North of Nowhere, South of Loss Read online

  It’s because I wore a hat, she thought.

  “Look,” Brian said, raising his arm, waving. “Here’s a Black and White.” He hugged her again. “Take care of yourself now, Dorrie. Go and put your feet up on the verandah for a while. We’ll see you later, okay?”

  He said something to the driver, gave him money, and we both waved. We kept on waving till the taxi disappeared.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Philippa.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just cut it out, okay?”

  “Don’t try and dump your guilt onto me.”

  “She would have hated it. She’s terrified of social stuff, always has been. They never went anywhere. I was being kind, if it’s any of your business.”

  “Jesus, Brian. That was brutal. And so totally unnecessary. I would have kept her under my wing.”

  “She would have hated it,” he insisted. “Anyway, I’m not even going myself. I’m off to the Regatta. Let’s go.”

  “What? But it’s in your honour!”

  “I don’t give a stuff and nor do they. No one’ll even notice I’m not there. It’s the free booze and free food they’re after, that’s all. C’mon, let’s go. You got your car here?”

  * *

  “You think it’s because I’m ashamed of her,” Brian said moodily on the verandah at the Regatta. “But you’re wrong. It’s not that.”

  I sipped my beer and stared across Coronation Drive at the river. Two small pleasure craft, motorboats with bright anodised hulls, were whizzing upstream, and a great ugly industrial barge from Darra Cement was gliding down, shuddering a bit, moving its hips in a slow, slatternly wallow. The sight of it filled me with happiness. Good on you, you game old duck, I thought fondly, and raised my glass to it. “Probably the same rusty tub we used to see when we were riding the buses out to uni,” I said.

  “Probably,” Brian said lugubriously, slumped over his beer. “Everything’s stuck in a bloody time warp, it’s like a swamp” – he waved his arms about to take in the verandah, the Regatta, the river, the whole city – “it’s like a swamp that sucks everything under, swallows it, stifles it, and gives back noxious …” His energy petered out and he slumped again. “There was this funny little man in the front row who used to sit in on lectures when I was in first year. Flat-earth freak, or something, he used to buttonhole people in the cloisters. We all used to duck when we saw him coming. Must be ninety now, if he’s a day, and there he was in the very same seat. It gave me the shivers.”

  I squinted, and lined up the top of my glass with the white stripe on the broad backside of Darra Cement. “I saw in the paper that home-owners in Fig Tree Pocket and Jindalee and those newer suburbs are trying to get the dredging stopped. One of these days we’ll come back and the river won’t be brown anymore, it’ll be crystal clear. I suppose that’ll be a good thing, but it’s funny how I get pissed off when anyone tampers with Brisbane behind my back. God, I love being back, don’t you?”

  “I hate it,” Brian said. He’d thrown his jacket across a spare chair. Now he undid a couple of buttons on his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. “Look,” he said with disgust, raising his arms one by one, inspecting the moons of stain at the armpits. “A bloody steam bath.”

  “That’s what I love. This languid feeling of life underwater.”

  Between us and the river, the traffic rushed by in beetling lines but the noise was muffled, a droning damped-down buzz. Everything was fluid at the edges. Cars seemed to float slightly above the road and to move the way they do in old silent movies. Even the surface of Coronation Drive was unfixed, a band of shimmer. A drunk man was shambling along the bike path giving off mirages; I could see three of him. I could see the gigantic bamboo canes at the water’s edge doubling, tripling, tippling themselves into the haze. I could see wavy curtains of air flapping lazily, easily, settling on us with sleep in their folds. “The only reason I don’t come back to stay,” I said drowsily, “is that if I did, I would never do another blessed thing for the rest of my life. I’d turn into a blissed-out vegetable.”

  “It makes me panic, being back,” Brian said. “I feel as though I’m suffocating, drowning. I can’t breathe. I can’t get away fast enough. I get terrified I’ll never get out again.”

  “Go back to Bleak City then,” I said. “Stop whingeing. You sound like a prissy Melburnian.”

  “I am a Melburnian.”

  “Bullshit. You’ll be buried here.”

  “Over my dead body. I can never quite believe I got out,” he said. “I’ve forgotten the trick. How did I manage it?”

  I shrugged, giving up on him, and let my eyes swim in Coronation Drive with the cars. An amazing old dorsal-finned shark of a Thunderbird, early sixties vintage, hove into view and I followed it with wonder. “Who was that friend of your brother’s? The one with the Alfa Romeo. Remember that time we came burning out here and the cops –”

  “You’ve got a mind like the bottom of a birdcage, Philippa,” Brian said irritably. “All over the shop.”

  “Polyphasic,” I offered primly. “Highly valued by some people in your field. I read an essay on it by Stephen Jay Gould. Or maybe it was Lewis Thomas. Multi-track minds, all tracks playing simultaneously. Whatever happened to him, I wonder?”

  “To Stephen Jay Gould or Lewis Thomas?”

  “Neither, dummy. To that friend of your brother’s. How’s your brother, by the way?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Still in Adelaide?”

  “Mm.”

  “Did he stay married?”

  “Knock it off, Philippa.”

  “You stay in touch with her?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, Brian. I’m really sorry about all that. Are you, you know, okay?”

  “Yeah, well.” Brian shrugged. “It’s easier this way. No high drama, no interruptions. I practically live at the lab.”

  “I read a glowing article about you in Scientific American. It was an old one, I picked it up in the waiting room at my dentist’s.”

  Brian laughed. “There’s achievement for you.”

  We lapsed into silence and drank another round of beer and stared at the river.

  “Your mother said she ran into Richard’s mum.”

  “Don’t get started, Philippa,” Brian warned.

  “I miss them, I miss them. I miss our old gang. Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “I never miss anyone,” he said vehemently.

  “Your mother said –”

  “Okay, get it over with.”

  “Get what over with?”

  “The lecture on how I treat Dorrie.”

  “I wasn’t going to say a word,” I protested. “But since you mention it, I don’t understand why you feel embarrassed. You were actually blushing, for God’s sake. As though anyone minds”

  “You think I’m ashamed of her.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s not that. I’m not. I’m protecting her. I can’t bear it when other kids smirk at her. At them. I can’t bear it.”

  “Other kids?”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know, Philippa.”

  “I don’t know why you think they were any different from anyone else’s parents”

  He signalled for another jug, and we waited until it came, and then Brian filled both our glasses.

  “They were,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “They weren’t. I spent enough time at your place, for God’s sake.”

  “God, I’m depressed,” Brian said.

  “I spent time at Richard’s and Julie’s and Elaine’s. They weren’t any different from anyone else’s mum and dad.” Brian said nothing. With his index finger, he played in a spill of beer. We were both, I knew, thinking of Elaine.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I shouldn’t have … That’s something that happens when I come back. Every so often, you know, maybe once or twice a year, I still have nightmares about Ela
ine. But not when I’m back here. When I’m here, we all still seem to be around. In the air or something. I can feel us.” I stared into my glass, down the long amber stretch of the past. “How long is it since you’ve been back, anyway?”

  “Five years.”

  “That’s your average? Once every five years?”

  “It’s not that I want to come that often,” he said. “Necessity.”

  I laughed. Brian did not. “You’re not usually this negative about Brisbane,” I protested. “When was the last time I saw you? Two years ago, wasn’t it? In Melbourne. No, wait. I forgot. London. June before last in London when you were there for that conference — Yes, and we got all nostalgic and tried to phone Julie, tried to track her down … that was hilarious, remember? We got onto that party line somewhere south of Mt Isa.”

  “It’s different when I’m somewhere else,” Brian said. “I get depressed as hell when I’m back.”

  “Boy, you can say that again.”

  “Last time ever, that’s a promise to me,” he said. “Except for Dorrie’s funeral.”

  “God, Brian.” I had to fortify myself with Cooper’s comfort. “You’re getting me depressed. Anyway, speaking of your mother, we’d better get going. What time’s she expecting us?”

  “Oh shit.” Brian folded his arms tightly across his stomach and pleated himself over them.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I can’t go.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t go, Philippa. I can’t go. I just can’t. Can you call her for me? Make up some excuse?”

  I stared at him.

  “Look,” he said. “I meant to. I thought I could manage it. But I can’t. Tell her I’m tied up. You’ll do it better than I could.”

  “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “Look, tell her –” He seemed to cast about wildly for possible bribes. “Tell her we’ll take her out for lunch tomorrow, before my afternoon flight. I’m staying at the Hilton, we’ll take her there.”

  “I won’t do it. I’m not going to do your dirty work for you. This is crazy, Brian. It’s cruel. You’ll break her heart.”

  Brian stood abruptly, knocking over his chair and blundered inside to the pay phone near the bar. I watched him dial. “Listen, Dorrie,” I heard him say, in his warm, charming, famous-public -person voice. “Look, something’s come up, it’s a terrible nuisance.”

  “You bloody fake!” I yelled. There were notes of rush and pressure in his voice, with an undertone of concern. It wasn’t Brian at all. It was someone else speaking, someone I’d never even met, someone who couldn’t hear a thing I was saying, someone who didn’t even know I was there.

  “They’ve got something arranged at uni,” he said smoothly, unctuously. “I didn’t know about it, and the thing is, I can’t get out of it. I’ll tell you what though. Philippa and I will take you out to lunch tomorrow. She’ll pick you up at twelve o’clock, okay? and we’ll all have lunch at the Hilton. Look, I’ve got to rush, I’m terribly sorry. Look after yourself, Dorrie. See you tomorrow, all right? Bye now.”

  “I’m going,” I said as he lurched back. “I’m taking a cab right now to your mother’s. I won’t be part of this.”

  “Philippa, stay with me.”

  “I won’t. It’s just plain goddamn rude and boorish when she’s got a meal prepared. At least one of us … I’m just bloody not going to – What? What is it? What the hell is it?

  He looked so stricken that there was nothing to be said.

  “All right,” I conceded, resigned. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Come back to the Hilton with me. I don’t want to be alone. I have to get blind stinking drunk.”

  In the cab I said: “How come I feel more wracked with guilt than you do?”

  He laughed. “You actually think I’m not wracked with guilt?”

  “Oh, I know why I am,” I said. “It’s because I’m a mother too.” If my son did this to me, I thought, I’d bleed grief. My whole life would turn into a bruise.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know,” Brian said. “I can’t talk about it unless I’m blind stinking drunk.”

  We didn’t go to his room. It wasn’t like that. We have never been lovers, never will be, never could be, and not because it isn’t there, that volatile aura, the fizz and spit of sexual possibility. I vaguely remember that as we got drunker we held each other. I seem to remember us both sobbing at some stage of the night. It wasn’t brother/sister either, not an incest taboo. No. We were once part of a multiform being, a many-celled organism that played in the childhood sea, that swam in the ocean of Brisbane, an alpha-helical membrane-embedded coiled-coil of an us-thing. We were not Other to each other or them, we were already Significantly Us, and we wept for our missing parts. We drank to our damaged, our lost, our dead.

  When drink got us down to the ocean floor, I think Brian said: “It’s the house. I really believe that if I went there, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d never get out of it alive.”

  And I think I asked: “What did your mother mean about the nights? Those awful nights, she said.”

  And the second I said it, a memory I didn’t remember I had shifted itself and began to rise like a great slow black-finned sea-slug, an extinct creature, far earlier than icthyosaurus, earlier than the earliest ancestor of the manta ray. It flapped the gigantic black sails of its fins and shock waves hit the cage of my skull and I was swimming back to Brian’s front gate, I was waiting for him there, fragrant currents of frangipani were swirling round, and these monstrously eerie sounds, this guttural screaming and sobbing, came pouring out through the verandah louvres in a black rush that whirlpooled around me, that sucked, that pulled … I clung to the gate, giddy with terror.

  Then Brian came out of the house with his schoolbag slung over his shoulder and he pushed the gate open and pushed his way through and walked so fast that I had to run to catch up. “What is it?” I asked, my heart yammering at the back of my teeth.

  “What’s what?” Brian demanded.

  “That noise.” I stopped, but Brian kept walking. “That noise!” I yelled, and Brian stopped and turned round and I pointed, because you could almost see those awful sounds curdling around us. Brian walked back and stood in front of me and looked me levelly in the eyes and cocked his head to one side. He gave the impression of listening attentively, of politely straining his ears, but of hearing nothing.

  “What noise?” he asked.

  He was so convincing that the sound sank beneath the floor of my memory for forty years, even though, two blocks later, he said dismissively, “It’s nothing. It’s Ed. He does it all the time. It’s from the war.”

  And forty years later, swimming up through a reef of stubbies and empty Scotch bottles, he said: “He never left New Guinea really. He never got away. And it was catching. After a while, Dorrie used to have Ed’s nightmares, I think.”

  “Oh Brian.”

  “Sometimes the neighbours would call the police. The only place they felt safe was the house. They never went anywhere.”

  “I never had any inkling.”

  “Because I protected them. I was magic. I designed a sort of ozone layer of insulation in my mind, you couldn’t see through it, or hear, and I used to wrap them up in it, the house, and my dad, and my mum.”

  My dad and my mum. It would be something I could give her the next day, something to put with the corsage.

  It was a long time after I rang the doorbell before anyone came. And when she came, she didn’t open the door. She just stood there on the verandah peering out between the old wooden louvres. She looked like a rabbit stunned by headlights.

  “It’s me, Mrs Leckie. Philippa.”

  “Philippa?” she said vaguely, searching back through her memory for a clue. She opened the door and looked out uncertainly, like a sleepwalker. She was still in her housecoat and slippers. She squinted and studied me. “Philippa!” she said. “Good gracious. Are these for me? Oh
, they’re lovely. Lovely. Just a tic, and I’ll put them in water. Come on in, Philippa, and make yourself at home.”

  It was eerie all right, one little step across a threshold, one giant freefall to the past. There was the old HMV radio, big as a small refrigerator, with its blistered wood front. There were two framed photographs on it, items from the nearer past, tiny deviations on the room as I knew it. One was of Brian’s wedding, the other of his brother’s. I picked up the frame of Brian’s and studied it. I hadn’t been at his wedding. We’d all got married in the cell-dividing years of the us-thing. I’d been overseas, though my mother had sent a newspaper clipping. I was trying to tell from the photograph if Brian had been happy. Was he thinking: Now I’ve escaped?

  “I don’t understand about marriages these days,” she said, coming up behind me with the vase. She set the flowers on top of the radio. “I always thought Brian would marry you, Philippa.”

  “That would have been some scrap,” I said. “We were always arguing, remember?”

  “You would argue till the cows came home,” she smiled. “I always thought you’d get married.”

  I set the frame down again, and she picked it up. “They didn’t have any children,” she said sadly. “Barry either. I don’t have any grandchildren at all.” She returned Brian and his bride to the top of the radio. “I wish they’d known him before the war, that’s all. Before it happened. I just wish … But if wishes could be roses, Ed used to say, or maybe it was the other way round. Would you like to see them, Philippa?”

  I scrambled along the trail of her thought. “Oh,” I said. “Yes, I would. I noticed them from the gate. And your frangipani’s enormous, it’s going to swallow up the house.”

  “Ed planted that,” she said. “He was always good with his hands, he had a green thumb. I have to get the boy down the road to mow the lawn for me now. Watch out for that bit of mud, Philippa, there were some cats got in. These ones,” she said, “Ed planted when the boys were born, one for each. This one was for Brian.”