The Best Australian Stories 2014 (11 page)

Meanjin

The Peacock

Arabella Edge

She watches her husband manoeuvre the car through the open gate and waves him goodbye. He is booked on a flight that morning from Melbourne to London in a last-minute dash to be with his mother, who is dying.

As the car accelerates along the road, she braces herself for the challenge ahead. She has to run their accommodation business throughout the Christmas season on her own. Four cabins set on five hectares of foreshore bushland, which overlook lichen-covered rocks and the ocean. A spontaneous decision they had made three years ago to exchange their Paddington terrace in Sydney for a life on the south coast. The fact that neither of them had ever operated such a venture before had not deterred them in the least. They are happy, they have moved on.

Now for the first time, she is alone here.

‘Don't forget to ring Rick for water,' Luke had said, giving her a final hug.

She returns to Reception and once again studies the complicated chart and list of instructions he has set out: open road header tap to fill main tank, sound the cabin tanks with a stick to gauge the level, ensure the greywater pit hasn't overflowed, exchange empty barbeque gas bottles at the hardware store. And so on.

Within two days, however, she surprises herself by becoming adept at the completion of various daunting tasks, and has managed to move thousands of litres of water from one tank to another without losing a drop. Yesterday, she had come upon a large black snake on the track leading to the beach and hadn't even screamed out loud. She organises the cleaning rosters, checks the guests in and checks them out. She tends to the orchard and vegetable garden. She feeds grain to her flock of bantam chooks and to the peacock, his two hens and four peachicks. At dusk she throws out pasture replacement pellets for her ever-expanding mob of semi-tame wallabies headed by the matriarch, hand-raised Lucy, who is now nine years old. She recognises them all, the pretty sable does, the boxing juveniles and the dark mature males from the forested hills.

She makes it through Christmas without incident or complaint. The guests seem content and compliment her on owning such a beautiful place. When Luke rings she is able to honestly reply: all well.

On New Year's Eve, a massive electrical storm moves in. It's just before seven when she wanders out onto the deck with a glass of wine and is mesmerised by the white sheets of lightning that flash and flicker against the dark swell of the ocean.

For a brief moment, there is a light patter of rain, the first in weeks. It's swelteringly hot. She glances at her phone. She and Luke have arranged that it is he who will call, as she does not want to disturb anyone in his mother's house.

She thinks of his mother and the night nurse's vigil in the pretty Richmond home where Ann has lived for thirty years. Her most recent memory of her mother-in-law is from four months earlier in a Hampstead garden in late summer. She had taken a photo of Ann seated on a stone bench beside an ornamental lake where geraniums spilled from terracotta urns in front of a grand pre-Raphaelite mansion. How long has it been since Luke's departure? Four weeks? Well, she, Marianne, has got through at the very height of the season. She should feel proud of herself but she doesn't; she needs to be reassured; she wants Luke to ring, to hear his voice, to be told how capable she is.

She listens to the thunder roll, yes, roll at rapid and regular intervals always ahead of the lightning, which sends vivid flares across the far indigo reaches of the horizon.

If Luke were here they would exult in the tumult of the storm. This is the possum hour and she can hear their nimble scramble through the trees, their fierce warning screams. The peacock lets out a shrill protracted screech, a sound that drives Luke mad. The slam of a car door, the strike of a hammer, the rev of a chainsaw is enough to elicit six or seven relentless shrieks from the big bird.

‘I'd love to get a gun,' Luke exclaimed once, downing his tools in irritation.

‘It's seasonal,' she retorted, and reminded him that by February, the peacock would moult and lose his feathers, and for six months become sterile and silent.

‘Six months is not enough,' Luke replied.

Perhaps, she thinks, they shouldn't have come here after all. It's certainly not a place where she could live alone. If anything happened to Luke, what would she do? In the past she has raised this with him, this needling anxiety of hers. ‘Don't bump me off yet,' was his usual response.

She has no family of her own, no children, no brothers and sisters. Her mother died when she was in her early twenties. Soon after, her father remarried. He had invited Marianne and his new wife, Janice, to a Soho brasserie for dinner and over a glass of Beaujolais had proceeded to describe in great detail the occasion when Janice had first arrived in his office for a job interview, how sexy she had looked wearing a tight fitting dress, her long blonde hair tied in a ponytail. But hang on; that must have been at least fifteen years ago, Marianne had thought, and he had been married to her mother then. Her beautiful mother. How could he have betrayed her with a woman like Janice? The last link to her family, her aunt, had succumbed eighteen months later to leukaemia and she had flown to London to be with her. Dying is such hard, drawn-out labour.

An image of her aunt rises unbidden in her mind, the emaciated face almost invisible against the starched white pillow. Just a head on a bed in a West London palliative care unit. On her daily visits to that bleak institution she had soon discovered she was the only one strong enough to open the heavy glass door to the smoking room. Most mornings when she marched along the corridor there were frantic preparations in the adjoining wards as the patients who smoked heaved themselves onto crutches or into wheelchairs and thanked her each time she let them into the shabby little room.

‘Don't like to ask the nurses,' one of them giggled.

As she lit their cigarettes she could also keep an eye on the sparse cubicle where her aunt lay asleep. Often while she waited for Rosa to wake, she would pass the time with Michael, a man in his seventies, who favoured Café Crème cigars. These people were dying and yet how alive they seemed. She marvelled at them, the way they talked and joshed and smoked with an unrepentant defiance.

After a time she persuaded the nurses to allow her to sleep on a mattress beside Rosa's bed. Throughout her illness, Rosa showed no fear, self-pity or resentment. With courage she resigned herself to all the insidious and invasive calibrations of her treatment.

One afternoon she gazed at Marianne and said: ‘If there's an afterlife, they will declare that I could have done better and made more of an effort with my life.'

Marianne was so shocked by this that she could think of no immediate reply. Later that day she caught a taxi to Rosa's house, a semi-detached in Kilburn, told the driver to wait, unlocked the door and ran upstairs to Rosa's bedroom. There she opened the walnut cabinet and reached for the hatbox that contained the silk scarves which Rosa had painted in all their exquisite variations.

When she returned, her aunt once again asleep, she draped a scarf across the hospital bed, intricate whorls of pale pink and crimson poppies, the stamens gilded with pollen. She took out another and let it drift from a curtain rail, a riotous, iridescent profusion of green and purple peacock plumes with aquamarine eyes that sprang from a lotus flower in deepening shades of blue. In another, golden carp flitted through rippled wreaths of weeds that rose from one another on a single stem. This she spread over a chair. Then she held up a wild abstract of sunburnt desert dunes and saffron clouds. Rosa opened her eyes and gazed about with bewilderment. ‘Oh,' she exclaimed, ‘I'd quite forgotten.' With an almost childlike sense of wonder she began to examine her creations. She felt the texture of the stitched hem and lifted the fabric to the light; she traced the curve of the poppy petals with her fingertips and an expression of contentment passed across her face.

The doctor and a nurse came in and stared at the scarves festooned around the room.

‘Batik?' the nurse enquired.

Rosa shook her head and began to explain her method, while the doctor took her time, lingering to admire each one. When it came to the peacock scarf she held it up to the window. ‘Oh, I love this!' she exclaimed.

When the doctor had gone, Rosa beckoned to Marianne.

‘I would like to give the peacock to Dr Fiona,' she whispered.

Fiona was moved by the gift and on her afternoon round thanked Rosa profusely. ‘It's beautiful,' she announced, and tied the scarf in a loose knot around her neck.

Rosa lay back on her pillows, content.

On her way to the canteen, Marianne passed Fiona in a corridor.

‘I would just like to say …' Fiona began, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘It's an essential part of our training,' she said, ‘not to show any emotion here.' She touched the scarf lightly, and smiled.

That night, Marianne woke feeling stifled with a sense of dread. She got up, tiptoed into the smoking room and found Michael by the window. ‘I've just had the strangest sense …' she began.

‘Don't mind the ghosts,' he said. ‘Well, they bother me at times, particularly the anti-smokers. They keep pinching my lighters.'

And they laughed.

‘I know I'll go past one day and Rosa won't be there,' he said, and brought the cigar to his lips with a trembling hand.

When the hour came, Marianne bought a large multipack of lighters in bright primary colours and gave them to Michael. By then he was hooked to an oxygen tube, grey and wan, but he managed a smile. She thanked the doctor and the nursing staff and for the last time walked through the forbidding wrought-iron gates of the palliative care unit. On impulse she offered her cigarettes to a tramp bent over a damp rollie in the shelter of a bus stop nearby. She has not smoked since.

She shivers now, roused to the moment by the storm. Still the lightning patterns the ocean with vivid shafts of light. The thunder rumbles, a faraway echo reverberating through the night. She goes to bed and longs to speak to Luke.

The following day is the hottest on record and forty-three degrees. The peacock displays in languid, dreamy twirls; he does not stamp his feet for his girls but is absorbed in the intense sunlight that irradiates his train, a dazzling burnish of bronze and green and gold. In single file, the peahens and chicks sway along the path as if returning from a ball in their faded emerald gowns.

In the late afternoon, Marianne waters the parched orchard where the plums are shrivelled on the trees. Will it never rain? She looks up, and a cloud has mushroomed into the sky as if from nowhere. About time, she thinks, a shower at last, but when she looks again she can tell by the sulphur underbelly, its orange tinge, that this is a vast curtain of swiftly moving smoke. She hurries to the lawn where the occupants in cabins One and Two are gathered. They are return guests, visitors from Eden, and like most rural coast-dwellers are expert readers of the wind and sky, the rips and tides.

‘She's blowing south-west,' they call, ‘we'll be all right.'

Although she has lived in Australia for twenty years, she finds information of this kind impressive; it reduces her to her original Pom status, accustomed only to weather patterns of ceaseless rain. Relieved, she leaves them to continue their walk and switches on the sprinklers in the scorched vegetable garden. Part of the charm of this place, she thinks, lies in its natural bush setting. Guests find it delightful, but it renders the property indefensible in the event of fire. She studies the dense foreshore of she-oak and wattle, the tall stands of wild cherry and hoop pine, the forest of gums behind the cabins.
We don't stand a chance.

Two hours later, the visitors from Eden are anxious and begin to pack their car. Does she mind if they leave a day early?

‘Not at all.'

The couple in Cabin Four arrive on the scene and tell her that the motel in town has vacancies.

‘Best to be safe,' she says, as they too drive off.

Alone and with no one to worry about, she fills containers of water. Rosellas dive-bomb the birdbath and drench their green and red plumage before soaring into the air. The telephone rings. ‘Hiya.'

It's a familiar voice, Vron, her friend in Sydney, who has just heard from a news bulletin that bushfires are three kilometres south of Marianne and Luke's property, and could cross the highway. Marianne observes the stray twists and tendrils of the advancing smoke, fascinated by the way they funnel and spiral when caught in an immense updraught of cumulus clouds.

‘It's all right,' she replies. ‘I've evacuated the guests and now I'm seeing to the animals.'

There is a pause, followed by a long sigh. ‘Sure you're okay?'

‘Yes.' A golden hen pecks placidly at her feet while the peacock paces the reception deck. With great delicacy he sweeps his train above fallen twigs and leaves and the movement brushes against her knee. She is lost in admiration. She is fine, quite calm in fact.

‘You'll be glad to know I've taken your advice,' Vron declares, ‘and finally called it off, although eight years is a long time. We're practically married.'

‘Except you're not …' She studies the towering folds of smoke still drawn skywards. The peacock has hopped onto the roof of Reception and a hot gust blows back the feathers of his train. He lets out an angry cry, swings around and swoops onto the deck again. She wants to reach out and somehow restrain him, to keep him by her side.

‘Could have been if it weren't for his wife.'

Marianne takes a deep breath and wills herself to remain silent. For almost a decade she has been the reluctant confidante, privy to every detail of Vron's affair with a man who lives above her in the same block of apartments in Elizabeth Bay.

‘At first it was great,' Vron muses. ‘No attachment, no responsibility, just wild sex. Unlike the wife, alone upstairs, poor thing.'