Peripheral Vision (10 page)

Klara stood above me and held out her hand to help me up, but I turned my face away from her.

‘Go away,' I whispered, the tears starting. Pain in my face, my throat, between my legs, my wrists. Moisture dribbling from inside me onto the dirt floor. I felt the cold on my bare thighs, the goosebumps rising, the hairs standing on end.

Klara moved slowly to the door of the shed. She hesitated there, her hand curled around the edge of the door.

‘Get out,' I whispered. My throat seemed to have closed. Words could barely escape.

She waited a few seconds more. Then she pulled open the shed door and the light savaged my naked skin.

‘If you tell,' Klara said in a scratchy voice like an old vinyl record, ‘he'll kill me. You know he will.' She pulled the door shut behind her.

Twenty years later, that scratchy voice spoke behind me.

‘There are seats here.'

A slim hand beside me pointed to a bench at my table, which was littered with chip packets and a dozen glasses – half empty, ringed with dried foam, lipsticked and smeared with oily fingerprints – from the crowd that had headed out to the beer garden. The funeral was over. Everyone had moved on to the informal wake at the pub and the drinking and shouting was getting harder and louder.

‘Natalie?' the voice said into my ear. Her fingers touched my wrist, light as fairy dust, and twenty years vanished. I was flung back to the days of Klara, the hot sunshine and tickly grass, our special jokes and the purse full of lucky white stones we collected from each corner of the playground, chanting as we went.

When I turned I half expected to see the old Klara, her earnest eyes gazing into mine, reedy brown hair wound into the tight plaits that boys at school felt compelled to twitch and pull at every opportunity. Instead, there stood a woman with a blonde bob and smooth made-up skin. She shook her head and the hair followed in a perfect feathery swing.

‘What are you doing here?' I said.

My chair rocked on its wobbly legs. Klara gave me some answer about a connection to my cousin's funeral as I tried to steady myself with my feet but found them jarring against the stubby carpet. A waiter came to collect the glasses and litter from the table. Once he had left, glasses in a ladder up his arm, the surface was still tacky with spilled beer and wine so that the underside of my arm peeled away from the table's veneer like a strip of contact.

‘Natalie and I were at primary school together,' Klara explained to her husband. ‘But my family moved to the country and we lost touch.'

I stared at her.

‘We used to be best friends,' Klara said.

‘I came to visit you after you moved.' I had to raise my voice against the clamour of the mourners. My glass was empty. Acid biting into my gut.

‘Did you? I'd forgotten,' she said, tilting her head, still alert and birdy. She leaned sideways so that her shoulder rested against her husband's chest. ‘Natalie was one of the smart ones at school. She's probably a doctor now, or a lawyer or something.'

‘I stayed at your house for a week.'

She shook her head as if this was unbelievable to her. ‘I've got a terrible memory,' she said. ‘Haven't I, darling?'

‘You always remember where the credit card lives,' her husband answered.

‘That's because you let it live in my purse,' she replied smartly and laughed.

Of course she couldn't be like the old Klara. The discord was a kind of relief. This was not Klara. This person wouldn't know the answer to the elephant riddle that used to make us laugh until we got a stitch. She wouldn't know anything about us, or what happened.

On my last day at Klara's house when we were twelve I eventually made my way back to the house. As I stumbled through the hot dry kitchen Klara's mother asked me what had happened. ‘I fell over,' I told her, and she asked if I was hurt and I said no, just a bruise. ‘Are you sure, sweetheart?' she asked me. I said yes I was sure. She told me I should change my clothes and have another shower because I had dirt all down my back and in my hair and she didn't want my mother thinking they hadn't taken care of me. The hot water of the shower hurt me in every place. Afterwards I sat on the bed in Klara's bedroom, wet hair dripping onto the eiderdown, waiting for my mother to arrive and take me home. Klara came and sat beside me. I was too exhausted to push her away. Klara's mother put her head around the doorway and saw us sitting there side by side.

‘Oh, you darling girls are like a pair of beautiful dolls,' she exclaimed.

Until that day I'd thought Klara was like a doll made of porcelain, that she was the one who would be easily broken.

‘I'm going to get another drink,' I said to Klara and her husband.

I wouldn't come back to the table. I would pretend to fall into conversation with someone on the way to the bar, then slip away home to try to gather everything close again.

‘I'll have a G and T. Give Natalie some money, darling.'

‘No!' I said too loudly. I pushed myself out of my seat and rushed into the crowd of people roaring and jostling elbows around the serving counter. Once I was surrounded by other people, I began to feel better. At the bar I ordered a shot of whisky and downed it on the spot. Above me, the racks of glasses jittered in time with the jukebox bass. I ordered another whisky and moved further along the bar, out of Klara's line of vision, holding on to the counter with my fingers resting on its damp sticky towel because my legs were still shaking.

‘Natalie!' A man in a grey suit with his tie loosened and his sleeves pushed up emerged from the crowd. He leaned across the bar and ordered himself a beer and me another whisky. He looked me up and down as if he was appraising my value, as if I was a piece of real estate.

‘You're looking good,' he said. He rigged his sleeves higher up his arms. Rolled his neck before he picked up his beer and drained the glass. He knew I was a likely chance.

Klara and her husband were waiting at the other end of the room for me to reappear with a gin and tonic and amnesia. My cousin was burning to ash and bone in the crematorium. As the noise around me pulsed in shouts and raucous laughter I sucked in fast desperate breaths, giddy with the unreality of it all. The only reality was Klara, sitting at a table in that room. Klara wearing peach silk. Klara all grown up. I didn't want her to be Klara, but she was.

On my way back from the bar with a gin and tonic and another whisky, the muscles in my neck tingled and released. The third shot was fanning through my bloodstream.

‘We thought you'd run off,' Klara said, glancing at her husband.

I raised my fourth shot to my lips and swallowed. ‘Not this time. How is everyone, anyway?' My voice rode the hubbub, a punchy voice filled with green light and dust.

‘We've left Rhiannon with a babysitter. We hate parents who take their children to every inappropriate event, don't we, Squidge?'

Squidge, as she obviously called the husband she had introduced as Lawrence, nodded. He was nursing the same glass of wine he had first brought to the table. Klara nestled up to him again. He smiled as she turned back to me and lifted her glass. The straw bobbed up and down in the fizzy tonic and she followed it with her pursed lips like a baby seeking a nipple. At last she caught the straw between her lips and I saw the old Klara for a moment, focused intently on her drink, frowning. I would have recognised her anywhere, but I was surprised she had recognised me – it was as if she'd left little Klara behind on that dusty property.

‘I meant the people I knew. Your family.'

Her face rippled, almost imperceptibly. It was the second sign of the Klara who had been my best friend so many years ago. I used to see that deep quiver when Dieter walked by, or when we heard his voice from another room.

‘Oh, Mum and Dad have moved to Queensland. Dieter's married. Has his own salon now. Helen's still teaching.' Her eyes blinked, empty, while her hand travelled around her husband's lap like an animal searching for somewhere to hide. ‘What about your family? I can't remember – did you have any brothers or sisters?'

‘Salon?' I said. Did Klara remember our pretend salon? I would lie on the bed while she smeared my face with yoghurt and stained my lips purple with the juice of a cherry.

‘He's a barber. He likes to call his shop a “salon”.'

A laugh hacked out of my chest. ‘They let him near people with a razor? Does he still throw knives? I hope he got better at it if he does.'

Klara and Squidge stared at me. Then Klara dropped her gaze. She picked up her purse and began sorting through its contents.

‘Sorry?' Squidge said, speaking directly to me for the first time.

‘Dieter loved to throw things at people. Sharp things. Didn't he, Klara?'

She pressed her lips together and shook her head slowly, looking down at the table. Her blonde hair flared in the light. Both her hands had delved inside her purse now.

‘Did he? He was a terrible teenager, I suppose. I told you I had a shocking memory.' She looked up at Squidge. ‘Didn't I?'

‘Dreadful,' he answered. ‘Completely vague.'

I had to close my eyes because I couldn't stop staring at Klara's features, trying to find the girl I had loved so deeply. We used to lie beside each other on the spongy surface of the playground and count each other's freckles. I would watch as Klara's bottom lip pressed briefly under her top teeth before she spoke. I thought it made her look like a mouse, a sweet, hesitant mouse. Sometimes I stood in front of the mirror trying it myself, but it never worked for me. I looked like a dumb rabbit. It was the shape of Klara's face and her mouth that had made her so loveable and vulnerable.

I rubbed my eyes till they stung, trying to superimpose one Klara on the other.

‘I should get you home,' Squidge said to Klara.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Yes, please.'

When I opened my left eye she was looking back at me. The blue of her eyes was like the sky shuddering behind a copse of wind-torn trees.

When I opened my right eye she was looking back at her lap.

I touched her arm. Her thin white arm.

‘Klara,' I said. I didn't know what else needed to be said anymore. I tried our old call sign, one of the secret codes we used together. ‘Time flies like an arrow.'

‘Very nice to see you, Natalie,' she replied. She was supposed to say,
Fruit flies like a banana
.

Squidge stood and stretched, the bones in his back cracking.

I took Klara's hand in mine. I wanted to have the sensation of our damp childish hands clasped together under the desk one more time. But her hand was dry. Under the skin I could feel the tremor of her bones and muscles, a tremor that probably never left her.

‘I'm glad you made it,' I told her softly, so her husband didn't hear, so there was one good thing left between us.

She stood. Her husband held out his hand to help her and she took her hand from mine and gave it to him like a princess taking the hand of the groom from the carriage step.

‘Bye,' I said.

‘Bye,' she answered.

Once, we were like sisters. But we were not sisters. She has a real sister and a brother and they are her family. And she owes me nothing.

Deja Vu

One wall of the room with the sulphur spa was glass, and Anthony arrived early each morning so that he could slip into the warm water right next to the window wall and look out, down the hill, at the view of the small French village of Llo and its surrounding mountains. If he came late there would already be a cluster of crepe-paper old men in the bath,
snorting and complaining and arguing as if they were drinking
Pernod around a table in a cafe, not undergoing a cure at a medicinal hot spring. At the height of their gesticulations, the old men's hand slaps landed
crack
on the water, creating little tidal waves that lapped over the rim of the pool and spread across the red tiled floor. But if Anthony arrived early enough, only he and another man, a quiet old man, used the pool. They sat and watched the mist rise off the silver fields on the mountains opposite, and the people hurrying to work in the village below, and they kept the silence.

For three days in a row Anthony had shared the bath with the old man and watched him leave when his wife came to get him. She arrived each morning at eight fifty-five, according to the misty clock on the wall. She always walked straight up and tried to peer through the one-way glass into the baths, cupping her hands around her face and looming up in front of the two of them like a seal nosing against the glass of an aquarium. The old man would wave back at her, pull himself out of the bath and pad off past the ornamental palm to the men's changing room.

On the fourth day Anthony slept in. At lunchtime he was sitting in a nearby cafe when the bather's wife stepped in through the entrance. She made an exclamation that sounded like a squawk as she surveyed the tables. She's like an old chook, Anthony thought, but he kept watching her anyway, oddly fascinated. The woman was wearing a large floppy hat of aqua terry towelling that completely covered her hair and partly obscured her face. Her upper torso was quite slim and she swivelled like an office chair on her heavy hips as she looked around until she had found a table to her liking. Then she pointed to the one she had chosen and, still pointing as though her levelled finger would keep the seats in existence until she arrived, pushed her way through and sat down. She had already examined the menu by the time her husband reached his chair.

‘You'll have
café au lai
t
?' she said.

‘No, I think I'll have a beer,' he answered. He reached over and took the menu from her.

Anthony, watching surreptitiously, noticed the old man's hand quiver as he held the cardboard menu. Despite his casual air, the man was quite frail.

‘
Un café au lait et une bière Kronenbourg, s'il vous plaît
,' the woman said to the waiter. ‘
Une bière
,' she repeated after the waiter had walked back to the bar. ‘
Une bière
,
une bière
. I'll never get that “r” sound.
Une bière
.'

‘He understood. I don't see a problem,' her husband remarked. He kept perusing the short menu.

The first time he saw them, Anthony had guessed they were English. It was the man's long face, and the woman's hat, and her expression: discomfort or anxiety, the look of a displaced person. He wondered if English people had always looked this way or if it was something that happened when the empire crumbled. From the corner of his eye, he saw that the woman was making her way to his table, carefully arranging the four chairs in her path to form a corridor as wide as her hips. He slid the postcard he had been writing under his book.

‘Do you mind?' she asked as she sat down next to Anthony. ‘I saw the book and I thought, well, he's either English or speaks English, so we really should introduce ourselves. I'm Alice. That's my husband, George.' She beckoned to George, who got up and walked languidly, like a movie star, through the chair corridor toward them.

‘We were dying to speak to someone in English,' Alice said. As she looked around and saw the waiter standing at the table she and George had left, she made the odd, squawking sound again before calling him over, ‘
Ici, ici!
'

‘Anthony.' Although he wished the couple would leave him alone to his book and his silence, he had never been able to speak rudely to anyone. ‘I've seen you over there, looking at that building. And of course,' he nodded at George, ‘in the bath.'

‘Our son designed that building, Anthony. Martin's an architect. He's designed buildings all over Europe, hasn't he, George.'

George nodded, and shaded his eyes to look across at the building.

‘He always makes the doors too narrow, though,' she went on. ‘You couldn't fit a pixie through some of Martin's doors. In his house, it's a lovely house but— Oh, there's Madame Larouche.'

Madame Larouche was a small figure under a white parasol, climbing the steps of the complex across the road.

‘She's French, staying at our hotel, taking the cure. She's taken a real fancy to me, I can't say why,' Alice said.

George turned his head to gaze at Madame Larouche.

‘She's very kind, does absolutely everything for us. And she lives in Paris. Paris! Yoo-hoo, madame!' Alice stood up and waved at Madame Larouche, who eventually saw her, waved back, and kept walking.

‘Well, what do you think of that! Now she's ignoring us. She's on the hot-spring cure for her arthritis. Of course, you're too young to be on the cure,' she said, looking directly at Anthony for the first time. Alice's oversized glasses emphasised the smallness of her features, each delicately in place like petits fours on a plate. Her mouth held the shape of a drawstring purse.

‘No. I'm here on the cure, too.' Anthony shifted in his seat.

‘Arthritis? A strong, young man like you? Why, you can't be over thirty.' Alice's eyes scanned what was immediately visible of Anthony's body, the tanned arms and prominent collarbone.

‘Actually, insomnia,' he answered abruptly, trying to head off more questions.

The conversation halted. Anthony lifted his empty coffee cup and pretended to drink.

‘Your son's not with you?' he asked Alice after a few moments.

‘Oh no. As if Martin would come anywhere with me. No, we came to see the building and George thought he'd enjoy the baths. We knew he'd have doors like that again, though. His signature doors, they say, don't they, George. I think it's because his wife's so tiny. Even in their magnificent house they only left the external doorways the original size. They built a granny flat for us on the side. Completely separate of course. A young couple need their peace.' Alice's lips grew tighter, as if someone had pulled the drawstring.

‘Yes, it's a good house and a lovely flat,' George said. He smiled at Anthony, but Anthony couldn't read anything into the smile.

‘Should you be drinking coffee if you're an insomniac?' Alice said. She reached over and placed her warm hand on Anthony's knee. ‘Let us buy you a cup of tea.' She swivelled and called the waiter. ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!'

‘No, thank you, really,' Anthony said. ‘I must—'

‘Do you walk, Anthony? George walks. He's an amateur geologist.'

‘Is that right?' he asked George, then looked behind Alice to where the terrace cafe ended and the mountainside seemed to grow up out of the floor. The tiles of the cafe floor matched the basalt colour of the rocky mountainside, but there was no mistaking where one ended and the other began: up from perfectly even square tiles reared the jagged blocks of stone that characterised the whole mountain range. Every morning an attendant would be out here first thing, sweeping away the soil and rock and leaf matter that had drifted down the night before.

‘Yes. Where you find these natural springs in the mountains, you'll also find some fairly interesting volcanic formations,' George began. ‘It's really quite astonishing how you can look at the surface of a piece of land and work out what's happening underneath. Why, I—'

‘George, we'd better let young Anthony get on with his book. You know how bored people get with your rock talk,' Alice broke in. She had already taken money from her purse. ‘Do let us pay for your coffee, Anthony. It's been such a pleasure to meet you.'

Anthony watched her trudge away to negotiate with the waiter, who seemed to be pretending not to understand Alice's French. After she had paid and started walking with George down the road to the village, Anthony's shoulders dropped. He slipped the postcard out from under the book and picked up his pen. So far, he had written the date. He scribbled,
Dear Mum, today I met someone you might like
, then decided to order more coffee.

The next morning Anthony was stretching out in the warm bath and watching the hairs on his legs drift like seaweed under the water when George slid in beside him.

‘Morning, Anthony.'

‘George.'

George rolled his head back against the lip of the bath and sighed.

From the other rooms of the complex, Anthony heard coughs and wheezes, the thwack of oiled hands against skin in the massage room, a couple of women talking about the hotel where they were staying. The soft splashing of water and the hum of people's voices carried through every room. Anthony lay with his eyes closed, listening to the surface murmur, and the rumble of the pump machines under the complex. Even when he felt the water curl around his body because George had stood up, he kept his eyes closed. Alice would be outside the window now, trying to peer in. Or she would be clomping up to the front door of the building to wait. She would always be there, Anthony thought. Like that rumbling sound of the pumps under the floor, you would always know she was there.

The following day Anthony sat hidden in the shade of a cafe awning, watching the passers-by, many of whom had become familiar in this small town of people taking the cure, walking the mountain paths, eating at the same restaurants and hotels. George sauntered past on his own and turned off at a sign that pointed to a hiking track. Half an hour later, Anthony was startled by Alice's voice.

‘George is out on a walk. I can't make it up those hills with my hips. Rheumatism, you know. How are you feeling, Anthony?'

‘Fine, thank you.' He flipped over the postcard his pen had been poised above‚ the same postcard he had been trying to write for days. The picture showed a deep chasm that ran the length of the mountain range. Anthony had taken a bus tour along a road that wound along the top of the mountains, directly above the chasm. At a photo stop, while the other tourists lined up for pictures and broke out crackers and fruit from their travel bags, he had stood at the far barrier of the carpark and stared down at the fast-flowing river that churned and eddied at the bottom of the chasm. He had imagined himself in the water, being thrown about, dashed against rocks, tossed up and sucked down again like a leaf. He had felt the same sensation people feel at the edge of a sheer cliff – that momentary desire to let go and fall away.

‘I must admit my hips are aching right now. It's the damp,' Alice said.

Anthony closed his book as Alice sat down. He slipped in the postcard to mark the page.

‘Reading again, Anthony? I don't like Agatha Christie but it's all they've got in English at the hotel. My son reads a lot. He and George often talk about books. Of course, Martin never mentions what he's reading to his mother.' She picked up the menu, glanced at it, then put it down. ‘Still, he's a grown man.'

Alice's sly complaints made him want to shout, to start up from his chair and stand over her, to smack her‚ all things he would never do. She made his head ache as though all the words he wanted to shout were dammed up in there. He thought of her husband, the silent partner. Did George have the same feeling when Alice prattled on like this?

‘It's your first time here, Anthony?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ours too, but I don't think we'll be coming back. It's quite a tiny town. If you're not taking the cure there isn't much to do, is there? George has worn his own personal path over the hills. I'd like to go with him if it wasn't for my hips.'

‘Perhaps you should take the cure,' Anthony said. Not that it was working for him. As if a warm bath could cure anything. As if travel could take you away from the persistence of memory.

‘Oh no, not me. No, absolutely not me. Madame Larouche from our hotel is taking it. A lovely woman. Quite taken with me, I can't imagine why. Now, I wonder if George is back at the hotel yet. He might be waiting for me. Yes. I'd better go. Anyway, Anthony, you must have dinner with us tomorrow night. We've found an excellent restaurant and we'll be leaving the next day. It's the Le Clos. We can meet you there at eight.'

Anthony declined. Alice insisted. When he finally accepted, she laughed with delight and told him how pleased George would be to have a proper, manly conversation.

‘We've had Madame Larouche and a Spanish woman following us around everywhere, but George is tired of them. He needs a man to talk to. And I can see you're lonely.'

After another restless night and a day spent avoiding the places where he thought he might run into the couple, Anthony arrived at the restaurant to find them already seated.

‘My hair,' Alice moaned, fingering the drab frizz that had previously been neat, artificial curls. ‘It's the humidity. I was almost too embarrassed to come out and see you tonight, Anthony, but we were so looking forward to it.'

‘I won't take a photo then,' Anthony said. He feigned a gesture of putting away a camera, and in the pocket his fingers brushed the dog-eared corners of the postcard he had been trying to write to his mother.

George began to smile at the camera joke, then slowly leaned way back in his chair and performed a long, almost soundless, wide-mouthed laugh.