Charades Read online

  up the little ones, ’specially me. And then after the war …

  “I remember the year Kay wasn’t there, before they sent for me, after they’d gone to Brisbane. Seems like me dad coughed all year, that whole year, coughed his guts up. This stuff, this phlegm, would come up. That’s the war, he’d say. I’m getting it out of my system. In the end I had to wash him and all, he hated that, and hold a bottle, you know, for his pee.

  “It’s funny, can’t remember when my mum shot through. Can’t even remember my mum. Everyone said she was a bad one, a floozy, I reckon I took after her. I reckon I would’ve liked her. Well, my dad was a TPI after the war, he didn’t last long. Got his TPI badge somewhere, I’ll give that to you, Charade, when I’m gone. My dad was one of the Rats of Tobruk, got that badge somewhere too. He was a hero. But his lungs gave out or something, he coughed himself away.

  “Kay’s mum and dad came down from Brisbane for the funeral and took me back. We weren’t any kind of relation but I reckon they felt they ought to, or maybe Kay missed me. And yeah, Grandma Llewellyn, she stayed on in Melbourne, I reckon she would’ve taken me in but they thought she was too old to cope. With me, I mean. I was what people called a handful.” She shrugs. “Or maybe Kay asked them, I don’t know.

  “But I reckon I got a bit of my mum’s blood in my veins, Charade. ‘A bad lot’ people said about her, and about me too. So what? I said. I was always going off in the bush with boys, running away. Struth, what can you do if it’s in your blood? Took them a long time to give up on me, though. They couldn’t help themselves when souls were around to be saved, it was an itch they had, the way other blokes go for beer. They were holy rollers, don’t get that wrong, they were okay and I reckon I loved them. But all that praying and stuff, it didn’t agree with my constitution. I’m not cut out for it, like. You know, there was a magnet inside me or something, and something pulling. It was like there was this thing inside me always knew I had to go bush and have men and kids, lots of both. I reckon I’ve had a good life, Charade.

  “But Kay. Blimey. She must’ve been born on a Sunday, between the first and second hymn, she had Bible-milk in her highchair. Still, I reckon it didn’t agree with her either, in the long run, holy rolling. Maybe that’s why she went gallivanting off. I just ran off to the bush, but she ran off to the world and kept on running.

  “Praying. I tell you, they were barmy about it. Start of the day, middle of the day, end of the day. You couldn’t sit down to eat or get up from the table or set foot in the door or try to leave without somebody telling you to close your eyes for a word of prayer. There were daily mercies and travelling mercies and eventide mercies, we prayed for them all, we gave thanks for them all, amen. Mind you, back then, even Kay prayed like mad, even I had a go, we were always dragging God around like a swag on our backs, we always had Him tagging along. I reckon Him and me hit it off all right, we come to an understanding. Listen, God, I said to him, you give me a bit more rope, I won’t say a word about my dad and the war and all that.”

  Bea crosses herself, wrong way again. “That’s for my dad,” she says. “He was a Catholic, not the fancy kind, he never went to church. Grandma Llewellyn used to be one, back when, till the Gospel Hall got her and she switched. Just the same, I saw her cross herself once or twice, when she didn’t think anyone was watching.”

  No one, not one, not anyone watched, not one person was watching on a certain perfect day well remembered by Bea — though it must always be kept in mind that the process of recollection is imperfect at best — a certain perfect day that slipped on its axis, spun, lurched, skidded to a fault.

  “We were maybe thirteen or fourteen,” Bea says.

  “Funny thing, I always thought Kay knew nothing, I always thought I’d have to watch out for her, I couldn’t believe how dumb she was. Like men, for instance. I always knew what to do about men, I came out of my mother knowing, I reckon my mother slipped me the knowhow in her third or fourth month. Before I even started school, old men down by the railroad tracks would give me sixpence for a cuddle. I used to tell Kay, I could make her eyes go round as two-shilling pieces, I liked to shock her. Little old ladies liked Kay in her little smocked dresses; and little old men liked me. I thought Kay’d turn out simple, she was that naive.

  “There was this day …

  “See, I could do things with my eyes, sometimes it took longer than others. What I used to do was toss out lines … like philodendrons, sort of, like lawyer-cane. I used to spin them out of my eyes like a spider, I’d make gold-streaked leaves, and white-streaked ones, and just plain dark green, and they’d go sailing out like feelers and wrap themselves wherever I wanted. I used to sit at my desk and just about cover Mr Carlyle with my vines, he looked like a moon in the rainforest with that pale Pommy face, he never could go brown, you know how it is with Pommies, poor blokes. I s’pose, now I come to think of it, it’s on account of him I fell for Nicholas later. He was my dry run, you might say.

  “He was my Scholarship teacher, Mr Carlyle, and it took me forever to reel him in. Dunno why I wanted to do it so much, I never could stand Poms with their pasty skin and especially the way they talk. But Mr Carlyle’s talk had gone soft at the edges, I reckon it warmed up, got riper, the way a green mango does you know, if it lies in the grass long enough. Like bananas when the possums have been at them. I mean, you could tell he was a Pom all right, but he was trying, he didn’t sound so poncy any more, you had to feel sorry that the sun didn’t like him and never would.

  “Maybe it was because he was my grade eight teacher, my last teacher, because I knew I’d never pass the Scholarship, I knew they’d never let Bea Ryan inside a high school, not that I bloody wanted to. And there was this other thing, Charade. University men, teachers and those types, the men who look inside their own heads all the time like they’ve got bookshelves in there, it scares them, someone like me. See, I was beautiful back then, Charade, no sense pretending I didn’t know it. I could make any ditch digger trip over his prick and give a wolf whistle. So that didn’t even count, it was that easy. What I liked though, was the way a bloke like Mr Carlyle would look and look away quick.

  “I dunno, I reckon it didn’t seem right to him that someone like me looked the way I used to look. It scared him. Like it would, maybe, when the Queen drove around Brisbane waving from that fancy car without a roof; if she’d stuck out her tongue instead of waving; like that. Mr Carlyle showed me this painting once, in one of his arty books, of this silly bloody woman with no clothes on and fat little boy angels flying around her. Reminds me of you, Bea, he said. He would’ve felt better if I was pasted down on that page, I reckon, where I was good and safe. Men like that, there’s this big ditch you’ve got to pull them across before they’ll touch you, they’re dead scared they’re gonna fall into something they’ll never get out of.

  “Well I dunno, I reckon it’s my bad blood, Charade. I loved to pull them across that ditch. It was maybe my favourite thing.

  “So maybe that’s what it was with Mr Carlyle.

  “Or maybe it was his eyes, cow’s eyes, too big for his face, I guess he missed something back there in England, he used to sit at his table and stare out the window and dream about it, while I wound miles of my philodendron leaves round his neck and yanked him in.

  “Or maybe, yeah, that’s what it was, it was his hands, his fingernails really. I’d never seen a man with fingernails like that. I mean, clean. They were like little white pieces of moon, they were the most beautiful fingernails I’d seen. Up till then, I always thought men’s fingernails were black, I thought that was their natural colour. I used to close my eyes and think about Mr Carlyle’s hands, I used to imagine them trailing down my face and over my breasts. (I had breasts already by grade six, the girls weren’t allowed to play with me, their mothers figured it was my bad blood coming out. And the men teachers were scared to look.) So I used to spin miles of leaves, I used to spin tree orc
hids, long trailers of them, and let them settle round Mr Carlyle’s wrists, and I’d pull and pull.

  “Finally, one day, I knew I had him, I knew I could start to reel him in. It was one of those hot wet days when everyone is slithering into sleep and Mr Carlyle is having trouble with his eyes. His lids feel like lead, I can tell, so I give a little yank on my lines. His eyes are practically closed, he’s fighting to keep these two slits from locking shut, he’s ordering them to march up and down the desks while we scribble away at some fool bloody test or other. And then it happens. I’ve just got that second when the eyeslits go by me, so I stretch my cat stretch, and I purr and wait. His eyes go by, and come back. I can tell when I’ve got a catch.

  “Lunch time,” Bea says dreamily. “Lunch time comes …”

  Bea cat-stretches and gathers up her exercise book and her pens and stuffs them languidly under her desk top. She knows Mr Carlyle is watching. She rests her chin in her hands and gazes out the window and thinks of the pearl-white shells at the tips of his fingers. If you held his hand up to the light, she thinks, you could see right through the nails. It is half embarrassing, really; so peculiar, so not-like-ordinary-boys, so unnatural, that it makes you desperate with excitement to run your tongue over those fingertips. To see if they are real, to see if they will stay, to see if you will be the same person after you have licked them one by one. It is as though you have stumbled on an angel, pale and shining as butter, sitting quietly on a bench outside the pub. It is a miracle.

  All the stragglers have left the room, even poor mad Ethel with her thick bottle glasses, who has wandered back in twice, pawing through the rummage of her desk for a lost orange. Bea stretches and sighs heavily. Mr Carlyle sits at his desk, watching her. So many green knots, so many tangles of creeper, so many orchids opening themselves to the heat in the room, that Bea wonders if either of them will be able to move.

  At first, when he speaks, she thinks it is the ceiling fan beginning to shake its blades — there’s a sluggish rattling sound, low and breathy. She raises her heavy lids, a question.

  “What are you?” he asks. “A witch?”

  A smile begins in the soles of her feet and spreads and rises. She is a witch, a cat, a mote of sunlight. She does not look back as she leaves the room and drifts downstairs and skirts the rim of the soccer field and walks all the way from Wilston school to halfway home where there’s an acre of bush and she disappears into uncut scrub.

  She knows he will follow and he does — for part of the way. But there’s that ditch, the one that gives him nightmares. And it takes one month, two months, school is over, the Christmas holidays are over, before she finally pulls him across the ditch, because it’s Finsbury Park, and Kay is still a little girl who is still at Wilston school, who lives inside grade eight. On a hot February day, Kay is sitting in a mango tree in Finsbury Park with a book, that’s how stupid Kay is. And Bea is not thinking about Kay. Bea has hung around the shop where Mr Carlyle buys his tobacco, she has leaned on the counter and stretched like a cat and he has followed her out of the shop all the way to Finsbury Park.

  What she feels as he lowers himself onto her is what the magnet feels when iron filings approach. Fistfuls of paspalum and wild couch anchor her, her body bucks at the sun, she is crying out.

  And then mayhem. A body hurled, someone pummelling, Kay yelling: “Bea! Bea! Mr Carlyle, what are you doing? Oh Bea! Mr Carlyle! Please stop!”

  “Jesus!” Bea screams. “You idiot, Kay! You bloody idiot, you flaming bloody retard!”

  Kay is huge-eyed and still with shock. She opens her mouth but is mute.

  Oh, and Mr Carlyle! Bea sees his beautiful bouncing pink dick shrivel up and cringe like a worm. She wants to cry, she wants to scream, she starts to laugh. Great gobs of laughter gust up like smoke rings from her lips. “Oh Kay,” she splutters. “Oh Kay, you stupid ninny.”

  A switch flicks within Kay. She turns and walks away with silent dignity, past the lantana clump, past the stringybarks, and then she runs. Her footfalls reach them like scatter-shot.

  Mr Carlyle has his head in his hands. Grief is rising from him like a fog. Bea knows its smell and places a hand on his knee. He flinches violently. “Not Katherine,” he says, staring at her with horror. “Of all possible people. Not Katherine, our little scholar, our shining light.”

  “So then,” Bea says, squeezing a roll of scone dough in her palms, “I knew Kay had something I didn’t understand. I knew she was stupid, and I knew she wasn’t too. Like you, Charade. There’s something in you that scares me, I don’t know where it comes from. Well, it comes from Nicholas, he had it too, but it’s different in a woman. It’s like a man with white fingernails, it’s not something I understand.”

  “Did my father have white fingernails?” Charade asks, breathless.

  “Yeah,” Bea snaps. “And white fingernails are pretty bloody useless when it comes time to chop wood or feed chooks or make scones.” And she slams the oven door shut, the subject closed — though Charade sees she is smiling and biting on her lips. Charade expects her laughter to rise like scone

  dough.

  “You know,” Charade tells Koenig. “I’ve thought and thought, and I don’t understand where one life ends and another begins. I don’t understand time at all. When I found Aunt Kay (she was lost you know for more than twenty years, Mum didn’t know where she was) when I found the house outside Toronto and rang her doorbell and she opened it and stared at me that way she has … she looked, actually, as though she had gone into shock … do you know what I thought?

  “Do you know what thought came whole into my head, and almost jumped out of my lips?

  “I nearly said: ‘Kay, it’s just Mr Carlyle and me, you stupid ninny.’ ”

  12

  On Obsession and

  the Uncertainty Principle

  “It’s dark,” Charade says nervously. “Where are we?” She gropes across runnels of blanket … not blanket, it seems; something softer, cushiony, something that limits. She feels for his pillow but cannot reach it. “I can’t move, I feel cramped. Where are you?”

  “Here,” Koenig says. “Here. You shouldn’t have come — I’m working. But I’m glad you did.”

  “I can’t seem to move.” She is fingering a ridge that runs down her left side: a seam? a zipper? the inside edge of a dream? She is feeling for clues, not panicky yet, breathing deeply, in, two, three, and out, two, three. “I can’t see a thing. Where are you?”

  “Here.”

  “I can’t move.” I’m pre-moth, she thinks. Larval. Her arms feel useless as unborn wings. A thought presents itself: this could be a dream of death, or death itself, the last prescient moment. She takes a frantic gulp of air, cries out, thrashes at the sides of her cocoon.

  “Shh,” he whispers. “Shh. We’ll have the janitors rushing in.”

  “I can’t move!”

  “Keep still.” He gropes for her mouth, puts his hand over it, gently. “I can’t find the zipper,” he whispers. “Wait. I think — Got it.”

  The sleeping bag shucks itself off, Charade lifts her arms and holds him. “Where are we?”

  “Building 6. My office. You don’t remember? I keep the sleeping bag here for all-nighters. I lose track when I’m working on something. I’m glad you found it. Did you get some sleep?”

  Charade shakes her head, squeezes her eyes shut and rubs them. “I felt so desolate,” she says, remembering, “when you weren’t at the apartment.” She sees only darkness on darkness, black lines branching like an intricate subway system, spectral capillaries. She cannot remember how she got here.

  “I’m glad you managed to get in.” Nevertheless he is puzzled.

  She says bemused. “I’ve never been able to find my way around MIT.”

  “You certainly startled me,” he says.

  “You work in the dark?”

  “No. I mu
st have dozed off. The janitor must have turned out the light.”

  “It’s odd,” Charade says, “but now that my eyes are adjusting, I feel as though we’ve spent the night here before. But we haven’t, have we? Isn’t this the first time?”

  “You’re very forgetful,” he says. “You’re a bit weird like that. Sometimes you make me wonder whether you even … Of course we’ve done it before, we’ve often done it. But you startle me every time. I can never figure out how you get in.”

  “Well …” she says, making an effort to remember. “It’s so far back, that first time I met you, that I can’t quite …”

  “I know. I’ve been trying to pin down when that was. I can’t remember not knowing you. It was before March break, wasn’t it? Before reading week even.”

  Charade laughs. “Before reading week! I should certainly say so! It was back in the fall term. I came here in the fall. Actually, if we’re going to be really precise about this, it was late summer, late August.”

  That’s right, he thinks with a shock. It was before the fall, and classes were just beginning.

  Charade huddles against the wall, feels around for the sleeping bag, and pulls it up against her. “It’s cold in here.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Well, old buildings. Here, let’s … we can both fit inside it …” He cocoons them together, snakes the zipper along its tracks, slides a hand between her legs. “Isn’t that better?”

  Parthenogenesis, no, that wouldn’t be the word, he thinks. Is there a word for it? — the ability to fit sexual needs into the cracks of thought and will, without undue hindrance to the obsession in hand.

  These seemed to be his stages: intense thought, intense fatigue, then the euphoria: a sort of white-out, the mathematics moving toward the new shore at full speed like a crested wave. Then the girl. That is the point when she appears. Then the sexual frenzy, then breakthrough. That would come next.