Blue Skies (16 page)

On Thursday I woke early without thinking, and then remembered. James slept. He had taken to coming home in the early hours of the morning—making someone miserable, I supposed with some pleasure. I wondered if Ben expected me to come. But I didn't want to see him—only his wife. There was no sure way of seeing her alone. I would keep trying to phone her at work to arrange something. I would go out anyway. I got Angelica and myself ready to go. James slept on. He was restless, and I tried to be silent as I moved about the room. As I turned in the doorway, he moaned and waved his arms. I pulled the door shut behind me. As it was early, we went to the beach on the way. The new swing was broken; the seat had parted from the chain on one side, and it dangled earthwards. A ‘Danger Keep Off' sign was propped against a leg.

I delivered Angelica and caught the bus to town.

I went to the museum and the art gallery, turning left from the entrance hall. Long narrow rooms, filled with brightly lit cases of coins and manuscripts, led through to a large central room crammed with stuffed animals. Around the sides was a series of scenes let into the wall. Stuffed native creatures froze warily behind glass windows; a moth-eaten Tasmanian tiger had pride of place, snarling dismally into eternity. On display in a corner was an Aboriginal group—the extinct people— models, not stuffed, an attractive reconstruction, as accurate as could be made, of a family group. They stood in a line on a replica beach. Behind their heads, painted sea merged into painted sky. Scattered handfuls of grey sand and bits of broken shells lent authenticity to the floorboards. A stuffed seagull teetered lopsidedly on a papier-mâché rock off to the side. The family smiled and smiled out upon the world. They had good teeth.

‘They used to have the bones here. You used to be able to come in and look at 'em.'

The words came from behind. I turned. It was the old man from the bus.

‘The bones?'

‘Yeah, bones. Abo bones. Some old woman's, they was. Dug 'em up just after she died. Put 'em in a glass case, they did. Very interesting it was. Very popular. Particularly with us kids.' He chuckled and it turned into a cough, ‘They're still here, you know, or so I've heard. Downstairs. In a cardboard box. You can still look at 'em, but youse've got to have a reason these days. Be a student down at the varsity or something. People are very interested in them old blacks these days, I'm told. Bit bloody late, innit?' He laughed again and choked.

We moved along together, inspecting rows of bottled spiders.

‘Come and look through here,' he said, tugging on my arm.

I followed the flapping raincoat through an archway. We were in a room full of displays with moving lights. He flapped from one to another, pushing buttons and choking with pleasure as rows of multicoloured bulbs revealed the presence of various minerals scattered across the continent.

‘Not bad is it?' he wheezed. ‘Not bloody bad at all. All that flaming buried treasure. If I was a younger man, I'd be off after it like a shot. Prospectin', they calls it. Prospectin'. That's it.' He looked at me. ‘What are youse doing here? I'm early for me appointment at the hospital. I often come in here. Very interesting it is. Upstairs they've got all them convict things. Balls and chains and that. Instruments of torture. Would youse like a cup of tea? There's a place over the road I generally go to before I goes to the hospital for me treatment.'

We drank our tea in the back of a sweet shop. The owner had put a few tables in the space between the counters. The air had a hot sticky candy smell and was almost too thick to breathe. My hair started to cling to my head in matted fairy-floss strands.

I wondered if what the old man had said about the bones was true. He was talking again, saying that he was staying at his sister's place at present. ‘While this treatment's going on. Some new thing they dreamed up. Don't know why I went home in the first place. No sooner got there than they sent me one of their flaming letters saying to come back again.' He slurped into his tea. Coloured jelly-baby scents blocked each nostril. ‘Sitting drinking tea,' he suddenly shouted. ‘Drinking nothing but flaming tea. Time was when things were different. Proper grog artist, I was. A regular flaming piss artist, that was me all right. Famous for it.' He gurgled into his tea, struggling for breath and sending up a fine brownish spray.

I decided to go. I stood up. ‘Goodbye.'

‘Goodbye then. Nice to see youse. Might see you again. I often step into the museum when I'm a bit early. Can't hang about me sister's place all day, can I? Me flaming cough frightens the bloody budgie.'

I looked back and waved from the doorway. His hand flapped back through the gloom.

On the bus I decided that Thursday could go too.

Angelica showed little pleasure at being collected so soon. She grizzled all day; and in the evening I wheeled her down the bumpy track to the doctor's surgery.

‘It's just a tooth coming through. Nothing to worry about,' said the doctor.

‘I hadn't thought of that,' I said. ‘I'm sorry. I needn't have come.'

‘That's all right. Don't hesitate. That's what we're here for,' he said, although there was only one of him. ‘To set mothers' minds at rest. Especially the young ones. These things come with experience. You'll find the next one a quite different proposition. Much easier.' He smiled benignly at the now peaceful Angelica.

‘There's another reason I came as well,' I said, although there hadn't been.

‘And what would that be, my dear?'

I told him. That each day took too long. That I couldn't make time pass at an acceptable speed.

‘I think what you are telling me is that you're depressed?'

‘I suppose that's it.' He was some kind of northern English immigrant, and it was hard to follow what he said.

‘Well, that's nothing to worry about, that's natural too. More common than you might think. We can help you there all right.' He wrote out a prescription and ripped it from his pad. ‘These tablets will make a new woman of you, you'll see. Above all, don't worry about things. You've a fine baby there to be proud of. Don't hesitate to come and see me any time. We're here to look after you, you know. Good evening to you.'

I took the piece of paper and left. Back home I crumpled it up and pushed it into the jar on the mantelpiece.

On Friday morning I called the school. From the man's tone of voice there seemed to be more excitements. Gloria was dead, he said. Suicide, it looked like. The police had been at the school this morning talking to her colleagues. Wondering why. There was no note, it seemed. She had been found by a neighbour lying still and full of broken bones under his water tower. Not quite dead.

‘You're not a relative, are you?' he asked anxiously. ‘Or a close friend or anything? I don't want to upset anybody.'

‘No,' I replied, ‘a private detective.' I dropped the phone.

Next day there was a short paragraph in the paper.

James instructed his mother to say nothing of it, and it wasn't mentioned between us. I felt relieved but neglected.

An inquest was held, but in the absence of a note or any evidence of obvious intention, a verdict of death by misadventure was recorded.

Two days before the funeral Gloria's widowed mother flew over from the mainland; she wore a petalled hat with feathers on it like the Queen Mother. From the airport at the edge of town she hired a taxi to take her out to Ben's place and next morning she took the boy back with her to her exclusive Sydney suburb.

On the day of the funeral it rained. That is as I remember it. There had been no rain that summer, but on this day it came. As it should. James accompanied me to the funeral; he knew his duty when he saw it. The crematorium was a square building, newly made from greasy yellow stone slabs, away from the town and standing alone on a windswept strip of high ground. It was surrounded by green well-tended lawns studded with shiny brass plaques with names and dates on. There were low walls as well, with niches let into them. You could go in one instead of into the lawn, if those who had survived you wished it, or if you had wished it yourself and written it down somewhere.

In the small shoebox chapel James and I hovered together near the back. There were few people there. The deceased's ex-colleagues huddled in a professional bunch to one side, avoiding everybody else's eye. This small congregation of strangers was standing on a carpet of slimy liverish yellow—it matched the building bricks. The coffin was there, centre-front. It was very large. I supposed that there was a lot of room left over inside it.

At the end of a brief service, the coffin lurched forward and disappeared silently through a hole in the wall—shiny purple curtains jerked together across the gap. For a time nobody moved or understood that it was over. A trickle of thin recorded organ music brought everyone to their senses. They fled the building with decent haste. Men, briefly conscious of accident and mortality, supported their women going down the outside steps. The teachers raised umbrellas stiff with disuse over each other's heads. The rain came down in neat straight grey lines.