Where There's Smoke (12 page)

‘I was just thinking.'

‘Thinking what?'

He smiled like a goose. ‘I was thinking about you and China.'

I shifted in my seat. ‘What about us?'

‘You two were like Romeo and Juliet for a while there.'

‘Maybe we was. Nothing worked out for them either.'

‘If you don't mind me saying so, Cal, she was the hottest chick in town. I saw her down at the beach a few times in that red bikini she wore. She drove the boys crazy. What a body she had.'

‘Yeah,' I tried shrugging. ‘What a body.'

‘Most of the girls we went to school with let themselves go. Tribe of kids. Ton of weight. Not that I can talk,' he laughed, grabbing a handful of fat. ‘Not that China Doll.'

‘She's most likely gone the same way,' I said, while hoping I was wrong. ‘It's been a long time.'

‘But she hasn't, mate. Not her. Not when I last seen her.'

‘You saw her? Bullshit.'

‘Oh, I did. About six months back. I was after a new dog, a heeler, and went through the stock classifieds in
Farmers' Weekly.
I came across some pups for sale, a litter of blues. I gave the number a call and drove the hundred clicks across west to pick them up, at the old lion park on the Western Highway.'

‘The lion park? Those poor scabby animals still there? I thought the bloke who ran the place was done for animal cruelty.'

‘He was. He went broke and sold up to this bloke with the dogs. He runs a few horses, some sheep and these heelers that he breeds. When I got there he let the pups run around in the yard so I could get a look at them and pick one. I'm on my hands and knees playing with this pup, a lovely dark blue, Jhedda, that's what I named her. I picked her out of the litter and brought her home. While I'm playing with the dog I hear a screen door slam and this woman comes out of the house holding a mobile phone. It was a call for him. I look up and see China.'

‘You sure it was her?'

‘Sure I'm sure. She looked a bit heavier. There was a kid running around. I suppose it was hers. But the face, and that red hair and her eyes. It was China, all right.'

‘She say anything to you?'

‘You didn't know who I was when you saw me, so why would she? She didn't know I existed when she lived here, so she wouldn't know me now. Anyway, she didn't really look at me. She handed him the phone and walked back inside. But it was her.'

I didn't say much for the rest of the drive. When he stopped at the gate I sat in the car without moving.

‘We're here, mate. You getting off? Or do you want to come out to my place for a good feed?'

‘What's the best way over there?'

‘Where? My place?'

‘No. The lion park.'

‘Oh. You cut across country. Take the fire road out behind the speedway. It gives you a straight run to the highway. It's about another forty k on from there. You thinking of catching up with her? I'm sure she'd be married to this bloke. They looked pretty homely out there. I can't see him laying out the welcome mat for an old boyfriend a month out of the nick.'

‘I'm not driving over there. Just curious. As it is, I got no car. Thanks for the lift.'

Old Bob was standing by the gate, waiting for me.

‘How much longer you thinking of being with us, Cal? I don't like my boat out in the sun.'

‘Oh, not much longer at all, Bob. I'm about to move on.'

*

I skipped my mother's cooking and lay on top of the bed thinking about what Bruce had said. Just on dark I grabbed my jacket and wallet, left the garage and headed for an old haunt, the car park at the RSL. I walked the aisles and settled on a battered Ford sedan with an unlocked back passenger door. I'd wired the car in less than a minute and was on the road in another thirty seconds. I passed the speedway and turned onto the fire road, driving through the pitch-black night. Pairs of eyes flashed at me from the scrub and behind trees. A fox raced across the dirt road carrying the bloodied carcass of a rabbit in its mouth. I felt the left front wheel slam into it, crushing its ribcage. By the time I'd turned onto the highway I'd dodged a dozen more animals and hit maybe two or three, although I couldn't be sure on account of the bumps and divots in the road.

The lion park wasn't hard to find. A faded billboard with the face of a roaring lion welcomed visitors. I pulled off the road at the gates. A light burned on the porch of a house at the end of a drive. I left the car and walked. A dog barked and came running from its bed on the porch. It was an aged blue heeler, a little timid. The porch light went on and the door opened.

There was no mistaking China. The shapely silhouette resting against a verandah post could belong to no one else. Another dog sat by her side.

‘Can I help you? This is private property.'

‘China,' I croaked, as if someone had shoved a handful of dust in my mouth.

She stepped forward and stood under the porch light. She was barefoot and wore a floral cotton dress, with her hair tied in a bun. She looked beautiful.

‘Jesus, Cal. Is it you?'

I felt shy all of a sudden, like a schoolboy.

‘It's me.'

She came down from the porch and walked across the yard.

‘Christ. It is you. Let me look. Wow. What are you doing here?' She was a little nervous. ‘My husband, he's away at an ag meet. He'll be back soon.'

‘I don't want any trouble, China. I was just driving by.'

She raised a hand, the same soft hand she used to rest in the small of my back.

‘It's no trouble. It's just that I wouldn't have expected you to show up out of the blue like this. How long has it been? Four years?'

‘A little more.'

‘I read about you in the papers. How long have you been …?'

‘About a month. I've been staying back with mum.'

She looked out to the highway, to where the stolen car was parked.

‘You say you were driving by? How did you know where I was? I haven't been in contact …'

‘This fella I've been working with, Bruce Conlan, I guess you don't remember him? He bought one of your dogs some time back. We were talking and your name came up and he told me that he'd seen you. I had to come over this way and I thought, only then when I saw the old sign, that I'd call in and see how you are. But like I said, I don't want to cause you any trouble.'

She shifted on her feet, reached behind her head with her hand and pulled a clip from the back of her hair. It dropped, bounced and rested on her bare shoulders.

‘Where are you heading to?'

I heard a car engine, turned and spotted headlights at the end of the drive. China nervously smoothed the front of her dress.

‘Here's my husband now.'

I had only seconds left to me.

‘China, I just wanted to tell you that when I was inside I thought about you. A lot. It sounds stupid but I need to tell you that you were a good person. I never understood that before. I was too wild to know anything when we were going out.'

I scraped my boot in the dirt.

‘And I want to also tell you that you were beautiful. You are beautiful.'

‘You told me that plenty of times,' she laughed. ‘You were pretty nice yourself.'

‘Oh, I was trouble. I've always been trouble.'

‘You were not.' She leaned forward and brushed my arm with a fingertip. ‘You were sweet. Most of the time.'

The car pulled into the yard and the dogs ran to meet it. The driver hopped out. He was tall and thin and fit looking, full of purpose, and no doubt suspicious of me.

‘Can I help you? Is that your car on the highway?'

‘I'm working for a farmer over east and he's after one of your working dogs. I was driving this way and I thought I'd call in on the off-chance. I shouldn't have. It's late. My apologies.'

He relaxed a little.

‘We don't have pups at the moment. It's not the time of the year for them. You should have called ahead.'

‘Your wife was just explaining to me, that they're out of season.'

He kissed China on the cheek.

‘Sorry I'm late, Marg. It went on longer than I expected.'

I hadn't heard China called by her proper name since school rollcall. He took out his wallet and handed me a business card.

‘You give me a call around December and I'll let you know what we've got. Should have some pups then.' He offered his hand. ‘Tom.'

‘Bruce,' I answered. I took the card. ‘Thanks.'

I stepped back and took a last look at China, arm in arm with her husband.

‘And thank you, Marg.'

‘You too,' she answered, looking down at her bare feet.

I sat in the car for an hour or more. I couldn't get my mind off her. I got out of the car and watched the house. A honeyed glow framed a narrow window on the side of the house. I walked quietly behind a row of apple trees until I reached the window and stood among the trees, listening to my own heavy breaths as I watched China through the window. She stood naked before a mirror, brushing her hair. Her husband lay back on their bed, smoking a cigarette and admiring her until she turned to him.

I walked back along the driveway to the car, gunned the engine and turned onto the highway. The country gradually flattened until the dark horizon fell away. Although the air was cold I wound down the window to keep myself from fading away. I could smell the sea in the wind and thought of China and the nights we'd spent in each other's arms. I could see her hair glowing against the moon and hear her laugh.

I didn't want the highway patrol bearing down on me. I turned onto an irrigation road. It would run flat and hard for a long way. I could see a radio tower in the distance, pulsing a beam of red light across the dark sky. I set my bearings for it, as I would if I were following the Star of Bethlehem itself.

MRS PORTER AND THE ROCK

DAVID MALOUF

The Rock is Ayers Rock, Uluru. Mrs Porter's son, Donald, has brought her out to look at it. They are at breakfast, on the second day of a three-day tour, in the Desert Rose Room of the Yullara Sheraton. Mrs Porter, sucking voluptuously, is on her third cigarette, while Donald, a born letter-writer who will happily spend half an hour shaping and reshaping a description in his head, or putting a dazzling sheen on an ironical observation, is engaged in one of the airy rockets, all fizz and sparkle and recondite allusions, that he can barely wait, once he is out of town, to launch in the direction of his more discerning friends. In a large, loose, schoolboyish hand, on the Sheraton's note-paper, he writes:

To complete the scene, only the sacred river is missing, for this resort is surely inspired by the great tent city of Kubla Khan. Nestling among spinifex dunes, it rises, like a late version of the impossible East, out of the rust-red sands, a postmodern Bedouin encampment, all pink and apricot turrets and slender aluminium poles that hum and twang as they prick the skyline. Over the walkaways and public spaces hover huge, shadow-making sails that are meant to evoke, in those of us for whom deserts create a sense of spiritual unease, the ocean we left two thousand miles back.

So there you have it. The pitched tents of the modern nomads. That tribe of the internationally restless who have come on here from the Holy Land, or from Taos or Porto Cervo or Nepal, to stare for a bit on an imaginable wonder – when, that is, they can lift their eyes from the spa pool, or in pauses between the Tasmanian salmon and the crème brûlée …

Mrs Porter is here on sufferance, accepting, with minimal grace, what Donald had intended as a treat. Frankly she'd rather be at Jupiter's playing the pokies. She takes a good drag on her cigarette, looks up from the plate – as yet untouched – of scrambled egg, baked beans and golden croquettes, and is astonished to find herself confronting, high up on the translucent canopy of the dining-room ceiling, a pair of colossal feet. The fat soles are sloshing about up there in ripples of light. Unnaturally magnified, and with the glare beyond them, diffuse, almost blinding, of the Central Australian sun. She gives a small cry and ducks. And Donald, who keeps a keen eye on her and is responsive to all her jerks and twitches, observing the movement but not for the moment its cause, demands, ‘What? What's the matter? What is it?'

Mrs Porter shakes her head. He frowns, subjects her to worried scrutiny – one of his what's-she-up-to-now looks. She keeps her head down. After a moment, with another wary glance in her direction, he goes back to his letter.

Mrs Porter throws a swift glance upward.

Mmm, the feet are still there. Beyond them, distorted by fans of watery light, is the outline of a body, almost transparent – shoulders, a gigantic trunk. Black. This one is black. An enormous
black
man is up there wielding a length of hose, and the water is red. The big feet are bleeding. Well, that's a new one.

Mrs Porter nibbles at her toast. She needs to think about this. Between bites, she takes long, sweet drags on her cigarette. If she ignores this latest apparition, she thinks, maybe it will go away.

Lately – well, for quite a while now – she's been getting these visitations – apparitions is how she thinks of them, though they appear at such odd times, and in such unexpected guises, that she wonders if they aren't in fact
re
visitations that she herself has called up out of bits and pieces of her past, her now scattered and inconsiderate memory.

In the beginning she thought they might be messengers – well, to put it more plainly, angels. But their only message seemed to be one she already knew: that the world she found herself in these days was a stranger place than she'd bargained for, and getting stranger.

She had wondered as well – but this was only at the start – if they might be tormentors, visitors from places she'd never been, like Antarctica, bringing with them a breath of icebergs. But that, she'd decided pretty smartly, was foolish. Dulcie, she told herself, you're being a fool! She wasn't the sort of person that anyone out there would want to torment. All
her
apparitions did was make themselves visible, hang around for a bit, disturbing the afternoon or whatever with a sudden chill, and drift off.

Ghosts might have been a more common word for them – she believes in ghosts. But if that's what they are, they're the ghosts of people she's never met. And surely, if they were ghosts, her husband Leonard would be one of them.

Unless he has decided for some reason to give her a miss.

She finds this possibility distressing. She doesn't particularly want to see Leonard, but the thought that he could appear to her if he wanted and has chosen not to puts a clamp on her heart, makes her go damp and miserable.

All this is a puzzle and she would like to ask someone about it, get a few answers, but is afraid of what she might hear. In the meantime she turns her attention to Donald. Let the feet go their own way. Let them just go!

Donald looks sweet when he is writing. He sits with one shoulder dipped and his arm circling the page, forever worried, like a child, that someone might be looking over his shoulder and trying to copy. His tongue is at the corner of his mouth. Like a sweet-natured forty-three-year-old, very earnest and absorbed, practising pot-hooks.

Poor Donald, she thinks. He has spent his whole life waiting for her to become a mother of another sort. The sort who'll take an interest. Well, she
is
interested. She's interested, right now, in those feet! But what Donald means is interested in what interests him, and she can't for the life of her see what all this stuff
is
that he gets so excited about, and Donald, for all his cleverness, can't tell her. When she asks, he gets angry. The questions she comes up with are just the ones, it seems, that Donald cannot answer. They're too simple. He loses his cool – that's what people say these days – but all that does is make him feel bad, and the next moment he is coming after her with hugs, and little offerings out of the
Herald
that she could perfectly well read for herself, or out of books! Because she's made him feel guilty.

This capacity she appears to possess for making grown men feel guilty – she had the same effect on Donald's father – surprises her. Guilt is not one of the things she herself suffers from.

Duty. Responsibility. Guilt. Leonard was very strong on all three. So is Donald. He is very like his father in all sorts of ways, though not physically – Leonard was a very
thin
man.

Leonard too would have liked her to take an interest. Only Leonard was kinder, more understanding – she had almost said forgiving. It wasn't her fault that she'd left school at thirteen – loads of girls did in those days, and clever men married them just the same. Leonard was careful always not to let her see that in this way she had failed him; that in the part of his nature that looked out into the world and was baffled, or which brought him moments of almost boyish elation, she could not join him, he was alone.

She was sorry for that, but she didn't feel guilty. People are what they are. Leonard knew that as well as she did.

Donald's generation, she has decided, are less willing to make allowances. Less indulgent. Or maybe that is just Donald. Even as a tiny tot he was always imposing what he felt on others. His need to ‘share,' as he calls it, does have its nice side, she knows that. But it is very consuming. ‘Look at this, Mum,' he would shout, his whole tiny body in a fury. ‘You're not
looking! Look!
'

In those days it would be a caterpillar, some nasty black thing. An armoured black dragon that she thought of as Japanese-looking and found particularly repulsive. Or a picture of an air battle, all dotted lines that were supposed to be machine-gun bullets, and jagged flame. Later it was books – Proust. She'd had a whole year of that one, that
Proust
. Now it was this Rock.

High maintenance, that's what they called it these days. She got that from her neighbour, Tess Hyland. Donald was high maintenance.

‘What's up?' he asks now, seeing her dip her shoulder again and flinch. ‘What's the matter?'

‘Nothing's the matter,' she snaps back. ‘What's the matter yourself?'

She has discovered that the best way of dealing with Donald's questions is to return them. Backhand. As a girl she was quite a decent tennis player.

She continues to crouch. There is plenty of space up there under the cantilevered ceiling, no shortage of space; but the fact that twenty feet over your head the splayed toes of some giant black acrobat are sloshing about in blood is not an easy thing to ignore, especially at breakfast. She is reminded of the roofs of some of the cathedrals they'd seen – with Leonard it was cathedrals. They visited seven of them once, seven in a row. But over there the angels existed mostly from the waist up. You were supposed to ignore what existed below. They hung out over the damp aisles blowing trumpets or shaking tambourines. Here, it seems, you did get the lower parts and they were armed with hosepipes. Well, that was logical enough. They were in the southern hemisphere.

Donald is eyeing her again, though he is pretending not to. They are all at it these days – Donald, Douglas, Shirley. She has become an object of interest. She knows why. They're on the lookout for some sign that she is losing her marbles.

‘Why aren't you eating your breakfast?' Donald demands.

‘I am,' she tells him.

As if in retaliation for all those years when she forced one thing or another into their reluctant mouths – gooey eggs, strips of limp bread and butter, mashed banana, cod-liver oil – they have begun, this last year, to torment her with her unwillingness to do more than pick about at her food. When Donald says, ‘Come on now, just one more mouthful,' he is reproducing, whether he knows it or not, exactly the coax and whine of her own voice from forty years ago, and so accurately that, with a sickening rush, as if she had missed a step and fallen through four decades, she finds herself back in the dingy, cockroach-infested maisonette at West End that was all Leonard was able to find for them in the Shortage after the war. The linoleum! Except in the corners and under the immoveable sideboard, roses worn to a dishwater brown. A gas heater in the bathroom that when she shut her eyes and put a match to it went off like a bunger and threatened to blast her eyebrows off. Donald in his highchair chucking crusts all over the floor, and Douglas hauling himself up to the open piano, preparing to thump. To get away from that vision she's willing even to face the feet.

She glances upward – ah, they're gone! – then away to where an oversized ranger in a khaki uniform and wide-brimmed Akubra is examining the leaves of a rainforest shrub that goes all the way to the ceiling. For all the world as if he was out in the open somewhere and had just climbed out of a ute or off a horse.

‘You shouldn't have taken all that,' Donald is saying – she knows this one too – ‘if all you're going to do is let it sit on your plate.'

Dear me, she thinks, is he going to go through the whole routine? The poor little children in England? What a pain I must have been!

In fact, she doesn't intend to eat any of this stuff. Breakfast is just an excuse, so far as she is concerned, for a cigarette.

But the buffet table here is a feature. Donald leads her to it each morning as if it was an altar. Leonard too had a weakness for altars.

This one is garishly and unseasonably festive.

A big blue Japanese pumpkin is surrounded by several smaller ones, bright orange, with shells like fine bone china and pimpled.

There are wheatsheaves, loaves of rye and five-grain bread, spilled walnuts, almonds, a couple of hibiscus flowers. It's hard to know what is for decoration and what is to eat.

And the effect, whatever was intended, has been ruined because some joker has, without ceremony,
unceremoniously
, plonked his saddle down right in the middle of it. Its straps all scuffed at the edges, and with worn and frayed stitching, its seat discoloured with sweat, this saddle has simply been plonked down and left among the cereal jars, the plates of cheese, sliced ham and smoked salmon, the bowls of stewed prunes, tinned apricots, orange quarters, crystallised pears …

But food is of no interest to her. She has helped herself so generously to the hot buffet not because she is hungry and intends to eat any of this stuff but so she'll have something to look at. Something other than
it
.

It
is everywhere. The whole place has been designed so that whichever way you turn, it's there, displaying itself on the horizon. Sitting out there like a great slab of purple-brown liver going off in the sun. No, not liver, something else, she can't think quite what.

And then she can. Suddenly she can. That's why she has been so unwilling to look at it!

She is seven, maybe eight years old. Along with her friends of that time, Isobel and Betty Olds, she is squatting on her heels on the beach at Etty Bay in front of their discovery, a humpbacked sea creature bigger than any fish they have ever seen, which has been washed up on this familiar bit of beach and is lying stranded on the silvery wet sand. Its one visible eye, as yet unclouded, which is blue like a far-off moon, is open to the sky. It is alive and breathing. You can see the opening and closing of its gills.

The sea often tosses up flotsam of one kind or another. Big green-glass balls netted with rope. Toadfish that when you roll them with a big toe puff up and puff up till you think they'd burst. But nothing as big and sad-looking as this. You can imagine putting your arms around it like a person. Like a person that has maybe been
turned
into a fish by a witch's curse and is unable to tell you that once, not so long ago, it was a princess. It breathes and is silent. Cut off in a silence that makes you aware suddenly of your own breathing, while the gulls rise shrieking overhead.