Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘My father had us to church every Sunday, rain hail or shine. We had to traipse across Parramatta Road to the Presbyterian Church in Johnston Street. The Stanmore churches were too soft for him. Or Catholic,’ he said, adding, as if addressing them from the pulpit, shaking a fist for emphasis, ‘Idolaters!’

  Shouting it out in that instant of silence at the end of a song.

  Several people turning to look.

  ‘Stanmore?’ Eugenie said.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, embarrassed, although not quite ready to relinquish the Presbyterian minister, as if sticking with the charade might make sense of it to those around, speaking to all three of them under the assumption they might be interested in his origin story, even though the others across the table were unlikely even to be able to hear. ‘Mum wouldn’t come with us. She’d stay at home to make the Sunday roast. Her father was a minister. She said she’d had enough o’ the kirk. Hadn’t banked on marrying my father I suppose.’

  ‘I lived in Stanmore,’ Eugenie said.

  ‘In Stanmore? As in Stanmore, Sydney?’

  ‘Well, on the border. My nan told everyone we lived in Petersham because she thought it was more posh, but it was Stanmore just the same. My pop worked in the mill.’

  The coincidence allowing them to play the game of exchanging places held in common: the swimming pools in Petersham Park and Leichhardt; the small corner shops; the Academy Twin for films on a Saturday afternoon; the schools. She’d been at St Michael’s (a Catholic! After what he’d just said), he’d gone to Fort Street. Mapping the two suburbs for each other.

  ‘My parents still live there,’ he said, still talking too much, unable to stop. ‘They bought a little one-storey in Lincoln Street before I was born. Paid, I don’t know, ten thousand dollars. It’s worth a fortune now. My brother wants them to sell and buy up here but they’re not interested. We have everything we need right here, my mother says.’

  ‘My grandparents’ house was in Denison Street. I went to live with them there when I was eight,’ she said.

  Talking on over the top of her until the significance of what she’d said, grandparents, not parents, dawned on him; necessitating questions which she brushed aside.

  ‘I’ve not been back for a while,’ she said. ‘My nan’s in a home and my pop’s dead. I used to go down all the time but it’s harder now that David’s away so much, me with the girls and all.’

  Listening hard to her beneath the noise of the music so as not to miss a thing, at the same time interpreting every word from the point of view of spending time with her. The husband was apparently often away; although what the existence of a husband might mean, he’d have to say, was immaterial at this moment with this woman here, beside him on the hard wooden seat in her striped matelot top and jeans, her wonderful wide open face, clear clear eyes, talking to him.

  ‘I love this song,’ she said, turning to listen to the band.

  The singer, with her husky voice, embarking on ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’, which just about summed him up.

  When he went to the bar for drinks Cooper was there, engaged in his own repartee with the barman.

  ‘Doctor Lasker,’ he said. ‘You seem to have landed on your feet.’ Inclining his head towards the table with the women.

  Nick didn’t reply, studiously watched his drinks being assembled. Oddly vexed by the suggestion. As if Cooper had assumed too much intimacy.

  ‘Sorry,’ the young man said. ‘Maybe I don’t need any more to drink.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Nick said, waving it away. The band as loud as it ever was. ‘You were going to tell me why the people who attacked you didn’t get into trouble.’

  Cooper, coming in close but speaking loud, giving the answer as if it had been waiting there, primed, on his lips. ‘Because that’s what the program is. It’s designed to pick out the bully boys and girls, not to punish them. They want them.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘It’s not helping.’

  ‘There’s always going to be a need for people who don’t mind hurting other people, isn’t there?’ Cooper said. ‘I mean, if you’re running a security firm. Especially one that might, potentially, have to police an unruly society – one that doesn’t agree with the direction in which you’re taking it. But you have to be able to identify who they are, don’t you? You have to be able to figure out which are the lunatics and which the useful ones. Camps like that, they’re fertile ground. They do it in schools too, of course, they’ve always done it. But a camp like Spring Creek, full of the children of the converted … it’s all hyped up … you’ve got young people squashed together, physical stress, religion, competition, you get to see their baser natures.’

  Hot in the bar. Humid. Men and women from a broad spectrum of ages in loose multi-coloured clothes enjoying jazz-rock fusion, drinking glasses of micro-brewed beer and pinot grigio.

  The barman lining up the drinks, asking for money.

  ‘And that’s just the start of it, of course,’ Cooper/Martin said.

  ‘A funny thing,’ Nick said to Eugenie as he squeezed back in beside her. The two of them isolated by the music, become a small unit, obliged to be close to hear each other, the subject matter irrelevant, the important thing become how to keep it going, employing anything and everything to make her laugh or think him worth the effort of staying where she was. ‘I don’t know if you remember the first time we met …’

  She, nodding, glancing across at the others, flicking her eyes back to his.

  ‘I came in with a young man with a broken arm? Don’t look now, but that’s him up at the bar. Cooper.

  ‘I did say,’ he said, ‘not to look now.’

  Bringing herself back to him. Smiling.

  ‘Isn’t he too young to be drinking?’

  ‘In theory.’

  ‘Which theory is that?’

  ‘Well Cooper seems to be about twenty years older than he appears. Do you know anything about him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Before you arrived I was talking to him outside. He gave this remarkable spiel, conspiracy theories abounding. I mean, he is extraordinary for his age, articulate, confident, possibly brilliant. And gay, of course, which shouldn’t make any difference but I figure was why he was hassled at the camp in the first place. The thing is he said no charges were laid against the people who beat him up, never mind that his dad’s highly influential. The reason was … well, this is what he said … is they’re training thugs up there in the bush.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Yes, well, there you have me. It wasn’t clear. A multinational security firm? The government? Someone else? The trouble is, while he was talking, it seemed, you know, believable.’

  Telling her what he knew about Peter Mayska, which wasn’t much more than everyone knew but mentioning the case of wine delivered to his door as a way of illustrating his wealth. Considering the possibility of offering to drink a bottle with her but figuring that was a step too far; a too-open declaration of intent.

  ‘And you accepted it?’ she asked.

  ‘I shouldn’t have?’

  ‘Do you know how much it’s worth?’

  ‘No idea, it’s not the sort of wine I’m familiar with.’

  ‘So it was by way of a bribe?’

  ‘I didn’t see it that way,’ he said, reminded of Bain in Canberra, that pall of discomfort descending again. ‘I just thought if you were a billionaire and you wanted to give someone a gift as a way of saying thank you then you’d look pretty cheap if it was Jacob’s Creek.’ Distressed as much by the ethical dilemma as that the topic was taking them away from the central focus of the moment which was each other, trying to bring it back, saying, ‘I was just considering asking you to try some with me.’ Which was hardly innocent repartee even though it seemed to work, but then maybe they were already past that stage because, at the end of the set, Ann stood up saying, sorry to interrupt you two love-birds, but s
he had to be getting home.

  Eugenie standing up abruptly, as if she’d not been aware of time passing, flushing pink around her neck and shoulders, glancing at Nick and giving him a slightly wan smile before saying that she, too, had to go; everyone finding coats, the three women kissing each other goodbye, making arrangements, starting towards the exit near the bar.

  Nick saying he’d go, too. ‘I live up next to the hospital,’ he said, ‘I walked down.’

  ‘In this rain?’ Eugenie said. ‘I can give you a lift, if you like, I’m going past that way. Save you getting wet.’

  Working his way through the tables behind her, Cooper no longer in evidence. Maybe gone home. A driver come to get him.

  The musicians were outside, having a cigarette under the cover of a small tacked-on piece of roof. Eugenie stopping to kiss the saxophonist on the cheek, the other nurses going on ahead, waving at them as they ran to their cars. Nick hanging back.

  She waved him forward. ‘This is my father,’ she said, ‘Jean-Baptiste.’

  Nick shaking the saxophonist’s delicate hand and complimenting him on the music which he’d hardly heard all night, realising, a bit slow on the pick-up sometimes, that the man was French. Not knowing enough yet to put the pieces together.

  ‘It can rain for weeks at this time of year,’ Eugenie says in the car, apologising for the state of the interior, the children’s mess, dog hair; winding the blower up to try to clear the windscreen, Nick glad not to be out in the rain for all sorts of reasons but mostly because he is now being driven by this woman who half turns in her seat as she backs out of the parking space revealing a delightful litheness in her upper body, a taut swelling of breast against her shirt, an expression on her face suggesting both nervousness at being in control of the car and defiance about it at the same time, a kind of I-can-do-this sternness around her lips, communicated by a tight little lift in the corner of her mouth, everything enhanced, as if he’s taken a drug, which, of course, in some ways he has. His drug of preference.

  ‘I don’t want you to read anything into this,’ she says, taking the turn out of the car park onto the road, wet tar gleaming in the streetlights.

  ‘No,’ he says. A maximum of three minutes, less, to get him home, in which to persuade her to stay with him, if not for the night then just a little while longer.

  ‘And in that spirit maybe I could invite you in for a drink, or a cup of something? A herbal tea?’ This last delivered as sardonically as possible

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘A man can but try.’

  ‘He can, but shouldn’t. I’m married.’

  Up the main street, past the medical centre run by the competition, around the curve where the houses had been built below the road, the lights of the new development on the hill glinting through trees. Her hands held at ten to two, very proper, fingers small and neat against the hardness of the wheel, the machine’s steel and plastic and glass, its implicit masculinity, accentuating her fragility, the delicacy of her construction.

  ‘Just up here,’ he says, ‘on the right, then the first house on the left.’

  ‘I know where it is,’ she says, easing the car in to the kerb. Leaving the motor running, looking at him, the game they’ve been playing all evening about to end.

  ‘I could come in for a minute,’ she says. ‘Just a moment.’

  Nick’s delight tempered by his sudden awareness of the state of the house, not that it’s dirty, or even untidy, just the lack of furniture, the sense of the place as a home. Nina has been to visit twice and even she, with her no-nonsense, we’re-here-to-fuck manner, has commented on it, telling him to go and buy a bed, at least, which is fair enough, but when does he have the time? And who would help him avoid making the wrong decisions?

  Opening the door and stepping aside to let her in and then having to squeeze past to lead her up the stairs because it’s a tiny hall and the downstairs is really just garage and laundry, the walls made of purple feature-brick. He can’t help seeing it through her eyes. The living room not so bad: a table and some chairs, a framed black and white photograph of a yacht tilting in the wind, a couch which he’d ordered online and didn’t disappoint too much when it arrived and, thankfully, didn’t require assembling. His laptop on the table surrounded by paperwork and mail. Apologising as he ushers her in and opens the fridge to see what, if anything, there is to drink, only a couple of beers and an expensive bottle of champagne bought to take to a wedding that he was called away from by work.

  ‘Champagne,’ he says. ‘Or there’s that wine I spoke of …’

  ‘Nothing more to drink, please. And I don’t know anything about wine anyway. Perhaps one of those cups of herbal tea? If that wasn’t a joke.’ Stranded at the end of the island bench in her knee-high leather boots and stretch jeans, her soft leather jacket, spotted with the rain, her thick hair pushed back from her face as if by a strong wind, her whole demeanour as if she is at that moment assailed by forces stronger than herself.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says, jocularity dispensed with, come beside her at the bench, ‘it’s quite safe here.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘What I mean is I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.’

  ‘But what if I do want you to? What if I want you to kiss me?’ So that she is, all at once, in his arms, her lips against his, no chance of taking even a breath, no room for thought, strategy, consequence, just her against him, his arms inside her jacket, the silk lining warm on the back of his hand, his fingers on the soft cotton of her top, the weight of her shifting beneath his palm, her tongue against his, the taste and scent of her, the complex subtle essence of some perfume sparsely applied hours ago, mixed with her, the musty sensuality of the skin on her neck, behind her ear, back to her lips again, his hands, now, inside the cotton, on skin that communicates the musculature of her back, her ribs, the curve of her spine, all pulled against him while her mouth breaks with his to draw air, to exhale a short sharp burst, almost a laugh, but, then, her hands coming onto his chest, pushing him away.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ she says. Looking at him directly. ‘I can’t be doing this. You know that, don’t you?’

  He, retreating a millimetre, causing her to grasp his shirt and hold him from further movement, eyes locked.

  ‘I’m married fifteen years. I’ve never done this.’

  One hand inside her shirt, on her skin, the other one on the benchtop. For stability.

  What to say? That he was married once, too, but that was over? That he had strayed one too many times? A picture of dark-haired Nina and himself in exactly this situation in her kitchen coming involuntarily to mind. Tell Eugenie that this time it would be different? How would he know? Was the strength of this feeling enough?

  Leaning forward to kiss her again, Eugenie’s hand finding its way down between his legs, feeling the swelling beneath the cloth.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ she says, again. ‘I’m going home now. I mean, now. Before it’s too late.’

  ten

  Guy

  The night train and boat from Venice had him back in London early in the morning, but by the time he reached the flat Helen had already left for work. In the few days he’d been away spring had arrived; the clematis on the back wall was flowering, a bumble bee burying itself amongst the frail petals. He took his typewriter out to the rickety table and set up there, filled with a sense of promise. The sentences, though, came awkwardly, even with the model for a character provided by Edward. It was one thing to recall the way he had stood while shaving, quite another to make that image relevant to the story in a manner that wasn’t woefully banal. He stood up from the table, sat down again, went back inside, came out again. No longer knowing how to do this thing. It might be that he’d once known how to trust in the process that led to the creation of a novel, but he could no longer remember how that was so. He was in the same place he’d been before he left, pacing the confines of the flat, stopping to make coffee, eat lunch, read an old weekend arts
section in the paper; sitting back down at the table then repeating. Looking up at every sound in the hope of seeing Helen coming in, laden with shopping, putting the bags down and rushing to him.

  The afternoon turning to evening. Still she had not appeared. It occurred to him that her lateness was deliberate, that she was punishing him for having gone away without her, giving him a taste of what it was like to stay at home and wait, as if, after all the long winter months of fruitless work, he didn’t know what that felt like. He opened the bottle of wine he’d brought back from Italy and poured a glass, went back to the table and drank it, smoking, all pretence at work abandoned.

  The long evening faded. The time for a meal passed. He brought his typewriter and papers inside, spreading them across the kitchen table, poured and drank a second glass. When he heard the key in the door he went to meet her, expecting she would come into his arms. Instead she pushed past him, dropping her bag on the floor, throwing her coat across the bench, without so much as glancing at him. Seeing the bottle she poured herself a glass. Only when she’d taken a mouthful did she raise her eyes. She had, he saw, been crying. He asked what the matter was, crossing the small space between them to offer sympathy.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said.

  He stepped back.

  She asked him if he wanted to tell her what had happened in Venice.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  She made a sound that wasn’t quite a word, more an onomatopoeic expression of disgust.

  ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ she said. ‘I think I could have dealt with you having an affair with a woman. Some young sycophant who worships your every word. That would have been hideous but understandable. I’m not sure what to do about you sleeping with a man.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘You’re going to deny it?’

  ‘Of course I am. I shared a room with Ed because the other hotel was awful, I told you that. I didn’t try to hide anything. I wasn’t sleeping with him, except to say we were in the same room.’