Escape (37 page)

There isn't a breath of breeze. The streets, lined with trees and
telegraph wires are frozen, like objects in a picture. There is something
dream-like about being the only moving thing in a painted landscape.
Nightmarish. I have a sudden urge to hear Simon's voice. Simon, with
the strong capable hands, the calm tone, the look of concern. I saw him
yesterday, when he came to clean the pool. What did he say? About
his wife, and the grief? I'm going to think about that. Repeat his words
in my mind instead of Guido's.

We sat for a long time at the wooden table. I hadn't seen him for
a week. We kept missing each other, he said. I told him I'd been out
running. I made coffee, pleased that I could offer organic beans from
East Timor. He seemed to approve. He told me he used to work for an
NGO in East Timor, as well as in Africa. When he married, bringing
his wife out here, they moved to a suburb near the beach. Zuri went to
university, finished her education. She was my best friend, he told me.
He worked for the Red Cross, made short trips each year to various
countries. Zuri stayed home to look after their daughter. It was breast
cancer, a little lump like a cherry stone under his thumb. She only had
a couple of years out in the working world. She was a teacher, infants
school. After she died, he got a job locally, anything, he had to look
after his daughter, pick her up from school each day. He concentrated
on simple tasks – the shopping, food in the fridge, paying bills. He
had to fill the hours, ticking them off like a person in jail. But he felt
he'd never be free. Grief is like a prison, that's what he said. 'It does get
better, with time. You realise there is freedom outside the bars when
you start to look forward to things.' There were the afternoons, when
he'd pick up his daughter in the pool van, blue and white. Her school
uniform was the same colour as the van, she loved that, and there she
was every day at ten past three, her school bag between her feet, her
neat round face looking down the road for him. Her smile when she
saw him lit up the afternoon. During school hours he was busy with
tangible things he could fix, and afterwards with his daughter and her
homework and her friends and her feelings, filling his days with life,
with the living. Now, he says, his daughter gets annoyed with him –
'Go and get yourself a life, Dad! You're young still, enjoy!'

We sat together for such a long time that the dark came down
and the possums ran along the telegraph wire onto the roof, cheeky as
tame pets. 'Better keep going,' said Simon, and we grinned.

I run past the house with the Chinese jasmine and the paperbark
tree and the fence with unreadable graffiti and the dog with the mink
coat and the pool shop. I see with disappointment that there are no
vans in the parking bay outside the pool shop. Too early, I suppose.
The windows are blank, even the paper shop is closed. I run home
and take a shower, the first in days. Water streams along the banks
between the hairs on my legs. I'll have to shave them for my meeting
with Jonny, but I can't be bothered today. I'll wear pants over them. I
wish I could wear a balaclava over my head too. Lena told me that after
two weeks, hair finds its natural pH balance and doesn't increase in
greasiness. Hot water is as efficient as shampoo unless you're working
with axle grease, which I'm not. Sounds a bit like the pool, which if
neglected for two weeks in summer turns green and sullen and stays
that way. Doesn't get any greener or any more sullen.

Why then does human misery not stop at a certain level, like a lift
arriving at the basement? Surely there is some limit, the lowest floor?
Why does pain turn bottle green, gangrenous, the pit deeper, greasier,
slimier, the darkness roughening into dirt that stops up your mouth,
your mind, your lungs?

*

After Belmore High I go to the supermarket. I'm out of red wine and
crackers and pasta sauce for my parents' dinner. Coles is a vast country;
god how I hate it. I trudge through the aisles, throwing things into my
trolley.
You'll break those biscuits, you're such a thoughtless waster!

I stand still, besieged by the voice. It bellows over everything, even
the miked-up announcer telling us strawberries are reduced, a steal at
only $3.99 a punnet.
Cold bitch, selfish bitch
.
He was never in love with
you.
I look for Harry at the fruit and veg stand. Come on, come on,
take me away from here! There are bananas and peaches and grapes
and blueberries, huddled on the green nylon cloth of the stall. Just the
cold hard facts, no mirage-metal shimmer, glitter of dark eyes, halo of
wiry hair. Just fruit and veg and that woman picking over the peaches,
trying to do her job and pry the probing fingers of her toddler away
from the grapes. I close my eyes and try to find him. Charles River
Bridge, Boston. He's diving from the bridge, bent over in half, his
hands manacled behind his back. He hits the surface like a bomb and
disappears in a necklace of white water. I hold my breath, we all hold
our breath, all of us at Charles River. Will he come up? Will he survive
the weight of those chains, unpick the locks and break through? Yes,
see him now? His cuffs dangle from the wrist as he shoots up in the air,
making the sign of victory. I feel myself smiling, the crowd is roaring,
that invincible Harry, look at him swimming for the boat, long hard
strokes, such powerful arms. He strides out of the water and up the
steep bank, his trunks clinging like a second skin to the curve of his
buttocks, but wait, no, he is slipping back down, grasping at the mud,
slipping down into the water. His head bobs up, he tries again and
slips, his hands flailing, small pudgy hands, tiny as the toddler who is
now screaming next to me. Oh my Harry, I can't help you, you can't
help me, what will we do?

I reach out to help Harry but instead I clutch wildly at the toddler's
hand. His mother looks alarmed.

'Oh I'm sorry . . .'

The woman picks up her toddler and they disappear into the next
aisle. I pick up the bananas I've dropped and push the trolley towards
the check-out counter. Run, run, run. God how I hate queues. The
girl at the counter gives me my plastic bags and I head for the plate-glass
door, the packages heavy as bricks in my hands. But I've gone
to the wrong exit. My forehead crashes against the glass and I leap
back, stunned. 'Silly me,' I say merrily to the staring shopgirl, 'I forgot
something.' My head is singing with pain, there'll be a lump like an
egg on my eyebrow, but I have to return to the fruit and veg. I need to
check on things, the woman with the toddler, the mess I left , Harry
drowning.

I rush back but the turnstile hits me in the groin and the bananas
and crackers and cheese and bread and biscuits and lite milk and
yoghurt brimming with live acidophilus spill onto the floor. 'Fuck!' I
yell, crouching among the debris, trying to rescue the split cartons and
the spilt milk leaking under the counter and the elusive acidophilus,
but everyone knows that the good little bacteria are as small as sperm,
impossible to see, so how could you catch them?

Someone is brushing against me. I can feel the heat of a person's
breath on the top of my head. Hands are picking up the bananas and
putting them into a bag, methodical, competent. Now they're handling
the milk cartons, shaking the drops off before packing them into the
bag, upright. Rough, hard hands, weathered and whitened around the
nails, a callous inside the knuckle of the third finger, a faint smell of
chemicals. One of the hands moves up under my arm. Lift s me up.

'Rachel, are you all right?'

Simon Manson hands. A tingle of pleasure runs through me.

'Are you real?' I ask him. I don't wait for him to answer. I want
to believe in him. 'It's too much,' I tell him. 'I thought we would look
after each other but he never did. He said will I come first as if it were
a competition and I thought he would, yes, but how can you with a
baby and now she's gone and all I did was criticise when I only meant
to love her and he was disgusted by me all this time, it's there in black
and white and Harry isn't being brave either, just desperate like me.'

Simon nods, as if he agrees with everything I am saying. 'I've got
the van outside,' he says. I follow him blindly, one foot after the other.

Ciao mamma,

The best day – on the back of a vespa! Don't freak out, I'm home safe
with all my limbs attached, okay? Roberto took me for a ride into the hills.
Che gioia! Russet hills deepening into folds of purple, exploding now and
then into halos of flowers from cherry trees.

Roberto dreams of wilderness and an empty sky but what i love is
the touch of HUMANITY here – the landscape so thoroughly tended, a
canvas worked and reworked, you could never lose yourself in the horizon
with all these loving stitches of human existence – a mustard cottage, a
small alter with a candel, the careful embroidery of fields.

In the hills today, I must have looked like those girls on vespas
whizzing past with their boyfriends and now I'm one of them. All the
moments of gioia in my life, suddenly notes to reach just this creshendo.

Hugs from your Clara in love!

xxx

Joy! Such
gioia
at Clara's words, and her sharing them with me.

When I close my eyes I see her 'russet' hills – such a lovely word.
There's her joy but also my fear, and look at it now, staining the
russet to blood. 'Vespa' – isn't that just another word for motorbike,
a machine offering no protection against crashes or heartbreak? She's
riding down foreign valleys, her arms around a man she's falling into,
falling in love with . . .

She's not you, I tell myself. She's not falling, she's feeling. She's
not blind, she can see! Just look at her looking
around
her! I wish she
wouldn't feel so much, though – such a long drop from that cliff . What
if he doesn't love her back? Her first real love . . . I'm so scared for her.
Who is this man, this Roberto?

If he doesn't last, at least she'll always have those russet hills. She's
seen them now, this world outside her skin – she's pinned them down
with her words, let them become a part of her.

Simon said something like that last week after he brought me
home from the supermarket. He said when he was young he used to go
into the bush with his pencils and sketchbook and draw what he saw.
Drawing helped him to see everything more deeply – the hieroglyphics
on the scribbly gums, the spider webs spangling between them. He
liked the quiet that didn't comment or judge, and the way his thoughts
flowed through it. He painted such a calming world for me with his
wide open skies and trees that my breathing slowed and the shouting
lights of Coles softened into green wells of shadow.

After we arrived back at my place and Simon helped me put
away the groceries, we drank red wine and talked and listened to Joe
Cocker. It was an extraordinary event I still can't quite believe in. A
smile hijacks my face, incredulous and private, each time I think of it.

'You need to relax,' he said. 'Will we have a drink? No, stay there,
I'll
get it.' He poured two generous glasses of wine even though it was
only four in the afternoon. We sat on the sofa and looked out at the
pool. It glared dully at us in the grey light. Tiny paws of ivy splintered
the fence, its wild fronds catching the breeze. The ferns, crowded and
brown with lack of water, drooped over weeds growing enthusiastically
from the cracks in the concrete around the pool.

'Lovely garden you have, Rachel. So lush and natural. When I was
a boy I loved gardens like this, you could find secret places to explore
and pretend. We lived near a river, built cubbies . . .'

I smiled at him. We were looking out at the same bedraggled
scene, neglected plants unravelling over fences and slabs, left to their
own devices. How was he able to spot the best in things, in people? I
tried to look with his eyes at the thriving lantana and ivy piling over
the fence but failed.

Simon got up and wandered over to the stereo. Long legs in
comfortable loose-fitting jeans, faded green shirt. Fine grey-blond
hair, a little long, rebellious over his collar. I liked his broad, unselfconscious
back. He was different, here in my living room. There was
still the checking glance back at me, the shared grin, the usual signs of
his considerate self. But he was purposeful. He found the pile of CDs
on the cabinet and in a methodical, absorbed manner he picked them
up, examining and discarding. He was gentle and assertive. He seemed
in possession, quite incisively, of the atmosphere, of himself. Perhaps
this was because he had saved me there in the supermarket among the
bananas and the acidophilus, and he was aware that he had been of
help. 'I like to be useful,' he said quite often.

'Joe Cocker!' he exclaimed. 'Are you in the mood?'

He'd put it on before I said anything. Something more reckless
than careful in him now.

He'd got halfway across the living room, heading for the sofa,
when the drums came in, driving. He did a wiggle and held out a hand
to me. 'Come on, you can't sit down when Joe's singing!' He ducked
back to the stereo and turned it up. The gravelly outrage of Joe's voice
conquered me and I was flooded with courage. Simon grabbed my
hand and pulled me towards him and away, twirling me as easily as a
baton. A swoop of joy like flying made me laugh out loud and we jived
and whirled and shook up and down the length of the house. After Joe
we found Bruce Springsteen's 'Dancing in the Dark', Motown singers
Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett , Diana Ross. Every now and then one of
us would run back to the coffee table by the sofa and take another swig
of wine. He said Joe Cocker had always been one of his favourites – 'All
that raw feeling, that's what I call charisma. You know, a person losing
themselves on stage, not performing so much as
being
themselves.
Risky. Generous.'

'Houdini did that!'

Simon laughed, sitting down suddenly on the edge of the coffee
table.

I sat down next to him. We were both puffing. 'Did you dance
with your wife?' I ask.

He smiled. 'Zuri was a great dancer, played the drums too. She
taught the djembe, you know, the drum you sling around your neck,
and the talking drums as well . . . Have you heard them? Used to
transmit messages from village to village, like morse code. The way she
played them, they sounded just like people talking. I think she would
have gone on to do more if . . .'

Simon was silent. The light in his face went out.

'Do you want to hear Aretha Franklin?' I ask. 'She always gives me
courage.'

We must have danced and drank and talked for a couple of hours,
until the garden outside turned lacy with shadow. It was strange, quite
glorious, being suspended in the flood of music. When I closed my
eyes the colours were big and wild, almost too intense, like something
you shouldn't believe in, a cartoon perhaps, the figures out of control.
But then, quite suddenly, the sliding feeling returned and almost
tipped me over, or maybe it was the wine, and I had to stop.

We went back to the sofa and sprawled comfortably among the
cushions. I could feel sweat gliding down my neck into my bra. When
Simon raised his arm, waving it above his head as he talked, there was
a big wet patch. Neither of us cared. It was so comfortable sitting there
on the sofa, sweaty and tired and exhilarated. We didn't bother to turn
on the lights. Before it got dark I noticed the colour of his eyes: green,
flecked with gold and blue and brown. The colour changed with the
light like a kaleidoscope when you twirl it around. I mustn't have
looked properly before. I'd always thought Simon's eyes were brown.
Not that I'd ever thought about it, really.

The darkness in the room was soft and whispered, encouraging
confession. Simon told me more about the river where he'd grown up
and how his friend had a radio and they'd bring it down after school
and listen. If they were alone they'd try out dance steps and wrestle
each other. They caught tadpoles and spent hours looking for cicadas
and water dragons. 'We pretended to be Indians running from the
cowboys. When I was hiding in the bush, sharpening my arrows, I felt
more at home than anywhere else. Like I belonged. Often we ended
up camping out so we could get on with the game as soon as the sun
rose the next morning. I suppose you couldn't do that now – as a kid I
mean. Parents worry too much . . .'

We both smiled. 'Is that why you went to Africa?' I asked. 'You
know, a place with bush and wildlife, not cars and concrete?'

Simon laughed. 'Yeah, maybe. I liked travelling and I knew how
to build and make stuff with my hands. I didn't know much else that I
wanted to do.'

'What about your art, your drawing?'

'Oh well, that was something I could take with me anywhere –
a way of living, seeing the world. Not something I wanted to make a
living out of necessarily. Maybe I was too scared to show other people!'
He spread his hands wide on his knees. 'Anyway, I got caught up for a
few years in Africa. They were wonderful years – then of course Zuri
came back with me here, and I had a family to provide for.'

I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be Zuri, leaving
Africa. I failed. Simon was quiet. 'How was it,' I asked, 'when you first
got there? Did you love it straight away? Was it hard, you know, dealing
with the poverty?'

Simon nodded. But he didn't say anything. His face had gone
still.

'I can't really imagine . . . ' I fussed with the hem of my skirt. 'Take
Zambia for example, life expectancy there is just thirty-seven years
old.' I stopped suddenly, feeling the blush start deep in my stomach.
To blare on to such a subject, so insensitively. 'Oh, god, well, I mean . . .
I'm sorry—'

Simon stirred, uncrossing his legs. 'When I first arrived in
Africa, I felt useless. Overwhelmed, I suppose. So much misery . . .
and beauty . . . I sat in a hut and, well, dithered. Thought about going
back, and why the hell did I come. Then I met Zuri and she said to
me, "Look, we don't have a schoolhouse for these villages. We've got
most of the materials, but we need men to build one. You can't fix
the whole Tanzanian education system, but you could do that." And
so I did.'

'How was that? I bet you felt good,
useful
.' I grinned at him.

He grinned back. 'But it wasn't just a do-gooder thing, I got so
much out of it myself. Working with those people, I was
living
.' He ran
a hand through his hair, his face charged with the memory. 'We worked
hard and long and ate this kind of maize porridge which I have to say I
never got to like, but the bananas were sweet and there was great coffee
and sometimes for a feast we'd get a chicken and roast it. Kids ran
around fetching and carrying and playing and there was music at night.
One guy, Themba, played these incredible instruments, sometimes he
even played his own body, used it like a piece of percussion. He taught
me a song on the kalimba – a kind of thumb piano, sounds like water
trickling, thirst-quenching music . . . One night, he invited me to have
dinner with his family – we sat around a fire, there were always big
communal fires, like the bonfires we used to have as kids on cracker
night – and Themba taught me to play some drums. We never had
much music in our house growing up. Music was a foreign language,
you know, like being a Brazilian, or an Eskimo. And I knew I'd never
be either one! But it was such a great feeling to be suddenly part of a
rhythm, playing together in the firelight, keeping back the dark. We
found this groove and we stuck to it, we were flying. I never wanted to
leave that rhythm.'

'You lost yourself.'

'Yeah, or found myself – found bits of me I never knew I had.' His
voice was thick.

It was dark in the living room now, the soft silver glow from the
streetlight hushing through the kitchen window.

I shivered. Simon stirred again, scratched at the pool of streetlight
settling on his knee. The rough skin around his fingernail glowed white.
'After Zuri died, everything hurt. Just opening my eyes and seeing the
morning sun. She was in everything. I didn't talk to anyone all day.
Just the necessities at work: chemicals, stuff you could measure. Didn't
even talk to my daughter – well, about anything to do with feelings. I
was like a robot. Tried
not
to feel. Tried not to remember, or imagine –
often the same thing, isn't it? Maybe I would have rotted away like that,
except that little Sam needed me. And I couldn't sleep. So I started to
read. It became such a comfort, reading. I did it to escape and yet it
brought me back to myself.'

'What did you read?'

'I started with the past – the present seemed too raw, so I read
Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. I got so caught up with those
characters, I came out of this dark place in my head and started to
share the stories with Sam. We read
Oliver Twist
together when she
was eleven – she loved it. At night we sat with the book between us,
talking about those lost boys and the injustices done to them and their
fear and courage and we faced it, faced each other. I owe so much to
books . . .'

I remember the way Simon smiled then. It was like the expression
he'd worn looking at the garden.

The heat from dancing had evaporated in the cool darkness of the
living room. I didn't know if Simon noticed – his eyes were following
the flickering beam from car headlights passing on the road outside. I
got up to put on a jumper.

We talked a bit about our daughters then, and what they liked to
read. I told him about Clara's performance to 'Unchain My Heart' in
sixth class, and the way I couldn't help myself.

'It's
you
who wants to be the escape artist,' he laughed. 'There
wouldn't be too many female magicians around, come to think of it.
Women are the attractive assistants, handing things to the main man.'

'Yeah, the assistant
is
the misdirection. And twins are especially
valuable – they make transporting illusions so much easier: you know,
magician locks girl in cupboard stage left , waves his wand, walks over to
cupboard stage right, and there she is! No lock picking, black cloth, no
dim light needed, just twins in the right places. Like human props . . .'