The Northern Clemency (90 page)

“You’re up early,” he said, after a time.

“Got to get moving,” Alex said. “Time to get to work.”

“Ah, I’m not doing that,” Stewart said. “Gwil can enjoy himself today, have a day in charge.”

“You give him too much to do,” Alex said. “He takes more interest in the shop than you do.”

“Yeah, I reckon he does,” Stewart said, in his big, placid way. “Let’s have a day off. It’s a real beautiful day.”

“Forget it,” Alex said. “It’ll be a beautiful day at the weekend, too.”

“You want to take a chill pill,” Stewart said. “I always forget what an uptight Pom you are. Take the girl out of England, but you can’t take England out of the girl.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex said, who had heard that one before, and not just from Stewart.

“But I tell you what I had in mind,” Stewart said. “I bet you’ve never been to the zoo, have you?”

“The zoo?”

“Yeah, you know, the zoo, collection of animals in their own habitats, you can go and stare at them. Australian animals mostly. Have you ever seen a koala bear?”

“You know what?” Alex said. “I never have. Apart from at the zoo in Manchester, actually. I’ve never ever seen one living in the wild here.”

“You won’t in Sydney, apart from at the zoo,” Stewart said. “Come on, it’s a gorgeous day, perfect for looking at koalas and kangaroos and Tasmanian Devils and duck-billed platypuses and black mambos. I bet you don’t know what a black mambo is, do you?”

“I’ve absolutely no idea what a black mambo is, unless it’s a dance, which I don’t think it probably is from the context.”

“No, it’s the world’s most venomous snake, and it lives right here in Australia.”

“Waltzing fucking Matilda,” Alex said, laughing at the peculiar forms Stewart’s national pride took, but she was quite enjoying the attentions of his hands up her sides, and in another ten minutes she had agreed to call in sick and go off with Stewart to the zoo. It was safer
than it sounded: Stewart’s shop and the zoo weren’t anywhere near Alex’s office, and so long as they waited until after ten, they weren’t likely to be seen by anyone.

Stewart was terrible, and she had to banish him out of her eyeline while she made the phone call, soon after nine. She made it as soon as there was going to be anyone in the office. Her boss, Kevin, was English like her, had come over only three years ago, and had a habit of not arriving until half past nine or ten. She had the feeling that insincerity or implausibility in her voice was much more obvious to him than it was to the others in the office, and she wanted to get in before she had to speak to him. She phoned at five past nine, and got Shannon, who sounded completely sympathetic. “It’s some kind of—eurgh, eurgh—bug I picked up, I reckon, it feels like—eurgh, eurgh—a twenty-four-hour thing, but I’ll get in—eurgh—the doctor if it’s not better by tomorrow and—eurgh—I’m going back to bed now. I won’t be answering the phone.”

She put down the phone and turned to see Stewart, as she knew, still in his loose blue jockey pants, which hung like a washing-line from hipbone to gaunt hipbone, hugging a cushion to his mouth in silent hilarity. “You’re absolutely shit at that,” he said. “That was the most unconvincing thing I ever heard. ‘Eurgh, eurgh,’” he quoted.

“It’s not my fault,” Alex said. “I asked you to break the news for me. You would have been much more convincing.”

“Everyone knows,” Stewart said cheerfully, “there’s nothing more obviously fake than asking someone to call up on your behalf because you’re too ill to come to the phone. You’re never too ill to come to the phone unless you’re in a coma.”

“OK,” Alex said.

“Jeeze, I’m sorry,” Stewart said, aghast, “I didn’t mean anything, anything about your mum, I wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s fine,” Alex said, smiling tightly. “I wasn’t thinking about my mum either. Are you going to get dressed and we can go to the fucking zoo?”

“Sounds like a top plan,” Stewart said.

She enjoyed her day, their day, though pretty soon they gave up on the zoo—after the few weird highlights, the showstoppers, most animals were the same as in any zoo anywhere, and you started to feel like somebody going through the archives. They were tickled by the koalas—they were just pissed old men, working up their trees step by step and looking seriously in danger of falling off at any moment from
sheer drunkenness. Stewart and Alex watched, entranced, for twenty minutes at their slow, blunt-nosed race up and down the tree; a whole noisy class of schoolchildren came and went round them. But in front of most of the other enclosures, perched in an elevated arrangement up the side of a steep hill overlooking the harbour, a ribbon-like path wending downwards from the peak, they just talked; Stewart liked to hear stories about Alex’s childhood, and today she told him about flashing her tits at Mr. Griffiths next door from the upstairs window, the day they’d moved house from London. He laughed at that, but she didn’t tell him about the other thing she’d done, left a turd unflushed in the upstairs toilet to greet the new owners. She told him, in place of that, about the people in Sheffield, the ones who had removed every single lightbulb, and he laughed again. He wasn’t so good at telling stories about his childhood, and the same ones tended to come up repeatedly, today the one about his auntie Pearl, who, one Christmas, had batted away a funnel web, flying right at her face, with a table-tennis paddle. She didn’t mind hearing them; she quite liked them; but it was a bit of an inequality in their relationship. When they were out together with friends, it often fell to her to turn Gwilym’s absurdities into a funny story, though Stewart had been there too. It was as if he didn’t quite see things that happened in front of him as stories; in a way she liked that innocence in him.

Afterwards, trusting to their luck a little, they made a day of it by driving down to the harbour front and having a seafood lunch in the sun. Shelled things were what had kept her in Australia in the first place; she always felt that it had been the eating of the magical oysters and prawns on the beach at Manly that day that had anchored her there, as if the products of the seas of Australia carried a spell within them, like the island of the lotus-eaters. She always liked to be given a broad platter of high-piled shells and carapaces and a neat little line of surgeon’s tools to pick away at them for forty minutes and leave, at the end, a pile of carapaces and detritus higher than the one she had been given, to let her fingers grow sticky and only at the end to rinse them in the bowl of warm water with a lemon in it, wipe them on the napkin, sit back behind her sunglasses and smile, replete. Stewart had a steak.

“I’d better get back,” she said. “I’ve not been home for three days and I’d better check my messages. They might start to wonder if they’ve left a message from work and I don’t call them back before five.”

“What time is it now?”

“Three o’clock,” Alex said.

“You don’t want to do anything this afternoon?”

“Let’s not push our luck,” Alex said. “Drive me home, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Stewart looked downcast and red-nosed, but he’d been granted his day, more or less; it was always better to leave him while he’d not yet had enough of her. He dropped her off at the door to her apartment block in Manly. Over the road, a black limo was purring, the driver sitting behind tinted windows in his sunglasses, reading a tabloid, and as they kissed goodbye, the newsreader from the television came out from the back entrance of one of the seafront blocks. She left about this time every day, and today she was wearing a beige linen suit with her usual Ray-Bans on.

“That’s Carol Walmer,” Stewart observed. “Off the telly.”

“Yeah, she lives there,” Alex said. “She spends all Sunday walking up and down the esplanade looking for fans who want her autograph. It’s a bit pathetic.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Stewart said. “Will you come over after work?”

As Alex was fumbling for her key, the door to flat six opened and Terry put his head out. He was a ludicrously fit and wizened old man, a pillar of the Manly running club, who even at sixty thought nothing of running ten miles up hill and down again, every day, and who, as he told Alex and anyone else he ever met, pretty well every time they saw each other, had never been outside Australia in his life because there was everything in this country a man could want. His wife, Vi, led a sad life, visible in her face as, for the third time that day, she started watering the hydrangeas on their balcony, which abutted on to Alex’s.

“Someone looking for you,” he said. “Someone come looking for you this morning.”

“Who was it?” Alex said.

“I don’t know,” Terry said, as if affronted. “How should I know? I could hear your buzzer going, buzz, buzz, buzz, then it stops, like he’s thinking, like, and then he only goes and buzzes on our bell.”

“I’m sorry if you were disturbed,” Alex said.

“Oh,
we
weren’t disturbed, no worries,” Terry said, now apparently aggrieved at the suggestion that they weren’t good neighbours. “I tell you, I couldn’t understand a blinking word he was saying, so I goes downstairs, to the main door, you know, the main door—”

“Yes,” Alex said, still frozen with her key halfway to the door.

“—and it’s this bloke, and he says he’s looking for you, and can he come in and wait. It’d be about one, this was, we were just sitting down to a bite to eat.”

“And you said no, I hope.”

“Vi says to me, afterwards, like, ‘You should have asked him in, be neighbourly,’ but I dunno. Because I didn’t let him in, I said to him, ‘She’s not here if you’ve been ringing on her buzzer and she’s not answering, stands to reason.’ I can tell you, he didn’t like that, not one little bit. So I tells him to come back later and he goes away. He’s a, he’s from England, I reckon, like you.”

“Oh, God,” Alex said. “It must have been my boss, looking for me.”

“He said he’ll come back, later today. Who do you reckon it was, then?”

“I think it must have been my boss,” Alex said patiently.

“Funny thing, though,” Terry said. “He said he was looking for Sandra, I didn’t know who he meant, but he’d got your surname right. He said he’d be back later today.”

She’d drawn the blinds, three evenings ago, and had gone back to Stewart’s without opening them. The flat had the dusty, unobserved look of an ancient tomb, and an ugly smell, which turned out to come from their dinner dishes, left soaking in the sink, and an open carton of milk for their after-dinner coffee, which she’d forgotten to put back in the fridge. Alex opened the blinds and pulled open the glass doors to the balcony, did the washing-up quickly, rinsing out the carton of its clotted curds before throwing it in the kitchen bin. She put a couple of bottles of beer and some water in the fridge for later. She played the red-blinking phone messages; there were five, including one from Stewart’s sister wanting to talk to her about her wedding next month—she’d turned down an offer to be a bridesmaid, knowing that it meant letting herself in for a dress like a peach-coloured meringue—two silent ones and a concerned message from Kevin, telling her to get some rest and come in when she was better. On the message, he called her Alex; she couldn’t remember that he’d ever called her anything else. Then she went downstairs, got into her car and drove out to the supermarket to get some tuna and salad leaves for her dinner; it was nice to have an evening off from Stewart, once in a while. All the way there and all the way back she was practising what she was going to tell Kevin the next day about why she hadn’t been in when he’d popped round to see how ill she was. In the end, she’d decided that the best explanation was that Stewart had come round and taken her back to his
house for a bit of TLC and hot-lemon drinks. Actually, she wasn’t sure she’d said to Kevin that she was home in the first place.

Alex was careless about shutting the front door to the building, and when she got out of her car, it was ajar. If Terry had seen that, he’d have another go at her. She’d overdone it in the supermarket as usual, and toiled up the three flights of stairs with two heavy bags in each hand. It was because of that that she didn’t see the man until she was nearly at her landing, her face down. He was standing in an awkward, uncertain posture, not calmly waiting but edgily, as if his bones were somehow uncomfortable in his own skin. She had seen that stance before. It was like those moments when, in a place long become deeply familiar in all its aspects, a school, a workplace, a lover’s apartment, an unexpected flash of memory, erupting perhaps from a single object, an irregular angle of vision, the first experience of that place is rendered again with complete freshness, the lost flavour of newness imbuing a long-known interior. To look at this figure, or at other figures like it, glimpsed or observed in a steely way on the streets of Sydney, was to make that mental journey in reverse. For years Alex had lived now in a nation of people who did not hang their heads over their bodies and look at the pavement; who did not move their limbs or smile in tentative and experimental ways, not quite sure whether their hard internal structures and their softer surfaces would agree to move together to the same purpose. She had lived for years in a nation that moved without thinking about it, and stretched without considering the matter first in the beautiful sun; and she herself now moved in the same way. She did not feel it in herself; rather, she knew that she walked like a person who had once learnt to dance from the fact that she, her body, now never considered anything about the way she held herself, and her body moved with unconscious grace. What now seemed bizarre and out of its place in Australia—in Sydney, in Australia—on the third floor of an apartment block in Manly outside the door of her own apartment had once seemed like the normal state of existence. Englishness, with all its self-consciousness and its occasional brash, lapel-holding exuberance assumed for an occasion, was no longer as normal as it had been for years, and she looked at the man in his odd posture and his pale awkward skin with an immediate impression not just of Englishness but of estrangement. She didn’t know him, but he, it seemed, knew her.

“Sandra?” he said.