The High Places (22 page)

Cara had homework to do. She sat at the kitchen table while the children watched something on the lounge-room TV. Sunday nights always felt this way: subdued, companionless. But this evening was worse, with Adam gone all day. Nobody spoke to Rachel when she came out of her room. She went into the bathroom, ran a bath, and stayed there so long the children had to use the toilet in the laundry before they went to bed. Cara read in her history textbook about a foolish English king. She thought she heard Adam return, but it was someone else opening doors and walking the wooden floors of the house. Probably Rachel, finally finished in the bath.

Cara realised she had left her toothbrush in her bedroom. She kept it there because if left in the bathroom someone else would use it. She knocked quietly on the door, and when there was no answer, stepped with care into the room. Danny and Johnno were asleep on Cara's bed. Johnno was bent around Danny's belly with an arm under hers as if it might be the only thing keeping him from rolling off. The bed had never been so full. The quilts twisted at their feet. They were close to naked: Johnno wore underpants, and Danny wore a long thin singlet that rose above her bump. They were both asleep with their mouths open, with formless faces and loose hands, so pink in the blue streetlight, so bundled, that Cara was embarrassed for them, but also fascinated by the ease of their limbs, by the damp fan of Danny's hair across the boy's shoulder, by all the ways their soft, sweet bodies rose and fell and fitted together. It was as if a curtain had been pulled away, some heavy velvet churchy curtain, and behind it were these two humans, who suddenly seemed so young to Cara – younger than she was, children really, sleeping around the child they had made. The curtain should be allowed to fall again. Cara looked and breathed and felt that she knew nothing at all about love, or fright, or whatever it was that held them there, tangled on the bed; she was meek and deferential before them, and aware for the first time of the shapelessness of her longing, how wide and open it was, how enormous in her body and in the world.

Cara found her toothbrush. Neither lover stirred.

She opened the bathroom door onto a hot puff of steam. Rachel rose up out of the bath, out of all that thick greenish water. Her kimono lay just out of reach, draped over the toilet; the bird of paradise was trailing on the hairy floor. The hair on her head wasn't fully wet, but it pressed to her cheeks in damp curls, and hair erupted too from between her legs. Her thighs were brown and ribbed, and at the very top of her arms there was an unexpected slackening.

‘Sorry, Mum, sorry,' Cara said, trying to pull the door closed, but it stuck on the tiles and would leave the smudge Rachel hated. All this time, while Cara tugged the door and the steam came out, exploratory, into the hallway, Rachel stood and stared. She squinted. She wasn't wearing her contact lenses.

‘Leave it,' she said, and Cara backed away as Rachel stepped from the bath; there was that particular pour of water back into the bulk of itself, all the amplified tides of a bathtub. ‘Come in.'

Cara came in and shut the door behind her. It swung easily when the tiles released it.

Rachel lifted the kimono, flashing red and yellow, and wrapped herself in it. The wet showed through in places. She had been in the bath so long her feet were baby-white. Cara began to brush her teeth.

‘Is it midnight yet?' asked Rachel. She blew on the mirror to clear the steam and rubbed it with her towel.

‘Nearly.' Cara's pyjamas were too thick for the heated room. Sweat prickled in the roots of her hair.

‘Gone all day,' said Rachel, with a funny laugh, and she turned to Cara with her hands spread out, with a smile on her face, and said, ‘What would you do, Cara? What would Cara do?' She couldn't say ‘Help me' but she could smile like that, she could spread her hands, she could stand in the dripping bathroom and look the way a plaster saint looks, asking God for something.

Cara, rinsing her minty mouth, shrugged. She knew what she would do: lock and bolt the doors. Turn out the lights and plant thick trees. She would booby-trap the front gate and line the path with knives. Oh, but who would watch him when he smoked and that little muscle tightened in his jaw? Someone else would watch him. Some other girl.

But Rachel was waiting for an answer.

Cara spat into the sink. ‘He's your boyfriend,' she said, and went to the lounge room to set up her bed. She closed her eyes tight when her mother passed through the room. She thought, I'll stay awake until I hear him. I'll sit up in bed – I'll call out his name, so he isn't frightened – and tell him everything that's happened. That way he'll be prepared to face her. She heard footsteps in the street she knew weren't his. Cara slept.

She woke to the noise of a person in the lounge room. It was Rachel, standing long and white above the makeshift bed.

‘Come and sleep in with me,' she said.

Cara obeyed at once. She was half asleep, she was dreaming, she would remember every minute of this night. She followed her mother into the bedroom, where the yellow curtains were open and a bluish light fell onto the floor. Cara knew it was a streetlight, but chose to think of it as the light from the neon cross on top of the church. Rachel wrapped herself in all the blankets, so Cara lay down on top of the sheets on Adam's side of the bed. She slept again, and when she woke it was because her mother was sitting up and squinting at the time on her phone.

‘Three twenty-four,' she said; evidently she knew Cara was awake.

Cara was cold. He'd told his mother he'd be back in the morning.

Rachel laughed, her low, sophisticated laugh, which was mirthless. ‘And now I can't sleep with you in the bed.'

‘I'll go back out,' said Cara, but soggily.

‘No, sweetie,' said Rachel. ‘I'll go out. I can't sleep anyway. I'll read or something.'

Cara could have reached out one arm – she almost did – and held fast to her mother's hair or her T-shirt. She could have kept her there, in the bed; she could have talked her to sleep, or brought her tea, or said she didn't mind a light on. But she had never been more leaden with sleep.
Sweetie
. That was an unfamiliar lullaby word. Cara tucked her knees to her chest. Then Rachel went, she was a gleam in the door and a shuffle in the lounge room, and Cara, guilty, rolled onto the other side of the bed, which smelt of her mother: that salty smoky perfume she wore, and a deeper note which Cara always thought of as a kind of fuzz, like the fuzz on a peach. She slept again, but woke as soon as Adam came. He came in the blue light from the window; he came in the solitary creak of a floorboard by the door. He blundered, but quietly. He pulled off his shirt and loomed up over the bed. His eyes were white, and his long loving throat, and his hands reached across the sheets to find her. To find Rachel. He buried his head in Cara's middle.

‘I'm sorry,' he said with his boozy breath, ‘I'm sorry, I love you, I'm sorry,' and Cara held his brittle hair, she let him kiss her stomach, she breathed up and down as he kissed her. ‘I love you, I'm sorry. Please don't be angry, please, please,' he begged, and Cara felt for a moment the great holy fury of her mother, the height she stood upon, how easily she was disappointed, how much she was called to forgive, and how she must be spared the noise of life, and left alone, and how she must be loved. The blue light buzzed at the window. Cara felt how still she was compared to all the living heat of Adam, his warm head and hands at her waist. His face was wet; he was crying, but as if he didn't know it. He was also falling away into sleep, or a version of it in which he might lie forever with his heavy head on her stomach. She could let him do that. She could also wake him. She knew where to touch and what to say. It was dark enough, and he was drunk enough, and the morning was very far away.

In the bed, in the streetlight, Adam's golden skin was blue. He looked like Krishna. There was a picture of Krishna in the bathroom; he looked like that.

Cara breathed deeply to feel his head rise up, then pushed it off. She rolled out of bed and went to the lounge room, where her mother lay sleeping. Rachel wasn't a messy sleeper like Danny and the boy. She was laid out, white and black, with her red mouth shut. Cara had to touch her twice before she woke.

‘He's back,' said Cara.

Rachel rose from the couch without speaking, went into the bedroom and closed the door. Cara listened, but could hear only the recycling truck, three streets away, lifting and pouring quantities of glass. Greek glass, she thought. It was nearly morning.

*   *   *

At breakfast, the children fussed and shouted when they heard Adam was home. They had to be reminded there were guests still sleeping. They dressed reluctantly for school. Cara bossed them into their uniforms, combed their hair, folded sandwiches into their schoolbags and into her own. They were ready to leave in a little flock when Rachel came out of her bedroom in her working clothes. She wore her hair up so her neck showed long and white and she smiled and laughed. She touched the children's heads and straightened their collars. Starting with Cara, she kissed each child in turn, and their kisses came like wicks from their dry lips.

 

Buttony

The children wanted to play Buttony.

‘All right,' said Miss Lewis, and she clapped her hands five times in the rhythm that meant they must be quiet and copy her. They were quiet and copied her.

‘All right,' she said with that smile she reserved for the sleepy, silly midafternoon. ‘We'll play. Joseph, get the Button.'

The children approved the justice of this appointment; that was apparent from the small, satisfied sigh they made together. They watched Joseph walk to Miss Lewis's desk. Joseph was a compact, deliberate boy, and his straight black hair fell to his shoulders. He wore his uniform in a way that seemed gentlemanly, but at the same time casual. He was both kind and beautiful, and they loved him.

The Button lay in a special tin in the right-hand corner of Miss Lewis's top drawer. The children listened for the sound this drawer made as Joseph opened it. They knew the shifting sound of that opening drawer meant largesse – gold stars or stamps or, in exceptional cases, jelly frogs – and that Miss Lewis's bounty was capable of falling upon them all, but perhaps more often on Joseph. Alternatively, the opening drawer meant Buttony.

All the children handled the Button with reverence, but none more so than Joseph. He was gifted in solemnity. He had a processional walk and moved his head slowly when his name was called – and it was regularly called. His attention was made more valuable by its purposeful quality. He never leaned in confidentially to hear a secret; the other children came to his ear and whispered there. Miss Lewis liked to call on him in class just to see his measured face rise up out of that extraordinary hair. His beauty startled her, until she met both parents – Vietnamese mother, Polish father. Then he made lovely sense. When he held the yellow Button out before him in the dish of his hands, Miss Lewis was capable of forgetting the mustard-coloured cardigan it had fallen off one winter's day. The Button was no longer limited by its cheap yellow plastic; it seemed to pulse with life. The children looked at it, and at Joseph, without appearing to breathe. Miss Lewis wanted her children to live in a heightened way, and she encouraged this sort of ceremony.

‘Close the drawer, Joseph,' she said, because she found she liked nothing better, after admiring him, after giving him the opportunity to be admired, than to gently suggest a mundane task. Miss Lewis could close that drawer with her hip. Joseph used a shoulder. The sound of the closing drawer released the children. Now they hurried to line up at the door.

They always played Buttony outside.

‘Quietly, quietly!' Miss Lewis scolded, brushing the tops of their heads as they filed past her into the corridor, led by Joseph and the Button. She followed them out. In the next-door classroom, 3A recited times tables under the priestly monotone of Mr Graham. One side of the corridor shone with 5B's scaled depiction of the solar system. The children claimed to like blue Saturn best, with its luminous rings, but Miss Lewis was fond of Neptune. She always put out a finger to touch its smooth crayon as she passed.

They gathered under the jacaranda tree. The day was sweet and green. Miss Lewis leaned against the tree and crossed one ankle over the other. Her ankles were still slim; she wasn't so very old. The children formed a circle around Joseph, and there was something very natural about this, about Joseph being in the middle of a circle. Grave Joseph. He stood with the Button as if at some kind of memorial service. Then he raised it to his lips and kissed it. No one had ever kissed the Button before, and some of the children raised their own fingers to their lips. Miss Lewis pursed her mouth. One boy – she didn't see who – let out a brief scoff, but was ignored.

‘Put out your hands,' said Miss Lewis, and the children lifted their cupped hands.

‘Close your eyes,' said Miss Lewis, closing her own eyes. She was often so tired, in the midafternoon, that this handful of seconds in which to close her eyes seemed the true blessing of Buttony. To stand under the jacaranda tree in the bright day and make darkness fall, and then to hear Joseph's voice. His eyes were open, of course. He made his way around the circle, and as he touched each set of hands, he said, ‘Buttony.'

Buttony, Buttony, twenty-one times. Miss Lewis counted them out, and when he was finished – all twenty-one pairs of hands, because none of her children were absent that day, no one was sick or pretending to be – she opened her eyes. The children stood motionless in the circle, and now their hands were closed, each set folded over themselves, possibly holding the Button. Joseph returned to the middle of the circle. He looked up at Miss Lewis and she looked at him and it was as if, from inside that hair, he were acknowledging sorrow and solitude and fatigue; also routine and expectation and quietness. And, because he was only a boy, trust. Miss Lewis nodded her head, and Joseph nodded back.