Songs from the Violet Cafe (12 page)

‘You need to be warm,’ Marianne said, tossing Jessie a mackintosh from under the seat.

‘I’m warm enough,’ Jessie said, because overhead the sun was brilliant.

Marianne shrugged. ‘It can get cold out here. You’d be surprised.’

It did too, with a quick wind slapping the water into short choppy waves that dissolved in the boat’s long wake. Lou spun the boat this way and that, looking light-hearted and carefree like a boy, not like a man who had been away to the war. His dark hair, worn slightly longer than the fashion of the time, sprouted in a dark halo as the wind eddied around them. He threw his head back when he laughed.

Dear Mum,

I hope things are all right with you. This is an interesting town. Yesterday, the father of one of the girls who works with me took some of us out on his boat. There’s a lot of history about the place, or I guess you’d call it folklore. Like the princess who swam all the way across the lake to the island, in the middle of the night, to find her boyfriend. She had hollowed out gourds strapped to her body, like lifebelts. The lake’s really pretty but you have to treat it with respect. They say the water’s very deep in places, and cold as a frog’s tit even now, as we’re turning into summer. (Yes, I’m getting some bad turns of phrase, that’s Lou for you, Evelyn’s father, the one who’s got the boat. He’s quite young for a father.) This whole bit of country’s pretty wild, squeezed up out of the centre of the earth a few million years ago, like a big tube of toothpaste, and it’s still oozing out. One day they reckon this whole place is going to blow again, like sitting on the top of a pressure cooker. The ground is heated in some places and I’m told carrots get cooked before you can pull them out of the garden. That might or might not be true, but it is a real fact that people are buried at ground level and the tombstones are built over the bodies, because it’s too hot to dig down. Well, it was just the best day out. When we got to the island, we swam in a hot pool. Warm bubbles trickle up
from
an underground stream and run up your back. I could do with my bathing suit, because I had to swim in my panties and bra which made me feel really undressed, although of course I was perfectly decent. Anyway, I thought about you and wished you could have been here and seen it with me. Mum, it’s about time you had a holiday.

Love Jessie

Was that how it really happened? Yes and no. By the time they reached the island, the sun had become clear and hot. Jessie swam in the pool the way she described it to her mother. Marianne and Lou and John swam without any clothes. Of course Jessie had seen Marianne naked before; the intimacy of their room meant that they had little to hide from one another, only, they tended to look away from each other when they shed their clothes. Now, Marianne stretched herself. ‘Sunlight,’ she said. ‘That’s what I want, a bit of sun on my face.’ Her breasts were full and springy, her nipples curved upwards, a blue mark the size of a thumbprint or a mouth beside the left one. Lou glanced at her with a puzzled frown, and looked away.

The men cast their windcheaters and slacks aside, stacking them beside the girls’ clothes, and slid one by one into the water, holding towels from the boat over their waists. Still, as they dropped the towels, Jessie saw the smooth way their penises hung between their unevenly shaped balls. As she crouched inside her underclothes, not wanting to be caught looking, she thought they looked strong and somehow touching. Lou stood above her for a moment with the green bush behind him, deep-chested and fit, his penis brown and heavy. John’s was longer and creamier, reminding Jessie of a bud lily as it swayed in its nest of black hair. He could be a dancer, he was so slim. His hands fanned out in a quick dramatic gesture, covering himself.

‘What green eyes you’ve got,’ said Marianne. Jessie blushed and looked away. The two men stayed at the end of the pool while Marianne and Jessie lay against the smooth rocks at the other side.

‘I like to have young people around,’ Lou said, in a mock fatherly voice.

‘You’re not old,’ said Marianne.

‘Old enough to tell you when to go to bed.’

Marianne eyed Jessie sideways. ‘Evelyn and I used to have midnight feasts at their house. He was always telling us off. Not that it will matter when I’m forty. People don’t notice things like that, the older you get.’

‘Steady on,’ Lou said, ‘a joke’s a joke.’ He changed the subject then, talking about the war instead, telling them how it was to travel in a submarine and know there was nothing except the skin of a machine between you and a million million tons of the ocean pressing down, and what it was like when you released a missile, and it hit, and you were so glad you weren’t the poor bastard on the receiving end, the fear of the lights going out, and being left there in the dark, and what it was like to come back up to the surface after days near the ocean’s floor.

As Jessie climbed out of the water on to the rocks, she noticed that her skin had turned a dull puce. I’m cooked, she thought, I’m boiled meat. Not on Violet’s menu. She sat down and started to shiver, in spite of the warmth of the pool and the sunshine. John got out of the water, drying himself with one of the damp towels, his back towards her. She couldn’t see Marianne and Lou, who were already out and dressed.

‘Jessie,’ he said, pulling his clothes on. ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You need a cigarette.’

‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘Where are the others?’

‘Gone for a walk.’

‘I don’t know what’s going on here.’ The air was quite still around her, and somewhere she thought she heard a raised voice but perhaps it was something else.

‘I think they were looking for nesting birds.’

‘Are we doing couples or something?’ she said.

‘Would it matter if we were?’ He had thrown himself on the grass beside the pool. Leaning on his elbows, he stretched a blade of it between his thumbs and whistled gently into it.

‘Lou’s married. He’s Evelyn’s father.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Are you scared of doing things?’ He hadn’t made any move to reach for her. And, as he was speaking, Marianne and Lou appeared along the path. Lou’s face was dark, the friendliness erased, and Marianne looked as if she had been crying.

‘Come on, shake a leg,’ Lou said, ‘I’ve still got that stuff to pick up for her ladyship.’

On the return journey across the lake, they veered away from the town, towards the eastern apron. Two men stood at the water’s edge, waving. Behind them was a ramshackle cottage, partly covered with vines, a window boarded up and a chimney pot broken. A row of trees grew near the cottage; in the falling evening light, it was shading a garden planted in neat rows almost to the rim of sand. Closer up, Jessie saw one man was covered with a thick red and black woollen shirt, black trousers and black waders. He had a big loose frame, and a fair open face. Both he and the other man, older and darker, carried wooden boxes on their shoulders. The second man was Chinese, dressed in old trousers, baggy at the knees, and a faded evening jacket. The men lifted the boxes up to John. The first was full of green lettuces. ‘Be careful of this one,’ the Chinese man said, ‘it’s Madam’s salads.’ When he spoke, a solid gold tooth glinted in his mouth.

The fair man splashed through the water and climbed on board. ‘See ya later, Harry,’ he called back to his friend. In a moment, the boat roared away from the shore, as they headed back to town.

‘Owen, this is Jessie,’ John said, introducing them.

‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard about you,’ Owen replied, his eyes resting on her, his expression not entirely friendly. His glance strayed to Marianne, sitting in the cockpit laughing at something Lou had said. Things seemed to be back to normal between them.

‘Jessie’s all right,’ John said, putting an arm protectively around her shoulders. Surprised by this embrace, she let his arm rest, finding herself calm within its circle. She wondered what had made her afraid. They were all acting as if something had threatened them, and now they were working in concert to drive the thing away. Owen looked from John to Jessie. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘okay.’

‘You and my brother getting things sorted out?’ John asked.

‘Sure. The wedding’s going to be fine. Harry’s new house is looking good, don’t you reckon?’

‘Yeah, he’s doing all right,’ John said. ‘I might move in with him yet.’

‘Sam wouldn’t like that, would he?’

‘Well, it might be a bit far to bike to work. Pays to have plenty of brothers, you can pick and choose your lodgings.’ Lou had notched the motor up, and the boat began to fly along at a breathtaking pace, the waves going bang bang bang beneath them. John’s arm tightened around Jessie.

‘Did you say that was your brother?’ Jessie shouted above the noise of the engine. ‘Yes, that’s Chun, but you can call him Harry. I live with Sam, the next one down.’

‘But I thought Hugo was your father. The old man who died.’

‘He was. My mother was Ming, and Harry is one of the sons she had in China before her first husband died.’

‘I didn’t realise.’

‘That I was a Chinaman?’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

He took his arm away. She wanted to say that it was all right, she didn’t mean it in a way that might offend him, but she couldn’t find the right words. Her face was smarting with the wind on her sunburned cheeks, and with embarrassment. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t seen what was different about John before.

They’d called him a pansy and threatened to cut off his balls, holding him against trees with their arms across his throat, blocking his windpipe, until he cried, in spite of himself, while girls stayed away from him, as if in deference to the masculinity of the boys they hung
about with. He couldn’t work it out, because he hadn’t felt anything for anyone. He knew boys who fagged for prefects. One of them wore a cape, and sat on the knees of sixth-form boys with his arm around their necks, and everyone laughed. John never wanted to do that.

He tried to see himself as they saw him. The mirror showed him a fragile girlish beauty he couldn’t change. You’re a clever boy, his English teacher said. The mathematics teacher said, you should specialise with us. You’ve got the brains. You ought to be a scholarship pupil, the principal said. When his school reports came out he tore them up. They’re too dumb, he said. You don’t want to know what they think of me, he told his father. Only one day his father, who thought they must be getting it all wrong, took it on himself to go down and ask how his son was doing.

John couldn’t forget the night his father came home, his face like whey.

‘Why?’ he said, ‘What makes you tell me lies? Why do you want to squander your life in this way?’

‘People don’t like me at school,’ he said, after a long silence, because something was required of him.

His father had studied him intently. This father of his was very old, and had four sons — two stepsons from his wife’s first marriage, his own older brother and himself — but none of them were like him. They were sturdy men on the whole, although his younger brother Joe, the one who should have been close to him, had trouble reading and writing and had been taken out of school when he was thirteen. He was a huge overgrown boy, nearly a foot taller than John, who stayed at home and dug whole paddocks by hand in an afternoon, lifting the earth as easily as if he was shifting dust. Strong in one sense then, although you couldn’t hold a conversation with him. John wished he didn’t feel ashamed of his family. His father had taught him many things when he was small that seemed to have escaped other boys his own age. In the evenings Hugo played recordings of Schubert’s music on a shaky turntable, although John believed he could no longer hear the notes, and the boy knew that the music was intended for him. Mostly, he pretended he couldn’t hear it either,
sat whistling through his teeth, or staring at the ceiling, thinking how awful it would be if anyone could hear the music his father chose. He couldn’t meet his father’s eyes when he found out how he’d been cheating on him.

‘Fuck,’ said his brother. ‘Fuckfuck. They want John to do fuckfuck.’

His father had stood up, ready to lash out at his huge son, but one of the older sons, Harry, in his thirties then, who lived next door with his wife and children, put out his hand and held him back.

‘You want to listen to him, old man,’ he said. ‘The boy knows a thing or two.’

‘Is it true, then?’ his father asked John.

‘No,’ said John. ‘Yes, perhaps that’s what they want, but not me. That’s not what I want. It’s not what I do.’ Although, in his heart, he knew that if he stayed there much longer, he would have to do it whether he wanted to or not.

‘I can send you away to school,’ said his father. ‘Boarding school.’

‘It would be the same there,’ John said. ‘It would be the same wherever I went.’

It was after that his father said he had a job for him to go to: the woman who ran the new café at the end of the main street in town was looking for someone to work in the kitchen. She could give him an apprenticeship. When he told John this, he had to squeeze his eyes tightly together as if to stop tears leaking down the seamy old parchment of his face; as if he had done the very best he could and felt that he’d failed.

‘It’s only as important as you let it be,’ John said. ‘Being one thing or another. Being Chinese. If you don’t like it, go out with someone else.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Jessie said. ‘I should have known. Your father told me I should go to China.’

‘He did?’

‘Yes, he did. But then my mother said that too. I thought it was just something people said.’

Up in the ranges, on a road that led through thick native forest towards town, Freda’s small Prefect car had broken down. The problem was probably the carburettor, she and Evelyn decided. Evelyn flagged down a car and asked the driver to ring her father when he got into town, and send help.

The motorist did ring Lou Messenger, but he was not there. The man who answered the phone had just overturned a tray of trout flies and his mind was not on the call. Lou, he believed, was out showing clients some fishing trips around the lake. As soon as he came in, he said, he would give him the message. Only Lou didn’t come in for the rest of the day, and besides, the man forgot about the call.