Dark Roots (12 page)

‘He just fell over onto the concrete while I was out at lunchtime. Someone helped him.'

There was a silence, then Steve said, ‘Funny how they're called
petit mal
and
grand mal
, isn't it? Epileptic fits.'

He still surprised her, after seven years, with the nuggets of knowledge he stored somewhere in his head. When they played trivia games with friends, he seemed to know odd, esoteric things that suggested another whole personality, one she had never met.

‘I've never heard that,' she answered.

‘Yeah, it means little bad and big bad. The
grand mal
being the one where you black out and collapse and so on. They reckon sometimes the people wake up and can't remember a thing about it, like the brain just runs a bit of blank tape.'

‘Well, it was a big bad,' she said. ‘This other guy knelt down and just looked after him. I found myself standing there just watching him.' She hesitated. ‘I mean, I felt completely helpless, but kind of … mesmerised. Drawn to it.'

She felt herself pausing again, waiting for him to ask her what had happened next.

He yawned. ‘Really? Maybe you should enrol in a first-aid course,' he replied.

Steve, she reflected to herself, would have dealt with it better than her, would have had a cool head in a crisis. He was good at solutions.
Do a course if you're bored. Go for a walk if you feel so restless.
Everything seemed logical to him, a simple matter of rational cause and effect.
You wouldn't wake up feeling sick if you didn't drink red wine before you go to bed
, he'd remind her when she complained; and then,
Well, you told me to tell you next time you did it.

Helen let the subject rest. She didn't want them to stay awake. Something was going wrong with their sex life where everything would seem fine between them until the very moment when she felt his questioning hand reach over, and she would remember again a squeamish unwillingness she'd put out of her mind until then. She hated the silence that sprang up between them as his palm would drop heavily onto her hip, the way he always seemed to forget where she liked to be touched. She would feel breathless; not with desire, she recognised with alarm, but with a kind of buried discomfort. Discussing it was something her girlfriends would describe as a no-go zone; but this unspoken space had grown and flourished into a volume of silence between them, something pitted with snags there in the dark, so that every manoeuvre between them in bed was now stiff with things unsaid.

She listened for the telltale lengthening of his breathing, which would mean it wouldn't be broached, and for the wash of relief under the uneasy sense that this avoidance was being made worse and worse by ignoring it. Helen's girlfriends, in their heart-to-hearts, all seemed to find their men lacking in a certain physical demonstrativeness, and Helen felt the same, although Steve would point out that he had noticed this in men himself and was consciously trying to rectify it. It was true, he made efforts to be physically affectionate outside bed, but if she had to find a word to describe his attentions she would have said ‘brotherly'. He would kiss her, like he did anyone else, briefly on the cheek. He put his hands in his pockets when they were out together so they didn't look like some cliché of coupledom. After such casual, careless gestures of affection she knew she should muster something else for what passed between them in private, when she felt that hand on her skin in the darkness. Instead there was this sense of obligation growing steadily into a faint hum of resentment at the idea that all that fraternal arm-squeezing should have been enough to keep her responsive.

Man-handled
, she thought now as she lay there, and checked herself with surprise:
Listen to me.
She stared into the dark, her mind roaming.

That sunburnt line across that guy's nose
, she thought sleepily. Probably played sport. Saturday with his mates playing cricket, maybe. Mates he still had from school. The easy intuitions of long friendships.

When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed she and Steve were on daytime television, being interviewed about keeping relationships harmonious. Steve was showing the admiring studio audience a housework roster he had devised outlining equitable task-sharing based on mutual understanding and respect, a gesture that brought envious sighs and ripples of applause from the female viewers. The second page of the roster outlined agreed-upon daily gestures and displays of love. He glanced across at Helen, smiling, and she smiled back, nodding as he talked about compromise and inviting cameras into their home any time to see how it worked. Their friends were in the audience, ready to step up to the microphone to testify and bear witness.

‘You're one lucky woman,' said Oprah to Helen as the alarm went off. Steve jumped out of bed, raking the curtains back to let in the sunrise, and rummaged in his chest of drawers.

‘I forgot to pack tweezers,' he said, ‘in case you get a tick again.'

He smiled at her radiantly, good-looking even at 6.30 in the morning. He glanced out at the clear morning with a conductor's sweeping gesture of pleasure at the day, pleasure she knew she was meant to share, but it looked through her squinting eyes somehow proprietorial, as if even the clouds cleared and the sun rose obediently at his command.

In the car, she drove while he read interesting bits out of the paper to her. Turning onto the freeway, she tried to be philosophical about the prospect ahead of her. She was being stupid. She'd agreed to go on the bushwalk, and Steve loved it when they got out of the city, and she knew she was lucky to live somewhere where you could get to such a beautiful place so easily, she knew all that. It was one of their shared interests, Steve told other people, and she wasn't going to whinge about it. Tomorrow they could go out to a café for brunch, sit in calm virtuous silence and read the papers and eat croissants. If she just went and walked through the bush with him today, she could have a day off. That would be the deal.

He didn't make her camp so much any more, thank God. Although now, sitting with the road directory on his lap, he was trying to convince her that both of them should go on the Great Australian Bike Ride together this year. She drove, trying hard to muster enthusiasm.

‘You'd love it,' Steve was saying, and she felt the same prickle of irritation she'd felt as a teenager when her old sports teacher had kept telling her how much better she'd feel after a run round the oval. Both of them so certain they knew what she needed, both exerting a confident authority that expected to prevail in the end. She would be compliant, she knew, swept along in a kind of slipstream of Steve's gusto for everything. Last year she'd begged off the bike ride, saying she felt stiff and unfit after a bout of flu. He had gone anyway, with some other friends.

If Steve really did make a roster like in her dream, Helen thought now, you could bet it wouldn't be fastened to the fridge with a frivolous heart-shaped magnet, or even the phone number for the local pizza shop. It would have to be a magnet the council gave you when you paid your rates, informing you what nights your paper and bottles would be picked up for recycling. It would serve a purpose.

‘Is there a film festival or something on this weekend?' she said to Steve. ‘Or were we meant to go to someone's place for lunch?'

‘Nope,' he answered, sprawled in the passenger seat in his monster hiking boots. She could smell the waterproofing gel he'd put on them the night before.

‘I can't help thinking I'm going to realise what it is later, and kick myself.'

‘There's nothing. The weekend's all ours to do exactly what we want with it.'

‘Hey, read me my stars,' she said, watching for the turn-off.

‘The horoscope? Don't be ridiculous,' he said, and she noticed with another little spurt of frustration that he'd thrown the magazine and the review section she liked into the back. ‘Listen, here's something on that Dutch election.'

Her head cleared as he read. Impossible to complain — the things that annoyed her about Steve were such petty, trivial things. Not even worth putting into words. She imagined how whiny she'd sound:
You never let me read the television section, even though I've bought the paper. You never tell me I look nice when we go out somewhere. You never want to hold my hand when we're walking along.
Ludicrous. Just small prickles of anger like those sudden headaches that faded away just as fast, accumulating and dissipating like clouds in the face of a beaming, good-natured sun.

Little bads
, she thought as she submitted to politics in the Netherlands.

As they parked the car and got ready, she caught sight of some other people in the park lying under a tree on a blanket, lazing in the shade with their books. Lucky bastards. It would be pointless to even voice her black mood; Steve would only ignore it and patiently, even-temperedly, wait for her to snap out of it.

‘This is going to be great,' he said now, still oblivious, as he waited for her to collect her things and lock the car. ‘Hey, Helen, look; you'll have to repack that.' He gestured to her backpack, lumpy with raincoat and lunch, and laughed. ‘Give it to me, I'll re-do it. It's bound to annoy you after a while if you walk with it like that.'

She slung it off stonily and handed it to him, watching his hands open the zips and rearrange her things inside, patting them down and folding them more exactly.

All she could think of were those other hands, soothing someone back to consciousness. The ordinary kindness of a calm gesture. Like he was a ministering angel, she thought now.

They walked to the Parks and Wildlife shelter; an arrangement of laminated posters of native animals they would possibly sight on their walk and a topography map of the park mounted between green poles under a corrugated iron roof. Helen gravitated into that slice of shade, dawdling and reading the history of the park as Steve skimmed it, keen to hit the track.

She rested her hands on the long perspex-sealed display case as Steve rapped on it with a finger.

‘Lucky we've brought our own map,' he said. ‘Look at that.'

Helen looked down vaguely. She was aware again of something long and taut being pulled from her — a line, a wick, playing itself out silently, steady and unchecked. She felt it cease abruptly as it reached some finite point, caught on something silent and dark somewhere and held fast. Under her hands she saw that the perspex seal had failed and that seasons of moisture and glaring sun had faded the map, where the shade missed it, down to a few pale bleached lines stretching to the curling edges, the whole thing spotted with spores of black mould. She didn't want to move, didn't want to tear herself away.

She broke her gaze finally and looked up to see Steve ahead, on the path already, waiting for her. Soon he would turn around again and set off alone, thinking she'd catch up dutifully in a few minutes. She saw herself for a few seconds through his eyes
: Being strange today, best to ignore it, she'll come around.

There was a word, meanwhile, which stayed tugging faintly and insistently on the end of that line, just outside her consciousness; if she stayed quiet and didn't break the spell, the word would come to her. She felt sleepy and disoriented, but the word would come to her, and then she would know what was missing. She went on staring down at the blurred, ruined map in a trance of waiting. This is how it would feel, she thought, to wake up with that blank, jarred feeling, sprawled out, exposed on the pavement in public, nothing solved, no explanation, a
grand mal.
But stroked awake, cared for, so you'd know you wouldn't have to fend for yourself. Those hands like wings.

Cherish
, Helen thought finally, feeling the cool relief of locating it settle over her as she slid off her pack and turned back to the shade of the trees.
Cherish.
That was the word.

The Light of Coincidence

I am not one of life's success stories. I'm first on the list when they're laying people off. I'm pulled over for speeding the day my car runs out of rego. My fly gapes open at parties. But one thing's for certain: I have a gift. I attract coincidence the way some people attract lightning. I could be browsing at a second-hand bookstall and pull out a book I remember from my high school English days and open it up and find my own name inside. This kind of thing has happened more times than I care to remember. Once when I used to have my own stall at Camberwell I was sitting leafing through the biography of Carl Jung, just at the chapter where he's talking about how the gods come into our lives to test our characters but they come disguised, so we miss them. I'm thinking about this, about keeping the book and reading on, when a punter who'd been poking round for a while clears his throat.

‘Hi there,' I say, keeping my finger on the page and having a sip of my coffee.

‘Hi,' he says. ‘Nice collection.'

‘Thanks. After anything in particular?'

‘Well,' he says, consulting a bit of paper out of his wallet, ‘I'm hunting for a paperback biography of Carl Jung.'

That's the kind of thing I mean. Once I got to the market early and bought something unusual — a green suede jacket. Not a common item. But I was there and just cruising around the stalls and bought it and put it on and, of course, it was a perfect fit. I walked off feeling pretty chuffed with myself — I'd been looking for something like it for nigh on eight months — when I go down the next row and what do I see but another green suede jacket. Cheaper than the one I'd bought. See what I mean? It's like there's a lesson, there's the signal, but I can't quite get what the point is.