Charades (8 page)

“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 quiet.”

“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
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.