Sunlit Shadow Dance (37 page)

She
showed no interest, saying it looked
like nothing much, just a dull grey color as the light was
fading.

That night he kept his arms
around her all through the night, determined to hold her
and thus keep her
for himself; to let no other invade her dreams. It felt as if this
person of her dreams was stealing her soul from him.

She woke up in the morning with
a sad wistful look
, saying. “Vic, your skin used to be brown, now it has gone
a dull and dirty grey, I can’t see your color anymore.”

She went to pick her baby up
from the co
t. She came back with empty hands, tears streaming down her
face. “Something has happened to my eyes, now I can’t see the color
of my baby’s skin anymore, he is a dull and dreary grey, the same
color as you.”

“
Everything looks the same color
now; that is no color, all the light has gone. It is only when I
dream that the light and color returns to my world.”

Vic thought of taking her to the doctor, but
it did not seem a problem that a doctor could fix, he knew it was
in her mind not her eyes.

He took her in his arms
and
brought
her back to bed, seeking to comfort her. He made love to her with
all the tenderness he could find.

He remembered
how
, once,
he had wanted a woman with a fire that raged at the world, someone
who could see the shadows as well as the sunlight. Then he had
found a woman who only saw sunlight and he had loved her for her
simple goodness.

Now it seemed that she
only saw shadows in
her waking hours and the sunlight was only for her dreams. More
than anything he wanted the sunlight to return to her waking eyes,
to see bright light in them again.

So, after that,
e
ach night
he let her to her dreams, it seemed to refresh her spirit though it
left her tired and irritable in the day. It was as if some of the
color of the night carried forward into the next day. By the
evening the light in her eyes had faded and she would take to her
bed early so she could return to her dreams.

He found himself hating the
spirit which shared this time with her, but
he could not withhold this from
her lest all the color faded completely from her daytime
eyes.

The thought that she could not
see the color of him was hard to bear. The thought that she could
not see the color of her baby was impossible to
bear
, and
made him feel like his heart was being torn apart all over again.
He hoped and prayed that, as the sun returned in strength, moving
the winter sky back towards spring, so too would the light come
back into her days and her need for nighttime dreams of color would
fade.

January
merge
d into
February, the sun grew brighter and the days were longer, but yet
the dreams continued and her daylight colors faded ever faster,
barely lasting the morning. Sometimes he would find her gone to her
bed and sleeping after lunch. It was as if she must return to the
one place which was real for her. It made his heart ache to see her
like this, his girl of fading, fading colors except in her world of
dreams.

Now he often spent sleepless
nights trying to understand who or what it was that invaded her
dreams. But while she often walked and talked in her sleep
it
seemed it
was never again to a person he thought he knew, as on the first
night when he knew she pled with Mark.

S
he never spoke any name. It seemed her
partner was a faceless soulless being. But always she returned to
commune in this place of colored dreams. After each two nights of
watching her, Vic needed to return to the helicopter base to
sleep.

She continued
to be sweet to him,
though now she was often irritable with her children and others.
But, more and more, it seemed her eyes no longer looked towards the
daylight but only to the night, as if he and others of the world
were fading from her view and, as they did, the colors faded
too.

Vic could feel quiet
desperation seep
into him. He had found this girl, his wife. He had loved
her and she had come back to him in body and soul. Why had he not
just taken her to a far off place where she knew nobody and the
past could never reach her. She had a new identity and they could
have gone and lived anywhere in the world, unknown.

Instead he had chosen to bring her back to
the simple and comforting reality of an older familiarity, trying
to give her connections back to her distant past from which to
build a new and different reality. But, while the past brought
connections and some were to the good, some were also to the bad.
It seemed she could not keep separation between them.

Now, as the bad came surging back, he felt
it was slowly tearing her apart, making fractures in her soul,
breaking apart the inner core of the new person he had found. It
was as if her dreams opened cracks between two beings resident in
one body. These cracks let in the colors, but so too did other
shadowed things slip through as well.

He did not know
for sure that the
people or things of her dreams were bad. But he could see them
sucking her vitality. Now her life force was fully consumed at
night and not enough remained for her daytime life with him and her
family.

He wished he knew what to do. His aunt had
glimpses of this shadowed self; she had become a quiet supporter in
his corner. Others saw less, and his wife, the consummate actor,
could hide it from them. Even the fact that she now was able to
live a double life, spoke of the return of a duplicitous part to
her soul, which was not there when he found her again.

He remembered how she had warned him on
the first meeting, “I do not know if you can find her, or if you
will ever be able to bring her back again.” These words now
resonated with a ring of truth. It was as if the more she
discovered of her of her past, the less remained of her in the
present and for the future. He felt despair at reliving all the
loss anew.

He did not think
i
t was not a
sickness of the body; rather it was an illness of spirit. It seemed
as if another spirit, perhaps a malevolent crocodile spirit, was
stealing away the soul of the person he loved.

One night
, at the helicopter base, when
it was daytime in Australia, he rang Alan and told him of his
fears. He asked him if he would talk to Ross and Charlie, to see if
either could offer any ideas of what he might do. If it was a
disease of the mind, perhaps medicine could help, or perhaps, if it
was a spirit, human or crocodile, drawing her back, the way it had
before, then there may be some aboriginal spirit man who could
help.

Next day Alan rang his back, saying he had
talked to Charlie and there was a parcel coming which he hoped
might help. It was heavy and had cost a good bit of money to
express post. But he should have it in a day or two. Charlie said
it was a powerful medicine against the dreaming spirits, crocodile
spirit to fight crocodile spirit.

Ross
rang later the same day. He had no
solutions. He talked to Vic about psycho-analysis but admitted
that, in her case, it was probably a waste of time, whereas he
thought Charlie’s idea was worth a try.

Vic returned from the base to
the farm on the third day
, nervous with anticipation. Sure enough an
express box sat on the kitchen table, waiting. It bore his name,
writ large, in black texta. He picked it up, it felt
heavy.

Susan was out visiting with her
aunt so he had the place to himself. He took the box to the bedroom
and opened it. In it, nestled in bubble plastic, was a black stone,
flat and round
, as if river smoothed, but with a dark polished texture.
It looked as if the stone was coated in impregnable matter which
had rubbed smooth into a dull luster.

He lifted it out. It
sat
, neat
and full, in the palm of his hand. He could feel it was infused
with a presence, emanating a silent force. It soothed his mind and
spirit like healing balm.

He understood, without it being said, that
it was intended for Susan to hold, for it to sit in the palm of her
hand or rest against her body. Alan and Charlie had talked of the
crocodile stone which had given her mind solace before. Perhaps
this was it and it could help again.

When she came in, full of
subdued brightness
, as the light of the night was fading from her eyes; he
brought her to sit on the bed and asked her to close her eyes, and
to put her open hand out, palm up.

She complied and he rested the stone in
this place, closing her fingers around it. She seemed to want to
open her eyes. So he rested a finger on each eyelid and asked her
to stay still and tell him what she felt. He could feel calmness
wash over both him and her, coming from her to him in the place
where their skin was touching.

She said,
“It is like a dream and yet I
know I am awake. My mind is full of light, light and colors. I can
see your color; I can see David and Anne’s color. I can see my
baby’s color. I can even see the color of the sky. It is so
glorious and beautiful.

“
It is as if, when I hold this
stone, my mind sees through other eyes, eyes not my own. These eyes
can see what mine cannot. But because I am linked to it I can see
the things these eyes see too.”

He lifted his fingers from her eyelids. As
he did the shared vision faded. He watched her face intently as she
looked at him. “It is not so bright as it was before, when you
touched me. But still color remains, softer than before, but still
a thing of beauty.”

She kept looking at him with a
beatific smile, saying.
“The thing of most beauty I see is you. I had
forgotten how wonderful you look.”

So now as she walked and talked she carried
the stone with her, mostly in an inside pocket where a part rested
against her skin, sometimes in her hand. It brought light back into
her eyes and joy to her smile. It almost made her seem whole again.
But then, whenever she put it aside, the brightness faded and only
the shadows remained.

Vic felt his anxiety fade as the
brightness returned to her eyes. It was not fully the Susan of old,
but at least, when she held the stone, the fading colors returned
to brightness and with them came a light which lit her face like a
shaft of sunlight.

Their life returned to a place
of quiet joy. He did not have her fully back but
, having known the fear of
losing her again, now he understood the preciousness of what he had
regained. She had a renewed zest for life, playing with her
children, talking to Anne, her parents and the old Kashmiri man,
making plans for the wedding. But it hid a brittleness; a shell
encasing a shell, hollow inside.

Others seemed delighted to have back the
Susan of old, perhaps they had noticed more than he realized. But
he knew that, while it was better to have her in this place, he
only held her by a thread, a thin line of contact through a
crocodile stone. The sickness was still in her soul and sometimes
he glimpsed it, even now.

He wondered
, as he saw her now, if on the
day when she gave Mark to the crocodiles, whether in that act a
part of the crocodile’s spirit occupied her soul and now this part
consumed her spirit from its inside place.

He must find a tribal medicine
man from the place of crocodile spirits, and see if she could be
healed
that
way. The crocodile stone was working as a medicine pill that kept
the disease at bay, but it was no cure. The soul cancer was still
there; when the link was broken the disease would
return.

But still it was something, a lifeline to
buy time, time to find healing. He knew he must bring her back to
the land of the crocodiles for this.

It was now
mid
-March,
only than a month to go until Anne’s wedding and plans were well
advanced. The days were much longer now and the grip of winter was
easing, most of the snow was gone from the hillsides and the trees
were all in bud and early leaves, with flushes of early flowers
starting to poke up their heads in the meadows.

Anne was flying in, arriving in two weeks.
Once she came Susan would take the children and stay with her
parents in Reading for a fortnight. That way she could share in all
the final preparations with her friend, going to the church
rehearsals and the hens’ night amongst many other
things.

David was flying in three
nights before the wedding, on the Wednesday
. Most of the other Australian
contingent arrived that day or the day after. Vic would also go
down that Wednesday, taking the following week off
flying.

There was a
bucks
’ night
on Thursday, where Vic would join many of the other Australian
contingent, along with Susan’s brother and a couple other locals to
give David a proper Aussie send off. Friday was a quiet night
before the wedding on Saturday in Greyfriars Church, a treasure of
an old Francisan building in the heart of Reading.