Coda (11 page)

An elderly woman found wandering in a late night supermarket at Chermside was unable to tell police what she was doing or even where she lived. Police investigating discovered that she had an interstate bus ticket from Newcastle but no means of identification. The woman was unable to tell them her name or address, although she was under the impression that her daughter had purchased the ticket
.

Inquiries are proceeding
.

To proceed: Sham
instantly found a compliant doctor who booked her into a private clinic for observation. She had developed mysterious and strangling cramps in her lower abdomen. The hospital rang Kathleen as next of kin. Within an hour of the phone call Bridgie arrived on her grandmother's doorstep, lightly swinging a beach bag, a pack, jean-stuffed, drooping over her shoulder. She wore too much eye makeup and her jaws worked busily at gum.

‘Hi,' she greeted the open door. Then she pushed rudely past her grandmother and dumped both bags in the hallway.

‘Shouldn't you be at school?'

‘Pupil-free day,' Bridgie said without interest. ‘We get loads of them.'

‘Now wait a minute, Bridgie,' Kathleen protested. ‘What is this? What's going on?'

Bridgie ignored the question. ‘Gotta sit.'
She sprawled immodestly on the living-room sofa.

‘Answer me,' Kathleen demanded. ‘I said what's going on?'

Bridgie looked up and grinned around gum. She explained languidly with limp finger movements. Mother had been rushed to a clinic right on lunchtime. Bridgie was undisturbed by the news she delivered. She dragged herself up from the sofa, ambled out of the living room and began raiding the refrigerator for juice. Kathleen could hear the crashes of shoved-aside dishes coming from the kitchen. Tracking the noise spoor!

She went out to the kitchen herself. ‘I'm beginning to understand,' she said testily, ‘why they killed the messenger. Bridgie, tell me immediately what is going on. I don't understand.'

‘God, Grandma, don't you?'

Bridgie was an aggressively pretty child who used insolence as a cosmetic aid. She did raised eyebrows and wrinkled nose. She gulped the last of Kathleen's orange juice.

‘It's a ploy. She isn't really sick, not sick sick. She'll be right by the weekend, just in time for Daddy's Perth junket. She suspects he's on with one of the secretaries, actually.' Bridgie looked down at the dregs of flavoured mineral water in her glass. ‘Pure puke, Grans.'

‘You didn't have to drink it,' Kathleen
rejoined vigorously. She removed the emptied bottle and rammed it in the waste bin, a task that seemed not to engage her grandchild's consciousness, while she repressed cosseting memories of a tear-stained four-year-old Bridgie displaying grazed knees and wet pants. What possible relationship did that mucus-streaked baby face sodden with tears bear to this teenage pouter brilliant with gold glitter and lip gloss?

Bridgie rolled her eyes in a world-weary fashion.

‘Mother told me to come here.'

‘Well, mother was wrong. I'm going away this afternoon for a little holiday. It's paid for and I'm not cancelling now simply to please your mother's suspicious whims. You can go back at once. I'll ring for a cab.'

‘But there's no one at home.' Bridgie allowed a badly-done-by whine to creep into her voice.

‘Now Bridgie, that won't really worry you one little bit, will it? In fact, knowing your record, darling, you'd prefer it.'

A sly smile flickered on Bridgie's lips.

‘And I've no money.'

‘My shout,' Kathleen said. She watched Bridgie's eyelids blink, concealing a brazen blaze.

‘Okay,
Grans.' Kathleen could tell she was doing mental arithmetic at computer rates as she calculated blackmail. The child stifled a yawn.

‘That's a good girl. I'll get the cab to take you to your mother's clinic first. She can sort it out from there. Do you know the address?'

‘Sure. She's often used it. She flogs Daddy with it. It's her panic hole. It's very expensive.'

Quite suddenly the two of them were smiling at each other.

‘You're not really going away, are you, Grans?' Bridgie asked complacently.

Kathleen said, ‘I decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might incriminate me. You know, Bridgie, sometimes you make me feel quite young.'

‘Hey,' the kid said, ‘that's great! That's really great! You know, Grans, I really like you. This should stuff it up for both of them.'

Could it have been that barely recalled firming of the spirits three years ago that now found her Lear-like between the homes of son and daughter, who had dutifully but reluctantly
offered haven and then made living in that haven impossible? The patterned landscape of her past had altered with the scumbling effects of time, presenting this day, this week, this year, as the blurred and entrancingly beautiful protoplast of an unskilled impressionist—as if she herself had cunningly but deliberately smudged the still-wet shapes and outlines.

Programmed, of course, to accept the blame.

Were you a scapegoat, too?
she had asked Daisy, Daisy's mouth smudged with cream and her own fogged past.

Whatever had Daisy replied? Her memory going while she lived in a world of names that more and more frequently refused to attach themselves immediately to the right object, any old word tumbling off the tongue, come trippingly, oh she could recall the Elizabethans, but only fragments of this hot present continuous in Brisbane town where even the town's silhouette was so changed from that of youthful recall it was as if she were living somewhere else. And the impatience that greeted that loss! The irritability and the mouth-munching as she fought for a place, a person! Yet across that stretched canvas, when she tried not to remember, names and incidents stuck with the particularity of rocks in a reef. There was no searching, no
fumbling. The days laid themselves out, laid themselves out, in the sequential design of a cunningly constructed game of chess.

End game?

Hers?

But where for the restart, the new beginning?

Reeftown, Brain realised, was replete with the memory of failures. There were the unshed spouses as well. Not of course that Reeftown society raised its eyebrows at marital peccadilloes. From the town's beginnings, from the pitching of tents on the banks of a river that snaked its way across the tablelands to drop a thousand feet before wandering through what had once been swamp and mangrove to the sea,
a tolerance to irregularities in wedlock prevailed. The mosquitoes had always made concentration difficult.

Yet Reeftown was the world in a way. A paraphrase of the microcosm. A précis. On the eyelid rim of sleep they had mumbled about where, the inevitable
ubi
of lifetimes that ultimately ten thousand years from now—or even fifty—would mean nothing.

Not there
, Nina had yawned sleepily, wiping from her mind the possibilities of that palm- and tourist-infested town that had fed her mind-blood for so long.
But
of
there
. She could never escape the northern tug, never erase. He had shaken her into wakefulness to demand exactly what she meant by those throwaway words and she answered that they were certainly not that. She fell asleep at last but in the morning, with grey snow light between the long grubby drapes, she described the next town south, with its ugly gobbet of rock staring across five miles of aquamarine to an island that tugged.

‘But not
on
the island.'

She watched Brain's eyes, red-veined from insomnia. ‘Not on. Somewhere along the coast on the escarpment. Just north or south.'

They left the hotel, searching for a breakfast bar. He drew a mud map for her in the slush of Copenhagen as they stood near a
pølse
vendor's stall. They planned their restaurant with tomato sauce from the hot sausage running down their fingers. Everything seemed fine then. It was easier not to think.

As now, Brain thought, momentarily imagining Bosie in a nimbus of humiliated rage, cleaning out his belongings back in Reeftown. He envisaged her shredding the sheet music, raping the tape deck, hauling down the speakers by the pool. All she would be left with, he reflected bitterly, was the house she stood up in, a million-dollar ocean-front and an annuity from her developer daddy.

Nina and he had returned in almost inelegant haste from Europe for a fortnight of spouse acrimony. Well, his, in fact. Mr Waterman, Nina told him, was totally absorbed in his collection of postcards, grabbed between bouts of diarrhoea at tourist spots throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, and had become obsessed with one particular brown reproduction of the classroom at Hawkshead Grammar. He kept wondering, though he put it more delicately, if Wordsworth had really bonked his sister.

‘I'm moving out,' Nina announced.

‘Are you dear?'

‘Charles, you're not listening. You never listen.'

‘Yes I am. I do. But look, Nina, I have his
collected letters. I have infinite comments made by his contemporaries. And after all he did have that little fling in France which must, don't you agree, have acted as some kind of ultimate moral slackening—if indeed, it weren't a warner!—wouldn't you think? Such a philosophic-stroke-pantheist Christian, if I can put it that way. One boggles.'

‘You can put it any damn way you like, the emphasis being stroke. Do you mind if I take the clock radio?'

‘Not at all. Take whatever you want, my dear. Yet there is something suspect. Oh I don't know. It's the disease of post-Freudians, isn't it, to attribute sexual appetence to almost everything.'

‘And what about the tapes? Fifty fifty? Half and half?'

‘My dear, whatever. Look at the whole thing this way: here's William; here's Dorothy. Now …'

But Nina had already left the room and was ramming clothes into cardboard boxes. When she emerged to ring for a taxi, her husband was still brooding over a blow-up of Wordsworth's cottage.

‘On second thoughts,' she said, ‘I won't take the radio.'

‘Won't you, dear?'

‘No.'

‘Or
the tape deck?'

There was a rude hooting from outside under the tulip trees.

‘That's it,' she said. ‘Goodbye, Charles. Look after yourself.' He looked up as she lugged cases and boxes towards the door.

‘You too, dear. Where are you off to now?'

She became furious. The honking outside repeated its primitive motif. Charles had easily won that round. Or was he even trying? That was the rub, that probably he was not even aware.

‘I'm not sure,' she replied, allowing the cold and the heat to bite through her words. ‘I'll be in touch.'

‘Of course,' he said.

Of course, of course, of course.

So there they were at last, the two adulterers, perched, re-plumaged parrots, on a ridge-roost of the Great Divide, too far (couldn't you guess?) from tourist traffic to make a financial killing, yet so awkwardly angled to tourism that the low-priced leasehold, the almost negligible rates, were constants in their conversations on profit and loss. But those, Brain realised in his growing disillusion, suspecting she did also, were nothing to do with the dwindling spiritual gains, the unrelenting mathematics of their own relationship.

The restaurant was a kind of shed-like
structure, all veranda and air, tarted with bamboo artifacts and tapa cloth. It had failed two previous owners. A short distance uphill was a small dwelling with small hot bedrooms and kitchen for the cafe management.

‘But the pluses!' Nina was in the first flush of proprietorship. The restaurant verandas gaped at a coastal plain that paused with astonishment before prairies of swinging blue. Bluer than blue. The staggering brilliance of still unsullied waters. ‘Just look at that … that dayspring!' Islands sailed untroubled along the marge, as indifferent as ships. Her partner, however, was gazing peevishly at the road in, a rutted memory of bitumen sustaining it, and a gradient that would attract only the most dedicated gastronome.

‘The cooking,' he commented, ‘will have to be bloody good to get customers tackling that track.'

‘We'll need a staff of at least four,' Nina said dreamily. ‘A superb chef, for a start.'

‘But I thought—'

‘I see myself rather as hostess of the cash register. Gracious troubleshooter. You, my dear, will be excellent in the bar.'

Will I indeed!
Oh the souring of fact.

The longer they spent on primitive addition and the frightening aspect of overdrafts,
the more their enthusiasm was buffeted. It was difficult, despite widespread unemployment, to find staff. The pair of them were forced back on their own efforts and Nina, in the early evening as they waited hopefully for the trickle of diners who had begun to face the distance and the horror of the road up the ridge, would put on a tape of Italian lusciousness and sing along with tenors about Napoli and Sorrento, snapping her fingers and thumbs during the fast bits and swinging her hips to the insidious rhythms. She was still a woman of voluptuous dimensions, her face moulded on harmonious bones protected by the lushest of camellia flesh. Despite the languor of weather, her hips swung vigorously between checking things in the kitchen, whipping up a sauce or altering a table setting. She cha-cha'd vocally with tenors of renown.