That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (31 page)

Her thoughts passed briefly through the subject of the man. The husband
-to-be that she imagined was not as detailed in his points as the other arrangements were in theirs. He was a benevolent abstraction, with something about him of Lieutenant Marlowe from
The Sea Rover
wireless serial, with whom she had been in love and who, sad to relate, had died trying to save the ship’s dog in a fire. Although
The Sea Rover
was long finished, Marlowe’s sacrificial end meant that she kept adoring him a little.

The fantasy then skipped decades, and pulled up like an express train in front of an apparition of herself as an elderly woman, surrounded by grown children and young grandchildren and the vague, now whitened bloke, smiling a serene
‘all’s well’.

To be that old, your work completed, the struggle of life over and heaven at hand
– this fantasy of the future had been a part of her imaginative repertoire since she was a child and she turned to it automatically for comfort, in defiance of knowing that she should take a greater interest in what lay between the trousseau and the end of life.

She heard the side gate open and shut, then the back door, as Dad came home. She stuffed the paper back in the drawer and returned to
Contes et Légendes
. She was still working on it fitfully when Mother called down the hall that dinner was ready.

Having saved up the announcement of the vision, Joan shared it with her family over the casserole. Keith was inclined to be scathing
– he was getting to that age – but Dad appeared to bring a genuine consideration to the matter. His rough nimble hands, clean now that he had gone from being a fitter and turner to an inspector at the railways workshop, lowered the knife and fork to his plate while he paused in eating to speak.

‘
I don’t disbelieve in them,’ he began. He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head as he did when he wished to make a qualified point. ‘But I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that they’re little green men from outer space. My bet would be that they’re experimental aircraft.’

‘
Russians?’

‘
Or Yanks,’ Dad answered Keith. ‘Yanks, more likely.’

‘
Did you find out about them when you were in the army?’ asked Keith, no longer scathing. Dad picked up his cutlery again and laughed.

‘
Heavens, no. I wasn’t high up enough to know about that sort of thing.’

Joan helped herself to more potatoes
.

‘
Don’t take so much, Joan,’ said Mother.

‘
I’m hungry,’ Joan protested.

‘
You’re looking very solid. Isn’t she, Arthur? Looking very solid?’

Dad looked down to consult his plate.
‘An army marches on its stomach.’

‘
Yes, but she isn’t trying to invade Russia.’

‘
I’ll put them back,’ Joan said.

‘
We do live in an age of advancing science, don’t we?’ Mother said suddenly, addressing a place on the tablecloth between the casserole and the peas. ‘Or, who knows that they weren’t friends of the Aboriginals?’

Where other people would have said
‘Aboriginal gods’ or ‘Aboriginal spirits’ she said ‘friends of the Aboriginals’. Mrs Walker’s deviations from the expected were always mild and ceremonious. It was the ceremony that irritated Joan and made her want to do something frightful like spit her food out onto the tablecloth or run around the room hooting like a monkey. She could not imagine being like her mother. The monkey was easier to imagine.

It was possible to see that Mrs Walker feared vulgarity and took refuge from it in slight affectations, such as an affinity for the far
-fetched and the exotic. With a more generous eye it was not impossible to find that her soul had been born in circumstances not very suited to it and, too strong to agree entirely to those circumstances, if too weak to refuse them, had grown up as a slightly artificial, or imaginary, to use a less condemning and probably more accurate word, version of itself. There was discernible partisanship in ‘friends of the Aboriginals’.

‘
Better the Aboriginals,’ joked Dad, ‘than the Russians.’

Mrs Walker
’s pursed expression made it plain that she thought her remark had been given unfairly short shrift.

After dinner, Joan returned to her room. Someone turned the TV on in the living room and cigarette smoke began to drift through the house. With the TV filling in the background, she closed the curtains resolutely and attacked her homework.

At around eight o’clock, Dad appeared in the doorway. He held in his hand the telescope that was brought out occasionally for impromptu astronomy lessons.

‘
Going all right?’ he asked.

‘
Yes, all right.’ Joan glanced inquiringly at the telescope.

‘
It’s a good clear night. I thought we could have a look for your UFOs, if you’d like a break.’

‘
Well, I don’t think we’ll find them.’ Joan was too surprised not to say the first thing that came into her mind. She worked up a smile. ‘But I wouldn’t mind a break.’

Mother did not come outside, as she felt the cold even on mild nights. Joan, Dad and Keith went out
.

After the UFOs had been searched for and the search abandoned, the skygazing session became an ordinary one. It was natural that Keith, as the youngest, should hog the telescope. While Dad quizzed Keith on the constellations, already familiar to Joan, she tried to rec
over at least the feeling that had brought on her singing of ‘Jerusalem’, but even that had been something wild that was not going to return when called.

After enough time had gone by, with the excuse of homework to finish, she went back
inside the house.

II.

Strathgower, 1964

Mr Dean was a miner from Strathgower
who now lived at the Coober Pedy opal fields in South Australia. He had chosen opals over gold, since, even before he was born, the gold remaining in Strathgower’s hills was too deep to be accessible to a man on his own, and he preferred being on his own to working in a commercial mine.

Like many miners, he left the fields during the summer and returned to his native town. A human figure made from a minimum of dried and hardened material, his forehead elevating to a flat plateau twigged with upstanding black and grey hairs, his way of living included a gentle and abiding alcoholism, the delicate early fumes of which
came into the Strathgower library with him at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning in January.

After browsing the shelves he brought two paperbacks to the loans desk where Joan was working that morning
.

‘
As I always say, I’ve come ter refresh meself at the bar of literature. I’m going down ter Melbourne; I’m taking these fer the train.’

Joan stamped the books and smiled with unfeigned cheer, for she liked Mr Dean. She liked the way he spoke, which was evidently to please himself. His elaborate stock phrase was more interesting than most people
’s talk.

‘
Making a business trip?’ Joan knew, having been told by Mr Dean himself, that he did not like to sell all his stone to buyers on the field. He kept some back, if he could afford to, until the summer hiatus, and sold them directly to a gem dealer in Melbourne.

‘
Reckon I am. Wish me luck, eh?’

‘
I certainly do.’

He leaned across the
varnished counter of the desk, breathing like Bacchus. ‘I’ll give yer a look. Yer can be the first person to see ’em, apart from me.’

Since no one else was waiting to be served, Joan indicated that he could show her.

He reached into an inside pocket of his sports coat and withdrew a brown paper bag from which he gently shook out a bundle in a handkerchief. Joan knew Mr Dean’s paper bags and watched the unfolding of the handkerchief with anticipation.

This time there were six or seven fingernail
-sized pale opals. As usual, the stones he had with him were ‘rubs’, cleaned of waste rock but still to be cut and polished. He spread them out on the handkerchief. The milky pebbles sparkled with electric green and blue, pink and orange, here and there showing off the strength of red or a burst of chartreuse.

He entered upon a
short, poetic speech that he had given before, on several previous show-and-tell occasions, more or less exactly in the same words he now spoke.

‘
Isn’t it amazing ter think they’ve been in the ground fer millions of years, and it’s taken till now fer someone to look at ’em? Yer could put ’em in a crown.’ He appeared moved. Joan gazed at the gorgeous stones, drinking up their sealed iridescence with her eyes.

‘
Magic, aren’t they? I wouldn’t do it just for the living. I save ’em. That’s exactly what I do. I rescue these beautiful things from the darkness of the ground.’

‘
And the light completes them,’ said Joan.

‘
Ah,
you
know.
You
know.’ He put the opals back in their handkerchief in the bag and the bag back in his pocket. He looked away and when he looked back his face exhibited a mixture of intense inexpressibles.

‘
I could tell yer a story,’ he said. ‘Most people wouldn’t believe it, but
you
might. D’yer want to hear it?’

‘
Go on. You’re right, I might believe it.’

He began by leaning over the desk again, his manner becoming confidential.
‘It was up at that place where I found these. Out on the fields, middle of the day. I’d just come out of me hole fer a breather. Well, I looked around, and I saw a bloke, standing just about ten yards away. Of course, I wondered what he was doing there on me claim.

‘
There was only him and me there, nobody else around. Me eyes were still adjusting to the light, so I couldn’t see him all that well – at first. Anyway, I called out hullo. He didn’t say anything, but he looked at me. Me eyes came good in a moment, and I saw his face.’ Mr Dean pulled his lips back against his teeth. ‘He wasn’t a human being. He had a face like a lizard. He wasn’t burnt, he wasn’t deformed – he just wasn’t human. And if you’re wondering how clear I saw him, I can tell yer he had sad eyes. Looked as if he was holding back tears – for what sorrows I couldn’t imagine. And then he was gone – poof! Just vanished. He was there, and then he wasn’t.’ Mr Dean leaned back, separating himself from the desk. ‘Well. Whad’yer think of that?’

‘
It gave me a shiver,’ Joan said truthfully. ‘I don’t disbelieve you at all.’

Mr Dean looked satisfied.
‘You’re all right.’

‘
Can you remember what he was wearing? A spacesuit?’

A shake of the lean head.
‘No idea. I wasn’t looking at his clothes.’

‘
What do you think he was?’

‘
Wouldn’t have a clue.’

‘
An ancestor spirit, perhaps?’

‘
All religion is hocus-pocus. Nothing in it,’ he said firmly. ‘No, he was a mystery.’

‘
I saw a mystery like that too, once,’ Joan began.

‘
Go on, your turn.’