Blue Skies (12 page)

‘It's not that. It's just so beautiful here. Specially beautiful today, somehow.'

We stood on the old wooden verandah looking over the golden yard.

‘Yes, it is beautiful. Feels good. Nobody near. Lots of space to think in.'

We were standing in a cloud of strange perfume: a heavy scent. Ben said it was called patchouli—a friend had sent him a little phial of it from Sydney, and he would give me some. Prostitutes had used it during the reign of Queen Victoria, he believed. It was Indian, he said. Mystic. Oriental. Sexy.

We went into the kitchen. I sat at the large scrubbed-pine table and took off my shoes, flattening my feet on the cool grey stone floor. Ben put the kettle on the stove and a Bob Dylan record on the stereo deck in the living room, a nice sunny countryfied Dylan to go with the morning—‘Country Pie'. He turned the volume up and opened the serving hatch in the dividing wall. We sat opposite each other, drank tea and smoked, feet tapping, heads nodding, mouths making silly smiles.

I was waiting for playtime, but Ben left the kitchen and returned with a block of drawing paper and a clutch of thick draughtsman's pens. He put them in a small brown rucksack.

‘Come on. We're going for a walk up the valley.'

I felt my face doing various well-recorded surprised things: jaw dropping, mouth opening, eyes widening. I was wondering what I had done. Sure it was to do with last week's scene—my punishment. I had hoped for something more interesting.

Ben was filling a flask with water and putting biscuits into a paper bag. He left the room again and came back wearing one digger hat and carrying another. He jammed the second on to my head. It came down over my ears. He pulled it off and balanced it carefully on top of my hair.

‘These belong to the old man. Genuine World War Two army issue. How about that? Getting any warlike vibrations?' He put his pouch of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers into his jeans pocket, took off his shirt and picked up the rucksack. ‘That's it. Get your shoes on. Let's go.'

He walked out into the yard, and I watched him through the window. He turned and beckoned me. I followed, through the yard and across the brown paddock nearest the house. He zig-zagged across it, avoiding the biggest clumps of thistles, and I followed a few yards behind. The hat was making my head hot and itchy, and I stopped to take it off. I also removed my T-shirt, which I draped over a large woody-stemmed prickle, placing the hat on top.

Once through the paddock, the way along the valley led in a stretch of boulder-strewn rough grassland round one side of a conical hill, but Ben didn't go that way. Instead he started up over the lower grassy slopes of the hill. I hurried to catch up.

‘I thought you said we were going along the valley?'

‘Yes. But then I thought of climbing the hill. It's great up there. High up, hot and grassy. Tucked right up under the sky. You can see for miles. Like a plasticine map. You'll see.'

We were at the edge of the strip of bush that curled round the middle section of the hill. As we entered it, the silence wrapped itself round our heads. The air was cool and fragrant, and the bush sparse. Four years before a bushfire had roared up the valley. The flames had crept up the hills on either side, scouring them clean of growth. There were groups of new, slender, dusty green saplings among the remaining large trees which bent and rustled in our ears, tickling our armpits as we pushed through them. Twigs snapped under our feet. Strips of bark layered the ground.

The growth became slightly thicker as we climbed, and we returned to single file. Large fallen tree trunks, some still blackened at the edges, made their own clearings in the bush. Most were half hollow, the wood inside a soft, damp, sawdusty, insect-riddled, rubbery pulp, the outsides covered with open-pored sponges of beige fungi and emerald-green mosses. We rested on one, sitting back to back. I sealed my skin inch by inch to his. We drank water from the flask. Ben rolled two thin cigarettes and passed one to me over his shoulder. We sat in a cloud of fragrant head-blurring smoke and admired the view. Below us, through the trees, was his neat wooden farmhouse: the paddocks, the creek, the duck pond, the yard. Beyond that was the township. A central group of simple square Georgian houses, with tiny rectangular windows and doors, stood clustered round a sandstone church—small boxes arranged round a bigger box topped by a tall narrow triangle, a geometrical study in gentle local stone. Behind the township, little fenced-in fields backed into grassland dotted with miniature cows, distant blobs on four short sticks. The grasslands climbed halfway up the rounded hills on the other side of the valley, the tops of the blue-green trees blurred smokily against the bright blue sky. High up, centred in the blueness, was the sun. Golden shafts came straight at us from its central silver disc: fine playground slides of gold. It looked just right for the sky to split and God and all His angels to come streaming down—sliding down the fat sunbeams, sandalled feet pink and kicking, white robes billowing.

Loud bird cries started up in the trees around us. Ben pinched out his cigarette and took out the block of paper and a pen. He started to draw.

‘I've been thinking of doing an engraving of this nostalgic old township as seen from up here. I could sell them around the place as a stopgap. In pubs, streets—anywhere.'

‘Good idea. Do you need money that badly?'

‘Yes, my love, I do. My old lady doesn't earn that much. Paints and that are bloody expensive. How are you and James getting on?'

‘All right, I suppose.'

‘Good old James. You don't have to worry about him. Fortunately he has little of the self-destructive in his being. Or he manages to channel it.'

‘I don't worry about him.'

‘Glad to hear it.'

‘Well, I don't.'

‘It's a drag, all this worrying about people. Just another word for interference. Let's get on. I'm not in the mood for this today. I need to be by myself to think about it properly.'

‘I'm sorry if I disturb you.'

‘Jesus. We can do without all this fish-and-chips-for-the-lady false humility. Let's go.'

We went on.

Birds screamed up in the trees. I looked up and saw they were large and black. Dislodged bits of dry twig, and showers of shrivelled leaves, fell on our heads as the birds crashed from tree to tree. A big group of them seemed to be moving up the hill with us. The bush grew thicker. We zig-zagged to avoid the pieces of tough old growth that scraped at the bare skin above our waists.

And then we stepped out of it, onto the small area of clear rocky land at the top. The grass was short, greyish-green and springy, the rocks large, sandy-brown and warm, lying on the ground like butchers' blocks. Ben slung down the rucksack, kicked off his desert boots and unzipped his jeans, signalling that I do the same. He crossed to one of the largest stones and stood beside it naked, his arms folded across his narrow chest, his hat tilted forward to shade his eyes, chewing the leather chin strap, watching me. I undressed, crossed to the stone and lay down on it, flat on my back, staring into the sun—until he towered darkly over me in the best romantic tradition and blotted it out.

‘What about the view?' I murmured.

‘Fuck the view,' he murmured back, as if he were insulting it.

Sometimes I wondered, but now was not the time to question his attitudes. His chosen stone was slightly hollowed out at the centre. It set us into a curious rocking motion as we moved together on top of it. The day came and went. Little flashes of light and dark.

Time passed, well spent. The sun moved in the sky. Ben's hat fell off. Perhaps the earth moved under us. We simmered gently in our hot rock crucible, slippery with patchouli oil and sweat. We slept. Waking simultaneously, we stared into each others eyes, put our noses together, screwed our eyes back shut, opened them again at the same time and wondered at the one enormous super-eye that looked back. We unpeeled ourselves and sat up. Ben fetched the water and the bag of biscuits. He rolled us an extravagant joint to finish up the picnic. He waved the empty pouch in the direction of everything else.

‘And now,' he said, ‘you may look at the view. Since that's what you came for.'

I knelt up on the rock and looked at it. But not for long. The land below bled away in a runny blur of colours. Rainbows slowly dripped at the edges of the visible world. I was trying to see through some bars that had appeared in front of my eyes. I recognised my eyelashes.

I woke up alone. It was very quiet and very hot. My jeans lay carefully folded at my feet, shoes on top, toe to toe. A roll of paper stuck out of one shoe, with a message written in back-sloping capitals:
MEET YOU AT
THE TREE TRUNK. HURRY UP
.

I hurried to dress, scared of being alone so close to the sky in the silent heat of mid-afternoon, and raced back down the hill. I had a feeling of being watched, of being followed. As twigs snapped under my feet, so twigs snapped behind me, echoes under someone else's feet. They snapped off to one side. Then the other. I was surrounded—escorted, it seemed, off the hill. I stopped, and so did the snapping sounds. Looking up, I saw the birds—silent, dull black and dusty, watching. Narrow shapes flickered in the green light between the tree trunks. I shouted in terror and they were gone. My terror called back to me, rebounding through the trees, carrying the memory of the sinister flounder-fishermen at the beach, the pictures in the museum—the squashy white figures, the staring Aborigines. But there were no Aborigines left in this state. They were dead—the last a woman who ended life as a fashionable pet in all the better drawing rooms of Hobart Town. Alone on the hill I knew I was being watched—being willed away, by a people who no longer existed. I ran. Young growth slapped and wound itself round my arms, breasts and back in stinging tendrils. Trees grew faces and laughed, stretching out their roots as traps to trip me—the fleeing figure in a Disney wood.

I reached the log. Ben was sitting astride it, hunched over, drawing. I sat on the ground and leaned against it. It made a shield between me and the hill. I concentrated on breathing slowly. My mind cleared. My trembling ceased.

‘Feeling better?' he asked.

‘Yes. I got frightened up there alone. I ran down too fast.'

‘Yes. I would have stayed. But you were so asleep I thought I'd come down and make a start on this. You sleep a lot, don't you? Always falling asleep. We'd better be getting back. They'll be home soon.'

I sat and waited while he packed up his things. I didn't tell him about being watched and driven from the hill.

Something was happening down below at his house.

Little black-and-white cars with blue lights on top were turning up the narrow dirt track that led round the side. One car stopped at the front corner and the other went on round into the back yard. Four tiny dark-blue uniformed figures got out. Two went round towards the front door, and two crossed the yard and disappeared into the shadow of the verandah.

Ben stopped. ‘Jesus Christ. What's happening down there? It's the fuzz. Those are cop cars, aren't they? Oh no, not again. What've I done this time?'

As we watched, the two sets of figures came from the back and front of the house and held a meeting in the yard.

‘The bastards stopped me yesterday. I came up to town last night, trying to score some stuff. Heard there was some about. A little bit of cool inspiration for sale.' He laughed. ‘They stopped me in the street. Asked what I was doing in the city. Playing silly buggers. Asked me if I didn't think I was a bit young to be wandering about after dark. Didn't search me though. Lucky for me. I suppose they've come out here now to turn the place over.'

‘Will they find anything?' I hoped we had smoked it all.

‘No. They're not that smart. They'll never find it. Besides there's nobody home. Can't bust their way in, can they? It's against the law. We'll just sit up here and wait till they go. Shouldn't be long, they're just having a little chat about it. The bastards hate to give up. What are they doing now?'

They were splitting up again—two round the front, two round the back. We waited. This time they didn't reappear.

‘Jeez. They've gone in. They must've gone inside. The buggers have broken into my house.'

He ran, and I followed without thought, over the long-grassed lower slopes, through the large brown paddock thick with thistles, not looking where I was going, praying hard: Our Father Who Art in Heaven, don't let there be a fuss—please. My ankles turned on the hard rutted dirt of the paddock.

The prickly clump, wearing my T-shirt and the hat, flapped in the corner of my eye, an absurd scare crow. I stopped to collect the things. There was no hurry, I thought. This was nothing to do with me. Better to wait until it was sorted out. The police needn't know I was here. If they did, they would only ask questions. perhaps start watching me, making life difficult. So I waited, sitting in the paddock under a little cloud of tiny sticky flies, until the sound of slamming car doors reached me.