Beggar's Feast (8 page)

“It was just a thought, no matter. Mrs. Astrobe always orders Mary new dresses for Christmas and I'm sure Mary wouldn't mind some of her old ones going to Ceylon this year instead of the mission up at La Perouse. You must have sisters. Maybe a sweetheart? Sam?”

But he wasn't listening anymore. And he wasn't worrying either, about his family, about cost or triumph, contact or taint. He should have been listening. He should have been worrying. But Sam was only waiting for Astrobe to stop talking so they could close the office for the day and go to Mary.

An hour later, her face flashed, then drained of all colour, then flushed red when her father knocked and walked into her bedroom in a single motion, his monkey close behind him. As usual, Cousin Malcolm was in the room already, his face Mary's mirror. He was standing beside her chest of drawers. His elbow looked nailed down.

“Father, why even have doors?”

“Shall we just remove yours then?” Father and daughter smiled at each other, sourly. Sam was smiling too, a wild idiot grin. Shown a mirror, he might have shattered it for shame.

“I see you have company with you, Uncle James.” Malcolm nodded at Sam.

“What I was about to say to Mary!” said Astrobe, louder than was necessary, still smiling sour, but now staring at his nephew, who looked down and said nothing else.

“Hello,” Mary said to Sam.

“Yes,” said Sam to Mary.

“Yes?” asked Mary.

“Yes. Hello,” said Sam.

After Astrobe explained that this year's mission crate would be going to Ceylon, she shrugged and disappeared behind the fine-worked door of a large wardrobe. Sam waited and watched. He watched so hard he could have counted the brass flower petals that encircled its knob, unravelled the cardamom-like braid of darker wood running in a square at its centre. Malcolm pried his elbow free from the dresser and went to stand beside her while she sorted her clothes. Sam heard them laugh. She emerged with an armload of frill. She carried it to him. He extended his arms. She gave him a dozen emptied embraces, not even looking at him but already calling back to Malcolm about something else. Astrobe turned to leave and so he had to turn too but then Mary called out “Wait a moment” and Sam Kandy became Lord Buddha's bo tree. She came back to him, bunching up in her hands a long piece of thin fabric, many-coloured. She left it on one of his waiting branches. He held his breath while she placed it there. When she turned he exhaled and it unfurled and Sam tucked his chin to catch it. Standing there in infinite patience, twenty-four sleeves and now this scarf hanging down from his arms, he looked prayer-flagged.

From the first, love had been this suffering, this burning and suffering with knowledge that she was near, which made every triumph of living in Astrobe's dark wood and dog carpet house so much deadwood and ash: the triumph of balancing a cup and saucer on his knee without looking at it, of eating beef, of eating beef with silver, of returning a blue-eyed visitor's gaze straight away, of shaking his ringed white hand. Astrobe told Sam that once a week, every Sunday when the family went to church and then made their calls about town, he could use the family bath. He was to leave no hairs. Even though the tub's taps were explained to him, it had looked to Sam like some mad hunter's trophy, the gutted body of a demon bull, claw-footed and low to the ground, black-hulled and crackled bone-white within. But bathing in heated water late winter afternoons in Sydney, the sunlight streaming through a corner of the facing window and catching the risen steam and making of it a bright angled smoke, was a glory not possible in the world he had known before, a world of bathwater funked and body-warmed by young brother monks, a world of hard and slippery wet stone and furious boring bugs at the bamboo spout in the village, of Colombo seawater that sometimes left you feeling browner, more pungent and pickled than before you'd waded in. But he could not triumph in his Sydney baths as he should have. Each time there was nothing else but to know that she too had been here, Mary's body, like his, waiting in this warm vapoury blanket bottom of the world, like this, just like this. Only she was not here now. She never was and would she ever be? The sun would always fade, the water long since lukewarm, before he stood up, streaming, shuddering from how cold love could be.

As usual, Malcolm came to his room that night. The first time Astrobe's soft heavy nephew had climbed to the observatory, a year before, it had been to explain why his dear cousin Mary had rushed from the music room upon Sam's introduction to the family. Her beloved brother had survived Gallipoli itself, only to die in the retreat from Suvla Bay, stumped at the shins by a landmine. The chaplain's letter home did not advise as such and shoes had been bought and remained boxed until, it seemed, Astrobe had given them to Sam.

Hello, yes, yes, yes, hello—they passed his five Mary words back and forth a thousand different ways, like two dogs running their tongues dry along some common belly sore. And then Sam made his case again and again.

“Never, I'm sorry to tell you,” answered Malcolm.

“But look where we are, where
I
have come!” Sam pleaded, his memory open like a conqueror's atlas. “Look at how I've been living with his family this past year! And now this Christmas crate! Also, he has said he wants to speak to me, about my plans, after Wellington. I think that's when I shall tell him. Ask his permission.”

“Oh yes, he is off to Wellington isn't he. Remind me when.”

“First of next month. And not just him; I am to go too.”

Malcolm nodded.

“Also, you have seen how he takes me with him through the city. Doesn't this mean, couldn't it mean that—” he'd never say it outright. In open air, words meant to shape the best possibilities negated them.

“Yes,” Malcolm allowed. “But you must know he has done that before.”

“You mean with, with—” Sam would never say
Jim
because Astrobe never said his dead son's name, and also out of his own cosmic worrying. Those jurying stars, the broadcast heavens, looked in on the lovelorn shadow he made of his nightly hours in his windowed octagon, high above much of Sydney, just as they'd looked down on his boyhood, those sleepless nights before his birthday runs along the village green.

“Yes, with—” said Malcolm like he was speaking with a child. But by now Sam had talked enough with Malcolm to know a goad. He stayed quiet.

“With Chawkees, yes, he went around Sydney with Chawkees just like he does with you, but that was years ago, when Chawkees was young and strong.”

“Chawkees? He called him Chawkees?” Sam asked, confused. Why did men say they wanted to make fellow men of their boys and then call them Squirrel?

“Yes, Chawkees. Oh no, sorry, I didn't mean Jim. Sorry. Is that really what you thought?” Malcolm smiled like he'd been sneaking treacle while the rest of the world was eating sour curd. “Actually, I was referring to that old hunting dog always sleeping in the music room. Chawkees. And sorry to leave you there, but I'm to take tea with Mary and Aunty in the garden.”

Sam took Malcolm by the throat, his fingers sinking into the fat folds of his face, his warm pink devil jowls. He choked him to the edge of the staircase. The only decision was whether to send him down without another sterile word spilt between them, or let him apologize and vow he'd make up for it, promise he'd speak to both Astrobe and Mary and make Sam's case for the one with both.

Only he didn't take him at the throat. He didn't send him tumbling down. He extracted no pledge. He only soothed himself with the idea of it as he watched Malcolm leave. There was nothing else to do, twenty-five years old and obsessed with a rich man's daughter, but stare and want and rage. And talk—all these words with her cousin. Talking, staring, wanting: he had discovered hope's darkness, how it endured as the absence of itself. Living in Astrobe's house had made Sam's Kandy chest into a beggar's bowl.

An empty one. She'd given him those dresses to be given, and the next day, Astrobe added some old bed-sheets, an old carpet, an unused set of blue-lined handkerchiefs monogrammed
AJ
by mistake, two old sunbonnets, one of his old yellow bowlers, a pamphlet entitled “Edited for Student Use: Lord Macaulay's
Essay on Warren Hastings
” with
DUNTROON
stamped on the first and last page, assorted blanched bathing caps. and, pledging Sam to secrecy, a woodcut of Sydney harbour that his friend Preston's wife had done, the ships and buildings outlined in beetle black and coloured broad and bright as from a child's hand. After the crate was packed in a drab salad of shredded newspaper and the father's name and village were extracted for the shipping slip, Astrobe said they were nearly ready and Sam thought,
Nearly
? Astrobe took a slip of paper from his desk and a pen from his vest and handed them down to him crouched on the floor beside this, his triumph or was it his tainting box.

“You'll want to say a few words, I'm sure.”

“Right. Yes.” Was this a test to see what kind of family man he was or would be?

“Well I'm not about to write it but please, if you would, say something to your father about the family that has sent this along.”

“I shall.”

“Very good.”

But before nailing it shut Sam still would have dropped a match in the box instead of a note. Let them sift in vain, feast on ash. He could have left the page blank and he could have written out a scroll longer than any Pali chronicle or rich man's horoscope, a letter of his life that would touch his father from here, to touch him as Sam could still remember him, waking before dawn and bagging up his sarong above his scuffed doorknob knees to step over their murmuring bodies, to step outside and wake the village with his throat clearing before returning inside to mutter them awake as he made his morning puja. The ink left an indigo pottu mark at the bottom of the letter. He'd kept the pen nib still, deciding not to write out Ranjith, the name they had known him by, or any other. Instead he offered a line of cryptic pride, then nailed the crate shut and wondered again why he was doing this. It was her fault, those emptied embraces, and he was filled with hatred and happiness to think of her while he was here in her father's office, who was seated behind his desk, his own face lost, a cloud of bombsmoke. And meanwhile he imagined something of hers reaching there, the village, passing through the low doorway to the family house, the crate's blond wood split and blooming mould in the upcountry air, the contents shadowed over with so many brown heads bowing as each cast-off and throwaway relic of Sam's faraway place was raised for veneration.

July 1, 1924: their ship was scheduled to leave shortly but they were still in Astrobe's office. Sam was watching him shake open the drawers of his desk, muttering that it wasn't ultimately important but he'd like to bring it along anyway, a scrolled menu card for a Federal Conference banquet held forty years earlier at the Menzies Hotel, Melbourne. The New Zealand representative had been a great-uncle of the man Astrobe was going to see in Wellington about securing exclusive agent's rights to the family's sheep concern. Sam was coming along to attest, firsthand, to the firm's care and success in shipping animals—elephants no less. Sam gripped the cool leather and metal handle of the suitcase he had been given for the voyage—he did not ask whose, just as he did not ask why, when Astrobe had presented him with a dark three-piece suit, he recommended Sam change in the coat closet at the office.

“We should make our way down to the ship,” said Astrobe, resigned.

“Do you want me to see if you left it upstairs?” asked Sam.

“You think you could run home and back before we left?”

Sam shrugged and both smiled, remembering their old wordless competitions.

“But what about this?” He spread his hands along his chest and down the length of her dead brother's suit, which hung loose on him the way a rice sack hangs loose on a pole in a garden plot.

“This time of day, no one should be about the house. And anyway be quick about it. Leave your kit here. I'll see that it gets on board.

He nodded and went with such great purpose and imagined rewards that he did not stop running until he reached the last step before the observatory. He was breathing so hard he did not hear their breathing within. They were lying together on his own cot, his own sheet bunched high around Malcolm's fat middle, whose body was going like a hammering pink temple. She was lying beneath him.

Mary gasped. Was this her brother Jim, burnt and shrunk by gunpowder death or hell, and anyway returned in his best suit, returned because what she had finally consented to do with their cousin was fit to raise the dead? Malcolm was making noise too, uncontrollably, sighs-into-groaning, his body moving past his mind's stilled sadness, hatred, at discovery. He looked away. She was slapping his shoulders to stop now, where moments before she'd been kneading, breathing deeply in and out with him. This misfortunate little brown fellow would now know why Malcolm had been so good and answering these past months to all his useless Mary-talk, why he had so nodded at Sam's telling him, falsely it seemed, that he and his uncle were going to Wellington this first-of-the-month.