Tourmaline (13 page)

He lay in his vast brass bed. Deborah was in his arms.

‘Suppose love fills your life,’ he said, ‘it still doesn’t fill your day. There are times I forget you exist. And you do the same.’

‘If that was all,’ she sighed. ‘Often you hate me.’

‘Well, you hate me.’

‘Yes, I do. When you’re cross and cruel.’

‘If you’d just understand that you don’t own me. I’m my own property. It’s good to be alone.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t want to be alone.’

‘You’re a woman,’ he said—gratefully.

‘Just a woman,’ she said. ‘There’s no more to me than that.’

‘It’s enough for me.’

‘You’ve got—oh, no curiosity,’ she accused him. ‘You don’t even wonder about people. You think there’s only you in the whole world.’

‘It’s the one thing I can be sure of.’

‘And the way you treat poor Byrnie. Like an animal. And he’d die for you.’

‘He’s weak. Weak people’ve got no resistance to it.’

‘Oh,’ she said, wearily, ‘it’s a disease, is it?’

‘Or a defence. Like a gecko’s colour.’

She sighed for his cynicism. ‘And with me, too?’

You’ve got to love someone. You’ve said so yourself, often enough.’

‘And you?’

‘Have we got to keep talking?’

‘It’s not love,’ she said, ‘not with you. I don’t know what it is. A sort of partnership, or something. Like dancing.’

‘What do you know of that’s better than that?’

‘I’d want to feel that—oh, that no other partner would do instead. I’d rather have the whole business go bust than have you carry it on with another woman. But you’d never feel like that.’

‘Quit pretending you do.’

‘I don’t,’ she admitted. ‘I feel like a partner too. Temporary.’

‘You loved me one time.’

‘Oh well. “One time” isn’t now.’

‘So now,’ he said, not quite joking, ‘you love the witchdoctor.’

‘I don’t,’ she cried, very irate. ‘Why do you keep saying that?’

‘I can read the signs. When we had him lying out on the road there, with his face like a horse’s backside, I could see you wondering what he was going to be like. I reckon you started getting ready for him before I even opened the truck door.’

‘You bastard,’ said Deborah.

He laughed, like a prison gate.

‘I’m not like you,’ she fumed. ‘Sleeping with every coloured woman in the camp—that’s what you did. I’m another kind.’

‘But what if you did find you loved him,’ Kestrel said, suddenly very quiet and grave. ‘Would you leave me?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I s’pose I would. What would you do then?’

‘I don’t know either,’ he said. And clasping her in his lean brown arms, he conjured her: ‘Don’t do it, Deb. Don’t. Don’t.’

I stepped out of my door to look once more at my garden. I have said before that the sky is the garden of Tourmaline.

The much-praised, the inexhaustible stars above me. Islands, ice-cold and burning. The burning ice-cold purity of God.

Love inexpressible, inexhaustible. My love for him, it, them. No matter if such love is not returned. In the contemplation of stars, in the remembrance of oceans and flowers, in the voice of the lone crow and the jacaranda-blue of far ranges, I have all I need of requital.

When I think that before the world began to die I did not know this love, I can praise the manner of its dying. On the tomb of the world, ice-cold, burning, I reach out with every nerve to the ultimate purity.

Lord, fill me with your sap and make me grow.

Make me tall as karri, broad as a Moreton Bay fig. Let me shelter all Tourmaline in my shade.

Birds in the air; sheep in the far green distance.

Love, love, love; like an ache, like an emptiness. Dear God, my gold, my darling.

I could not sleep, not on such a night. So much had happened in the day to brood upon; so much had happened in the past to remember.

There was no light in Tourmaline. Pacing the road I reached the war memorial, and went beyond it to the fallen fence that marks the road’s end, turning to look back. My footprints, in the moonlight, were small pits of darkness. A bottle, abandoned at the foot of the obelisk, glittered bluely. Long shadows of Tom Spring’s veranda posts reached towards me. The moon was behind and to the left of the store, leaving its front, under the veranda, in deep shade; but the hotel front was lit up for two-thirds of its height, and barred diagonally with the shadows of veranda posts, each pane of the windows reflecting a moon. The iron of the roof, where the moon shone directly on it, had a curious appearance of flatness, as if the surface were no longer corrugated but a plane, striped with silver and intense black. Around all these things a faint stir of air moved, bringing a hint of freshness; but even then, even at four in the morning, one could distinguish in the cool (which is itself a scent) the smell of exhausted dust.

Mary Spring’s black cat came stalking towards me, from the direction of the moon. Grotesque, the huge shadow-legs. Rubbing herself against my shins, indifferent, she accepted me without question as a feature of the night landscape.

Inside the dark houses, behind the blind windows, Tom and Mary, Kestrel and Deborah lay asleep. Moonlight would be coming in, perhaps, falling on the yellowed sheets that would be their only covering; lighting the soft curves of the women, the men’s lean folded angles. I could see them, as I walked by the walls that hid them. I could feel the heat of their close houses, I could smell that bedroom smell, of shoe-leather and powder, of cloth and warm flesh, that lapped them. I believe I loved them, without wishing to interfere.

Kestrel’s dog came loping to meet me, curious to know my intentions. But the cat, not to be ignored, walked back and forth in his path, brushing his face with a waving tail; so that he deserted me, after a moment, to interrogate with his nose the other animal. But from time to time, as I walked homewards, he would come bounding back, and lay his muzzle challengingly on the ground one step ahead of me.

In the iron shack behind his garden Rock would be asleep. In his tall room at the mine Jack Speed would be asleep. On the hillside, in their two stone cells, Byrne and the diviner would be asleep; stippled with moonlight, probably, from between the unmortared rocks. At the hospital, and in the house by the ruined Miner’s Mess, Horse Carson and others would be sleeping; and outside their humpies, dogs by their sides, the natives. And ten miles away, by their stock route well, Dave Speed and Jimmy Bogada lay, presumably, under the stars.

Remembering the natives’ stories (unsubstantiated) of lone men savaged by dingoes, and their use of protective campfires, it occurred to me that now, in this country, in this drought, there is nothing whatsoever to fear.

Church and bell tower on their small hill stood out black against the luminous horizon. Police station and gaol glimmered, very pale, in the moonlight. Behind me, in the Springs’ yard, the rooster flapped and crowed; and Kestrel’s dog, leaping about, forequarters low to the ground, gave for my benefit a yap of mock alarm.

It came to me suddenly that man is a disease of God; and that God must surely die.

There is a book I remember, from the days of my schooling; a child’s book, a school book, from which I began (I didn’t succeed) to learn French. And it had a picture that haunts me still. I knew that picture long before I could read, for the book had been my mother’s, and I was struck, as illiterate children are, by the strange image. So for years I returned and returned to it.

There was a well beneath a great tree. And in the tree was a princess, in hiding. And by the well, a hideous, pathetic, ludicrous negress, with a pitcher on her shoulder.

The negress was gazing into the well; which reflected not her, but the face of the princess among the leaves. The black woman’s vast teeth showed in delight.

‘
Ah, comme je suis belle!’ s’écria la négresse
.

A joke, then—was it?

Oh you in the branches.

I don’t find that funny.

Byrne pushed the swinging door and went into the bar. No one was there. The door was cutting the sunlight into strips and dropping them on the floor. Imprisoned flies were crying.

He went on, through the stark dining room, to the kitchen where Deborah was drying dishes.

‘Where’s Kes?’ he asked her.

‘Sleeping,’ she said, turning her head, a willow-pattern plate in one hand, the same blue as her dress, and a tea-towel made of Kestrel’s shirt in the other.

‘Lazy sod.’

‘He and Tom are the only ones who work in this town,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t he sometimes?’

‘I want a drink.’

‘I thought you’d stopped it.’

‘I feel good,’ he said. ‘It’s when I feel good I mostly need it. I feel so good I’ll bust if I don’t calm down.’

‘You can’t wake him up. And he’ll clobber you if you take it.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘Well, you can’t say I gave it to you, anyway.’

He leaned in the doorway, watching her. Beyond her, through the high sash window, lay the courtyard of the hotel, a veranda on three sides, the fourth wall made up of an iron shed. Warped crates and crumbling cartons were piled on the slate paving of the yard, and dust-coated bottles of extraordinary antiquity. The shed was actually a garage, a museum for a dead utility.

‘It looks as if no one lives here,’ he said. The dusty windows were stone blind.

‘It feels like it too,’ she said, opening a cupboard and putting the plates away. Then she combed her hair in front of a greenish mirror, and turned back to pick up a bulging flourbag from the table.

‘What’s that?’ he idly asked.

‘Bread,’ she said.

‘Going visiting?’

‘He won’t ask for anything. You have to offer it to him. Is he up there, in the hut?’

‘I think he is. He’s not too keen on visitors, but.’

‘I can’t help that,’ she said, echoing him. ‘I bet you’re there half the time.’

The light from the doorway lit one side of his poor cratered face. ‘You reckon I’m a nuisance?’ he asked, anxiously.

‘No,’ she said, ‘no. You’re too touchy. If he doesn’t want to see you he doesn’t want to see anyone.’

That made him happier, and he grinned at her, hollow-cheeked.

‘I’ll come with you,’ he offered.

‘Oh, why?’ she said. ‘He won’t talk unless there’s no one else there and he has to. Let me go by myself. All right?’

He gave in. ‘All right.’ But he looked dispirited as he trailed after her, through the bare-floored empty dining room and into the droning bar.

‘I warn you,’ she said, as he went behind the bar-counter.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘you warned me,’ watching her through the doors. Then he reached for a bottle and poured himself a drink.

The flies in the traps irrepressibly sizzled on. The clock, with a view of Windsor Castle on the glass over the pendulum, announced the seconds from a distance of twenty minutes. He leaned on the bar, his forehead on his hand, black-nailed fingers in his stiff black hair.

In time he roused himself, tossing off the contents of the glass; and taking bottle and glass with him he went out, through the bread-smelling kitchen, across the derelict yard, to his monastic room with its sagging iron bed.

Looking out of my window I saw her coming, little puffs of dust rising from her bare feet. So I came out of my house and waited for her at my gate. Oh Lord, I am like a spider nowadays; like a spider that lives on news.

‘Where are you bound?’ I asked her, as she came up. I thought she might be coming to see me; but why should she?

‘To Michael’s place,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t come down, so he never gets any bread.’

‘It’s hot,’ I said.

‘It’s the same every day,’ she replied.

‘Sad to be old in this country; not even the weather to talk about.’

She said, indifferently: ‘I can’t imagine anything else.’

‘I wonder what you’ll talk about when you’re my age. Before, even when nothing happened, there was always the weather—changing—reminding you of the universe. You won’t have that.’

‘I’ll talk about my grandchildren,’ she said.

‘Ah, you’ll have grandchildren?’

‘Why not?’ she asked, with her eyes suddenly wide and questioning. ‘Why shouldn’t I? I must.’

‘Are there any children in Tourmaline?’

‘Yes,’ she said; or hotly affirmed. ‘In the camp. There must be. One or two.’

‘I suppose there must be. I never go there.’

‘You should.’ She sounded annoyed with me. ‘They’re people too.’

‘I get tired. It’s a long walk.’

She stood with the bag dangling in her hand, red dust on her ankles, frowning, thinking. She was looking at my gaol but not seeing it. At last she said: ‘It
is
hot,’ as if to please me.

‘Shall I come with you?’

‘Everyone wants to come with me,’ she said.

‘Ah well, I won’t, then.’

‘You’re not hurt, are you? Only, he won’t talk if you come.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said; adding: ‘He’s an interesting boy.’

‘He’s not a boy,’ she objected. ‘He’s been somewhere.’

‘So he has. But where?’

‘He might tell me, if I’m clever.’

‘You’ll find it hard.’

‘Well,’ she murmured, with a shrug. And she looked away, over my gaol, to the hillside where his hut squatted, indistinguishable among the rocks.

‘Will you come in,’ I said, ‘and have some tea or something?’ But she politely refused, swinging the bag in her hand.

So we took leave of one another. And I went back to my kitchen, where the kettle boiled on the rusty stove, and a solitary fly on the window crossed and recrossed her distant figure climbing the hillside.

He was asleep when she got there; sprawled asleep on the iron bed with the grey broad-striped blanket, hiding his eyes in the crook of one arm. She put her flourbag down on the packing case and studied him. In the red light of the hut his skin was like copper. His feet were bare. He showed no sign of waking.

She stood over him, smiling her rather secret smile. Then she reached out and began to tickle the soles of his feet.

He sighed in his sleep. Suddenly there was a halt in his breathing, and he was awake, sitting up in alarm, his strangely coloured eyes staring.