Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (19 page)

easy come, easy go.

24

There is another departure to mention: Henry Graham's.

1929. France.

Each day the tango train from Paris to Deauville passes by the sanatorium.The iron beds are on casters and because it is summer the nurses have rolled the patients outside to sit beneath the rustling leaves of the Dutch and Belgian elms.

The pale TB sufferers are propped up with pillows to keep their blood and phlegm down. But as soon as they hear the approach of the train those who are bedridden inch themselves up their mattresses for a better view. In another minute they will see the figures of the dancers in the carriage windows. The vision at the bottom of the garden comes and goes. And after the last carriage departs and the cows in the paddock across the tracks look up, it is easy to question whether what the patients thought they saw actually took place. The cows, the railway line, the paddock. The sick patients who are all dressed in the same striped pyjamas sink back and turn their faces away. Stranded, like fish landed on a river bank, they open their mouths and release blood over the white pillowcases. Soon the cloud in the east will arrive and soon the nurses will wheel them back inside the sanatorium.

One morning there is a signal box failure and the tango train from Paris slows down and stops at the bottom of the garden. If he listens carefully, Henry can hear the orchestra playing. It comes and goes. Comes and goes. He can't quite place the melody. But in the end it's the dancers that trap his attention. It is just movement confined to shadow. It is the broad outline of something he vaguely remembers. The way the women press their cheeks against the cheeks of the men. Two inverted commas. He has seen that before.What is the French expression?
Déjà vu.
Louise and Schmidt, himself and Billy Pohl, and these day trippers from Paris.The cave in the Pacific and the tracks at the bottom of the sanatorium's sunlit garden. It is time and place catching up with itself.

Excited to have made the connection he turns to the young Englishwoman with the blood-splattered collar in the next bed. ‘Clare, I want to show you something.' He draws himself up and slides off the bed. The nurses are inside, so Henry leads Clare across the poppy fields to the lawn by the motionless train. Here, the music is louder. They can actually hear individual voices. A woman's laughter. The clatter of trays. The clink of glasses. An English word at least is what they hear—‘exquisite'—as a hand flashes in the window.

By now all the TB sufferers are sitting up in bed to watch Henry and Clare dance in the field by the train.

Once, Clare peeps over her shoulder and smiles shyly back at the congregation. All those still faces, like faces in a painting. She coughs, and before the astonished faces crowding the carriage window her smudged mouth drips blood on to the white collar of the man dancing in his pyjamas. Their faces are so pale. Their eyelids droop. And as the train departs and draws away two black stockinged nurses are seen running across the fields in the direction of the tracks.

Soon the train will trail its smoke and it too will be turned into memory. Or passed on in a letter. And Henry will be remembered by those surviving him. The other patients will jog one another's memory: remember the time the tango train from Paris stopped at the bottom of the garden…

25

This was the crowd I moved in those days. Tragic exiles who starved themselves to death; others, inflicted with tuberculosis and dying, out to see themselves off in a final ‘three-minute affair'. Insomniacs able to sleepwalk from one part of their life to the other, from the bed of their wife to that of their mistress. Departures of one kind or another…

Peter and Jean needed to hear from me that I would be home in time for my father's hip replacement op. My final exam was in the last week of November. By their calculation that would allow me a week to let my hair down, tie up whatever needed tying up, to pack, and get back to the farm in time for the muster and shearing.

Late at night, as I lay awake, odd details from home shifted into my thoughts. The kitchen cupboards, the paint cracking in places where it had been laid on too thickly. The ceilings, as it now occurred to me, were too shiny, the naked bulb much too bright. The hum of the fridge was too loud. The dogs barking at every ghost climbing over the fence in the night were plain irritating.

At the hostel the telephone rang and rang.

‘It's your mother again.' Brice Johns stood in the door, blinking back at me with that news. He couldn't understand why I didn't call back.

Brice was going home for summer and I lay on my bed watching him pack. We'd spent nearly a year together but despite that I couldn't say I really knew Brice; not when I'd spent nearly the same length of time with Rosa. For that matter, I probably felt closer to Louise and Schmidt than I did to my room mate. Years later, someone who had known Brice during this time was to tell me how much Brice hated it when I came back to the room late at night reeking of the restaurant kitchen and Argentinian pot roast. That sounded like Brice. But if he'd had any olfactory sense at all he would have picked up Rosa's Tosca scent. Even as I lay in bed I could smell it on me—and on my pillowcase in the morning.

I sat my final exam.The library closed. Instead of heading back to the farm, as expected, I stepped up my hours at La Chacra. I wanted to make up for lost time. And with Rosa in my orbit I didn't mind being back with Angelo's fatty oven trays, the pots, the food scraps, the soapy grey water; the noise and smells.

December turned out to be a crazy time. Dishes piled high to my shoulder. The waitresses urged me to go faster. Angelo came back yelling for more oven trays. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, one office party after another crammed into La Chacra. Some nights the bandoneon of Troilo was completely drowned out. Other nights there were requests for ‘that shit' to be turned up and I'd join the waitresses in the kitchen door to watch some fat-bellied drunk with a loose tie and a Christmas paper hat dance to cries of ‘get your gears off '.

One night with drunks falling in and out of one another's arms and Carlos Gardel straining goodnaturedly above it all, Rosa waved her hands to get my attention. As I got closer and saw the phone in her hand, I felt a slowing of the blood in my veins. She shouted into the receiver: ‘He's here now, Jean. I pass you over. Ciao for now.' As she handed me the phone Rosa's eye was slightly lidded. I wondered what Jean had told her. For a moment I thought she was going to stand there and watch me talk to my mother. Luckily the noise of someone tumbling to the floor and of glass breaking drew her away.

‘Lionel? Lionel, is that you? I can hardly hear you.' My mother's voice sounded small and frail. I could sense the isolation of the farm packed up behind her.

She said, ‘I called the hostel. I've left so many messages. God knows. Then it took half an hour for directory to find the restaurant number. Your father thought it was called something else…Makara. Or Cracker. You can imagine. I told the woman at directory it was La something…'

Jean was ringing to tell me that Peter had put the operation off until late January. So I needn't worry about getting back just yet. But no later than January 20, or thereabouts. ‘Thereabouts' is what I chose to hear.

There was another matter though. She wanted to hear that I would be home for Christmas.

‘Meg is flying in from Melbourne especially.'

At that moment Kay ranged in to view. She held a glass above her head.

With all the noise raging around me I had to yell into the receiver: ‘Listen, I have to go. This is an impossible time. The restaurant is packed to the gills. I'll call you back. Okay?'

I never did, and the following month my sister wrote me a letter to say she was shocked at how lame our father was, and even more shocked and, frankly, disgusted by my selfishness.

It was easy to be vague and even forgetful. It was rush rush rush.

The week leading up to Christmas frayed our nerves. Meals went to the wrong tables. Angelo snapped at waitresses. The waitresses held back their tears until they made it back to the kitchen. They swore at Angelo. Told each other what a bastard he was. The short-term solution involved words of comfort from Kay; maybe a curt, half-pie apology from Angelo. ‘I am sorry. I said I was sorry. Now I have grill for table ten, please.'

Come the end of the night, all was forgiven. After the last of the customers tripped out the door we sat around a table drinking. With a glass in his hand Angelo was back to his charming self. He set about mending fences.

‘I am sorry Katrina that I yelled.'

‘No. No. It was me. I was so sure they said Steak Argentine.'

And now Rosa would chip in: ‘Of course, they are all animals. They come here to get drunk—not to eat. I am sorry, Angelo. But that is the truth.'

These nights the boyfriends of the waitresses were invited in to join us for a late-night drink. By the time everyone left it was too late or else Rosa was too tired to dance.

She waved her hand at the last departing waitress and sat and closed her eyes.

‘Pasta, are you still here?'

‘Still here,' I said. I was never sure whether she was glad of this or not. She yawned into her hand.

‘I shall have to run you home.'

‘No. I'm right.'

‘Still, it is late.'

The line of her breasts rose and fell as she sighed. She began to push out of her shoes and exercise her toes.

‘What did Jean want?' she asked.

‘What?'

‘Jean. She called the other night…' ‘Just to say hallo.'

‘And?'

‘That's it.'

She grunted. She closed her eyes. Just like that my mother was forgotten. She said, ‘Be a sweet and rub my feet. I can't feel anything. There is no blood left in my toes. Everything has turned to wood. If I were a tree you would cut me down before I fell down and feed me to the fire.'

I moved a chair closer to her booth so she could lift her swollen feet on to my lap. I massaged her toes, the ball and heel. Rosa purred.

With the arrival of warm summery weather nearly every afternoon I went straight from the Stanley Hope Pool to the restaurant. It was just a short walk through the Public Gardens.

Now I suggested to Rosa, ‘Why don't you come swimming with me. It'll give you more energy.'

‘So now I need more energy? What do you want…that I work myself to an early grave?' She sank further back on to her elbows; her head dropped back so she looked up at the ceiling. Her dress hiked up her thighs. She said, ‘Well, maybe you are right. So long as the water is clean.' Rosa slept in most mornings so it was one or two o'clock before we met at the pool. By then the lunch-hour crowd and the lane swimmers had been and gone.

I liked to get there a bit early in time to see her sweep through the turnstile with head-turning flamboyance. She wore a plum-coloured head scarf, sunglasses, jeans that were a touch too tight, and a shirt tied in a knot over her bare midriff. A downy trail that I found irresistible led from her belly button to the top of her jeans. The first time she caught me staring she pretended to be put out. She yanked off her sunglasses and gave me a sharp look.

‘You are looking at my stomach. What is wrong with it?'

‘Nothing is wrong with it.'

‘So nothing is wrong with it, but you are looking at it.'

There was never any concession to public space. She spoke as loud and as freely as she would in a room with just me and her. I'm sure she enjoyed embarrassing me—this was part of her sport, seeing I was far too aware of the interest of the other pool people, in particular the girls my own age, and all the calculations going on in their heads.

Rosa loved to sunbathe.When she was stripped to her bathing suit every pair of eyes in the pool looked her way. She would lie along the wooden bleachers, and I'd sit upright with a stern look, like the palace guard; the guys couldn't stop looking at her crotch, at the hemline that struggled to contain her pubic hair. Let's say she attracted a lot of interest.

This afternoon it is a guy older than myself, in his late twenties I'd say, well tanned, a toned upper body. His chest is greasy with oil. Sunglasses are pushed up against his forehead. This is how it works. He stops to ask me the time—they all do that—and all the while staring at Rosa's crotch. Rosa has on her sunglasses so she can see what is going on. He doesn't know this of course. He is the Lone Ranger and I am Tonto. I tell him the time and we move on to the next phase. He whips out a pack of cigarettes. He asks me if I want a smoke. And as he makes this offer he thinks he might as well join us and sits himself down, at which point Rosa sits up, pushes back her sunglasses and gives the man a frosty look.

‘Lionel, do you know this man?'

‘No, I don't,' I answer.

‘So if he is not an acquaintance why is he sitting with us?'

It was like she'd aimed a revolver at the side of his head. The Lone Ranger holds up his hands in mock surrender, picks up his towel and moves his oily body along.

The Lone Ranger's artlessness stayed with me. What else was he to do, though? I thought a good deal about this. It seemed to me that this was where dance and its guiding rituals came in handy. There was a procedure to follow, rails to hold on to.

Another time I arrive at the pool to find Rosa already there. Now I note the second surprise. She is standing at the far end of the pool with someone I've never seen before. For all I know it might be someone she just happened to run across. Or else—and this more likely—it is another Lone Ranger climbed down off his horse. The two of them are smoking. I guess he must have asked Rosa if she wanted a cigarette and this time she must have found a reason to accept. She's the one doing the talking. The man seems pleased to have her company. His arms are folded. A cheesy smile says he can't believe his luck. About now he looks up and sees me, and that alerts Rosa. She glances back and this time there is no recognition at all. I might as well be a complete stranger. I have to pretend that I've left something back at the counter; I go around the other side of the pool to the men's changing shed.