Charades Read online

  “And Verity,” Koenig prompts. “What did she look like?”

  “She was tall and pale gold with brown eyes and long, long hair which she wore hanging loose to the waist. It was black and thick as a tree fern’s roots. I’ll tell you the tale of Nicholas and Verity that Michael Donovan’s dad told to Brian, his older son.”

  And her voice slid

  over the waterfall

  at the back of the Donovan

  shack and down down down to the basso pool at the very bottom of the beer-and-phlegm throat of Michael Donovan’s dad, who says, “There’s some women just waiting to be bruised. Don’t ask me how or why they got that way, but they give off something, you know? They got big dark eyes, set deep, asking to be made to cry — though they don’t, they won’t cry, these women. They just get silent. They bruise. That Verity woman — the Ashcan, Bea used to call her — she was one of those.”

  Mick Donovan could have sworn, so he tells his son, that she had a streak of Abo in her, that she stepped out of the Dreamtime, a ghost lubra with her hair black as sin and that golden body begging to be manhandled and eyes that could set a man to howling like a dingo, except she wasn’t even born in Australia. She was from somewhere else. “An Eyetie, maybe,” he says. “Some kind of wop. Foreign, anyway. I dunno where she was from, but wherever it was she shouldn’t have left there. Talked with a plum in her mouth.”

  He runs his tongue over his lips, licking at the beer mist on his stubble, and his son Brian looks away and winks at a cream- and-molasses barmaid.

  “And so did that Nicholas bloke who followed her around, so did he. Talk about plum in the mouth! He musta swallowed a fruit shop, an entire greengrocery,” says Mick Donovan with sudden violence. “Bloody Pommy, bloody fraud. His christly voice come out his mouth wearing corsets and crocheted knickers.”

  Brian says: “Keep yer shirt on, Dad. The bloke’s been gone for donkey’s years.”

  “I only met the bastard once,” growls Mick Donovan, “and that was one time too many. He walks into McGillivray’s pub on the 26th of January, 1963, not a day I’m likely to forget, the day Bea Ryan turned twenty-one.”

  Brian laughs. “Australia Day? Ma Antsy-Pants Ryan born on Oz Day? Pull the other one, Dad.”

  Mick Donovan swipes his son across the cheek, Brian lurches, knocks over his chair, a bystander thumps Mick hard on the back saying, “Watch it, mate!” and Brian raises his fists at the bystander: “Keep yer bloody hands off my dad.”

  Mick says: “If I ever hear you talk that way about Bea Ryan again, I’ll knock yer socks off.”

  He drains his glass and calls for two more and gooses the barmaid when she comes.

  “I reckon every man-jack of us wanted Bea,” he says, “and the whole of the Tamborine Mountain was gonna dance at her party that night. I dunno what it was about Bea. She already had a kid by then, Sid Andrews’ son, and Sid had buggered off to God knows where. But she still drove us crazier than any six virgins.

  “So this party is planned and I have to take Maureen — God rest yer mother’s soul. Maureen — and every other sheila on the mountain — watches Bea as though Bea is a snake. But twenty-one is twenty-one, and the whole world is gonna drink at this shindig.

  “Well, it’s January and ninety-six in the shade, and we — the blokes, I mean — are gathering at McGillivray’s to wet the whistle before the party starts. We’re on the verandah, see, and maybe some of us on the steps, and some others, yeah, I reckon some others are under the trees. There’s a sun like a flamin’ communion wafer hangin’ right against the roof of Wentworth’s, struth, I thought it’d set his sign on fire, like a bloody spitball of flame it was, just waiting for the half-dark to gobble it. And you can already see the moon standing by, thin as a piece of shell. We’re talking women, we’re talking horses, we’re talking bets. Bill Stolley, the old fool, has just lost his shirt at yesterday’s races and is cadging drinks.

  “Then this weird thing happens. Seems like every scrub turkey on the mountain hears someone at McGillivray’s call its name. Dozens of them, scores of them, maybe hundreds, cackling and scratching, colliding at the verandah rails, dropping feathers and worse in our beer. Holy shit, it was weird. I heard of it happening two or three other occasions, only when the sun and the moon are changing places in that space between Wentworth’s roof and the big blue gum outside of McGillivray’s.”

  “Dad,” says Brian, “this tale gets taller with every drink.”

  “And out of the moon,” says Mick Donovan, “walking in between the birds like — I dunno, like gods or something, comes these two strangers. Jacky Dobson — he’s part Aboriginal — he swears he saw them covered with feathers and carrying nets, butterfly nets, bird-catcher nets, people nets. He starts trembling like he’s got the DTs. Hey mate, someone says to him, lay off the metho, eh? And Jacky covers his face with his hands and calls out: ‘Watch out for their nets. If their nets come down, you’re done for.’

  “Those two can hear Jacky, o’ course. They stare at him, and then the bloke speaks.

  “ ‘We didn’t mean to alarm anybody,’ he says in his fancy-pantsy voice. ‘We’re looking for Bea Ryan. We’re friends of Bea’s.’

  “ ‘And pigs can fly’, says I. The whole damn pub is cracking up. We can just see Bea sucking on her words to get them all shipshape, plum juice dribbling out of her mouth. We can just see Bea having friends like these.

  “ ‘We’ve driven up from Brisbane. We have an invitation,’ the bloke says in his Pommy voice. He’s waving this bit of paper. ‘But I’m afraid it’s not very specific about directions. Does anyone here know where Bea lives?’

  “Someone says: ‘Every man and his dog knows where Bea lives. Just follow your own divining rod. Beg pardon, ma’am’ — because the sheila with the big dark eyes has turned to look at him, and we don’t use language in front of women. So there’s shuffling, like, and a bit o’ coughing and spitting, and someone else says: ‘She’ll be right, mate. She’s on her way

  if you’ll hang on a tick. You’re at the party.’

  “But this bloke acts like he don’t even know that a voice like his will get him into trouble. ‘Perhaps I’ll just go out to meet her,’ he says, ‘if you could point me in the right direction.’

  “And someone does, see. Point, I mean. And the bloke whispers somethin’ to his sheila, and next thing, pouf! he leaves her there on the verandah, leaning right on the doorway of the bar. I watch him moving down between the sun and the moon in that space between McGillivray’s and the blue gum.

  “Well, this is weird, you know, and everyone looks at everyone else with his eyebrows touching the top of his bloomin’ skull. I mean, the shadow of a sheila on a bar, it’s bad luck, it ain’t legal, it ain’t natural. Unless she’s a barmaid, that’s different.

  “Well, his sheila just shades her eyes and stares after her bloke till he disappears, then she turns and looks at us. She’s leaning against the door frame, one foot on the verandah and one in the bar, and then she speaks. It’s one o’ them plummy voices, but low and sexy, like Marlene Dietrich, you know? And we all suck

  in our stomachs and take our feet off the verandah rails and watch her.

  “ ‘I wonder,’ she says, ‘if it would be possible to have a glass of iced pomegranate juice?’ ”

  “Aw c’mon, Dad,” Brian laughs. “Give us a break. Pomegranate juice.”

  “Swear to God,” Mick Donovan says. “Bloody oath. Well. It’s like we’re all in a dream. It’s like everyone’s moving in his sleep. Pomegranate juice? She might as well’ve asked us for possum milk. Or for that dingo blood that some blokes swear they’ve seen Jacky Dobson get into, in that cave behind the Springbrook Falls.

  “The sun’s been swallowed up whole by this, and the moon is on her, on the sheila I mean, and not a man-jack of us breathes. Right then, I’ll admit it to ya, Brian, even the thought of Bea went clea
r out of my head, I couldn’t think of nothing at all, but I reckon I woulda killed, right then, to know what a pomegranate looks like and find it and milk it and bring it to that long-haired sheila. Turns out she means a grenadilla, but we don’t know that till later.

  “We’re all watching and no one moves.

  “Then Jacky Dobson starts in murmuring and chanting and swaying. He’s got two fingers out like snake fangs, warding her off, and he’s saying: Watch out for her net, watch out for her net, or we’re goners.

  “Maybe it’s Jacky that throws her, or maybe just the staring, or maybe we’re just all dreaming and the dream turns bad. She puts her hands up in front of her as though she’s expecting to be hit, and her eyes get enormous, black as the pit. There’s two things I realise I want to do, about equal amounts: one is to have a mouth full of whatever-the-hell-is-pomegranate and to kiss it drip by drip down inside her; and the other is to hurt her, I dunno why. But that’s what I say: there’s some sheilas born begging for trouble, don’t ask me why.

  “I know one thing. It feels like I got a live coal fizzing between my legs, it feels like she’s pulling me at her on strings, I can’t help meself. I got me arms out in front of me, but buggered if I know what I’m going to do when I touch her.

  “I figure me hands are an inch from her body — enough to feel the electric shocks coming off it — when she starts shaking. Shaking bad, like an earthquake has her. And she backs away, backwards across the verandah and down the steps and along the path, stumbling backwards, and shaking, and never taking her eyes off all of us, off me in particular. Her eyes have grown bigger than her face, they’re like black caves, they’re holes to nowhere. Me, I’m paralysed, standing there like a bloody idiot with my arms stuck out like a scarecrow. Funny thing, she’s not noisy, not that sort of hysterical, she’s quiet as death, but it feels like sirens are dinging in me ears, and she sure smells crazy to us.

  “It’s like tasting blood, it does something. We are sniffing at her fear, you can feel us getting madder and madder for having wanted her, a woman like that. Maybe we would’ve started to chase her, I dunno, if Bea hadn’t appeared right then, with the Pommy bloke.

  “Bea goes crazy. Like a bloody Tasmanian devil she is, Jesus, I thought she’d have my balls in one bite. Bea is cursing her bloody head off, I’m telling ya, that woman can give a tongue-lashing that’d make a bullocky’s hair stand on end.

  “But I’m watching the sheila and she is standing there shuddering, rigid, like five hundred volts has zapped her. She turns around towards Bea and the Pommy and gives this little cry that gets stuck in her throat and then she starts to crumple like a tablecloth falling off’ve a table. The bloke catches her, kinda swallows her up in his arms, kinda combs her hair with his Pommy-pale fingers, and Bea stands there with her hands on her hips and looks daggers at us and pitches in with some brimstone heated up specially for us.

  “But what I see, Brian, is the way she is watching the bloke as he strokes the Ashcan woman. That’s when I know. I know she wants him bad and I know he’s been fingering her. I reckon that is the night young Charade got made in a hurry, which explains that wild little she-tiger what young Michael can’t keep his eyes off. All I know is, I pissed off and went shearing for a year right after that bloody party, and when I come back there’s Bea with another nipper.

  “They musta gone at it like dogs, I reckon, Bea and that Pom, the fancy shithead, which is the real reason, if you want my opinion, for why Bea is so flaming mad. It’s because of the way he’s touching that other sheila, Bea’s mad as a hornet, except that she turns it on us. ‘You bloody dickheads,’ she spits at us. ‘You bloody uncivilised drongos! I asked them to come, and you better bloody make them welcome.’

  “Then the Nicholas bloke looks up at us through the Ashcan woman’s hair. ‘My apologies, chaps,’ he says, in his sick-making Pommy voice. ‘I’m sure no harm was intended. If I explain that … well, later, perhaps.’

  “And he does ’is explaining later, deep in the bar, men only and everyone blotto. ‘When she was six,’ he says, ‘her parents were dragged off to the camps, she never saw them again. It does things, I’m sure you understand. Allowances have to be made.’

  “ ‘Struth!’ Billy Stolley says to me. ‘I don’t know about no camps, but that bloke is a pain in the arse.’

  “And I drink to that then, and I drink to that now.

  “But I tell ya, Brian, I still have dreams about that woman. About what I might have done if I ever got close enough to touch her. I dunno about those camps, damned if I know what they got to do with anything. But I’m telling ya, son, that woman was strange. Like I say, some sheilas born asking to be bruised.

  “And Jacky Dobson was right. She got me, her net come down, and I’m a goner.”

  10

  Photographs

  Sometimes, Charade says, I think of the droplets of stopped time in photographs, oceans and oceans of it, in all the albums and wallets and drawers and attics of the world. Lies, all lies.

  Because the camera falsifies everything, doesn’t Koenig agree? There’s the picking and choosing, the arbitrary framing, the whole dishonest bag of photographer’s tricks, that’s for starters; and then there’s the self-consciousness of the photographer — even, or maybe especially, in the candid shot.

  Do we look like that? she asks him — you know, startled, sheepish, dramatic — when no one is watching? It’s all a sort of untruth; a composed — or discomposed — artifice.

  What’s interesting about a photograph, she says, is what isn’t in the picture. She is looking at his children in their silver filigree frame.

  “For instance … Is this Sara and Joey?”

  “Ah … no. That’s Alison and Jonathan, when they were little. Sara and Joey are my housekeeper’s children.”

  Charade digests this information. “No second family then?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “You and your second wife never …?”

  “There’s no second wife.”

  “Oh,” she says, surprised, looking about as though for ghosts. “It’s odd. I’ve had the feeling … They still seem to be around. I somehow thought there was a more recent

  breakup.”

  She studies the photograph again. He is afraid of what it might reveal.

  “Isn’t it ironic,” she says, “the way the future isn’t shown, even though it’s buzzing in front of their eyes?”

  She sees the way havoc, which is just beyond the reach of their soft pink fingertips, has been screened out. Alison was leaning towards it; you could see that tomorrow made horrible leering faces in her dreams. But she was being brave about it. This was a photograph of Alison being brave because she was perfectly well aware — poor little stoic — that her parents did not want gargoyles showing up in the family album. You had to look off-camera, to the left of the frame there, to see her fears flapping their batwings.

  And could Jonathan, Koenig wonders queasily, see the Reverend Moon waiting in the future with open arms?

  “Was it you or their mother,” Charade asks, “who told them to look at the camera?”

  Koenig says irritably, “I remember that day. At my mother-in-law’s house in Toronto. We were happy. It was a good day, all of us were happy.”

  Charade sets the silver frame back on the dresser.

  “Someone took a photograph,” she says, “of that party when my mum turned twenty-one.” She goes to the window and stares out into the night. “Sometimes the emptiness around the edges of a photograph gets to me,” she says. “Winds me a little.”

  She is still and silent for so long that he feels uneasy.

  “Shall I pour our brandies now?” he asks, but she does not stir.

  He lobs another suggestion into the silence: “Tea?”

  He stands behind her and strokes her hair. “It makes me nervous when you’re so quie
t.”

  “What?” Charade turns back to the room. “It must have been a Tuesday,” she says, “when my mother worked as a barmaid at McGillivray’s. Or else it was a Thursday, when she did the washing for Wentworth’s. I was rummaging in the cupboard in her bedroom — looking for a book, actually, one she’d taken from me because I … And I found the shoebox. Stuffed, absolutely stuffed with photographs, crammed with them, black and white, brown and cream, no coloured ones, they were all from earlier than that. Rotting away, some of them, dog-eared … some of them sort of smashed looking — thousands of tiny cracks across the surface. They came spilling out over the floor, whisper whisper, full of secrets …”

  Shivers went through her. This was backstairs stuff, subversive, she could smell it. She riffled through pictures of women in taffeta skirts and high buttoned boots, generations of babies, bearded men standing beside their drays and looking stern and sad. Then she saw what mattered, a group of people gathered on the steps of McGillivray’s, her mother in the middle, young and luminous as twenty-one years; and off to one side, not looking at the camera but at each other, two faces in profile, and right away she knew: her father and the other woman. Verity Ashkenazy, she thought. She hid it and read it every day for weeks. She used to stick it down the front of her shirt and climb the mango tree and sit and stare.

  Every morning a different history came off it like fog and she took deep breaths, gulping down one past after another.

  This was one version.

  Cyclone Anna is drumming on the iron roof of the shack and it seems as if half of Mt Tamborine is dissolving and churning and frothing its way down into the Pacific Ocean. Inside the cavern of sound, Bea sleeps. Her lover, Nicholas Truman, sleeps at her side. Their baby Charade sleeps between them. Around them the forest drips and slurps and sighs, the rain