The Complete Stories (32 page)

Well, he did and he did not. It wasn't nostalgia for a world that had long since disappeared under fathoms of poured concrete that had led him, in half a dozen fictions, to raise it again in the density of tropical vegetation, timber soft to the thumb, the drumming of rain on corrugated-iron roofs. What drew him back was something altogether more personal, which belonged to the body and its hot affinities, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing at the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone he knew now would never appear.

He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and that his original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather. In a fig tree taller than a building and alive with voices not its own, or a line of palings with a gap you could crawl through into a wilderness of nut-grass and cosmos and saw-legged grasshoppers as big as wrens.

It was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed. It fell on the new city with the same promise of an ordinary grace as on the old. He greeted it with the delight of recovery, not only of the vision but of himself.

He had left the place when he was not yet twenty. That was the year his mother went back to Sydney.

Twenty-three years earlier, his father, on a weekend rowing trip, had discovered her there and brought her north. She had never really settled. When she put the old house up for auction and went home, Colin had seized the chance to make his own escape. He went to London. Till now he had not come back.

In the twenty years that they lived together he had found his mother a puzzle, and where his need for affection was concerned, a frustration.

A lean ghost of a woman, intense, but not in his way, she had prowled the house with an ashtray in her hand, distractedly chain-smoking, argued with friends on the phone, mostly men-friends, gone to committee meetings and charity drives, and was always interested, out of a sense of duty, in his doings but reticent about her own. Dissatisfied, he thought, maybe desperate—he could not tell, and he knew she would not have wanted him to ask. She made no enquiry about
his
feelings. They got through his childhood and adolescence without ever being close.

Then something unexpected occurred. Freed by distance, they found a way of being intimate at last. Perhaps it was the writing itself that did it. Anyway, the letters she sent him, warm, inventive, humourously critical of everything she came across (he recognised, he thought, and with curiosity now, the tone of her telephone conversations), were those of a woman he more and more wanted to know. So much of what he was haunted by, all that underworld of his early memories and their crooked history, was in her keeping. If he was ever to get to the heart of it he would need her as his guide.

He no longer tormented himself with the wish that things had been different. They had made him what he was. But he did want to know why the world he had grown up in had been so harsh and uncompromising, and had made so little room for love.

Then there was the question of his father. His father had disappeared in the waters off Crete in May 1942. Swimming out on a night of no moon to be rescued along with other remnants of a defeated army by the British submarine
Torbay,
he had tired and gone under.

Colin, who was just six, had believed for a time that he was actually there and had seen it happen, but understood at last that he had been imposing on that moonless night on the far side of the world the only clear memories he had of his father and their time together; though even then there was part of him in which his presence out there, in those dark unknown waters, remained more vivid than either.

Each year as Christmas drew near he would suggest to his mother that he should come and visit. They would see one another at last and talk.

How wonderful, she wrote. How she would look forward to it. But she managed, each time, to find excuses, and he guessed that she was unwilling to put to the test this long-distance intimacy that had grown up between them. Her dying suddenly, with no suggestion of a previous illness, made him wonder how much more she had been keeping from him.

Arriving before the last of his letters, he put it into the coffin along with the many other questions to which he must accept now that there would be no answer, and since he was here, and unlikely to come back a second time, accepted an invitation to fly up to Brisbane and give a reading.

It was a strange homecoming. He knew no one in Brisbane but his cousin Corrie. He was forty-eight years old and nobody's child.

One of the few mementoes his father had left was a little green-bound pocket diary in which, for a few days in Athens, in the year of his death, he had recorded in his Queenslander's big copybook hand what he had seen of a city whose every monument he had already wandered through in dreams, but which had to be excavated, by the time he got there, from towers of rubble.

What moved Colin when he first turned its pages was the passion he found even in the driest details, and the glimpse he got, which was clear but fleeting, of a young man he felt close to but had barely known, and who had himself to be resurrected now from scribbled notes and statistics, tiny painstaking sketches of capitals and the motifs off daggers in a dusty museum, and from half a dozen hastily scrawled street maps.

He stuffed the diary into the bottom of his rucksack and when, at
the end of his first year in Europe, he went to Athens, spent a whole day trying to match the sketches to a modern map of the city.

What he had hoped to recover was some defining image of his father, some more intimate view of the amateur classicist and champion athlete who had played so large and yet so ghostly a part in his existence. He stood at corner after corner turning the sketch-map this way and that until, admitting at last that he was bushed, he took himself off to a caf on Venizelou.

He was settled there in front of a cold beer, still sweating, when he was approached by a dandified stranger, a fellow not much older, he guessed, than himself, but with a gold wedding-band on his finger, who seemed to have mistaken him for someone else. Anyway, they got talking, and when his new friend, out of pure pride in the place, offered to show him around a little—the sights, the real sights—he accepted.

His guide was so knowledgeable, he talked so well and in such impeccable English, that Colin, who had been wary at first, was soon at his ease. And it was astonishing how often it happened that Giorgios in his excitable way said: "Look, Colin, now look at this,” and there it was, just what the diary had described as being wonderful but hard to come upon and which on his own he had been unable to find.

They moved deeper and deeper into a maze. After the classical sights, the Byzantine—though “after” in fact was not quite accurate, because everything here was a patchwork in which bits of one period were used to hold up or decorate another, a half-column here, a slab there with two peacocks and a laurel wreath, so that styles and centuries tended to collapse into one another. As the afternoon wore on, the sights closed in. They were in a tangle of narrow streets where men with baskets were selling twists of salt-crusted bread and sticky honey-cakes; a crowded place, noisy, garish, where his new friend seemed to know everyone they met, and introduced him to men who showed him brasswork and filigree silver and other antique relics, but gave out, in an obscure way, that they had other wares to dispose of, though he could not guess what they might be and his new friend did not elucidate.

They stepped into one dark little taverna to drink ouzo, and into another to smoke, and afterwards he had the sensation that time, as he had already discovered among the monuments, was more a continual looping here than a straight line. He half expected, as a narrow street
turned back upon itself, to see his father appear in the shadowy crowd, though there was no indication in the diary that he had been in this place. Then quite suddenly, in a poky alleyway with stalls full of brazen pots and icons, his friend was gone.

It was the oddest thing imaginable. One minute he was there, as affable and eager as ever, and the next he had slipped away.

There was no misunderstanding. Or if there was, Colin had failed to observe it. Perhaps his guide had lost patience with him, with his failure—was that it?—to catch at suggestions. Or he had seen friends close by and, not wishing to desert him openly—anyway, the occasion was broken off, that is what Colin felt. Things had been moving towards some event or revelation that at the last moment, for whatever reason, had been withheld.

He was disappointed for a time, but came at last to feel that it might have been the best thing after all. He heard tales later of tourists, too trusting like himself, who had been led on and then robbed or assaulted. Perhaps the fellow had thought better of it and let him off. But the teasing suggestion of something more to come, which was unseen but strongly felt, and had to be puzzled over and guessed at, appealed to him. To a side of him that preferred not to come to conclusions. That lived most richly in mystery and suspended expectation. The afternoon had a shape that he came to feel was exemplary, and his readers might have been surprised to know how often the fictions he created derived their vagrant form, but even more their mixture of openness and hidden, half-sought-for menace, from an occasion he had never got to the bottom of, for all that he had gone back time after time and let his imagination play with its many possibilities.

S
O NOW,
shaved, showered and with a pot of strong coffee at his elbow, he got down to it, the usual routine.

He wrote quickly, his blood brightening the moment he took up where he had left off the day before. His people drew breath again, turned their mute, expectant faces towards him.

He had moved the desk so that it faced the wall. The sun was already high and the city in a swelter, but the room he was writing in seemed within reach of invisible snow peaks. He wrote in coolness, while down there in weatherboard houses under weeping figs, behind mango and
banana trees and spindly rust-coloured palms, his people sweated it out; till just on four in the afternoon, as a longish paragraph found its way towards that hour, the sky cracked, struck, and a storm broke, turning closed rooms into gigantic side-drums crazily beaten and shutting off, for a time, all chance of speech.

He put his pen down. It was almost ten. Quite soon his hosts would appear. That cloudburst had cleared the air. He could leave his people suspended in it, waiting to hear how they should go on.

It had cleared his own head as well, giving things, when he went to the window, an intense glow as if lit from within. The big trees in the Gardens opposite, that in their darkness of packed leaves might have been sinister, seemed filled with a powerful energy: gigantic angels momentarily stilled.

Greenness, that was the thing. Irresistible growth. Though it wasn't always an image of health or of fullness.

He thought of the mangroves with their roots in mud, and under their misshapen arches the stick-eyes of crabs and their ponderous claws. They had been banished for a time under concrete freeways, but would soon be pushing up fleshy roots, their leathery leaves, black rather than green, agleam with salt.

Vegetation spread quickly here. Everything spread quickly—germs, butter, rumours. There was talk of plantations outside the city, in pockets deep in the foothills of the Range, where cannabis was being grown in dense plantations. Each night late, trucks would move into the city, on the lookout for teenagers who had nowhere to sleep or were simply loose in the streets, available for whatever might bring a little action into their lives. They would be approached, hired, loaded on to trucks, and driven blindfolded to the marijuana fields, where in long rows, until first light, they would go about the business of harvesting the green stuff, the dream stuff. Then, towards four thirty, when the sun began to show, after being paid and blindfolded again, they would be driven back and dropped off in the Valley or at Stones Corner, or along the various bus routes into the city.

True? It did not have to be. It was convincing at some deeper level than fact. It expressed something that was continuous with the underground history of the place, with triangles and flayed ribs, the leper colony on its island in the Bay, the men with scabbed and bloody hands sleeping on sacks behind the Markets, an emanation in heavy light and
in green, subaqueous air, of an aboriginal misery that no tower block or flyover could entirely obliterate.

He moved one of his characters into place somewhere along Petrie Terrace where he could be approached. Loose, open, waiting for the truck that had just set out from a covered shed and was wobbling, low down on a rutted track, under moonlit leaves.

It was ten. Precisely. Any moment now his cousin Corrie would ring.

He and Coralie had grown up together. In the war years, with his father gone and his mother taken up with a social round that had a new definition as war work, he had spent the long weeks of the Christmas holidays at his Grandfather Lattimer's house at Woody Point, in a muddle of uncles and aunts and their children of whom Coralie James, who was just his age, had always been closest to him. In the obsessive way of only children they had done everything in tandem, having discovered in one another feelings they had thought too private, too much their own and only theirs, to be shared. They exchanged whispered secrets, scared one another with ghost stories, had their own coded language full of private jokes and references, which they would recognise only later as another version of the Lattimer exclusivity, and had, at eight or nine years old, to the amusement of the grown-ups, committed themselves to marriage. They had even picked out the house they meant to live in. A two-storeyed cottage with dormer windows, it was sufficiently unlike the houses they and their friends lived in to suggest possibilities of behaviour, of feeling too, quite different from the ones they found unsatisfactory at home.