Clowns At Midnight (10 page)

Finally, I broached the subject of the Risis.

‘Len, I’m slowly getting to know the area. I met the Risis the other night, and some of their friends.’

‘They’re good people. Good neighbours.’

‘I can see that. I went over for dinner on Saturday, had a great time. Tasted my first Sardinian cooking.’

‘Sardinian? They’re Italian. That right, May?’

‘That’s right, Len.’

‘Puzzled me too,’ I said, trying to sound off-handed about it. ‘Sardinia’s part of Italy apparently.’

Len scratched his head. ‘Yeah? Well, there you go. They’ve been here forever. Carlo’s folks moved here in the fifties. Lots of Italians came in then. Guess the Risis and the Bittis fitted in so well nobody remembers what it was like before. Good people. Good neighbours.’

‘They certainly made me feel welcome.’

‘May and me have been out there with Laura and the boys a few times, but that was what?—must be seven, eight years ago. There’s the cattle to look after, see. They don’t care what day of the week it is.’

‘Keeps you busy.’

‘Darn right.’

‘You ever see their maze, Len?’

‘Sure. Queer thing, if you ask me. They reckon it was already there, but I don’t see it myself. My family’s been here since the twenties. They would’ve mentioned it.’

I was glad Len had voiced his doubts. I had the feeling they wouldn’t have taken such scepticism from me. It would have been criticising the neighbours.

‘Know anyone I can ask about it? There might be a newspaper piece in it.’

‘Right. Beth said you were a journo. Sorry, Dave. I get the sense Carlo wants it kept quiet.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘So tell me about you two. How’d you end up here?’

And that’s the way it went; the best way right then, hearing about lives and choices, crops and herds, the day to day getting by, and how most years it was dry and hot like this, but how they could remember floodwater nearly touching the blades of the windmill down by Edenville Road. They took me back and forth in time, gave me more tea and scones than anyone could reasonably want in a day, and let me go on my way around 11:30 with good wishes and reminders not to be a stranger.

In less than three minutes I was back at Starbreak Fell, dealing with the gate and starting up the hill.

I didn’t relish returning to the house. With all that had happened, I needed to pull back, to anchor myself in the sort of reality that had marked my arrival at Starbreak Fell a week ago.

Better yet, I needed to see the tower.

I stopped the car at the high-point of the hill, stepped out into the glare and headed up the slope towards the forest line, to where the grey stone structure stood in its glade.

Had
stood. It was hard to be sure of anything now. There was the usual sense of dreaminess to the day, the usual trickery of heat and distances, the same far-off signatures of bushfire plumes against the ranges. Everything was so still. Cicadas drummed in the treetops, but always back there somewhere, always beyond a nearer silence in this part of the forest, as if the coolness of the tower’s stones had reached out to say: shhh, not yet, not yet, here it is still night. Here it is still the black page.

I stood looking out at the land, trying to lock in real things to counter that feeling, mundane things like the cattle, most tucked in under trees out of the heat, some still mindlessly grazing, brains toasting in their skulls. I located distant houses, found Len Catley’s place up by the intersection, somewhere I’d just now been, sitting behind its screen doors, breathing in its rooms.

It truly was a marvellous view, but the heat softened the edges, blurred them into mirages. Len Catley’s place: unreal. His rumbling fridge and chipped coffee mugs: just more illusion. His old clock, totally incredible, making its metronome beat while the ranges burned, calibrating the plumes and spirals: now here, now here.

It was too hot to stand there long. I hurried the last twenty metres, relished the relief of sheltering gums and softened light, but didn’t stop. I pressed on, peering through the forest to where I calculated the tower would be. Sure enough, it rose through the gloaming ahead, its dark form unmistakable.

I kept watching it, determined not to let it slip away, laughing at how important this had become. Madame had scared me badly. The shattered bottle-trees and the new TT images had. Now the days themselves seemed too closely replicated, perfect in their way but all flawed somehow, twisted a little out of true. I wouldn’t lose the tower.

And there it was, this time without the southerly to lend added drama to its presence. It rose up in its glade, lifeless and powerful, the hard stones resisting the heat but losing, losing. I pressed my hands against them, loving their roughness, and looked up at the crest. No windows, nothing. Sightless, blind, though for the first time I wondered if there might be some kind of opening at the summit. There was no turret, no battlements, just what seemed to be a flattened top, but there could be a parapet, a walled rim, and it would be easy enough to build angled ventilators and—what were they called?—luminators? skylights?—positioned to keep out the rain.

How could I check something like that? Climbing adjacent gums was out of the question; they were too smooth, too sparsely branched. A fly-over would do it, certainly, using a light aircraft or helicopter, but that seemed an expensive and unlikely solution somehow. Maybe a cherry-picker was the answer, like they used to change street-lights, repair power lines and rescue cats from trees.

For now I was just glad to lean against the hard granite, having it real and unchanged. The Scarecrow Cross would be on the other side, close by the door, but I was ready for it this time. After my night with Madame Sew, after dealing with her this morning, I was back on the flight deck, sufficiently in control. The tower was real, that was the main thing. That made everything okay.

With one hand on the stones, I began circling the tower. Would the cross still be there?

It was. Thank God it was. But there was something draped on it. Not clothes, though I instantly registered ‘tatters’ and prepared for quarter-clown and worse. Someone had draped a flower chain over the cross-tree, a simple garland of the local purple and yellow wildflowers looped across it like a serpent.

My clown-fear held, waiting to resolve or fall away. One moment I saw an adorned crucifix, the next a figure wearing a lei or festive garland. It was like one of those image-shifting 3D toys in breakfast cereal boxes; the picture kept changing from scarecrow to decorated cross and back again.

Then I saw it. Tucked into a curve of the flower chain where it crossed the main post was an upright sprig of gumnuts. I thought immediately of the sprigs in the mailboxes, the Risis’ and my own. This was an extension—a completion—of that, but only added to the impasse: scarecrow and cross, scarecrow and cross.

The sound of laughter saved me. From across the glade, from beyond the screen of trees where the glade ended on the northern side, came the unmistakable sound of laughter.

A single glance in that direction and I was free. Whoever had brought the flowers and the gumnut sprig were still close by. I felt a rush of relief mingled with delight. There was more in the day. Things were larger again.

I crossed the glade, glancing back once when I was half-way, not to test myself with the cross but because I remembered the door to the tower. I hadn’t tried it, hadn’t checked to see if it was locked. Raina had said she might be able to find the key. That thought was there. The people laughing up ahead—had they been in the tower too?

Reaching the line of the trees I stopped to listen. I was pretty sure of the direction, but wanted verification, especially now.

And there it was. More laughter through the forest, definitely from further down the slope on the northern side of the hill. On Risi property.

I hurried on, stepping over branches, pushing bracken aside, watching for snakes. More laughter came, and the sound of people talking: women’s voices!

Finally the forest thinned out and I was on the open northern slope. There, spread in the shade under a large river gum, were blankets and picnic baskets, and five women watching a sixth pushing yet another on a swing fastened to the tree’s lowest branch.

Raina Risi was the woman pushing the swing, and now I recognised—the names came to me in seconds—Angelina Pascari, yes, Lucia Tramonte and Katerina Bitti, Isabella Pellegrini and Pat Kesby.

The woman on the swing was Gemma Ewins, wearing a white dress and sandals, laughing as Raina sent her higher and higher.

‘Hi!’ I called, delighted and relieved.

They all turned. Raina stepped back from pushing Gemma. They watched as I approached, but smiling, all smiling, Gemma smiling too.

‘David!’ Raina seemed genuinely pleased to see me. ‘What a surprise!’

‘I hope I’m not intruding.’

‘Not at all. You remember Isabella and Pat, Lucia, Katerina, Angelina and Gemma from the other night?’

‘Of course. Hi. I heard you laughing –’

‘And were curious,’ Katerina said, with a cheeky smile. ‘A bunch of silly women playing at schoolgirls.
Non è vero
?’

It was an odd, old-fashioned remark, and I wasn’t sure how to answer it. I smiled and shrugged.

‘I rather like being called a schoolgirl again,’ Pat Kesby said, laughing. ‘What do you say, Gemma?’

Gemma was still swinging back and forth, but slowing now, almost ready to jump clear. ‘That I’ve been caught on a swing. What can I say?’

‘
Vieni qua
, David,’ Raina said. ‘Come and have some lunch with us.’

It had to be around noon, but I didn’t want to check my watch and seem as if I had something better to do.

‘Look, you’re having a private picnic here, and I’m interrupting –’

‘Nonsense!’ Raina said. ‘We were pushing Gemma on a swing and waiting for you.’

‘Waiting for me?’ Then I saw how gracious she was being, and was glad that there was no way out of this.

They moved back to the blankets and made a place for me. Gemma hopped off the swing and was last to settle. Raina prepared a plate with cold chicken, salad and crusty bread and handed it across, while Katerina poured me a plastic tumbler of what looked like pineapple juice from a green glass bottle.

It was all wonderful. Having defeated
la
Mâitresse
, having hauled her off to Len’s, then, just by chance, needing to anchor the tower in reality again: to have found this! I felt the tension fall away like the loosening of deep and tightly wound clockwork.

And Gemma was here. Brown and real and here, sitting across from me on another blanket, but near, near enough, eating chicken and salad from a plastic plate, drinking juice from a tumbler just as I was.

It was a victory feast. We sat in a momentary silence, with just the tick-ticking of plastic utensils, the occasional slurp of drink or slap at an insect. There was no urgency to make conversation. These women were comfortable together, and the act of eating made it all easy, so natural to sit and listen to the cicadas droning in the forest behind us, to look off through the day at the far hills or down the long slope through the last of the trees to where the Risi domain continued off and away. Only the dead intensity of the heat spoiled it, but somehow here in the shade it no longer mattered. It seemed cooler.

When I tried my drink I received another surprise. Instead of the sharp taste of juice, what I tasted was much sweeter, heavier, with the unmistakable flavour of honey. They were drinking mead.

I’d swallowed too much. Now, coughing and laughing, I had to excuse myself.

‘I thought it was juice. Sorry.’

Raina pretended mock concern. ‘Oh my! Katerina, you served him from the wrong bottle! Now he knows our secret!’

‘It’s mead,’ I said.

‘It is,’ Raina replied. ‘But there’s orange juice and mineral water if you prefer.’

‘No. No. This is wonderful, Raina. I just wasn’t ready for it. I would have sipped.’

Raina’s eyes twinkled with mischief. ‘Drink small and enjoy, David!’

I raised my tumbler to the seven women. ‘A toast to being in paradise! Once again!’

Plastic tumblers were raised.

Lucia Tramonte called: ‘More like hell with the heat, but to paradise, yes.’

‘
Veramente
!’ Katerina Bitti said, and drank.

‘
Sangue di Dio
!’ Angelina Pascari cried and did the same.

‘To us!’ Isabella Pellegrini drank it all.

‘
Salud
!’ Gemma called, and I was thrilled to see her smiling at me, nothing like the young woman in the hotel on Friday. She was forgiven. I was forgiven. I was stunned at how adolescent it all was, how fundamental, elemental.

‘To unlimited possibility!’ Pat Kesby said, completing the shared toast.

I took a good swallow this time, baulking at the sweetness, but loving it, loving the deep warmth, the deep, swelling languorousness that came when it hit my blood. It was like the heat of the day pouring into me, dragging me down to the blanket, down to the warm hard earth. More golden nets snaring us all.

But despite the feelings of delight, relief and simple uncomplicated joy at this wonderful meeting, I knew I had to take charge of events as well. When it was over, I would be alone again at Starbreak Fell, coming to grips with what remained.

When Raina handed me more salad, I said: ‘You were at the tower. You found the key.’

‘Not yet, David. I’m still trying.’

‘But you left something on the cross.’ It didn’t come out slurred, but finding words wasn’t as easy as I wanted right then. It was all so crazy: these women out in the blazing day, leaving flowers, drinking mead on a quiet hillside.

‘You saw it. Good.’ She smiled.

‘Just before I heard your voices.’

‘It led you to us.’

‘It helped, Raina.’

‘It was our invitation.’

‘It was?’ I remembered the gumnuts in the mailbox. ‘To me?’

‘To you and more, David.’

What of the bottle-trees? I wanted to ask. Did you put them there? And what if I hadn’t happened to stop the car, decided to investigate the tower? Perhaps there were contingencies: a note left under the back door, a phonecall.