Charades Read online

  Fathers were a very hot topic for the children of Bea.

  Here’s a thunderstorm afternoon and Davey’s come home with two black eyes, plum-dark, brilliant as eggplants. “Patrick Burke said I was a bastard. What’s a bastard?”

  “What we are,” Siddie tells him. “All of us.”

  “Not me,” I say. “I’m a bluestocking.” The whole world told me so, I thought it was a compliment. Snicketysnack, my thoughts went, pirouetting, making leaps of blue fire. I catch Davey by the hands and dance him round the kitchen table, blue stockings for his blue-black eyes.

  “Listen,” Mum says. And when she says it like that, you have to freeze. You have to hold yourself so still you can hear the spiders rubbing their legs against the walls. “I’ll tell you what a bastard is,” she says. “I’ll show you.” She is sitting on the front steps, shelling peas into the bowl of her skirt. Thunder growls and farts, but the rain has stopped for a bit, and the puddles are steaming back towards the sun. “Look here,” she says, pointing to the second step, which is rotting faster than the others, which feels spongy underfoot and gives off that thick yeasty smell that the lizards love. There are three of them, sunning themselves; and in the dampest part of the step, where the hole goes nearly right through, there’s a baby wood frog. “Some people got to chop off a lizard’s tail whenever they see one,” she says. “Some people got to put salt on a frog’s back. No reason. Except the bang they get from watching lizards and frogs go berserk. Some people, because they can’t lie in the sun all day, hate the ones who do. That’s a bastard. I hope we haven’t got any in this family.”

  Fathers. I used to study them, I keep them pickled in memory.

  Diane Stolley’s father — an interesting specimen — used to roll around most evenings on the slow way home from work, bringing a pack of Four-X, sniffing up honey and sweet time, talking about his wife and daughters.

  Diane Stolley’s father put a hand inside his pants and scratched. I’ll tell you about women, he said. They’re an itch. They got this thing drives a man crazy, but he can’t let it alone.

  Me, he said. I’m a maker of women. Got four daughters, no sons, that tells you something. I’m like Abraham and Isaac and those blokes that got nations started; it takes one strong man and a lot of women. See, you need breeders and cookers and looker-afters to crank things up, and that’s what I make. One day I’ll be in the school books next to Henry Parkes and Macarthur and those blokes, one day they’ll build me a monument. Billy Stolley: a Father of the State of Queensland.

  Yep, he said, I figured that out one day I was driving a truck to Cunnamulla. Down on me luck, I was. My wife had just gone an’ given me another baby girl, third bloody time, ah strike, nine months wasted. So I says to meself: stone the crows, I’m a doomed man, might as well shoot through. It was cyclone time, see, and there’s been flash floods and this rock as big as a house has gone. Clean gone. Jesus, I says to meself, water is stronger than rock. Then this comes ter me right outta the blue, it’s a pome: Water is stronger than rock, and cunt lasts longer than cock. Right outta the blue. And so I reckon the man who has daughters is king.

  And that’s me, said Diane Stolley’s father, scratching his balls and reaching under my mum’s skirt as she walked to the door with the potato peels. I can appreciate sweet sticky things and I can make them.

  Well, King Billy, my mum laughed, slapping his hand in her mother-cat Queen Bea way. Keep your hands to yourself in front of my children, if you please.

  And later, over the boiled vegetables and sausage, when I sulked as daughters will sulk: “How can you be so cheap? How can you let a dirty old fool like Diane Stolley’s father touch you?” she made me sit down on the front steps.

  “I’ll tell you something, Charade,” she said, “that you won’t find in any of your books. Every man has a right and an obligation to be a king inside his own mind. Every woman got a right and an obligation to be a queen. And you, Miss High and Mighty, you think you’re the booksmart queen of Mt Tamborine, you want us all to bow and scrape. What makes you think you got a right to poke holes in other people’s

  coronations?”

  At school, Diane Stolley showed me two things: a tin ring with pink flowers intertwined (won by shooting three cardboard ducks at the Brisbane Show) and the purple welts on her legs — both of them gifts from her dad.

  “Your dad is a dead possum’s stink,” I told her.

  “My dad is my dad,” she shrugged. “Anyway …”

  “What?”

  “Some nights,” she said, looking into the distance, “he sings to us and tells us stories.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Like everyone else, I knew how to draw quick blood. “At nights he tells us stories too. To my mum and me.”

  She turned away and her fists clenched and unclenched themselves. I owed it to her. In Wentworth’s store, her mother turned away from my mum as though she might catch something.

  “My dad is my dad,” Diane Stolley said again. “At least I got one, Charade.”

  Michael Donovan’s father smelled of slop bins and pigs. When he visited, his smell came before him like an aura. You could see that smell: it twisted and turned like lawyer-cane, it battened on to the air like a staghorn fern to a tree trunk, he couldn’t tear it away from himself no matter how much he bathed. And he did bathe, in rivers and rock pools and under the waterfall down near the Donovan shack, which had a dunny at the back of the yard but nothing so fancy as a bathtub.

  “Don’t need hoity-toity when there ain’t no woman around,” Michael Donovan’s father said. His wife Maureen died giving birth to Michael.

  He was, in his own way, a fastidious man. He would not, for example, take a swig from a passed-around bottle, nor permit schoolteachers (with their chalky hands) to comb his children’s hair for nits in the regular fashion. He shaved his sons’ heads with a long-bladed razor himself, regularly, so that once a month they looked like prisoners-of-war. We called him the Slops Man or the Pig Man, but he could speak — after several beers — in a looping musical rage on the subject of kids who put paper and cardboard scraps into the “Food Only” bins.

  “I seen a little pig,” he said, “cough itself to death because it took a mouthful of paper and plastic mixed in with the bread crusts and mush and soft apple cores. I seen it huffle and puffle and swell up in the face while I reach in an’ try to pull back a plastic bag that’s half swallowed. I seen it shudder and whimper and turn quiet.”

  And a hush would fall on all of us children as two beery tears went looking for a path down the crisscrossed leathery cheeks of Michael Donovan’s father. Maybe Davey or little Elizabeth would start to cry too. And my mum would take another beer out of the fridge and pour it for Mr Donovan and pat him on the arm. “You’re a soft-hearted bloke, Mick Donovan,” she’d say, and she’d smile to herself and he’d smile back and next thing she’d be ordering us off to bed.

  But there was another side of Michael Donovan’s dad.

  Across a thicket of too many beers one evening, he heard a coo-ee from out by our mango tree. “Christ!” he said, thumping the table.

  My mum, reading well-known signs, said to me: “Charade, go out and see what young Michael wants.” My mum was a stepper-in-between. My mum did not like to see child or man — or animal either, for that matter — get hurt.

  Well. It was an odd thing, going out there to meet my scourge of the schoolyard under our mango tree. Boys at school have a hard shell around them. They are full of spikes and sharp points. You can’t come near them. But under the mango tree at night, Michael Donovan looked small and different, almost naked. Like one of my little brothers in his hand-me-down pyjamas, say, when I had to hold his hand and walk him down the dark path to the dunny last thing at night.

  Michael Donovan and I stared at each other nervously, like strangers. Like dingoes waiting for the fight to start. Around us, the air was shrill with
crickets. I never thought of Michael Donovan before as someone who might stand out under the stars and pleat eucalypt leaves between his fingers; as a mirror image, in a sense, of myself. Minutes passed. Stars dipped and swayed in the sky, the Southern Cross wheeled above us. And from the kitchen a voice called: “Charade!”

  Michael Donovan and I both jumped, and I blurted: “My mum says what do you want?”

  “Gotta see my dad,” he said.

  “What for?”

  He rubbed one leg against the other and looked away as though the words he needed might be nailed to the broken-down fence. “ ’Coz of Brian,” he said. Brian was an older brother who worked in Brisbane, where he was, more often than not, in trouble with the police, people said. “Come home this evening and went off in Dad’s truck,” Michael said. “Smashed it up.” He turned to face me and his eyes were big and pale as Cape gooseberries. “I can’t get him out from under, he’s all

  bloodied up.”

  Fear leapt between us, and awe, and some kind of sordid thrill. And suddenly we were both belting across the space to the kitchen steps.

  “Mum! Mum! Come quick! It’s Brian Donovan killed.”

  Disaster cuts through beer-fog as a single note, maddening and high, the kind of sound that breaks glass. It careened inside Mr Donovan’s skull, I suppose, and he reached for the fastest relief. He struck and struck and struck. Michael Donovan took the blows on the face and chest and shoulders, yelling “Dad, Dad, I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t help it.” A shambling progress was made, a violent blubbering whirlwind of arms and legs, down the steps and into the night where Brian bled.

  I stood under the mango tree and listened till the thumping and yelling faded. I knew it would be years and years before Michael Donovan and I would look each other in the eyes again — if ever. Something else I knew too: it was not the blows Michael minded, but the fact that I saw. I thought he might never forgive me for that.

  I went down to the old track, past the banyan trees and silky oaks, swinging down the dangling roots, all the way down to the curtain fig and the bone man. The bone man was getting smaller and smaller, and some of his parts were missing, his white geometry in disarray. Pilfering possums, dogs perhaps, other children? He seemed to be disappearing line by bleached line — though he hid quietly under dead leaves and ferns that uncurled themselves like the fingers of a baby.

  Are there any good fathers? I asked him.

  They come good and bad, he said, and everything in between.

  Make me a father, I said. A good one. And tell him to me. And this was the bone man’s tale, but it’s my tale too. I was always inventing fathers.

  Once upon a time, in the northern hemisphere, there lived a king who had three sons — well no, not three sons, because the youngest child was a daughter. And behind the king, crouching at the back of his throne, lived a dream, and the dream had the king in its coils. Sleeping and waking, it had him, until he summoned his counsellors to his chambers.

  I dream of a land that does not exist, he said. I see deserts, but also small steamy pockets of forest. I see cities that cling to the edges of a dead hot heart as froth clings to the sides of my beer mug. The people who live in this dream have the faces of children. They worship the sun, they do not believe that a world exists beyond their shores, they are full of thoughtless cruelties. As flies rub their legs, these people rub the past from themselves. Interpret this dream for me.

  And his counsellors said: This is the dream of Terra Australis, O King, which is like unto the dream of El Dorado.

  And they read unto him from the scrolls of the sea captains and cartographers:

  But, altho’ the remote parts of the southern hemisphere remain undiscovered, we have traces from ancient times, warranted by latter experience, of rich and valuable countries in it … It has been commonly alleged, and perhaps not without good reason, from a consideration of the weight of land to water, that a Continent is wanting on the South of the Equator, to counterpoize the land on the North, and to maintain the equilibrium necessary for the earth’s motion …

  We read, O King, from An Account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacific Ocean, published here in London in this year of our Lord, 1767. This dream, O King, they said, has caused much royal insomnia and the loss of many ships.

  And the king said: Send in unto me my three children.

  And his counsellors answered: This is no voyage and no country for women, young or old, O King. Shall we not send only your two sons?

  But the king, being a rare and compassionate father, knew that his sons would take care of themselves. It was when he looked into the future for his daughter that his heart contracted, and so to all three he offered a riddle and a prize.

  Go forth, he said, and seek the kingdom of my dream, which shall go to the finder. And the solver of my riddle will be provided with ships for the voyage.

  Here is the riddle, he said. The country of my dream is beautiful and harsh, a man’s country according to my counsellors and cartographers and geomancers. A man’s country, they insist. A place where women will not be wanted, where it is unlikely that they will survive. When Terra Australis is found, therefore, how shall I people it with women?

  And his eldest son answered: O Father, you must send into the dreamland maidens of great beauty and tenderness, whose skills in the making and feathering of nests are legendary. Then the men of that country will learn to desire wives and will protect them.

  But his second son answered: O Father, you must cause an itch to fall upon the men of that country, an itch for which the dream of a woman is the only cure.

  Then the youngest one, his daughter, spoke. You must ensure that the men of that dreamplace continue to despise and ridicule and underestimate the women, she said. Then the women will learn laughter and independence and they will survive.

  And the king was well pleased with his daughter’s answer and he commissioned a fleet to sail into the dream in the year of our Lord 1787. And he arranged safe passage on a ship called Supply for his youngest child, who stepped ashore on the coast of the dream in January, 1788, and who was — so the bone man told me, says Charade — the great-great-great-grandmother of my mum Bea, the Slut of the Tamborine Rainforest.

  9

  Nicholas and Verity

  The lace curtains stir, ballooning softly and subsiding, as though the windows are breathing, and Charade asks drowsily: “Who’s responsible?”

  “Radiators,” Koenig says. “Convection currents.”

  “No, I meant: Who chose lace curtains for your bedroom?”

  “Oh.” Rachel, in a sense, he supposes. He still chooses things with her ghostly presence in mind. “Ah … Joanna, I guess. My housekeeper.”

  Charade sighs. “Was this her side? Her pillow?”

  He assumes she is not referring to his housekeeper.

  Here I am, Charade thinks, lying within the hollow of another woman’s life just as my mum floated in the cavity left by Verity Ashkenazy.

  “Verity stalks me,” she says. “She and Nicholas Truman, my father, are always there in the middle distance. Before I was born they walked through the rainforest like mirages, dropping crumbs of delirium, and the Tamborine people licked them up and had visions. That’s what Michael Donovan told me. Well, not in so many words, but that was the sense of it, and Michael got it from his brother Brian — the one who was paralysed from the waist down after he smashed up his father’s truck. And Brian had got it on another occasion, before the accident, from their father when they were on the town in Brisbane and his dad was drunk as a bandicoot and talking. But Michael Donovan’s dad had an axe to grind, so

  who knows?”

  In the loops of silence between sentences, Koenig hears the whisper of Rachel’s pen writing and writing her letters. His daughter’s voice reproaches him. His son chants with the Moonies.

  “Keep talking,�
�� he urges Charade. “What did your father

  look like?”

  “In the mornings he was golden, and glowed like Apollo. At least, that’s what I like to think. Since I’ve never seen him, I’m free to invent and I picture him hovering over Verity like a sort of god of the forest. He kept her safe. He gave her mangoes to suck, and she dreamed of him every night. My mother Bea and my aunt Kay dreamed of him too. He was one of those men …

  “He was like Krishna, you know? On the banks of the Jumna five hundred milkmaids pined for Krishna and each believed she was his one and only love. Each could prove in voluptuous detail that the night of the last full moon had been spent in his arms — even though they all knew that Radha could tie him up in the coils of her sari.

  “My father, Nicholas Truman, had powers like that.”

  “You’re looney,” Koenig says. “You’re wonderfully crazy.”

  “Very likely,” Charade admits.

  But Koenig wonders: do I put words into her mouth? She has such a flickering look, and he does have ulterior motives.

  “No, no,” she says. “If anything, it’s the other way round.”

  “What?” Koenig pivots on one elbow, looking down at her. He is certain, quite certain, that he hasn’t spoken aloud. Hasn’t even finished a thought.

  “First I dream up my man, then I track him down, then he has to hear me through. I was born under the sign of the Darting Tongue when the moon was licking at the Southern Cross. So my mother says. If I stop talking, I’ll vanish like camphor.”

  “Ah,” he says lightly, “and then where should I look?”

  “Looking,” she sighs. “I’m an expert in looking, but not in finding. I’ve never found my father.”

  “Who resembled Apollo,” he says dryly.

  “Yes. Though even he was struck dumb by Verity, and I can be specific about her. Well, loosely specific. There’s a painting.”

  “A painting?”

  “Michael Donovan’s dad did it. That’s something, isn’t it? A garbage and slops collector, a feeder of pigs, who painted. He used the sides of old tea chests and it was not a habit he admitted to; he kept it a deathly dark secret, I can promise you, but Michael found his hoard at the back of their shack and showed me. There were also crude likenesses of my mother in clotted ochres and greens, a Honey Bea deep in the wattles.”