On Brunswick Ground Read online

  I have never read the Bible, maybe because it sits there, smug and pious, as lordly as Shakespeare – a big hole in my education – yet images of it spring to my mind as if I had read it. So maybe I am floating in an amniotic Bible after all. The Three Wise Men travel to Bethlehem following a star, then hang around, waiting to see some baby in a straw cot. I don’t know why this image pops up, here along the Merri – perhaps because waiting can feel sacred. Along with my own waiting, I feel a strange waiting in my friend that I can’t fathom or put a name to. It keeps me listening to the birds and the wind and the water with a particular attention, as if everything were a clue.

  I know that Mary, since a few days ago now, has gone to stay with Billie. Sarah is daughterless again, just when things were getting better between them. The muted sound of her pain reminds me of the mangled echo of a stable door banging through the night in Wuthering Heights. Spells suit the Merri. The word ‘spell’ is not so old-fashioned here by the creek’s tugging waters, which shoulder themselves through today and yesterday, so transparent, so relentless and whispering, snatching at wisdom in gulps and bubbles as the sound of our steps and the rustle of dry grass confirm their warning. It also suits our voiceless understanding to be near the water.

  ‘I like walking along the Merri. I used to come here when I first arrived from Adelaide,’ says Sarah. But her few other desultory attempts at conversation rattle like pebbles in a drum.

  Her mind is in another zone and she settles back into silence. You could say Sarah is a mystery woman, but that would be too easy, like saying Jill Meagher’s killer is evil – it would reveal only a fraction of the whole. Sarah knows the right moment. She knows how to find silence in the hum of her bar or in the flow of a creek, handling situations like a blacksmith, sparks flying around her face. All this is more inexplicable than mere mystery.

  We have been walking nearly half an hour by now – or maybe it is Sarah time and it could be longer, or only a few minutes. When she speaks again, the words fall from her lips almost off-handedly.

  ‘Mary said she saw you last week.’

  ‘Yes, I stumbled on her at Green’s. She was there with a friend of hers. We got talking. It was nice.’

  Hearing about her daughter bares her immediately; she throws me a hungry glance. I look at the Merri carefully before continuing.

  ‘She told me about the job at The Monthly. Would that be good for her?’

  Sarah looks up at the sky.

  ‘It would be perfect for her.’

  She takes her jumper off in spite of the wind. We walk on for another ten minutes.

  ‘I’m glad you get on. Maybe something will happen at Billie’s place and the whole blue knot will disentangle itself.’

  Our ankles brush the grasses. Each blade seems to have an independent whisper. A cyclist passes us. He’s a wiry man in lycra. He turns round to wave at us jeeringly. There is something about lycra – you sometimes their see genitals painfully defined, as if presented for dissection, cyclists trussed up for sacrifice hurrying towards the slaughter. I like the way Sarah doesn’t mention his passing.

  The Merri has quietened round a bend. The gravitas of Sarah’s tread links all these little events in one block. When she takes a deep breath, I slow down without thinking. Sarah’s time seems to have come, she tells me what’s on her mind at last:

  ‘Do you know that she’s never taken that thing off in front of me, not once, not even in the house at night.’

  She nearly spits out her sigh.

  ‘We were like a Sunni and a Shiite living together.’

  I don’t even pretend not to understand what she’s talking about.

  ‘Surely she must take it off to sleep. Have you never gone to her bedroom to wake her up or ask her something?’

  Sarah stares down at the meandering path.

  ‘No.’

  I say another word I have heard so many Australian women utter in similar circumstances:

  ‘Right.’

  She smiles. I must have provided the right echo, like a Greek chorus. Between the whispering of the grasses I hear the swish of my grandmother’s skirt – even the imaginary feeling of her presence makes me more aware. As for Sarah, the Merri is probably helping her more than anything I could say.

  ‘I could speculate ad nauseam on the subject,’ Sarah says, then adds, with a wry smile: ‘Actually, I do. When I think of how beautiful she is – talk about hiding one’s light under a bushel.’

  I stuff my hands in my jeans pockets.

  ‘What about asking her directly?’

  Sarah sighs again.

  ‘I have. She brushed me off, saying that if she “disrobed,” she would never put it on again and that she needs it on.’

  There is a silence.

  ‘I know. I didn’t ask her what her reasons were. I felt I’d already pushed my luck.’

  A bird I don’t recognise calls twice before I suggest:

  ‘Islam doesn’t seem very present in her life. I mean, the little I’ve seen of her, she hasn’t mentioned it once. You’d think …’

  Sarah pounces on that.

  ‘You’re right. The cultural statement blurs the issue too. It’s such a hollow argument, because she doesn’t exactly seem to be reciting the Koran, does she? There is no sign of the arsehole either. I thought she did it because of him. We’re all in the Boy Scouts together kind of thing.’

  She kicks a can, sending it flying down the path.

  ‘Did you know that Mary’s husband wasn’t born a Muslim?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. He’s from Queensland. He got involved with this imam, long after he got involved with Mary. Her decision to wear the burqa is only recent – maybe a year.’

  I turn the thing over in my mind.

  ‘Did she take it off in front of you when you were last in Adelaide?’

  Sarah shakes her head with a kind of raw solemnity.

  ‘I’ve not seen her once without it since she started.’

  Her voice stumbles.

  ‘Not once.’

  The problem is so simple and so impregnable.

  Sarah bends down and picks up the can she has kicked to put it in a plastic waste bin, clamped in a metal circle on a stand. Thanatos, Eros. The two gestures describe her so well. She loosens her leg for another go at a can but there are none on the path.

  ‘I can’t help thinking I am the one she is shutting out intentionally – as if she were waging a jihad against me. I even imagine her wriggling out of her outfit as soon as I’m out of the room. I’m completely narcissistic about it. All I can feel is the blue door slamming in my face – never mind the rest of the world. It’s all about me, I know.’

  The way she says I know runs so counter to how it is usually said that it sounds almost foreign. Her foot has found a stone now and she boots it into the water.

  ‘Why do I tiptoe around her so much? Didn’t I change her nappies, for fuck’s sake?’

  She stares doggedly ahead:

  ‘… Though not as often as Helen did, of course. My mother was the anointed nappy changer.’

  Heedless, sleek and slinky, the creek quivers within its own reflections. Sarah trudges on with a sigh.

  ‘I just don’t understand the statement Mary is trying to make.’

  She stops and grimaces.

  ‘This is fast becoming my one and only topic, isn’t it?’

  Mary’s burqa is a mix of The Thousand and One Nights and Bluebeard – a fairy tale thrust on Brunswick with no happy ending in sight. I am filled with what I can’t say to Sarah, as if silence were the sound of our connection. I turn my head to look at her.

  ‘Maybe Mary’s use of the burqa is making it into something else altogether.’

  ‘That’s an idea. The burqa’s international statement could be starting to attract other constellations of meaning: women hiding, or lambasting themselves, or making themselves sacred – there is no end to it. Mary the trailblazer …’

 
Bluntly, Sarah changes the subject.

  ‘Any news from Jack?’

  That’s when I tell her about his letter folded in my pocket.

  ‘He still writes.’

  But she must see something in my face.

  ‘I knooooowww … ’ she says. This assuages things a little, even though she has no solution for me, just as I have none for her.

  A dog bursts out of some bushes and comes rushing up, a Kelpie, his redhead owner running behind him. They don’t notice us; they are in the flow and flash past us. On the other bank, within that red flash, I notice the lycra man walking his bike towards the bridge over us and then tying it up. The way he does it reminds me of a shepherd tying up a sheep for branding. Soon it will be too dark to hear the birds and we head back instinctively. Everything is more beautiful at dusk, even the few hoots and squawks. As we walk, I feel as if we are carrying something. But I shouldn’t – both our lives bear more of a negative load, a body of memory, rather than a weight. The weight comes from waiting.

  Tonight I understand that waiting is an action, a travail. Night is nearly upon us and Sarah glances at her watch.

  ‘I must get to the bar soon; it’s my night.’

  I turn round to look at the setting sun. It looms like a larger orange moon, straddling the creek, slowly descending on us. But I also catch sight of something else. Going down the bridge behind us is a tall man in a tracksuit, but instead of looking baggy they look as taut as if he were wearing a pair of jeans. Even in the lengthening shadows, his body has a muscular presence.

  In front, the lycra man is coming down the last steps to our side of the river. Suddenly I am aware of them both together. They know each other. They have talked to each other by the water. I know it like I know my mother is dead. They are so different, but their movements have the same slow, withholding darkness. I grab Sarah’s arm.

  ‘Sarah, these guys, it’s not good. Be careful.’

  Now they are walking faster together towards us. A cold comes over me. My thoughts slow down, distilling each idea to make it completely useful. Sarah casts one sharp glance at me and I hear her soundless intake of breath. There is hardly any time now. It has all been sucked away. The only thought I have is water – rushing, cold and clean on the black stones – killing air, murdering bubbles of oxygen to stay whole.

  I feel the shadow behind me closing off the setting sun and at the same time I see the other man waving a knife in front of Sarah, who is standing on firm legs, half turned towards me. I hear her voice cut through the air.

  ‘A knife. So you’re planning to kill us both, are you?’

  Her words jump into the present moment, killing anything else, keeping us on the tight rope of what is happening to us right now, holding us firmly here, where we can survive this, not leading somewhere else or believing anything other than this. Fear is a strange, powerful thing. It wakes you up quick smart. Everything that is not essential, everything that leeches onto you, that is not part of your soul, is burnt. In a brief, studded instant, I see Jack. His face. But I don’t start checking out my life like a film in front of my eyes; I look for clues. I look for a big branch. I look at the water again. I don’t focus on the men. They are not moving, as if Sarah’s cold words had checked them an instant. Then before I can think the big one makes a step. I can sense him just behind me. I know that once he touches me I will not be able to move anymore. That’s when I jump towards Sarah and grab her and launch us both into the creek. As the waters lift and splash at us, she seems to spring to life and we are thrashing blindly ahead. We are doing the right thing – we were stuck – but now we are moving. They have not jumped in after us. They are still on the bank. We wade and wade and push ourselves forward, to the other side of the creek, away from the setting, dying sun.

  8

  THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS

  Sarah’s bar, The Alderman, is full.

  ‘Attempted rape and possible murder are good for business,’ she whispers to me, walking by to stoke her wood fire, with small logs under her arm.

  It’s 8 pm. You can still feel the dusk in the air, though it’s already dark. People smell of fresh showers and newly applied make-up. The night is almost a darker day, a new beginning, back to front: faces resting from pursuing something, men’s jaws loosened and women smiling understandingly. It’s been a week now since our Merri Creek promenade. We’ve given the two men’s descriptions to the police. They think we’ve had a close call. The idea of jumping in the water has put everyone in stitches, but the police, surprisingly, are the only ones not to laugh. It seems that it’s often a small thing that will make the difference between life and death in an attack of that kind.

  ‘It’s luck, of course, but it’s also about not giving in – in your mind – at any moment,’ an inspector tells us.

  ‘Drenched women, unparalysed by their fear, are a different kettle of fish to stunned victims. Unless,’ he adds with a smile, ‘these guys had a catlike fear of water.’

  Maybe Jack is looking at big cats at this minute. Feeding them, even going into their cages. I wonder how he manages without music. There are so many questions my imagination stumbles on, a bit like a Magritte painting, with doors opening into nowhere, or into a sky of terribly ordered clouds. And there is always a man in a bowler hat. He waits there like a clown in a suit, without a circus. And I feel exactly like him.

  It’s nice to sit at The Alderman now I know Sarah. Even if she is too busy even to wink at me, I can be the Magritte man in peace, without feeling like a sore thumb. Here I’m safe to read and to remember other beers, and other conversations, on the other side of the planet. The stool morphs into a strangely comfortable seat, carrying me through the landscape of my book. As a child I used to daydream about the peas on my plate. If you observe them long enough they become mysterious. Each one has its own distinct personality. You get to like them individually, and so I swallowed them whole to keep them alive inside me. Reading is the same. The characters settle inside you like peas – whole and alive.

  When you’re not feeling so hot, characters in books are preferable to real people, who always seem to lead you back to the one person you shouldn’t be thinking about. We’re all in the same boats of misunderstanding and haphazard wisdom, inexorably rowing towards each other. Albert Cossery’s novel Proud Beggars pops into my mind. Thank the gods for that. Two beggars are friends. But one of them wants to commit suicide. His companion begs him not to. The candidate for suicide explains he could just as well be travelling in some distant country. His friend protests that in that case it would still be possible to imagine him walking in the sunshine, or savouring some wine in some shady café. But if he is dead, what can he imagine? Not his happiness, nor the breath coming through his lungs, nor the smile on his face, nor the coffee warming his belly – what torture. Every time I think of that story, it comforts me.

  Jack is alive. He may be patting a giraffe, gently closing a gorilla’s cage, offering his finger to some parrots to nibble. I imagine his breath clouding on a cold winter day, his tousled head in the morning. I see his neck and the quirky growth line of his hair behind his collar, as if someone had planted it while humming a tune. I see his kind eyes and his slow walk, as if his every step were there on purpose, for him to put here, on this Australian earth, where his parents and grandparents were born. I remember the shape of his hands and fingers and nails. I see his feet. He may have lost his memory, but he is alive – he is treading the same earth as me.

  Even thinking of books doesn’t always work.

  The bar noises stop swimming around me. Bernice is tapping her index finger on my shoulder.

  ‘I thought you’d be here.’

  Then her ten soft fingers land on my forearm.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  With a severe expression on her face, she drinks deep before speaking.

  ‘Because, I know. Things hurt after. On the spot they just splash at you, don’t they?’

  I smile at
her.

  ‘They did splash.’

  She shakes her head, until her fringe bounces.

  ‘When my husband left me, I was in shock, it didn’t sink in, but for weeks, and now, for months, it’s as if he’s leaving me over and over again. So, you see, I know.’

  Her words reverberate in the air of the bar – where they seem to shiver. Every time we miss the opportunity of consolation, we should make a knot in our handkerchief. But I don’t have time, Bernice is already clearing her throat.

  ‘Anyway, I’m sure you’re both suffering from post-traumatic stress.’

  Sarah casts me one of her quiet glances and I feel the creek again – icy, reassuring against my legs.

  Bernice puts her beer down.

  ‘The first time we met was right here, wasn’t it? Maybe we’re sitting in the exact same places tonight, on the exact same stools, who knows?’

  I try to change her mood.

  ‘Maybe it’s the exact same minute too.’

  Bernice frowns at her watch and I look at the clock on the wall as if it were a doorway.

  ‘Maybe it is.’

  Bernice waves her hand:

  ‘I won’t drink Pimm’s Nº 1 anymore. It’s treacherous.’

  I feel a smile taking over my face. I can understand why people like listening to her program. Things are put back where they belong – the waves in the sea, the clouds in the sky – they stop slipping and sliding all over the place. Some of us have that talent – a bit like Atlas holding the earth on his shoulders, except that Bernice would probably hold the world in a Silver Cross perambulator.

  Even though her show on Triple R is doing well, all she can think about is her phantom child. The fact that it could be a he or a she is her main conundrum. She isn’t talking of prams now, but more about forms, and appointments with psychologists, who are checking to see if she is suitable.