Escape (13 page)

When I asked Guido about his early experiences, his answers were
short and hard and concrete. If reflections on personal issues were
translated into philosophy, though, particularly historical philosophy,
he could be expansive, even loquacious. He'd studied at the
liceo
classico
, after all; he could read Classical Greek, quote Euripides,
Sophocles, Plato. When I talked about careers – the agonies of
choosing, of balancing social responsibility with personal fulfilment,
he quoted Seneca. The great Roman philosopher ('What
do
they
teach you in Australian schools?') claimed that to live a healthy mental
life, 'our first duty was to examine ourselves'. We should do this before
choosing a career, Guido said, or thinking about how to live. Reflecting
on one's own nature and desires was of first importance. 'Talent does
not respond to force,' he quoted. 'Where nature is reluctant, labour is
vain.'

To follow Seneca's path, I thought, you'd first have to know what
it was you liked to do. Really, I had no idea. I was a blank of a person,
undefined by ordinary interests or the ability to choose one thing
over another. Things usually chose me, and if the things made me
uncomfortable, I just waited until they went away, or accepted them.

When I started teaching and received a monthly salary, I wrote out
a list of charities to which I would contribute: World Vision, Amnesty
International, Children with Cancer, the Spastic Centre. I liked the
packages of information and reminders sent through the post, and
felt soothed as I sat in the sunlight on the back porch, writing out
cheques. It seemed a good mix of international and local charities, and
I was doing 'what I could'. But sometimes, lying in bed at night, the
enormity of what I really
should
be doing assailed me.

As a child, I'd felt guilty watching the sad hungry people on TV:
guilty about clean sheets, and good dinners, and being miserable when
I had no right to be. I had a comfortable bed to lie on and a gleaming
set of drawers of polished wood and a window cleaned so diligently by
my mother that birds often flew straight at it.

It was hard to sleep since meeting Guido, with ideas bursting like
fireworks in my head. I clenched my toes in the dark, questioning
long-held beliefs. If Guido and Seneca thought it was valid to examine
your needs, to consider your
self
as well as your duty to the world, then
perhaps it was.

Guido had become the coloured glass I looked through or perhaps
more the mould in which all my thoughts and visions were set. I
would close my eyes and imagine being with him forever. It became a
form of meditation, this imagining, a deep chant of possible happiness
in which a multitude of utopian scenes replaced former worlds of
devastation and misery in Africa, India, South America. Being with
Guido began to feel synonymous with the possibility that I could start
to be myself.

I imagined having a baby with Guido. I had never thought about
having a baby before, but I would study his face while he talked about
Plato or the Galilean moons and think, I want a baby just like you. I
imagined soft brown limbs tugging at my knees. The little person I had
in mind would love me forever.

I didn't mention this subject to Guido. It was a secret wish that
I somehow sensed he wouldn't share. Later I wondered if the idea of
having Guido's baby came to me so early because my body was already
trying to prepare me.

I didn't talk about babies or the idea of married bliss but I did long
to withdraw into an intimate world with Guido. He made it difficult,
though: his silence often enveloped a whole afternoon. Sometimes
he'd get up, take his cigarettes and go off for a walk or open a window
when he was tired of a subject. His periods of gloom, I began to think,
probably had nothing to do with me, but I only realised this after
having picked over each of my sentences, searching for offence I may
have given, insensitive remarks I might have made. Maybe on those
quiet afternoons he was merely bored. The thing was, even if his gloom
was not my fault, wasn't it my fault if I couldn't help? What was the use
of me if I made absolutely no difference to his state of mind?

When he came down with the flu, something changed. It was four
weeks to the day after we met. I had brought a bottle of champagne
to celebrate in his room and we drank it in our underwear in bed with
the pillows fluff ed up behind us. Guido grimaced a good deal as he
swallowed and said I should not call this fizzy white wine champagne,
as that was a region in France where the grapes undergo a special
fermenting process. The taste was sharp and acidic and afterwards,
actually, I had a headache. When I woke during the night, dreaming
of being caught in a fire, I found Guido hot and sweaty beside me and
wondered if the false champagne had poisoned him.

I felt his forehead against my palm. It was burning. I wanted to take
his temperature but we had no thermometer so I found a handtowel
and soaked it in cool water, laying it across his forehead. Every ten
minutes I went back to the bathroom to run cold water over it. He said
to bring a bucket near the bed because he thought he might be sick.
There were no buckets so I brought the wastepaper basket.

'Do you think the champagne made you sick?' I asked.

He said no, he had a sore throat as well and it was probably
l'influenza
. 'I jus need to sleep,' he added.

But I couldn't. I lay, alert, next to him, wondering what else I
should do. What if I fell asleep and his heart stopped during the night?
If his temperature climbed too high, he could have a seizure. Or was
that only in children?

The following night I wasn't able to see Guido. It was my father's
birthday and my mother insisted I stay home. 'You've got black circles
under your eyes,' she said reprovingly. 'We never see you. And how
do you manage grade three with no sleep?' Uncle Nathan and Auntie
Ruth were coming over for dinner. 'When was the last time you had
a conversation with your family?' I sat through the meal wondering if
Guido was eating his.

When I spoke to him the next morning on the phone his voice
was gravelly. But he said 'the show must go on'. He gave a short bark
of a laugh which turned into a hacking cough. I had to hold the phone
inches away from my ear. Finally he put the phone down. When I rang
in the early evening, he told me not to come, that he would just sleep.

I went to bed late and tried to read. But nothing penetrated past
my eyes. I went out into the kitchen to make some hot milk. I had
to feel my way along the wall of the corridor in the dark. The light of
the fridge was loud like an alarm. As I poured the milk and turned on
the stove I kept thinking about Guido lying alone in his bed. He knew
practically no one in Australia, and he was ill. What would it feel like to
be sick and vulnerable in a foreign language? How could he let anyone
know if he fell unconscious? The thought of that lunar atmosphere in
hotels where your existence makes no impression at all was becoming
scary now, rather than liberating.

I drank the milk but it didn't soothe me. Did he know about
Panadol and how it can lower your temperature? What about tepid
baths? He often left the glass door wide open to get the breeze. He
shouldn't do that tonight, the chill could make his flu worse. He didn't
know about December nights in Sydney, how they could turn into the
sharpness of spring.

I went back to bed and wriggled about, not able to get comfortable.
A panicky feeling was rising in my chest. Could we be like twins – was
he too writhing about in bed, frightened, delirious, and I was sensing
his feelings?

I took the torch next to my bed and padded back out to the kitchen.
I went to the telephone and rang the hotel and told the sleepy girl at
the desk that I wanted room number 17 and that it was an emergency.
I was breathing so hard I could hardly speak. The girl said was I sure,
that it was three o'clock in the morning. Yes, I said, not wanting to say
that I was never sure about anything.

He answered after fifteen rings. 'How are you?' I asked into the
silence.

Guido was furious. He said I'd woken him up and he started
shouting something in Italian. I went red, staring into the dark of the
kitchen. His voice was raw and loud. When he returned to English I
understood that not only had I woken him from the first sound sleep
he'd had in days but he hated people checking up on him. It was
'invasive' and
brutto
, ugly.

'What you think I am doing at three in the morning, Rachel? You
think I 'ave a girl in 'ere? Why you are suspicious like this? You drive
me crazy!' He slammed the phone down.

Suspicious? What girl? I hadn't even thought of that. Maybe
he was feeling suffocated by me. I used to wonder about that, when
boyfriends didn't last. Could they have felt the cling? Maybe I'd
squeezed the breath out of them. I wondered if they'd been trying to
keep themselves, the deep inside parts of them I wanted, but could
never have.

I lay awake for hours that night, thinking about the boys I'd dated,
the ache when they left . I used to throw myself up in the air, crossing
my fingers that a man would catch me. Men were made of solid stuff . I
was made of vapour, a breath on the mirror.

But my worry about Guido was more like a heart attack than a
toothache.
Now look what you've done
, said the voice,
you've ruined
everything, as usual
. I gritted my teeth and decided that no matter how
great the temptation, I would never ring in the night again. Please god,
I said under my breath, if Guido comes back to me I promise never
to ask where he has been, or what girlfriends he's had, or what plans
he is making. We would live in the present, like people on holidays,
together. We wouldn't be weighed down by burdens of the past, and
consequences in the future: we would travel light.

After all, what I treasured most when I searched Guido's face was
the absence of sorrow I'd seen in my father.

When Guido moved out of his hotel into a flat, I asked him home to
dinner at Cuthbert Street. '
Sì
, I will come,' he replied quickly. 'Is a long
time since someone cooked for me.'

He was under contract to the Capitol Theatre for another two
months, but he'd grown tired of living in a hotel. He didn't like all
traces of himself being swept away each morning; he liked his things
to stay exactly where he put them. And he didn't appreciate people
knowing his habits, spying on the small towers of empty takeaway
boxes perched like miniature cities on his bedside table. When a maid
asked him why he always ordered sweet and sour pork, and how come
he drank so much tea when everyone
knew
Italians preferred coffee,
he decided to accept the stage manager's offer of a room in a boarding
house at Paddington.

Mum made chicken à la crème and baked potatoes for dinner. She
told Dad to put on a clean shirt and long pants, even though it was
30 degrees. I bought a bunch of carnations for the table and liqueur
chocolates to have with our coffee.

'Ugh,
garofeni
,' shuddered Guido when he saw the flowers. 'These
you buy for funerals,' and he did a little hop, touching his testicles to
ward off the evil eye.

But he seemed to enjoy my mother's chicken. 'This is very good,'
he said warmly, smiling from me to Deborah. 'Is a pity your daughter
does not inerit your talent,' and he pinched my cheek.

When Dad got up to pour the wine, he said to Guido, 'Now Rachel
told us not to give you the third degree, but I've got to ask you what
it's like to be a magician – and a travelling one at that!' He gave a low
whistle. 'That's something I never came across, I can tell you.'

'Yes,' said my mother. 'Such an exotic way of life!'

Guido shrugged. 'Is exhausting. Every day, the same thing. Is not
so different from going to the office.'

My father laughed in disbelief.

Guido's eyebrow rose, then he smiled suddenly, lifting his fork to
nail a bite-sized piece of thigh in a fold of bacon and mushroom. 'For
me is
this
the real magic,' he said, popping the morsel into his mouth,
and he winked at Deborah.

In the silence that followed, I could hear the squeak of my father's
back teeth. Guido ploughed on through his meal, barely lifting his
head to breathe.

'So,' my mother said brightly, 'what are your plans? Do you have
engagements back in Italy after this tour? Or can you extend your
work here?'

Guido finished his mouthful and took a gulp of wine. 'We will see
what happens,' he said. And he pressed his lips together.

While we ate, we talked about politics in Australia. I told Guido
about our prime minister, Gough Whitlam, and his introduction of
free health care and tertiary education, and how lucky it was that my
going to university had followed the election of the Labor Party. 'We
never could have afforded uni fees otherwise,' I said.

In 1975 we'd watched Whitlam accept defeat on television.
'Maintain the rage!' he'd thundered. His sonorous voice had always
had a vibrato, an inbuilt flexibility to it like an opera singer, but this
time I'd heard a definite wobble. Every time that oily silver-spooned
Malcolm Fraser came on the news, growing sleek as a seal in his pool
of victory, Mum would howl. Once she threw her leather boots at the
screen and almost smashed it. But I just went back to school. Actually,
I took two days off before that and lay on the sofa like a tumour. I only
got up to pee. But it wasn't about Gough. Michael Jeffries had dumped
me. I should have gone on the protest marches, but I was too sad to
move.

As we finished the meal and moved on to dessert, I was grateful
for my mother's conversation, even though I wondered if Guido
considered political upheaval in Australia tame in comparison with
terrorist bombs and fascist conspiracies. After a while I noticed Guido's
gaze flicking over my head quite often and his eyes became fixed on
the yellow wall opposite, as if he'd left them open politely while he
was thinking about something else. So I rushed in with chatter about
the history of magic, recounting Guido's unique interpretation of the
miracles in the bible. I kept pausing so that he would take over and
be brilliant and charismatic the way he had been with me, but he just
spooned up his ice-cream, chasing the last strawberry around his plate
with total concentration.

'Fascinating,' Dad said, squeezing my shoulder.

'You must miss your life back in Italy,' said Mum.

'No,' said Guido.

'Well, then,' said Dad, 'what about the politics? Pretty interesting
times, as the Chinese say, eh? I hear you were active in the student
movement back in Italy—'

'Where you hear this?' Guido looked up sharply.

'From Rachel, of course—'

'Ah yes, well, was all a long time ago.'

After coffee and six liqueur chocolates, Guido got up to leave. I
felt desperate – now there would be no time to retrieve the night. I'd
been hoping for that alchemical change that can happen in a room
when people connect and the world shift s for a moment, for the better.
'You're going already?' I protested, hanging on to his sleeve.

Guido grinned and took my sticky hand, kissing it with an
old-fashioned flourish. 'Don worry to drive me, I get a taxi. Thank you
for dinner, was very good.'

He kissed the air next to my mother's cheeks, light and dry. 'Do
come again,' she murmured half-heartedly, then went to ring the taxi.

Dad and I came to see Guido out. We stood on the porch in
the warm evening, a feathery breeze bringing scents of jasmine and
frangipani. Below, the lawn shone with circles of gold falling softly
from the kerosene lamps on the low stone walls. 'It's pretty, isn't it?' I
ventured.

As we stepped down into the garden, a dark shape winged
overhead. '
Ecco!
' Guido pointed, his face alight. 'Is
pippistrello
, no?
You don see that in Italy!' We looked up at the sky and another inky
smudge swept past the trees.

'Fruit bats,
yes!
' I cried, feeling grateful to those little mammals,
with their doggy faces and upside-down mothering. But even as they
disappeared something pale and luminous rose up in their place.
It hovered above the earth, above our lawn. It wasn't flying away. A
ghostly creature was threading the air into a small human form.

'What the—' my father gasped. He took a step forward. The
ghost shimmered, expanded, thickened, and shrank again. We stood
transfixed, staring up at the shape of a small boy. He was floating on
layers of darkness, his arms stretched out toward us, legs trailing on
the wind. For a moment his face grew sharper, his mouth open in
some kind of pain and his arms seemed to grow longer and thinner
and emptier in the shuddering breeze.

A cry from my father made me turn and I saw him pass a hand
over his eyes. When I looked back at that space above the lawn, there
was only the lemon light of the lamp glinting in the trees.

'What was that?' whispered my father. He turned to Guido, his
chin trembling. 'How did you do that?'

'Magic,' Guido smiled, his finger to his lips.

Dad tried to smile back, but couldn't manage it.

A loud toot sounded at the end of the drive, making us jump.

'My taxi!
Buona notte
,' Guido turned to shake hands with Dad,
kiss my forehead and he was gone, whooshed away with the sound of
tyres on gravel.

'He didn't mean to give you a shock,' I said to my father as we came
back in. 'It must have been some kind of optical illusion.' Mum blinked
at me when I explained about the ghost-boy. Dad was still speechless.
He sat down
whumpff
on the sofa as if his legs had collapsed beneath
him. 'Well, what I mean is, he thought you'd find it exotic, you know,
how you said you were interested in magic tricks and all. See, if an
object is lit and reflected in a concave mirror, you can get that kind of
effect. Maybe he used the statue . . . '

Dad patted my head. 'It's all right, love.' He closed his eyes for
a moment. 'I'm a bit tired. I think I'll go and lie down, watch the
cricket.'

As Mum and I washed up, my cheeks felt hot. 'Guido is just, you
know, a private sort of person,' I began. 'He likes to
show
his magic,
rather than talk about it. Magicians are like that.'

'Hmm,' said Mum, handing me a plate to dry.

'But, you know, he's so well-educated, he wouldn't show off about
his classical background but really, he knows so much history, you
wouldn't believe . . .' I trailed off , my voice dribbling into the grey
washing-up water.

Mum sighed. 'Well, sweetheart, it's hard to get a grip on who he
is, what with his English being so scanty. I'm sure we'll have lots of
full-bodied conversations when he's got his vocabulary going.' But she
looked disapproving.

Later, as I came out of the bathroom and into the hallway, I heard
my parents talking. 'You can see she's smitten,' my mother said, 'but
you can't tell how
he
feels about anything. Except food.'

'No,' my father agreed. 'That was so strange out on the porch. You
should have seen it, Deb. This little boy all alone, floating out there, his
face twisted up, reaching out for . . . Made me think of—'

'I can imagine,' my mother said brusquely. 'Don't think about it
now.'

'But I wonder how he did it. Gave me the creeps.'

My mother made an irritated sound with her tongue. 'How a
grown man can spend his life playing schoolboy tricks I don't know.'

'Now that's not fair. It was really quite extraordinary. No, he's
talented all right. What worries me is he's got no roots, he's a traveller
– you get the feeling he's never made a commitment in his life.'

'I know. But there's no point in saying anything. She's too far gone.'
And there was a loud sigh, probably my mother's.

I tiptoed to my bedroom, not wanting to hear any more. I dug
around in the back of my wardrobe for my old comfort doll, Sasha.
Lumpy, homemade and almost bald, she could still soothe me, tucked
into my chest under the sheets. I tried to think of nothing as I closed
my eyes, not Guido disappearing down our path, nor my mother's sigh
or my own swamp of disappointment. I turned on my side, stroking
Sasha's tummy, but what floated into my mind and stayed there was
the ghost-boy Guido had conjured, and my father's terrible broken cry
when he'd looked up into the sky.

*

Before his accident, I had never seen my father cry. Afterwards, I
thought he'd never stop. Only when the doctor announced that his
hip was finally healed, although he'd always walk with a limp, and the
police invalid pension came through, did the leaking begin to abate.
Some weeks, I noticed, there was only one outbreak, maybe two. I
loved it how my father stashed his slippers away in the cupboard and
wore shoes again. When it rained for a week he even wore galoshes
and went outside to unblock the drain and clear the gutters.

I was so relieved that my father was going to live. But I knew the
shooting had changed him. It was the cause of his departure from the
police force and the sudden passion for community work with the
Youth Refuge. The truth, which I would never have told anyone in a
million years, was that I hated my father's new job almost as much as
I'd hated his leaking disease.

Dad wasn't paid very much to work part time at the boys' refuge.
Due to lack of government funding, there were only nineteen beds
and often, as Dad complained, twice that number of kids needed
assistance in any given week.

'How can we turn them away?' Dad would ask Mum in the kitchen,
his eyes tearing up. Although he was paid for only fifteen hours a week,
Dad worked thirty-five. He was never too tired to listen or talk, and
once prevented a suicide at three o'clock one Saturday morning.
Our
resident angel
his coworkers called him affectionately. I saw him bristle
at that. He always turned away, shrugging off the name like something
dirty. He said to Mum, 'I know what I am.'

Johnnie Walker, as he called himself, was the first boy Dad brought
home to stay. 'Just for the weekend,' Dad told us, 'to give the boy a
break. On Monday there'll be a bed.' There was no bed, though, until
Friday, and by then Mum and I understood the damage that Johnnie
had suffered in his family home.

Johnnie arrived at the refuge with a broken arm and two cracked
ribs. His father had come home drunk and been annoyed by a shoe
that Johnnie had left in the hallway. Since the age of two, Johnnie had
been visiting the emergency room at the hospital. He'd had a broken
shoulder from 'falling out of his cot', a cracked cheekbone from
'running into a door', a concussion from 'jumping off the roof '.

At thirteen, when Dad met him, his arm plastered and a bandage
around his chest, Johnnie sat on the torn vinyl seat at the refuge and
cried. I remember Dad coming home, describing how Johnnie had
sobbed for forty minutes, choking on his words. Dad had patted the
shoulder that wasn't hurt, saying, 'It's okay, you're safe now, it wasn't
your fault.'

Johnnie slept on our couch that first week, as did many of the
boys who came later. Eventually, Dad fixed up the built-in verandah
at the back of our house and I moved into that. By then I didn't mind,
because I liked being the one furthest away from the crying.

That was what Johnnie mainly did, like my father before him.
Johnnie's main sin at our house was leaving mounds of snotty tissues
on the floor under the couch. So I don't know why I felt so angry and
abandoned. I hated the way I felt, and I tried like anything not to show
it. The more Johnnie cried, the more hopeful my father seemed. 'It's
good for him to get it out, tell someone,' Dad whispered to me. 'It will
make him feel better.'

I made Johnnie cups of tea when I got home from school. On the
first afternoon I talked to him about basketball. I really liked the game,
I told him, but I hadn't been picked for the A or B grade. My friend
Joanna Mulgrade got into the A team, though, and her father was a
judge. Johnnie wasn't interested in basketball or Joanna's impressive
father, but he did say thank you for the tea. The cup sat on the little table
next to the couch, growing cold. I sat on, watching Johnnie. He stared
at the picture of hydrangeas above the mantelpiece. Everyone said it
was a fine painting, but I was unable to look at it without thinking of
the artist who'd created it. He'd used his feet because his poor arms
and fingers had been crippled in a car accident, or some other horrific
disaster I didn't like to remember. My mother had carefully explained
it all to me, how he'd gripped the brush between his toes.