Dark Places (32 page)

At the Quay she spoke for the first time. ‘Where are you going now, Father?' she asked, and to the eye that knew, her relief was transparent when I said, ‘Oh, along Pitt Street to the office, so I will say goodbye now.'

In her relief, she made a great show of giving me a peck on the cheek. ‘Bye bye, Father, see you tonight,' she said, and I was chilled to the bone by her duplicity. She was not kissing me out of any daughterly affection, but as a smokescreen: as clearly as if written upon her face, I could see her thought, ‘I will be loving, for I am about to betray him.'

A lifetime of practice at not allowing my feelings to show on my face stood me in good stead now. ‘Yes, Lilian, I will see you later on,' I said, and smiled inwardly to think what a short time
later on
I would see her.

I was like a panther in the jungle, here in the streets of my city: I knew every laneway and doorway, and when I wished to, I could be invisible, just one more dark suit and a mouth-slit under a hat. Almost, I would have wished it to be more difficult to lose myself among the serge backs pouring towards Pitt Street. But I did so, and then cut back down through the dog-leg lane that ran behind the tram-sheds. Blood coursed vigorously through my veins, my eyes saw into every corner: I was a healthy animal in hunting mode, padding along between the dustbins. And yes, there she was, a big fat bottom labouring up the hill with the bookbag bouncing against her calves.

It was easy, too easy for excitement, to follow her. I had a newspaper—bought especially for the purpose at the Quay—furled in my hand, ready to whip up in front of my face if necessary; my hat was low on my brow, my face was set in a soapy benign blandness that no eye would glance at twice in a crowd. As we walked up the hill, separate, yet joined by the wire of my watchfulness, I studied the way the shadows fell across the street, and worked out the lanes and doorways I could dart into if she looked back: I considered lines of sight, and invented perfectly good reasons for being here walking up Macquarie Street, rather than in my office ordering seven gross of paper-clips. I relished it all, and suspected I might have a certain aptitude for this spying business.

But I had no need of any of it. My unimaginative daughter simply went on forcing her way up the hill against gravity, brick-like in her solid refusal to speculate on what might be going on behind her.

From one or two little experiences of my own with one or two little friends, I knew of the existence of one or two little hotels in Darlinghurst where guests without luggage were made to feel at home for an hour or two, and I was prepared to see Lilian turn in that direction. But she did not, and I was pleased that I was to be given a run for my money.

Nor did she turn off towards the Gardens, so this was evidently not going to be a day on which she would lie on the grass there, to be observed by sharp-eyed employees of
Singer Enterprises.
My heart fell out of step with itself as I imagined the word getting around the back rooms.
He cannot control her
,
you know
, they would say.
She laughs in his face.
How dare she, how dare she, my feet beat out on the pavement. How dare you, how dare you, until I had to make myself slow down, for my feet had beaten away so assiduously I had almost run up against my daughter's back.

When Lilian reached the park at the top of the hill, she glanced at her watch and quickened her steps. It was not the Splendide or the Bijou, then, or the Gardens today: it was the geometrical avenues of Hyde Park in which my daughter had her assignation. If there had been any thought in my mind that she was innocent of guile, this clinched it. What might she be doing in the Park, pray, on a Wednesday morning at half-past nine, when a person who had taken a look at her timetable of lectures knew that she should at this moment be sitting with a hundred others in a draughty hall, writing down the salient facts about Peter the Great?

The Park was a challenge to an invisible man, the thoroughfare too wide for clusters of people to form. Even with his hat down to his eyebrows, even with his special hard-to-see buttery blandness in place, a father would be hard to miss. It was now, at this late stage in my life, that I discovered God's purpose in creating fat women. One came along, with a huge silly hat stuck to her head, bearing her enormous bosom in front of her, bound for Mark Foy's, probably, and another silly hat covered with flowers, and I allowed myself to be drawn unobtrusively into her slipstream. Her bulk, and the plumes and foliage of the hat, could have hidden half-a-dozen fathers. When we were as close as I felt I needed to be to Lilian, I lifted the newspaper again, adjusted my hat-brim, and slipped out from her shadow towards a bench from which, peeking around my newspaper, I could watch Lilian sit on the edge of the fountain.

A man invisible is a man with a situation in the palm of his hand: I was grim but buoyant. No man so clever at spying could be made mock of by his daughter for long. Behind my newspaper, behind the smooth-stretched amiable face I had put on, my spirit was fragrant with glee.

From behind my headlines, I watched her with a stranger's eye. Between us was the path, and an expanse of grass, flawlessly green as if rolled out by the yard. Dodging around her, as she sat with her legs sticking out and her bookbag sprawled at her feet, serious folk bustled along with briefcases, handbags and parcels: stolid young men who took their futures seriously, with the sun glinting blankly off their glasses, and parts in their hair as straight as tram-tracks; office-girls neat in navy-and-white, with their sleeve-protectors in their bags, and a cut lunch because they were saving for their glory-box. In all this purposeful bustle, my daughter was conspicuous: she was the fat girl with the stockings wrinkled around her ankles and her hair coming out of its fastenings, squinting into the sun with her skirt trailing in the dust. Above her, various bronze heroes of myth, somewhat larger than life size, clutched lyres and wrestled with bulls. I blushed for my daughter, perching on the rim of the fountain with an arm shading her eyes, in unconscious parody of Apollo far above her, lordly on his column with the water cascading off his private parts.

Now she was shifting her buttocks up off the rim of the fountain, hallooing and waving across the park so pigeons scattered and clerks stared: and there, angling along the path towards her, was that Duncan person from the tennis court, all elbows and ears, in a jacket too short in the arms.

I should not have been surprised, but I was. I had drawn my own picture of Lilian's seducer, the man who lured her out over rooftops at night, and made her hollow-eyed at breakfast. The man I had drawn for her was possessed of a well-fitting jacket, did not have ears that stuck out, and knew what to do with his elbows. It was even possible that he had a splendid head not unlike my own.

My spirit drooped at seeing that it was not for any proper, red-blooded, manly sort of man that Lilian was betraying me, but for this stalk of a boy, who looked as though he needed a good propping-up with a tomato stake. Now he was bending intimately in towards her ear. His trouser-bottoms flapped and his jacket became twisted as he folded himself down to talk: he was like a praying mantis crouched over her. But she was turning her face submissively up to his, smiling as his mouth opened and closed at her and his hands sketched some kind of suggestion on the air.

When they set off towards the tram stop in William Street, I was brazen. A man with metal tips on the soles of his boots hurried along the path beside me, and the self-important sound of his boots on the stone rapped out like a signal across the air: but even then I had no fears. I knew that, even if she were to turn and stare me straight in the face she would not see me, so invisible had I made myself.

It was an easy matter to insinuate myself on the back of the tram. All the long jolting way out to South Head, I watched the backs of their heads and the way their shoulders jostled against each other on every corner, and my steely pleasure grew. From the back they were quite a pair: next to skinny Duncan, Lilian was like an ocean liner, and I felt a throb of the old disgust, seeing the way her vast shoulders squeezed him up against the window. Duncan's head was long, like a bean seed, the back of his neck inflamed and stubbled from a recent encounter with some barber's clippers, and was it my imagination, or did his plate-like ears actually waggle as he talked?

When the conductress came around, Duncan handed her the money for both of them; I saw Lilian turn her head and the side of her face crinkled up in a smile, and I wanted to shout,
For God's sake
,
girl
,
it is only a ride on a tram
,
not the damned Crown Jewels he is buying you!

By the time the tram neared the end of its journey, I could have told the two in front of me just what they were going to do: could have spelled out every move for them. There was nothing here at South Head—no bohemian coffee-houses, no crowds of lunchtime clerks to scandalise, no pubs that allowed young ladies to drink alongside young men—just a few scattered houses, and a lot of bush. It did not take a genius, only a man who knew the ways of the male and female of the species, to deduce what Lilian and this Duncan person were after. What they were after was bush, secluded bush, the more of it the better, where they would not be interrupted in doing what it was that I was now quite sure they were going to do.

A father might, of course, be called on to provide proof of this thing having taken place, and during the tram ride I enjoyed planning my proof. There was the conductress, I would make sure to engage her in conversation so she would remember both the fat girl who was with the thin boy, and also the distinguished man in the grey worsted. Then there would be significant footprints, perhaps, immortalised in mud along the way somewhere; and, thinking now further ahead, to the kind of place a male and female might look for in order to minimise the discomfort of the thing they were about to do, there might be a thumbnail of beach somewhere, perhaps a rock overhang, and under it soft sand which would record the incriminating groove where two bodies had locked themselves into one another. My scientific turn of mind had even made me think of plaster casts, and myself with a pointer: here, ladies and gentlemen, the mark of a head is quite clear, and if you look closely just here, you will see the shape of Lilian Singer's bottom, kindly compare it if you please with the original.

By various rather clever little ruses—a few questions asked of the conductress, and bending to fasten a bootlace, and above all trusting to sheer effrontery—I allowed them to get on the tram ahead of me, and draw ahead, and set off down a track with a snapped-off sign pointing into the undergrowth.

A hasty man, a thoughtless man, a man who quailed from finishing an ugly job, would simply stride off after them, and would be given away by the noise of twigs crushed and leaves scattered underfoot. I knew better. I was not interested in rustic strolls, romantic but blameless trysts along sylvan glades. I was not wasting an entire morning on this, to have Lilian then go all wide-eyed and pipe at me,
But Father
,
we were only admiring the bush flowers
,
what is wrong with that?
No, the end of this was going to be unpleasant, but I was not going to flinch from it. I dallied, and let them draw ahead: I would take my chances on losing them. I would give them time to get to whatever spot they were going to, and commit themselves completely to what it was that they were going to do, because what I wanted was the whole ghastly picture, the entire
flagrante delicto.

Nature was not as friendly to a gentleman wishing to be discreet as were the monuments of man. There was a definite resistance to my progress along the track: my boots slithered on rocks, pebbles rolled beneath them so I had to grab for balance at thick grass that cut the side of my hand; things snagged my trouser-legs, stones rose up before my feet, roots reared to trip me; sticky flies danced in front of my eyes, sat on my lips and explored my nostrils; and in spite of a mass of trees the sun beat down on my back as if through a lens.

The track climbed around among lumpy haunches of stained yellow rock that fell away under your hand if you tried to use it as a support. Then it plunged down into a humid and airless cleft where a creek ran secretively between banks hairy with ferns. I took care not to wet my boots, and yet when I began the climb up the other side, one sock squelched at every step. Now the path skirted around the side of a low cliff above the water, where the waves had eaten away at the land leaving an overhang that one day—in geological terms, any second—would slump into the water below. The path was narrow here, only a boot's width. I could not prevent myself imagining what it would be like to slither off the shoulder of the cliff, and be forced to bleat for help. How Duncan would gape and grin, and how repugnant would be the heat of his hand in mine, hauling me up! I could not afford to slip, and I did not. But I would not have liked anyone to have seen the way I crouched along the path, clinging with both hands to rocks and bits of bush, like a shaky old woman.

Past this difficulty, I paused, for there was a trembling in the air, or in my flesh, that told me I was close. I stopped for a moment to brush down my trousers, pour the water out of my shoe, and try to stop the thudding of my heart.

I heard a cry, but of bird or person, male or female, I could not have said. I peered around me at the vile baffling rubbish of bushes and half-dead bunches of prickles, and out of the corner of my eye saw a flash of white. Irritation dropped away; a metallic calm took hold of me. My moment was upon me. I was about to see what so much cleverness with hat-brims and newspapers, so much applied invisibility of featureless bland face, had provided me with: my daughter rutting like a bitch on heat.

Would I see her shake her white dimples at him, would I see the actual flesh exposed to the sun? Would I see him coming towards her bearing his skinny sundial ahead of him, and his thin white nates pumping her full of himself ? Would I hear some cry torn from my daughter's throat, the alien voice of a daughter who was a daughter no longer, but a woman, known of man?