The Idea of Perfection (28 page)

He had dogs now, but they did not seem to make him happy. There were some things that you had to have when you needed them, or it was too late for ever after.

She had not really been paying attention at the time, of course. She had been in no frame of mind to think about a dog, with Philip so suddenly dead.

Upset:
that was the word they had used.
Poor thing, she’s upset.
But she had not felt
upset.
She had not really let herself feel anything. The feelings that were waiting for her, on the other side of a cool coping, could not be survived. So she had
dealt with it well,
had used the phrase
a death in the family
on the phone to people, as if it was just that, a simple
death.

There were sometimes worse things than mere death, but they were too bad to think about.

A smartly dressed woman was coming towards her, hurrying a neat boy along. She recognised the woman from the museum meeting and was pleased with herself for remembering.

Hello! she said, and got a nice smile ready on her face.

But the woman did not notice her.

What about your library book? she was asking. And your homework? The project? The disasters?

Her voice was drilling away at the boy.

And did you get the excursion money I left for you? And the note?

The boy’s face was blank. He did not say anything. It was as if his mother was simply not there.

When the school bell buzzed, a few stragglers made a run for it, and suddenly Parnassus Road was empty except for a man crossing the road with a long fluorescent light tube under his arm, like a Frenchman with a loaf of bread.

In the Mini-Mart, she was glad to see it was Leith behind the counter rather than
Grandad
with the mended glasses.

Hello again, Harley, she said as she started to punch in the items.

This was the moment.
Followed me home,
she had planned to say, with a nice easy laugh.
Followed me home, you know how they are.

But while she was still rehearsing the nice easy laugh, Leith was speaking.

Don’t know if this is any good, she said, and brought something out from under the counter wrapped in a plastic bag.

Grandad’s been using it for putting the super on the citrus.

It was a ladle, that you might use for soup or stew. The handle was an old metal file, ground down to a tapering point, and joined with three brass rivets to a piece of tin hammered into a bowl shape.

Harley felt it warm in her hands, could feel the texture where the tin had been painstakingly rounded.

Grandad thinks it might have been his dad made it, Leith said. But who’d know, after all this time.

Many hours of fiddly work had gone into it. Someone had tapped away at the bowl and ground away at the handle, and filed the brass rivets until they were like inlaid gold.

If all you wanted to do was get stew out of a pot, there were easier ways to do it. She had seen dippers made with a tin can and a piece of fencing-wire that would have done the job just as well. But just getting the stew out of the pot had not been the point with this one.

She imagined them sitting together, the man and the woman, by the flickering firelight, a big iron pot on the hob with the ladle in it, the baby asleep in a cradle made out of butter-boxes, and outside the bush heaving and whispering, and the dew falling cold out of the air, nothing for miles and miles but the trees scraping their chilly leaves together in the night wind, the little bead of warmth and light of their hearth puny, but powerful too, in all that darkness.

There were times when the corny old phrases suddenly made sense.

She felt almost shy of the ladle, as if it were something too private to stare at.

It’s good, she said, but her voice stuck in her throat somehow and she had to cough, and let Leith come around the counter to pat her on the back.

 

 

It was not till she was back out on the footpath, squinting into the hard white light beyond the awning, the ladle wrapped in its plastic again in the basket, that she remembered the dog. There it was, glancing up at her as if to say
Where to next, Harley?

The youngest had brought a dog home one day.
It fol lowed me home, Mum,
he had said, and squinted up at her from the bottom of the back steps.
Just followed me, honest.

Until this moment, meeting the gaze of this dog, she had forgotten about that.

She had not believed him, naturally. They had had an argument about it.
Dogs don’t just follow people home,
she had said. She remembered, reluctantly, how nasty she had been. She had ended up shouting, as she had too often.
What do you take me for, an idiot?

It was starting to look as though she might be.

 

 

As she wheeled away from these thoughts, she found herself suddenly face to face with the man she had had to rescue from the cows. This time she spoke up quickly, to make up for seeming to snub him that day in the Cobwebbe Crafte Shoppe.

Oh, hello, she said. Didn’t recognise you.

She could not imagine why she had said that, since she had recognised him straight away this time.

His face broke into a big eager smile that transformed it.

I wanted to thank you, he said, so fast the words tripped over each other. For the other day. You know, with the cows.

He did not seem like a tall man, with his diffident shoulders, the humble tilt of his head, but his face was up on a level with hers.

I thought I‘d, you know, had it, he said. Stupid of me not trying the fence.

He smiled so his crooked teeth showed. He did not seem to remember he had said all this before. She nodded as if he had not, and smiled.

Oh well, she said.

She realised she was trying to think of a way to save his pride.

You weren’t to know the fence wasn’t turned on.

He shook his head emphatically.

I’m just a duffer, he said. I’d be no use to you on a desert island, anything like that.

It sounded rather personal:
no use to you,
as if he had been thinking of the two of them, alone together on a desert island, and himself looking to be
of use.

He seemed to be thinking that too, biting his lip as if to punish it for what it had said.

His ears seemed bigger than ever when he blushed, and they blushed too, warm and rosy. He looked away at the dog and when he patted his leg it came over straight away, pushing its nose into the palm of his hand. Then it rolled over on to its back and he hunkered down to scratch around the hard knobs of its nipples. The dog’s eyes narrowed to slits of ecstasy and its hind leg scratched in sympathy, although its ears were still cocked alertly towards Harley.

He looked up at her.

I should have given you a lift, he said. I only thought of it too late.

She was about to explain about the
forty-five minutes to an hour,
but suddenly he looked straight up at her and in an odd high-pitched way said,

Would you let me take you to lunch, or afternoon tea? As a way of thanking you?

Before she had taken this in, a man in a blue singlet came out of the alleyway, poking a ladder between them. They stepped back from each other quickly, as if they had been too close.

Scuse me, mate, he said. Coming through.

It seemed to take the ladder a long time to pass between them.

When he had gone they were left staring at each other.

Yes, she said.

It was just the word that came out of her mouth. It was as if it was just the first word that her mind came upon, while it was busy remembering the way he had looked down in the paddock, waving his branch at the cows, and the way, together up on the road, the toes of their shoes had pulled grooves in the dust as they spoke.

Her mouth opened again.

Of course.

Why
of course?
There was no
of course
about it.

But although the words had popped out by accident, they set things in motion that had a momentum of their own.

The Panorama Cafe, he said quickly. Out on the Jurgo road?

Now he seemed in a hurry to be gone.

Tomorrow, around the three mark?

Even as he was speaking he was backing away, making a little waving gesture with one hand.

Yes, she heard herself call. It’s a date!

She had meant it to sound light, airy, inconsequential, something of a joke. A
date.
With such a woman as herself, the idea of a
date
could only be ironic. The way it came out it sounded simply strange: coy, but huge and loud. The dog glanced up at her as if startled.

He was nodding and still backing away, as if from Royalty, and nearly bumped into Coralie, who was suddenly there behind him with a carton of milk in her hand.

Whoops-a-daisy! she cried, and looked from him to Harley.

With one last jerky wave, he was turning and more or less fleeing into the doorway of the Caledonian.

Coralie watched him go. Then she turned her attention to Harley.

Know that bloke, do you?

No, Harley said. That is, not really.

She did not, only knew how the sun had lit up his ears from behind, so they were like translucent pink flowers, and she did not know why she remembered that so well.

Coralie went on standing with the carton of milk in her hand, waiting for more.

Know him I mean, Harley added. She did not know where to start about the cows, and the fence, and the way he had clutched the stick. She had only been joking, calling it a
date,
but somehow, as a joke, it was hard to explain.

FELICITY FOUND THE entrance without difficul,ty, in the lane behind Alfred Chang Superior Meats, and went in boldly, through a back yard with a choko vine wandering over the broken fence, and into the doorway. There was a dim staircase with green lino on the treads. She looked up to where the top of the stairs went away into shadows and gripped the handles of Great-Grandmother Ferguson’s quilt bag more tightly.

She was, very kindly, arranging for Alfred Chang to pho- , tograph Great-Grandmother Ferguson’s quilt for the Karakarook Heritage Museum. Actually, the woman from Sydney had talked them into calling it the
Karakarook Pioneer Heritage Museum,
because she said that would give more the
flavour of the collection.
Felicity thought it made it sound a bit amateurish, but the others seemed to like the idea of pioneers. Several of them had even mentioned their convict ancestors, almost as if they were something to be proud of.

Anyway, that was all there was to it: arranging for the photographing of the quilt. It was true that Alfred Chang was in love with her, poor man, but there was nothing she could do about that. Men were always doing it, falling in love with her. Could she help it if they found her attractive?

There was nothing underhand about it and certainly nothing in the least bit
awkward.
She did not mind who saw her go into this doorway, and she did not know why she was a little breathless, even before she had gone up the stairs.

At the top there was a big hot open space with screens partitioning off smaller spaces. The nearest screen was covered with photos: of dead gumtrees silhouetted against the sky, of rounded boulders nestled against each other like eggs, of various orange sunsets. There were a lot of photos of a fat Chinese baby sitting naked on a sheepskin laughing, and several family groups with the same baby being held up by various people dressed in their best.

She called out in a tentative way.

Hello? Hello?

There was no answer. The windows were all covered with black curtains, but over in the far corner behind some screens there was a pool of brilliant white light, and she went over towards it.

All around her, shadows went off into deeper shadows. A lamp on a tall stand swayed like a dandelion as she passed too close to it and she flinched back, then tripped over a coil of flex, and on the rebound from the flex barked her shin on a metal box. What with the heat, and the clutter, and wondering if Alfred Chang was watching her, she felt a little disoriented.

Behind the screens was an open space with lights pointing down at a white backdrop spread out on the floor. Lying on the backdrop, very small and shabby, was the old shirt Mr Cutcliffe had brought for the Museum. It lay in a clean blaze of brilliance, a sad little wrinkled thing. Above it a camera stared down from a crude gantry.

She stepped into the lit-up area, on to the white paper. You could almost take hold of the light in handfuls. It bounced up from the white floor and ricocheted off the walls of darkness all around, making a cocoon of radiance, a magic circle with herself at the centre. The blackness was like a living thing around the whiteness: solid, organic, shifting its boundaries, receding and advancing as the pupils of her eyes dilated and contracted. She could feel them doing it, operated by some mechanism beyond her control.