Clowns At Midnight (6 page)

In moments I was at the thin white strand of the cattle fence, disconnecting it so I could drive through, then at the gate to the back terrace close by the driveway. Thankfully, I’d remembered to leave the yard lights on, so the approach was clearly visible; the windows I could see were intact, and there were no obvious signs of disturbance.

I needn’t have worried. Everything was secure. I checked every room, every door and window to make sure they were locked. I was far from easy doing it, so unsettled that the smallest things were charged with an immanence, an oppressive strangeness. I even unlocked the spare bedroom the Rankins used for storing things during their absence, the only room functionally off-limits. I’d looked in on it when I first arrived, finding the curtains tightly drawn against the eastern sun, making it pleasantly dim and cool, and with so many stacked boxes and things covered with dust-cloths that I could barely get in the door. It had given me an appropriate frisson at the time to know that any dolls or figurines, any artwork or things considered a potential risk by the Rankins had been shut away in those boxes or hidden away under those shrouds, carefully reduced to so many safely neutral cubes and anonymous forms. Ignorance being bliss, I’d simply locked the room again and consigned it to limbo.

It took considerable courage, but now I opened that door again and looked inside. For many phobic, nervy people there is real terror in gazing upon draped objects. There could be anything waiting to spring out—the Boo Factor it’s often called, the Jack-in-the-Box effect—or, worse still, just moving ever so slightly under the drapery so you couldn’t even be sure you’d seen it.

Back when I was seeing Nellie Barwood, I’d met a fellow client, a phobic guy named Eric Lees, whose greatest fear was barely moving draped figures. Some of that was with me now. I made myself lift one of the dust cloths to see what it concealed. It was Beth Rankin’s wooden spinning-wheel, still draped with yarn, set aside mid-task, a reassuring homey touch. Not a doll, not a dress mannequin (how
they
troubled me—headless and armless, so erect on their poles, with their adjustable panels and heavy bases, often with casters instead of feet).

I managed to make my way through the shrouded shapes to check the window locks, then worked my way back, gingerly touching various draped things to confirm their sheer reality, doing it with an outstretched palm so as not to feel any clear definition. Then I locked the door and returned to the kitchen.

What to do? Tell Jack? Phone him at 11:30? Call Mick or Lou or Paul and Angie? Julia? How I needed to. But I needed the illusion of managing even more. I was alone on the flight deck, but it was
my
flight deck.

Finding the bottle-trees like that had given me a bad scare, but there was nothing subjective and solitary about it. It had happened in the outside world, the world that others shared. I put on music, set the jug going for tea, and stood in the bright kitchen calming myself. Maybe I’d switch on the computer and check emails, maybe even risk another TT, check the black page again, use one lot of fear to dislodge another.

Then the phone rang.

I answered on the third ring, had the immediate reassurance of music playing in someone’s living room, then Carlo’s rich voice.

‘David? I was hoping you hadn’t gone to bed yet. Raina and I just wanted to make sure you got home safely and to say how good it was to have you here tonight.’

I felt such relief that I had to lean against the kitchen table.
Bless you, Carlo Risi
.

‘Carlo, thanks for calling. I had a marvellous time. I really did. You were both very kind.’

‘Well, you understand how it was. We had to do a dance. And you won us the Cannonau. You will keep in mind what I said about visiting.’

‘I will. Of course I will. Thank you.’

‘Good. And, oh yes, Raina is reminding me. She thinks she may know where the key for the tower is. She will look for it tomorrow. We may have our picnic after all.’

‘That would be great. Just great.’

‘Goodnight then, David.
Buona sera
.’

‘Goodnight, Carlo, and thank you. Please thank Raina. Goodnight.’

I hadn’t mentioned the shattered bottle-trees or my fear. I’d wanted the humanity of these new friends, the treasured ordinariness of a courtesy phonecall at the end of a vivid and trying evening.

I made the tea, switched off the sound system, and took my cup to the bedroom, set it down next to the second-hand copy of Mary Renault’s
The Mask of Apollo
.

Leave one thing, I’d told Beth Rankin in a phonecall before they left on their travels, just one. Something mild to test me. And there it had been beside my newly made bed when I arrived, this old 1980 reprint of Renault’s 1966 novel, with a tilted gold theatrical mask of the god on the cover, surrounded by charcoal-grey rays. One eye socket had an iris and pupil; the other contained only darkness. I’d been so glad to find it there. It had become the first and last tolerance test of any day and I treasured its presence now.

I lay atop the covers and considered the events of the day. I was exhausted, exhilarated and, yes, fearful: bothered by the fate of the bottle-trees, concerned about the tower and the Scarecrow Cross, troubled all over again by the black page on the TT disk.

Paranoia was there too. Once the thoughts began connecting up, there was no stopping it. What if Jack
hadn’t
added the image? What if someone else had done it; worse yet had come in this evening while I was out and added new images to the disks? I had to know.

In moments I was back in the study, had the Rankin’s computer booted and was loading TT Disk 4.

Still thirty-one images. Check. I grabbed a pen and wrote a big numeral 4 on the disk, then scrawled my signature. My name, my disk. Accept no substitutes. It was breaking self-imposed rules but I didn’t care. The rules had changed.

One by one, I loaded and opened the other three disks. The image neighbourhoods were as they should be: seven images by four plus two. No new additions.

That I could tell!

What if Jack, whoever it was, hadn’t made the tampering obvious, hadn’t just added an image this time but had first deleted one so that the image neighbourhood
looked
the same? How would I know?

I’d have to sample every image to find out.

An exquisite ambush. Force TT’s of all of them, with the added burden of something waiting amid the image arrays.

I couldn’t do it after all that had happened. It was too much. I just signed each disk and returned it, unnumbered, to its case. Tonight I
could
resist the compulsion. Tonight ignorance was bliss.

I grabbed the Renault novel and lay atop the covers, meaning to read for a while to calm my nerves, but that was how Day 7 found me with its impossible sunlight and blessed reprieve.

CHAPTER 4

It was even easier to resist the TT disks in bright daylight, and there were more compelling duties. After breakfast I drove down to the front gate and confirmed that my bottle-tree had been trashed.

It looked a deadly thing leaning there, all wicked blades and shards, like something made for fighting. Better yet, like something innocent and set-upon that had been forced to defend itself. There wasn’t a single bottle intact.

It also looked more like a signpost than ever in a yes-no, there-and-gone way, and began triggering my fear responses. I needed to act. Pulling on a pair of John Rankin’s work gloves, I used pliers to snip away the bottle ends still attached to the shaft, and dropped them into a cardboard box that went into a sturdy garbage bag. Then, after clearing up the glass on the ground as best I could, I worked the metal stake back and forth till it came loose, loaded it in the car with the bag, and started back to the house.

Halfway up the drive, I pulled over and switched off the engine. Over breakfast I had decided not to bother with the ruined bottle-trees on the Risi property. They weren’t my concern; they had their own caretakers. Now curiosity had the better of me.

I got out of the car, put on my gloves again, and hurried across to where the posts had been the night before.

They weren’t there.

Could I have miscalculated? I scanned the hillside, took my bearings from the line of the forest, even looked down the slope towards Edenville Road. This
was
the spot. But there was no sign of them; every trace of shattered glass was gone.

Almost. I went to where the grass looked freshly trampled and, sure enough, there were still fragments, all so tiny that no casual visitor would have noticed them. Whoever had cleared up had been unusually thorough, just as whoever had shattered every bottle had been excessive and methodical, not like your typical vandals at all. Vandals usually favoured smash and run; they certainly didn’t return to clean up afterwards.

What had happened here? It was as if every trace of the bottle-trees had been obliterated, their existence wiped from the record. And I had participated in the cover-up. In my determination to keep a tidy house for the Rankins, my own bottle fragments would go off to Lismore for recycling, the wire remnants with them; the stake would go back in the shed. All would be as before. A whole stratum of experience gone.

I lived in a world where the authenticity and nature of things always remained a crucial issue. I quickly took off one of my gloves and slipped some shards into it as proof. It was the sort of flight-deck systems check Jack would understand and applaud. It was keeping it real—the other meaning of holding patterns. Hold on to what
is
as best you can.

It was as much as I could do. Back at the house I found that I was still able to resist the TT disks, and instead did solid work on both the novel and the
Mind Fields
article, first at the kitchen table using my laptop, running the Rankins’ air-conditioner, then in John Rankin’s study, using his PC and the portable cooling unit.

But I also found myself at the kitchen windows looking up at the hill, or standing before the glass doors to the long veranda. The air beyond the windows was mercilessly hot. It was bushfire season. There were plumes of blue smoke all along the ranges, untidy smudges and spirals adding to the haze. In the fields, Scotch thistles stood dry and blown. The once green and purple crowns were corn-husk silver stars now; their seed pods sailed on the bright air, each one a Santa Claus or ‘fairy carriage’ as Julia used to call them.

The memories were rich and strong, but the day pressed in, reaching through the glass. Bushfire plumes on the hills. Emergency services called out. Homes and lives at risk.

I returned to the study, resumed work on a new chapter and wrote through much of the afternoon. At five o’clock I left off, went out onto the veranda and looked over to the Richmond River hidden deep in the cutting between its double line of trees. From where I stood, those tree lines made the first of four distinctive horizontals on the land: the river, the highway, the railway line, the far line of the ranges. I planned to visit the river soon, now little more than linked pools of emerald water, with boulders and the occasional bones of cattle rising to mar the stillness. But with the air so hot and still and even the cattle tucked in under whatever shade they could find, this was definitely not the time.

Determined to be part of the day regardless, I took the old regional map from the magazine rack by the television and spread it out on the kitchen table. There it was, this vivid landscape in miniature, neatly labelled:
Ettrick 9440-1-5 Topographic Map 1976 Reprinted 1979 1:25 000 Published by Central Mapping Authority of New South Wales
.

How strange to see it reduced to so much unmarked emptiness, just contours, road- and creek-lines, a scattering of names, hardly changed in the thirty or so years since the map was reprinted.

I became lost in it, intrigued by the names of places and properties I would never see, that probably lived more as locations imagined and hinted at than if visited: Edenhope, Ardenlee and Stratheden, Everdowns and Armagh, Starlite and Glentimon, so many places marked
Abandoned
, here bordered by Doubtful Creek, there by Hope’s Bore, names that said it all. Eden itself was a lightly forested hilltop marked with the triangle of a trig point and a height designation: 174.

I located the Risi place and looked for any sign of a maze. Nothing. Just more contour lines and numbers on white paper. I found where the Summerland Way turned into McDonald’s Bridge Road, then into Edenville Road near where Len Catley lived with his wife and sons. I ran my finger along what I had so often driven across, found my hill with its property divide. The tower wasn’t marked, but I guessed where it would be.

The phone rang, pulling me back to the reality of a kitchen in a house set between two contour lines further down that hill.

I grabbed the receiver. ‘Hello?’

‘Davey?’

‘Jules?’ Davey and Jules; how easy to fall into the old routines.

‘You okay? You didn’t return my call.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s part of getting through it. You have to understand.’

‘But your mum and dad haven’t heard from you. Sam hasn’t. I thought one of us should check in.’

I made myself stay calm. There was so much wild emotion, so many contrary rushes of feeling, I didn’t dare let myself react, didn’t say: There’s a reason why
they
haven’t phoned here. We have an agreement to leave me be for a while. They would have told you. I told you.

‘Well thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s all part of the healing, you know.’

‘I know. You know I do. But you’re managing?’

‘I’m managing.’ The words covered a multitude of things. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m fine. Doing well considering. The promotion came through.’

‘Knew it would. I’m really pleased, Jules. Congratulations! How’s Mark?’

It wasn’t a question she wanted. It snatched away the illusion, brought distance, made it them and me.

‘He’s fine, Davey. Busy as always. Asks after you all the time.’

‘Well, give him my best. Tell him not to work too hard.’

It was telling her to finish and be gone. It was refusing to help with the guilt.

‘I still care for you.’

‘Julia, I know.’ Julia not Jules. ‘I really do know. But it’s hard right now. It’ll get easier and I’ll be glad when it does, but right now I want to be away from that world. I truly do wish you every happiness. Both of you. But I need to be away.’

‘You’ll call if you need anything?’

‘I’ll call if I need anything you can still give,’ I said, and before she could be stung added: ‘Which is more than you realise. But it’s tricky right now. It’ll get better.’

There was a brief silence.

‘You seeing people?’

‘Starting to.’ The faces of Carlo and Raina came to mind; then I surprised myself by thinking of Gemma Ewins. ‘It’s good here, Jules. Really good.’

‘Well, I just needed to call, okay? Just wanted to check in. Your mum and Sam were worried.’

‘When you talk to them, say I need more time. They’ll understand. And you take care.’ Giving the cue.

‘You too. Bye.’

And there it was. Intimacy phase-down accomplished; everything moved one more step along. Soon it would be good again. Smaller, distant, but better.

After hanging up, I folded the map and went back to
The Riddling Tree
. But, splendid irony, I had to keep cutting text. My protagonist, Rollo Jaine, was becoming too reflective, too confessional all of a sudden. I accepted that for what it was, let myself write whole pieces that would never make the final version of the book, would probably not even survive the afternoon.

In the end, it took two hours to smooth six single-spaced pages down to three. I felt better but edgy, calmer but restless. If only we could edit our lives as easily, trim the unwanted bits, delete the hardest of them. I couldn’t remember the last time fiction had been therapy like this.

Those three pages triggered three more, so that when I shut down the laptop at last, I found that it was nearly eight o’clock. Weary, but curiously satisfied, I went out onto the terrace and stood looking through the bonsai garden up at the hill. The sun had set over its southern shoulder, leaving a wash of rose gold across the sky. The cicadas had stopped. There was only the chattering of willy-wagtails, the plaintive cries of roosting koels, the cawing of crows in the last of the light. Now and then the distant lowing of cattle came in from the fields. I relished it all.

This was why I was here: to be back in the world after Julia, after that strange, sudden loss, inconceivable then, so inadequately mourned, Julia three months gone.

I made dinner—re-heated chilli con carne with salad—and ate it at the plastic yard table near the northern end of the house. The mosquitoes weren’t a problem, so I stayed till around nine, sitting in the twilight watching hundreds of fruit bats against the deep blue, seeing the Milky Way as I hadn’t seen it in years, huge and impossible.

Now I could risk the TT disks, check out the neighbourhoods. It would be hard facing all five, but it would be done. I could sign them, number them and lock them away. They’d be wholly mine again.

Daylight was better for something like this, I realised, but, once again, it was the choosing that mattered. Even if I managed only one, I’d have made a start. I’d be winning.

First I verified that Disk 4 was as I’d found it on the Friday night: four terrible minutes of finger-fumbling, racing heartbeat, quick glances away and back. Non-coulrophobes simply cannot know. The rogue black page was still in its place at Image 025; nothing else had been added.

I selected one of the other disks then, loaded it and brought up its thirty-image neighbourhood. It turned out to be most difficult TT disk of the series, with the Blue Meaney at Image 023 and Tim James from the 1994 movie
Funny Man
at Image 030. My hands were shaking when I finally lifted the disk from the CD drive, scrawled Disk 1 on it and returned it to its case.

Two out of five. A good start. I could leave off.

But better to know. Better to have it done. I was choosing. Choosing.

It was like a delirium then, vividly real, intensely unreal, a gripping rush of demon images amid shakes, cold sweats and ragged breathing that barely seemed to be mine. My hand on the mouse was a separate creature, clenching and unclenching, relentlessly clicking, determined to face all comers.

That’s how it was. In fits and starts, with glances away and back, away and back, I worked through the neighbourhoods of two more disks, manically grinning as I labelled each one and slipped it back into the TT case.

Disks 2 and 3. I was winning. Winning!

One to go, as intimately known yet as treacherous as the others. After standing to do a few quick stretches, easing locked muscles, I settled back at the computer. I dared not keep away. A migraine was there, building steadily; my breathing was short, but it was nearly done.

I loaded Disk 5 and clicked on Image 001.

There he was: Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
, amiable face so clearly human but with
that
extra burden. An easy one considering, but it had my attention in an instant, locking out all but the dimmest recollection of the hill and the tower in the growing night, snatching away any thought of the black page. It was that sort of moment.

But no stopping. Hesitations, yes, split-second agonies of resistance, but no stopping now. Image by terrible image they appeared: the painted face of Herk Harvey from the 1962 film
Carnival of Souls
, the Celtic ‘Janus’, the image of the hunch-backed Anasazi flute-player, Kokopelli, one by one they came and went, each driving out the other. My head was pounding. My heart thundered. There was heat, breathlessness, the growing chance of muscle-lock and a wholesale syncope black-out. It was the risk; always the risk. Part of me wanted to leap straight to Image 030 and work back, to take charge of the image-forms however I could.

I could quit, I kept telling myself. I could safely quit and come back to it.

But there were so few. So few to go.

Image 010 nearly stopped me: the Gorgon mask from the Etruscan temple at Veii, splendid and awful and more powerful than ever, its manic glee instantly reminding me of the mask at the Risis’.

So few left. My hand clicked on the mouse. Up came the famous, hackneyed Comedy and Tragedy masks, sad vestiges of the truly marvellous theatre masks of ancient Greece, followed by Max Pam’s teasing, atmospheric Laughing Clown gate at Luna Park. There and gone in the hideous rush. At Image 021 appeared the most fascinating, least wounding of the Commedia masks: the beautiful, haunting Neutra Espiral—its creamy-gold visage marked with the brown spiral drawing ever inwards to the point of the nose. That spiral made you forget the eyes at first, and I had long ago learned that the eyes often determined the degree of clown-fear. These were curiously serene, but they stared through the spiral and made it firmly quarter-clown. The force of it nearly stopped me. I yelled in the silence of the house.