Blue Skies (17 page)

Ben was outside. He was standing under a strangely Italianate and formal-looking evergreen tree of some kind. He stood hunched over. His hands dug deep in his jacket pockets. He wore a narrow-cut black suit, early Beatles style. The shallow velvet collar was soggy with rain. His hair was different, cut short and uneven. Water poured from his patchy head, streaming down his country-and-western singer's bootlace tie and bouncing back up in decorative fountains as it hit his shabby silver boots. People passed him by in silence, crunching over the gravel, stumbling through the downpour to their cars. James and I faced him arm in arm. James said: ‘Just wait here. I'll fetch the car over.' He ran away and was lost in rain. Ben and I stood under the foreign tree and gazed at the crematorium doorway.

‘Whatever happened,' I asked, ‘in the time before it happened?'

‘Nothing happened,' said Ben. ‘Really nothing happened, a whole lot of nothing. She wouldn't speak to me, not properly. Wouldn't go out. Wouldn't go back to work. Wouldn't say why. She didn't sleep properly. I thought she should see a doctor. I told her to go, but she wouldn't. She had bad dreams at night. They were full of snow and nothingness, she said. One morning she told me there wasn't enough colour left in the world. I said that wasn't true, not if you looked properly, used your eyes. I told her I had colour running out of my ears most times, enough for both of us. She said my opinions didn't count. That everyone knew I was crazy.' He rubbed his rainy knuckles into his eyes. ‘She said I drained all the colour off from her world and put it in my own. That it was all over everyone else's walls in my pictures. She said I stole bits of her life and sold it to strangers. I tried to tell her she was wrong. That it wasn't like that really. But she said I didn't understand. I didn't. I don't. She was ill really. People who kill themselves are ill really, don't you think?'

‘Oh yes. I should think so.' But I didn't know.

Ben bit his nails. His teeth ground the brittle pieces. I moved a little apart from him. He spat the pieces out and spoke again.

‘It was the thing with the police mostly, I suppose. My fault, no question of that. I came back next morning. I thought she'd be at work. I was going to mend the windows, clear up properly, get it all back together. But she was there. She wouldn't let me touch anything. I said I'd take the car and get glass cut, do some shopping, whatever she wanted me to do. But she wouldn't let me. Wouldn't say why. She never went back to work. She seemed scared about it. I thought maybe she was frightened of gossip, believed someone there would have heard what had happened. It made me so angry that she should worry what that load of idiots thought about anything. I shouted at her a lot to tell me why she cared, or if she cared. I drove over there one night and wrote on the fence what I bloody thought of them. Don't suppose they got the point, though.'

‘No, they probably didn't,' I said. ‘Never mind, though. At least you did something. Did she mention me at all?'

‘No she didn't,' said Ben. ‘Not once. After the school episode I didn't try to talk to her much. She just looked after the boy and I shut myself in the workroom and got on with things. Her mother came over the other day. She spent the best part of one night screaming at me. Said I wasn't fit to be a father. She said a lot of things. Next day she upped and took the boy away with her. I didn't try and stop her. Didn't really know how. I mean, she's probably right. I've got no bread. No nothing. All I want to do is paint. It'll be better now. A nice easy life. I won't need to bother about him. He'll be better off with her. Without me. She's got bags of money—big house, all that. One more fatherless kid in the world's not going to make any difference to anything.'

James honked the car horn. He sat peering through the rain at us as we huddled under the tree.

I offered Ben a lift back to town. To his home. To anywhere he wanted to go. He refused. He didn't wish to go anywhere yet.

James started the car.

I urged Ben to phone me if there was anything I could do.

He didn't speak, and I kissed the fine line of his unmoved wet mouth.

I got into the warm steamy car next to James. He put his hand on my thigh and squeezed hard.

‘I'll take you to lunch,' he said.

We went to Jonathan's restaurant.

I hadn't been there since his disappearance. A new manager had been brought over from Melbourne.

A Catholic priest perched on a stool. He slid the head of a long glass of cold beer into his mouth and wiped his lips slowly with the back of his hand. We sat at the other end of the bar and drank white wine. The priest watched us for a time and then leaned toward us and said: ‘You are looking so very sad. Are you in trouble?' We didn't reply. James looked embarrassed, and the priest repeated his question.

‘A friend of ours has died and we have just been to the funeral,' said James. ‘We are just having a drink to cheer ourselves up.'

‘And some lunch,' I added.

‘That's the ticket,' said the priest. ‘A car crash, was it? A terrible lot of the young people get taken that way in this country, so I'm told.'

‘No. It was suicide.'

‘Well, God bless the poor soul anyway. Have another drink. Have it on me.'

‘Actually, she was a Hindu. We burnt her. So her soul could get out of her body properly.'

‘Ah well, that's a good thing then. Drink that up and have another.'

He went with us to our table. We shared a bottle of wine, and he told us he was thinking of giving up the priesthood and going into journalism. He ate no food and left when all the wine was gone.

Coming up into the street we found the rain had stopped. James returned to work. I returned home to the afternoon silence. I sat in a chair under the window and read my library book. Details lodged in my mind like grit. In following days they dug deep and irritated.

In the early hours of the day after the funeral I got up and went down through the darkness to the beach. There was no moon to see. The night sky was thick with clouds. The swing was mended. I sat on it, my toes touched the ground, and I swung slowly back and forth. The sensation was pleasant in the warm close night. The swing sighed in the air. Waves broke on the sand and withdrew, whispering quietly. The swing swung higher. A wind blew harder round my head. Sounds started in the night. Clear sharp cries blew about on the wind. One by one they were muffled under heavy sound-proofing thuds. A muted moaning shivered last of all along the dark curve of the beach.

I recognised these sounds. I now knew of the dead dramas being given a nightly run-through along the edge of the low surf. I swung high above the action as black women were pursued and clubbed to the sand by white men. Their menfolk hesitated, confused and powerless. They were killed. Bits of them hacked away. The lost pieces lay rotting for days buried under a weight of tiny carnivorous crabs. By then the women were gone; taken off in boats; tormented and tortured round campfires in nightly cabaret; put to work luring the abundant seals to their doom. The women were made to lie at the sea's edge, their brown skins glistening under sun and moon, beckoning the seals in from the deep waters of the bay with the sinuous flipper actions of their arms and the deep siren-songs in their throats. The seals swam in. They foundered, land-clumsy on the beach. The waiting men clubbed their heads to bubbling pulp, scattering crimson drops on the golden sand.

Dawn came. The show was over. The swing returned to earth.

It was in the days that followed that I killed my neighbour, Mrs Olive Stacey—Ollie to her friends. Exactly when I did it is difficult to tell—I became worse at handling time. I passed my days behind the blinds. I left the house only in darkness. James came home and left again. It seemed he came more often now. Perhaps he worried about me. Perhaps he was happy at home. He bought me magazines and chocolates, sometimes tiny bottles of perfume. I lined them up on the mantelpiece. I wondered if he thought me ill. He bought me treats as though I were in a hospital—flowers sometimes. Each night when he slept I left him.

During the day I stayed dreaming behind the blinds. Green dreams of the secret pulses, the unexplored places on this heart-shaped island. Lurid orange-tinged dreams of the far-off dead red heart of the continent.

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,' cackled Call-me-Ollie. She had come calling, bringing the Avon Lady with her. The coloured dreams swirled in my mind, reforming themselves in a halo round my neigh.bour‘fs unsuspecting blue-rinsed head. She had come, she explained, to take me out of myself.

‘What you need is cheering up,' said Ollie, ‘and Edna here is just the girl to do it. Besides, pet,' she confided, ‘it just doesn't do to let yourself go like this. The menfolk don't like it. Can't says I blame them either.'

The Avon Lady smiled. Her lips were slick with shiny pink grease. Her lipstick was running round her pursed-up mouth in the heat of the afternoon, making tiny rivers in the wrinkles. She beckoned me closer. Her breath smelled of dead violets. She spoke softly to me of moisturisers, indispensible in a climate so harsh to women's skins. She suggested a green cream made from cucumbers. I heard myself ordering many things, entranced by their pastel colours, the smooth plastic containers, their artificial fragrance.

Ollie looked pleased. She said she was glad to see me back on the right track. I wondered what track and where to, but it was too late to ask.

Ollie and the Avon Lady saw themselves out. The fly-wire door shut behind them, eerily silent.