North of Nowhere, South of Loss

“Philippa, stay with me.”

“I won’t. It’s just plain goddamn rude and boorish when she’s got a meal prepared. At least one of us … I’m just bloody not going to—What? What is it? What the hell is it?

He looked so stricken that there was nothing to be said.

“All right,” I conceded, resigned. “Where do you want to go?”

“Come back to the Hilton with me. I don’t want to be alone. I have to get blind stinking drunk.”

In the cab I said: “How come I feel more wracked with guilt than you do?”

He laughed. “You actually think I’m not wracked with guilt?”

“Oh, I know why I am,” I said. “It’s because I’m a mother too.” If my son did this to me, I thought, I’d bleed grief. My whole life would turn into a bruise.

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Brian said. “I can’t talk about it unless I’m blind stinking drunk.”

We didn’t go to his room. It wasn’t like that. We have never been lovers, never will be, never could be, and not because it isn’t there, that volatile aura, the fizz and spit of sexual possibility. I vaguely remember that as we got drunker we held each other. I seem to remember us both sobbing at some stage of the night. It wasn’t brother/sister either, not an incest taboo. No. We were once part of a multiform being, a many-celled organism that played in the childhood sea, that swam in the ocean of Brisbane, an alpha-helical membrane-embedded coiled-coil of an us-thing. We were not Other to each other or them, we were already Significantly Us, and we wept for our missing parts. We drank to our damaged, our lost, our dead.

When drink got us down to the ocean floor, I think Brian said: “It’s the house. I really believe that if I went there, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d never get out of it alive.”

And I think I asked: “What did your mother mean about the nights? Those awful nights, she said.”

And the second I said it, a memory I didn’t remember I had shifted itself and began to rise like a great slow black-finned sea-slug, an extinct creature, far earlier than icthyosaurus, earlier than the earliest ancestor of the manta ray. It flapped the gigantic black sails of its fins and shock waves hit the cage of my skull and I was swimming back to Brian’s front gate, I was waiting for him there, fragrant currents of frangipani were swirling round, and these monstrously eerie sounds, this guttural screaming and sobbing, came pouring out through the verandah louvres in a black rush that whirlpooled around me, that sucked, that pulled … I clung to the gate, giddy with terror.

Then Brian came out of the house with his schoolbag slung over his shoulder and he pushed the gate open and pushed his way through and walked so fast that I had to run to catch up. “What is it?” I asked, my heart yammering at the back of my teeth.

“What’s what?” Brian demanded.

“That noise.” I stopped, but Brian kept walking. “That noise!” I yelled, and Brian stopped and turned round and I pointed, because you could almost see those awful sounds curdling around us. Brian walked back and stood in front of me and looked me levelly in the eyes and cocked his head to one side. He gave the impression of listening attentively, of politely straining his ears, but of hearing nothing.

“What noise?” he asked.

He was so convincing that the sound sank beneath the floor of my memory for forty years, even though, two blocks later, he said dismissively, “It’s nothing. It’s Ed. He does it all the time. It’s from the war.”

And forty years later, swimming up through a reef of stubbies and empty Scotch bottles, he said: “He never left New Guinea really. He never got away. And it was catching. After a while, Dorrie used to have Ed’s nightmares, I think.”

“Oh Brian.”

“Sometimes the neighbours would call the police. The only place they felt safe was the house. They never went anywhere.”

“I never had any inkling.”

“Because I protected them. I was magic. I designed a sort of ozone layer of insulation in my mind, you couldn’t see through it, or hear, and I used to wrap them up in it, the house, and my dad, and my mum.”

My dad and my mum. It would be something I could give her the next day, something to put with the corsage.

It was a long time after I rang the doorbell before anyone came. And when she came, she didn’t open the door. She just stood there on the verandah peering out between the old wooden louvres. She looked like a rabbit stunned by headlights.

“It’s me, Mrs Leckie. Philippa.”

“Philippa?” she said vaguely, searching back through her memory for a clue. She opened the door and looked out uncertainly, like a sleepwalker. She was still in her housecoat and slippers. She squinted and studied me. “Philippa!” she said. “Good gracious. Are these for me? Oh, they’re lovely. Lovely. Just a tic, and I’ll put them in water. Come on in, Philippa, and make yourself at home.”

It was eerie all right, one little step across a threshold, one giant freefall to the past. There was the old HMV radio, big as a small refrigerator, with its blistered wood front. There were two framed photographs on it, items from the nearer past, tiny deviations on the room as I knew it. One was of Brian’s wedding, the other of his brother’s. I picked up the frame of Brian’s and studied it. I hadn’t been at his wedding. We’d all got married in the cell-dividing years of the us-thing. I’d been overseas, though my mother had sent a newspaper clipping. I was trying to tell from the photograph if Brian had been happy. Was he thinking: Now I’ve escaped?

“I don’t understand about marriages these days,” she said, coming up behind me with the vase. She set the flowers on top of the radio. “I always thought Brian would marry you, Philippa.”

“That would have been some scrap,” I said. “We were always arguing, remember?”

“You would argue till the cows came home,” she smiled. “I always thought you’d get married.”

I set the frame down again, and she picked it up. “They didn’t have any children,” she said sadly. “Barry either. I don’t have any grandchildren at all.” She returned Brian and his bride to the top of the radio. “I wish they’d known him before the war, that’s all. Before it happened. I just wish … But if wishes could be roses, Ed used to say, or maybe it was the other way round. Would you like to see them, Philippa?”

I scrambled along the trail of her thought. “Oh,” I said. “Yes, I would. I noticed them from the gate. And your frangipani’s enormous, it’s going to swallow up the house.”

“Ed planted that,” she said. “He was always good with his hands, he had a green thumb. I have to get the boy down the road to mow the lawn for me now. Watch out for that bit of mud, Philippa, there were some cats got in. These ones,” she said, “Ed planted when the boys were born, one for each. This one was for Brian.”

It was a tea rose, a rich ivory. Champagne-coloured, perhaps. Off white, I would probably say to him in some future joust. His mother hovered over it like a quick bird, darting, plucking off dead petals, curled leaves, a tiny beetle, a grasshopper, an ant.

“You’ve kept them up beautifully,” I said.

“And I call this one Ed, I’ve planted a cutting on his grave.”

There was something about the way she bent over it, something about her gaunt crooked arms and the frail air of entreaty, that made me think of a praying mantis. Maybe she heard my thought, or maybe the grasshopper she pinched between finger and thumb reminded her. “He said something about a praying mantis,” she said. “You asked him about it, Philippa. What was that thing?”

“The ootheca.”

“Funny word, isn’t it?” She pulled her housecoat around her and tightened the sash. “He won’t be there for lunch, will he?”

I bit my lip. “He had to take an early flight,” I said. It was and it wasn’t a lie. We both knew it. “He had to be back in Melbourne.”

She concentrated on the roses, bending her stick limbs over them, a slight geometric arrangement of supplication. “Anyway,” she said. “I don’t like going out. We never did, Ed and me.” She straightened up and turned away from me, walking toward the gate. “I hope you won’t mind, Philippa, if I don’t …” At the gate, she reached up and picked a frangipani and gave it to me. “Could you tell him,” she said, “that I’ve still got his crystal set? It’s in his room. I thought he might, you know … I thought one day he might …”

I held the creamy flower against my cheek. It’s excessive, I thought angrily, the smell of frangipani, the smell of Brisbane. I had to hold onto the gate. There was surf around my ears, I was caught in an undertow. When I could get my voice to come swimming back, I’d tell her about the safety layer that Brian kept around his mum and his dad.

NORTH OF NOWHERE (#ulink_34cf6d43-34f9-5a5b-9777-2ea0f87c6acd)

They are curious people, Americans, Beth thinks, though it is easy to like them. They consider it natural to be liked, so natural that you can feel the suck of their expectations when they push open the door to the reception room and come in off the esplanade. Their walk is different too; loose, somehow; as though they have teflon joints. Smile propulsion, Dr Foley whispers, giving her a quick wink, and Beth presses her lips together, embarrassed, because it’s true: they do seem to float on goodwill, the way hydrofoil ferries glide out to the coral cays on cushions of air. Friendliness spills out of them and splashes you. Beth likes this, but it makes her slightly uneasy too. It is difficult to believe in such unremitting good cheer.

Of all the curious things about Americans, however, the very oddest is this: they wear their teeth the way Aussie diggers wear medals on Anzac Day. They flash them, they polish them, they will talk about them at the drop of a hat.

“Got this baby after a college football game,” Lance Harris says, pointing to a crown on the second bicuspid, upper left. Lance is here courtesy of Jetabout Adventure Tours and a dental mishap on the Outer Reef. “Got a cheekful of quarterback cleats, cracked right to the gum, I couldn’t talk for a week. It was, let me see, my junior year, Mississippi State, those rednecks. Hell of a close fight, but we beat ’em, all that matters, right? Keeps on giving me heck, but hey, worth every orthodontist’s dollar, I say.”

Beth never understands the half of it, but in any case, what can you make of people who talk about their teeth? She just smiles and nods, handing Dr Foley instruments, vacuuming spit. American spit is cleaner than Australian spit, that’s another interesting difference. Less nicotine, she thinks. No beer in their diets. But Scotch is yellowish too, wouldn’t that … ? and certainly the boats that go beyond Michaelmas Cay for marlin are as full of Johnnie Walker as of American tourists with dreams. Champagne too. She’s seen them onloading crates at the wharf. She imagines Lance’s wife, camcorder in hand, schlurping up into her videotape Lance’s blue marlin and his crisp summer cottons and the splash of yellow champagne and the dazzling teeth, whiter than bleached coral. How do they get them so white? Here I go, she thinks, rolling up her eyes for nobody’s benefit but her own. Here I go, thinking about teeth. What a subject.

She wonders, just the same, about amber spit and clear spit. Is it a national trait?

“Australians don’t floss,” Lance mumbles, clamp in mouth, through a break in the roadwork on his molars.