Charades Read online

  thunders.

  Something screeches — a scrub turkey, or a larger creature, malevolent — and Bea starts awake. At the window she sees the face that is always there. It is pale, pale as a ghost gum, with enormous deepset dark eyes and long black hair that streams into the rain and the trees. There is no body. Just a head floating on ribbons of lightning and rain.

  Bea is not afraid. There is nothing beneath the sun or the moon, nothing that comes on the wings of a cyclone, that can frighten Bea. She pads barefooted to the window and throws open the casement.

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  Verity says nothing at all, just holds out her pleading arms, and makes rain with her eyes, fierce rain, that batters through the gullies of Bea’s thought.

  “You’re not getting Nicholas,” Bea says. “You were killing him. You were sucking him dry. He was exhausted.”

  The wind howls through Verity’s mouth. The lightning spits. “I have nothing, nothing, nothing,” she moans.

  “Rubbish!” Bea shouts. “You have every man you meet turning sick with want, you make them dream about you, you want them grovelling. Want, but don’t touch! that’s what you tell them. You’ve got money, you’ve got brains, you’ve got this fragile bruised look which I personally find pathetic, which makes me sick, if you want to know the truth, but which seems to drive most people crazy. You’ve got this goddamn gold-embroidered tragic bloody history that you want us all to pay for, pay for, pay for!”

  She slams the window shut and climbs back into bed. She props herself on her pillow and watches her baby and her lover who is tossing in his sleep. At the window Verity is licking her lips and drinking rain.

  Nicholas grows paler and paler, colder.

  In the morning when Bea wakes he has all but disappeared, all but the hand that is resting between her thighs. Before she can squeeze her legs together it has fallen away. She watches it, pale and slick and blue-veined, slither wetly between the sheets.

  She got him, Bea growls on thunderstorm nights. That bitch at the window got him. She swallowed him up.

  This was another 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, Nicholas sleeps. His lover, Bea Ryan, the Slut of the Tamborine Mountain, sleeps at his side. Around them the forest drips and slurps and sighs, the rain thunders.

  Nicholas dreams of England, of boarding school, of the richly embroidered past.

  In his dream he is walking in the grounds of the grammar school in Eastbourne. Sounds of silverware and afternoon tea chime softly in the air behind; there is a soft smell of libraries and books. And then bam! he is falling down the rabbit hole of his life, falling, falling, falling, and climbing out in a pocket of wet forest on the underside of the world. He is in bed with a woman who is as full of heat as the sun, a warm and slatternly woman, a total stranger.

  Bea, he says to himself. Bea. Just Bea. Just be.

  Out in the rainforest, from up in the tangle of tree ferns, the will-o’-the-wisp calls again. At first he sees only a piece of phosphorescence, bluish fire licking a tree trunk, a radioactive orchid. Then there is the pale gold face emitting light and the eyes that are the absence of light (pure pure darkness) and the naked glowing body. Help me, she whispers. Help me. And he goes to meet her with open arms.

  She shines against the treetops, the cyclonic rain fizzes and hisses around her, she cannot be reached. He climbs. Steam rises off him. He is mad with desire, wet through. Help me, she says, I can’t get free.

  What is this? he asks, hacking, wrenching, untangling, pulling, cutting. He can’t tell her hair from the creepers, there is miles of growth, a rainforest full, it goes back and back to the edge of the forest, the beginning of time. My God, he says, what is this?

  It’s my past, she sobs. I can’t get free.

  She is being pulled away from him by the hair, she gasps with pain. First her golden hips slide away through his arms, then her thighs.

  I won’t let you go, he vows. I won’t.

  Already her voice is an echo, fainter than bellbirds: You’ll have to come with me, with me, with me.

  But what about Bea? he calls. I can’t just leave Bea …

  You could leave a baby behind, that’s fair. That’s fair, that’s fair, that’s fair, the echoes call.

  Then Nicholas sees his daughter, the changeling child in the tree ferns, the starling, the glowling, caught in the tangle of creepers.

  Yes, he agrees, that’s fair.

  What kind of charade is this? asks Bea in amazement, staring at the space where Nicholas was, where the baby is.

  That is Charade’s favourite version of the origin of herself, immaculate confection and changeling extraordinaire, bluestocking, semi-orphan, second brat of the Slut of the Mountain; but she has others, one for each day of the week, one for matins and one for evensong, one for before exams and one for the long summer holidays that stretch across December and January, one for cyclone weather, one to tell the bone man down by the curtain fig when the sun is hotter than the black stump that is back of beyond in Alice Springs.

  And she has Bea’s version, which came briefly and abruptly, one day when Charade was in an experimental mood and the suspense was too much for her to handle.

  This was what she did. She hid the photograph in amongst the peas in the chipped enamel basin. Bea sat on the front steps with a colander between her spread knees, Charade hid under the verandah, waiting. Pock, pock: there was the soft sound of the peas being burst open and stripped, then the muted clatter of green pellets hitting the dish. Pock, pock, clatter; pock, pock, clatter; pock, pock, clatter.

  Suddenly: silence.

  Charade, crouching in cobwebs and dust in the crawl space, held herself perfectly still, her eyes on her mother’s face. Ten seconds, twenty seconds. Charade’s muscles screamed. Bea stared into the basin of unshelled peas.

  There was nothing on Bea’s face that Charade could read: not shock, not grief, not anger. Just stillness, like someone waiting for a daydream to lift.

  Thirty seconds.

  Charade’s knees were tucked up under her chin. She thought that she might never be able to unlock her legs, she could feel pain like needles along her calves and behind her knees. She kept her eyes on her mother’s face.

  “Charade,” Bea said. “Come on out of there.”

  A bluff, Charade told herself, and did not move.

  “What is it you want to know?” Bea asked.

  Everything, Charade thought. Everything.

  “A photograph,” Bea said, “is no more use than a snakeskin after the snake has crawled out.”

  “But is it my father and Verity Ashkenazy?” demanded Charade, crawling out from the dust.

  “Them two kids?” Bea shrugged. “Yes and no. It doesn’t have his smell, her smell, it doesn’t tell you anything at all.” She began to laugh. She stood up on the steps and held the colander of peas high over her head. “We were all mad,” she said. “He was mad, she was mad, Kay was mad, and I was mad. We were all completely bonkers.” She laughed again and whirled the colander like a discus and sent it flying across dusty gerberas and hibiscus clumps into the passionfruit vine. The peas trailed it like a dotted green line.

  11

  On Bea-particles and

  the Relativity of Scone Making

  “When you disappear,” Charade asks Koenig, “where do you go?”

  “Oh, here and there,” he says vaguely “Conferences.”

  “Six nights. You were gone six nights without a word.”

  He frowns. Hadn’t he told her? Perhaps not. When the compulsion strikes, he simply goes. “It was reading week,” he says, as though this explained everything.

  “You go to Toronto, don’t
you?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You see,” she says, “I understand about that. The way you worry about your ex-wife. It’s the way Nicholas was about Verity. Do you see your son and daughter too?”

  “Not my son,” he says, the knife turning inside.

  “Sometimes,” Charade says dreamily, “I pretend Nicholas does that too. That he, you know, keeps tabs on me. Sometimes I feel absolutely certain that he’s walking just behind me and that if I turned suddenly … but of course I don’t turn because that wouldn’t be fair.”

  A long silence drifts across them. They fall asleep in each other’s arms. Koenig dreams he is at La Guardia airport and his son is just ahead of him, turning a corner. Koenig quickens his step, he breaks into a run. Charade dreams that someone is about to tap her on the shoulder. They both cry out, waking, reaching for each other.

  “Say something,” Koenig says urgently. “Tell me another story. Tell me about your mother.”

  “All right,” Charade says. “I was always trying to make her talk about Nicholas and Verity, but I had to trick her, I had to get to them via Aunt Kay, I had to …”

  “Kay and me,” Bea says. “We were peas in a pod to start with, and then we were chalk and cheese. Never figured each other out and couldn’t do a thing apart. Then one day we just didn’t have anything in common. Well, those two came between us, that’s what did it. That was the beginning of the end.”

  “What two?”

  Bea is rolling scone dough, her wrists flip and snap. Ritual is important: the forward roll, vehement, involving shoulders; the pause, the lift, the backward arc; and the dough fanning out like a flood plain from the confluence of Bea’s thighs and the table.

  “What two?” Charade persists.

  Bea frowns, pulls in all the dimples and valleys of Bea-flesh for an instant, tightens some knot of muscle-nerve-sinew in the top of her head.

  “What two?”

  “Your father and that Ashkenazy woman.”

  “See …” Absentmindedly Charade trails her fingers down Koenig’s body. “A moment like that, it felt like D-Day. If I could just make her say it. It felt like chipping away at some great … some vast mountain of rubble.

  “Your father and the Ashkenazy woman. Tap, tap: they were inside there somewhere, under the rubble, still faintly alive, still sending out signals, still waiting to be dug out.

  “Seems like I spent half my childhood thinking up ways to catch Mum out. I used to keep score, I used to … I would ask her about Aunt Kay, it was bait, it was my decoy, because all the stories led back to Nicholas and to Verity Ashkenazy. And so Aunt Kay … but how can I explain Aunt Kay?”

  “Isn’t this where we came in?”

  “What?”

  Koenig closes his eyes. In the beginning was the hologram, then the girl in his bedroom and … “Something about your Aunt Kay, that’s where you began. Katherine to me, you said. It seems ages, weeks, since you mentioned her.”

  “Yes, well.” She frowns. “You’re the one who’s been away.”

  Something has been evoked that bothers her. She seems to remember a need for caution. She slides away from his arms and huddles in his armchair again.

  “Aunt Kay …” she says, and he has to wait out another lengthy silence. If he moves when she is in these suspended states, she may take fright and leave. He waits.

  “What I’m doing here, you know,” she says, “is stalling … hanging on to you as though … and talking, talking … Of course I’ll have to go back eventually —”

  “Go back?” He has a sudden queasy fantasy of a green twister sucking her into mathematical blips, and then darkness. Loss swamps him and he half stumbles across the room and draws her against himself, tongue and hands convulsive, geographies interlocking. “Ahh, thank God, you’re so …” His mouth closes hungrily over hers. Not an abstract flavour, not a hint of the dry burn of mathematics or theory, which are, no question about it, acquired tastes. Matter, he thinks with enormous relief. Sweet vulgar heavy Newtonian mass. Substance.

  “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  “Oh nothing,” he says, relaxing a little, but holding her so that her lips are against the crook of his neck, her cheek on his shoulder. “I just had a silly … a fleeting nightmare.” He strokes her hair. “It’s nothing.” The irony of this strikes him and he laughs. “Or rather, it’s not nothing. Luckily. It’s

  matter.”

  “Ah,” she says. “Matter. One of our most persistent illusions, so you told me. Koenig …?”

  “Mmm?”

  “These … these nights … We’re just, you know it’s only …”

  “Yes, yes.” He doesn’t want to know what it is.

  “Eventually I’ll have to go home. I’m just stalling, you know, staving off the … The truth is, I can’t bear to think I’ve checked out the last clue and not found him. Nicholas, I mean. My father. That’s why in Toronto I was afraid —”

  “Afraid in Toronto.” He laughs a little, letting her glide out of his arms and hunch up in his chair again. Images come to him: of swept curbs and decorum, of tea and buttered shortbread, of clean subways, safe streets, tacit curfews.

  “Aunt Kay … Katherine … lives outside of Toronto. Sort of nowhere, really, in the middle of woods and on a lake. But she

  was in Toronto when she saw Nicholas again. Or thought

  she saw.”

  “Saw your father?”

  “Well, thought she saw …” He watches an uneasy laugh pulse up like alpha rays. “With Aunt Kay it’s difficult to … Now I know what it’s like, for her and Mum.” Getting queasy at certain names. Picking a path through memories that might blow up in the face. “I used to watch how Mum …”

  She used to watch, she watched, she was watching,

  past tense imperfect,

  she was watching the curvature of time.

  It’s now, Charade, and then; it’s only now and then; sing a song of Einstein, a perfect circle full of time. She watches, she does watch, she is watching …

  Charade watches everything: the way Siddie, her older brother, stiffens at certain bird calls, the ones that come McGillivray- throated, rising from the lips of the publican’s daughter; the way spittle hangs in bright stalactites on the slack chin of Em, sweet Em, the vacant third-born, her younger sister; the way Michael Donovan rubs one bare foot against the other, flylike, when he comes for his dad. But most of all, she studies her mother. What fascinates her is this: there are three strings which can pull her mother’s easy body to sudden tautness.

  They are making scones together, Charade and Bea, scones that will swell thickly and stickily into the little pinched stomachs of the Bea-lings, that happy-go-lucky multi-fathered Ryan tribe. Bea makes the plain and solid kind of scone: flour and lard, a few raisins, a pinch of soda, a half-cup of milk. Flour dusts her arms, her hair, and hangs above her, shot through with the morning sun. Em, threading buttons to keep the littlest ones amused, laughs with excitement to see the way gold rides through the room on white scone-smoke.

  Charade plumps dough into a square for cutting and says carefully: “Are these as good as the scones Aunt Kay’s grandma used to make?”

  And there it is: a quick tightening of Bea’s fingers on the ends of the rolling pin; a ripple that crosses her cheekbones and moves on down through the beads of sweat on her breasts where they rise like oven-ready dough from her shift. It crosses her large and languid thighs and buttocks so that they suck themselves in and shiver slightly — the way horses’ flanks do to shake off flies. Charade watches the calf muscles hum like telegraph wires, the toes clench in their worn sandals, the current moving on to the floor where she sees it dispersing itself in points of light across the cheap linoleum.

  “What would you know,” grumbles Bea, “about Grandma Llewellyn’s scones?”

  “You to
ld me.” Charade’s innocent eyes go wide. “You said they were the best ever made in Australia.”

  “Well, so they were.” Bea crosses herself with a floury hand. Bits of religion cling to Bea here and there like fluff from a patchwork quilt.

  “Wrong way, Mum.”

  “What?”

  “You did it wrong. It’s this way, see, forehead to belly button, left to right.” She ducks from a floury slap. “Why do you always do that when you talk about Aunt Kay’s grandma?”

  “Because.” Bea thumps away at the dough.

  “Because why?”

  “Because she was grandma to everyone, me included, God rest ’er soul. Nobody that knew her didn’t love her.”

  “And you and Kay?”

  “Me and Kay, back then, we were like two peas in a pod. Seven years, eight was it? we were sisters in the self-same house.” She sighs and looks into the middle distance. “But Kay,” she says, “she was a gallivanter, right from the start. And me, I’m happy stuck in mud. Always gallivanting round, Kay was, round the countryside, round the world. She could be in Timbuctoo now. Prob’ly is, for all I know.”

  “Why’d she gallivant around?”

  “I dunno. Started, I reckon, when her family lit out for Brisbane. Nah. Before that, when we were kids in Melbourne. That was before we were sisters, we were just kids who lived near Ringwood station. Let’s hide on a train, she’d say. Let’s go to the Dandenongs. We thought the Dandenongs were the edge of the world. Nah, I’d say, let’s play in the paddock and roll in the buttercup patch.

  “Back then,” Bea laughs, “I was boss. I was older. What I said went.” She laughs again. “We were both born the same year, me in January, her in November, but I’ve always been years and years older.”

  She wipes the back of a floury arm across her face, breathes deep. “Funny thing, I think about Kay, I always smell grass and the buttercups.

  “Melbourne,” she says. “I reckon that’s mostly what I remember. The railway line and Ringwood station and the paddock behind our two houses and the buttercup patch.” She squeezes her eyes tight shut, concentrates. “And the war and black paint on the windows and no fathers but all those other men, Yanks, hanging round watching the girls, and some of them feeling