As Far as You Can Go (26 page)

‘Sorry.’

Larry returns the pills, screws on the lid. ‘Not your fault,’ he says. ‘Don’t get upset. But I will have a word with Fred.’ He
puts a finger under her chin and tips her hot face up. She has no choice but to look into his eyes.

They are calm, almost kind again. ‘No harm done,’ he says. ‘No need for the long face, eh? I’m sorry, I got a bit agitated there. Tired, you know. Tell you what, I’ll go and freshen up, why not make another batch of pancakes, eh? With bacon. I’ve quite an appetite, suddenly.’

He wipes his finger on his sleeve, goes out of the door into the hall, the eskie under his arm. Drugs? Did she lock the cupboard again? Yes, she did, she
did
. She looks at the back door. If she could run. But it is
OK
. It will all be OK. How could he know she’s been in the bathroom? He can’t know.

She takes bacon out of its paper bag, peels the gummy strips apart. But the door opens again and he comes in. She lays the bacon slices in a pan. She squats down to check the fire in the belly of the stove. His eyes burn into her back.

‘Enjoy your bath?’ His voice is level, grating gently with disappointment. With her thumbnail she picks at a blister of pocked enamel on the stove door. ‘Straighten up, Cassandra, don’t be stupid. I never thought that you were stupid.’

‘All right,’ she says. She stands up, wobbles a bit. Hands greasy with bacon fat.

He has a hair stretched out between his fingers like an invisible garrotte. ‘Yours, I believe.’ He holds the hair up between a finger and thumb, squints at it, before letting it fall, rubbing his fingers fastidiously together as if to rid them of the sensation. ‘How did you get in?’

‘Keys.’ She fumbles them out of her pocket.

‘And where?’ Larry indicates the table with his head.

She puts them down. ‘There. Behind the cupboard under the sink.’

‘Behind
the cupboard
under
the sink.’ He snorts. ‘And what on earth were you doing
behind
the cupboard
under
the sink?’

‘Cleaning,’ she says.

Larry laughs. He slaps his thigh. ‘Oh my my.’ He comes across and grips the tops of her arms. A shiver runs through her at the touch of his hands. He looks closely into her face. His breath smells of Cinnamint. The whites of his eyes are faintly pink.

‘I don’t like anyone in my bathroom.’

‘Sorry.’

‘And one thing I loathe above all other things is a snoop.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Perhaps you think it strange?’

‘No!’ she says, flushing. ‘It’s
your
house.’

‘Indeed.’ He runs his tongue over his front teeth and then he lets her go. ‘Let’s have breakfast then,’ he says.

*

Fred’s out of it, flat on his back on the bus-seat bed, snoring till the windows rattle. Ziggy’s moving about, what’s he doing? Something was said about food. How long ago was that? Graham looks at his watch again. Still not noon.
Some
grass. But
still
not noon?

‘Watch stopped?’ Ziggy looms above him. ‘Crackers?’ He brandishes a crackly orange pack of Jacob’s.

‘Yeah.’

‘Another Bloody Mary?’

‘Nah.’ He swallows, thick taste of tomato juice cloying on his tongue. He scrunches his eyes at his watch, trying to catch the second hand, a fly’s leg that should be jerking round. As he frowns at it, it does a feeble kick and trembles without moving forward. He giggles.

‘Magnetic field.’ Ziggy wrenches open a can of sardines. ‘It’s a bugger round here.’

‘So what time is it?’

Ziggy looks down at the mash of little fish. ‘Lunchtime, I’d say,’ and though it’s not funny they crack up. Graham clutches
his stomach, the laughter jerking out of him till it almost hurts. Hasn’t laughed like this since Christ knows.

‘No, really,’ Ziggy says, when he can speak again, ‘I do rely on the old turn to tell me the time.’

Fred sits up, his bloodshot blue eyes blinking wildly till he works out where the hell he is, and then he grins.

‘Going for a slash,’ he says.

‘Don’t you want to eat, old chap?’ Ziggy says.

‘Give a bloke a minute, mate. Nature calls, old bean, tally-ho or whatever.’

‘Toodle-pip,’ Ziggy shouts after him. ‘Have I taught you nothing?’ Graham chokes on a laugh, coughs till his eyes stream. Ziggy clouts him between the shoulder blades and he eventually gets himself back under control. Takes a long swallow of lukewarm water. Pours himself a shot of vodka. Better without the tomato and stuff. Clean, carves a hot tube down his throat, so he can breathe.

‘You’re from England, right?’ he says when he can speak.

‘How on earth can you tell?’ Ziggy grins; it is so huge, that grin, you could get lost in it, the expanse of cracked lip-skin, the dance of teeth, the slice-of-melon size of it. ‘Mum an Abo – that’s where I get my looks.’ He frames his face with his hands and shouts a laugh. ‘Dad a travel writer. Yeah! Wrote a famous book about Aboriginal art.
Stepping into Dreamtime
. Read it? Course it’s been superseded now but it was a classic of its day. Fuck off, old chap.’ He bats his hand through the air at a fly crawling on the sardine tin. ‘Good for you, sardines, if you eat the bones. Calcium.’ He crunches. ‘They went to England, I was born, Mum couldn’t hack it – the weather, the prejudice, the philistine way of treating the land – came back, but Dad persuaded her to leave me there for my education. Winchester, the lot! But –’ He shrugs.

‘Man.’ Graham’s mouth is dry, nearly stuck together with cracker crumbs. He knocks back the vodka. ‘Do you see her much? Your mum.’

Ziggy shakes his head. ‘I’ve seen her. Didn’t – didn’t work out. She’s living on the Kallikurri reservation. New family. Very resentful, unfortunately. I think she’s decided to edit the episode that includes me out of her life.’ He brings the wide tip of his index finger down and squashes the fly dead against the oily tin, sucks the oil off his finger, wipes it on his vest. ‘But – well, that’s her prerogative, isn’t it? Don’t blame her actually.’

‘And you just live here alone, all the time, don’t you get – you know – lonely?’

Ziggy sticks his fingers in the jar of pickled cucumbers. The vinegary scent is sharp. Graham reaches his own fingers in.
Fork, Graham
, Cassie would say. First time he’s been out of her sight, practically, for a couple of
months
. He catches a cucumber and pulls it out, vinegar running down his wrist.

‘My choice. Tried marriage,’ Ziggy said. ‘Delia, English woman. Got a kid actually, up in Cairns.’ He lurches up and fumbles through a pile of papers till he finds a photo, a boy in shorts, pale-brown skin, knock-knees, yellow hair that looks like it’s been ironed flat against his head. ‘Billy. Nice lad. I catch up with him sometimes.’

Graham savours the vinegary nip, the dill-flavoured scrunch of the pickle.

‘Thing is,’ Ziggy says, ‘he can just about get away with being white, what with his mum. But if I turn up –’

‘Hey!’ Fred blunders back in. ‘Let’s have some tucker, mate. Or have you scoffed the lot?’

The light has changed. First Graham thinks it’s his eyes, the dope and drink, the suffocation, the sweltering heat. He goes out to have a piss. Walks back to the water, darker now, rippling steadily against the bank. Notices another carving on a tree. A fish, its bones and innards showing, a maze-like map of a fish. The more you look, the more you see. The swans obviously fake swans, not
fake
, they’re art.

He frowns at the distinction, can’t think straight, pulls off his
T-shirt, thinking to jump in again, wash the sweat away, clear his head. But the light changes as he hesitates on the edge; the sun casts a hard bright fan of beams and then slips down behind the quarry side, leaving him dazzled, leaving the car park in shade. He shivers. Too quiet. And why the ripples, when the air is still? A face painted on a rock catches his eye, or its eyes catch him and won’t let go. A primitive face, mouth open, eyes cornered in white against dark-blue stone. He puts his T-shirt on again and walks towards the bus, feeling the eyes on him, fake eyes that’s all, not eyes at all, daubs of pigment but still he’s glad to get back in the bus.

‘Getting dark,’ he says.

‘Eh?’ Fred doesn’t turn his head. He’s looking at a magazine, where a blonde girl with her tongue stuck out spreads her legs, shaved cunt gleaming like a freshly opened whelk, a staple right there painful at her centre.

Graham winces and looks away. ‘Shouldn’t we be making a move?’

‘Can’t drive now,’ Fred says. ‘Oh dear, we’ll just have to stay.’ He flips the page, the same girl kneeling, arse in the air, from the back. Tattoo of a rose right in the middle of one buttock.

‘You’re most welcome,’ Ziggy says.

‘Open the Scotch?’ Fred says. ‘Let’s get settled in.’

‘In fact, I insist you stay. Where are my manners?’

‘Cassie’ll go ape-shit,’ Graham says.

‘Nah, she’ll be fine. Tonight, tomorrow, what’s the difference?’

‘You reckon?’

But there is no choice. Not up to driving himself even if he had a licence. Why didn’t he think? He can just hear Cassie saying that. You never
think
. Consequences, all that shit, responsibility. Fuck it. He reaches for the vodka bottle and tips his head back for the dregs.

It’s dark. They won’t be back now. Cassie’s ears ache from straining all afternoon to hear, sure several times she could hear an engine approaching but no; nothing. Just aeroplanes dragging trails across the sky, birds cackling. No sign or sound from Mara. Larry in his study, working. Stiff and polite when their paths have crossed, though she’s avoided him as much as possible, spent much of the day in the garden.

Standing there under the shady nets she’d wished she’d made more of an effort. She turns the compost, amazed to find the centre of the heap already decomposing, dark and crumbly. The magic – eggshells, tea leaves, orange peels, turning into such lovely, sweet-smelling stuff – has happened ten times faster in this heat than at home. She hopes they’ll keep it up. Maybe she’ll pin some instructions up for whoever’s next. But apart from the compost heap she’s left nothing to show for herself. She feels a pang of guilt, thinking of Mara. But she
can’t
tell her. As if to try and make up for their imminent departure, she’s spent ages weeding, watering, tidying before picking the salad stuff for dinner. She’d thought they would all be there and made a huge pan of Bolognese, rich with her own sun-dried tomatoes, but now it looks like it’ll be just the two of them.

It might be peculiar of him, keeping his precious bathroom secret, it might be selfish but, she sighs, staring at herself in the
mirror, that’s his business and they are out of it anyway. She smoothes moisturiser into her face and decides, for once, to make an effort. If she dresses up to please him – maybe he will forgive her. Not that she’s anything to dress up in, but she changes out of her grubby shorts and puts on her clean blue dress. Brushes her hair, puts some eyeliner on, a bit of lip gloss.

She tries to keep her mind off Graham but still, something keeps trying to force itself into her notice. Some hard feeling – you can see why they’re called hard feelings – of anger or disappointment, or both. But still, she doesn’t
know
. Maybe there’s a good explanation. Wait till he gets back and hear it. Give him a chance before she goes off at him. She leans in to the mirror to pluck her eyebrows. Too dim, she lights a candle. Still can’t see but plucks by guesswork, each sharp sting of extraction threatening to bring tears to her eye. The ends of her hair shrivel away from the candle flame, a sharp stink of singeing.

She flumps down on the bed, pulls her hand through the burnt hair, ripping off the brittle ends. The stench has filled the room. She could easily cry but won’t. Lies down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, the old red lampshade, the fire sensor – the only modern thing in the room. The candle shadows waver, on the walls, the curtains. She is aware of the space beside her where Graham isn’t.

So, just herself and Larry then. Will they drink wine? Better not, though she couldn’t half do with a drink. She squints at her watch. Time crawls by. Not light enough to read. If only there was a telly, or a phone. She looks at the photos of Patsy and Kate, Cat – and remembers the one Mara gave her. She gets up and finds it in the pocket of her discarded shorts. It’s bent now from the shape of her backside. She holds it close to the candle, stares at the fair-haired young woman with the uncertain smile.

She starts at the sudden deafening onset of a noise, like wet
chips lowered into fat amplified a million times. She goes to the window and pulls back the curtain to see rain sluicing down the glass. Of course! Rain on the tin roof. Wonderful! The refreshing scent of it creeps into her nostrils, cool and fragrant. But
Graham
should be here with her to share it.

She waits a long time for it to stop or slacken off, but it doesn’t and in the end, holding a T-shirt over her head, she goes out in the downpour. The sky is dark-green, a strange light shining up from the ground that seems to be rising in pale strands around her. Tepid water washes over her feet, between her toes, flattening her dress to her body. The T-shirt is useless, she’s instantly drenched. Can just hear the hens scandalising in their coop but mainly the sound is of a giant streaming, a deluge of wetness, sky collapsing on to hard-baked earth.

Larry laughs at her when she walks into the kitchen. And she looks down at herself and smiles too, red dust splashed up her legs, dress a clinging blue skin. Her hair runs rivulets into her eyes and down between her shoulder blades.

‘You’ll have to change out of that,’ he says. ‘Wait.’ He brings her a towel and the white shirt – the same one she used for painting the kitchen. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll leave you to it. That’s your wine.’ He pushes a glass towards her and goes out into the hall. The kitchen is loud with the rain on the roof, warm with the homey smell of meat sauce. She sloshes some wine from the open bottle into the Bolognese before she strips off her dress. Even her knickers are damp but she leaves them on, rubs dry her skin and pulls on the soft cotton shirt. Still a splash of white paint dried stiffly on the sleeve.