‘Why don’t you come with us?’ she asks. And after the initial run of panicky thoughts and not knowing how to respond, I pause, turn away, hide my face then realise: now it must become a question of sharing. In the sculpting of souls, pain dissolves best when it is lived as a common experience.
Francesca stands before me, arms by her side, waiting patiently.
‘Come with us,’ she says again.
So I do.
Kids in the back singing barmy versions of sitcom signature tunes, Frannie smiling and cross-legged beside me. A tiny bald spider scuttles behind the dashboard as I clunk into gear. Beneath a milky sky we drive away from the farmhouse, veering through bushland and cutting across the pale shadows which slash the road. We drive for half an hour then the hills collapse into paddocks and we see brittleness, bare earth, cattle gathered in familial knots. The car slices through a postsummer landscape that is dusty and constricted; the grass grey and dolorous, occasional collections of trees looking like spider legs, thin and black, knotted.
‘It’s so dry,’ says Amelia. ‘Sort of colourless.’
It is, I think, but even in this drab, ordinary place, surrounded by arid plains and dark crusts of creek-bed soil, there remains a richness and serenity that can always be cherished.
Soon the coast is in view. We drive towards town, enjoying a wider smoother road which eventually becomes the main thoroughfare of Barilba Bay. Silent now, we keep driving; past warehouses and deserted building sites, past the public golf course, past over-priced land, until we hit the city centre, drive through coded plastic messages — the golden arches of McDonald’s, Yes We Have Vacancies in welcoming neon, Bargains Galore!, an arrow to a Drive-Thru ATM. This is another Bright Universe, a gaudy place filled with cheerful people going about their everyday lives; purchasing, using, discarding, embracing the modern cycle. Then we are out of the shopping precinct, drifting into the suburbs, weaving between broken kerbing and uneven lines of houses. The sun pierces the cloud-cover and bounces dully from the steel rooves. I see verandas cluttered with children’s bikes and wilting pot-plants, gargantuan metal sheds filled with upturned boats and workbenches and clothes driers. Signs guide us — John Street, Frangipanni Crescent, Oleander Avenue.
‘Australian street names,’ I told Kaz once, ‘are so condescending. So dreadfully banal. Have you noticed: they’re either Anglo-Saxon or Aboriginal. Nothing else. Nothing migrant or Asian, for example.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘No. I just thought you’d like to know.’
The beach curves before us like a slice of rockmelon. We disembark, breathe in the cleaner saltier air. The children rush before me, drawn magnetically to the sea like thousands before them. I walk along the top part of the beach over the white softest sand, look out and see a stretch of shells lingering in the wash of the Pacific. The children are gathering, picking up, inspecting then placing their trophies carefully into small plastic bags. It is a thoughtful, elaborate process. The shells are wing-shaped with funnelled ribs spreading from their hub. Spread along the sands, they remind me of a thousand dropped fans, leeched by salt and the gently rolling surf. They are perennial, a measure of the immutability of time. Channels of water will gush, currents will continue to splice in vectors, sands will shift and settle, land-masses will grind at each other like animal molars yet still the shells will remain; tiny ideals, perfect shapes, odes.
‘Why shells?’ I ask Amelia. ‘Has it always been shells?’
Below us, the sea flows comfortably across our bare feet, swirls in circles and makes us sink slightly into the slush. Out in the ocean, away from sight and human sound, life teems. Amelia stares at the collection of shells in her hands, opens her fingers and allows the grains of sand to slip back into the water.
‘No,’ she admits. ‘There’s been flowers of course, but other things too. A little toy each, some hand-written messages, a basket of marbles and old buttons.’
‘Marbles and old buttons?’
She looks up at me. The beach wind plays lightly upon her face, makes her eyes narrow.
‘Anything,’ she says. ‘We just took anything. They seemed to like doing that — and when we got there, it didn’t matter what it was. It all sort of made sense, I suppose.’
Things do. The sun beats upon our backs, the cries of marauding seagulls interrupt us, our flesh takes on a familiar sheen, a new understanding of shared blood pumps through our hearts. Connections, disruptions: a lifetime of each awaits us all.
‘How?’ I ask. ‘How did you do all that? When?’
‘Most weekends,’ she says, gazing at the ocean. ‘Sometimes we caught the bus, but usually Delphine drove us’
‘Delphine?’
‘Yeah. She offered. It was nice of her, I thought.’
It is an oddly disquieting vision: my children with Delphine, bumping along towards their mother’s grave while I remain at home, inward, self-absorbed.
‘But, why didn’t you tell me?’
She turns and looks directly at me.
‘I didn’t think you’d want to know,’ she says simply.
We meander further along the smooth wet sand, watch the waves lift then roll into nothingness.
‘Did you ever skip stones?’ Amelia asks. ‘When you were a kid? I love doing that kind of stuff.’
‘All the time.’ I lean down, pick out a couple of flattish pebbles. ‘I was well-known as a champion stone-skipper throughout my formative years.’
I fling the first one into the waves. It jumps briefly before disappearing into the depths.
She grins, flicks her wrist and releases a stone. I count six skips before it sinks.
‘You’re out of practice,’ she grins. ‘We should have a competition some time.’
I am about to pick up another pebble when Francesca approaches, still perfectly coiffed despite the breeze.
‘They’ve finished,’ she says simply. ‘It’s time to go.’
Time to go? Time to leave this place, with all its glare and openness? Leave the whipping air and the balm of waves lapping, sand squeezing between our toes?
Sunlight dances on my hot mad skull.
‘Come to the cemetery,’ says Francesca. And then curiously, arm around my waist: ‘There’s a space for the story.’
Blink, blink. CEMETERY. SILENCE.
It is neat, of course, a serene place that echoes with bird-song. As we walk the lawn between the plaques and stones, I feel transported. There is a subtlety of colour here for this is a world that is washed in pastel, muted hues to honour our families.
The children go before me. Despite the circumstances they are confident, practised. At ease, I think; there is a great comfort for them in this ritual.
I watch, fascinated, as they arrive at a newish stone in the landscape. It is faintly tinged with yellowness like an adult tooth. There they stand, hands clasped in front, heads bowed as their lips shape a silent prayer then they drop to their knees, begin to arrange the shells. Although they do not speak to each other, their actions show their togetherness. This, I see, is their mutual, habitual condolence.
It is time for me, their father, to participate.
I reach into a pocket and extract a photo. My favourite shot of Kaz, it was taken without her consent, on a humid March day when late-morning had turned murky. A troop-carrier of low pregnant clouds threatened, the sun was a thin mustard disc. At midday a severe electrical storm had smashed and flashed overhead, our power was completely cut and Kaz, writing feature columns at the time for a city magazine, had an impending deadline.
‘Leave it,’ I told her. ‘They’ll understand.’
Instead, she sat at her desk with two candles burning and wrote the column longhand, fashioned an impressive piece on our child-like reliance on technology: gadgetry, electricity, techno-wizardry. Then she put the paper into a sealed plastic bag, walked out into huge gusts of pelting rain, drove into town and paid for a courier to get it to Brisbane.
My photo capture
s her between the two candles, pen poised, face upturned as she searches for a phrase. The lambency from the tiny flames illuminates one elegant, controlled hand as it settles about her cheek, her lips are bunched and pensive, her eyes lifted to elsewhere.
I bend down next to my son, place the photograph carefully against the base of the stone, smile gratefully as my wife’s hand rises gently from a scented garden of flowers and shells. Sunlight winks from the gilded frame. Radiance, elegance, the endurance of love: in time, I know, the photograph will fade and crumble, as people do, but it will be replaced, and then replaced again, and again. For a photograph is not a feeling but an expression of memory, and I have plenty of those to sustain me.
I stand, trace my fingers across the coolness of the stone. Just to touch it is comforting. My fingers find and follow the words: Katherine Louise Daley, 1964–2002. I explore further, feel nothing below the inscription but a polished blank rectangle.
There’s a space for the story.
To which I might add some words — perhaps from e.e.cum-mings (lovers alone wear sunlight) or perhaps from myself (so that the Bright Universe may continue to shine) but that is a matter for later consideration. For now I look away, remove my own hands from the headstone and its quiet, intricate lettering. In the distance Otis is wandering, skipping beneath trees on a patchwork of grass as she reads other people’s memorials. When she stops, briefly, she is framed against the wavering leaves and sky, like a child centred in a Tom Roberts landscape. The colours are all there, earthy and daubed; she stands amidst a swirl of ochre and brilliance, the wind teasing her hair, her elfin face turned to the light.
Once I would’ve thought her vulnerable, but here, now, I can see the strength of her, the lustre of her skin, the tilt of her nose, the grace that courses through those long elegant fingers.
Still at my feet, the boy has finished re-arranging his shells amongst the flowers, many of which, I notice proudly, are fresh.
‘Milo,’ I begin.
Pause for reflection.
‘It’s Alex,’ he tells me but earnestly, like he is reassuring an old man who has somehow forgotten.
He stands by my side.
‘Okay … Alex.’ I say it as a word, not a name, roll the ‘l’ gently and finish with a crisp, slightly sibilant ‘x’. ‘Your mother’s idea. Very sensible and practical but still sweet around the edges. Exactly like her.’
‘When people say my real name, I think of her,’ he tells me, and I feel five small soft fingers creep between my own: the mesh and tug of love.
I smile, lean down, ruffle his bird’s-nest hair.
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘Me too, Alex.’
A single petal, a tiny sprig of ivory, detaches from a flower and flutters onto the grass while the sun strokes our backs, kindly, warmly, like today it cares.
And I think, maybe it does.
Maybe. For just a moment anyway.
Acknowledgements
William Blake ‘The sick rose’
S.T. Coleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
e.e. cummings ‘unlove’s the heavenless hell’
Martin Luther Quoted in The Book Of Quotations, Fitzhenry and Barker (Allen & Unwin, St Leonards 1994)
Bruce Dawe ‘Enter without so much as knocking’ from Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954-1978 (Longman Cheshire, Melbourne 1978)
Robert Browning ‘My last duchess’
Percy Bysshe Shelley ‘Prometheus unbound’
Alfred Tennyson ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’
William Shakespeare ‘Romeo and Juliet’
William Shakespeare ‘As You Like It’
First published in 2003 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
© Richard Yaxley
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any foram or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
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This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Sponsored by the Queensland Office of Arts and Cultural Development
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Yaxley, Richard
The Rose Leopard
I. Title.
A823.3
ISBN 978 0 7022 3346 3 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5865 7 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5866 4 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5867 1 (kindle)
Rose Leopard Page 21