Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  Sandra was quiet for a moment or two. Then she said: ‘I do like your great-aunt, Leon. I do like Jennifer.’

  Leon put his hands on his lap to hide the trembling. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I read the parts of the journal you sent me. It was…difficult. I feared to learn that my great-aunt was… perhaps like me. I feared that. Miss Perelman, I have been loyal to destiny, if nothing else. Not everyone is. Destiny isn’t a law, but a powerful suggestion, I think. People can abandon destiny, disregard the suggestion, but that’s…a wrong thing. A great deal goes into the suggestion—I do believe that. Well and good if the suggestion is…I don’t know, eat, drink and be merry. But what I’m loyal to is a…a solitary thing. I didn’t wish to learn that I fitted a pattern. Do you see?’

  The room took on a deeper hush. Leon was relieved that Sandra paid him the regard of saying nothing. The trembling was now in his shoulders. He thought of offering Sandra another cup of tea. Tess seemed distant.

  When Sandra spoke, it was to make an offer. She would, if he wished—and he should accept, she said; she hoped he would—take him back to Melbourne. She would drive him down now. Susie would care for him.

  ‘Leon, you need help.’

  He roused himself sufficiently from the wreckage he’d become to sigh. He thought: I look worse than I know. To avoid Sandra’s gaze for the moment, he glanced here and there about the kitchen, at the electric jug on the earthenware sink, at the canisters on the shelves behind his guest. At the bassinet. He thought of the baby sleeping under the mounded bedding, waking at last to the teeming world—a world like a treeful of birds rising in riot to the sky. He thought of Tess in the sleep she’d endured in her last days, unconscious against her will when so much unconsciousness was waiting. All her beauty had fled. Her parched lips moved. The nurse whispered to him, ‘She’s dreaming.’

  ‘No,’ he said to Sandra. ‘Thank you. Thank you for the thought. No.’

  He stood to boil the jug once more. He said that Sandra might like to walk about the place and make notes. She could stay as long as she wished.

  It began to rain just as the baby stirred into wakefulness.

  chapter 31

  Another Part of the Heath

  THE RAIN wasn’t heavy but it fell for the whole of the afternoon. By early evening water lay in shallow puddles all around the Delli camp site. The camp itself was gone, carted away by Reg Cruikshank of Rutherglen and two offsiders. Even without tents, Emmanuel Delli and his wife might have kept themselves dry in either of their cars, but the professor didn’t wish to shield himself from the rain. He stood naked and dripping with his clothing at his feet, staring fixedly at the blurry shapes of the hills.

  Daanya stood beside her husband, fully clothed. At intervals she attempted to shelter the professor with a plastic umbrella she kept in her car—a bright yellow with a hemisphere—but whenever he noticed that she’d insinuated the dome over his head he lashed at her with his fists and told her to go to the devil. Finally she told him that if he intended to die of pneumonia, she would too, and she let the wind carry the umbrella away. Within minutes she was covered in a sheen of tiny droplets.

  The wind had also whipped the most recent version of the professor’s hand-lettered sign onto the highway, and that’s where it remained, sodden now, the wording mangled by the tyres of passing traffic. Earlier in the day the sign had read, Come one, come all! How did Little Courtney meet her end? By what vile process? The Monster of Yackandandah reveals his gruesome handiwork!

  But the truth was that Courtney Singh hadn’t been murdered in any of the ways described by the professor over the past weeks. Her throat hadn’t been cut from ear to ear; she hadn’t been sliced into rashers and served up with mashed potatoes and gravy; she hadn’t been split down the middle with a buzz-saw, or hanged from the elm outside the Athenaeum in Yackandandah. Courtney hadn’t been murdered at all; she was alive and well, or well enough: a bit malnourished, unwashed, disorientated. She’d been found on the afternoon of the previous day asleep in the chapel of St Michael’s in Collins Street, Melbourne, with a homeless boy of eight, and was now under observation in hospital, her parents at her bedside. The rumours that were soon to reach the town would turn out to be true. Courtney was pregnant, she’d been messing around with drugs, and the man she’d named as the father of her child was no longer living in the north-east, having recently returned to his native Poland.

  Senior Constable Cuff had overseen the removal of the camp in the late afternoon, as he’d warned he would, and it was Cuff who’d told the professor that Courtney had been found. The constable had added a few comments on the professor’s recent behaviour. He’d googled ‘Emmanuel Delli’ a few days back, he said, and had been amazed to read of all the honours the professor had earned over his professional life.

  ‘Mr Delli, you’re obviously a very intelligent man, but you need help. You really do. I know for a fact that Mrs Delli agrees with me. I sympathise with you regarding your daughter, but that’s no excuse. I don’t want you making a nuisance of yourself once the young girl gets back here. I hope that’s understood.’

  The professor’s response to Cuff ’s news had been no response at all. It was only when Cuff and Reg Cruikshank were gone that he’d betrayed what Courtney Singh’s safe delivery meant to him. He’d undressed himself slowly and deliberately, as if enacting the prescribed stages of a rite. He’d laid bare his upper body before unlacing his shoes and drawing off his socks, unbuckling his belt, allowing his trousers and underpants to fall to his feet. He’d shivered for a short time but had then gained control and stood dead still, the rain running off his body like the water shed by a figure in a fountain. Daanya provided a chorus of protest, as if she too were fulfilling a role at the culmination of a tragedy: ‘Husband, no! Oh please no! Oh God restore his sense! Emmanuel, I beg you!’

  =

  As the light of day faded the wind picked up and the rain grew more intense. The professor’s white singlet was tumbled towards the highway and Daanya had to chase it down. The sign that had been blown away earlier was snatched from the road and flung into the air. Daanya, the singlet under her arm, hugged herself against the cold, murmuring the Arabic words of a prayer for the deliverance of the afflicted. In the midst of the prayer, she caught the sound of her husband’s voice, low and steady, repeating a word that she couldn’t quite place. She turned to him and listened. It was, hoorch, the Kurdish word for ‘nothing’ and he was chanting it in a sort of solemn ecstasy, still staring straight ahead: ‘…hoorch, hoorch, hoorch…’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Daanya whispered, for it frightened her, the chanting, even more than the sight of her husband standing naked in the rain. She put her hand on his upper arm. ‘What is “nothing”?’ she said. ‘Is it nothing that I love you, husband? Is it nothing that Sofia loved you, that Joseph loved you? I hate the word!’

  The professor didn’t hear, or showed no sign if he had. ‘Hoorch,’ he said softly, as if he were speaking a word of desire, of love, ‘…hoorch…hoorch…’

  Daanya looked about wildly, as if for help. She would go as far as anyone who loved another would dare—stand in the cold and rain until his spell had passed; in extremity, open her own veins and provide her blood—but she would not see him wholly mad, or dead. She turned back in anger and pushed her mouth over her husband’s moving lips. But his lips, enveloped by hers, still shaped the word.

  She held his face with her two hands and looked into his eyes. He stared past her, chanting, ‘hoorch…hoorch…’ The flesh of his face felt as cold as metal.

  ‘Husband, listen to me, listen to what I say. We have come to a place in the world where things are possible. Do you understand? When we came here you said, “This is the right country, nothing is possible.” Nothing good, nothing bad. You said your brother could not have been murdered here. You said Joseph could not have been killed in the street. “Let Sofia grow up amongst these turnips,” you said. But it was possible for our daughter to love
a man like Mark Averescu. We are here, husband. And we can go no further.’

  The professor said, ‘Hoorch…hoorch…hoorch…’ with the dedication of a raven calling from the bough of a tree.

  ‘If I have forgiven Sofia, why won’t you?’ Daanya cried. ‘Love shook the sense from her! Leave her be!’

  A voice called her name. She turned quickly to see a figure in the rain and dying light. Daanya thought immediately of the homeless men who sometimes came to the clinic, asking for her. This man stood still, puzzled, no covering on his head. If he were one of her patients, she didn’t recognise him.

  He came closer.

  ‘Emmanuel?’ he said.

  Daanya stared at the figure. In that moment, all that could be heard were the thudding of the rain on the highway and the professor’s strange cry.

  But Daanya knew the voice.

  chapter 32

  The Story of Edith Duck

  SANDRA PERELMAN stayed all afternoon. She asked permission to take photographs of the house and chapel, and permission was given. Leon, to assist her, held the baby for a few minutes at a stretch. This was his first experience of cradling a child. It roused in him more completely than ever a sense of a life, his, lived incompetently. He felt like a foolish piece of machinery, an absurd invention that would make people in a patent office laugh and say, ‘But this is ridiculous, this will never work.’ At the same time, he adored the child. He thought he might leave Joyful to Goldy in his will. Or if that was not acceptable to her mother, he could perhaps pay the fees for the child at a good school. Or simply give Sandra a large sum of money.

  He saw the chapel for the first time. He’d known of its existence but had avoided it. Solidly built of red brick, it remained in good condition. Even the picture windows were intact. The heavy copper-plated door looked sealed with disuse but opened easily when the key was turned in the brass lock. Peppery dust floated in the air, stirred up by the gusts of wind that threw the misty rain about. The dark wooden pews in five rows divided by an aisle were coated in the same fine dust. Christ the Worker in the window above the aisle advanced with his fist raised and his mouth open, as if captured at the moment of shouting a slogan. On the raised dais that served as an altar stood two huge earthenware bowls filled with dried petals, ancient rosebuds, the brittle stems of herbs. This was the source of the difficult-to-place tang in the air. Leon could guess who had left the bowls there, who had filled them with herbs and rosebuds.

  Sitting in the chapel, Sandra asked if she could tell Leon just one thing about his great-aunt, about Jennifer, just one thing, would that be okay?—actually, two things. So weird, she said, that it was her, Sandra Perelman, instead of Leon Joyce who knew most about the Joyces, the Victors, the Suzmeyans!

  ‘Is it necessary for me to know what you wish to tell me?’ said Leon.

  Well, not ‘necessary’. And yet.

  Goldy on the stone floor played with a yellow and red device equipped with three small doors. The trick was to strike the doors with enough force to make them spring open. Success was rewarded by the instant appearance of a pig, a cat and a cow, each providing a musical version of their characteristic sounds. The baby had mastered the opening of the doors, but couldn’t yet close them. Sandra had to push the doors shut every minute or so to forestall the baby’s cries of anger. Determination glittered in the baby’s eyes, violent in its intensity. Watching, Leon’s own eyes again filled with tears. The child had no choice but to fill her lungs with the world; drink it into her bloodstream.

  Jennifer Victor had died here—that was what Sandra wanted to tell Leon. And she also wanted to say that Jennifer was buried here beneath the stones of the altar.

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘No,’ said Leon. But he had guessed, just as he’d guessed that it was his mother Dorothy who’d put the bowls on the altar years ago and filled them with herbs. She’d never asked Leon to accompany her here. She would say, ‘I’m going to Joyful. A private matter.’

  ‘So much I could tell you, Leon, if you’d let me,’ said Sandra. She put her camera away, took his hand and held it on her lap. ‘But I won’t. Perhaps one day you’ll read Jennifer’s journals. Or my book, when it’s done finally.’

  ‘Is the rain getting heavier?’ said Leon.

  ‘Don’t worry about the rain.’

  Watching the child negotiate the doors of her toy, smiling at her delight when music echoed all over the chapel, Leon entered a rapture of death by waiting. He might commence when Sandra’s visit came to an end. It was worth a try. He could pen something quickly leaving Joyful to Goldy, stuff it in a sealed envelope and give it to Sandra last thing. Did he have an envelope? He didn’t. He’d post something to her. Meanwhile, he found it was possible to enjoy having his hand held.

  It was early evening when Sandra left. Leon held her umbrella over her while she fought, half inside the car and half out, to strap the baby into the capsule. The wind and rain had taken hold of everything—the fading day dominated by its caprices. Leon watched in despair the red tail-lights of Sandra’s car lift and fall, disappear, reappear a long way off at the gate. The lapse into oblivion he craved seemed a hard, hard thing to set in motion. How? Drinking had not done it. Sit in one place, perhaps, until one’s heart forgot how to beat? And now for days he would think of Sandra Perelman and her daughter without wishing to, and so pointlessly. The ludicrous suggestions one’s heart threw out!—be a parent, learn great patience, cradle the head of a baby as it feeds, love like Miss Perelman, carry on broken-hearted while your egocentric boyfriend chases salvation in Palestine.

  The two red points in the mist of the evening remained at the gate for long minutes; longer than it would take to open the gate. The baby, perhaps? Some trouble? Leon waited a further time, then dialled Sandra’s number with his mobile. Sandra answered in the manner of a person who has scrambled to the phone just before the call rings off, breathless, urgent. ‘Leon! Oh God, a branch has fallen onto your driveway! I’ve been trying to move it!’

  Leon drove down, aware of how unlikely it was that he could be of use. He found Sandra under her umbrella in the headlights of her car gesturing at the mottled bough of a liquidambar. The branch had fallen from one of the trees that arched the driveway.

  ‘Big mother of a thing, isn’t it?’ said Sandra. ‘I absolutely have to get back tonight. I have classes tomorrow.’

  The baby was howling. Sandra called out, ‘Mummy’s here, darling! Shut up for a bit!’

  Leon surprised himself by finding the strength to haul the bough almost to the side of the driveway. There was room for Sandra to skirt it, with some help. Leon stood in the rain and wind guiding her as she inched her car around the bough and through the gate. She stopped the car with her window down before turning onto the highway.

  ‘Leon?’

  She reached up from the car and circled Leon’s neck with her arm.

  ‘Please care for yourself?’

  She was gone in another minute. Leon stood, letting water run through his hair and down his face. A fuzzy aura had grown around every shape, the trees, the fenceposts, the distant hills. He saw himself as if from above, a forlorn shape on the roadside. The vision made him smile for a moment, embarrassed by pathos. He thought of his father, of Roger, one Sunday unaccountably taking him to an oval to kick a football back and forth. Would he have been seven, eight? Roger was the last father in the world to kick a football about, but something had got into his head, the idea that he was failing his son in some crucial outdoor way, maybe. It had begun to rain, but Roger persisted, dressed in cardigan, shirt and tie, baggy white shorts. ‘Don’t be troubled by the rain!’ he’d called to Leon. ‘It builds character!’ They’d gone home drenched and wretched, astonishing Dorothy. The day was never spoken of again and the football had rested in the bottom of the shoe cupboard year after year, ashamed of its part in the disaster.

  ‘It’s good for character,’ Leon murmured. It came back to him that he’d loved Roger—somethi
ng he hadn’t recalled for a while.

  On the highway he noticed a big sheet of white paper that had come to rest on the white line. He walked over and picked it up, vaguely concerned that the wind might blow it against the windscreen of a car and cause an accident. He was surprised to read the word ‘monster’ handwritten in bleeding red. The other words were illegible. Perhaps ‘gruesome’?

  His ears pricked up at the sound of voices. He listened, but couldn’t make sense of them. Someone giving orders—was that it? Two voices. More? No, two; one a woman’s. Against his inclination to become involved, he walked slowly along the verge of the highway, pausing every few steps to reconsider.

  Two figures became visible in the mist and rain. They stood on a grassy strip between road and paddock. One was a naked man, the other a woman, clothed. Leon, baffled, stopped in his tracks. Surely the man was Emmanuel Delli—was that possible? And the woman was Daanya? The man had his head raised and was repeating something not loudly but insistently; the woman was—was she imploring him? Emmanuel Delli, Daanya Delli? Why?

  Leon drew closer. He could hear the words Daanya Delli was using. What her husband was saying made no sense.

  ‘Daanya?’ he said.

  Daanya turned, her black hair hanging in a drenched tangle like sea wrack.

  ‘Emmanuel?’ said Leon.

  Daanya stared. She was shivering fiercely. Emmanuel’s clothes lay sodden at his bare feet. The question that Leon would have asked—‘What are you doing?’—seemed senseless. ‘You must come out of the rain,’ he said. Emmanuel had fallen silent. ‘I’m afraid I must insist,’ said Leon. ‘Come out of the rain, both of you. Come to the house.’