As Far as You Can Go (11 page)

‘The thumb or the snake?’ Cassie grasps her own precious thumbs against her chest.

Fred laughs. ‘Me thumb! Didn’t take a very big hole.’

‘I could
never
do that,’ Cassie says. ‘Could you, Gray?’

‘It was that or curtains,’ Fred says.

‘One never really knows
what
one would do if one was pushed to the very limits,’ Larry says. He smiles at Cassie. ‘Does one?’

‘Well, no.’ She looks down at her knees. If only she could think of something witty. ‘Excuse me a minute.’ She goes outside and down the veranda steps, a blast of laughter following, not
you
they’re laughing at, she tells herself. What
is
up with her?

She stands irresolutely in front of Mara’s door. It’s not right, not healthy, Mara shut up in there, in all that stuffiness. Maybe she could offer her a cup of tea? She knocks but her knock sounds feeble and there’s no reply. The paint has peeled off in map shapes; she picks at a flake, sharp under her fingernail.

She longs to talk to Patsy. If
only
there was phone or email. It had never occurred to her that there would be no phone. The distance makes her giddy suddenly, a rope unfurling from her diaphragm to her sister but it’s too far to reach, the connection gone. Not even in the same time zone, can’t imagine what she’ll be doing. She walks out into the humid, almost solid, afternoon heat. She walks away from the house until it is small behind her.

First, noting the stand of trees on her right, she shuts her eyes and walks as if through a field of hanging sheets, her hands pushed out ahead to part the air. Under her feet the crust of dried
dust reminds her for a second of snow, but that memory melts instantly, leaving the sensation of grit on her lips. Hard to make herself walk with her eyes closed, hands pushing forward, hard to trust that there’s really nothing to impede her. There
is
nothing.

Small sharp shrubs dried to leather, nothing else for maybe half a mile until the bush thickens. There’s nothing and no one. She needs someone to talk to. Someone other than Graham. Mara in that shed, suffocating hot red room, the thought of it makes her gasp for air. She dares herself on, like she and Patsy used to, on the beach, or the playing field. A competition, who dares to keep their eyes shut longest. They’d walked, eyes shut, hands in front like sleepwalkers. One leading the other, step up, step down, stop!

She remembers leading Patsy very near the edge of the canal, Patsy trusting her, just the smallest step out of line, the smallest stumble and she’d have fallen in. The temptation to make her walk right along the very edge, just to see if she might fall. Patsy’s blonde ponytail just like hers, the checked school dress, the runkly white socks under her sandal straps. But she didn’t fall. Or maybe she was cheating, looking through her lashes, just like Cassie did when it was her turn.

A sharp jab on her shin makes her eyes fly open – a snake! But it’s just a thorny plant, a bright bead of blood on her leg. She smears it and licks the dark taste off her finger. And looks round, startled. She’s swivelled on her course. The trees are behind now instead of on her right. Yet she didn’t turn. She walked straight, she’s sure of it.

Feels like someone’s watching, stupid, they’re all indoors. No one watching. What
is
up with her? But the
feeling
is there – a shadow at the corner of her eye? She whips round. No one. Of course. Idiot. Just the sun playing tricks, eyes playing tricks, imagination playing tricks. She goes back towards the house, forcing herself to walk at a normal pace and not to run.

Woolagong Station
(But send it to Box 25, Keemarra Roadhouse)
23rd October

Dear Patsy
,

How are you? Do you realise this is by far the longest we’ve ever been out of contact? Of course you do. It’s all pretty weird here. The man, Larry, and G haven’t really hit it off that well, but I think it’ll be OK. L
is
a bit weird but I like him, he’s amazing, giving up everything to live out here with Mara, his wife, who’s really not well. Mental rather than physical. Not sure yet quite what’s wrong but she wears a sheet and spends most of the time alone in a
shed
!

Hope Katie likes the picture of a kangaroo. I really miss you, Patsy. I’m not used to not being able to tell you everything – and knowing everything about you. Hope Al’s not being a pain, tell him he’ll have me to answer to. (That’ll scare him!)

It is beautiful here though, in a stark sort of way. We’re getting brown. And, G would say, browned off! Though he’s bagged a room (the best) for a studio so I hope he’ll start painting. He’s petrified of the spiders! Quite sweet really. I’ll bore you rigid with photos when I get home. Garden lovely and I’ve started a compost heap
.

Give Katie the biggest hug you can without squashing her. And stroke Cat for me, give him some extra Munchies. Thanks again for having him. Lots of love
,

Cassie

xxxxx

Graham lets his head hang back, stretching his throat. The sky is wrong. The constellations warped and much too fierce.

That’s the Southern Cross,’ Larry says. He leans close to Cassie on the log seat beside the barbecue. Graham watches her chin travel up, her eyes follow his finger through the meaty smoke and into space. ‘That group of three and –’

‘Tucker’s about done,’ Fred says. ‘Where’s the plates?’

‘Refill?’ Larry offers more wine around. Whatever they are likely to go short of here, Graham thinks, at least it won’t be booze.

Mara sits beside him, the flesh of her thigh pressing against his, her smell again, maybe just the smell of an older woman, sort of ripe. She’s wearing the same old sheet, dark smudgy lipstick. Scarlet parrot-feather earrings tangle with her hair.

‘Like your earrings,’ Cassie says.

‘Fred made them for me.’

‘Make you some an’ all if you want.’

‘Oh thanks!’

‘Keep your eyes skinned for a couple of nice feathers.’

‘Most intelligent creatures on the planet, parrots,’ Mara says. ‘Fred said, didn’t you Fred?’

‘Humans aside, presumably.’ Larry eases out another cork.

‘Heard it on the radio.’ Fred flips the kangaroo steaks over one last time. ‘Ready with them plates, Laz?’

Laz?
Things are obviously fine between Fred and Larry now but earlier he’d left them in the kitchen to go for a slash and when he’d got back they’d been rowing. Least, he’d heard Fred shout something and, rather than walk into the middle of it, he’d gone away again. But maybe he’d got it wrong.

‘Some test they did,’ Fred continues, hefting alarming hunks of meat on to the plates, ‘whales, dolphins, dogs, parrots, and parrots came out tops, would you believe.’

‘Can’t imagine
how
you’d test a whale alongside a parrot,’ Cassie says.

‘Anyway!’ Mara is triumphant. ‘Parrots won!’

Graham winces at the thought of such intelligent creatures flying free,
thinking
all over the place. Thinking
what
? Doesn’t seem right, somehow. Some old aunt or something of his mother’s they used to visit when he was small had had a parrot, a stinking grey thing, blind in one eye, that clutched your fingers in its scabby claws if you stuck them through the cage. ‘It’ll have your finger off,’ the old woman used to say but he couldn’t resist poking at it, though the smell nearly made him choke. He wonders what
it
thought, if it was so clever.

Larry hands out the loaded plates. In the light from the kerosene lamps the meat looks almost black, covered in ashy flecks. Graham takes a bite of the tough charry meat and chews.

‘What do you think of the kangaroo?’ he asks Cassie.

‘Very nice,’ she says through a mouthful, refusing to meet his eye.

Larry sits back down beside her with a contented sigh. ‘Fine bread, Cassandra.’

Cassie swallows with difficulty. ‘Thanks.
Please
call me Cassie.’

‘If that’s what you’d prefer. Though it seems a shame to mutilate such a beautiful name,’ Larry says.

Fred guffaws. ‘Mutilate! Get a hold of yourself, mate!’

‘Cassie,’ Larry says, tipping his glass to her.

She smiles and sips her wine. Graham stares at her expression, sort of pleased and smug. Is she getting off on these smarmy looks?

‘So, you’re gonna be painting?’ Fred says. ‘Used to dabble in that line a bit meself.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Years back.’

‘The painting in the kitchen that caught your eye,’ Larry says.

‘That’s not you?’ Graham looks through the smoke at Fred, a shadowy shape but for the lit point of his fag. ‘It’s beautiful, man. And you don’t paint any more?’

‘Nah.’

‘That’s criminal.’

‘You can talk,’ Cassie says.

‘Criminal,’
Larry repeats, amused.

‘What exactly
is
it that
you
do, Larry?’ Graham says.

‘Research,’ Larry replies, shortly.

‘On what?’

‘Collation of pre-existing data.’

‘Into –?’ Graham says. He enjoys making Larry squirm. What’s the big mystery? And where does he get off, looking at Cassie like that? Prat.

‘Graham,’
Cassie says, giving him a look.

‘Good and lean,’ Fred smacks his lips.

‘There’s plenty more,’ Larry says, ‘do eat your fill.’

‘What do
you
do then, Graham?’ Larry says. ‘I take it you haven’t been artistically productive lately.’

‘I’m starting a compost heap,’ Cassie says.

Fred almost chokes on his food.

‘So put all your fruit peels and tea leaves in the bucket by the sink.’

‘I can get you a sack of compost, love.’

‘No,’ Cassie says. She leans towards Fred and begins to explain.

The meat in his mouth, the smell of Mara by his side, remind Graham of something. He strains his mind at the tease of it and remembers the old woman with the parrot again: how once he’d had to stay with her alone, can’t remember why, Mum in hospital maybe. She’d called him into her bed in the mornings, for a cuddle. She’d had no children of her own, she’d told him, never even married, but she did like to cuddle a boy, she’d said, and he had submitted, face against the scratchy lace of her nightie, holding his breath against the smell of her. Once she’d said, ‘Shut your eyes and stick your pinkies in your ears,’ but he’d watched her squat over her chamber pot, her nightdress spread, and heard, despite his fingers, the slow widdly sound, watched how she patted herself dry with her hem before climbing back into bed.

And in her cold kitchen the meat she cooked for the cats. That’s it. Something rises in his throat, preventing him from swallowing. She didn’t keep a cat because of the parrot but all the strays in the neighbourhood would come every afternoon to her door. Her friend the butcher gave her unsold meat to feed them with and afternoons were the smell of it boiling, the grey liquor she poured down the sink, the knobbles of chewed gristle and yellowish beads of bone the cats left in the yard.

He swigs his wine, empties his glass, the thick purple taste of it washing away the taste of the meat. He hasn’t even
thought
about her for years. And now, he almost misses her. Although she must, surely, be dead? And he never knew. Can’t even remember her name. Or who she was. He’s hardly given his parents a thought for that matter. Never felt the lack. Though it is a lack. Only from this distance can he feel it.

Beside him, Mara chews the meat, he can hear it mashing and catching between her teeth. He focuses his ears away, outward to the noises of the night, scuffles and cries, the generator.
Mara’s arm brushes his. Through his sleeve he can feel the cool of her solid flesh. The skin at the tops of her big sheet-flattened breasts is brown, almost sheeny, the line between them fine and black like a brushstroke. He looks away quick. Under the veranda he sees a movement, catches a gleaming eye. Only the lizard thing, the goanna, squatting by the veranda steps.

‘I’m whacked,’ Cassie says. ‘I’ll have a cup of tea and go to bed if nobody minds. Anyone else?’

Fred startles everyone with his laugh. ‘Tea! Bloody sheilas!’ He knocks back his beer and cracks open another bottle.

‘Gray?’

‘No, ta.’

Cassie carries her plate inside. To chuck her meat away, he guesses, enviously. He’s got to a thick bit that may not be cooked right through.

‘I’m going in too, Larry,’ says Mara.

‘I’ll get you your pills,’ Larry says.

‘Don’t hurry,’ Mara hauls herself up. ‘I’ll go and talk to Cassie in the kitchen.’

‘No,’ Larry says. ‘You’re tired. You should go to bed.’

Mara pauses, opens her mouth, then shrugs. Feeling Graham’s eyes on him, Larry turns. ‘She mustn’t get overtired,’ he explains, ‘it exacerbates her condition.’

‘Hey,’ Graham says, a surge of energy, impatience. He puts his plate down. With any luck the dog’ll eat his meat. ‘Before you go, Mara, I’ve got a trick, wait –’

He goes to fetch the ladder.

‘Shine the torch, Cass.’ He points to Fred’s big tungsten torch sitting on the veranda rail.

‘Why? What are you doing?’ Cassie says, but she switches it on. It dazzles him a moment.

He holds his finger up, ‘Silence please, ladies and gentlemen,’ The ladder rises above him to the stars. He climbs one rung, the next and the next, hearing Mara gasp, smiling as he steps up
again, swaying, swaying, he sees the long swaying shadow, maybe too much wine, his foot slips and he has to jump down, just manages to catch the ladder before it crashes on to the barbecue.

Larry gives a slow handclap. ‘I’d say, stick with the day job if-’

‘Try again,’ Mara says.

But Cassie is shaking her head at him. She switches off the torch. The energy has gone.
Prick
. ‘Nah, need more practice.’ He puts the ladder back, and standing in the dark, looking out into the pitchy nothingness, feels like he could cry.

*

Cassie scrubs her teeth, spitting the froth into the sink. There are still stringy threads of meat between her teeth. Doesn’t really like eating meat but at least kangaroo is free-range, about as free-range as you can get. Can’t find the floss. Too tired to care. Too tired to care that her skin is clogged with suncream and sweat. Too tired to care about anything but getting her head down. Behind the bedroom door, she lets herself go in a voluptuous yawn and stretch. The candle burns low. She lights another. The light wavery and soothing, kinder to her tired and prickly eyes than electric would have been. She sheds her clothes and staggers into bed, the creak of it carrying her almost immediately into a deep and fur-lined sleep through which she doesn’t hear Graham come to bed.