The Complete Stories (38 page)

“We did,” the boy crowed, "this time we got lucky.”

“Brad Jenkins,” the man told her, starting the car up. “And that's Lou and Mandy”

“I'm four,” the boy announced, "an’ Mandy's one. Nearly. Our mum ran off an’ left us. He's our dad.”

She looked at the man. Oh Delilah, that mouth! she thought. He lifted an eyebrow and gave a slow grin. “Reuters,” he said, "all the news as soon as it happens. That's enough, eh, Lou? We don't want to give away
all
our secrets.”

“What secrets?” the boy shouted. “What secrets, Daddy? Have we got secrets?”

“It's true,” he told her, still grinning. “No secrets.”

The boy looked puzzled. Something was going on here that he didn't get. “Hey,” he said, "you didn't tell us your name.”

“Sally,” she told him. And added for the man's benefit, "Prentiss.”

“I know,” he said. “Jumbo's wedding.”

Almost immediately the heavens opened up and water began pouring into her lap. Not just a few drops, but a torrent.

“Sorry,” he said.

She shook her head. There was not much use complaining. The car swooped up and down the low hills.

“Hey, Brad,” the boy shouted over the sound of the storm, "are we gunna take Sally to our house? Like the last one?”

“Steady on,” the man told him. “She'll think we're kidnappers.”

“We are. We're kidnappers.”

“Don't worry,” he told her seriously. But she wasn't worried. It amused her to think of him riding round the countryside letting Lou do the talking for him, using the kids as bait. She didn't expect to find herself tied up at the back of a barn.

“He goes on like that all the time. Non-stop.”

“What?” The boy shouted. “Was that about me?”

“Yes it was,” the man told him. “I said you talk too much.”

“I do, don't I?” the boy said. He was very pleased with himself. “I'm a chatterbox.”

“Okay, now, a bit of silence, eh? While we work out what we're doin'. You're soaked,” he told Sally. “We could get you some dry clothes if you like. I could take you back after we've eaten. We'd be goin’ out anyway t’ get the baby to sleep—No, Lou,” he told the boy, who was trying to interrupt, "I'll handle it. It's true, we
would
like it. I'm a pretty good cook.”

She wasn't taken in by any of this and he didn't expect her to be. Part of his charm, she saw, was that he expected you to see through him and become complicit in what all this playfulness, with its hidden urgencies, might lead to. But nothing else had happened to her in the last week.

“Okay,” she said. “But you're looking after me, eh, Lou?”

“Am I? Am I, Brad? What for?”

“It's all right, mate,” he told him, "she's jokin',” and he gave her a
bold, shy look that was meant to disguise with boyish diffidence his easy assurance that she was not.

When they got there it proved to be a house on wheels, a portable barrack-block for workers on the line. Long and narrow, like a stranded railway carriage, it consisted of a dozen rooms all of the same size along a single corridor, with a kitchen unit at one end and a shower and a couple of toilets at the other. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the land, all washed and dripping, glowed under a golden sky.

“Well,” he said, "this is it—nice, eh? We aren't cramped. Lots of room for expansion, if you'd like to move in. We can put up any number. We could open a hotel.”

Only four of the rooms were in use. The others, when she looked in, were thick with dust, the little square windows grimed with months, maybe years, of muck. One or two of them had old pin-ups on the walls. Another was piled with dusty cartons and magazines, and there were tools, several shovels, and a pick or two in a pile in one corner.

“That's it,” he told her; "have a poke around. I'll find something for you to put on in a minute while we dry your clothes.”

It was true. She was soaked. Her hair was dripping.

He was kneeling while he got Lou's wet shoes off. The baby was gurgling in an armchair.

“Sorry,” he said; "take a towel. In that basket there—it's clean—and dry your hair. Children can't wait.”

After a minute, with the children settled: "You watch baby for a bit,” he told Lou and, soft-footed in his socks, led Sally two doors down the corridor to a bedroom.

As soon as she stepped in, though he was careful to leave the door open, she felt the change in him; a heightening of his physical presence, a heat that glowed under his clothes, out of the open-necked shirt, and a wet-grass smell that was his excited sweat. She recalled what her mother had said: "Two kids—that can't be much fun,” and was impressed by how easily her mother had found, in that word fun, just the light in which he should be looked at. What was essential in him, what you might need to take most seriously in him, was a capa-
city he had for being light-spirited, for making himself easy with the world.

“Well,” he said, breaking the tension between them, "let's see what we've got.”

He found a pair of jeans in one drawer—his, she guessed, but they were clean enough—and among a jumble of T-shirts and jumpers in another, a woollen shirt, also his. He put his face into it and smelled to see if it was clean.

“Okay? Will they do?” he asked. “I've got t’ look after the baby now.” He hovered a moment, hesitant, apologetic, appealing to her to understand that he was not entirely free.

She closed the door behind him, but it was unnecessary really, and as soon as she did so she knew it was not to preserve her own privacy but so that she could peek a little into his. She changed quickly, then opened the door of the wardrobe.

Dresses, all neatly on hangers, and at the bottom a pile of shoes. In a drawer, jeans, shirts, all ironed and folded. His wife's clothes. Why hadn't he offered her something from here?

But she could see why. All this was untouched.

And what had she expected? To find them torn from their hangers and ripped? She felt a sadness in these things. In their emptiness. In their remaining just as the woman had left them, untouched. No, not untouched—she could imagine him opening the wardrobe and letting his hand move among them. Undisturbed. His own things, as she had seen when he found the shirt for her, were a mess.

She opened the drawer again, took up one of his T-shirts, and held it to her face; saw the girlie magazine underneath, and the stiff, crumpled handkerchief.

“How's it going?” he called.

“Fine,” she said, closing the drawer.

“We'll toss these in the drier,” he said, when she emerged with her pile of wet clothes.

“I will! I will!” Lou shouted, and rushed to take them from her.

“It's okay,” he said, "he knows how t’ work it. I've got to bathe the baby. Do you mind? Then I'll get us some tea.”

She watched while he sat the baby in a tub of warm water and washed her, supporting her very gently with one hand while he soaped
and splashed with the other. He spoke to the baby, who crowed and gurgled, soft-talking her, and was absorbed. The habitual nature of what he was doing absorbed him and for moments at a time he seemed unaware of her presence. But at others he grew self-conscious, and the soft-talk, the way he handled the baby, she felt, was for her. Or perhaps it was simply that she was aware of
him.

The jeans she wore, which were too big for her, were his. So was the shirt. Her own clothes were tumbling away in the drier.

Lou had come back. With the baby's fresh clothes in his lap, he was sitting very quietly watching them both. He too was subdued.

“Is she gunna stay?” he asked at last.

The man cast her one of his shy looks. “I don't know,” he said. “Why don't you ask her.”

“Are
you?” the boy asked.

“We'll see,” she said.

The man turned away, but was smiling, she knew, and, holding the baby high, smacked a kiss on its wet belly. The baby laughed.

“Okay, Lou,” he said when the child was dried and set down, "you can take over.”

“We're a team,” he told her.

“Oh, I can see that,” she said.

She did stay
,
and did not hold it against him that he was so obviously pleased with himself, and so eager to show how good he was—he was—and that it wasn't because of
thatthat
his wife had left.

What was it then? she wondered. Why did she? Would she too find out?

Lying awake beside him, this almost stranger with his warmth against her, listening to the depth of his breathing, she was aware of the watchers she would have to deal with: the ghostly versions of Hedda and Rosalind and Blanche Du Bois waiting silently in the dark for her breath to release them. Behind the flimsy pine door of the wardrobe, just feet away, the rows of empty frocks.

Then there was the hurt she had felt in him. She could heal that. It seemed to her, at this moment, that she wanted nothing more in the world than to be his healing. She did not see, or not immediately, that
his presenting himself to her in this light, with so much tremulous need, and when he felt her response to it, so much commanding passion, might be her healing as well.

Sometime in the night she woke to find him gone, and when he came back again he had the baby.

“Sorry,” he whispered, as he set it down in the bed between them. “Do you mind?” He lay down again holding the child close to his chest, cradling its head.

So there was that, too.

She began to laugh.

“What is it?” he asked; "what's so funny? She won't be in the way. You go on back t’ sleep. I'm used to it.” And reaching across the baby, he had another hand for her, his fingers gently stroking her cheek.

Lordy, Lordy, she said to herself, looking at the two of them, the rough thatch of his blond head, the baby nestling into the warmth of him, snuffing his scent, burrowing deep into the familiar bulk of him.

Life is so—

But she was not sure that she believed, quite yet, in such happy turnabouts, and feared it might be tempting fate if she were to find a word, a new one, to finish the phrase. Instead she too snuggled down and let herself float free on the unloaded breath.

S
o it is settled.
Jacko's Reach, our last pocket of scrub, has been won for progress. It is to be cleared and built on. Eighteen months from now, after the usual period of mud pies and mechanical shovels and cranes, we will have a new shopping mall, with a skateboard ramp for young daredevils, two floodlit courts for night tennis and, on the river side, a Heritage Walk laid out with native hybrids. Our sterner citizens and their wives will sleep safe at last in a world that no longer offers encouragement to the derelicts who gather there with a carton of cheap wine or a bottle of metho, the dumpers of illegal garbage, feral cats, and the few local Aborigines who claim an affinity with the place that may or may not be mystical.

Those four and a half acres were an eyesore—that's the council's line: openly in communication, through the coming and going of native animals and birds, or through seeds that can travel miles on a current of air, with the wilderness that by fits and starts, in patches here and great swathes of darkness there, still lies like a shadow over even the most settled land, a pocket of the dark unmanageable, that troubles the sleep of citizens by offering a point of re-entry to memories they have no more use for—unruly and unsettling dreams. Four and a half acres.

Boys riding past it on their way to school are caught by a sudden impulse, and with a quick look over their shoulder, turn in there and are gone for the day on who knows what adventures and escapades.

Driving slowly past it, you see a pair of boots sticking out from under a bush. At eight thirty in the morning! A drunk, or some late-night rover who has been knocked on the head and robbed. A flash of scarlet proclaims the presence of firetails lighting the grass.

Jacko's Reach: once known, and so marked on older maps, as Jago's. How, and at what point, by what slip of the tongue or consonantal drift, did the name lurch backwards into an earlier, not-quite-forgotten history, so that the white man's name became a black one and the place reverted, if only in speech, to its original owner's? Jacko's.

For as long as anyone can remember the people who had a legal right to the Reach, and are responsible for its lying unkept and unimproved, are Sydneysiders, but there are no Jacks or Jagos among them. They themselves have fallen back to a single remnant, a Miss Hardie of Pymble, who claims to have been a pupil of Patti, speaks with a German accent, and sold Jacko's over the telephone, they say, for a song.

It is a place you have to have seen and been into if you are to have any grasp of it. Most of all, you have to have lived with it as the one area of disorder and difference in a town that prides itself on being typical: that is, just like everywhere else. Or you have to have been hearing, for as long as you can recall, the local stories about the place, not all of them fit to be told—which does not mean that they are not endlessly repeated. Or you have to have lost something there—oh, years back. A little Eiffel Tower off a charm bracelet, or your first cigarette lighter, which you have never given up hope of kicking up again, and go searching for in sleep. Or you have to have stumbled there on something no one had warned you of.

Back before the First World War, two bullockies (they must have been among the last of their kind) settled a quarrel there. No one knows what it was about, but one party was found, the next day, with his skull smashed. The other had disappeared. The bullocks, no longer yoked to the wagon, had been left to wander.

Then, two days later, the second bullocky turned up again, hanging by his belt from a bloodwood. An eight-year-old, Jimmy Dickens, out looking for a stray cow and with the salt taste of porridge in his mouth and that day's list of spellings in his head, looked up and saw, just at eye-level, a pair of stockinged feet, and there he was, all six feet of him, pointing downwards in the early light. Old Jimmy was still telling the story, in a way that could make the back of your neck creep, fifty years later, in my youth.

The facts of the case had got scrambled by every sort of romantic speculation, but it was the awe of that dumbstruck eight-year-old as he continued to look out, in a ghostly way, through the eyes of the gaunt
old-timer, that was the real story. That, and the fact that it was still there, the place, and had a name. You could go out yourself and take a look at it. That particular patch of Jacko's, that tree, had been changed for ever, and become, for all of us who knew the story, the site of something you could touch. A mystery as real as the rough bark of the tree itself, it could change the mood you were in, and whatever it was you had slipped in there to get away from or do.