New Australian Stories 2 (28 page)

I haven't been home for so long, and I can't imagine a time when I'll ever return.

In the end my father will surely die, and when he does he will die not knowing how I wished he'd lived.

Outback

RUBY J. MURRAY

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Mark stares at the Siamese cat, and it looks back at him knowingly from under the brim of its top hat.

The calendar was a gift from River Jones. There's an inspirational quote on every page. And a picture of an animal. It might be a horse in a Heidi outfit, frolicking in a field of daisies somewhere high in a range of neon mountains, or a Shihtzu in a dressing-gown reading a book and smoking a pipe like Sherlock Holmes. Today's Siamese, with its wise black eyes looking over its shoulder, is walking into a luminous sunset.

It's Monday, and Mark is sitting behind the counter in O'Carroll's Australian Outback Adventure Outfitters on Ryrie Street, Geelong, Victoria, Australia, population 132,770, sipping his coffee out of its cardboard cup, and waiting.

From the outside looking in, this particular Monday would seem like any given Monday in Mark O'Carroll's life. Although if you
were
outside, and you could look at all the Mondays in all the lives of all the people in the world, like so many snow domes lined up in a storefront, you wouldn't spend much time in front of Mark O'Carroll's.

Mark's life is no sparkling globe of bright beads. It's akubras, Hard Yakka and Driza-Bones; a small semidetached in Geelong; a cat called BooBoo that makes him sneeze; a wife who suspects she could have done better. The water in his snow dome is sort of cloudy, the contents:

1. A shoe display wall.

2. A cascade of dust from the stock piled out the back.

3. A ceiling fan in a bedroom that slows ever so slightly every third rotation.

But today is different.

Mark's shoes are too tight.

His wife bought him the shoes for Christmas, in an attempt, he suspects, to make him look more like a small-business owner and less like an outback outfitter's shop assistant.

‘Don't call yourself a shop assistant,' says Mark's wife when people ask him what he does. ‘It's
your
shop. Say you run a small business.'

Mark's wife, whose name is Sandra, is always buying him clothes that are too tight across the chest, jeans too short in the leg, jackets that leave his wrists exposed. In his wife's mind, it seems, Mark is a much smaller man than he is in reality.

At 10.03 a.m. River Jones comes spilling through the entrance, trailing shoelaces and hairpins and a faint smell of ozone, moisture, bindi smoke. Mark is crouched on the floor before the first customers of the day, a gay couple down from Melbourne who want matching cowboy boots. Mark doesn't look up as River comes in. He doesn't need to look at her at all, not anymore. The last four months have left him with the pieces of her in perpetual motion inside his head.

Once the couple leaves, clutching their awkward boxes, Mark joins River behind the till.

‘Am I late?' she asks.

‘No.'

‘Oh, that's fantastic. I've lost my phone again, see. It's driving me crazy.'

‘You weren't late.'

They stand next to each other. River runs her hands absently over the fake wood of the countertop. Mark stares out at the morning traffic on Ryrie Street.

Mondays are slow.

River edges around the counter, says something about going out the back to stack stock. Mark knows that her face is: quizzical; a little amused; one eyebrow exasperated and the other slightly droopy and resigned, two arcs separated by a perfectly smooth expanse of skin three and three-quarter centimetres wide.

Mark nods, and River goes. Her fingers on the bench have left small marks of condensation, and he covers them with his wide palms. His palms are sucking up her moisture.

River is from San Francisco, California, in the U.S. of A. That's how she says it. Her full name is Maria River Escobar Jones. Her dad is Mexican, and her mum is a Buddhist who used to be a communist who used to be a WASP. River went to high school in The City, which is what she calls San Francisco, and then she went to the University of California at Berkeley where she studied economics, which she dropped after two years to study shiatsu, which she dropped for a boy, who she dropped because she needed to travel and find herself, which is how Mark came to find her on a soggy Tuesday afternoon four months ago, when he walked out of the storeroom to see a tall woman standing at the counter and glaring up at Andy, the stuffed moose-head over the shoe display.

‘Can I help you with anything?' he asked her.

‘What's that?' She gestured with long, bare fingers at the moose-head.

‘That's Andy. He's our moose.'

‘Well, I think it's cruel.'

‘He's not real. It's not a real moose, it's a fake,' Mark said, setting down the stack of plastic-shrouded Hard Yakka shorts he'd been carrying. Rain blew in through the open door.

‘Oh.' The woman ran a finger over her top lip. ‘Well. I guess that's okay then.' She paused. ‘Mooses. Moose. They're Canadian, you know.'

‘I know.'

‘Okay. You don't have them here. Anyway, my name's River, and I was just wondering if you're looking for anyone at the moment?' And then Mark saw the folder clasped under her arm, its clear, wet plastic showing a thick wad of photocopied CVs. Was he looking for anyone?

He hired her.

When Mark told Sandra about it that evening, she was exasperated.

Sandra said, ‘Well, Mark, you should have asked me, if you were looking for someone. You know Magda's sister Linda needs summer work.'

And he said, ‘She's got experience, this lady.'

For the next week, he watched River knock around the store, muddling receipts, putting shoes back in the wrong boxes and hanging plaid shirts backwards on the hangers.

River wasn't funny. Not funny ha-ha, as Sandra would say. River made jokes, but they trailed away, segueing into stories about mustard or ingrown toenails or the Year of the Pig. It wasn't her jokes that made him laugh; it was how she lived. River lived in full, screaming technicolour. Life clutched at her. And once, when she saw that Tibetan guy down on the waterfront with one leg who hula-hooped with tinsel round his neck for hours over the summer, she clutched at Mark.

‘OhMyGOD!' she yelled, yanking on his arm so that he spilled coffee down his shirtfront and onto the new leather shoes. ‘Ohmygaaaawwwd, Mark, would you just check that guy out?'

Mark felt, through the scalding coffee, that life was clutching at him too.

The morning is passing. Mark is staring at his diary. Monday. The day is blank. He hasn't filled it in. Normally, on Fridays, he takes the shop diary out of the drawer and fills Monday in, so that he can arrive and look at a full, productive day between the small inked lines.

River emerges from the back of the store.

‘Have those Caterpillars come in yet?' she asks.

‘No.'

She stands for a moment. Mark knows she is looking at him, knows she is running her finger over her lip, which means: nervous, unsure, undecided. He keeps his eyes on the empty Monday in the diary, on the diary on the bench, on his hands on the bench, on the moisture spots that spread out from under the fingers on his hands on the bench.

He has one thing to do today. The blankness of the Monday on the page says nothing about the Monday he is living in his gut.

‘Okay,' she says. ‘Okay then.' Which means: Whatever. Be like that.

Mark concluded a while ago that some part of him must have known her straightaway. Maybe it was his spinal cord, maybe his fingernails, maybe his clavicle. Whatever it was, it had controlled him for the nine and a half minutes it had taken for them to organise her pay, her shifts, what she should wear, and for her to walk back out into Ryrie Street, popping open a bright pink umbrella.

He's not sure when the rest of him achieved the same level of self-awareness that his clavicle seemed to possess. It happened in pieces. First, a week after she started, he found himself picturing her as he masturbated, and he had to stop, releasing his penis and holding his hands out in front of him in the water. He stood, flat-footed in the bathtub under the slap of the shower, staring blankly at Sandra's pastel collection of body puffs, those weird half-sponge things that slide over your skin without cleaning you at all.

After his initial shock, what briefly paralysed him was the thought that it might have been sexual harassment, somehow, this picturing of your co-worker during masturbation. That scared him, that and how quickly River had appeared unbidden in his skull, her long thighs in their firm jeans leaning over the fitting bench.

Then Sandra thumped on the door. ‘There's a bloody drought on, Mark.'

Sandra was obsessed with the drought. According to Sandra, the drought was responsible for, among other things: higher food prices, Mark's lack of sexual drive, and also his dry skin, which she was always caking in various tonics and creams in an attempt to get him to suck stuff up.

It's lunchtime, and Mark leaves without telling River that he's going. He doesn't do this intentionally; he just walks out the door on autopilot, holding his ten-dollar note to buy a pastie and a tall hot strong soy latte. He sits in the window on a green Starbucks armchair and watches his shopfront. The Starbucks Summer Mix plays over the café's sound system: Louis Armstrong, Burt Bacharach
. Do you know the way to
San Jose?
croon the speakers.

River would know the way to San Jose.

Across the road, River walks out of O'Carroll's Australian Outback Adventure Outfitters and, shading her eyes against the afternoon glare, squints through the exhaust haze of Ryrie Street. She is looking straight at Mark looking at her, but she can't see through the reflections on the plate glass. After a moment, she lets her hands fall to her sides, turns, and walks back into the shop, disappearing from view.

Mark eats his lunch.

Across the road, River's hands fall over and over and over, and she turns away over and over and over, and Mark chews on the vegetable paste that fills his pastie, and swallows.

Mark isn't sure if he's a hero, or a coward.

It's hard to know.

It was already Christmas by the time Mark realised what was happening to him. Customers elbowed in and out of the shop, and he and River brushed up against each other in the storerooms out the back, and she sang flatly to herself and crawled into swags on the shop floor to show people just how totally comfy they were, and he realised he loved her.

Not that he'd
fallen
in love, because there was no motion in it. He'd probably always been in love with her.

When he wasn't looking at her, her body played itself out in his head all the same, and her disembodied voice became America: long empty roads, petrol stations sparkling in the blue distance across the plains, diners with blinking lights, teenagers jumping on MTV, cheerleaders and civil rights and Oreo biscuits.

They started going for walks along the Geelong waterfront after closing up the shop. Sitting on the hill above the sea baths in the evening, wreathed in sonic clouds of mosquitoes, they talked and ate Calippos, sucking the juice out of the bottom of the cardboard tubes. He'd never considered himself smart or funny, but with River he found himself full of anecdotes. He saved small happenings from each day, and these pieces of his life grew smooth and polished under the pressure of his mind so that when he told them to her, and she threw back her head and snorted, he knew that he had achieved perfection.

After the first of those evenings, he sat on the couch with Sandra watching
Thank God You're Here
, wracked with guilt. They had sex later that night, much to Sandra's surprise. It was the least he could do. He tried not to focus on anything while they fucked. He felt the press of the covers on his back and the pillow riding up and down against his nose. Face down in the bedsheets. Three months ago. December. The month that he'd finally met River.

December.

Which, Sandra told him yesterday, was also the last month that she'd had it.

‘What?' he asked, flipping the dinner plates onto the drying rack and absently imagining a hundred ways of making love to River in the back of the store, surrounded by crunching cardboard and the boom of falling fixtures.

‘I said, I haven't had my period in three months, Mark.'

Mark turned to her, feeling the water dry up on his hands. ‘It might be the drought,' he said.

Sandra made a half-laugh half-sob, and then she put her arms around him.

‘I know we didn't plan it,' she said, ‘but when you think about it, it couldn't really have come at a better time, don't you think? We're ready for it now. We've just about paid off the mortgage. You've got that American girl who can take over the shop for a bit if you need. I'll be able to get good maternity leave. Our careers are at the right points. It couldn't be better if we had planned it, really. Mark?'