glistening snake banded in gold, thick at the middle, its head upraised. He slid his bare foot close but the snake swarmed over it on its way to the open back door. His heart grew fuller for a few seconds.
He stood on the upstairs balcony above the verandah and stared at clouds the colour of ruined fruit mounting in the north-east. ‘I think it might rain,’ he said, as if it were his habit to forecast the weather, when it wasn’t at all. It startled him, that he’d spoken aloud, and he glanced around quickly to see if he’d been talking to anyone. He wished the snake had honoured him with its fangs instead of its touch. But compelling a snake to kill you might be considered cruel. Yes, it would be cruel.
=
It was Christmas, approximately. Susie, who was not a Christian, had nonetheless taken to the holiday with an enthusiasm almost equal to Tess’s. She sent gifts to the Yackandandah post office and instructed Leon to pick them up and open them. He was then to call her before she shut the shop and went to Rangoon for a fortnight.
Leon did as he was told. The electric shaver from Finland was a work of art, he said. The bound copies of the New Yorker from 1929—lovely. The French chocolates—also lovely. He had his own instructions for Susie: she was to take five thousand dollars out of the shop account and buy herself whatever she liked from David Jones, maybe. Or from Tiffany. Susie said she would do no such thing. But she would buy a modest present for her son Michael and say it was from Uncle Leon.
‘Doctor Perelman is coming soon,’ Susie said. ‘Did you forget?’
‘No,’ said Leon. Of course he had.
=
Emily Williams turned up in the new year to tell Leon that Daniel had left for Poland and that she was going to Darfur to work for Oxfam. The shop and the Enchanted station wagon were on the market; Nutty and Jo were for sale. But she would leave all that in Gareth’s hands.
Leon, eyebrows and lashes thick with sawdust, climbed to his feet from his sanding position on the verandah. He’d been at work on the exterior face of the front door, since he’d now exhausted the surfaces he could reach inside the house. He said nothing for the moment. But he was capable of registering that Emily looked prettier than usual. The blemishes that had disfigured her complexion were gone; her cheeks seemed sheer instead of puffy. It was as if she had sorrowed her way to beauty.
‘You’ve had your hair cut,’ he said.
‘Yes. Well, I can now. Daniel was strict about keeping it long.’
Belt-sander in one hand, Leon gestured at Emily’s attire, dark slacks, a short-sleeved green woollen top, red shoes with silver buckles. ‘You look very attractive,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘You might like to go now. I’m busy. As you can see.’
Emily glanced through the open door at walls and floorboards dense with text.
‘I was hoping we could part friends.’
‘Certainly. Perhaps you’d like to go now?’
‘I’ll just say that I’m sorry for pestering you. Because I am sorry. Most sincerely sorry.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Renovating?’ said Emily.
‘No, not at all. Yes, a little.’
‘I’m going to the most dangerous part.’
‘Pardon? The most dangerous part?’
‘Of Darfur.’
‘Really? Well, I hope you…I hope you achieve whatever it is you wish to achieve.’
‘What I wish to achieve?’ Emily gave a troubled laugh, three hollow notes. ‘What I wish to achieve is being dead, if possible.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Leon.
‘What?’ said Emily. ‘Don’t you believe me? Where I’m going the life expectancy for an unarmed white woman is very, very short. Don’t you know about Darfur?’
‘I imagine the poor people of Darfur will not object if you choose their country as a stage for your death. But it would be better for them if you remained alive in Yackandandah and sent them a cheque. Pardon me for saying so.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It’s my opinion. If you’ll excuse me now, I have work to do.’
‘The opinion of a raving lunatic?’
‘I rarely rave.’
‘Maybe I’m entitled to be just a little bit melodramatic, Leon. I did have a baby taken from me, you know. By your wife, as a matter of fact. By Tess.’
‘She was wrong to do so.’
A second or two from tossing a match into the tinder of resentment she’d gathered, Emily Williams paused, closed her eyes, regained her composure.
‘I’ve never thought of myself as a drama queen,’ she said. ‘I feel more like a victim in someone else’s melodrama. In Tess’s. In Daniel’s.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Leon. ‘I shouldn’t pretend to know you better than you know yourself. Although victims are often ambitious. They write themselves into whatever drama they can find.’
‘Are you a victim?’
‘No. I’m the fool who makes himself a footstool for the king.’
‘I wish we could have a proper talk. Just for once.’
‘I wouldn’t welcome that, Mrs Williams.’
‘I know.’
Emily drew a folded sheet of paper from the pocket of her slacks and handed it to Leon.
‘What’s this?’
‘Read it.’
The handwriting on the paper read, Adam Zagajewski.
‘What am I meant to understand?’ said Leon.
‘Do you know him?’
‘I know of him. He’s a poet. Polish.’
Emily nodded. ‘So you like my hair?’ she asked shyly.
‘Very much.’
‘I’m glad. Tess trusted your taste in everything, didn’t she?’
‘No.’
‘She said she did.’
‘Tess
was capable of exaggeration.’
‘He wrote what you burned last week.’
‘Who wrote what I burned last week?’
Emily gestured at the paper Leon was holding. ‘Him.’
‘Adam Zagajewski?’
‘Daniel copied everything from a book of poems by him. Everything. It was a total lie, the whole thing, Leon. I’m sorry. I thought you had a right to know.’
‘I see.’
It wasn’t clear to Leon, immediately, whether he was disappointed.
‘He’s a very good poet,’ he said.
‘Daniel?’
‘Zagajewski.’
‘I didn’t know if I should tell you.’
A grasshopper had landed on Emily’s shoulder. It may have been attracted by the colour, the woolly green. Leon watched it for a good minute or longer, not thinking of insects at all but of the people who come into one’s life, the unwelcome guests who leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, who say ‘absolutely’ when no emphasis is called for. He experienced a sudden rush of affection for these people, the unwelcome guests, the mess-makers, and wished somehow that his life had been marked by courtesy towards them rather than dismissal. He himself would have been an unwelcome guest in other lives—possibly even in Tess’s. In this poor foolish woman Emily’s.
‘Well…’ he said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to work.’
‘Can I ask you one last thing?’ said Emily. ‘One thing before I go?’
‘Of course.’
‘Was Tess really a woman, do you think? Because I don’t think she was.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘She was more like a huntress.’
‘Huntress is female.’
She shrugged. The grasshopper moved, but only fractionally. Its feelers twitched above the tiny jewels of its eyes.
‘Mrs Williams, keep yourself from harm in Africa. No good can come of martyrdom.’ He offered his hand a second time and waited until she’d driven away before he returned to his sanding.
=
It was after midday before the front door was ready for Leon’s message to Tess.
Beloved your friend is in Poland and poor Mrs Williams now has no option but to search out suffering in Africa. You see how the powerful in purpose trample the lives around them, like titans at a picnic. I am one of the trampled. Look at me, intent on covering the outer skin of Joyful with my messages. Mrs Williams had a grasshopper on her shoulder a green one with its hopping legs hinged and waving its feelers as if translating human speech into insect sign language, as if it were fascinated by passions that exceeded so greatly in complexity the passions of grasshoppers for herbage. Like my passion for sanding paint from wood, Mrs Williams’ passion for misery, both mere means to an end while the grasshopper’s passion for food is an end in itself. I wanted to say dearest something that came to me once Mrs Williams had gone: that you were a type of monster, the beauty of your face the treasure of your mind grafted to frightful appetites. You were like a Gorgon, elements of different creatures melded together. But if you were here now dearest I would honour you whole, believe me believe me beloved, I would honour everything, your beauty, your grace, your music and your sex. You would be my monster and I would change nothing, nothing.
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