Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (13 page)

‘You are happy, yes?'

I smiled and nodded.

We sat in silence for a bit.

Then Rosa said, ‘I wonder if this place is for sale?'

‘Would you buy it?'

‘Maybe. Maybe.' Then just as quickly she decided differently. ‘No. I do not think so. I don't like other people's castoffs. Secondhand clothes. Things. This place is like that.'

‘How so?'

She stabbed her cigarette out on the porch and immediately lit another.

‘Let me ask you a question.'

‘Go ahead.'

‘Have you ever had a pen pal?'

‘Yes.'

I surprised her with that answer. But my mother used to encourage me and my sister Megan in this area. Jean had a pen pal in Canada she wrote to for years until one day the woman's husband wrote to say that she had been killed in a car accident. Megan wrote to a girl in Spain and an Australian boy living in Port Moresby.

‘And you?'

‘Jules. He lived in Ottawa.' He had sent me a photo of himself ice skating and I sent one back of myself on a horse.

‘And this Jules,' she said. ‘Supposing for the moment it was a Julia who once you had loved. And she asked you to come and live, where did you say, Ottawa, would you drop everything to do that?'

She saw my confusion. ‘Never mind,' she said. She felt around for her cigarettes. They were in the bag, and she'd left it in the car.

‘Lionel, would you be a sweet?'

It is 1919. Louise stands by her letterbox looking at her first letter with foreign postmarks. She weighs it in her hand. It is light as a feather. A short letter. The piano tuner acknowledged the point himself. It was just to re-establish contact. He promised a fuller account once he heard back from her.

Immediately she wanted to write to him. She wanted that contact. But then she thought, what's the point? It would just reopen an old wound. He had hurt her. He must have known that. Besides, an ocean separated them. She screwed up the letter. Within the hour she was searching back through the rubbish to retrieve it. This time she set it alight so Billy wouldn't find it.

Sweeping up the ashes she regretted the finality of her action. She hadn't written down Schmidt's address. She'd left herself without any possibility of a change of heart. And of course, no sooner was Schmidt's letter a pile of ash than she felt that change of heart. She regretted it the day after, and for weeks after that. Schmidt had given her a rope with a hook to haul in the horizon and she had rejected it.

Another six months had passed when a young man in a suit showed up to her door.

‘Louise? Louise Cunningham?' he asked.

She went by the name Pohl these days but she nodded.

The young man introduced himself. He was the new piano tuner for the Coast. She could have saved him the trip. She didn't own a piano any more. She was about to tell him as much when he mentioned Schmidt.

‘Mr Schmidt. Paul Schmidt has written to ask that I give you this.' It was a letter. As she took it from him he said, ‘Mr Schmidt wasn't sure you were still at this address and so wrote to the firm asking us to verify.'

Even on the page he was able to gently chide her and make fun of her anger. He managed to do so without raising his voice. He was quick to tell her how much he missed her. He missed their dancing. He missed her eyes, her hair. He missed the feel of her. She had come to fill in that place that he had carried around inside of himself during their time together in the cave. She had usurped a country-sized craving. In Buenos Aires he lived with the constant thought of her. At any time of the day or night she was his companion. And on a more playful note he was happy to report that she was alive and well in Buenos Aires. In fact, he said, she was ‘thriving'. He may have been joking but she felt her face light up when she read that. Schmidt was also anxious to know how her days in the cave had ended. If she would write and tell all he would reply immediately.

She waited a day, then she decided to wait another. In the evening she watched Billy by the fire turn his clothes on the drying rack. He looked so gaunt. It was that hour when his chin turned blue, and the day's labour left him looking drained. The steam off his clothes brought back the hideous nature of the mine, its cruel procedures and Billy's role.

That afternoon she had walked up Paradise Valley road to watch the pit ponies dip their heads in the fields; it was their last day after a month in the open air. She had watched Billy fit on their eye pads and lead them back down the hole in the earth. A month earlier she had stood with schoolchildren behind a rope as the poor animals were brought to the surface. A small girl had touched the nearest pony and left a small handprint in the coal dust.

In the morning she sat on the back step to write her first letter to Buenos Aires.

She told Schmidt about falling sick in the cave and how she'd woken up in hospital to the fresh smell of linen, the sound of trolley wheels creaking in the corridor. For several days tubes carrying a saline solution ran into her veins. She was badly dehydrated. She wondered if he remembered the policeman who had come to her house.Well, he had also visited her in hospital. It was the same old Ryan, awkward, officious, uncertain. He leant over her bed with his notebook. He wanted to know if he could ask her some questions. She said he could if Tom Williams was present. He gave her a strange look. She heard him say, ‘Tom Williams is dead.' Then as he realised he was breaking news to her, he said, ‘Dear Christ, I'm sorry, Louise. Tom suffered a heart attack back in early December.'

She chose not to tell Schmidt she was married. But she mentioned Billy Pohl and Henry Graham in passing. How they had sat out the rest of the war in a camp at the foot of a windblown mountain. She told him of the kind acts she was treated to when she got out of hospital. Neighbours had brought her food. In the Little River Cemetery Jackson had come over with his paper bag of sweets. ‘I saved you a caramel.' Audrey gave her a hug. She told her, ‘Jackson kept your grass nice and trim.'

Louise's first letter ended with a request. She asked Schmidt if he would trace out on paper the dance steps he had taught her. She wanted to practise them. She had one other thing to ask. In the future, he should write to her care of the local post office.

Schmidt's letters filled in another world for her. And of course they supplied her with new dance steps. A Portuguese furniture polisher who lived beneath Schmidt complained of the floorboards creaking above his head. The furniture polisher had the feeling that the world was sneaking up on him. But Schmidt couldn't put the steps down on paper until he'd traced them out on the floor.

How odd it was to contemplate that bad relations between tenants were all a result of a woman's requests from the other side of the world. To Louise it was reassuring. Schmidt's descriptions of his irritable neighbour had her believe that despite all the distance separating them, their lives could still impact on each other.

Schmidt sent photographs of himself. He asked for the same from her. With a pair of scissors she cut Billy out of one of the studio photos and sent that.

For the next few years they exchanged letters. Her relationship with Schmidt continued as it had always done—as something half-realised, a glimpse that strives for more.

In the sitting room Louise rolled back the rug and set about following the latest steps Schmidt had written down. She attached the notes to a broom. It saved her going back to the letter whenever she lost her way. This was adequate for a while, but then she found herself wishing that the broom wasn't merely a broom, that it offered more presence. More possibility.

One morning down at the beach she happened to spy a ketch; its sails were down and as soon as she saw the cross hatch of the mast and rigging she knew what to do. She hurried back to the cottage and hammered a piece of wood across the top of the broom and hung on it one of Billy's jackets.

Schmidt possibly never knew the value of his letters or the extent to which they sustained Louise and nurtured in her a capacity for a parallel life. In one letter she asks him to write less frequently. She is afraid of arousing suspicion at the post office. As it is she always watches the postmaster's face whenever she asks, ‘Anything for me?' The slightest smile may mean more.

‘Let's see.Yes. Something from your pen pal, Louise.' Each time is cause for fresh surprise. Year after year, surprise after surprise. Mail is bounty. It is treasure to be parcelled out. Every new letter she takes to the beach, to a log she snuggles up to. She reads quickly to the end to make sure there were no unwelcome surprises, then she goes back and reads slowly, digesting each morsel. A silken feeling bloomed inside her when she read how much Schmidt missed her.

She stowed the letters, along with the photos of Schmidt, in a cake tin which she hid under the front steps.

She gave Billy no reason to suspect that the piano tuner was still part of her life. She even felt secure enough to buy a map of the world at the church fair, and bold enough to pin it to the wall above the kitchen sink. It was three days before Billy even noticed it.

‘What's this, then?' he asked.

‘Just to show where we are in the world,' she said.

She watched Billy's eye skate across the pale blue Pacific for South America, then stop and pause before drifting south to the pink and white cap of Antarctica.

At night they lay in bed in wakeful silence. She waited for Billy to raise himself on to his side, and with a big ‘oh well' sigh reach for her. He wanted a baby. She kept putting him off without saying why, exactly.

‘There's nothing wrong, is there?'

‘No, Billy, it's not that.'

She couldn't say what it was either. It was just a feeling that once she had a baby with Billy her correspondence with Schmidt would have to end. That thread would be severed. She would have responsibilities, loyalties of flesh and blood to consider.

She had come a long way in her private world.The experience of the cave had made her aware of the layers people wove about themselves. She could lie next to Billy and dream of another man. She could cross the floor with a cup of tea for Billy where just an hour earlier she had danced with Schmidt's stand-in. She could stand idly dreaming before the map of the world and when Billy came up behind her and placed his hands affectionately on her waist he would have no idea where her thoughts were or who her smile was for.

It was an unsatisfactory life, of course. A wallpaper life interweaved with too many bright smiles. She began to feel a disgust. She found herself wishing for the wallpaper to peel away.

One afternoon she deliberately left the dance notes taped to the broom and when Billy turned to ask, ‘What's this?' she said, ‘What does it look like, Billy?'

His face appeared stricken for thinking what he did. He started to say something but swallowed that reply.

‘They're just dance steps, Billy. I've got no one to dance with.'

As soon as she said the word ‘dance' she saw his thoughts rush back to the cave. She saw the same urges rise in him. The wanting. His doubting. For a second she thought they might actually dance. But then the hand holding the broom fell at his side. Billy was simply unable to lead.

Instead he mentioned the name of a woman, the wife of a workmate. Dottie Fearnley.

‘Dot says the curtains are closed here during the day.'

‘That's because I dance with the broomstick,' she said. ‘You wouldn't want someone looking in and reporting back to you your wife's gone mad.'

‘Well, has she?'

She saw him grin.

‘Well, maybe just sometimes, Billy.'

‘Sometimes is reasonable,' he said.

In 1924, Schmidt wrote asking her to come to Buenos Aires. He wanted her in his life. But he couldn't wait much longer. She must decide. The letter also contained the news that he'd started a business, ‘importing bandoneons'.

Louise stood at the back door with Schmidt's letter. This was the fifth time she had read it. She arrived at the word ‘bandoneons' and looked up and stared through the clumps of flax at the shredded ocean.

The end came unexpectedly.

Most of the mail passing through the post office was domestic. A great deal of it related to the mine and the government department that managed it. Leading up to Christmas, volume tended to swell with packages from the United Kingdom and Australia. In the new year it quietened down to the regular correspondence. Letters from Argentina were always likely to catch the postmaster's attention.

He was a small man with an eyepatch—he'd lost his eye in an explosives mishap up at the mine. He also hobbled, though no one knew why. His hobbling and his eyepatch contributed to Louise's idea that he might be discreet, so when he mentioned his stamp collection she was happy to steam off the stamps and give them to the postmaster.

In 1927, to celebrate the non-stop flight of Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic, Little River held a ‘kite day'. The celebrations included wood chopping, a cake fair, some local knitting and crafts and the postmaster's stamp collection.

At the miner's hall Billy found himself in the crowd moving past the tiny colourful postage stamps set against a white mount— a fresco of British Royalty figures, fantails and kowhai, and more unexpectedly, the howler monkey, the giant anteater, the condor, the rhea, Iguazú Falls and José de Martin, the military hero of Argentina. All this was merely interesting until Billy caught sight of Louise's name in the postmaster's acknowledgment thanking all those ‘whose correspondence made the display possible'.

Billy walked home. He let himself in and sat down in his chair. Louise was in the kitchen, her back to him. Over her shoulder he could see the map. This time his eye stopped at the tail of South America.The rest of the landscape and ocean, he now realised, was diversionary landscape.

Louise was chopping up beans when she heard Billy call to her, a quaver in his voice, like he got when he was trying to sound firm with damaged goods taken back to the shop.