Dark Roots (18 page)

Stella had reached a point, with that raw salmon, where it had ceased to become food. Shaving it with the cleaver, she had seen it reduced to a single dense slab of flesh, of matter. Twenty-seven dollars, but it contained no secrets, nothing precious, nothing worth fetishising, despite the pompous mystique. Even the fishmonger at the market had lifted it away deferentially, handling it with almost a caress. It is ridiculous. It is quite right that Daniel — in fact, all of them — should eat each laboured-over morsel with such carelessness. She had had one piece, and the feverish image had risen in her mind that she was devouring a sliver of pressed tongue. Yes, perhaps she is feverish. The gerberas are positively oscillating in their own radiance, five flowers so perfect you could hardly believe in them.

‘Coffee?' says Stella, rising in her beautiful black dress, steadying herself with the thought of a cold face cloth to the neck and forehead. Just through the kitchen, and into the bathroom. Then in a half-hour they will be gone, and she can break her news on the cusp of this dinner's success, on the gentle end of a wave, the battle over, the shore in sight.

‘Would anybody care for chocolates?' she says, and as she moves past Daniel she feels him give the flesh of her backside a squeeze. Stella thinks of the magician's assistant, keeping things seamless. She thinks of the fishmonger.

She wipes her face, brushes her hair. Deep inside her, a ratchet is tightening up, each new calibration a metal nip of pain. ‘I just want to spew,' she says to her reflection, and the word, so immediate and earthy, seems as shocking as
fuck.
How would it sound in the rarefied company of the dining room?

Her throat is tight as she re-enters that atmosphere, heavy by now with cigarette smoke and words, a sickening broth of indifference. Nobody asks her where she has been; nobody asks her opinion.

I might be a dummy
, thinks Stella, wonderingly.
I might be made of sawdust.

‘Marvellous meal,' says the visiting Fellow to her lover who has spent the afternoon reading a book. Daniel, smiling genially, says, ‘Oh, I didn't do much.'

‘Yes, thank you so much,' says the professor's wife to Stella, and Stella can tell by the odd stumbled inflection that the woman has meant to say her name, but has forgotten it.
And why shouldn't she
, thinks Stella, holding the edge of the table.
I am just someone with a dining-room table and six chairs. I am something you sift in passing, looking for something worth having.

‘Goodnight,' she says. ‘Goodbye.'

Stella kicks off her shoes and treads back unsteadily to the bathroom. Unwillingly, because it is dawning on her, with an exhausted certainty, what she will find there. She knows what the pain is now, feels it sharpen into something recognisable. That tilting drag, her queasiness, that accumulation of tension on the verge of becoming something else. Its familiarity springs her like a punchline, her obtuseness seems almost hilarious. Her teeth are chattering. As she unzips and steps out of her dress she observes her own devious body, its skipped cycle last month like a blank shrug. She sees her mistake. Her fingers skim her belly, one hand reaches between her legs, and then moves before her face fluttering with a bright flag of blood. She will not need to say her lines about the body making choices. This body, her body, has already hidden and then disclosed, revealed itself palm upwards. It is not a vehicle for carrying something else. Stella sits drained and naked on the toilet, and bleeds.

She hears, some minutes later, Daniel's solicitous knock.

‘You okay, darling?' he says from the other side of the door.

Be careful
, Stella tells herself.
He is cunning.
‘Yes, just a bit sick,' she answers.

‘Could it have been the raw salmon?'

‘No. Just ...'

‘Women's troubles?'

Prudish bastard. Fool.

‘Yeah. Would you mind going? I'm really tired.'

She can feel him weighing it up behind the door, frowning.

‘Sure, if you think you'll be okay. Call you first thing?'

There is a pause. Stella feels her insides contract and unclench like a pulse, the fist turning into a hand.

‘Goodnight,' she calls. ‘Goodbye.'

Stella runs the bath. She will not be home first thing. She will be at the café, drinking pale China tea and writing an ad for the window, advertising the room. Thinking about it now, she savours it, a distilled flavour, runs her hands down her breasts and hips and legs. She is all here, and the cramp is lifting off her like steam.

Sea Burial

There's something so quiet and dignified about a burial at sea. It wasn't exactly that Alan had had a nautical past, but he'd loved the ocean. Loved that little yacht of his.

Up at Port Douglas he was never off the water, given half a chance. When I came in here just then and let myself into the silent house, it made me realise how very final death is. A cliché, I know, but true.

I'm glad I went with my instinct, and not decided on an ordinary plot. I don't know how people stand it — walking away leaving a loved one to be pressed under forever by damp clay. Instead I felt light. Divested, somehow. Oh, I was drained, certainly, but with what my new book from the library calls
closure
. Just a final goodbye, and a slip away. Beautiful.

I should have had time to get used to the quiet of the house, what with Alan away for weeks at a stretch in Singapore with his business. His business. Right up until the actual Commission Inquiry, I foolishly believed his business was the importation of woodcarvings. I swallowed everything he told me. Must have been a laughing stock. Even Alan realised at the end it was pointless even calling me as a witness.

So. The Philippines, doing God knows what, or else up in Queensland gambling with his cronies.

The ladies who came for bridge were always sympathetic about his absences. ‘I don't know how you put up with it,' they'd say, when I told them Alan was away again, stocking up on new carvings.

The truth was, I'd gotten used to it. I had the house, of course, which meant I had the beach, and plenty of what Alan called play money. I had fresh freesias ordered every three days from the florist. So expensive, freesias, but they're my favourite flowers. I'd sit there looking at them, inhaling their perfume, and marvelling at the strangeness of fate.

When you think that only four years ago, after all, I'd had to borrow money for everything. Even for the funeral. Imagine that. My own daughter, and I had to have her cremated because it was cheaper. Borrowed money for the flowers, too — oriental lilies. Twenty-two dollars. They're too powerful, those flowers, aren't they? The scent. Stood there breathing in that sickly sweetness as I wept. Didn't shed a tear today for Alan; funny, isn't it? Completely dry-eyed. But then, I had closure.

Lilies are expensive flowers too, of course, but they're death flowers. Freesias are like a luxurious, perennial spring.

I loved arranging them, loved sitting on the leather divan with my nails done and a pile of glossy new magazines, carefully tearing open the sample perfume sachets. I'd subscribe to all the expensive ones.
Country Life.
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
and everything.

I was comfortable.

Comfortable — now there's a good word.

‘I'm only thinking of your comfort.' That's what Alan would say in his wounded voice when I complained how often he was away, how I was marooned there in the beach-house.

‘Sorry, sweetie,' Alan would say shortly, ‘but business is business.'

And he bought me a cocker-spaniel puppy before he took off again. Within three months all the wives in the bridge club had one. There we'd sit, talking about puppy preschool and our husbands' heart medication, lining the mantelpiece with photos of our dogs.

‘Never say you're rich, say you're comfortable,' instructed my mother, the instant expert, like someone who watches a game but never gets to play. She saw my marriage to Alan, my door into a new life, as her own leg-up into the upper echelons. My wedding day was the happiest day of her life. When she found out that Alan had hired the same florist as the one who did the Packer wedding, she cried tears of real joy.

So here I was, comfortable. Thanks to Alan, who was also supremely comfortable.

In fact, the only time I ever saw Alan uncomfortable was when he was subpoenaed. There he was on the stand in his thousand-dollar suit and his face so florid and uneasy. He visibly winced at the word ‘trafficking'. It offended his sensibilities. Well, Alan always kept his hands clean. He knew the value of good staff. Someone else opened doors, someone else changed gears. It's only good sense to have someone else who signs cheques. He was a businessman. The trouble was that woodcarvings were not, in the end, the business.

But he was confident that things would all be fixed up and he was right, of course. Alan had a broad range of acquaintances. He'd spent a good many years cultivating friends in high places, and quite a few in low. He'd survive.

No, what really bothered Alan after the inquiry, what really got him popping those heart tablets, was not the law, but someone outside the law, someone still on the outside with an axe to grind. I have to hand it to him. His instinct, as usual, was absolutely unerring.

I've been thinking today about the funeral, and me standing there holding the lilies, thinking my heart was going to break. I think maybe that it did break, or else something else broke. Something came away and drifted off like an empty boat.

It's the stupid little things, isn't it? What I couldn't stop crying at was the cheap yellow polyester lining of her coffin; all the tack and scrimping. Stapled onto the sides with a staple-gun. And her stick-thin arms. I hadn't seen her in a year, so it was a shock, still. And the powdery make-up they'd slapped on over the needle tracks. They could have matched her skin-tone, surely. Just shown a bit of love. That wouldn't have taken two minutes.

Poor Alan. In the end he just wanted a refuge, I suppose. I remember him arriving home last Wednesday after laying low in Port Douglas for two months. I know how he would have spent that time. Looking over his shoulder and doing a lot of business by phone. He was a nervous wreck. He looked a hundred. Waiting for the shoe to drop, I suppose.

Still, he played his part as best he could. Fumbling with the dog's leash, brightly suggesting an early-morning walk over the headland.

I took Goldie off the leash, though. Let her meander with me past the guardrail and down to the bluff. It wasn't the first time we'd done it. I suppose it does look dangerous, with the sheer drop and the waves crashing below. It's only natural he would follow.

Say what you like, it has dignity, a sea burial. So silent and elemental, and so few witnesses.

‘Alan gone again?' That's what the bridge ladies will say tomorrow with that mock sympathy, and I'll nod with a mock regretful smile. Then I'll deal the cards.

Kill or Cure

‘It's a lot of routine, I'm warning you,' John had said before they were married. ‘You won't just be marrying me, you'll be marrying the place.'

‘Can't wait,' she'd said. Helen remembered that night; exactly the way she'd said it as she'd leaned over the table. She'd had no idea, then, how much organising it had taken him just to have a weekend off in the city. She'd assumed once you planted stuff in the ground or put sheep out in a paddock, things basically took care of themselves.

‘You won't know what to do with yourself,' her friends at work had said, not without a trace of envy, and she'd laughed.

‘Watch me,' she'd smiled, raising her glass. She remembered that day, too; a great lunch in a good café where the owner knew her name. Funny the things you took for granted.

Now she watches John methodically chewing through a sandwich as she cuts up more cheese and tomato. As he eats he reads through the mail: the bank statements and veterinary bills she's collected for him that morning. The phone only rings now at mealtimes when people know he's going to be home: stock managers, reps, the CFA lieutenant, with some message about fertiliser or machinery or a meeting. At first, they'd rung all through the day, and she'd done her best to take everything down dutifully, pretending to know what they were talking about, but something's shifted there; word's got around.

Nothing else breaks the pattern of the day, not even weekends, when things go the same, only slower. When she visits the butcher, who's always friendly, she notices she has to be careful not to talk too much in what is often her biggest conversation with someone other than her husband for days. In town, she walks slowly down the quiet main street with its two pubs and three takeaways, the big new supermarket dumped at the end looking like a huge shiny toy. She glances into the hopeless little library with its old magazine collection and well-thumbed large-print westerns. She hasn't gone in there to sign a membership form. Not yet.

The old dog trains up the young dog, is what John explains.

‘Up, Fella,' he says shortly to the old dog, whose adoration overcomes arthritis and bad hips, so that he determinedly hauls himself onto the tray of the ute. The new dog, in rangy puppyhood, watches nervously, then crouches and unfolds like a pocketknife to spring up alongside.