Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  He thought she was done, on her knees, panting, her hair everywhere. How wrong he was. She sprang at him and this time she was using her fists, not only on his face but anywhere she could land a punch. Leon tried to ward her off; she was far too strong, far too athletic, one instant with her hand on his throat, the next on her feet above him raining down blows with both hands.

  Eventually she slowed. This time when she backed off it was to the far side of the room. She was struggling to catch her breath, hands on her hips, chest heaving. Her face, usually composed, as if she were at prayer, was flushed a violent wine red and made ugly by a grimace that bared her teeth. Leon couldn’t judge if he dared move, dared speak. He took the risk of trying to stand; a shriek and a raised hand put him back on his behind.

  Susie walked to the passage and picked up the bag she’d left there, that beautiful pouch by Kasim Sultan he’d brought back for her from Istanbul. She found a hairbrush inside and a small pack of tissues. Kneeling at Leon’s side (he flinched) she wiped his face and his lips. The first tissue came away stained with blood. So did the second and third. She held another tissue at his nostrils to soak up the flow. Every time he attempted to speak she lifted her hand and glared. When the bleeding abated she brushed his hair, attempting to give it some shape. ‘Drink!’ she said and thrust the bottle of malt at him. Most of it had spilled but a small quantity remained.

  She didn’t bother with her own grooming. She wanted to speak. Still on her knees, she took the bottle from him and set it aside. She said: ‘I will tell you something true. Do you want to hear? I hated that devil. Okay?’ She pronounced devil darwill. ‘I don’t care if I tell you this. She was a liar and a big thief. She took money from the shop account all the time. For this person, for that person. Not for herself, okay. For this person, for that person. For Daniel. A big thief.’

  ‘I know,’ said Leon. His nose had begun to bleed again. He reached for a fresh tissue but Susie slapped his hand away and applied the tissue herself. She went on with what she had to say, still holding the tissue to Leon’s nose.

  ‘One day I am so angry with her. One day on Saturday when you are gone to Sydney. She went upstairs with Daniel and when she came down again she asked to him, “Do you need something?” She wrote a cheque for him. Does she care if I see? No! She doesn’t care, Leon! She thinks to herself you are such a fool. I asked to her in a very kind voice, “Please don’t do this. Please this is so bad.” She says this money is for some books that he sold to the shop. What books? Where are the books? Nowhere! I want to tell to you, “Tess is a liar and a big thief!” But you love her, why?—because she is beautiful. Foof! Beautiful? It is nothing, Leon, nothing! It is skin! Skin like this.’ Susie grabbed of the flesh of her cheek and pinched it. ‘Nothing! In the shop, everywhere, books, books, books. Is a book beautiful because it is made with a good paper? Okay, a little bit beautiful. But the writing is much better for a beautiful book, better than paper. Why do I must have to tell you this? Why? Why don’t you understand? Today in the shop a feeling came into my mind, “Leon will hurt himself.” I am sure you are going to hurt yourself. Straight away I ask for Monica to pick up Michael after his school and I lock the shop and drive here. This is one year Tess is dead. I was thinking, “Okay, tomorrow I will get Leon, tomorrow after he cries about Tess then I will get him.” But the feeling came into my mind, “Leon will hurt himself ” and I came today. And look! Look! You are going to burn up your house and burn up yourself!’

  Susie turned her face away in anger or distress, Leon couldn’t tell. He only hoped she wasn’t going to hit him again. When she turned back she said: ‘I am not going to hit you again.’ Then she hit him again, a hard, perfect slap on the right side of his face that undid all of her good work with the tissues and the bleeding.

  ‘You fix it,’ she said.

  =

  Leon was not to be trusted to drive himself back to Melbourne; he would go with Susie. She parked Leon’s Camry at the back of the house and locked it. Her friend Monica would drive her up to Joyful maybe in a week and she would bring the car back herself.

  While Susie locked the doors of Joyful, Leon stood by the car gazing first at the house, then out over the paddocks. He felt his jaw. He’d thought Susie might have broken it, but no, it was less sore now.

  He was thinking that there must have been for Tess one final visit to Joyful, maybe even after she became ill. She might have stood where he was standing now, knowing what was coming, the end of the life she had led.

  He forgave her everything. Every lie, every evasion, every trick.

  Susie called from the verandah, ‘Leon, get in the car!’

  He paused to watch the green parrots shoot down from the chestnuts and settle in a row on the balustrade above the verandah. The birds watched him with what seemed to be expectation, although it had never been his habit to feed them.

  Susie called again: ‘Leon! Get in the car.’

  He gazed back at the birds. Nothing in the moment should have made him recall what Father Bourke had said, but the priest’s words came to him now: ‘She was just holding it together all her life.’

  Leon thought: ‘Then it was my good fortune to love her.’ Perhaps she had been glad of it in some part of her being.

  He walked up the steps of the verandah. Susie was locking the front door after a struggle and the exasperations of the past hour made her look savage.

  She said: ‘What? I said to you, get in the car.’

  Leon took her hand—the one not holding the ring of keys. He said: ‘Susie dearest, I’m going to stay here.’

  Susie was wearing sunglasses. She reached up and snatched them off. ‘What is you’re telling me?’

  ‘I’m going to stay.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I’ll be all right. I will.’

  Susie looked to one side and then another, gripping her bottom lip between her teeth. She may have been about to hit Leon again, or she may have been ready to howl. Leon put his arms around her in a way that he’d never attempted before, with anyone. She submitted briefly, then she made space between her face and Leon’s.

  ‘Leon, please listen to me now. Please. You are not proper here,’ and she touched his forehead to show the place where he was not proper. ‘You are sick here. Come back to the shop, you work for one month, two month, soon you will be okay again. One month, two month, three month, soon you will be okay again. At this place you will never be okay again. I can look after you. One month, two month, you will be fixed in your mind. Come with me.’

  ‘Susie, I’m going to stay. I’m better now.’

  ‘You are better now? After you made a fire in your house? You are better now?’

  ‘The fire was…it was ludicrous. Perhaps it had to happen, but not again.’

  ‘Get in the car.’

  Leon placed his arms carefully around Susie once more and squeezed hard. He whispered: ‘I must stay. Trust me, please?’

  ‘For what thing?’ said Susie, her cheek flush against Leon’s stubble. ‘What thing can you do here? Make writing everywhere? And every day I am worried. Every minute I am worried.’

  She pulled away from Leon a little, so that she could see his face.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A long time,’ said Leon. ‘Years.’

  What did he mean? He didn’t know.

  Susie allowed Leon’s embrace to go on longer, and longer still. He could feel her anger failing her.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, that empty phrase. Why would he be fine? He wouldn’t be. Something more, but nothing he could properly grasp. He was reluctant to release his hold. Finally Susie said: ‘Enough.’

  =

  She set off bleakly in the red Hyundai, after tugging Leon by his earlobes—a custom of her clan that took the place of a kiss. Leon watched the car lurch down the driveway, no pothole avoided. Such a surge of regret seized him that he put his hand over his eyes. He couldn’t bear it.

  What we may do in a situation—
any of us, any situation—is not that hard to predict. Even when we’re children, we’ve marked out a perimeter of expectation: tears or fists, blushes, bluster. We surprise ourselves once in a blue moon.

  Leon chased the car. He had never in his life run anywhere of his own free will—games at school, a ball in the air, a teacher’s exhortation: ‘Run, Joyce—catch it!’

  ‘Susie!’ he shouted, losing ground in the chase. A colony of white cockatoos pecking grass seeds on the side of the track took flight, all but one, as he strove past.

  ‘Susie! Susie, please!’

  He was compelled to hold up his trousers with one hand, loose about his shrunken middle. Just past the wooden bridge he had to stop. He stood with his hands on his knees fighting for air. Directly below him a troop of ants with iridescent bodies hurried past the toes of his shoes, every fifth or sixth ant rearing to wave its front legs as if challenging him to box.

  He lifted his gaze and saw the white car at the gate, Susie busy with the bolt and the steel ring. He charged forward, calling at the top of his voice: ‘Susie! Susie, wait!’

  She saw him and rose on her tiptoes as if to glimpse whatever was chasing him.

  She called: ‘Leon, for what?’

  He reached her at the extreme of exertion, doubled over, inhaling with a sound like the rasp of a saw.

  Susie crouched down to see him at face level. ‘For what, Leon?’

  He lifted a hand. ‘A minute,’ he gasped.

  ‘All this running, running,’ Susie said. ‘For me, okay, sure. For you, heart attack, Leon. Stupid.’

  ‘One…one minute. One.’

  Susie patted his heaving back, keeping up a flow of censure. ‘If you go to a gym, no problem. You can run all the time, no problem. But you never go to the gym. I bought you membership in June, maybe June, one month trial, and you never go, remember?’

  Leon unbent himself, still struggling. Susie peered at his face closely, holding him by the shoulders.

  ‘Will you…’ he began, and ran out of air. ‘Will you…stay, Susie?’

  ‘Stay?’

  ‘Will you stay?’

  ‘Stay here? Are you saying?’

  ‘Here, yes.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘No, stay here, live here. Do you see?’

  Susie let her hands fall from Leon’s shoulders, puffed out her cheeks and released her breath in one long stream. She looked at him again, puzzled and angry. She seemed about to say something but instead went to the open door of her car, reached across to the glovebox and returned with a pouch of Wet Wipes. She plucked two of the damp tissues from the pouch and set to work cleaning soot from Leon’s face. ‘Dirty,’ she muttered. Then, still at work: ‘Burning down his house, and now, “stay here, live here”.’

  She seemed to Leon to be scrubbing harder than was necessary. When she was done she made a wad of the wipes and tucked them into the pocket of her slacks.

  ‘Come in the car,’ she said.

  She reversed back through the potholes towards the house. Leon fumbled one of her hands from the steering wheel and made an awkward attempt to kiss it, but Susie shook herself free.

  He said: ‘Susie, I can’t bear it anymore, people going away, I can’t.’

  Susie said: ‘Leon, be quiet.’

  ‘It’s just that—well, it’s just that I can’t bear it anymore. I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  At the house, Susie led Leon into the big downstairs living room with its tall mullioned windows opening to the east and west. She swept a hand to indicate the full length of each of the walls. ‘Shelves,’ she said.

  ‘Shelves?’

  ‘The bookshop will be here.’

  Leon, baffled, thought it best to nod. He expected Susie to explain herself a bit more but she said only, ‘Come with me,’ and led him upstairs to the bedrooms along the corridor. She pushed open three doors.

  ‘This one is for me,’ she said, pointing into the room of the weeping figure. Then, gesturing with her hand at the second bedroom: ‘This one is for Michael.’

  ‘For Michael,’ said Leon. Michael was her son, eight years old.

  ‘Yes. And this one is for abah.’ Her father, the only surviving member of her Burmese family.

  Now Susie walked to the door of the room she had chosen for herself. She pointed at the writing that covered it from top to bottom.

  ‘This door,’ she said, ‘every door, here on the walls, here everywhere, paint. Here on the floor, here for every floor, all the places, a man will come with a machine for sanding.’

  She stood looking at Leon with her chin raised, her arms crossed, a stance of challenge.

  He wanted to say, ‘No.’ The experience of writing for Tess, how close it had brought her—no, he must have that, the hours of all those days and nights when he felt her breath on his neck, he must have that. Her breath on his neck, her sighs, times when he heard her whisper my love, my love, dear Leon, dear person, my love…

  Susie would go away. She would say: ‘This shrine for a dead woman, this shrine for a dead woman I hated in my heart, a dead woman who did not love you.’

  What Leon had written on the timber of the walls and the floor was legible from where he stood. These past few weeks, he’d shuffled about the house pausing in one room or another—here, sometimes—to read from his long letter to Tess, his love letter to Tess, and to mull over plans for killing himself. He didn’t allow his gaze to catch hold of any of these sentences now. He’d noticed something he’d missed until this moment: Susie’s hair was shorter than he’d ever seen it. It just reached her shoulders. When he’d first met her she’d worn it down her back in a black curtain, at other times a bit shorter. But not this short. It gave her a more mature look.

  ‘You’ve cut your hair,’ he said.

  Susie didn’t reply. The insistence in the set of her lips, in the focus of her black eyes moved Leon to tears. She was wearing a red silk blouse with her slacks, the fabric rumpled like the petals of a poppy from the journey. Small pink buttons ran from the neck to the waist, as many as twelve. Ten years earlier, dressed differently, she had stood between soldiers of the Myanmar Army and a group of children the soldiers intended to kill. Susie had told Leon the story. Ten years ago, standing in the way of harm.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ he said. ‘Very.’

  Susie snorted, dismissing the compliment. She glanced away, then back. The insistence had set itself in her eyes once more.

  ‘You’d bring the whole bookshop here?’ he said. ‘Will people come?’

  Susie said: ‘Your customers have money. They come to you for sure. Nice drive, nice house. Our online now is forty-five per cent. Next year, fifty-five. New website, Leon. Beautiful pictures. I choose some nice clothes for you.’

  The stink of the fire hung in the air, cured by the implacable heat of the day into something herbal. Sunlight poured through the tall windows printing bright rhomboids on the floorboards, on the scribble. Leon saw that some of the power coiled in Susie as she faced him was that of an idling engine; given the chance, she would roar into action, throw open every window in the house, sweep down cobwebs, fill the place with the smell of fresh linen. Some years ago she’d read Great Expectations on Leon’s recommendation and confided her special disgust at the mess in which Miss Havisham lived.

  If he didn’t speak Susie would say: ‘Enough.’ She appeared to know with a physician’s certainty how long a wound can be left exposed.

  Leon said: ‘A man with a sanding machine, a man with a paintbrush.’

  Susie eyes opened a little wider. ‘You are saying?’

  ‘Sanding machine, paintbrush.’

  Susie almost smiled. ‘You are saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked down at the floor and rubbed at the script there with the toe of her black shoe. ‘Good,’ she said, and by the set of her face Leon knew that her natural bossiness was about to find a fuller expression.

  He allowed himself one final
minute in Tess’s thrall. He pictured her on the day she came to be dressed, the day she’d tried on the halterneck in black cashmere. It was the dress he’d chosen for her to wear in her coffin. He was betraying her now, he had no doubt of that; but simply to remain alive was a betrayal of the dead.

  The minute was up.

  chapter 35

  Jennifer Victor

  SOMETHING WAS amiss. Jennifer Victor took her pulse after breakfast each morning and discovered that for a period of minutes at this time of day she was dead.

  She was more convinced that she still existed in the outdoors. Birdsong, grasshoppers, the tawny snake that baked itself on a boulder past the clothesline—her pulse was roused from lethargy. And the vain and beautiful owl on its rafter in the now-deserted barn, and the wind finding paths through the tall grass of the neglected paddocks. Everything indoors censured her in a nasty, nagging way for years of pretence and gibberish, but the outdoors was too big and various and too spread out to accommodate only failure.

  She wandered with notebook, fountain pen and linen bag down to the orchards where apples in their infant stage filled the trees. With her back against a trunk and knees raised, she poured a squat china beaker one-third full of Irish whiskey.

  Such a waste to have had the benefit of distilled spirits revealed to her this late in life! Walter had discouraged her. Walter, who’d known as much about whiskey as any man alive. ‘Jen, I require you sober at every hour of the clock.’ At every hour of the clock to take dictation, to badger the correspondence editor of the Manchester Guardian, to bake and serve raisin scones and gingerbread and whiskey, to sit at the piano while Walter roared out hymns of the Welsh valleys.