Spotted Lily (21 page)

—33—

At a quarter to six,the public address system announced store closing in fifteen minutes, and at five minutes to six, the announcement nagged to a mostly empty store, 'Please take your purchases to the checkout counters.'

So I closed the book and shoved it under the bookstand, after crumpling a fistful of its pages.

My bum was in the air as I slapped my legs to get my feet to wake up.

'That wasn't very nice,' Brett said to my bum.

'Shee-yikes!'

Though I hated him, I needed his help to get up. 'How did you find me?' I asked.

'I felt you.'

'How sensitive of you.'

'Are you hungry?' he asked, as the bookstore door closed on us.

The pavement was a tangled mess of people rushing home. It felt good to be in their way.

'The only good thing about you pissing off like that, was that brat. Congratulations on ruining someone else's life besides mine. And you ask me if I'm hungry? When I haven't eaten since the break of dawn?'

'Sorry. Where would you like to eat? I'm easy,' he smiled, all let-bygones-be-bygones.

'I didn't even have the money to buy the book I wrote. And you have ruined my life. And my book is read by millions, and loved, and destined to be a classic, in numerous languages, and not only that, but I have written many, many books. By my estimate, something like twenty-five already.
And none of them will have my name as author.
And why the fuck did you tell me that the house had gone up in smoke when everything I had there is now in the hands of the only two people who can compete with you for the greatest fucker-uppers of my WHOLE ... FUCKING ... LIFE!'

People turned, people moved away, people laughed. The security guard inside the bookstore opened the door and poked his head out.

Wiping my arm over my face and under my nose, I stomped off toward the hotel, or maybe the Harbour Bridge. That direction, anyway.

Brett followed, grabbing me when I stepped out into traffic.

We walked with him holding onto my elbow, and me, crying and yelling in spasms of blinding, snot-generating tears.

'Mad woman of shallot', I mumbled, giving me a mad little giggle that broke grief's clutch.

Now, as we walked, the crowds pressed tighter, as no one avoided us. I was just a bereaved woman of means, not a casualty of the mental health system's lack of care.

We crossed the last street, and there was the harbour, as surprisingly beautiful as I had always found it, and the mysterious sea itself. We walked to the edge of the quay, and sat, dangling our legs over the water.

'You didn't set that fire, did you?'

'No, Angela. An aromatherapy candle in Simone's room started it. I only came back when everyone was running around in the house. Except you.'

'Did you do that stuff with the tampon?'

He nodded, his remorse slightly touching. His action would have looked sheepish,  but for the horns.

'What about the Higher Light?' I asked.

'What about it?'

'Burned?'

'I had no need to burn it, did I?'

'None at all,' I agreed, tasting bitterness with each new realization.

'Angela...'

'Don't soulful look me, you bastard!'

'Angela, did you not think anything of the present I gave you?'

It was hard to think of what Brett thought of as a present. All I could bear to do is to grunt. Words would have been too hurtful.

'Didn't you like my work? The Lily Retrospective?'

My heart pumped hard at that one. Breaking. But there was no point in showing him how much it hurt.

'Brett Hartshorn. Venice Biennale, here he comes.'

'Please don't make fun of me, my dear. I have suffered a disappointment with the exhibition, too.'

My heels banged against the concrete, reminding me that my boots were soft. 'You are
made
, Brett. That was the best launch you could ever get.'

'Really?' A self-absorbed joy, something I recognized as the expression I most wanted to have myself, glowed from his face. He was
such
an innocent.

'Have you seen tomorrow's papers yet?' I asked.

He smiled back, the smile of a supplicant. 'Angela, the show was political.'

'It sure was!' I laughed.

'Not that way, my dear...'

His gaze was unnerving—as if I were there in front of him, but wasn't—as if I were a contact lens that he was staring at while it was lost in the grass.

'Will you help me?' he asked, and two creases at the top of his nose twitched.

What else was there for me?

Crawling back from the edge, I tugged him upright. 'Feed me, you truant from the bottomless pit.'

—34—

We were in tourist central, down at the quay. There was a restaurant just behind us. I ordered lasagne, and Brett followed suit. Its meatiness would have horrified me when I lived at Bettawong. Now, what I really wanted was the meat alone. Lots and lots of red—preferably seared, rare steak. Brett ate, but rather chorefully.

There's nothing like a feed when you need one. I was picking my teeth when he cleared his throat the way a person does.

'Yes, Brett?' I sighed, but only inwardly.

'He asked me how the book is going.'

'Who? Justin? He doesn't care, does he?'

Comically, Brett mouthed, 'The Omniscient.'

'Whooh! You believe that?'

'Don't you?'

'Scientifically speaking?'

'Speaking as you.'

'Speaking as'—and I sat up as tall as I could— 'Me the Great, the whole thing's a crock.'

He didn't even smile. 'Crock? What about?' He leaned toward me and stuck his elbow into cold, melted cheese, and didn't notice. 'Hell?'

It was real, all right. But the purposefulness of the supposed Him had no purpose. How could I put it so Brett would understand?

'He's Mister Chance, Brett. Random Chance.'

'He's coming,'—a stage-whisper.

This was getting weirder.

'Make sense, Brett.'

'Help me to escape.' He reached across the plates. 'Pleeeze, Angela!'

Between us, his shirtsleeves silently sucked up orange grease at a mosquito-buzz level of annoyance.

I took back my hands and stood up. 'Let's get outa here. We'll talk at the hotel.'

~

To my relief, the staff had changed. One can only take so much humiliation in one day.

Brett had a zillion messages waiting for him. When got to our room, he threw them in the bin.

I made him change his shirt for another, and the one he waved into being was the same style as the last. He either liked it, or had no imagination. I didn't have a chance to ask, because he launched straight into his problems.

~

'So you think he wants to come here and check up on you?' I asked.

'You could put it that way.'

'Doesn't he know all?'

'He doesn't have time to.'

Ah. 'Like parents.'

'Eh?'

'They're like that, too. Pretending to be able see around corners.'

Those bootlaces of his needed adjusting again. Now I knew the pattern. While he was bent over, his words floated up. 'I never had children.' Incredibly, some biological clock tolled for him, of all ... For a moment, his tragedy was almost funny. Only for a moment.

'My father...' I said. The father I hadn't seen for a dozen years. The father who I knew loved me. The father I couldn't talk to. 'My father died today.'

Brett rushed over and crouched at my knees. 'Today!'

I wanted to cry, but couldn't.

'Worse.' And doesn't having to explain make everything worse? 'It was some time ago.'

'I'm
so
sorry,' His lips and eyes twitched through several expressions—sincere and silly at the same time.

'My brother is dead too. One of them. The other is in America.'

'I don't know what to say.'

'That's all right, Brett.' I gave his head a brief scratch between the horns. 'No one ever does.'

As he continued to gaze up at me, his sympathy was no longer silly.

Two big tears splashed from my eyes onto his knee.

'How is your mother?' he asked.

'Okay, I guess.'

'Is she alone?'

'Not sure. Probably.'

'Isn't she lonely?'

'Are you asking because you wonder how we feel, or because you want to know?' I asked, and then wanted to take it back

He stood and flexed his back, turning away from me. 'Do you want anything more from Sydney?'

'...No.'

'Would you like to see the world?'

Why would I want to do that? 'Fine.'

'And then go to see your mother?'

'Hell, no!' That came out so fast, I didn't temper the thought.

'Don't you love her?'

'I guess, Brett. But I left for a reason. I
hate
living in the country. It's horrible. And you would, too.'

'I wouldn't know. But your mother...'

'Don't worry about my mother, Brett. Didn't you ruin my life, to save yours?'

'When you put it that way, my dear—'

'It's been a long day. Days. I'm just tired.'

Appeasement had been reached. Good.

Going to the country had been forgotten. Even better.

Punching him companionably, I grinned and bounced on my bed. 'Now what's this about a world tour?'

'It's best that we move around a bit.'

'Evasion?'

'Something like that. I can call it research.'

Better to humour than to scorn. 'Does he suspect anything?'

'I don't know. He does rather think my holiday is taking a while.'

'Does he think in terms of years, too? Your years, or his years?'

'No.'

Very illuminating, but what did it matter.? The real question was: 'How do we travel?'

'Blink?'

—35—

I picked the first destination, one I had fond memories of.

On this occasion, however ...

There's me, post-lunch, lying on the hard black sand of Singaraja Beach, sweat pooling between my breasts. Two beautiful Balinese girls are near me, sifting beach gravel to make cement. They've been here since morning, sifting for a while, then carrying baskets of gravel on their heads to a building site overlooking the tepid sea. Brett sits on the beach next to me, dressed insistently and interminably, even to the boots, in his Brettwear.

In this heat, the boots bother him more than usual.

My beach book was
Barbara
. It read like an airport book—nothing like that article in the
Herald
that had labelled
Barbara
'uproarious'. Reviewers so often can't admit they cry. They have to turn every tragedy into humour, every hero into anti-hero. The success of
Barbara
showed me again the falseness of those who would be tastemakers. Just like Barbara Cartland's books,
Barbara
was accompanying millions of people to bed. As I blew my nose into the beach sand, so did millions blow theirs into manufactured tissues or fine embroidered lawn—as we cried with Barbara, yearned for Barbara, urged Barbara to victory and love, as we do all our heroes and heroines in the greatest of books—especially when we see that they, like us, have been kicked in the teeth by life.

I bought it at the little shop by the beach, the one that sold SPF 15 for us easy-to-burns, baby oil, batik sarongs, prawn crackers and dayglow-coloured sweets.

I read stretched out on the beach in my sarong. Brett sat cross-legged on a bamboo mat, reading a book he had obtained for himself. A Darwin, first edition.

'You look like a dork,' I told him, but he was oblivious to public opinion.

It wasn't only that antique book. To my surprise, he had acquiesced to my suggestion as soon as we arrived, to buy and wear an Asian-style baseball cap—the only headwear sold at that little shop. I thought it would be a good idea. Brett could blend in, and not shock the sensibilities these simple locals might have. The cap was black mesh, high in the crown, and its brim twisted like a roadkilled duck, but it hid those horns.

By our second day on the beach, it was obvious to me that the locals had seen everything and were unshockable by anything. They were not interested in me or Brett. They did their jobs, smiled gracefully all the time, and maybe hated us. Who could tell? They wouldn't. So I told him he didn't need the cap, but he didn't take it off. When I told him to dump the cap, he said he liked it.

Bali didn't satisfy me now, and the food was all pizza, and mango smoothies, and pawpaw fruit salad, and toasted cheese jaffles—or starve. They didn't even have water buffalo. And Brett was no beach bum. So we left.

After Bali, I didn't want to choose.

~

New York. The people were pushy, and Brett was now attached to that dumb cap, which meant that he looked as dorky on a city street as he had on a tropical beach.

He landed us in an apartment where the residents were away. Brett didn't explain anything, but the apartment was just like the house of the three bears. We slept in soft beds (or rather, I slept in a soft bed), I ate their food (fresh from their freezer), and he read their books.

'A great library,' he informed me in a somewhat scolding tone.  It was an actual library with a dictionary on a stand and a giant globe, and a reading table and a giant desk and a Persian carpet to dampen the noise of a page being turned, and an upper walkway and long ladders. Its saving grace was a chesterfield.

He sat in a hard chair, a book splayed on a reading table in front of him. I was stretched out, reading my book for the third time, but that was my business.

When he again praised the collection, I responded. 'Uni ended for me years ago. I will not be told what to read.'

Happily, he didn't push.

New York was cold. It smelt of hoary diesel exhaust and artificial maple flavouring.

Barbara
was in every bookstore window, and so were pictures of Simone Kitchen. I didn't read newspapers, as I would have run into her there, too, or been sucked into all the other terrible news of the world.

Brett cared for me, though. If I wanted something new to wear, I got something new. There was no point in me shopping for clothes. There was no point in me doing anything.

So I read
Barbara
in the tropical heat of the apartment, and ate steak.

~

It was almost my bedtime. He was hunched over the reading table in the library, making favourable and snide comments to a book. Since he had always read silently, I leaned over his shoulder to see what made him such a chatterbox. It was an oversized glossy coffee-table production, some sort of history of the Devil as depicted in art.

I unbuttoned my boots and pulled them off. 'Why isn't your tail like the pictures?'

He closed the book. 'I wondered about that, myself. Must be the reason why we have so many artists come through now, as opposed to centuries ago.'

I sat on the carpet floor and massaged the ball of my foot. 'What do you mean?'

'I haven't looked like that for nigh on a hundred of your years now, and has anyone shown my beautiful hair?'

'You mean your tail? I thought it was just like a bull's tail.'

I'd seen and combed a lot of bulls' tails. A length about a foot long of flesh-encased vertebrae covered with fur, from which a long ponytail of hair extends, ending sometimes almost at the ground, in a wavy curl.

'Want to feel?' he asked.

'Can I?'

But he had already stood and turned his back to me. He pulled down his jeans, and as I should have expected, he wore no underdaks.

I reached up and felt through the fur, to the fleshy part of the tail. Thick, bonelessly flexible as a kelp stalk, and more than a metre long, it ended as a handful-size triangulated point—a parson's nose, it was called at home, when the chook was plucked bald and that fleshy tail piece exposed itself.

Brett's thick, long ponytail hid his parson's nose. I held his tail horizontally so that the silky black hair fell away and the heart shape revealed itself in gleaming curves.

He craned his head back to look down at me, without pulling his tail from my fingers. 'Have you ever seen pictures as I am now?'

I stifled a laugh. 'No. Only the shaved version like in that book.'

He bent over and pulled his jeans partway up, his tail flowing through my fingers. In a complicated manoeuvre, he arranged his tail so that its nose rested behind his exceeding manliness. He buttoned the jeans and then bent and spread his legs, and straightened and bent back in the exactingly careful dance with a slow jerk at the end that I had seen blokes perform—blokes who had much less to be careful of.

'Do you like it this way or the other more?' he asked, going to the door.

'I don't know,' I said honestly, picking up my boots and going to the door with him.

'Neither do I,' he answered, as he ushered me out.

'Sleep well,' he said, as I opened the door to my room.

'Hope everything's well enough back ... you know,' I said, not knowing what to say.

When my door was shut, I began to undress, but I wasn't sleepy. I had ten dollars in my bag. Though I have never liked drinking alone, I went out for coffee.

As I drank, I pondered the question: If he was beginning to develop vanity, why was he so attached to that asinine mesh cap?

~

The next day, it seemed, we were in Vienna. We dossed down in the State Library, where he settled in as happily as a paper mite. We slept on sofas in the library itself.

I spent two days walking in the rain.

'Are we running?' I asked.

'Mm.'

'Do you think he is watching us?'

'Don't know.'

He was hunched over another book!

'Enough is enough.' I hurled the thing. 'I'm fed up with this!'

That got his attention.

'Brett, I 'm going crazy with doing nothing. Do you have a plan?'

He tilted his head, silent movie method-acting: Listener.

I semaphored my presence with my arms, inches from his face. 'Hell-oh-oh!'

He gripped my throat with that choking smell. 'Shut up!'

His hiss was unnecessary, as I was rolling on the ground in pain.

The building rumbled.

He threw himself on me, knocking my head against the marble floor.

The pain lasted through the crash of a naked marble lady smashing on top of us both.

~

A small, dark room, with no personality. Me on a cot.

Brett beside me, holding my hand.

Now smiling at me. 'Feel better?' he asked.

I shook my head and moved my legs. Outside of a dull headache and the general pains you would feel if you fell down a flight of stairs and were avalanched by a marble Amazon, I felt fine.

'Great, Brett.' As best I could, I smiled. 'What was that all about?'

'An earthquake.'

What a headache. But wait a minute! 'Wasn't that Vienna?'

'We were in Vienna when it happened.'

Something creepy was creeping up my brain. 'Vienna doesn't
have
earthquakes.'

'Not recently.'

'Look Brett, let's not parse the plastocene. I mean, Vienna doesn't have earthquakes in human memory.'

'Seventeen sixty-eight. I know that's not human memory.' An apology with, I was relieved to note, no sarcasm. 'But here. Let me help you up.'

'Ta.' A few hundred years ago. Not exactly earthquake-prone. 'Do you think it's a message to you?'

A hangnail of his needed to be bitten off, before 'No' came through his teeth. A practised answer.

'Maybe we better move around more,' I suggested. 'Unless ... You ready to jump?'

'Could we move around a bit more first?'

'Sure, Brett.'

~

We sure did. Ten cities, ten days. I found
Barbara
in every city, in the language of the natives, and my own. I enjoyed finding and buying a copy, just as he preferred to visit libraries and antiquarian bookshops rather than take the easy route of swirling a hand and instantly obtaining any book.

It was almost hypnotic, this new life. He never told me the intended destination.

This part of the trip was something I had always fantasized about. Going on an airplane somewhere, being packed perfectly for wherever, and not knowing till landing, where it would be. Of course, the destination would always be someplace wonderful, and the travel itself would be unreal—no lost baggage, no touts ...

Brett's mode of travel had minimal problems. His luggage always arrived safely. I had none-only the bag I carried, with nothing inside except the little bit of money I asked for. If I lost the bag, another was supplied.

The motion-sickness lasted for such a small moment that it didn't matter. Oddly though, sometimes I had jet lag, depending on the distance. As for Brett, he had no problems with the travel itself. His sickness was nerves, post-trip nerves in my morning, when he came back from his nightly visits back 'there' as we referred to it.

~

One day Brett transported us to a palatial apartment that he said was a 'mere walk away' from the Vatican library. The important thing is that water pouted from the mouths of golden dolphins, crystal bottles of Cleopatric libations awaited my choosing, and I left a rainbowed soap ring in the chalcedon bath. On a bed fit for a queen, all red and gold and cherubim, Brett had laid out new attire. The dress and jacket and boots pulled and gapped and pinched, just as everything he made. But the clothes fit better than what I would have found by shopping.

While I was dressing, Brett suddenly walked into the still steamy bathroom and closed the door. Odd. He'd never been interested in bathrooms before. I was putting on my boots when 'Aaaaargh!' came from beyond the door, then 'Angela! Is it supposed to feel good and bad at the same time?'

Lots of things do, so 'What?'

'...Eliminating? I don't know—'

A plop ... a series of little toots ... and a long bugle note.

'Don't flush!' I yelled.

Eventually he came out, smiling.

'Did you wash your hands?' I asked.

'I forgot.'

While he was washing them, I examined his production. It was massive, but otherwise normal in colour, shape, texture. And the smell in this inadequately vented room was normal, too.

'And your pimples? Gone?'

'Going,' he said. 'Aren't I supposed to flush the toilet?'

'Now you can.'

He did, and with the weighty joy of a boy, he watched his shit twirl down.

Well, that apartment was fun.

The next day, we moved again.

And the next day, again.

~

That apartment had been a welcome interlude, but it was the only fun part of these travels with Brett. Mostly, he found us libraries where I dossed down in some corner while he read.

Actually, I don't know if he did read any more. He was acting like a paranoid looney now, forever on the move. So one day, just as he was preparing to move us again, I asked, 'Do you think he did it to us?'

'What?'

'That earthquake.'

'No,' he answered.

Something needed to be settled, and
now
. 'Doesn't he know everything, do everything? According to you.'

'Only according to you.'

'Not me!'

'No, Angela,' His hands made drunken butterfly movements, fluttering and dropping to his lap. 'I don't mean
you
.'

'Are you going back tonight?'

'You know.'

'Can you ask him a question?'

His eyelids dropped self-protectively. 'It doesn't work that way. What?'

'Ask him about the tree and the grain silo, and my family ... Ask him, Brett!'

'Okay.'

He sat in the only chair, some plastic and chrome horror. I think we were in some sub-sub-basement room of the Library of Congress, but book tombs tend to look like book tombs the world over. I rested my back against the wall.

I was either meditating or nodding off when his voice broke the silence. 'Shit, that was close.'

'Too right,' I agreed, but there was something that riled. 'You don't have to condescend, Brett.'