Where There's Smoke (18 page)

Next day was Saturday. I got down to the swamp early in order to have the raft to myself awhile and had only pulled it from its nest of reeds when Alan Mannering appeared beside me. He never said a word. I actually cannot remember that boy ever uttering a word meant for me. He lived over the road for ten years. He all but walked me home from school for five of those, poking me from behind, sometimes peppering my calves with gravel. I was in his house once, I remember the airless indoor smell. But he never spoke to me at any time.

Alan Mannering lifted the jarrah picket he'd ripped from someone's fence and pressed the point of it into my chest. I tried to bat it away but he managed to twist it into my shirt and catch the flesh beneath so that I yielded a few steps. He stepped toward me casually, his downy legs graceful.

You're shit, I said, surprising myself.

Alan Mannering smiled. I saw cavities in his teeth and a hot rush of gratitude burned my cheeks, my fingertips. Somehow the glimpse of his teeth made it bearable to see him drag our FJ Holden roof to the water and pole out into the shimmering distance without even a growl of triumph, let alone a word. I lifted my tee-shirt to inspect the little graze on my chest and when I looked up again he was in trouble.

When he went down, sliding sideways like a banking aircraft out there in the ruffled shimmer of the swamp's eye, I really didn't think that my smug feeling, my satisfied pity about his English teeth, had caused the capsize. He didn't come up. I never even hated him, though I'd never called anyone shit before. After the water settled back and shook itself smooth again like hung washing, there wasn't a movement. No sign.

I went home and said nothing.

Police dragged the swamp, found the car roof but no body. Across the road the Mannerings' lawn grew long and cries louder than any mower drifted over day and night.

That Christmas we drove the Falcon across the Nullarbor Plain to visit the Eastern States which is what we still call the remainder of Australia. The old man sealed the doors with masking tape and the four of us sat for days breathing white dust. The limestone road was marked only with blown tyres and blown roos. Near the South Australian border we stopped at the great blowhole that runs all the way to the distant sea. Its rising gorge made me queasy. I thought of things sucked in, of all that surging, sucking water beneath the crust of the wide brown land.

Back home, though they did not find his body, I knew that Alan Mannering was in the swamp. I thought of him silent, fair, awful, encased in the black cake-mix of sediment down there.

The next year, come winter, the night air was musky with smoke and sparks hung in the sky like eyes. Bulldozers towing great chains and steel balls mowed down tuart trees and banksias.

I learned to spell aquifer.

Three doors up, Wally Burniston came home drunk night after night. His wife Beryl locked him out and if he couldn't smash his way in he lay bawling on the veranda until he passed out. Some school mornings I passed his place and saw him lying there beside the delivered milk, his greasy rocker's haircut awry, his mouth open, shoes gone.

New streets appeared even while the bush burned. In the phone box, which stank of cigarettes, I listened to the man from 1194 and knew that he was making the time up as he went along.

I saw the rainbow mist of the market garden sprinklers and felt uneasy. I thought of Alan Mannering in that mist. He'd have been liquid long ago. I was eleven now, I knew this sort of thing.

As our neighbourhood became a suburb, and the bush was heaved back even further on itself, there was talk of using the swamp for landfill, making it a dump so that in time it could be reclaimed. But the market gardeners were furious. Their water came from the swamp, after all. Water was no longer cheap.

The van Gelders divorced. Wally Burniston was taken somewhere, I never found out where. One Sunday afternoon I found myself in the van Gelders' backyard scrounging for a companion when I came upon Mrs van Gelder at the back step. I coasted over to her on my Dragstar to ask where her son might be but the sight of her struck me dumb. She had kohl around her eyes and a haircut that made her look like Cleopatra as played by Elizabeth Taylor. Her dress was short and half her buttons were undone. I stared at the reservoir of shade between her breasts and she raised her chin at me, took a great drag on her cigarette with her eyes narrowed, and gave me a confounding smile. She blew smoke across my handlebars. I popped an involuntary wheelstand in my hurry to get away. I hurtled back out into the street, didn't even see the car coming, but its slipstream tugged at my shirt as it swerved to miss me. Tyres bawled on the fresh-laid bitumen. When I wheeled around, someone threw open the car door and began to shout and cry. And then people came into the street. I pedalled past them and coasted down our driveway to hide in the shed. Months later I woke from a dream in which Mrs van Gelder leant in towards me with her blouse undone and I peered into her cleavage as though into a well. Then I sat up in bed wet as a Catholic.

From one summer to the next water restrictions grew more drastic and people in our neighbourhood began to sink bores to get water. The Englishman next door was the first and then everyone drilled and I thought of Alan Mannering raining silently down upon the lawns of our street. I thought of him in lettuce and tomatoes, on our roses. Like blood and bone. I considered him bearing mosquito larvae – even being
in
mosquito larvae. I thought of him in frogs' blood, and of tadpoles toiling through the muddy depths of Alan Mannering. On autumn evenings I sat outside for barbecues and felt the unsettling chill of dew. At night I woke in a sweat and turned on the bedside light to examine the moisture on my palm where I wiped my brow. My neighbour had gotten into everything; he was artesian.

At the age of twelve I contemplated the others who might have drowned in our swamp. Explorers, maybe. Car thieves who drove too close to the edge. Even, startlingly, people like the Joneses before they became working class like us. The more I let myself think about it the less new everything seemed. The houses weren't old but the remnants of the bush, the swamp itself, that was another thing altogether. Sometimes the land beyond the straight lines seemed not merely shabby but grizzled. I imagined a hundred years, then a thousand and a million. I surveyed the zeroes of a million. Birds, fish, animals, plants were drowned in our swamp. On every zero I drew a squiggly tadpole tail and shuddered. All those creatures living and dying, born to be reclaimed, all sinking back into the earth to rise again and again: evaporated, precipitated, percolated. Every time a mosquito bit I thought involuntarily of some queasy transaction with fair, silent, awful Alan Mannering. If I'm honest about it, I think I still do even now.

I knew even at ten that I hadn't willed him to die, good teeth or bad. I pulled down my tee-shirt and saw him slip sideways and go without a sound, without a word. I faced the idea that he did it deliberately to spite me but he looked neither casual nor determined as he slipped into the dark. It was unexpected.

The brown land, I figured, wasn't just wide but deep too. All that dust on the surface, the powder of ash and bones, bark and skin. Out west here, when the easterly blows, the air sometimes turns pink with the flying dirt of the deserts, pink and corporeal. And beneath the crust, rising and falling with the tide, the soup, the juice of things filters down strong and pure and mobile as time itself finding its own level. I chewed on these things in classroom daydreams until the idea was no longer terrifying all of the time. In fact at moments it was strangely comforting. All the dead alive in the land, all the lost who bank up, mounting in layers of silt and humus, all the creatures and plants making thermoclines in seas and rivers and estuaries. I wasn't responsible for
their
coming and going either but I felt them in the lake and on the breeze. I have, boy and man, felt the dead in my very water. Maybe that's why my wife finds me so often staring across the Cockleshell mudflats at the end of a grim day's teaching.

Not long after my thirteenth birthday we left the neighbourhood. We sold the house to a man who soon married and then divorced Mrs van Gelder. News of the street trickled back to me over the years. I met people in malls, airports, waiting rooms. The man next door murdered his wife. Up the road, near the ridge, a man invented the orbital engine and the Americans tried to ruin him. Bruno went back to Serbia to burn Albanians out of their homes; someone saw him on television. One of the Box kids became a celebrity priest. Girls got pregnant. Families began to buy second cars and electrical appliances that stood like trophies on Formica shelves. The suburb straightened the bush out.

Years went by. So they say. For the past five the State has endured an historic drought. The metropolitan dams look like rockpools at ebb tide and it has long been forbidden to wash a car with a running hose. Unless they have sunk bores people's gardens have crisped and died. With all that pumping the water table has sunk and artesian water has begun to stink and leave gory stains on fences and walls. And our old swamp is all but dry. I saw it on the news because of the bones that have been revealed in the newly exposed mud. All around the swamp the ground is hardening in folds and wrinkles. The mud is veinous and cracks open to the sun. I saw for myself when I pulled up, stunned from the long drive.

From the moment I arrived in my air-conditioned Korean car I began to feel sheepish. Police were pulling down their tape barriers and a few news trucks wheeled away. The action was over. I sat behind the little steering wheel feeling the grit of fatigue in my eyes. What had I been expecting to see, more bones,
the
bones perhaps, have them handed over for my close inspection? Would that suddenly make me sanguine about Alan Mannering?

The swamp has a cycleway around it now and even a bird hide. Around the perimeter, where the wild oats are slashed flat, signs bristle with civic exhortations. Behind the pine log barriers the straight lines give way to the scruffiness of natural Australia. The sun drove in through the windscreen and the dash began to cook and give off a chemical smell. Down at the swamp's receding edge the scrofulous melaleucas looked fat and solid as though they'd see off another five years of drought. I pulled away and drove up our old street running a few laps of the neighbourhood in low gear. I took in the gardens whose European ornamentals were blanching. Only a few people were about, women and children I didn't recognise. They stood before bloody mineral stains on parapet walls with a kind of stunned look that I wondered about. A man with rounded shoulders stood in front of my old house. The jacaranda was gone. Somebody had paved where it stood to make room for a hulking great fibreglass boat. No one looked my way more than a moment and part of me, some reptilian piece of me, was disappointed that no one looked up, saw right through the tinted glass and recognised me as the kid who was with Alan Mannering the day he drowned down there on the swamp. It's as though I craved discovery, even accusation. There he is! He was there! No one said it when it happened and nobody mentioned it since. People were always oddly incurious about him. He was gone; time, as they say, moves on. They all went on without him while he rose and fell, came and went regardless. And they had no idea.

It's kind of plush-looking, the old neighbourhood, despite the drought: houses remodelled, exotic trees grown against second-storey extensions. Middle class, I suppose, which is a shock until you remember that everyone's middle class in this country now. Except for the unemployed and the dead. The city has swept past our old outpost. The bush has peeled back like the sea before Moses. Progress has made straight the way until terracotta roofs shimmer as far as the eye can see.

As I left I noticed furniture on the sandy roadside verge around the corner. Some black kids hauled things across the yard in Woolworths bags under the frank and hostile gaze of neighbours either side. An Aboriginal woman raised her fist at a man with a mobile phone and a clipboard. I pulled over a moment, transfixed. Another man with a mobile phone and aviator glasses came over and asked me to move on. They were expecting a truck, he said; I complied, obedient as ever, but as I gathered speed and found the freeway entry I thought of the Joneses being evicted like that. I was right to doubt the 1194 man on the telephone. Time doesn't click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has travelled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us through it. Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognised from the old days, just confirmed what I've thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.

MAUVE

PATRICK CULLEN

Paul was in the spare room, taking boxes down out of the cupboard when Sarah came back from the beach. The top of the desk was already covered in cardboard boxes, and he was putting the last of them on the floor.

She stopped in the doorway of the spare room and watched him, waiting for him to see her there. ‘You're home early,' she said. ‘Did you skip class?'

He glanced towards her and nodded. ‘Early mark.'

Sarah took her bag and towel off her shoulder, dropped them in the hall and went and sat in the chair beside the desk. ‘Tough day?'

He didn't answer, instead he pulled out a desk drawer and took from it a pair of scissors, which he opened out and ran a single blade through the tape on one of the boxes. He folded back the box flaps. ‘I'm just taking some time off.'

‘How long?' she asked.

‘A day or two,' he said. ‘That's all. I just need a break.' The box he'd just cut open was full of notebooks and loose sheets of paper. He took out some of the paper and examined the front and back of each sheet. Paul taught English to secondary students, and the box of paper reminded him of his in-tray at school: a pile of pages with students' submissions for the school magazine, and practice essays for the HSC.

‘What are you looking for?' she asked, peering into the opened box.

‘Not sure,' he said. He put the paper back into the box and folded the flaps back down. He pulled another box over. ‘But I'll know when I find it.'

Sarah put her hand on top of the box and held it there until Paul looked at her. ‘Is something wrong?'

‘I just need some time off,' he said as he picked up the scissors and knelt beside the boxes on the floor.

She got up from the chair and moved to the doorway. ‘What are you going to do while you're home?'

‘Not sure.'

‘That's not what I wanted to hear.'

‘I'm going to sort out some things,' he said, sliding the scissors beneath another box flap. ‘And I'm going to spend some time with you.'

‘Good answer,' she said, shaking her head and smiling. ‘I'm making lunch if you want anything.'

‘No, I haven't worked up an appetite yet.'

Sarah headed to the kitchen. Paul sat at the desk; he pulled a box towards him and started reading. There were pieces of paper on which he'd written short phrases or single words. The paper had yellowed and the ink had faded. The handwriting was barely legible; he did recognise it as his own but he could no longer feel it in the grip of his fingers.

Sarah came back to the doorway. ‘What is all of this anyway?' she asked.

‘All sorts of things,' Paul said. ‘Textbooks. Notes from uni. Things I've scribbled down over the years.'

‘What will you do with it all after you find what you're looking for?'

‘Put them back up out of the way, I guess.'

‘Why don't you just get rid of them? Do you really think you're ever going to need any of it?'

He shook his head a little then shrugged it off. ‘I don't know.'

When Sarah came by again later in the afternoon, Paul was still sitting at the desk. He was writing, but as she came in he put down his pen and closed his notebook.

‘What are you writing?'

‘Nothing,' he said. ‘I was trying to but I couldn't think of anything to write about. I haven't done it for such a long time.'

‘Why not?'

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don't know. Maybe I've never had anything to write about.'

‘What did you used to write?'

‘Stories,' he said. ‘A few poems but mostly stories.'

‘Were they any good?'

‘I thought so then. But I'm not so sure anymore.'

‘Do you know what would be better then?'

‘What?'

‘If you would just give up on that and do something practical. Start fixing some things around here. You could make better use of this time.'

‘But I need to do this,' he said as he got up and set about opening the remaining boxes.

Sarah leaned against the doorjamb and watched him. ‘It smells stale in here. Open the window. Give it some air.'

Paul reached across the desk and undid the latch on the window. He tried to raise the sash. ‘It won't budge,' he said.

‘Maybe that's the first thing you can fix. I'm sure there's plenty of other things you can do too. You could start on the bathroom. I don't know how long it is since you said you'd do that. We bought the tiles, remember? They're out in the shed, aren't they?'

It was early evening when Paul went out into the courtyard. Starlings quarrelled in the trees behind the house. The pavers were still warm beneath his feet; they shifted, pinching the soles of his feet as he walked across to the shed.

In the shed he saw that there was washing in the machine ready to go out, so he pulled it into the basket and carried it to the clothesline.

Sarah watched him from the verandah. She shook her head.

‘What?' he asked. ‘It needs to be done.'

‘I know. And I always do it. You should just do what you need to do.'

He dropped the basket beneath the clothesline and went back into the shed. He looked at the tools that for years he'd said he would one day use on the house. Moving aside rolled offcuts of carpet and lengths of timber he thought he would find some use for, he uncovered the tiles and carried them up onto the back verandah.

After the earthquake, when the first of the tiles came away from the wall behind the door, Paul had said that they were lucky they hadn't already renovated the bathroom, which was something they'd considered before moving in. ‘It would've been a waste to have it all falling down now,' he'd said at the time. Now, years later, the bathroom remained untouched and they'd come to accept or, in Sarah's case, ignore, the missing tiles; they left the door pushed back against the wall.

Sarah stood at the clothesline while Paul went back and forth from the shed. When he sat on the back step she turned to face him.

‘I'll get started tomorrow,' he said.

‘If it wasn't for tomorrow …'

‘I'll start tomorrow. I will.'

They ate dinner in front of the television, and after they'd finished Paul took their plates to the sink. Sarah went up to bed and Paul went back to the spare room. After midnight, when she came back down, he was still there. He had a lamp on and was hunched over the desk with his elbows splayed out and his head in his hands. She put her hand on his shoulder. He turned quickly. She pulled her hand away from him, twisting a handful of her nightie in her palm.

‘I thought you were asleep,' she said.

He sat back in the chair and stretched.

‘I wish you'd come to bed.'

‘Soon.'

‘Don't forget tomorrow.'

Paul looked off to one side and rubbed distractedly at the corner of his eye.

‘The bathroom,' Sarah said. ‘You're starting on the bathroom tomorrow.'

Paul was already at the kitchen table when Sarah came down for breakfast. ‘I've seen Ray this morning and he said that we can shower over at his place while our bathroom's out of action.'

Sarah nodded and moved about in the kitchen.

‘I've made coffee.'

‘Thanks,' she said, taking a mug down from the shelf. ‘I don't remember you coming to bed.'

‘I didn't,' Paul said. ‘I slept on the lounge.'

‘Why?'

‘I got tired of sitting at the desk. I went into the lounge room to read and I only made it through a couple of things before I fell asleep. It was already light when I woke and I didn't think it was worth going up to bed for only an hour or so.'

Sarah nodded and made toast. She sat at the table with her coffee. ‘What's your plan for the day?'

He drank the last of his coffee and stood up. ‘To get as much done as I can,' he said. ‘I'm just going to grab some tools from the shed.'

Sarah finished eating. She poured the last of her coffee into the sink as Paul came back into the house. ‘Better keep moving,' she said.

Paul followed her into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath while she got ready to shower. He watched her undress and wondered when he'd last seen a woman other than his wife naked. He reached out and held his hand against her thigh. She glanced back at him as she stepped into the shower.

He started work as soon as she had finished in the bathroom and by the time she'd come down dressed for work he had half a dozen tiles off the wall.

Sarah stood in front of the mirror and tied back her hair. ‘So when can we use the bathroom again?' She was already backing out the door.

‘It'll be a few days yet,' he called after her and the words fell between each strike of the hammer. He knelt and gouged at the grout between the floor tiles with the chisel. They didn't come up easily or whole. He threw the broken tiles into a bucket and kept going, down on his knees, wedging the chisel in under the edges of the tiles and hammering away. It was late in the afternoon when he finally stopped.

Paul was out on the back steps when Sarah got home from work. ‘I just saw the bathroom,' she said. ‘It looks ready to tile.'

He made a show of drinking his beer. ‘It is.'

‘So are you going to make a start tonight?'

He shrugged. ‘These things take time.'

‘But you don't
have
time.'

‘There's no use rushing into it, though. Is there?'

She turned and went inside.

He heard her on the phone but couldn't make out what she was saying or whom she was talking to.

‘I'm going to my sister's for dinner again,' she called.

He got up and followed her into the lounge room.

‘I'm not sure how late I'll be,' she said without looking back. She pulled the door closed behind her. Paul watched as she crossed the street and got into the car and drove away.

An hour later the phone rang. It was Sarah calling to say that she would not be home; she was staying at her sister's for the night.

He stood beside the phone for a while, and then went into the kitchen and opened the door of the refrigerator. He closed the door again and went back to the spare room. From one of the boxes he pulled out a notebook and thumbed through the pages, which were lined with pale blue ink but had nothing written on them. He spread the notebook out on the desk, took a pen from the drawer and at the top of the first page wrote: I
do not know what I would do if she left me
. Then he got up and went out to the back verandah.

He picked up a box of tiles, took them inside and sat them on the floor in the middle of the bathroom. He ripped the top off the box, took out some of the tiles and laid a row out across the floor one way and a second row at ninety degrees to the first. Stepping back into the doorway and tilting his head to the side, he closed an eye and looked along the wall to see how it all lined up. He got down on his knees and moved the first row of tiles closer to the wall and shuffled the other row to suit. He looked at it again and nodded.

Retrieving a bucket and trowel from the shed, Paul began mixing up tile glue. He half filled the bucket with water from the garden hose and shook some adhesive in from the bag. Some of the grey powder stayed on the lip of the bucket and he tapped the side with the toe of his boot to get it in. He used the trowel to work it all into the water and kept adding the powder until he had it right. When the batch of glue was ready, he took the bucket inside and put it on the bathroom floor.

Paul set up a stringline across the floor and then he began tiling. He worked his way out from the floor waste and by the time he was too tired and hungry to keep going he'd tiled three-quarters of the floor. Trowelling the last of the glue onto the floor, he set another couple of tiles and bedded them in with the heel of his palm. He got up slowly; his back ached. He rubbed at the patches of glue that had begun to dry on his knees, and saw that he'd almost worked himself into a corner. He took a long step out over the tiles and stood in the hallway looking back into the bathroom feeling pleased with himself. It was getting there.

In the kitchen he washed his hands and made a sandwich, and from there he went straight to the spare room. The moment he sat at the desk he opened the notebook and wrote:
I do not know what to tell her.

*

They were at the kitchen table. Paul had finished his dinner, but Sarah was still labouring over hers.

‘Not hungry?' he said.

She put her knife and fork on her plate and looked up at him. ‘I don't feel like eating,' she said, pushing her plate into the middle of the table.

He picked up both of the plates and took them to the sink.

‘Paul. Why aren't you working?'

‘I have been,' he said as he came back to the table.

‘At school, I mean. Why aren't you working at school?'

‘I needed a break,' he said, rubbing his thumb over his lips. ‘I just needed a break.'

‘Why do you need a break? Did something happen? If there's something I should know you need to tell me now.'

‘I nearly hit one of the kids.'

She stared at him, unable to form words.

‘
I nearly did
,' he said, as though the emphasis took something away from the intent. ‘One of the Year 12 boys had a story that he wanted me to read – something for the school magazine. A couple of weeks ago I gave them an exercise, just a short exercise for them to complete in class and this one kid kept writing. He made a story out of it and he wanted me to read the story.'

Sarah got up from the table. ‘What was it about?'

‘It was about a teacher who couldn't teach anymore because he realised that he knew nothing.'

‘And?'

‘Well' – he drew together the logic for her – ‘I thought the story was about me.'