The High Places (3 page)

(Sheba lay panting in the corner of his cage, overwhelmed by the pain on which he concentrated with a careful doling out of attention. He kept himself steady but his small side rose and fell, rose and fell, higher and then deeper than it should. His eyes moved toward the door and his mouth sat open, showing pink.)

Mr Ronald's laugh was a clatter behind his teeth. Sarah huddled close to him as he moved against his seat. She placed her arm around his shoulders, touched his damp forehead, and felt her hair lift away from her skin, all along her arms and the back of her neck. The summer passed through the car, windy and wet.

‘Hold on,' said Sarah. ‘Just hold on.' Her mouth was close to his ear. David would come soon. You could swear at a cat that rocked this way, crowded close in pain and confusion; you could talk softly, not to the cat but to the idea of the cat, to the faces of the family to whom you must explain the cat's condition. You could sing to the cat and if you had forgotten its name you could call it ‘kitty' – you could say ‘Hold on, kitty' while your hands moved and your neck craned forward and the parts of you that understood the machinery of a cat, its secret places, worked despite the cat's terror. You could set the leg of a monkey and watch it, later, as it limped back and forward across the surgery floor, scowling and shaking its funny fist at you.

Noises came from Mr Ronald's throat now, and these sounds seemed accidental, the by-product of something else. They continued past the point Sarah felt certain he had died; they rattled on in the can of his throat. After they had subsided – although this took time, and they came in unexpected spurts – she became aware of the sound of a radio playing. In her own car, or this one? Who could Douglas be? A son? A grandson?

Sarah was unsure how long she had been sitting beside Mr Ronald and how long it had been since he stopped making any sound at all. His wife cleaned the walls of their shower and he had been to see orangutans in Berlin. He was too young to have been in that war.

Without warning, David filled up the space in the passenger door of Mr Ronald's car. She had been so certain she would hear his footsteps on the road, but here he was in the doorway as if she'd summoned him out of the field.

‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't find anyone.' He was wet and his breath came quickly. ‘I ran and finally found a house but there was no one home. I thought about breaking in. Kept going for a bit but no sign of life. No cars on the road, even. So I came back to try the car again.'

He looked at the stillness of the man in the driver's seat. He saw the blood on Mr Ronald's trousers and the way that it crept toward his belt and shirt, and he searched for blood on Sarah.

Sarah concentrated on David's face, which swam in the sound of the rain and the radio. My husband. She smiled because she was happy to see him. Then she placed the wallet in Mr Ronald's lap. She moved to step out of the car and David made space for her.

‘How is he? How does he seem?'

When a cat died during an operation, when a macaw was too sick, when a snake was past saving, then Sarah must tell its owners. It was difficult to tell them this true thing, and so along with it she added other, less true things: that the tumour caused no pain, that the animal hadn't been frightened to go under anaesthetic. Still, it was difficult. It made no difference to Sarah that words were inadequate to her enormous task. Of course they were. There might be a time when she would have to tell her friends, Sheba's owners, that he wouldn't survive his infection. Each loss of which she had been the herald seemed to have led to this new immensity: Mr Ronald, dead in a car. But they didn't know Mr Ronald. David had never even spoken to him. She had been married that midday, with no rain. There were only two witnesses.

‘He's dead,' said Sarah.

She stood and shut the door behind her. David fought the desire to lower his head and look through the window. It seemed necessary to make sure, but more necessary to trust Sarah. He held his hands out to her and she took them.

‘My god,' he said. She shook her head. He knew that when she shook her head in this way, it meant: I'm not angry with you, but I won't talk.

‘What now?' he asked. ‘Should we take him somewhere?'

David felt that Sarah owned the wreck, owned the tree and piece of road on which Mr Ronald had died, and that he need only wait for her instructions, having failed to find help. He thought of her sitting alone with the unconscious body of an old man, and he thought of the moment at which she must have realised that Mr Ronald was no longer unconscious, but dead. David saw with certainty that Sarah was another person, completely separate from him, although he had married her today. His wife.

‘We'll try the car again,' said Sarah. ‘We just have to get to the surgery.'

‘We can use the phone there,' said David.

Sarah crossed the road and he followed her. She didn't look back at the wreck. Waiting on its grassy rise slightly above the road, their car had a look of faithful service, of eagerness to assist. It started on the third try with a compliant hum. Sarah had always been better at coaxing it; even before trying the ignition she'd known it would work. She was unsure if this resurrection was good or bad luck, or beyond luck – simply inevitable. Now that she could see the rain in the headlights, she realised how soft it was, how English. She missed home, suddenly: the hard, bright days and the storms at the end of them, with rain that filled your shoes.

It grew bright and then dark in Mr Ronald's car as their headlights passed over him, and it remained dark as they left that piece of road and that tree. David watched Sarah drive. They didn't speak. As the distance between their car and Mr Ronald's grew, it seemed that the roads were all empty – that all of England was empty. It lay in its empty fields while the mice moved and the airplanes flew overhead to other places, nearby and far away.

They reached lit buildings and the surgery so quickly that David was embarrassed at having failed to find help. Sarah walked calmly, and she spoke calmly with the nurse about Sheba. She didn't look at the telephone. There was no blood on her clothes. David watched his wife as she made her way toward the cat, who rubbed his head against the bars of his cage. He was waiting for the pain to stop. And then he would be let out, healed, to hunt mice in the wet grass.

 

Art Appreciation

Henry Taylor had always known he would have money one day, and this confidence was vindicated when his mother won the lottery on a Thursday in the August of 1961. He could afford to get married. But he wasn't yet sure if he could afford to quit his job, so he went to the office the day after he heard the news. The sun came through the window blinds in long tedious slats and time passed outside, far below, with the noise of the road and the joy of boys on bicycles. Above, where Henry was, women walked among the men, delivering coffee and papers. They were all decorous, even the young ones – even those reproachable few who lingered with one hip against the corners of desks. One particular girl had caught Henry's attention. She was new to her job, but had already made a name for herself with her prettiness and good nature. She dressed modestly, with a sense of pleasures offered all the same: a heightening of her body's secrets through her polite attempts to conceal them. Her name was Eleanor, and she called herself Ellie.

Henry thought, now he had money, that he would marry her.

He didn't tell anyone that his mother had won the lottery, and a considerable amount of his delight had to do with his windfall being secret. That was the great thing: to sit at his desk, observing as he always did the movements of the office – and Ellie's movements among them – but as a profoundly different man, with a new and superior perspective. There was no longer anything to keep him from approaching Ellie, but he held off even so, not out of hesitation but in order to savour his own intentions. Henry noticed that she stole frequent looks at him. She had the quality of a bird among grasses, peering out in nervous excitement, eager for a mate but afraid to abandon safety. He was certain she was in the office not to make flimsy dates with different men but to find a husband.

As he left work that Friday afternoon, Henry made sure to say goodnight to Ellie. She was flattered and demure.

‘Enjoy your weekend,' he said, and she said – she almost sang – ‘You too!' She wore her hair pulled back with a navy ribbon.

Henry, as usual, took the stairs to the ground floor of the building – this was part of his fitness regime, to exercise his legs in the morning and the evening – and when he reached the lobby, the elevator doors sprang open and Ellie stepped out from between them.

‘Fancy that,' Henry said. He looked at her with pleasure. Her waist was small, she had pale, plump arms, and her hair had a good-natured sheen.

Ellie stood swinging her handbag this way and that.

‘Walk me to the station?' she asked, and he offered his arm, which she took.

It had begun to rain, and they walked beneath his large black umbrella. She tucked herself in beside him and her small, uneven steps limited his stride. He wanted to lift Ellie up in his arms the way you might a child at a parade.

‘I'd like to take you out sometime,' Henry said.

‘That would be lovely,' she said, with a small frown.

‘I'd like to take you out right now,' Henry said.

‘Tonight's impossible,' she said. ‘I have a class on Fridays. But some day next week?'

‘What kind of class?'

Ellie gave a little smile, the bashful twin of her frown, and said, ‘Art appreciation.'

They arrived at Wynyard station and there, between the sound of the trains passing underneath the street and the sound of traffic passing over the street, she leaned her head into his shoulder for one unexpected moment. Then she ran down the steps into the station. Henry watched her bright brown head move among the commuters and disappear in the direction of the North Shore line. He considered her his girl from that moment.

*   *   *

Henry was fond of Sydney on a Friday afternoon. It was late winter, so the sky lowered early, and there was that weekend feeling of relief and consequence. There was a place near the station where he liked to eat after work. The whole establishment smelled boiled – boiled meat, wet raincoats, and the undersides of shoes. He ordered a hamburger – no onions, never onions – and ate it while imagining Ellie on the way to her Friday-night class. He had a vague sense that art appreciation involved bowls of fruit and flowers. But his mind didn't stay on her for long; he began, without quite knowing it, to think about his money. He wondered how much of the ten thousand pounds his mother would give him and concluded that it would be at least half. He thought of her clutching his arm the night before, saying, ‘I'll set you up, you'll get married.'

Although Henry's mother had promised to set him up, he still went to the dog track, because it was Friday. He had a weekend schedule: Friday night the dogs, Saturday the horses, Sunday lunch with his mother, and Sunday night with Kath, a girl he knew. For so long he had dreamed of a windfall, of a sudden fortune, and of what it might make possible, because every week there was a chance: the dogs ran, the horses flew, and Henry was always there to see them. There was money on every race. He won, and sometimes he didn't. This was the greatest pleasure he knew: a little profit and a little loss. He also liked the company of gamblers. They're cheerful people, he would say; they're optimists.

Henry might have taken a bus to the dog track, but he preferred to walk: down George Street and Broadway, through Glebe, and into Wentworth Park. The Friday city was so festive in the rain, full of women running from warm taxis into warm houses and men standing at street corners waiting for the lights to change, holding newspapers over their heads. The gum trees lining the streets of Glebe took up the easing rain and shook it out again in heavier drops. In every one of the terraced houses Henry passed, a woman like Ellie waited for a man she loved amid the furniture and finery he had bought her.

Because he was careful with his money and lived with his mother, Henry had a small but steadily growing savings account, which was commendable for a man of twenty-eight with a mid-level job in an insurance firm. The thought of his nest egg produced in him a simple, serious pleasure as he entered the Wentworth Park greyhound track. It pleased him to think that he would be here, with money he could afford to bet, whether or not his mother had won the lottery. And because he was a man who enjoyed weighing his odds and his options, it didn't occur to Henry to bet any more recklessly on that Friday than he normally would. Still, he had an unusually successful night. He sat in the good feeling of the crowd as it hung on those few moments that mattered, when the dogs flattened against time and won, or failed to win. Then men erupted around him in victory or regret, and there was a new surge toward the bookmakers, who stood illuminated above the throng. The bookies were the men Henry admired most of all. They spoke in a ribald and rhythmic way, singing out the odds like a sea shanty. Henry was covetous of their easy authority, which he believed came from handling large sums of money.

Henry stayed three hours, passed jokes among his track acquaintances, rolled on the balls of his feet as he waited to see which dog would emerge from the starting tangle, and collected his winnings. Then he walked to Central and took a train south. He never drank (he hated a fogged mind), and that night, as he walked home from the station – late, with the streets dark and his mother waiting for him, even in her sleep, her lamp bright in the window – he felt a new clarity to his brain, as if a frost had settled on it. It was still there the next night, at the horses, and he won again – a larger sum this time, and still without undue risk. It interested him, in an offhand way, that his weekend could look the same as always, even when his life had changed. But his wealth had already altered things: made Ellie possible, aided him at the track, kept his mind clear.